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Why do certain situations overwhelm you while someone you love seems completely unaffected?
In this episode, Dr. Alison explores one of the most important questions we ask about ourselves: Why am I the way I am?
Using the image of a seed planted in soil, she explains how your God-given wiring, childhood environment, sensitivity, and nervous system all work together to shape the person you are today.
This conversation offers a compassionate framework for understanding yourself—and the people you love—in an honest, empowering way. (You’ll want to share this episode with your loved ones!)
You’ll learn:
- Why your brain is like a plant
- How childhood shapes your mental and emotional health
- The difference between your wiring and your wounding
- The research behind “orchid children” and “dandelion children”
- How different kinds of “soil” shape your nervous system, relationships, resilience, and sense of safety
- Why highly sensitive people may struggle more in hard environments—and thrive more in healthy ones
- Why healing begins when you understand both the seed you were given and the soil that shaped you
This episode will help you see your story—and your loved ones—with more clarity, compassion, and hope.
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 143: Reparenting Your Younger Self—How to Stop Seeking Approval From Others & Find Inner Security
Episode 22: How to Build Trust with Yourself
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Your brain is like a plant and every plant, if you think about it,
starts with a seed. It's the wiring you came into this world with, the way you process the world
around you. This is your seed. Now let's talk about the soil because you can have the most
beautifully made seed in the world and if the soil is wrong, if it's depleted,
if it's toxic, if it just doesn't have what that particular seed needs,
the plant, is going to struggle. It might survive but it won't thrive.
The seed and the soil don't operate in isolation. They're in constant relationship with each other
and that relationship is where a lot of the story of your current life actually lives.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of The Best of You. I'm Dr.
Allison, and I'm really excited about today's episode because I want to share something with you
that I learned recently that I couldn't wait to share with you here on the podcast. It's a
metaphor. I heard it from my daughter who was recently home visiting us. She's in medical school.
She was sharing it with my husband and I as we were driving up for a weekend getaway into the
mountains. And honestly, it stopped all of us in our tracks. We couldn't stop thinking about it and
how it applied to our own lives individually and the lives of people we love. Because I think this
metaphor helps explain one of the most tender questions so many of us carry.
Why am I the way that I am? Why do I get overwhelmed so easily?
Why do I shut down when someone gets too close? Why do I feel anxious even when everything is
technically okay? Why do I keep reacting in ways I don't want to react? Why does healing sometimes
feel so hard? Why am I the way I am?
And underneath those questions is so often an even deeper one. Is this just the way I'm wired or
did something happen to me? And if so, what? In other words, how much of who I am is just my
nature, my biology, my temperament, my nervous system, my genetics, and how much of who I am is
nurture, the environment I grew up in, the relationships that shaped me,
the stressors, the wounds, the messages I absorbed along. way.
And here's where this gets tricky. When we put too much emphasis on nature, we can start to feel
helpless. We think this is just my brain. This is just my personality. This is just how I'm wired.
And while there may be truth there, it can leave us feeling stuck as if change isn't really
possible. But when we put too much emphasis on nurture, especially on parents or childhood or
family systems, we can end up feeling overwhelmed in a different way. We can start searching for
someone to blame. we can feel crushed under the weight of trying to figure out exactly what
happened and how to fix it. And if you're a parent yourself, that kind of nurture emphasis can also
become terrifying because suddenly it feels like every mistake you make might permanently damage
your own. child. Either of those extremes can leave us with a victim mentality,
feeling helpless or stuck. We feel like we can't change ourselves or we can't change what happened
to us. We need a better way to understand the relationship between how we're wired and how we've
been shaped. A way that tells the truth without making us feel hopeless. A way that honors the
impact of our environment without reducing us to our
ourselves with compassion and still believe that growth and change and healing is possible.
And this is why I love this metaphor. Here it is.
Your brain is like a plant. And every plant, if you think about it,
starts with a seed. That seed is your nature. It's your DNA,
your temperament, the raw material that God put into you before you ever took your first breath.
It's the wiring you came into this world with, the way you process the world around you,
the things that come naturally to you, the things that cost you, that are hard for you. This is
your seed, the seed of this plant. that is your brain. And that seed gets planted in soil.
The soil is your nurture. It's your family of origin, your parents or step-parents,
your grandparents, the town you grew up in, the culture and community that surrounded you.
The soil is everything that was already there when you arrived. You didn't choose it.
You were just planted in it. Now, here's the thing. Both make up who you are today.
The seed cannot grow without the soil. And soil without a seed is just dirt.
Both matter. Both shape who you become. And the relationship between them,
between the seed you were given and the soil you were placed in, that relationship is,
I would argue, one of the most important things you need to understand about yourself.
In today's episode, we're going to dig into both of these elements. What kind of seed were you
given? What uniquely makes you you that cannot be changed? And what kind of soil shaped you?
We're going to go through some of the different types of soil that I see and how that impacts the
way your brain, your nervous system, who you are today developed. Because I don't think you can do
the real work of healing, of becoming the best, most whole version of yourself without getting
honest about both. So I want to start with the seed because I think this is where a lot of us have
some catching up to do in terms of our own understanding and self-awareness. Seeds are not all the
same. I have this Christmas cactus sitting in my office. And this is a true story.
I'm a little embarrassed to tell you this, but I have not watered it in over six weeks. I haven't
touched it. My mom gave it to me and I was so excited. I do well with succulents. I am not a plant
person. I don't have a green thumb. I'm a little too, let's say, scattered. I get distracted and I
forget to take care of them. This hasn't been touched in six weeks and it still looks pretty good.
It's a little droopy. The dirt this morning was just bone dry. I've watered it now,
but it's a lot. it's still looking okay. And this is the thing about a cactus or any sort of
succulent. But this is the thing about a cactus or any sort of succulent. The seed is just hardy by
design. It can go without a lot of nutrients for a stretch of time and still be okay. It still
suffers, but in a different sort of way. It was built differently. And then there are other kinds
of seeds in the plant world. These are seeds that grow into some of our most beautiful flowers,
the gardenias, the orchids, and flowers like those. And these types of plants,
these flowers, these are not like my... cactus, they need regular watering.
They cannot have too much direct sun. They need rich soil, careful tending,
the right temperature, the right humidity. If they get neglected, they wilt or die on the vine.
But here's the thing, when they're cared for well, they're extraordinary. There's nothing quite
like a gardenia in bloom. I love both types of flowers. I love my succulents and I love my more
delicate blooming gardenias. And here's where I think this gets interesting.
This is supported in research in psychology. Researchers in psychology...
childhood development have actually found something very similar in humans. There's a concept in
developmental psychology called differential susceptibility. It's a term that was developed by Jay
Belsky. And the shorthand version of Belsky's research, it's fascinating, is this.
Some children are by nature more sensitive to their environment than others.
Belsky used the metaphor of orchids. and dandelions. Dandelion children are the ones who can thrive
almost anywhere, put them in a challenging environment and they survive, put them in a flourishing
environment and they do well. hearty. They're resilient. You've seen these people,
maybe in your own family, maybe in your friend group. Maybe you are this person. I like to think of
them as wildflowers instead of dandelions, but these are the people that just seem to get up and
get going no matter what soil they're planted in. And then there are the orchid children.
They're more sensitive to their environment, to stress, to conflict, to the emotional temperature
in a room. In difficult soil, they really struggle. But here's what the research also shows.
When orchid children are placed in a supportive, nurturing environment, they don't just do okay.
They flourish often more than their wildflower peers. The same sensitivity that makes them more
vulnerable also makes them more responsive to goodness and nourishment.
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There's another framework that I think also speaks to what Belsky's research is getting at.
And this is the well-established framework called the highly sensitive person. This is research
that was originally developed by psychologist Elaine Aron. And if you've never heard this term
before, it might be worth pausing here for a moment and checking this research out. About 15 to 20
% of the population is wired with what she describes as a deeper processing of sensory information.
Highly sensitive people notice more. They pick up on subtleties in a room,
in relationships, in tone of voice, in the unspoken tension that other people might walk right
past. They feel things more deeply. They tend to get overstimulated more easily.
And I've worked with a lot of women in particular who have this designation. And sometimes we can
shame ourselves for being too sensitive when in fact, this is a beautiful way that God has made us.
I've always been highly aware of the emotional environment around me. Even a little bit of unhealth
in a room registers in me. It always has. And for a long time, I didn't understand why other people
seem to just be able to move. through the world and in and out of groups of people and not be
affected by things that would have derailed me. And when I've come to understand that this is not a
deficiency, it's the seed God gave me to steward. And that seed needs a very specific kind of soil.
On the other side, I think of people I know. One of my closest friends, a roommate I had for years
comes to mind. My mother-in-law comes to mind. These are people who grew up with very little,
who've navigated enormous hardship. My mother-in-law ended up as a refugee in a resettlement camp
for years. She then became an immigrant in this country where she spoke English as a second
language. And she is just... She can just adapt. She just shows up in a certain kind of strength
wherever she is planted. She's a wildflower. I see it in her.
I just... Throughout the course of different seasons of her life where I've traveled with her, I'm
just amazed at her ability to adapt to hard situations.
We need people, friends, family members, loved ones, maybe it's you,
people who can hold steady when things are hard. Now here's why this matters.
Neither is right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse. Neither kind of seed is the problem.
But if you don't, know what kind of seed you are or what kind of seed your loved one is,
you will likely spend a lot of time either berating yourself or struggling with things that don't
seem to bother other people, or you'll be completely blind to what it's costing you to keep pushing
through without care. And both of those things will catch up with you eventually.
So I want to pause here. for a moment and ask you as you're listening,
where do you land? Are you more like a wildflower, like a dandelion where you can land almost
anywhere and land on your feet? Or are you more like an orchid where you need the right kind of
soil? You're sensitive, you're attuned. If something's off, it's going to get to you. Or are you
somewhere in between? How much do you... understand about the raw material you came into this world
with. The way God designed your nervous system, your brain, your psyche to work and move through
the world with its unique gifts and unique challenges. Because that self-knowledge,
that ability to understand yourself, this isn't just interesting. It isn't just good for cocktail
conversation. This is foundational to how we see ourselves and how we become a healthier,
more whole version of who God made us to be. Now let's talk about the soil for a minute.
Because you can have the most beautifully made seed in the world. And if the soil is wrong, if
it's... if it's toxic, if it just doesn't have what that particular seed needs,
the plant is going to struggle. It might survive, but it won't thrive in the way it was meant to.
And the thing about soil is you didn't choose it. None of us did. We were planted and we grew up in
whatever was already there. I want to walk through a few different kinds of soil,
and I'm going to be personal here because I think sometimes stories are the best way to make this
real. In my own case, you already know I was given a highly sensitive disposition.
I grew up in a small town. My parents were good, kind people. My grandparents lived down the
street. Wherever I went in this town, people knew who I was. There was good and bad with that, but
there was a stability and a rootedness to my childhood that I didn't fully understand until I left
at 18. That soil had a lot of nutrients in it, genuine connection.
consistency, the security of being held by a community. And I don't want to paint it as perfect.
It wasn't. You'll read about some of the wounds I carried out of that childhood in my new book,
The Secure Soul. They're there. We all have them. No soil is perfect.
But looking back, that soil gave me a really strong root system.
But here's the problem. When I left that soil as an adult,
when I stepped into the real world with all of its complexity and hardship, I wasn't always
equipped. There were rainy seasons. I didn't know how to navigate dark seasons,
lonely seasons. I hadn't learned certain skills because my soil had been in many ways.
sheltered. Good soil can sometimes mean you haven't been exposed to enough of the hard things that
build resilience in a different way. So I struggled a lot in my early years as a young adult.
Now, I want to contrast that with a different kind of soil, a soil that is also characterized with
loving, good nutrients, but where hardship enters in young. And for this soil,
I think of my own two stepchildren who came into my life having already navigated.
profound loss. At a very young age, they lost their mother to a terminal illness.
They had to adjust to the loss of their mom, to grief, to so much change,
and then to me, eventually coming into their family and their family structure shifting.
Now, there were a lot of really good, beautiful ingredients in this soil. They had a wonderful dad,
an incredible grandmother, my mother-in-law, who I told you about who stepped in to that role in
those couple of years. And then I came in and I think I understood because of my own disposition
and my own wiring, I understood intuitively how to be a healthy presence as they began to slowly
attach to me in new. So there was a lot of good in this soil,
but it was still bumpy. It was still rocky. It was soil that required them to adapt and develop
resilience. early on and these two kids i'm so proud of are some of the most resilient people i
know now as young adults the soil they grew up in demanded something of them very young and they
rose to meet that challenge cultivating skills at a level of maturity that i see in them as young
adults that still is amazing to me and i'm so grateful for that you may relate to that kind of soil
where there was a lot of good nutrients But there was heartache or suffering or sorrow introduced
early on that gave you an understanding of what grief feels like,
of what resilience requires in a way that not everybody has.
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And then there's a third kind of soil. And this is the one I think about often in my work.
And you may relate to this. There are people who grew up in soil that was in ways you may not have
fully understood at the time, genuinely harmful, constant lying,
deception. gaslighting, maybe bickering or fighting that never resolved,
maybe walking on eggshells, maybe a home where love was conditional or unpredictable or chaotic or
simply absence. And the painful thing about this kind of soil is that you don't always know it's
toxic until you're out of it because it's the only soil you ever knew. Had a conversation about
this with my guest, Melanie Schenkel. We'll link to that episode in the show notes.
But she talks about her experience of getting to adulthood and looking back and realizing this
childhood wasn't normal. The way my mother treated me wasn't okay. This soil wasn't just neutral or
benign or filled with a certain kind of suffering. It was toxic. It wasn't only lacking certain
essential ingredients. It was also poisonous. Now, I want to name here that as we talk about the
soil you were planted in, this isn't about laying blame. I want to say that clearly because I know
that a lot of people I encounter feel some resistance to this kind of looking back.
It can feel disloyal. It can feel like you're reopening something that you'd rather just leave
alone because you can't change it. here's what i've come to believe you cannot heal a wound you
haven't named you can't tend a garden you've never actually looked at and naming what was real and
hard in your soil, especially if there were toxins there. This isn't the same thing as blaming the
people who were in it. Sometimes the harm was so pervasive and deep and profound that there's
hardly any good that you can see in it. Sometimes it was otherwise good people who were wounded and
as a result wounded you. Often it's somewhere in between.
of these cases the work is the same you have to be able to see the soil clearly to understand how
to heal the you that came out of it you have to be able to understand where were their nutrients
where were their good things and where were their deficiencies where was their toxins or poison
that was never actually named that i need to be able to name in order to move forward in healing
Where was there too much shade where I was left alone too much and was neglected to where parts of
me were never really seen? And where did the sun shine so harshly that maybe all of my achievements
or all of my performance or all of my pleasing had a light shined on? But the other parts of me
never got seen, the ones that were messy, the ones that needed care too.
Where did things in my life and my soul not get watered or tended and they had to learn to go
without? Where were you not taught how to survive the hard seasons, the droughts,
the dry spells? Because nobody around you knew how to do that either. Here's the thing,
if you can't look back at the soil in which you were shaped, it's really hard to steward the plant
God has given you to steward now. It's hard to have those hard conversations with a spouse about
why you sometimes do the things you do. It's hard to explain to your own kids, hey,
I'm not making an excuse. for this behavior, but I want you to know this is something that happened
to me that I'm trying to change when it comes to how I'm showing up for you.
If you don't take the time to look back and understand that soil that shaped you,
it's really hard to show up in healthy ways now. Again, this isn't to blame our past.
This is to see it clearly, to name it. Honestly, and it's the root of what I think brings about the
ability to heal. So now I want to bring these two things together because the seed and the soil
don't operate in isolation. They're in constant relationship with each other. And that relationship
is where a lot of the story of your current life actually lives. I want you to think about it this
way. A hearty seed, a wildflower or dandelion, whichever you prefer. planted in difficult soil will
probably survive, maybe even thrive in certain ways. But even that seed has limits.
Even the most seemingly resilient person has a point where the soil has taken too much from them.
And the thing is, they don't always. know it because they've spent their whole life being the one
who's fine, who's getting by, who's being strong for others. I hear this a lot from couples,
actually. One partner is more of a sensitive seed, more like the orchid,
and they tend to know they're struggling because they feel it and they need something to change.
And the other partner is more like that wildflower, dandelion, more blinders on. And they've been
pushing through for so long without tending to themselves that they sometimes lack empathy for
others or for themselves. They sometimes deny the reality that the soil could and should change.
Sometimes these folks are resistant to change, right? Both. Types of people need to grow in self
-awareness. Both people need to know what they're working with in their raw material to have that
perspective, to see the other, to see outside of their own box, to see that the two together make
something beautiful. And then there's another thing that happens that I think about a lot. A tender
seed, an orchid, is planted early on as a child in depleted soil,
you needed. This is where some of our deepest wounds come from. And here's what I want you to know.
It also is where some of the most profound healing is possible. The research on highly sensitive
people actually shows this, that when an orchid child or an orchid adult finally gets the right
environment, the right support, the right nourishment, they don't just catch up.
They often surpass what anyone expects. The sensitivity that makes you so vulnerable on one hand to
hard things also makes you exquisitely responsive to the good things.
So wherever you land in this conversation, whatever raw material you are getting, whatever soil you
are planted in, neither one is a verdict. If you identify more with the orchid type of seed,
it's an invitation to recognize that you can flourish, to look at the soil and begin to understand
the nourishment that your soul needs to thrive. And if you identify or if one of your loved ones
identifies more with that wildfire, you've just plowed through the soil and kind of stayed hardy
without. ever really taking a look the invitation for you is to take a look is to recognize that
that soil still matters just because you've survived doesn't mean You're thriving.
And this kind of honesty, this kind of ability to name and to see is how we begin to heal and
become the best version of who God made us to be. We do it for ourselves and we do it for our
families, for our children, for our marriages. We do this work of honest naming in order to heal.
Here's where I want to land today. Every single one of us carries something from the soil we were
planted in. It's true for all of us. There is no person listening to this who came through
childhood without some deficiency in the soil, some place where it was too dry,
too harsh, too uncertain, or simply not enough. This isn't a flaw.
This is just the condition of being human. And here's what I've seen over and over again in my own
life and in the lives of the people I've worked with. Healing is possible. It's more than possible.
It's one of the most amazing things that God has designed us to be able to do. Real,
meaningful, lasting change is possible. You can't change the raw material,
the seed you were given. You wouldn't want to. This is how God made you to be in this world who you
are inherently. matters not only to you, but to the world around you. You are a part of this
overall system, this ecosystem of humanity and who you are in your essence matters.
But you can change the way you carry that essence forward. You can change the soil you create
around yourself now as an adult with the awareness and the agency you didn't have as a child.
And this work starts with two. things. Number one,
knowing the kind of seed, the raw material, really understanding it without judgment.
And number two, looking honestly at the soil that shaped you without blame, but without flinching
either. Next week, part two, we're going to... about what that healing actually looks like as you
do it, what it means to notice and name and tend the garden you're growing now with everything
you've learned about the ground you started in. For today, I want you to... sit with a couple of
questions first what do you really know and understand about the seed the essence the raw material
god gave you this can come through looking at personality styles or tools we have a podcast episode
on ocean the the personality traits we understand to be the most inherited the most in that nature
category i'll link to that in today's show notes that could be a place to start understanding
yourself as a orchid as highly sensitive, looking at patterns that have just been true your whole
life. Make a list. Begin to talk to God about God. What are things that are just how you made me?
Things I accept about myself, even am fond of in myself. Yes, there are things about it that
sometimes drive me crazy. And also, I'm grateful, God, for the person you made me to be.
And then number two, what have you been willing? to see and really look at about the soil that
shaped you, what was good, but also hard at times,
what was lacking, what was not there at all, and what maybe was toxic,
poisonous even, that you haven't really fully wanted to name, which means that toxin still has some
access to your own soul. I want you to get honest with yourself about these two dimensions of your
own being. Let these questions sit with you. Pray over them. Talk to God about them. God,
help me to see. Become a student of your own soul in partnership with God's spirit.
And if you want to start going even deeper, a lot of what we're talking about today is at the heart
of my new book, The Secure Soul. It's all about healing the wounds that form when the soil around
us wasn't quite what we needed. You can actually start reading the first few chapters as well as
the first few chapters of the companion guide workbook. Now, when you...
-order. You can find the details about how to get that information emailed directly to you at
thesecuresoulbook.com. I'll also link to all the other resources I mentioned in today's episode in
the show notes, or you can head over to my website, drallisoncook.com backslash podcast.
Thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to be with you for part two next Thursday.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
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When did being a responsible adult become synonymous with being serious all the time?
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that curiosity, playfulness, imagination, and wonder were things we needed to leave behind in order to grow up. But what if those qualities aren't distractions from a meaningful life?
What if they're essential to it?
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with entrepreneur, creative visionary, and author Piera Gelardi to explore why playfulness is far more than a luxury—it's a powerful source of resilience, creativity, connection, and emotional well-being. Together, they unpack how stress, perfectionism, and the pressure to "have it all together" disconnect us from our authentic selves, and how reclaiming play can help us feel more alive.
You'll learn:
- Why playfulness is a sign of emotional health—not immaturity
- How stress, perfectionism, and the "cool police" rob us of joy
- The surprising connection between play and resilience
- How to move from a pressured state into a playful state
- Practical ways to reconnect with curiosity, wonder, and creativity
- Why your childlike qualities may actually be your greatest strengths
This conversation is a gentle invitation to loosen your grip, laugh a little more, and rediscover the parts of yourself that make you feel most alive.
More Resources:
Order Piera’s book, The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 188: Tiny Joys, Big Healing: Retraining the Brain for Hope with Dr MaryCatherine McDonald
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
I hoped I would get to the next stage of my career by cosplaying serious adult. I felt more
disconnected. It was like I kind of lost my intrinsic motivation. So she said, what do you think
the qualities are that got you here? Curiosity, experimentation, creativity, my joyful,
creative personality. So why do you think that those qualities you have to like...
throw in the trash can to get to the next level. She said, what if you actually lean into those
more as your superpowers to grow? When we listen to the cool police and we try to not be cringe,
we try to not stand out. We're not expressing ourselves. We feel a bit empty in life.
When we try to be a responsible adult and make that mean just being completely serious and zipped
up in our serious suits, we lose connection and joy and wonder and curiosity and all of these
beautiful things that make us feel alive, creative, connected to each other.
Hey everyone and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You. Have you ever
noticed as we enter into these summer months how quickly the summer can begin to steal your sense
of playfulness? These are the very months that are supposed to be more laid back and carefree and
yet they can become the season of stress. There's less structure. And I know structure for me is
often what keeps me steady. So in the summer, it can throw me off kilter. Often our kids are at
home, which is fun, but also creeps into our downtime, our sense of order. Lines are long.
The weather is hot. Someone says the wrong thing. Your child won't cooperate. Your inbox is
overflowing. And before you know it, you're running on fumes. You're tense, maybe even short with
the people you love. And you start to become that anxious, tense adult who isn't any fun.
Well, today's episode is an invitation for all of us back into a playful spirit,
because here's the thing about playfulness. It's not only good for our relationships and for our
emotional health, it's part of our spiritual formation. Jesus says in Matthew 18,
3, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Now, I want to unpack that for a second. What does Jesus mean there? What does it mean to become
like little children? Obviously, we're adults. We're caring for other people. We need to be
responsible. We need to be mature. We need to work on ourselves, right? All these things we talk
about. And Jesus isn't calling us to become irresponsible or childish.
This isn't an invitation to become something we don't want to be. However,
there's something so important here that Jesus... and I tend to think of it like this.
If you think about the context of this passage, the children are running to Jesus.
They're curious. They're open-hearted. They're excited. They're trusting.
They sense someone who is there for them. And I think this has something to do with that childlike
spirit Jesus is calling us. to recover. Children, when they feel safe,
are naturally curious. They're imaginative. They're in their bodies. They laugh easily.
They trust easily. They experiment. They're adventurous. And all of this happens because when
they're safe, they're securely attached. They know someone is there looking out for them,
which so often is our job in the summer. But what if we too can learn from the children around us?
because we too have one who is always looking out for us. But somewhere along the way,
so many of us have learned to leave that part of ourselves behind.
We've learned that being responsible means being serious, that it means we have to hold everything
together, that we have to try to be perfect or polished. We've learned that being spiritual means
being serious. We've learned that the only way to survive is to tighten up, look down,
and try to work harder. But here's the paradox.
Sometimes the very qualities we think we have to abandon in order to be serious adults are the very
qualities that bring us back to life. Curiosity,
wonder, playfulness, movement, imagination, joy.
These qualities are a crucial part of resilience. They're a part of how God designed us to move
through hard things. And they're also part of what helps us love other people and ourselves better.
Richard Schwartz, the founder of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy, described
playfulness as a quality of the true self. comes, it flows out of that centered,
grounded, spirit-led place inside of us. It's not forced positivity or pretending everything is
fine. It's a spaciousness, a freedom, a vitality, an ability to drop your shoulders,
take a breath, and laugh at yourself and at all the shenanigans and absurdities around us.
Playfulness helps us stay present to what's hard without being consumed by it.
And this is what I love about today's conversation. My guest is creative visionary and author,
Piera Gilardi. And she tells this incredible story about being stuck in a long TSA line.
It's one of those tense moments where everyone is frustrated. Everyone is anxious. The atmosphere
feels like it's buzzing with tension. In the middle of it, she makes a tiny,
playful choice. That choice doesn't change the length of the line.
It doesn't magically fix the situation. But it changes her experience of the frustration.
And that in turn changes the experience of the people around her.
I've noticed in my own life recently that when I can find my way back to a good inner eye roll,
I can laugh at myself. I can laugh playfully with the people around me.
The room changes. The stress lifts. Suddenly you're back in that spirit-led place with just a
little more creativity, a little more joy, a little more lightness as you walk through the day.
This is the power of playfulness. It doesn't deny the reality of what's hard,
but it helps move through reality with more connection, more creativity,
and more humanity. And a lot of us need this right now. The world has been a lot.
The summer can be a lot. can be a lot. Marriage and family and relationships and friendships and
church life can be a lot. And maybe the invitation for you today is not to try to do one more thing
better or get one more thing right, but instead to return to a playfulness that God has placed in
you from the beginning. A little wonder, a little laughter, a little curiosity,
a little freedom, a little joy. My guest today is Piera Gilardi.
Piera is a creative entrepreneur, speaker, author, and the co-founder and former executive
creative director of Refinery29, where she helped shape one of the most influential media brands
for women and launched an immersive creative experience, 29 Rooms.
She's also the co-founder of NumaLuma, which is a platform devoted to helping people rediscover
creativity and play in everyday life. Her new book The Playful Way is a beautiful practical
invitation. to move from pressure into possibility. And she helps us reclaim play in practical
ways. You're going to get some practical ideas in today's episode to reconnect to a sense of wonder
and play. I love this conversation. It's so refreshing. It had me smiling from ear to ear,
and I know it's going to have something for you as you enter into the week.
Please enjoy my conversation with Piera Gilardi.
The founder of the model, he talks about the qualities of kind of when we know when we're in the
true self, when we're in that nervous system regulation, when we're connected, you know, and a lot
of them are clarity and calm. But one of them is playfulness. Right. And that's what you're
speaking to. So I would just love to kind of start there because you opened the book with such a
relatable. frustrating story I was just in one of these where you're I think in a TSA line at the
airport so frustrating and you have this moment of becoming playful could you could you share that
with us yeah absolutely so I was at the airport and there were huge delays the TSA line was you
know snaking this way that way it looked like it was miles long and our flight was in an hour and
we were going on a vacation that we really needed um and have been really looking forward to and so
we're just looking at this line and you know the the atmosphere in the airport is so tense you know
it's like it's like a thousand like stress flies like buzzing in the air it feels like and you know
everyone's huffing and puffing and getting annoyed with each other when you know they accidentally
bump each other with their roller suitcases and whatnot and i feel myself starting to just have
that internal voice of like why didn't we leave earlier why did you know that spiral and i
recognize it i say oh i'm spiraling into you know i'm spiraling and i decide to just i we're we
started around the first bend of the first turn in the line and i just made a split second decision
i raised my hand to my partner and he looked at me confused but he gave me a tentative high five
and i said yes one turn closer and he kind of giggled and then like the people around us looked at
us you know they were like slightly amused confused uh so then the next time we went around the
next turn my partner philip was ready so he raised his hand we both high-fived we said in unison
one turn closer and that time people you know chuckled around us and by the third turn in the line
this dad raised his hand for a high five before we even raised ours and You know,
he and his kid were laughing. And then by, you know, basically as we went along in this line, each
turn more people got involved or started to laugh. And so what had been this very pressured,
stressful situation where everyone was, you know, kind of isolated in their own frustration became
suddenly laughter, camaraderie. You know, we weren't going any faster in the line,
but we. felt so different. And we had sparked this moment of laughter and connection for the people
around us. And so ultimately, the state that we were in before that, where we were spiraling,
we were white knuckling, we were stressed out, we were in our minds fighting against what was
happening. That's what I call the pressured state. And when I took a breath and caught myself and
realized that i had a choice to show up a different way and i chose the playful way it didn't
change the situation but it changed us and it changed the people around us it's such a powerful
story because i loved that opening and you're such a great writer you just bring it to life but i
just thought oh my gosh that's it it's so simple but we so often don't choose that You know,
that moment was just this, you know, just a second of you making a different choice.
And you talk about how as children, this is much more normal for us.
We kind of automatically are we're automatically able to play. It's so sort of intuitive.
But as we become adults, we lose that. Why? What's your talk? And how do you describe in the book
why we lose that that childlike desire to play? Yeah,
play is intrinsic to all humans and we... we always can have access to it but we have to practice
it and we we often lose touch with it so i think of it like a muscle that you know if you decide
that you want to be more in touch with it it's about choosing it and finding those moments to
practice it but as as we grow up a lot of things happen i mean unfortunately for a lot of people
they have adverse childhood experiences that might you know mean they have to grow up much faster
there are also a lot of like systemic and privilege-based barriers who's allowed to play and
where. So all of those things are definite realities. And then there's also just the social
conditioning that we get from a very young age. When you think about it, as you start to get into
grade school, all of a sudden, play is just for resource re you know recess so it's this very very
small pocket of time you know unless you go to a school where play is integrated more mindfully but
at most schools it's really about you know doing things a certain way point a to point b it's sit
you know sit still pay attention don't joke around and you're you're you know that's like how how i
grew up you know all my report cards kind of talk about that so there's that then there's sort of
the layer of you know as we get older being a responsible adult and sort of being taught that that
That means being joyless, you know, for whatever reason, that responsibility means seriousness and
approaching things seriously. We have that perfectionist voice that tells you, you know, I
couldn't, I can't afford to make mistakes. So I'm not going to experiment. I'm not going to
explore. I'm just going to try to get the right answer and do it perfectly. So we get all these
voices. There's the cool police, you know, tells you don't stand out. Don't be cringe, you know,
and all of these things, you know, slow. slowly remove you know pull us back from our playfulness
and they pull us back from our authentic selves right like when we're not when we're so
perfectionistic that we're not taking any risks or doing any exploration you know we lose we lose
so much of you know what could be and and that those sparks of inspiration those um those trials
that actually get us to a better answer and something that's more aligned for us when we you know
when we listen to the cool police and we try to not be cringe we try to you know not stand out
we're not expressing ourselves you know we we feel a bit empty in life.
When we try to be a responsible adult and make that mean just being completely serious and,
you know, zipped up in our serious suits, we lose connection and joy and wonder and curiosity and
like all of these beautiful things that make us feel alive, creative, connected to each other.
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It's so true. It almost gets conditioned out of this.
And I almost see it in different... The older I get, it gets conditioned out of me in different
ways. And I was noticing, you know, I'm... in my fifth you know I'm menopausal and I've got to get
to the gym right and get those those and I was at the gym the other day it just reminded me of this
when you said this and I was so out of place I wasn't it was not cool you know this was like a
everybody there was under 30 with like huge biceps you know I was not you know the cool police I
was like I am I am not the cool police here I am so sticking out like a sore thumb and it was just
stressed me out like this And then this older woman, and you could just tell she did not care.
She was much older than me, just came running over to me. And she's like, we have the same orange
shoes. And we did. And it was so adorable. And just to your point, I immediately found joy.
And it was her being connected. And it made me think of it when you said the cool place.
Why is that still getting to me?
it doesn't matter i walk into a room where i'm not fitting in and i immediately sort of shrink and
then this one yeah and this one person who doesn't care and that just changed my whole experience i
had a great time we kind of like kept checking her yeah yes and it's it's powerful it's really
powerful and yeah i the way i think of it is that that pressured state yes what we get into when
we're feeling perfectionistic, when we're feeling judged or self-conscious, you know, that,
that, Oh, I don't want to stand out kind of voice. Like all those things shrink us. So I sort of
think of that pressured state as being clenched hands, right? It's like in our body, we can feel
it. Like everything is tight. Our shoulders are up, you know, maybe we're clenching our jaw,
our hands, you know, our breath is maybe shorter and we're white knuckling, you know? And when
we're in that playful state, we're more like an inflated balloon we're like that woman you know
pointing out the orange we're we're more filled with air um so i always i always kind of think
about that and how what state even just noticing what state am i in right now um is really helpful
just the awareness so you you talk about a point of burnout in your own life and realizing that you
were thinking about it as burnout. You were thinking about it as a creative block maybe. And that
was really underneath it was a disconnection from play. So what, how did you recognize that?
How did you, you know, cause you're in the white knuckling. How did you recognize what was actually
going on there?
Yeah. So, I mean, I grew up in a very playful family and I, you know, moved to, I was,
I'm very, you know, colorful, exuberant. creativity has always been core to my life and my career
and so when I was starting my company Refinery29, my first company,
I brought a lot of playfulness and a spirit of curiosity, exploration,
experimentation to the work that I was doing. And that really served me.
We built a company that was growing and we were hiring a bunch of people.
We started hiring people from more corporate backgrounds.
We also had a lot more pressure on us, a lot bigger goals, you know,
investors that were looking at our progress. And so it started to feel very pressured.
Yes. And I also started to feel like I was standing out in a not good way with my,
you know, being this colorful, creative, playful person that was now sitting in boardrooms where
people were slinging all this jargon that I didn't know and saying things I didn't understand. And
so I had this, you know, I had this huge imposter syndrome and I had and I thought,
you know, I think these playful qualities that got me to this point now aren't appropriate,
you know, and I want to be taken seriously. So I need to be serious. And so I and I think of it
like we're zipping ourselves into our serious. So good. Like it's like. You're getting in there and
it's a tight suit. So I started to stop exhibiting these playful things.
I thought if I asked a question in a meeting, then people would immediately know that I didn't know
the answer. I thought if I floated big wild ideas, people would think I was an unrealistic dreamer.
And I thought if I cracked a joke in the meeting, I would be seen as a joker. So I stopped doing a
lot of these. things that were really natural for me to do in my work. And I hoped that I would be
taken seriously from that. And I hoped I would get to the next stage of my career by cosplaying
serious adult, basically. And what happened was that I wasn't learning.
I still didn't know the answer to these. you know things i mean i was googling like a maniac but
like i still didn't you know still didn't have the answers i felt more disconnected it was like i
kind of lost my intrinsic motivation um i just felt yeah i felt very disconnected and i really lost
my perspective too I remember laying on my apartment floor and crying about what a failure I was,
like sobbing hysterically about what a failure I was. And I wrote this list of all the ways I was
failing. And it was at a moment when the outside world would have thought, you know,
this was my career peak thus far. But inside, I was so brittle,
so depleted.
I was able to realize that I was underplayed and overworked because I had the,
had the privilege at the time to recognize that I was in this bad state. I actually thought, I
thought I should probably just leave my company. I should resign because I wasn't clearly wasn't
cut out for this. Um, and fortunately I got connected to this coach,
Katya Verison and, uh, When I talked to her, the first thing she asked me was,
what do you think the qualities are that got you to this place in your career where you have all
this pressure, you know? Because in some ways, like Billie Jean King said, pressure is a privilege,
right? Like in this case, you know, I had built something. It was a result of success in some ways.
Yeah, it was a result of a certain kind of success, you know? A certain kind of success, that's a
good way to put it, yeah. Yeah, and so she said, what do you think the qualities are? that got you
here. And I said, curiosity, experimentation, creativity. You know,
I also said, I think my personality, my joyful, you know, my joyful creative personality,
like allowed me to meet and connect with a lot of people. And so she said, so, so why do you think
that those qualities you have to like throw in the trash can to get to the next level?
She said, what if you actually lean into those more? as your superpowers to grow and so I didn't
necessarily know if she was on the right track or not but I decided you know I mean right now I'm
at this place where I'm thinking of quitting my own company so I might as well try it and so I
started you know I started leaning more into these playful qualities and what I saw was you know
when I asked questions in a meeting I actually wasn't left out of the room. In fact, people leaned
forward to hear the answer and thanked me afterwards for asking because they were too afraid to.
So my curiosity was helping me to get more knowledge and it was helping me to actually help other
people to also have a better understanding and to clarify what was happening.
I started going back into that big idea. visionary you know imagination mode and what happened was
that we started to have these breakthroughs these like breakthroughs and innovation and do things
that you know ended up being sort of the most the thing our company was most known for came from
leaning into being more imaginative and i started just bringing back my my joy and my humor and
that made me feel much more connected and my day-to-day brighter and so yeah in that moment i was
like so burnt out i was just so so brittle yeah and i found that yeah like i identified that i was
overworked underplayed and when i brought that playful spirit back it brought me back to life
there's such a your time you know i think about the word authenticity right as you're when we are
when we are really inhabiting our true selves, like who we were made to be,
that's when we're going to bring the best. We're not only not going to burn out, but we're going to
bring the best of who we are to the table. I love that.
I love that story. I think it also makes me think of there. You said something really profound that
it was like you had reached this level of success, which is when the pressure. came in.
And I even think about that happens in so many different ways. It can happen with work. I just was
listening to you going, oh my gosh, I've been thinking about that this last six months. I'm like, I
notice I'm losing the play. I'm trying to be somebody because I, you know, and it's not sustainable
and it also isn't your best work. But I think it happens. I was thinking about parenting where we
think our kids need some type of person or some perfection. And really what they need is us.
and our realness and our playfulness. You know, but it's like when the stakes get higher,
something in us goes back to that pressure cooker when actually as the stakes get higher,
that's almost more when we need the playful self.
Yeah, we think of play too as something, oh, I'll do that when times are good or I'll do that when
I have a little free time. Yes, yes. Or, you know. when it's low when it feels low stakes and the
thing about it is that play play is the most helpful actually in those in a lot of those more high
stakes moments when we need you know because play play that playful spirit of exploration
experimentation curiosity that taps us into being stronger problem solvers it helps us to be more
connected to each other and more collaborative it helps us to lower our stress which you know
stress you know shrinks like shrinks our creativity and our resources for finding solutions finding
answers um so playfulness actually is really incredibly practical and useful but we see it as
something that is frivolous and recess That's so, so true. So you've already talked about this a
little bit in your own story and just there that sort of almost the opposite is the inner critic.
When criticism comes in, either towards ourself or towards others, what are the kind of the most
common voices that will shut that play down? You've kind of talked about this, but I think it's
helpful to really name them and notice them because that's when we can make that pivot. Yeah,
you know, I think something people also don't think about, they think of playfulness as being,
because we see it as being frivolous, we don't see it as being courageous. And it's incredibly
courageous to be playful because it requires us to be our authentic selves. It often requires risk.
It requires us to stand out. And so it takes a lot of guts.
And so in the book, I talk about these different powers of play, but I did a whole chapter about
self-compassion at the end because in order to have that courage,
I think we have to nurture our own inner voice and our own self-compassion because there are these
voices that kind of tell us not to play. And those are that voice,
the perfectionist voice that says, I can't afford to make a mistake. I need it to be perfect.
I can't, you know, I can't explore and experiment and play. There's the voice that says I have too
much responsibility to play around. There's the voice that says,
yeah, blend in, don't stand out, don't be cringe.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of some of the other voices, but those are some big ones. You're going to
make a fool of yourself. That's a big one, I feel. You're going to make a fool of yourself. Yeah,
that one really. Yeah, no one's going to take you seriously.
Yeah. A lot of times it's like we're trying to meet serious energy with serious energy.
Yes. Like we think it's a mismatch to bring playfulness into a situation.
What I've been loving is I've been as I've been doing this book tour, I've been going to done this
in four different cities now. I've been hosting these story hours where I share some of the
different powers of play. curiosity, imagination, wonder. And then I tell a story about a time that
that quality has helped me in my life. And then I have the audience share their own stories.
And it's been incredible to hear, you know, people telling stories about being at their parents
funeral and bringing humor with their siblings into it as a way of connecting with each other.
you know, helping to like move through the grief and also to connect to their parents who are, you
know, deceased, but were playful, funny people. Or, you know,
someone shared this hilarious anecdote about going home for the holidays and deciding, you know,
that they wanted to break the cycle of constantly fighting with their parents and trying to change
their parents and reverting to like an adolescent state. So they said they decided they were.
not going home for the holidays they were going on safari and when you're on safari you don't try
to change the animal's diet you don't get in the animal's face about you don't like that they did
you just sit back and think wow this is wild it's
been so fun to hear people's stories a lot of parents you know sharing you know funny ways they get
their you know they like get cooperation their kids brushing their teeth um you know people have
been sharing ways that they're transforming you know mundane tasks through you know through play um
so it's been that's been really fun to just hear these firsthand anecdotes.
And I think everyone has one when they start to see also gratefulness as not just goofing around,
but how it's, how it also represents, you know, humor and curiosity and wonder and imagination.
you know, moving, you know, moving our bodies is so playful. So once I start to kind of open people
up to these different powers of play, the stories that I'm hearing are just so incredible and
vivid. I love that. And I love that you call it a power because it is powerful. Like even just
listening to you tell those, I'm like something shifts and you've touched on these,
but I really kind of want to just take a second and drill down on these. I think there's eight of
them. Yeah. Can you, can you say them again? I've heard you say curiosity.
Yeah, I will say, I will say the powers of play. Let's see if I can remember all eight.
It's a pop quiz.
There's the joyful gesture. So this is someone who brings humor and levity, and they're really
amazing at diffusing tension because humor helps us to de-stress. It helps us to have a little
distance between us and whatever's going on. So the joyful gesture, their power of play is humor
and levity. Then there's the visionary dreamer. So they're the... one with a big imagination who
sees beyond the you know what is to what if um so they're really great at imagining new
possibilities um then we have the curious quester so the curious quester is someone that might go
down rabbit holes of curiosity there they ask a lot of questions they're more of an experimental
you know take a more experimental approach to life And so that's always really good for finding new
ways and also illuminating situations. We have the mover and shaker.
So these are people who find play through moving their bodies.
And they're really amazing at recognizing that our bodies are also,
you know, powerful for helping our minds to get unstuck. So they can help move through stuck
situations by moving their bodies. um we have the wonder wanderer so this is someone whose powers
of noticing are really amazing so you might be walking down the street with them and they're the
one that's pointing to the cloud that's shaped like a rhinoceros or the little you know sparkly
bracelet that's in the crack of the sidewalk they're just always noticing they notice patterns they
notice um and they're also really tapped into just the beauty of day-to-day life
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That's a pretty good list. And I think the listener can go get the book to get the rest of them.
Yeah, get the book to get the three that I'm not remembering right now. I love the way that there's
different, you know, because we're going to resonate with different ones. Because, you know, then I
can almost feel the tension of, I'm not funny, you know, like. But then it's like, but I'm a
dreamer. It's like there are different ways we all play differently. And finding your own kind of
unique. I think of people I know who have sort of a dark sense of humor that sort of is like,
that see the, and I'm like, there's a playfulness in it. And again,
I think what's interesting is you're not talking about We're not trying to bypass what's hard.
No. Right. And any of these things, just like we talk on the podcast all the time, any any strength
or anything can have can become a mask. Right. Right.
But at the same time, that that ability to the flexibility that we know is such an important part
of resilience to kind of flip into. I love the story about going home and seeing the family as the
safari to harness that. as a tool to use in a hard situation is,
is really powerful. And then kind of knowing your own unique way you're going to do that.
Yeah. Yeah. When I, what I was hearing from a lot of people was that I'm not playful.
And when I, you know, double clicked on that, what I would find was that it was because people
think of play as being the joyful gesture, basically. Yeah. Funny.
Silly, light. And so if they're not that or they think of play as being the fun one,
you know, I'm not the fun friend, so I'm not playful. So what I really wanted to do in the book was
to show all these different facets of playfulness and so that people could see themselves in it.
And they could also understand how if they if there was a quality that they wanted to develop more,
how they might do that. and how they might practice that in their day-to-day life.
So let's talk a little bit. So for the listener who's been in that pressure cooker, maybe feels
like they've lost a little bit of that sense of play where you were when you had that.
What's a practice, you know, we can do to, because you do talk about moving out of your head,
right? So then we can get in our head with it. So what's a way that we can begin to shift from
pressured to playful? Yeah. So I think the first thing is recognizing that you're in that pressured
state. So then you kind of feel it. So the way I have, I have an acronym,
even though acronyms are my kryptonite, I have an acronym for kind of shifting state and it's play
P-L-A-Y. So it's pause. And like when you're pausing,
you recognize, oh, I'm in the pressured state. Everything's tight. I'm stressed out. I'm spiraling.
Okay, pause. And then you lighten. So you can lighten with a breath. You can lighten with a,
you know, moving your body or laughter. But essentially,
you want to just kind of try and go from being that clean. from the clenched fist to like a little
bit more of an inflated balloon. Then you activate your play power. So whatever,
you know, you kind of tap into that, whichever play power feels right for the situation or right
for you. And then you're basically saying yes and. So you're saying, which is an improv principle,
but you're saying, okay, this thing is happening. I might not want it to be happening. And I can
look for a playful approach here. So that I find really helpful for adults that feel like they've
completely disconnected with their playfulness. I usually tell them to look in the lost and found,
like go back to childhood. What made you lose track of time?
What, you know, what did you just love doing? And often there's a kernel,
it might not be that, you know, you might, might not want to play with Barbies as an adult, but
maybe that role playing, you know, that you did means that you love, you know,
you love narratives. So you love, maybe you love like sitting on the train and like imagining the,
what the different people's like lives are like, or maybe, you know, you love doing.
improv now or you know there's like so finding the thread like for me as a kid I loved beachcombing
I grew up in Maine and I loved looking for treasure along the beach and so now as someone who lives
in New York City as an adult I love going on wonder wanders so I go for a walk and I just basically
try and like I'm like I'm tuning my dial to delight And I look for things that are interesting to
me. And I look up, I look down, I look all around, I put my phone away unless I need to take a
picture of one of the amazing things that I find. And so that's sort of a practice that relates
back to a childhood practice, but it now fits my adult life and my environment. So I think people
can, yeah, look back and see if there's an adult version that seems appealing of like that
childhood interest. i love that because there's a there's definitely a connection like i was
thinking when you were talking about like the imagination you know i could just imagine worlds in
my head and sometimes i'll go back and read the books that sparked the kids books it sparked the
imagination because somehow it just opens up that pathway back yeah in my brain you know whatever
was tapped into Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And in the book, I also have like these daily,
these small practices. So a couple of my favorite ones that people want to practice play.
One is move to get out of our heads is to do a shake break. So, you know,
I think we think of a lot of times as adults, we're like, I need to move and it's tied to a should,
right? It's all about exercise. I need to be, you know, need to be healthy.
But. kind of finding some space for just like a little bit of free movement. So Shake Break is I
put on a song. I just move freely however I feel like for a minute.
And I did it before this podcast. I do it whenever I need to, you know,
like move through. Sometimes it's nerves or I just want to like wake up my energy if I'm feeling.
anxious i'm feeling sad i take a shake break i love that that one i love that's one of my own
practices that i do all the time the other is the wonder wonder which i just told you about and
it's you know we can even do it in our environment and just say like i'm gonna look up and find
five things that are green or i'm gonna look up and see if i can find five things i haven't noticed
before in my space um so that's that's one just to tap us into that the wonder that's always around
us. And, you know, so often we're so in our head or we're so in our to-dos or our stress that we
don't actually notice the world around us. And that's one that's been, as someone who lives with
depression, going on Wonder Wanders has been so helpful for me. It's such a gentle,
it's like a gentle form of play for me. I love that. Yeah, so I love that one.
And then another one that I really love is Find the Funny. which is basically looking back at my
day at the end of the day and finding something that I can look at through the lens of humor. So
maybe it's a moment I took myself too seriously that I can laugh at. Maybe it's a situation that
stressed me out, but that if I imagine it in a sitcom, all of a sudden it seems so hilarious.
Or if I dramatize it, it feels hilarious. But it's a great way to look back at your day and kind of
find the lightness. put a little distance between you and whatever was frustrating you or stressing
you out. And then I find that because I've, because I practice it sort of retroactively,
then in the moment, I'm more able to see the lens of humor on things.
And it really, it just helps me so much to like laugh about it a little. It's not about not,
it's not, and I think we think of play as this thing that's. the opposite of seriousness.
Yeah. But it's really that that playful spirit helps us to move through through seriousness with a
little bit more flexibility, levity, resourcefulness. Exactly.
It's so well stated. And those are such practical. I love the the practical.
I love that idea of just thinking over your day. I just did it. While you were talking about it, I
was like, oh, I've been taking myself so seriously there. And I can almost imagine the screenplay.
I can almost imagine the script, kind of inner eye roll. I have like an inner eye roller.
I just start, oh, gosh. And it's not being mean. And you're so right. It's such a paradox. It's not
being mean to yourself. It's actually kind of like seeing yourself. And it's just, again, I always
think about, we talk a lot on the podcast about kind of reparenting these. parts of yourself right
it's a gentle and you know think about with your real life kids like if they're doing something
sometimes that eye roll when it's done in love not in anger it's an actual really like side eye
you're you're actually showing confidence you're showing courage and that tracks so much more with
a kid than you know getting all serious and giving them a lecture And it's right. And it's kind of
the same with ourselves. It's kind of like, oh, gosh, you know, if I can if I can sort of laugh at
myself, like I'm pretty free, actually. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's not about being mean and
being like, oh, why did I why was I like that? It's just more like, oh, my God, there I go again.
Freeing. It's it's very it's it's very paradoxical. I love that you're kind of highlighting that.
And even just I appreciate your vulnerability and saying you've dealt with. depression right it
doesn't these things coexist and in many ways playfulness you know some of the funniest people i
know are the people who can kind of see the humor in the darkness yeah and it's not and this is
where just to circle all the way back what i was saying about richard schwartz the founder of this
ifs model that's where he talked about that playfulness is a it's part of our design that is the
healthy kind of resilience, you know, that's allowing us to hold what's hard and also,
you know, just kind of hold it loosely, you know, hold it with a little more lightness.
I really like that. That's beautiful. That's beautiful the way you put it. Yeah. Well, I think,
you know, we also, we internalize a lot of binaries,
you know, and that is so destructive. And so playfulness is holding,
it's holding both and it's a yes and sort of energy.
And I think that that helps us to feel more whole and connected and to be able to sit with the
beauty and the pain and the... know the it's not you know the complexity of of life I love it tell
my listeners a little bit more about where they can find the book it's such a great read it's it's
filled with and you embody I just want to say the playfulness about which you know I felt it even
And I can tell it's a practice because I felt it in myself as we were talking. And I see that in
the book, too, right, that you're embodying it as you go. And it's really powerful. Where can
people find it and find more about it? Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I embodied all these
practices as I was writing it as well. So I really challenged myself to lean into my own
philosophy. And it helped me so much. Listeners can find the book where,
you know, major online sellers where books are sold the playful way. And if you want to also
practice play day to day, I have an app called Numaluma currently free that is all about creative
play in your day to day in those in between moments of your life where, you know,
you have a few minutes and you might be doom scrolling.
it's giving you an active form of low stakes play. So I would love to,
yeah, all about spreading play ripples. And I hope that this book and these practices help people
to feel more connected, creative, alive in their day to day.
I love it. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us. Thank you so much. I loved our
conversation. It was so delightful. Thanks for playing. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for joining me
for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to
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you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
What does it actually mean to raise an emotionally mature child?
In this powerful conversation, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with renowned psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, whose groundbreaking book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents helped millions name what they didn’t receive growing up.
Now, Dr. Gibson turns toward a new question: How do we become the kind of parents who help our children feel safe, seen, respected, and emotionally strong?
Together, they explore the emotional foundation children truly need—not perfection, but presence. They unpack what emotional maturity looks like, the impact of being raised by an emotionally immature parent, and how we can begin to give our own children the kind of parenting they need.
You’ll explore:
- The signs of an emotionally immature parent
- What a “good enough” parent actually looks like
- How repair builds trust more than perfection does
- The dance of balancing connection and autonomy
- How to create emotional safety for your child
Whether you’re parenting toddlers, teenagers, or adult children—or simply learning how to become more emotionally mature yourself—this conversation offers a hopeful, grounded framework for growth.
Because healthy parenting isn’t about raising perfect kids. It’s about creating the kind of emotional soil where both you and your child can grow.
More Resources:
Order Dr. Lindsay’s new book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child: Your Blueprint to a Lifetime of Happiness and Success for Your Child
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 175: A Game-Changing Toolkit to Help Kids Conquer Worry and Build Courage with David Thomas and Sissy Goff
Episode 68: How *Not* to Lose Yourself—Remaining You While Raising Them with Alli Worthington
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
You can't do these things that encourage emotional maturity in your child if you're not also
simultaneously working on this within yourself. How are you going to orient your beingness toward
your child in such a way that you will create the best possible soil for them to grow in?
And that is your mindset. That is your attitude toward your child.
This attitude that says, I know that you're real inside. I'm very interested.
Hey,
everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of the Best of You podcast. Today's
conversation was such a gift for me personally, and I know it's going to be for you.
We're talking about parenting. We're going into summer, and we're not talking about it as a set of
techniques or skills or tips, but as one of the deepest invitations to our own emotional and
spiritual growth. If you're a parent, you already know this. Our children have a way of bringing up
parts of us that still need tending. Maybe it's a part of you that is desperate to get it right,
to correct any of the wrongs that maybe happened to you. Maybe it's a part of you that feels
completely overwhelmed, like you're losing yourself in the work of parenting. Maybe it's a part of
you that worries constantly. Am I doing enough? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Maybe
it's a part of you that remembers what you received or didn't receive from your own parents,
and you're constantly comparing and constantly stuck in the past. And this is where parenting,
as challenging as it can be, is also such a beautiful and sacred work because we're not only
helping our children grow into emotionally and spiritually mature human beings,
we're also being invited to grow into emotional and spiritual maturity ourselves.
You can't really become a healthier parent, as our guest today shares with us,
without becoming a healthier human. And the reality is there's a dance at the heart of parenting,
at the heart of any healthy relationship. It's the dance of connection and autonomy, of coming
close and of letting go, being needed, and then also letting our children move out on their own.
They're making their own choices, having their own interests, becoming their own. person.
And today's guest is just so gifted at naming these experiences,
both of parenting ourselves, but also of being parented. She's someone who has mentored me from
afar. I'd never met her before today, but I've read her books. I've recommended her books so
frequently. I'm sure many of you have already read some of her books because she's just such a mix
of kindness and honesty and deep wisdom. I was just so honored to get to have this conversation
with Lindsay C. Gibson. Dr. Lindsay Gibson is a clinical psychologist with over 30 years of
psychotherapy experience. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Adult Children of
Emotionally Immature Parents. This is a book that has sold over a million copies and has been
translated into 38 languages. Her work has helped so many people name what they didn't receive
growing up, not necessarily through harsh labels or blame, but through the deeply clarifying lens
of emotional immaturity. And now in our brand new book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child,
Lindsay turns toward the question so many of us are asking, how do we become the kind of parents
who help our children feel safe, seen, respected, and emotionally strong?
What I love about this conversation is that it's not about perfect parenting. In fact, we talk
about how perfect parenting does not set our kids up for success. In fact, Lindsay gives us so much
relief around this idea of a good enough parent. She even quantifies it for us, what it actually
means in real life. Spoiler alert, it is the parent who misses things sometimes,
who gets distracted sometimes, who loses attunement sometimes, but learns how to come back,
repair, and reconnect. This conversation is for any kind of parent,
parents of toddlers, teenagers, adult children, step-parents, and honestly, for anyone who is just
learning how to become more emotionally mature in the presence of another human. I am so thrilled
to bring you my conversation with Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson.
Well, I couldn't be more thrilled. As I said just before I hit record,
I feel like you've mentored me for these past years and how many times I recommend your work.
I kind of want to start. They're Lindsay bridging to the new book. I think that the naming of your
first book or your previous book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents,
was so powerful for so many people because it's less stigmatizing.
Many of us, you know, many folks who I interact with or talk to are clients or, you know,
we... have this sense of something was missing. But almost in our culture,
it can be like, well, it's got to be narcissism or something extreme or it's perfect.
And it's like, well, no, it wasn't that. It's just something was missing. And I think you really
named something so helpful, gave people a way to frame their experience.
I think especially for my generation, Gen X, where some of this was just not in the air that we
breathed. back in the 80s this idea of emotional maturity i i would love to just hear your thoughts
about how that's been for you to see how that has landed so viscerally with so many people and just
what that what that's been like for you yeah well it's it's funny because the The title was
something that we left until fairly late in the process, my editor and I, of writing the book.
And it was recommended by somebody, it might have been a consultant from Barnes & Noble,
I'm not sure where they were from, but they said, no, you've got to describe what's in the book.
You've got to say what it is in the title. And so so we were kind of reluctantly,
OK, we'll we'll you know, we'll we'll make it a descriptive title if you say so. And we laugh about
it, you know, all the time from, you know, do you remember when we had this other title and how
funny that would have been? Anyway, so. Yeah. So, yes, it was it was something that I think.
needed to be articulated needed to be put into words for people like you say people already knew
what this was but they just didn't have a a way of defining it or talking about it that didn't
automatically make them feel like they were throwing their parent under the bus with a psychiatric
diagnosis which is also kind of a You know, it's sort of a euphemism for saying that they're bad.
Yeah. I mean, emotionally, you feel like you're saying something awful about them when you give
them a diagnosis like that. And I was just trying to describe in as kind.
and yet accurate a way as I could what this kind of behavior was all about.
And what it's all about is that the person never got the chance or never had the capacity to be
mature enough to think about other people and to imagine what the experience of other people was
like and have that govern their behavior. So yeah, I was trying to trying to get at this thing that
I knew people knew about and yet did not have the language for it yet.
It's so powerful. Before we segue into how we raise emotionally mature kids,
can you give us just an overview of what are these qualities of an emotionally immature parent?
Because that's essentially with this second book we're trying. to figure out how to be emotionally
mature as a parent. So our children can be emotionally mature. So what is it?
How do you see it at a high level, an emotionally immature parent?
Yeah, no, what you said was very interesting because if you are trying to raise an emotionally
mature child and that's your mindset, you actually are going to be emotionally maturing yourself.
It's like the hidden benefit. You can't do these things that encourage emotional maturity in your
child if you're not also simultaneously working on this within yourself.
You don't have to be doing that consciously. It can happen indirectly as part of the process of
trying to help your child attain maturity. It's kind of a cool twofer thing.
It's an added benefit of trying to approach your child in this way. You will actually be increasing
your own maturity. But to go into the qualities of emotional immaturity,
we recognize this. all day, every day,
whenever we have an unpleasant interaction with somebody.
And it's that the other person is...
Basically, they're egocentric. Their focus is necessarily on themselves because they have never
psychologically developed to the point where in their inner world,
there is a place for the inner subjective experience of another human being. They're like big four
-year-olds. They've got language. It looks like you should be able to reason with them because
they can talk now.
But emotionally, they just can't imagine that there's anybody else in the world but them that
counts. And so they're very self-preoccupied.
All roads lead to them. And they have very low empathy. They have some empathy.
You know, if they're not stressed, if they're not tired or, you know,
maybe feeling under the weather. Yeah, if they're in peak form. they have the capacity to show some
empathy and that's what confuses people because they they think well there was that time when i was
sick and mom brought me the stuffed animal or you know i remember when dad um you know took me out
for pizza and they have empathy but they're so self-absorbed yeah that they can't tune into that
unless they're so well resourced that they've got plenty of extra energy.
They also don't have the capacity for self-reflection usually. Again,
things are going great. They can sit back and maybe self-reflect, but it doesn't go very far and
it doesn't last very long. They don't ask themselves, you know, gee, maybe it was something I said,
or maybe I could have handled that differently. Or, wow, I'm really sorry, you know,
seeing the look on my child's face that I said that. I need to apologize. That is so upsetting to
them that they just stay away from it. And then the last two things are emotional intimacy is very
hard for them. They like to keep things simple and they like to keep things on the surface. I
described it with one of my clients as... You know, could you think of yourself as 3D and maybe
your mom as 2D? And would that help you to understand how she experiences life and why it's so
unsatisfying to you as a 3D person? And that really helped her.
And then the last thing is that their relationship to reality,
how they see the world, how they think things work,
optional they dismiss deny distort reality in whatever way that will make them feel good about
themselves and make them feel less stressed so that that really you know opens wide the floodgates
for misunderstanding because if you try to talk with them about something or communicate something
about the relationship You know, A, they're terrified of the emotional intimacy of that. They don't
want to get close to that meaningful stuff. And, you know, secondly, they will just say that didn't
happen or I didn't mean that or you're way too sensitive. They'll shut it down by distorting the
reality that you thought, you know, was something that you shared together because you were there.
But that doesn't hold them back from rearranging things to make it feel better to them.
Yeah. And what is then, if we're thinking again, if you're raised by someone who has this kind of
emotional capacity, and I always think to myself, you know, if your parent had the emotional
intelligence of maybe a five, six-year-old up through five or six of your own life,
that might have been fine. But then as you develop, what is the impact? And especially as you
become an adult, how does that affect us? How does that affect our own ability to form emotional
intimacy and empathy and have these skills? Yeah,
well, first of all, it's going to make you feel very lonely. Because if you as a little child
person have a deep need for emotional intimacy,
meaning you want to share your inside world with someone else and you want to hear theirs back and
you want to have that meaningful, deep connection at that profound level. And you can't connect up
with this incredibly important person in your life, the basis of your security,
and you can't find or form a bridge to them. You're going to feel very emotionally lonely.
And of course, for a child, you know, because everything to them feels like they caused it or
they're the root of it. There's that nice egocentrism again of the very young. They're going to
feel like there must be something in the matter with them. Yeah. And so maybe it would be better to
kind of keep all of this stuff secret and don't share it with other people because their experience
with an emotionally immature parent is that the parent actually. you know draws back and you know
puts up a kind of a shield. They don't come toward the child with interest.
And so they learn to keep all this stuff to themselves, which is tragic.
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Lindsay, it's so powerful. You talk about the work of parenting to segue into this new book as the
psychological construction of another human being. You're providing the atmosphere.
And I love what you just said. It's so interesting. It's kind of touching me personally because I
wrote a little bit about the process of moving toward the parts of my own self that felt so lonely
and unseen in this new book, right? They always needed that.
These parts of me always needed that presence. And I had to find for me other ways of getting it
for myself and from God, you know, from that sense of almost that withness that we just need.
And there are ways, you know, I know part of why I love as we were talking before we record this
inner work is, is it sort of like, because what do I do? You can't change what you got as a parent,
right? So how do you find a way to bring that kind of loving presence into those parts of us?
I wonder about, and I'm sure you get this question all the time,
right? So we're aware of that, how important that is. And then we become parents.
And so we're trying to figure out how to not create that gap. that loneliness gap,
that gap of being unseen with our own, you know, and you speak about this so well in the new book.
And so I kind of want to pivot there to, you know, for the listener who's kind of hooked on what we
just talked about, please check out, if you haven't already, about your own parents, the, you know,
what sort of the residual effects of having an emotionally... immature parent, but now pivoting to,
gosh, now I know this. I've seen in my own self how valuable and important that withness is.
It can be kind of terrifying. How do we begin to think about our own children without sort of
collapsing into fear and pressure, but also recognizing how important that role of...
kind of creating that emotional atmosphere for this little being, this little soul that's getting
formed. Yes. Well, you know, what just occurred to me when you said that was,
if you have been doing any kind of self work at all, and I would imagine that probably a lot of
your audience has already been engaged in that. You are already doing that with yourself.
In other words, you are, instead of allowing yourself to remain unseen to yourself and just sort
of, you know, heaping blame on yourself, like there must be something wrong with me or maybe I'm
the crazy one or I want too much or something like that. If you're engaged in any kind of self
-discovery, you are already putting yourself in the mindset of that withness and that presence.
with yourself, okay, with whatever that spark is within us that we recognize as me,
myself, who I am. If we are already engaged in that process of being in communication with that,
we are set up perfectly for doing that with our child.
It's really only when, you know, for people who are very emotionally immature,
They just don't turn inward. Inward is a scary place. They construct a kind of a facade in order to
shore up their self-esteem and to keep themselves emotionally and socially stable. So they live
kind of from the outside in. But if you have any interest in what's going on inside you,
and you've been working on it at all, or reading interesting books on that subject,
then you already know implicitly the right attitude to have toward your child in order for your
child to grow up with the best chance for emotional maturity. And let me tell you how this works.
So when I wrote this book, I thought... are a million books out there, really good books,
that will tell you what to do when your child has a tantrum, that will tell you how to do illogical
consequences or how not to do consequences, how just to be collaborative with your child. I have
such respect for that. I have a whole section in the back of the book about resources for those
very books.
I didn't want to write a book that would just be about addressing specific behaviors.
I really wanted to write a book that would be a sort of a, to use your language,
Allison, a soul orientation. Okay. How are you going to orient your beingness toward your child in
such a way that you will create the best possible uh soil or her ground for them to grow in and
that is your mindset that is your your attitude toward your child and this goes back to that part
about also doing self-discovery and work on the self because if you approach your child as someone
who is real inside The inside world is as real as the outside world.
If you approach your child with that attitude and you approach yourself with that attitude, now you
are positioned for really deep, true emotional intimacy because that's where it resides.
It's not in your communication skills. It's not in how you phrase your questions or how many times
you ask. It's this... It's this orientation,
this attitude that says, I know that you're real inside. I'm very interested in what's going on
inside there. And I am going to attend to you in such a way that you and I both learn together who
you are as an individual, how you feel, and I'm going to help you find the words.
to be able to express that so we can communicate about it. And I'm going to take your emotional
needs completely seriously. I don't care if you're 2 or 12 or 17.
I'm going to treat your inner world like something that is as essential and important as anything
in the outside world that our culture values. You are precious to me for who you really are.
And I'm going to get to know you at that level. And we're going to delight in each other.
That's powerful. If you get that going, you are going to do just fine.
That's so encouraging. It's such a paradox in many ways that listening to you,
the more we cultivate that soil in our own soul, that's what spills.
out. You know, that's what spills out. That's what's our kids. And I'm aware of that.
The more I'm with myself, I kind of figure out what I actually need from me, from, you know, from
even I think spiritually for me, like kind of learning that's what it means, God with us, you know,
rarely to be fixed, rarely to be lectured, sometimes a boundary, sure.
Always with understanding. That's how I then approach my own kids.
Yes, it absolutely is then. Oh, I get it now. Oh, that's what you want in this moment.
Exactly. Yeah. And it's and it's basically this recognition that comes across.
We can you can tell you can tell how someone attends to you,
whether they think that you're really inside there. That there's really something inside you that
they're connecting with. That comes across, you know, in a crowded room.
You meet the eyes of someone who can do that, who can recognize the realness inside you.
And you instantly feel like you want to gravitate toward that because you know it's going to be
kind. You know it's going to take you seriously. You know that you have the feeling that you could
tell this person anything and they would just be curious. you know, about you. They wouldn't judge
you or reject you. It's a very particular kind of energy. But what I think is so cool,
because it's amazing it works this way, it's so cool that when we show curiosity toward ourselves
and our own development, how we got to be the way we are, that's going to translate. to our
relationships, and also to our parenting with our child. It's to your point at the beginning, it
really is, the more we try to be better parents, we are going to become better people.
And it's very beautiful. You talk about this concept that I love from Winnicott.
I think it's from Winnicott, the good enough parent. I kind of want to bring that in because we
also... I think part of that balance and that paradox is we make mistakes.
We have bad days. We miss things, you know. So tell me how you encourage parents through that in
this book because you really are. It's not a quick fix how-to. It's more of a who you are.
So what's this idea of a good enough parent and how do we think about it in our own process?
Yeah.
Well, in a way, it's sort of the counterbalance to the implicit message in some books,
which is, let me tell you how to be a more perfect parent, or let me help you perfect yourself.
Or step down from that is, let me show you how to do the skills.
Let me show you the steps for how you do this. But this is really about,
and I think Winnicott was getting at this too, it's an orientation. It's a way of seeing the world
or this other person where you are sensitive enough,
you're attuned enough, you're interested enough in the experience of that little baby,
that toddler, that middle schooler. where you will turn toward them with interest and curiosity and
maybe concern when you sense that there is something going on inside them that is not being
expressed, that maybe needs to be expressed or is in the process of trying to form into something
that can be communicated. So the good enough parent is the person who knows their child has an
inner world and they're sensitive and responsive to that at an emotional level.
It's that, I think you called it the withness, you know,
being with the person. And that kind of attentiveness it turns out,
does not have to be done 100% of the time every day. There you go.
This is the big relief.
Load off your mind. And the infancy researcher, Ed Tronick,
actually set out and did the experiment to find out, okay,
let's operationalize this. How much time do you have to be perfectly attuned to your child in order
to be a good enough parent? I need some parameters here. Don't just tell me to be good enough.
And he found that approximately a third of the time, maybe I think his actual number was 30%.
If you are attuned to and attending to your child at a emotional level of being present with them
and sensitive to them yeah if you're doing that about a third of the time now this we're talking
interspersed yeah right you're not with your child presumably all day long so the third of the time
you're with them yeah yes because he you know he recorded wow you know when at whenever the parent
tuned in to the child and made that resonant right brain to right brain kind of connection with the
child. And he found that that's really all it took for the child to apparently feel safe,
soothed, and kind of ready to meet the day again.
It was not necessary to try to be perfectly attuned and always there.
That gets us into helicopter parent territory. But that we can have peaceful coexistence with our
child, except when they begin to show us that they need more engagement,
which they will reliably do by fussing or crying or trying to get attention. They'll always tell us
what we need to do. That's so good. I noticed as your kids get older,
too. when you've learned when you know when you've been present or not present as they get older
because they know you can name it you know I will say to my daughter I am so distracted I'm just
not here you know or I'll circle back and say I'm present now I'm sorry I wasn't earlier right
which is that yeah you build that trust they don't expect perfection because that's not real life
but you build that trust over time as you kind of Learn. It's not to beat yourself up.
Oh, man, I'm not present right now. It's I noticed that I'm not. Oh, wow. What a win.
You know that I know the difference. It's self-reflection. Yeah. Awareness.
Yeah. Yes. So when we can go back in and reconnect like that deliberately and also.
to confirm your child's experience to validate their experience by saying i wasn't present earlier
or i was distracted or i couldn't listen that you know at that point um it it confirms to them oh
i'm not crazy uh this really did happen right and that goes into their model of life in interacting
with other people i mean they They then understand and they're not,
you know, thrown by someone who is distracted at times.
They now know that's a thing that happens between people. They don't need perfect attention all the
time because they've learned that from you. And they also have more trust in the world because,
like, who would you trust more? The friend who...
never ever ever uh had any and created any problems between you or the friend who when there was a
problem they noticed they circled back like you said they say hey you know i really missed the boat
on that one i don't think i'd listen to you very well could we talk about that again at some point
because i was really distracted you have Better trust for that person because you know they're
watching, they're monitoring themselves in the relationship. And I can count on them to feel
something, feel off about the interaction too. They're going to feel it too.
And if they come back to me, I'm going to trust them more than if we had never had a breach.
That's a good point. It actually feels, in any kind of relationship, that's such a beautiful
feeling when you realize we both got that we disconnected. Yes. And we can repair it. That's
powerful. Yeah, and that idea about that actually strengthening trust and hope,
that's from Ed Tronick and Claudia Gold in their book, The Power of Discord, which just turns
upside down this idea that we have to be perfect all the time. Yeah, perfection is not the goal,
actually. That's so good. So what, Lindsay, so we're kind of doing this work ourselves.
What does emotional maturity look like in a child? Yeah.
Right? Because when you were describing the emotionally immature parent as a four or five-year
-old or whatever age, I thought to myself, I was thinking, right, a four-year-old or a five-year
-old can show these moments of empathy. And it's really cool. And you're so excited about it. But
it's not stable. So what are some, you know,
signs of real inner development, real inner emotional maturity that we can look for in our kids?
Yes, and the way you just said that was beautiful because it really is signs of a becoming.
You know, it's not something that has already happened,
of course, because there are only, you know, three or six or, you know. whatever we're not going to
see emotional maturity in the way we mean it for an adult but what we what we really mean is that
according to what they need to be doing at different stages of life this is why i i went from birth
to young adulthood in the book because i wanted people to know what these developmental challenges
are for each age And they're all different. We're working on different things.
So if we're meeting the developmental challenge of our age, like for the two-year-old,
it's autonomy versus shame and self-doubt. If they're learning how to be autonomous and they're
learning to do that in a way that shows confidence and yet connection with other people,
then they are showing their maturation that's appropriate at that age.
Same thing with a teenager who is looking for their identity. The ways that they try to find their
identity may be through artists or music idols or maybe the upperclassmen of the sports character.
They're looking for their identity. So we would say, Right on track. That child is maturing into
it. Also with teenagers, of course, if they're giving us a hard time, if they're not telling us
everything, if they're needing time alone, we might say, right on track.
They're developing their autonomous and their independent identity.
What is going to be the sign of maturation is going to depend on their developmental challenge of
the moment. But in general, if you're looking for, is my child emotionally maturing okay?
You're basically wanting to look at, is my child in a state of emotional connection with me and the
other important people in their life? Interesting. yeah because are they are they turning to me and
i i say me but it could be no are they turning to dad are they turning to their grandparent when
they have something that they are excited about do they come and show um do they ask look at me do
they engage like that or are they do they make eye contact are they showing that desire to be close
with another person that's that's a hallmark and then you know once in a while are they showing
some signs of empathy you know you know in a two-year-old it's going to be pretty brief but are
they are they able to you know momentarily even sort of think about the other person or the
situation in a way that shows some kind of beginning wisdom.
We want to see that. And then are they trying to communicate what it is that they want and who it
is that they are, which includes saying no. Yeah. a sign of emotional maturation in a two-year
-old may very well be a tantrum. That doesn't look very mature, but if it's them beginning to
exercise their independence and their ability to be their own person,
that's a step on. road to emotional maturity it's so good it's again so paradoxical in a way and i
think as as parents right it's that that nuance of right i don't love the tantrums but the tantrums
are actually my child um showing us a cue and again it always i always take it back to the the
inner work similarly if i do something i don't love it is a part of me giving me a signal that I
need to pay attention to you know same same with with our kiddos you know there's something there
that that we want to we don't want to squash that because this is part of their becoming not that
we're saying have tantrums every day but that we're saying okay I oh to use your words I'm learning
something about your inner world here yes I'm learning something about you Yes.
I've got to help shepherd you through that so that you can function in society, but you're telling
me something about you. That's important. It is important, and it's also you telling the child,
I understand that you're overwhelmed. Yeah. I know what this is like. I've been there.
Maybe I was there yesterday. I know what this feels like. I'm here for you.
You're having a moment where you're telling me how bad it is for you inside right now and I'm right
here and I'm going to be here and we're going to sit this out or we're going to go through this and
I will be there on the other side. That's kind of the message that you're communicating to them
through your attitude of interest. you know essentially forbearance you're you're living through it
with them and you're able to give them that feeling that i'm being understood i'm not being judged
my parent is not in a panic because i'm having a tantrum and that's a really bad sign my parent has
a wide enough perspective that they're putting this in context about me and it's okay yeah there's
safety at this point this is okay and that feels selfish that creates self-acceptance yeah okay so
that when they feel overwhelmed as an adult you know 20 30 years down the road they're not going to
launch into deep shame over the fact that they lost it or that they you know they became
incapacitated by some feeling of failure or whatever it is they kind of remember that This is part
of the process of life. And we get through these things. But the parent is who shows them that in
the first place. Yeah. This is so good. One last kind of deeper topic I want to touch on.
You touch on in the book this idea of kind of letting our kids have their own unique individual
selves. Kind of this, we talk on the podcast sometimes, enmeshment. Versus differentiation.
And when you were describing these hallmarks, I was thinking, as a parent, it feels wonderful when
your child, especially as they get older, come to you with things.
I'm very aware there's a difference between feeling excited about that because I'm the center of
their universe, right? In that sort of coercive way. And you kind of, I can tell you were kind of
like, it's not about that. It's more. what you the the healthy thing is oh my gosh I I have become
safe for them and they are now able to use deploy that skill of asking for help asking for support
right it's it's always that dance right because we are human and we want that closeness and also
we're always holding that with that dance of autonomy of mostly what's really you know of course
the human part of me is like you know and even sometimes with my husband I'll be like oh she came
to me that feels so good and And then I also am aware with the other side of me, this is mostly
good for her because she's now got this skill that she can deploy when she's hurting to ask for
help, right? It's such a dance. And you talk about it in the book of the importance of honoring
their autonomy and just that human pull. I think we want our kids to...
We want our advice, you know, or want our opinions. We want our kids, and you talk about this,
sometimes we're delighted if it turns out that they actually like some of the things we do.
That's okay. It's not that that's not, but we always have to be kind of monitoring that mostly this
needs to be about their autonomy. Can you tease that out for us a little bit?
I think you do a really great job of that in the book. Yeah, well, all you have to do is think
about your adult relationships or think about yourself in an adult relationship.
If somebody respects your autonomy and they respect that you know more about your inner experience
than they do, and they are cognizant that you are...
an adult who is going to make her own decisions, you know, with input, but you are your own person,
if they have that attitude toward you, won't that make you feel like going toward them the next
time you have an issue or a problem or you need some help, right? Totally.
I mean, children and adults are so similar at an emotional level.
not intellectually, not experientially, not in terms of wisdom, but they are so identical in the
way that things affect them. So if we are to go toward our children with a kind of...
um let me tell you what i think about that or let me uh let me make that all better for you i'm i'm
the center of your feel good feelings come to mommy come to daddy and there's that kind of push for
enmeshment the the child automatically backs up from that fascinating yeah to to protect their hard
-won autonomy, their sense of self that has begun to develop as an individual,
that differentiation from the parent or from the family,
you know, sort of the family, one person called it the family ego mass, the conglomeration of
people, not individuals interacting. Yeah, so when you are doing that,
dance of I'm respecting you as an individual person.
I love it when you come to me. When you need me,
I love to be needed. I mean, that's one of the great benefits of parenthood as far as I'm concerned
is when your child needs you, they really need you. And there's no flattery or fakery about it.
You are essential. As they say in Pinocchio, you are crucial to them being able to get re
-regulated and feel better. into a sense of balance.
So that feels wonderful and we enjoy it when it occurs. And then we feel the pang and the little
bit of hurt and the distance when they move out from us and go about there. business like they
never, you know, gave us a second thought. That is, you know, that is the gift that we give them.
Yes, it's lovely to be needed, but I as a parent don't mind having the pangs when you have to go
out and do things on your own or, you know, make up your own mind. I, as a parent,
am learning to live with that. That then takes us back to our own self-discovery,
doesn't it? Because where do those pangs come from? It comes from our childhood and whatever
experiences we had about being left behind or feeling suddenly not as important as we were a moment
before. It's so good. It's such a back and forth, such a dance of...
I always think about it like the dances in the old...
old like Pride and Prejudice, you know, where the dance wasn't clinging to each other in a slow
dance. They're moving in and out, right? I never thought about that before.
That's really true. And sometimes even in those dances, they're with other people.
And, you know, again, that's a romantic picture, which I think is a good one for romance too.
It's dance, you know. It's a great visual. It really is. And yet,
like you say, our romantic ideal is two people clinging together like kittens on a raft.
Exactly. And that's our ideal of romantic love. Yeah.
And it lacks that rhythm. Yes. that felt rhythm of the back and forth and the separating and the
coming back together. That's something that, I mean, gosh,
the whole world operates on that kind of rhythm. Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate that.
What, just kind of as we're winding down, for the parent who's listening, we're going into summer.
It's a great time for this. What are a couple of, you know, just... So practical shifts that,
you know, the book is both deep and practical. I love that about what you do. What are just some
practical shifts kind of, because again, some of what we're talking about, even thinking about that
dance, there's got to be some inner stability, you know, especially heading into the chaos of
summer. What are some practical things we can do that to just implement a little more of this kind
of into our day to day? Yeah, well, because we usually have more time with our children in the
summer and things feel a little less hectic, at least because you've had the school schedule taken
out. There is much more of an opportunity for you to do that stepping back and sort of just
noticing. And having that feeling that your child is a separate individual with their own inner
world that is unique and special to them. And that they have these needs that are going to be
coming up. And your job as a parent is to give a little bit of reflection or thought to what is it
that they need most from me at this moment. And that can be,
you know, do they need to be protected? Do they need nurturing? Do they need some guidance?
Or do I need to just put a limit down here? I mean, to be aware of those four parental functions as
creating the container for the growth of this little special,
unique individual that you have created.
And you are now nurturing into becoming a fully complex person who can think beyond black and white
and who doesn't oversimplify life, but is able to greet difficult situations with some thought and
some forethought, who doesn't indulge their impulses so as to make things worse instead of better
with their next move. But I think the most important and probably the easiest thing to do for the
summer is to, from time to time, step back and just sort of behold the fact that your child is real
inside.
And if you do that, you're going to find yourself taking them seriously, even if it seems like a
silly little fear or, you know, why are they so excited about that or, you know.
But when you really experience them as real inside,
you move into the position of being able to be a parent who actualizes who it is that they're
becoming. And that's one of the greatest rides of all in parenting, even if they're not turning to
you specifically or needing you. You're not getting that.
that kind of that sugar high hit from that attention from your child.
But you will feel yourself part of this larger mission,
this more meaningful endeavor that you're engaged with in being kind of the neuro architect of your
child's emotional development. And that all starts with that view of,
I see you. You're really there inside. I got you.
I love that. That is beautiful. That behold, you are real inside.
And that's really profound. That's a profound statement of the value of that human soul.
And just as you said that, again, it's that profound understanding of each of our souls is that
worthy of that beholding and the beauty. Yes, and if you take the time,
if you step out of your goal-driven left brain for half a second,
it's there. It's ready. It's ready to go. It's ready to engage.
And we can be pulled into it by any kind of emotional distress or maybe an urgent situation.
We can return to that presence and that awareness of the other person. hey,
this summer, let's try to do that on purpose and see how it begins to change how we approach our
child and then how we feel about the child within ourselves, how we're regarding ourselves as well.
That's so good. That's so good. Well, the book is out. When is it out,
Lindsay? It came out on Tuesday. Oh, it's out this week. How to Raise an Emotionally.
mature child. It's so good. You're just such a gift.
I feel like you've somehow taken your own wisdom and not only parented,
and I use that word in quotes, but just a generation of us, you know,
just out of your own. the beauty of your own spirit and really,
really grateful just for your time and for your wisdom. I know a lot goes into it and internally,
right? I'm sure a lot has gone into your own inner workings to be able to spill forth what you
have. And I'm just so grateful. Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. I'm just so delighted to
have the opportunity to talk to you and your people because This is at the heart of everything that
matters most to us. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to be with you. Thank you for joining
me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to
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What if getting “triggered” isn’t the problem… but a signal?
We all have moments where our body reacts fast—your heart races, your defenses go up, and suddenly you’re not responding from your wisest self.
In this episode, Dr. Alison sits down with Dr. Kelly Flanagan to explore what’s really happening in those moments—and how to respond with more clarity, connection, and intention.
Together, they unpack what’s happening behind reactivity and what it looks like to interrupt that cycle in real time.
You’ll learn:
- Why being triggered is a normal nervous system response
- How to notice your reactions before they take over
- The difference between protection mode and connection mode
- How to set boundaries without escalating conflict
- Why an open heart leads to wiser—not weaker—boundaries
If you’ve ever felt stuck in reactive patterns in your relationships, this conversation offers a grounded, compassionate way forward.
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Order Dr. Kelly Flanagan’s new book, The Road Less Triggered.
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Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 203: Staying Close When Connection Feels Hard: The Relationship Skills No One Has Taught You
Episode 180: When People Push Your Buttons — The Power of Curiosity Over Control
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TRANSCRIPT
The first step is that our nervous system activates. That's the physical response. The second step
is that our heart closes to what's happening. We enter a state of resistance and defensiveness
about what's going on. And then the third stage of being triggered is that we choose to let that
happen. And usually when that happens, we actually escalate the entire cycle, the entire pattern,
and the entire response. The practice of open-heartedness was changing the people around me even
when they didn't know I was practicing it. What I say now is that you don't have any power over
your people, but you have tremendous... around your people.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of the best of you. I'm Dr.
Allison, and I'm so glad you're here with me today. This conversation is such a good one.
I thought about it for days after we recorded. We both stumbled on a couple of just wise truths
that really will stick with you. We're talking about what happens in those moments when something
in you gets activated fast. We all know what it feels like when your nervous system takes over,
your heart starts to raise, and suddenly you're not responding from your wisest self anymore,
right? You're reacting, you're defending, you're shutting down, you're over-explaining. Maybe you
start to rage clean. Maybe you start to rage bike, as you'll hear in this episode as my guest
shares it didn't go so well for him. And this is why I love today's conversation,
because it takes a word that gets used a lot, we see it all the time, the word triggered,
and brings it back into a grounded, clinically wise, deeply human conversation.
Because yes, we all get triggered at times. There are triggers that are rooted in deep trauma.
And also there are just those everyday moments when our nervous system interprets something
relational as danger. Maybe your spouse makes a comment. Maybe your teenager rolls their eyes.
Maybe a friend asks for one thing. more. And suddenly you find that your body is on high alert.
So the question we're dealing with today isn't how do I become a person who never reacts because
it's not realistic. And I love that about today's guest. The question for all of us is how do I
begin to notice what's happening inside of me sooner so that I give myself a better chance of
responding with more wisdom, more clarity, and more love. and by the way several of you had emailed
me asking for an episode on what to do when you're triggered especially in the context of marriage
so this episode is for you if you find it helpful i hope you'll share it with a friend or with
other people because this is the kind of information that the more we all understand it the better
we'll be in our families and our friend groups in our communities when we give each other a little
grace as we're working through these very normal moments of reactivity today Today's guest is Dr.
Kelly Flanagan. Kelly is a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and a thoughtful guide at the
intersection of emotional health, relationships, and spiritual growth. He's the author of several
books, including his brand new book. It's called The Road Less Triggered. I love that title.
It explores how to move from protection mode back into connection mode in the moments that matter
most. Kelly also hosts an online community. It's called The Less Triggered tribe and he'll share
with us at the end of the episode if you want to join that community how to be a member of that
where you practice these principles in real life what i appreciated so much about kelly is that he
doesn't just speak as someone kind of with his own expertise he brings his own life to the story he
shares with us some of his own moments of being triggered, right? And what happens inside the body.
He uses his own self, his own nervous system as a case study for us to kind of walk through this
three-step process that happens so fast inside all of us when we get triggered.
And the framework alone that he lays out is so helpful. But we also got into some deeper questions
that so many of us wrestle with. I kept asking him the same kinds of questions over and over. How
do I stay? open-hearted, which is a big thing Kelly talks about without becoming a doormat?
How do I set boundaries? We have a great conversation about boundaries without turning them into
battles, right? And what if someone else really is behaving badly? What do I do then?
Is it still my job to work on my own response? One of my favorite lines from Kelly in this episode
is this. He says, an open heart doesn't make your boundaries weaker. It makes your boundaries
wiser. I love that because so many of us were taught to think in these binaries,
right? Either I stay quiet and keep the peace or I speak up and risk disconnection.
Either I'm loving or I have limits. Either I'm compassionate or I'm strong. But what Kelly helps us
see is that true emotional and spiritual maturity holds these things together.
Such a great conversation. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr.
Kelly Flanagan.
Kelly, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. We have so many overlaps in our work.
I want to start with your own journey through working through triggers.
You share quite personally. in this new book about your own experiences of being triggered.
I think it's really interesting that you are a clinical psychologist and you are married to a
clinical psychologist. And it does not make one immune from this work.
So share with us a little bit about how your own journey has unfolded through this work.
Yeah, absolutely. It is amazing that no matter how much information you have,
And no matter how many tools you have, we still can get hijacked in that moment in relationships
and in life, right? That moment where the nervous system takes over, we switch from connection mode
into protection mode. And now we're on the defense rather than really sort of drawing upon our best
tools to be together. And certainly was the case for me.
I mean, I started off that year not on a good footing. I was in a difficult business partnership
with my best friend, did not handle it well, was getting triggered, blew up that business
partnership and blew up the friendship in the process. So I was sort of like... coming into COVID
with the landing gear up already. And then the kids are schooling from home and becoming zombies,
as I like to say. And I was just getting triggered left and right. And for me, it sort of
culminated on a Sunday afternoon that morning. My wife had convinced me to go ahead and put in an
above ground pool. Like, you know, all the pools in the area are going to be closed. So we got to
get that above ground pool finally. All right, let's do it. So she goes out on a Sunday morning and
hangs the hose over the side of the pool, the garden hose, to fill it up, and she puts a rock there
to anchor it. But the rock wasn't heavy enough, and we didn't go back for five hours to check it.
And when I went out in the afternoon, the pool was bone dry, and the backyard was just a muddy
lake. And I recognized that moment, right? Like, I'm triggered, right?
And I'm going to say and do things that sets my relationship back. tremendously and so i was like i
got to get out of here and blow off the steam and so i need to take a bike ride today so i hopped
on my bike not the wisest thing to do to cycle at 35 miles per hour on asphalt when you're not
really paying attention because you're frustrated and i went over the handlebars and i broke my
collarbone in two places on the asphalt road. And the bones did not heal stronger in the broken
places. I wound up with a couple hinges in that collarbone. They're called fibrous tissue non
-union fractures made for a really long and painful recovery for the rest of that first COVID year.
And I got to New Year's Eve going into 2021. And I was literally looking for fitness resolutions
for the new year. And I came across this incredible quote by Michael Singer. Don't let anything in
your life be important enough that you're willing to close your heart over it. And that quote sort
of hit me harder than the asphalt road had. It was like, wait a second. It really isn't the
situations in my life that are creating my suffering. It's my reaction to the situations in my
life. Despite all my training, despite all my knowledge, something's taking over in that moment.
And it's creating a lot of suffering for me. And so I set a New Year's resolution going into 2021
that moment to moment, I'm going to notice my heart closing and try to open it back up.
And that was easier said than done. And it launched me on a bit of a journey, both personally and
professionally, to learn what happens in that moment to us and how do we learn to keep our hearts
open so that we have access to all of our best communication skills and all of our best connective
capacities. And that ultimately culminated in this book I've written. Wow.
What a story, right? There are consequences to how we behave when we're triggered,
as you learned in a very profound way, right? Help me understand this,
Kelly. Is it normal? And I kind of know these answers clinically, but to this day,
I still find myself in these positions. I know my listeners find ourselves in these positions. Is
it normal to have that immediate reaction, right? You see the flooded yard. To me,
that's a normal, like, of course there's a feeling in that moment. So walk us through that.
Give me some examples. Before we hit record,
you started talking about different examples of this. It's not just marriage. It's with our kids.
It's with our friends. These are normal, everyday moments. First of all, give us some examples.
Does everybody have these moments of... we call triggered,
you know, that moment. And then let's get into how can we begin to change that so we're not rage
biking and hurting ourselves. Rage biking. That's such a great term. I love that.
I'm going to steal that. That was great. I sometimes rage clean, you know, I might be cleaning the
dishes, but really I'm, you know. Yes. Rage biking was one of the unwisest things I've ever done.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. And what I've discovered is that when you put the word triggered
on the cover of a book, it's triggering to people because the word triggered has a lot of baggage
attached to it. And one of the things I address in the book is that from a clinical perspective, as
you and I know, triggered is something we associate with a serious psychological disorder called
PTSD in which people have a very specific traumatic experience and certain present day experiences
trigger them to feel like they're back in that. that past experience so in that sense it's a sort
of a rare phenomenon that happens to a very specific set of people but on the other side of it you
know it's sort of that's a word that's been sort of taken over by popular culture and you can you
get like a tiktok influencer who gets the wrong kind of cold foam at starbucks and suddenly they're
telling you know a million online followers that they're triggered and in that sense it doesn't
really mean like much of anything so i think it is important to be clear about what i mean by that
yeah And I think of being triggered as essentially like a three-stage process. And the first step
of the process is that our nervous system activates. If your nervous system doesn't activate,
you're probably not triggered. You're probably just having a response. But the first step is that
our nervous system activates. That's the physical response. And you really can't do a whole lot
about that. The nervous system is designed to activate. We wouldn't be here if it didn't activate
voluntarily. If you are walking through a dark parking garage in the middle of the night and you
hear footsteps coming up behind you, you want your nervous system to activate. If your child steps
out in front of traffic, you want your nervous system to activate.
But if you tell your teenager to please do the dishes... And they look at you like you've just made
the most unreasonable request in the world and roll their eyes at you and your nervous system
activates. It's a different story, right? Your nervous system is specifically designed to activate
when you're in mortal danger. And so something about this moment with your teenager just made your
nervous system interpret it as mortal danger. So we need to start to slow down around that moment a
little more. So the first step is that nervous system activates. The second step is that our heart
closes to what's happening in that moment. We enter a state of resistance and defensiveness about
what's going on. My nervous system is telling me this is dangerous. I don't want to participate in
it anymore, and now I'm in a state of resistance against it. And then the third stage of being
triggered is that we choose to let that happen. We choose to let our heart closed. We choose to let
ourselves stay in a state of resistance against this. And usually when that happens, we actually...
escalate the entire cycle the entire pattern and the entire response so what we want to do is we
want to help people not not somehow like surgically remove their nervous system they're never going
to do that they're also never going to be able to eliminate their heart closing because god has
given us a heart that can close if we've got more than we can handle in the moment that can kind of
go nope i don't want to participate in this but we do want to restore people's sense of choice and
empower them to be able to open their heart back up and participate with what's going on in the
wisest way possible, right? Which doesn't mean necessarily being passive. It doesn't mean being
weak, so to speak. I often say an open heart doesn't make your boundaries weaker. It makes your
boundaries wiser. With an open heart, you're sort of able to show up to the moment with all of the
things you've been gifted with. So we want to restore people's ability to do that. And when you
really start to pay attention to your heart closing, you realize, yeah, it definitely happens a lot
oftentimes in the marital relationship because there are things you're expecting from that
attachment that you're not expecting in other attachments in your life, and so that one can become
a really triggering one. It happens all the time with your kids.
Bedtime's a classic. You think you're finally to the finish line of your day, and you're going to
get a little bit of time for yourself, and then they keep pushing that bedtime later, super
triggering for a lot of parents. Teenagers are particularly triggering. I think it's their job.
But our family of origin relationships with siblings, with our parents,
with bosses, these are all situations in which we can sense that our heart is starting to close to
what's happening. And if we can be empowered to keep our heart open, we'll engage it in the wisest
way possible. Wow. That's a really helpful overview.
And I love how you're painting that picture of it's not quite what we see on TikTok. It's also not
always in this category of PTSD. But somewhere in the middle,
we do have these nervous system responses. And especially I love how that list of relationships
makes a lot of sense, where there's some hot button. wiring that's going to inevitably go on.
That's right. And how we, I love what you said. I want you to repeat it, that it's not that we
don't have boundaries in those moments, especially when you give the example of the teen, right?
It's not that we're, it's not, and again, that would be a flight response or a fawn response. It's
not. what we're after, we're after a wiser response. I love that. You know,
parents ask me all the time, for instance, like, so when my teen's acting out, do I have empathy
for them or do I set boundaries with them? And it reveals that we sort of assume those two things
can't go together, that we can't have an open heart and boundaries at the same time. And my answer
is, oh, you have to do both all the time. You know, like that if you try to set boundaries without
empathy, you'll set those boundaries aggressively and in a controlling way usually that will just
sort of set the relationship up for a battle. But if you think that having an open heart doesn't
mean that you can't have, that it means you can't have limits, you can't have expectations, you
can't have boundaries, you can't have things you want, then you essentially become a doormat. And
what we're aiming for here is the capacity to be able to regularly express your boundaries,
your wants, and your needs with an open heart rather than shutting down. That's so good. So this
leads me to my next question. You make this distinction between connection mode and protection
mode. And what you're saying there reminds me of this because that flip of the switch happens
quick.
Usually, it's not like we're consciously, it's just the flip switches. And in that moment,
in that quickness of that moment, we want to reach for connection mode, not protection mode.
Once that reaction becomes more obvious, like, okay, I am triggered or I am having a moment.
I don't want to flip into protective mode. I want to flip into connection mode. How do we bridge
that? Yeah. One of the first things I address and that what I realized early on was that if my
nervous system was dysregulated, I couldn't switch back into protection or to connection mode.
Right. Like your nervous system will override your higher mind. which will go,
oh, wait a second, I don't need to be protecting here. Everything's okay. You actually have to
train your nervous system to know it's okay again before you can make that switch back into
connection mode. And so one of the first things I recommend in the book is,
number one, is really starting to tap into what's really a superpower.
It's your sixth sense. It's called interoception. It's the sixth of the senses.
And interoception is the capacity to tune into your body and to notice your body sensations. So
everyone who's listening has already done that dozens of times today when they thought, I'm hungry,
or I have to go to the bathroom, or man, I'm really more tired today than usual, or I could use
another cup of coffee. You're tuning into your bodily sensations and making sense of them. But we
do it unconsciously. And we don't slow down to actually go, wait a second, I could use that
superpower to start to notice when I'm getting triggered. Because the reality is, we think of
triggers as happening instantaneously and dramatically. When you really start to tune into the
subtleties of your body, you realize that your nervous system functions a little bit more like a
furnace, where the pilot light kicks on. Right. And then you start to hear the starts to rumble a
little bit as it heats up. And then eventually the furnace kicks on on full blast. So one of the
first things we encourage people to do is actually start to tune into your body first. That's going
to give you an 80 percent, according to the data, an 80 percent earlier warning that your heart's
about to close and you're going to shift into defense mode. So if you can notice it sooner.
You might actually be able to make a choice of like, I don't want to do the defensive thing. Can I
give you an example from this morning? Oh, my goodness. My wife and I, I will admit,
I'm neurotic about my first cup of coffee in the morning. I like to pour the first cup out of the
pot. I've got it all set up. There's no question I'm neurotic about it. Well, this morning I see my
wife grab a mug from the counter, and I immediately hop up and I go pour my cup of coffee.
And she says to me, you always got to be in control and have it your way, don't you? I could feel
the tightening in my chest, right? Now, I know that that tightening is a sign that I'm about to
close my heart and go into defense mode. About a cup of coffee here, let's remember. And so the
temptation in that moment is just to allow it and to allow it to happen and to switch into defense
mode. But because I've noticed my body tighten, I've got... little bit more warning to go, do I
really want to start to act offensively? Because if I start to act offensively, what I'm about to
do is I'm about to list all of the things that I do for her and my family that I don't want to do
and try to make the case that I'm not quite as selfish as she just suggested.
And escalate something that isn't worth an escalation. No,
over a cup of coffee. And so... But what I've got to do in that moment,
if I'm not going to close my heart and shift into defense mode, is I've got to get that body
regulated. I've got to get the nervous system regulated and go, okay, you're in your kitchen. This
is just a cup of coffee, and you're not being chased by a tiger on the Serengeti. You're good. You
do a little bit of breathing. And then I have a choice about whether or not I want to get
defensive. And the temptation will be to jump into defense mode. And so one of the challenges is
just to sort of watch the thoughts and the urges starting to come up, you know, rather than acting
on them. We say watch them instead of wielding them. And so I watched all those urges to defend
myself come up. And I asked myself in that moment, what would it look like instead to set an open
-hearted boundary in this moment? Like, what would that look like to not just shut down and
disconnect? And the answer was to say, I don't think that's totally true about me.
I wonder if you could come up with any situations in which I have not gotten what I wanted and made
some sacrifice. In other words, instead of defending myself, invite her into sort of joining me in
seeing me as a more whole person than I was just characterized as. And she was willing to sort of
step into that. And so really just looking.
For the bodily sign, you're about to close, you're about to get defensive, telling the body that
you're safe, teaching the body that you're safe, and then looking for that opportunity to open back
up and find a different way to move forward.
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this episode.
That is such a great example. It leads me because I wanted to go right into a question that I got
from a reader that I thought would be perfect to ask you because of the topic of your book. But
that's such a great example. If you did speak up for yourself, you weren't a doormat,
but it was from a different place. And I think that's the... that we go into these binaries.
It's either I don't say anything and then I'm a doormat or I defend myself and it doesn't really
help. And that's such a beautiful, you noticed, which allowed you to make a wiser response.
And I'll notice for myself, over the years,
my husband and I will find kind of almost humorous ways. But again, shows the regulation.
So I'll say something like, you know, once I'm able to, and it's not coming out sideways and it's
not, it's genuinely coming from a more regulated place. I'll say, oh, you know,
just, just sort of a, oh, you know, and then, which is a cue for him to go, oh, I, I didn't, or,
you know, or he'll, he'll do it to me. Like, and it, it just is that cue of, um,
I'm not defending myself, but I'm letting you know. Right. that didn't feel fair,
you know, just those normal everyday moments. I, but I love that where you said,
I don't think that's completely true, you know, and then inviting it's inviting connection.
Yeah. Yeah. What all that's a great example. I like, I'll often say to people, you may,
you'll be less reactive, but you won't be less responsive. Yeah. Right. So you may pause for a
little bit. Yes. But that pause you eventually hit play on and then you show up with a more open
hearted, wiser way of addressing it like you did. Like, ouch, like you're basically instead of,
you know, instead of responding with your protections, you're being vulnerable about your pain.
Yeah. Right. That's a wiser, more open hearted way to respond. I think of a time like I was driving
my middle guy. He's 18 now. So this was probably a few years ago and he was he was 15 at the time
because I was driving him around. He was just. he was hitting me with both teenage barrels, you
know, and sometimes I'll say to my kids, like, all right, it's enough teenager for now. And that's,
you know, that's enough for today. But in this case, I remember I said to him, I go,
dude, I love you unconditionally, but I don't drive you unconditionally.
And I'm going to give you a choice. Like if you want to start to treat me differently, like we
could be good, but if you don't, I think you're walking the rest of the way, you know? And I think
there was no doubt in his mind that I do love him and that I was just simply setting a boundary on
how I'm going to allow myself to be treated. And so we're trying to find that sweet spot where
those two things can go together. That's so good. And there's power in that. And I think that even
when we think like scripturally, right, it's not about being a doormat. It's about that there's
more strength that especially our teenagers, but anybody kind of picks up on from that.
Like, oh, they mean it. They're not. There's a grounded response to my button pushing that,
oh, even if they don't change instantly, they sense that, the people around us.
It's powerful. And true strength feels safe to people, right?
I think in that moment there was a boundary, but my son didn't. feel unsafe in the midst of that
boundary. There was clear structure to it. You have a choice. Here's your options. And so what we
discover is that when we can show up openheartedly in those triggered moments, we actually create a
greater sense of safety. Even as we show up fully, we're creating a greater sense of safety for our
people, which actually, the thing that causes you to close your heart is that you feel unsafe.
So as we're showing up in that way and creating a sense of safety for our people, we're actually
inviting them to open up as well. So I want to read this reader question because it gets at that.
I love how you said we're inviting them to open up. There's more of an invitation.
Here's the question that one of my listeners wrote in.
When I'm the one who gets triggered, especially with a spouse, is the right move always to work on
my own response? Or should my partner also be working on not triggering me in the first place?
In other words, whose work is this? And your example is a good example of that, right?
So I thought that was kind of an interesting question. It's a great question.
It's on all of our minds. Right? Like, you shouldn't trigger me. You know this is a trigger,
you know? So how do we navigate that? You know, one of the things I like to say is that in a
situation like that, Yes, you have actually 100% ownership of how you respond to that triggering
moment. And they have 100% ownership of how they showed up that triggered you.
And that sort of undoes the whole process of who should be working on themselves more in this
moment. That the only thing we can ultimately control is ourselves.
And so we might as well invest our time and energy in working on that. And I'll say a couple things
about that.
The reason I feel so strongly about that is the example I often give.
Last summer we were here in the upper Midwest, heat wave, humid. I was sitting here in this very
chair one afternoon, and I could feel the heat rising in my office. I'm like, what's going on? Air
conditioning's not kicking on. I went into the furnace room, and it was sort of rapid cycling,
going on and off real quickly, so it wasn't working. And so what I did for the rest of the week is
instead of calling the HVAC guy, I just brainstormed ways to cool it down outside instead of
cooling it down here in the house. It's just a joke, of course. I would never do that. But that's
actually where we spend a lot of space in relationships. How do I get the weather to change? How do
I get the weather to change versus going to the control board? dealing with what's going on there
in the control board, calling the HVAC guy, calling the therapist or the coach or your pastor,
whoever you need to help you kind of deal with that control board. We spend a lot of time trying to
control the weather, the behaviors, the thoughts, and the feelings of our people, which is entirely
out of our control. So that, to me, is just an example, a metaphor that helps us realize that that
energy we put in trying to get the other person to change is wasted energy, and we can redirect it
at ourselves. Having said that, one of the most powerful learnings for me in this whole process
happened actually a year to the day after I made that original New Year's resolution.
We had just returned from a Christmas vacation in Mexico as a family. It was the second COVID
Christmas, and we're like, I don't know if we'll be able to get together with families. Let's just
get out of Dodge and do something different.
triggered travel I don't I don't travel well I don't I don't mind the whole flying and potentially
crashing like for some reason it's getting to the airport late and then finding my way to the hotel
you know it just all stresses me out and I get triggered but I was almost a year into the practice
of open-heartedness and and my my only sort of intention going into that trip was no matter what
happens I'm gonna gonna keep my heart open to what's going on And so we get back from Mexico,
and we're sitting around the dining room table, and we're setting our intentions for the next year
as a family. And my wife says, hey, why don't you tell the kids what you've been practicing for the
last year, this open-heartedness thing? And so I shared with them a little bit of what we're
talking about today. And my daughter, who was 12 at the time, she looked at me, and she said,
that must be why every time something went wrong on the way to Mexico, I looked at you and I felt
calm.
The practice of open-heartedness was changing. people around me even when they didn't know i was
practicing it right what i say now is that you don't have any power over your people but you have
tremendous power around your people right that you can become the soothed nervous system that
soothes nervous system the calm soul that calms souls and the open heart that opens hearts and that
this is really the power that we wield is the way that we show up especially if we can show up calm
and open-hearted We are creating, now we're the weather, right?
That's powerful. Now we're the weather, right? That can influence the temperature inside of someone
else's house, so to speak. And so that's my encouragement to folks is that when you choose to fully
invest in owning your response to those triggered moments, not just to sort of like white knuckle
it and get through them, but to genuinely transform the way that you show up to those moments.
You are a powerful force for change in the system. You and I know this, right? Systems theory says
that when one component in the system changes, the rest of the system is forced to change to adapt
to it, right? So as you transform, you will be transforming the relationships that you're in. And
sometimes, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, whether it's marriage or even with
parents, especially those, you know, or siblings.
And sometimes when we begin to change ourselves, other people in the system don't like it and can
get worse or come after us more to try to push those buttons.
Because there's something in that pattern that felt, you know,
wasn't healthy, but felt comfortable to that other person. What would you say to folks?
How do you deal with that in your practice and with folks where that? is the result, where you're
doing your own work, and maybe it reveals more toxicity or even more pathology than maybe you were
even aware of as you're pulling out of that unhealthy dynamic. Yeah, oh, absolutely.
And we also know from systems theory that... first the rest of the system tries to maintain what's
called homeostasis, right? It doesn't like the fact that that one part of the system is changing.
So it tries to tug it back, back into place. Um, and one of the things that you discover in the
process is that, um, you sort of, you resolve to yourself here,
you know, this is, this is my personal growth. I'm going to learn how to navigate these triggered
moments with a more open heart, show up more open heartedly. And that's going to be enough for me.
And then you do it and nobody changes or they get worse. And now you're frustrated and your heart's
closing. And you start to realize that your open heart was just a closed heart and subtle disguise.
You were hoping that you could have some control over them. by opening up,
showing up differently. And I think a lot of your listeners will notice that a lot of what looks
like personal growth is secretly just a hope that our change will change our people in the
direction that we want them to change. And so what you're really starting to surrender to here is
the reality that you don't ultimately have control over the most valuable things in your life.
You don't have control over it, right? You have control over how you show up to those things and
you're learning how to live through because a lot of, Michael Singer also says,
if you want to know why you do what you do, don't do it and then watch what happens inside of you,
right? And so what happens is we try to take control of the people in our life in subtle and not so
subtle ways in order to calm it down inside here. If we can be in control of this situation or get
them to change in this way or get this reaction from them, it'll be calm in here. But we develop a
tremendous amount of resilience and power when we can endure that unpleasant feeling in here,
get through it without having to assert control. We're actually much more powerful at that point
than if we were trying to control them. Yeah, go ahead.
This is, I think, where our spiritual grounding can help because I want to know you're not saying,
and this was actually my next question, don't set boundaries. No. Because what's so nuanced about
what you're saying is someone could hear this as...
Just let it go. Let somebody mistreat you. Let somebody walk all over you.
And I know that, right, but what I- I thank you for naming that, yeah. Yeah, so keep, so right,
it's, and you've kind of already, let's drill back down on it. It's, I cannot, and that's,
there's a grief in that. I cannot. And actually, there are millions of ways every single day we're
actually trying to control the people around us, our kids, our spouse. And when we start to really
let go of that, it is a spiritual journey of like, wow. And it doesn't mean we are at other
people's mercy either. So keep going with this. This is incredibly profound.
Yeah, I love the way that you're digging into this. To me, this is fundamental.
We have to break through this. dilemma in order to get into really healthy territory and
relationships. And so one of the ways of breaking through it is to recognize that oftentimes when
we don't set a boundary with our people, that's our way of trying to control them. We're not
setting a boundary because we don't want them to get upset. So we're trying to keep them calm. We
don't set a boundary because we're afraid they won't like it. And they'll distance from us or they
might even threaten the relationship. So that's our way of staying sort of stable in the
relationship, right? Someone asked me recently, like, what's the hardest boundary to set in
relationship? And my answer was the one that you think will cost you the relationship. The one that
you think will create more separation if you said it, right? We're always afraid of that
abandonment and loneliness and rejection. And so the hardest boundary is always the one that you
don't think someone will like and will cause them to distance from you. And so it's really powerful
to recognize that when I'm staying quiet and not expressing myself and not setting a boundary,
that's actually, I say, I'm not a control freak, but I'm a control sneak. I'm a terrible control
sneak. And that's a control sneak. It's a way of maintaining. some steadiness and stability in the
relationship by staying quiet. So ironically, this is wild. Like when you show up open-heartedly
with a boundary, and by the way, in the book, I talk about how boundaries are the third stage of a
process. The first stage is actually just saying what you want. And when you open-heartedly
express what you want, you'll be surprised how often people help you get it. If they don't,
you can decide to escalate it to a need. And once they realize, oh, it's that important to you,
they will also be more likely to help you get what you need. But then if that doesn't happen, then
you express it as an open-hearted boundary.
That's actually a step into surrender and not controlling,
ironically, when you set a boundary. Because as soon as you put yourself out there and you express
yourself, they're free to respond however they want, right? And how they want could hurt. And now
we have to learn how to stay open-hearted through the lack of support, right?
I often say that the one thing we're always trying to avoid in relationships is the experience of
loneliness. And loneliness has three pillars, feeling unseen, misunderstood, and unsupported.
So when you tell somebody you want something, when you set a boundary around it and they don't
support you in it, that feels really lonely, right? And so it's quite the opposite of what we
think, that actually you're surrendering control when you set a boundary because you're allowing
them to respond however they want. And then you're saying, if you continue to respond that way,
I might have to do this. Right. Um, that's a totally different, that's a totally different thing.
You're not telling them what they have to do. You're letting them know, like I did with my son,
what I will be doing the rest of the way. Yeah.
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Yeah, I will be driving alone if you continue to. I don't want to. Yeah, it's not something you're
trying to get them to do again, which is the control. So this, yes, you're right. So this is
chapter seven for the listener. It's called set boundaries without. battles.
It's not a power play in that traditional sense. It's actually a move of strength. What is a shift,
just as we're winding down here, kind of a nugget that... a boundary boundaries i think are another
one of those things i've written a lot about boundaries they're so misunderstood on the tiktok
culture the therapy culture right um but they're so powerful um when you really understand them and
i like how you cast it as the shift that makes a boundary feel like an act of love instead of an
act of war it's really an act of and and i would say that love is All three of the loves Jesus
commands, love of God, love of other, and love of self. Absolutely. It's real love. It's not
pleasing love. It's the love of, there's too much truth and love here for me to,
it's a grounded strength. How do we make that shift, Kelly? Help us all.
That's a good question. And a lot of it has to do with the sequence of how this all tends to play
out. So what often happens is that you stay quiet. trying to be loving right when really you're
maybe being a little controlling ironically but you're staying quiet staying quiet but what happens
is i often say a resent resentment today is a boundary you didn't set yesterday right But
resentment is the emotional experience that goes along with not setting healthy boundaries. And so
you stay quiet, you stay quiet, you stay quiet, but your heart's closing all the time. You're
getting more and more resentful, more and more frustrated, feeling more and more mistreated. And
then what happens is your heart closes all the way and then you set the boundary. So it comes out
aggressively, it comes out in controlling ways. And so you've sort of set up the situation for a
battle. I often say, if you wear gloves to church, a boxing match will break out.
And so if you set a boundary with a closed heart, you're going to end up in a battle, not a
collaboration. What we want to see you do is we want to see you not close your heart and then sort
of set a reactive boundary. We want to see you set a boundary in order to keep your heart open.
When you feel like you can't keep your heart open unless you set a boundary, that's the time to set
it. You actually don't get to decide, ironically, where your boundaries are at.
Your heart decides that for you. If I can't keep my heart open without setting a boundary, I guess
I've got to set one. I'll give you an example.
Back when I was doing traditional outpatient mental health and clients would no show for a session,
it would mean that their insurance doesn't pay and they're going to have to pay the full. the full
fee out of their pocket which is never never very pleasant so they would come into the next session
and i would hand them an invoice for the full fee and almost invariably they'd look at it and
they'd be like oh you must be really mad at me if you're charging me the full fee and i would say
to them no i'm charging you the full fee so that i don't get mad at you right i'm setting the
boundary so that my heart doesn't close to you i didn't give you that invoice Good.
Right? If I didn't give you that invoice, you'd walk out of here today and I'd be resenting you a
little bit. And I'd be disconnecting from you with my closed heart. This invoice is keeping me
connected to you right now. Wow. Oh, okay, I get that. And then they'd happily pay it because it's
a symbol of relationality rather than penalty, right? That's a great...
Way to look at it. I could see that. And you really have to buy into that. But I could see that
with even a friend you love. You know, I if I don't say no now or if I don't do this now,
I will. Yeah, that's boy, that is nuanced. But that's a great example. A friend asks you to to do
one thing and you gladly do it. Right. And then they're like, oh, yeah. And next week,
can you buy a $200 ticket for our table at the fundraiser? And if you sense that your heart will
close to that, that you're going to be at that fundraiser silently resenting it,
you need to set a boundary now so your heart doesn't close. Actually, I can't do that one. And now
we're still in open-hearted relationship.
That'll preach. I want every listener to think about that for a second, right? How are we not?
I mean, that hits me. And I've been talking about this stuff for years and it's because it's so
hard. Those hardwired. And I love how you're naming the quiet ways.
we, oh, I just don't want to have the conflict or I just don't want to make the person mad or I
just don't want this to be uncomfortable. Yes. That's all about control. It's, it's, it is.
Yeah. I mean, it's not, I mean, sometimes we're just being a nice person or we're tired or
whatever, but, but often those patterns are every, the more we make those decisions,
the more I, that's, that's when that heart suddenly will start to go. I'm just kind of done with
this person or I'm kind of done with this volunteering. And that could be prevented by our own
honoring of the open heart. Exactly. The irony being that what we're mostly walking around doing in
relationships is trying not to end up lonely. For the human being, that's about as painful as it
gets. And so we don't set boundaries.
Because we fear that a boundary will leave us separate and alone. But then what happens is our
heart starts to close down and now we're separating anyways. Now we're sort of trapped inside of
the aloneness we create with our own heart. So we actually, boundaries are this sort of
foundational, they form the foundation for the capacity to stay in connection and to not be lonely,
essentially. And the people you belong to will be the people who really appreciate you setting
boundaries. And those that don't, won't. Stick around. Yeah. And that's part of the discerning in
real time. And it is vulnerable. I mean, this is ongoing work. I know you say in the book, this is,
we're in, I feel so much in process with all this. There's so many different iterations with
different seasons of life. And I'm in a new season of kind of figuring this out and I'm in a new
community. And it is vulnerable, right? To sit with that. Okay,
someone. may not appreciate this, even though I know, like even a client or,
you know, in your situation, a client, I don't like this, but that's okay. I know, I know what's
going on here. I know this is about keeping my heart open and God knows, you know, that's that
spiritual piece. Like I can anchor in that and I'll be disappointed and sad if the other person
doesn't respond well, but I have to let that go. I can't control that outcome.
That's so powerful. And my encouragement to listeners is, as you are pointing out over and over
again, it's so much easier said than done. And if that's the case,
if you find yourself in a situation where this conversation leads to that awareness of,
oh, this is one of those moments. My heart will close if I don't set a boundary. And you find
yourself unable to do it anyways.
Because... afraid that that boundary will lead to separation and disconnection and loneliness
usually.
My encouragement to listeners is to just sort of in that moment, there's an opportunity.
Because the reality is for us adults, loneliness isn't terribly threatening. Like, you know,
if friend A rejects you, you have 100, you can text or 1,000 people you can get to on Facebook.
And there's just all sorts of ways to mitigate loneliness as an adult. But there wasn't when we
were kids. And so if there's this part of you that is just going, I can't tolerate the threat of
loneliness and rejection in this moment, probably isn't an adult part. It's probably a younger part
of you that couldn't handle loneliness, that didn't have the freedom to manage it in adult ways
when they were young. And so it's just an opportunity. If you can't set a boundary, if you just
can't bring yourself to do it, cool. like don't don't hammer yourself for that get tender with the
part of you that is feeling really threatened by the fear of separation and and show that part of
you some love and help that part of you be a little bit less lonely in the moment i love that
that's great because i i agree with you i yeah that's a great um a great word to just be gentle
with the part be aware of it that this is a part of me But be gentle with that part of you because
it's there for a reason. And it's got data from the past. And you do go into that in the book,
those past strongholds. Tell my listeners where they can find you, Kelly, where they can find your
book and all the things you're doing out in the world and the goodness you're providing. If you
want to find out more about the book, you can go to roadlesstriggered.com. It's also just
available anywhere where books are sold in paperback and digital and audio. I'm very excited to
announce it hit the USA Today bestseller list recently, and we're very excited about that. It was
out of stock for a while once the first print run was sold, but it's back in stock, which is very
exciting. So you can get it anywhere. I also host an online community on Substack called the Less
Triggered Tribe, where we're actually taking the principles from the book, and we're actually
like... going through the journey together on a weekly and monthly basis. Yeah. So drkellyflanagan
.substack.com is where you can find the Less Triggered Tribe and you can join for free and join us
there. And then my website is drkellyflanagan.com. Okay. So we'll link to that in the show notes,
but that sounds like a great resource for folks who are really trying to apply this in real time.
It takes practice. It's not magic. I love that you're doing that. That's beautiful. We have a
group. sort of coaching community call the third Friday of every month. And literally this topic
comes up every time because we just have such a bunch of gentle souls in our community, right? And
they're like, they're wanting to show up more fully and they're wanting to show up with healthier
boundaries and they're working through all these questions. So you'll fit right in. I love it. I
love it. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us and with so many others. It was great to
be here, Alison. Thank you so much. You too. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of
The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple,
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Remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true
to your God-given self.
Episode Show Notes
What if the dry, weary place you’re in isn’t something to escape—but a place where God is working?
So many of us know that quiet middle space: you’re not in crisis, but you’re not exactly flourishing either. You’re tired, spiritually dry, disconnected, or simply going through the motions. It’s not dramatic enough to call a breakdown, but something in you knows you’re weary.
In this episode, Dr. Alison and author/priest Tish Harrison Warren explore what grows in these weary places—and why seasons of spiritual dryness, burnout, and languishing aren’t signs that something is wrong with you.
They may be part of how God forms you.
Together, they talk about aridity, resilience, stability, and what it means to stay present to the life you actually have instead of constantly looking for a way out.
You’ll explore:
- Why spiritual dryness doesn’t mean you’re failing
- The difference between depression, burnout, and languishing
- What the desert fathers and mothers can teach us about resilience
- Why “staying in your cell” can become a path of formation
- How ordinary repair, routines, and relationships shape us over time
- What it means to let where you are do its work
- How hope changes the way we endure hard seasons
This conversation offers a counter-cultural invitation: you don’t have to rush out of the weary place. There may be something growing there.
More Resources:
Order What Grows in Weary Lands - out this week!
You can preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 176: Dr. Stephen Macchia on Intimacy with God in a Noisy World
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Have you ever replayed a conversation over and over in your mind?
Maybe it was something your partner said. A text that felt off. A moment at work. A look on someone’s face. Suddenly your mind is looping, analyzing, judging, and trying to solve something that never seems to resolve.
Today’s conversation with science writer Donna Jackson Nakazawa is about rumination—what many of us experience as overthinking, thought spirals, or getting mentally stuck.
Donna brings together powerful neuroscience, personal story, and practical tools to help us understand why our minds loop, what those loops are trying to show us, and how we can begin to interrupt them with compassion and clarity.
We explore:
- Why rumination is not random—and what it reveals
- The difference between productive reflection and a mental loop that leaves you feeling worse
- Why social media can trigger rumination so quickly
- Donna’s MIST framework for stopping the spiral
This conversation is especially for you if you’ve ever thought, Why can’t I just let this go? or Why am I still thinking about this?
Get Donna's new book, Mind Drama here
Connect with Donna here
Preorder my brand new book The Secure Soul
Want to hear more episodes like this? Start here:
Episode 158: Your Pain Has a Name: The Deeper Hurt Behind Distressing Thoughts with Therapist Monica DiCristina
Episode 51: The 12 Common Thinking Traps, Mind Reading, Mental Filters, and How To Stop Taking Things Personally
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Join 80,000+ soul tenders in our email community and receive weekly wisdom here.
Don't forget to browse this week's sponsors, who make it possible for us to bring you these resources for free + provide you with additional discounts!
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*Some of the links above are Amazon affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
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:
Am I replaying scenarios? Am I replaying them without a sense of finding a resolution?
Is my brain loading up the same reels over and over but without the benefit of cognitive or
emotional processing? or an action plan that offers a sense of release relief and how to move
forward according to all indicators we're ruminating more than we ever have before one third of us
have never heard the word rumination or we don't know what it means you cannot solve a problem that
you aren't being honest about that you haven't named so let's name it frame it and let's do that
interior work with a sense of tenderness for our own story, because that's where the wellspring of
well-being begins.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of the Best of You podcast. I'm
Dr. Allison, and I have such an exciting announcement to share with you today. So over the...
Past few years, I've been working on a project on the side, really quietly. It's a book.
It's the most personal book I've ever written. It's my own journey through healing the parts of my
own soul. And it is finally finished. It's off to the printer. It's going to be printed any day
now. It's actually terrifying to me. If you've followed my work for a while, I...
to be a little bit more comfortable in the expert seat, right? And in kind of helping other people
understand themselves and in helping bring language to some of these concepts and theories and try
to make them practical for others. It's a lot harder for me to write about my own story,
write about my own experience. So I'm definitely experiencing a vulnerability hangover as we speak.
And so I'm so thrilled to share with you all today, my podcast listeners in this community, you're
the first to know if you're listening right now. I have a new book coming out. It's called The
Secure Soul, How to Find Inner Strength and Connection When Trust Doesn't Come Easy.
It's different in so many ways than my past books. It's more personal. It's more honest.
It's less scripted. It's just my own perspective on what I believe are the three most important
ingredients to healing, attachment, parts work, and spiritual formation.
And I bring these ideas together using my own story as illustration,
right? So I'm sharing with you insights into how I did this work to heal parts of my own soul,
even as I'm trying to help you and me together understand how attachment wounds,
how inner parts work, and how spiritual formation is essential for all of us to develop a secure
soul. This new book, The Secure Soul, it comes out August 18th, and I wanted to share it here first
with you, my podcast listeners. I also want to share with you just honestly,
behind the scenes, if you've ever followed an author you love, you... likely already know this, but
when you preorder a book, it makes a big difference. It really helps support the authors you like.
It's one of the main ways that publishers and distributors pay attention to kind of what's
signaling out there that this is a message people care about. So when you preorder a book,
it helps people hear about it. So if you're listening to this message today and you think you're
gonna read the book or it's a work that you wanna do, maybe you've read Boundaries for Your Soul or
one of my other books or you've engaged with this podcast and you think, I wanna go deeper in this
work. I wanna learn more about how this actually works in my day-to-day real life. I'd be so
grateful if you consider pre-ordering it now. When you do pre-order the book now, we put together
some really meaningful pre-order bonuses. For one thing, you'll get the first couple of chapters
of the book. There's also a companion guide. This is the first time I've ever done a workbook. So
there's an accompanying workbook that goes with the Secure Soul. You'll get a few chapters from
that. We've also put together some webinars and masterclasses and workshops.
For those of you who are interested in pre-ordering, you can get access to those when you pre
-order the books. So we want to make it worth your while. It's also my way. I've been wanting to
create more resources out of this work. It's again, the most powerful way I've seen to kind of
engage this work of inner healing and this intersection of healing and spiritual formation,
because this is a, when we bring God into this work, we are reshaping our souls in partnership with
God's spirit. So please head over to my website. You can find everything there. You can go to the
secure soul book. That's where you'll find all those bonuses. You can order the book anywhere books
are sold. I'm so thrilled to bring this to you. I'm grateful that you've been with me for these
past four years on the podcast. I'm grateful for the messages you send me about how this work has
helped you. I'm praying and hoping that this new offering will truly be not only a teaching tool
for you, but a... a companion for you on the journey, something that says, I'm not alone in this,
right? That was my heart with this book. And I'm so thrilled to finally be able to bring it to you
today.
Today's conversation is so good. I have been thinking about it all day and there's just so much.
practical insight and wisdom and helpful tools. I cannot wait to share it with you.
My guest is Donna Jackson Nakazawa. She's an award-winning science journalist,
and she's the author of several groundbreaking books at the intersection of neuroscience, the body,
and emotional healing. You might be familiar with her previous books, including Girls on the Brink
and Childhood Disrupted. She has spent her career translating cutting-edge brain science into
language that actually changes. how we live in our newest book. I have it right here. It's called
Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist.
I cannot recommend it enough. Here's what drew me in. Donna opens by naming something that I think
most of us experience, but we don't always have the right words for, that spiral, right?
That loop that gets sticky, that place in our brain that just keeps going. It's the replaying of a
conversation you had three days ago. It's the middle of the night replay reel that just won't stop
no matter how hard you try. And she calls it rumination. And it turns out,
Most of us. are doing it without even really knowing there's a name for it and understanding how to
break that cycle. In today's conversation, Donna helps us understand that rumination isn't random
and it's not a flaw. It's actually a survival response that we have for a reason. It's been wired
into our nervous system. And she explains so beautifully how it's almost always rooted in our early
childhood wounds. These places in our stories where we maybe didn't feel seen or didn't feel like
we belong. or weren't sure if we mattered to the people who mattered to us, right?
These are the tender, unprocessed places from our past that tend to show up in these spirals.
Now, the spirals usually relate to different stories, but they're often linked. And how uncovering
that link can actually help us break free. And Donna actually walks me through this framework.
She calls it the mist. model in real time in today's episode. She helps me apply it to my own
ruminations. And it was really powerful. somewhere really specific and true and really helpful in a
matter of minutes. And it opened up something I hadn't quite fully been able to name for myself in
this same way before. I would encourage you to grab a journal for this one because you can do this
exercise right along with us. So if you're someone who lies awake at night running the same
scenarios on repeat, or you find yourself hijacked mid-afternoon by a worry spiral you can't shake
loose, or if you're just someone who thinks of yourself as an overthinker, this episode is for you.
And honestly, it's really for all of us. Please enjoy my conversation with Donna Jackson Nakazawa.
I want to open where you open, which is this idea that I think you say a third of Americans really
have maybe don't understand the word rumination, but absolutely are doing it and feeling it.
What do you... How do you define rumination and what do you, how do you understand it?
How do you experience it? Because you share also your own story in the book. Oh, sure. Right. I'm
not standing here in a glass house going, don't ruminate. I'm looking in the mirror and going,
what can we do to stop ruminating here? So really a very common vernacular way of thinking about
rumination is thought spiraling. You know, we are thought loops that are so sticky. We just can't
get out of them. We kind of know this isn't good. for us but we keep replaying the same
conversation or the interaction that we had maybe with our partner or teenager the night before or
a colleague or a parent a sibling you know fill in the blank and it can often in short form when
people are struggling like Is this rumination? We can ask ourselves, like, am I really judging
myself? Am I criticizing myself? Or am I caught in cycles of judging and criticizing others?
Am I replaying? scenarios? And am I replaying them without a sense of finding a resolution?
Like is my brain loading up the same reels over and over, but without the benefit of cognitive or
emotional processing or an action plan that offers a sense of release,
relief, and how to move forward. So technically,
in mental health circles rumination is worry about the past or projecting into the future so you
can use any of those but they're all a good way to frame the word rumination as you said one third
of us have never heard the word rumination or we don't know what it means so i'm kind of on a
mission to help us understand what it is And I have reasons for that,
which I'm sure we'll get into. And is it fair to say we all do it on some level?
It is because it's a survival response. It's built into the nuts and bolts of being alive.
It's part of our neural hardware. And it's a survival response gone wrong.
Think of it this way. Across evolutionary time. If you were sitting around the communal fire and
two or three people were elbowing each other, rolling their eyes or whatever people did a million
years ago to let you know that you were being dissed or dismissed or diminished in any way,
that was a dangerous proposition. Why? Because back across almost all of evolutionary time,
minus the past whatever hundred years, That was a sign that you and your offspring,
which we, our brains, our biological beings, we care a lot about our offspring, our gene pool,
we could be set at the edge of the tribe. And what does that mean? It means in a best case
scenario, you're not there for the good meat on the fire or you get the last little tuber that was
collected or buried. In a worse case, you're put so far outside of the realm of protection that
you're at risk of being picked off by marauding tribes or wildlife.
Wild animals, yep. Our immune systems are so sophisticated that across time,
our immune systems evolved with a sense of social threat. Social threat is clothed by the brain as
the most dangerous type of threat because it's really physical to us as beings.
And therefore, our immune systems, our stress chemicals, our stress hormones get really ramped up.
when we're ruminating because we're replaying social threat and that's a problem that's a problem
and rumination is is tied as the largest transdiagnostic factor to mental health so it's not just a
little thing that we're doing yeah it's a survival response gone rogue your brain just doesn't have
good mechanisms to stop and that's where my book comes in i'm trying to give people those yeah yeah
so if i'm and i'm hearing you correctly that it's most often we are ruminating about social threat
the threat of rejection the threat of isolation the threat of disconnection the threat of conflict
Loneliness. Not mattering. Yeah. Not belonging. The number one thing we ruminate about is whether
we matter to the people who matter to us. Yeah. In any aspect of our lives.
It could be in high school. I work a lot with high school girls. It could be.
That sense of your friend group. It could be a group chat. It could be the mom group. It could be
the neighborhood. It could be that thing your neighbor said over the fence. It could be,
again, anyone in your immediate or extended family. You're probably ruminating about one of them
right now. And I would guess social media could could trigger it.
Right. That's another era. It's a whole new thing we've introduced where suddenly, you know, I'll
notice that I'll be in a perfectly healthy. state mentally kind of thinking about the day in the
present. And then I'll see one thing and that spiral begins. It's just,
it's, you know, it's unbelievably quick and fast in that moment.
And it is. And, and that is one of the things that I work with parent and girl groups about,
especially girls, but also high schoolers and college age students. Because we see that social
media is turning on that fire hose of threat very quickly. Images do that much more quickly than
words. Videos do it more quickly than images. And most of us are using social media through video
imagery now, which means that we clock that sense of outrage or threat or loneliness or panic in a
much more visceral way. So you're absolutely right. I will add that according to all indicators,
we're ruminating more than we ever have before. And that is probably tied somewhat to social media,
to a pandemic just barely in the rearview mirror, to that just unending fire hose of rage and fear
and isolation from the news, from online life, from social media. from every corner that we turn to
is just amping it all up. So you're absolutely right. How,
in the book, you rely on your own mind as sort of your case study. One of them,
yes. One of them. What did you find that surprised you?
about your own patterns and tell us just a little bit about your own experience of realizing you
know it is to your point it's a helpful naming um and we'll get to what where there can be healthy
versions you know like i was mentioning there could be overthinking that can be healthy but but the
spiral the the negative spiral the rumination i bet you became very familiar with your own patterns
what did you notice Well, I noticed and I wrote very openly in the book that when I was very young,
my father died in a very freak overnight medical accident.
He went in for very minor surgery and he died due to a medical error.
And so it was the shock. that lives on forever. The reverberations will live on forever,
obviously. It's not something that you get up and shake off, you know,
as a kid of 12. And a lot of things changed in my family. Obviously,
my mom was widowed with four teenagers. I was the youngest and the only girl. My brothers were off
to the wind, girlfriends, colleges, what have you. And I really became my mom's emotional support
and just... everything that I could into protecting her,
taking care of her, worrying about her emotional needs. Was she okay?
Not okay. Coming out of her bedroom, not, you know, imagine being widowed overnight with four kids
and no way to support yourself. So my complete being went to that desire to care give.
as a child and make sandwiches for my brothers or whatever. So I never really processed any of that
until I began to report this book. And sure, I'd been to therapy.
I'd done all the right things. But as I was reporting this book, it really came about because one
day, and this is the opening of the book, you can read it for yourself. But I was coming out with
another book, not this book. And a researcher with whom I had shared the manuscript reached out to
me. I was at a doctor's appointment. And it was not the first time that something like this had
happened in my career where he told me he was going to borrow a bunch of it for a paper he was
writing. And he was doing me a favor because he was certainly more famous than me.
And it would come out under his name in a professional venue. And we would get it out there.
And he knew that I wanted that. And I had to leave the doctor's appointment.
I drove home. And I think most women could relate to this kind of a situation.
You know something has happened that shouldn't happen. You didn't have a voice for it. You weren't
able to speak up for yourself. And it's all trapped in your head and your body,
right? And so just talking about it, my heart still pounds a little bit.
I came home.
lawyer husband was here when I got home and he said, no, that's not okay.
You have to email your editor. I'm very close to my editor. We're very good friends. And she
immediately got the legal team on it and the whole thing disappeared. It disappeared. I didn't have
to solve it. They solved it, but it wouldn't stop replaying in my head.
And I kept saying to myself and my husband, It was three minutes of the worst phone conversation
I've ever had. But I'm not injured. Nothing happened. I can't get it out.
And that took me back to some of the patterns of voicelessness from my childhood and overdoing,
overgiving, and often in an atmosphere of male domination and male control in a big,
large... you know family so there were triggers that I had not attended to and we I'm sure can
break that down in the way in which naming the different images those movies the emotions and the
somatic sensations can help break our rumination and I have a an acronym for that writers love
acronyms called mist and i don't want to get into that now because it's based on the latest brain
science on where rumination is emanating from in our brain and how to work with that area of the
brain and we can get into that but i've already been talking for like three minutes no that i let's
get let's go there but i i just want to make sure i'm understanding you because this is there's so
much in what you're saying right as a as a I'm a therapist.
My listeners, this is why I wanted to have you on, right? We're always kind of trying to figure out
where are these triggers coming from. So I think what you're saying, let me make sure I'm hearing
you, that we ruminate for a reason, right? We're going to ruminate,
but what triggers a spiral is probably there for a reason and it's probably linked to some sort of
trauma or some sort of negative experience. from long ago. It's not unfamiliar.
It's not random. Is that, am I hearing you correctly? 100%. And to frame it through my lens,
we know that that area of the brain that gives rise to our ruminations for the nerds out there it's
called your default mode network and it's really three areas that we can work with discreetly to
unlock the brain from ruminations so we'll dive into that in a minute but first to address what
you're saying through my lens and the research that I did it's very clear that these patterns of
rumination in this area of the brain allison gets set up in response to events in childhood this
area of the brain is wired and fired in response to our early senses of mattering and belonging to
early caregivers and family members so rumination isn't random this is why it's almost always about
whether we belong or we matter to the people who matter to us but here's the tender thing beneath
all that mental noise Rumination is a signal fire from your past.
It is asking you to attend to those fearful, exiled,
angry, grieving, unseen, hurt parts of you that you have not fully attended to where emotional
processing still needs to happen. And so trauma is very much a theme through this book because
We've all had trauma. I wrote a whole book called Childhood Disrupted about the ubiquity of trauma
that we may not call trauma. Having parents who weren't present or having no one to really care
about you or think you were special or being put down or humiliated or critiqued all the time.
These are all classified by the CDC as types of childhood trauma. So our ruminations are...
encoded with information we each have a very distinct pattern of rumination we have things that can
happen to us in the world that will trigger this area of our brain to go into a kind of lockdown
that it's very difficult to get out of it's almost like an airport where airplanes are going around
on the tarmac in circles but they can't get out again Nothing flies in, nothing flies out,
and we have to be able to attend to those broken places and name them,
see them, and honor them for this area of the brain to let go again.
Gotcha. So part of, and I'm a big fan of naming, I'm going to use myself as a case study here for a
second. Good. That's okay. Yes. I think part of what you're saying is if we can find the underlying
pattern,
that's rooted in the past, it helps us access the path to release it.
So in my case, I often notice, and this is pretty new for me to notice this, but,
and this is kind of where social media comes in, especially in our polarized world. But in
childhood, I was shaped by attachment figures, all of whom I loved,
but who did not always know how to communicate with each other.
And they represented different, to use kind of your tribal, you know, different tribes, different
ideas, different ways of orienting to the world, whether religiously or spiritually or just the way
we are in the world. And I always found myself, where do I belong? I don't belong in any one group
because if I pick, I have to, and this is right in my own family,
right? I lose this person. Oh, my God. Right. So I don't want to pick this because then I lose this
person. So I have to figure out how to live coexist. So can you imagine? So that that is where
you're always under the threat of the possibility of loss of loss by any attachment.
And so it makes it nearly impossible for me to to this day.
I've had to figure out how. And so, again, I think there and this is where I want to get with you.
I've learned that there's as with anything. There's beauty in that because I've become something of
a translator, of a bridge builder. And also where I can spiral is I don't belong anywhere.
And if I choose this side, I lose this side. If I, you know, and, oh,
I don't belong in this side. That hurts. You know, it's always kind of comes back to that sense of
where do I belong? I'm just always sort of holding a lot of other people's belonging. Is that kind
of, but that's taken me a while to realize that's almost always where the. the spiral starts
because if you think about it allison underneath that fear of where do i belong is the fear of
where will i not Yes. Belonging. Where will I not matter?
Where will I be socially rejected or emotionally rejected? Yes. And again,
that is clocked by the brain as one of the most severe threats we can undergo as a human.
And it has a rapid escalation effect on your body's stress machinery.
So what you're feeling is real and getting in touch with that with real specificity.
language yeah by working with this part of the brain and what I've called the mist framework
because when we're lost in those places where we get triggered into thought spiraling rumination
self-judging other judging we're in a mist we actually can't see and what yes like on a
neurobiological level is that there are 267 areas of your brain that are super important to clear
clear thinking they're not lighting up They're not in use. They are offline.
All that's really working is this one closed circuit in your brain.
And you feel it, right? You feel it. It's like, whoa, I just keep going here.
I just keep going here. It's like Groundhog Day in your brain. And it feels terrible.
And you're actually not getting anywhere. You're not getting to any relief from the fear or the
wondering about the past or the future. So by using words,
and you like to use words, with incredible specificity,
we can actually decode our pattern of rumination in a way that...
it and puts it here in front of us maybe three feet away and that begins to make all the difference
that is the first step to emotional freedom because your brain starts to light up with awareness
other areas of your brain get engaged to go oh this isn't good I just spent the last hour making
dinner and I don't know if I added the salt to the stew or not I have no clue or I just drove here
I have no idea how I got here because I was loading the same reels over and over and over again so
we could try doing the MIST framework if you want sure okay I want it yeah that'd be great I love
it to
use your example We would start with the acronym is M-I-S-T for MIST.
And we're trying to clear the MIST by using the MIST framework. I love it. Okay, so M for you would
be using very specific words to create the sense of the story behind all the familiar reels that
you've seen a thousand times that your brain... loading up and where m is for mental imagery or
movie reels whatever works for you or montages it's that mental imagery the movies that replay a
little will come in from when you were five a little come in from yesterday and often it's like
Here's my old story or my familiar story of how people always dismiss me. Or here's my old familiar
story of how my voice doesn't matter. Here's my old familiar story of how people put me down.
I've interviewed so many people. They all come down to belonging and mattering. But what matters is
that you find your words for M, for your mental imagery, because the words that you say out loud,
that you name. Wow. Those are the words your brain will pay the most attention to.
Not the words I give you. Those words are not to be woo-woo. Those words are inside you and
they've been inside you for a really long time now. So if we were to do M, here's my old story of
how I don't belong. That would just be me spitballing, but you do it your way.
Yeah, it came as I was listening to you very clearly. They don't see me. Yes.
Yes. Okay. Let's start with that. Here's my old story of how they don't see me.
Let's move on to I. I is for the intensity of emotion, intense inner emotions.
Those could be, and they're very tied to our movie reels, right? Like you see the movie reel,
intense emotion gets going very, very quickly. It could be, which makes me feel afraid,
angry, scared, small.
So then we just go, here's my old story of how they don't see me, which makes me feel X and Y.
I mean, it's so interesting when you get specific. right? It actually makes me mad,
like angry. It makes me mad. It really does. I'm like, yes. Okay, Allison,
here's my old story of how they don't see me, how they don't see me,
which makes me feel. angry and mad and now we're going to do s for somatic sensations oh boy where
do you feel it in your body some people feel it like in the back of their head uh one person i
worked with just her headache like came on in eight seconds Some people, I feel it in my solar
plexus, like this anvil just landed on my chest. Heart might pound. Some people just,
their whole body contracts. So here's my old story of how they don't see me,
which makes me feel so mad and angry. And it makes my heart pound,
my solar plexus, whatever. Okay, so this is interesting. The minute I named it,
I felt more grounded in my body, which is interesting. But when it happens,
before I'm conscious of it, it feels like I, it's kind of what you were saying.
It's like I go down into a cave in my, it feels like kind of a cave in my brain. Like I just get
lost in a little kind of worrying energy in my brain, you know, like back here,
you know. Sure, yeah. Well, that's part of your default mode network, by the way. okay it's just
sort of like you know this buzzing sort of like worrying in in my head yeah so here's my old story
of how they don't see me which makes me angry and my head buzzes yeah so you can keep going there
and i want to say we all have multiple sentences we can say right yeah Different things are going
to emerge with different times. I had one person I worked with. She had one saying around her
husband, another around her daughter, and another around her mother. Like different things came up.
We can have multiple codes. But let me ask you this. So, so why don't you try saying the whole
thing in one sentence? Because that's where the magic is. Okay. So I want to ask you. And you can
change it. Okay. Because I want to, when you just said that, it made me realize, I think part of
what happens is, so I, they don't see me and that I feel mad.
And so there is a little bit of a, like, you know, when I say it, it's kind of in my, in my fists,
you know, in my, in my body. But I think it's actually a step after that. I go to either.
beating myself up typically. Yes. And that's what I feel in my,
it's like a loop opens up where I just start, why are you not bad? What's wrong with you,
Allison, that you haven't made them able to see you? Oh, I feel that viscerally.
Yes. Isn't this beautiful? So here's where you would be going with that. It's my fault. I'm
actually mad at myself. So here's my old story of how they don't see me. which makes me ashamed of
myself or feel like there's something wrong with me and my fists clenched.
Yeah. Like, try it again. Sorry, people, but this is important. Like,
you know, we all have to do this work. This is an important moment. So run it again.
Run it until... Yeah, and the listener, try to journal through this in your own experience. It's
powerful because I've never really been this granular about it. They don't see me. And that makes
me mad. I feel that in my fists. And then it's like I'm mad at myself.
Why can't I make them see me? So here we go.
And that is your code of rumination. And it's beautiful. And it's yours. And it's tied to your
whole story across your whole life. And probably your first caregivers who couldn't see the
position they were putting you in. Right? Yeah. Hey, Allison, you must choose.
Are you with us? Nope. Or are you with us? Grownups should be able to see the position they're
putting you in. And that had to make you really, as a child,
we code all of those situations as our fault. That's why when parents are getting divorced,
courts now order, you know, therapy for kids if there's some kind of custody battle.
Because From an early age until our brains are fully formed.
I've reported on this a lot. Kids cannot make that essential leap from there's something wrong with
me to there's something wrong with them. We cannot make that leap as children. And so we carry
things that are not ours to carry. And we carry them across a lifetime.
And what I found in doing my missed framework with people. is that they are able to drop things.
They are able to set down things that are not theirs to carry anymore. And it's the beginning of
the work. I don't want anyone to think that you do this and that's all you need to do and you won't
ruminate anymore. This is like a first step. It's the awareness that allows the other steps toward
real emotional freedom.
There's a lot in that. That's a really helpful, I think. I really appreciate your working through
it because I get what you're saying. Once you have that name for it,
you can look at it. What would you say to the listener who begins to connect those dots?
And you cover this in the book. Just as we're winding down here, Donna,
you know, how can you begin to, I love this phrase, repurpose? That energy.
Because it does feel like a lot of energy. It is a lot of wasted energy. It's a lot of dark,
wasted energy. Yeah, I love the idea of repurposing it, right? Yes. We all have things we would
rather be spending our precious mental energy on, right? We all want to be closer to that state of
flow, creativity, awareness, ideation. You have a podcast.
You see patients. You write books. you have a lot of ideation going on you want to be free and open
to that sort of importing or downloading of the good the good ideas or the next steps and not
walking around in this familiar story of rumination right so the first step is what we just did the
mist framework because what happens inside your brain is your brain kind of goes like oh you caught
me
Yeah. Steps back a little bit. Yeah. And it's happy because we want to be seen by ourselves.
Right. Like your story is about not being seen. You want to be seen by yourself.
So obviously we have to go way beyond that to do deeper work in terms of.
getting out of our ruminative habits so in the book really what I walk people through is then to
take that work somatically because what our brain is thinking oh I see that and what our body feels
they have to agree right our mind is a wonderful tool for escaping rumination but if we're still
somatically caught in the sensations of threat or social exclusion or feeling any of the D words
are a lot of diminished, dismissed, disregarded, disliked. Our body isn't coming along for the,
for the healing. Yeah. Yeah. And so I work, I walk people through a lot of very quick somatic
exercises that are based for working with the mental work that we're doing and for taking our
bodies out of that ruminative clutch as I think of it right we've got to get out of that ruminative
clutch we probably don't have time to run through them here but I do think they're pretty fun and
easy and all of them almost all of them are 60 seconds or less like you can literally excuse
yourself from a conversation go in the bathroom practice your missed framework and then do a 60
second silent exercise and come back and be like oh I see where I was here I see how I was getting
derailed and triggered in this conversation with difficult people toxic people but I'm going to
come back into it now with a refresh and and and I can't underscore this enough.
I didn't know this when I started reporting the book. You asked what surprised me. Yes.
What surprised me the most, Allison, is that this work allowed people to find their voice.
I did not know that that was going to be an outcome. But after a year of working with a lot of
people, that kept coming back over and over, that people were able to speak up.
by seeing themselves they were able to speak up to others in pretty wise and wonderful ways and
that was absolutely beautiful to witness wow and and it changed their families right one med
student changed his specialty he decided to go into a different specialty than what he had thought
he wanted One woman was able to voice herself with her husband. It was kind of like a gray-haired
teenager. And it made their marriage so much better that she had her voice and was able to speak
her truth.
From there, we can move into working more with language in our minds. We can give ourselves self
commands to get us out of rumination. Again, the language your brain generates is the language that
you're most likely to pay attention to. So we can literally come in after we've done some of this
work and just catch ourselves and be like, well, I'll give you an example. i was giving a lecture
and i am a little bit klutzy and that's okay i don't see that i'm not being self-critical here
it's just like that's how it is and i tripped on a wire going up to the to the stage right and i
caught myself i didn't go down but the ruminative me would have been like You're such a klutz.
And I would have carried that right to the podium. I would have been a little bit lost the first
couple of seconds of my talk. And I found myself going, it's okay,
Donna, you're human. Oh, this is how the work begins to show up for us.
I love that. And I go through a whole bunch of different statements that we can use in different
situations as self-commands. It's really great if you come up with your own. Yeah.
That you can load up, talk to yourself. It helps to talk to yourself in the third person.
Yeah. Use your own name. So you'd be like, Allison, that's okay. You're human or Allison.
Yeah. Because our brain associates a third person.
our own name with a sense of urgency in a way that using I does not.
Using I is associated more with anxiety and depression. Wow.
So those are some simple things right there. I love the moving into third person,
kind of speaking to yourself as if you're the moving, leaving the room and kind of,
I love, we'll link to all of the very practical.
somatic exercises, right? Because we don't always solve head problems with head. Sometimes our body
has to be part of the solution, right? Even just the movement. It's all in the book. It's just
like, just load it up with as many things as I found that can help you,
right? Like I was on a mission for myself, but also my reader. And some things,
here's a quick one. Lie on the floor. or go outside and lie on the grass,
our brain clocks the difference in perspective with a reboot.
It just gives you like literally two minutes out of rumination and if you can do the missed
framework. And you can do one or two somatic movements and you can lie on the floor.
You just gain 10 minutes of emotional freedom from which you can use all the other exercises to
reenter that state of creativity. I love that. Just simply changing, changing the scenery, changing
rooms. I mean, I will say I love also just want to what you said about voice,
because that makes sense to me. And I'm glad you. Because even like the example I gave, what I've
noticed is when I do notice that more and more, part of the shift internally more quickly,
to your point, I love that where there's just a quicker, you start to notice it's more easy for me
to go, do I want to be seen by that group? I actually love who I,
the folks, you know, and it just much more easily I can kind of let that release,
you know. And you're right, it's not. It's a whole embodied thing that just kind of happens slowly.
We talk a lot on the podcast about deeper formation, right? These are forming us.
And it's not often the quick fix hack. You know, it doesn't always happen. But there is this over
time you go. I love your example of just realizing I didn't in that moment. I just kind of released
it. And your brain somehow. learned a different way through the work that you're teaching us.
I love it. Donna, it's so helpful. It's kind of like a new language. You don't learn a new language
overnight. You don't just wake up and know how to speak, you know, Italian two days before your
trip. You have to build the brain. And I think if I could say anything about my hope for mind
drama, the book is,
I feel that I spent two years looking at every, I'm a neuroscience reporter,
looking at every single technique known to humankind for recognizing and exiting rumination and
coming up with the MIST framework, which is really just built on me putting together.
different pieces of very recent science and running them by neuroscientists because I'm not a
scientist. And I feel like I gave this everything in this book that I would want my kids to use as
an adult so that they're not ruminating. I love it. Because I don't want that for anyone that I
love. And I don't want it for the reader. I don't want it for anyone listening. It's a human
condition we don't talk about. And because we don't talk about it, we can't solve it.
You cannot solve a problem that you aren't being honest about, that you haven't named.
So let's name it, frame it, and let's do that interior work with a sense of tenderness for our own
story. Because that's where the wellspring of well-being begins, is that recognition within that
we're worth that time and effort. Yeah. And that energy, right? And repurposing that energy.
It's such a great book. It's called Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your
Inner Defeatist. I love that. How can my listeners find you,
the book, your work, other things you're doing, Donna? Yeah. So DonnaJacksonNakazawa.com has all
of my books and it has information about how to buy Mind Drama. You can go to...
anywhere where you like to buy your books right it's on amazon it's at bookshop i love bookshop
because it's independent bookstores which we all love to use but walmart um target anywhere that
you go where you like to buy your books it's there it's it'll be on audible um well i guess it'll
be on audible by the time this comes out so they're taping it now so really pretty much anywhere
you can find it and You can find me on Substack at Donna Jackson Nakazawa,
where I'm giving exercises and ideas.
Instagram, I'm not super big on social media. I'll just tell you right now because I have reported
a lot on social media and I feel like I'm mostly protecting my brain. Good for you.
I'm not being on it very much. I do post a little bit, but all of those places. Wonderful.
Thank you. Thanks so much for your work. for sharing the benefit of your wisdom with us today.
Pleasure. Great to be with you, Allison.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to or
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And be sure to join us each weekday for the best of you every day, a brief daily reflection to help
you start your mornings with a steady dose of wisdom. Remember, as you become the best of who you
are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
What if the reason you feel stuck… isn’t because something is wrong with you, but because different parts of you are pulling in different directions?
We all know that feeling—one part of you wants to follow through, while another part resists. And often, one side takes over… leaving you with regret or confusion afterward.
In this episode, Dr. Alison is joined by IFS therapist and best-selling author Jenna Riemersma to explore what’s really happening beneath that inner conflict and how to respond differently.
Because the goal isn’t to fight those parts of you.
It’s to understand them.
Together, they walk through Jenna’s simple, practical framework that helps you move toward yourself with curiosity and compassion instead of shame or control.
If you’ve ever felt stuck in cycles of overthinking, self-criticism, or reacting in ways you later regret… this conversation will help you understand why and what to do in the moment.
You’ll explore:
- Why the parts of you that frustrate you most may be trying to help
- What keeps you stuck in the same inner battles again and again
- The surprising shift that can calm the conflict inside
- How to know when to share what’s happening inside you—and when it’s wiser to protect yourself
- What real relief can look like when you stop fighting yourself
This is a simple but powerful shift: You don’t have to control or silence parts of yourself to change.
More Resources:
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Want to go deeper with parts work? Join 80,000+ soul tenders in our email community and receive weekly reflections and gentle practices on parts work here.
Connect with Jenna here.
Get Jenna’s new book, Move Toward.
Get her free Guided Meditations and Journaling Worksheets here.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 160: When You Feel Unwanted—Meeting the Parts of You That Long to Belong with IFS Therapist Tammy Sollenberger
Episode 108: Inside Out—Internal Family Systems, Therapy, and High-Performing Protectors with Jenna Riemersma
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
One part of me wants to eat all the Oreos and another part of me wants me to go to the gym and
those two parts of me are at war with each other. What happens is one part of us will take over and
we will react from that part of us and then afterwards we'll have regret or remorse.
And it turns out that just like with a friend, when we listen to them and find out what they want
us to know and find out if there's anything they need from us, they calm down and they feel
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of The Best of You. I'm Dr.
Allison, and I'm so excited about today's conversation. If you've been around this podcast for a
while, you know that I talk a lot about the work of Understanding what's happening inside of us,
the inner conflicts, the tension, the parts of ourselves that sometimes pull us in completely
different directions. And if you read my book with Kimberly Miller. Boundaries for Your Soul.
I know many of you have. I know that's a book that has brought many of you to this place. So you
know that making this inner work practical and accessible is something I care a lot about.
It's a big part of why I do what I do here on the podcast and in everything I do. So when I come
across others who are doing a similar kind of work and doing it beautifully, I get really excited.
And this is exactly what my guest today has done with her brand new book. My dear friend and fellow
therapist, Jenna Reemserma, is back on the podcast today. And I have so been looking forward to
this conversation. I can't wait to share it with you. If you've caught... previous episode,
you know that she is just such a warm and grounded voice in this space. She has this gift of taking
concepts that can feel really clinical or overwhelming and make them feel like something you can
actually do. Today, in the grocery store line, in the middle of a hard conversation with your
spouse, she meets us right where we are. Jenna is a licensed professional counselor. She's a
certified IFS therapist. That's Internal Family Systems, which is the model that has deeply shaped
both of our work. And she's also an IFS-approved clinical consultant. She's a certified sex
addiction therapist supervisor, and she's trained in EMDR and somatic therapy. She's also teaching
faculty for the International Institute. Trauma and Addictional Professionals. Jenna is just a
wealth of wisdom and helpful resources and insights, as you'll hear today.
And she's also a bestselling author. Her first book, All Together You, is an integration of IFS
with Christian spirituality, and then All Together Us, which looks at how IFS connects with other
therapeutic and community modalities. And today, we're going to talk about Jenna's brand new book.
Toward, a simplified IFS therapy tool to welcome all parts of you. And I want to tell you,
I work in this space. I read a lot of books in this space. And I read a lot of books on inner work,
on parts work, as you can imagine. And this is one of the most accessible, most practical I've come
across. Jenna has distilled the IFS model down to three simple steps that she'll walk us through
today that you can actually remember and use in real time when you're activated,
when you're triggered, when a part of you has taken over and you need something now in this moment,
not next week in your therapist's office, but now. And what I love about this conversation is that
we don't just stay in the theoretical. We get into how this work changes, the way you show up in
your marriage, in your past. in those relationships where things feel stuck or painful or even
unsafe. Jenna talks about what to do when the person across from you is safe.
enough to be vulnerable with about what you're feeling, about what you're learning inside.
And she also talks about what to do when they're not safe, right? When you actually need to protect
yourself. And this is such an important distinction because I hear from so many of you who are
navigating all kinds of relationships, right? Some that are safe and healthy and you just want
better tools for communication, but others of you who are navigating relationships where it's not
safe to be super vulnerable. right? And Jenna walks us through both. So whether you are brand new
to this idea of having different parts of you in her parts work, or whether you've been doing this
work for years, and you just want a simpler, quicker tool to reach for, or maybe to share with
someone you love to let them know about this work that you've been doing, this episode has
something for you. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Jenna Reemserma.
Well, I'm so thrilled you're here. I love these chances to have you on the podcast. So thanks for
being here. Thank you for having me. I love getting to be with you and to talk about these
wonderful topics. I know. It's always such a treat to get to have people from my real life world on
the podcast who are doing such great things. And so one of the things I love about what you do,
Jenna, is you make this whole world of inner parts work so accessible.
And this new book is one of the more accessible books I've read.
So for my listeners, if you're new or even if you're just wanting to really understand what is
actually happening inside of us as we connect to these parts of ourselves, this is such a great
resource. So to start, I want to just kind of start at that very top level.
When you're feeling conflicted inside, which is, I think, something a lot of us relate to.
When I'm feeling pulled in different directions, I can't figure out, you know,
kind of sometimes it feels like I'm spinning or I feel like I'm just stuck or overwhelmed, but, you
know, just this inner tension. What is actually happening beneath the surface?
I love this question because this is such a universal experience. I probably experienced this 10
times a day where one part of me wants to eat all the Oreos and another part of me wants me to go
to the gym. And those two parts of me are at war with each other. And it's very,
very common and normal to have different parts of ourselves that have different perspectives,
different goals for us that are at war with each other. Maybe we have a child who is in a baseball
league and the coach is being really hard on them. And we think, gosh, there's a part of me that
really wants to let that coach have it and tell him to get off my kids back. And another part of
me, you know, wants me to not say anything and not create any waves and those two parts are really
at war and very often what happens is one part of us will take over and we will react from that
part of us and then afterwards we'll have regret or remorse so if we might you know the part of me
The part of us that wants to let the coach have it might take over, and then later there might be
regrets. Or the part of me that wants to eat all the cookies might take over, and later the part of
me that wanted me to go to the gym is pretty mad about that. So this is a really normal experience.
And rather than either letting those parts just take us over and run our lives and then having
regrets later or trying to fight against them, which is really common.
If we try to fight against the parts of ourselves or of others that we don't like,
they tend to fight back. that which we resist as Carl Jung said persists.
And so the harder we try not to eat all the Oreos, drink all the wine, buy all the shoes,
the more we tend to do it in the long run. And so fighting against these parts of ourselves only
makes our suffering worse. And it turns out that a really counterintuitive way of helping this
inner battle is to do the opposite. to move toward these parts of ourselves with curiosity and
compassion. I love it. So this frames kind of your unique approach,
sort of your distillation of this internal family systems model that you and I both have been so
shaped by. The name of the book is Move Toward. And so talk to us a little bit about what do you
mean by move toward and move against? That's kind of what you were just describing. Go a little
deeper into that. What are we, what does that look like in real life when you're in the middle of
that, which is so relatable, right? You know, I'm locked in this and, and you're exactly right. I
just, I just want to hate the part of me that wants to down the bag of cookies. That feels like the
right thing to do, right? That's a bad part of me, you know, and just beat myself up for it, right?
That feels like, you know, the righteous, you know, action. Why would I move toward that part of
me?
What we need to do in those moments, what does that look like? Yeah, well, when we move against or
fight against a part of ourselves that's feeling or doing something that we don't like,
it tends to, as we said, fight back. And I've really seen this a lot in my other area of clinical
specialization, which is addiction. And when our approach to addiction work is to fight against or
move against the part of our client that's engaged in the addictive behavior, what tends to happen
is maybe they get sober for a period of time. And then that part tends to come roaring back.
If that's the only thing we do is just fight against it, try to lock it in the basement. Just don't
drink. Just stop it. Stop doing that. And it tends to take back over with ferocity.
And that's why relapse rates are so high with addiction. One of many reasons,
but I think that's a key one. And this really transformed my practice when I became trained in IFS
and began to realize that actually fighting against these parts of our clients,
it was exhausting. It wasn't really working. It wasn't successful. And it was actually making their
suffering worse because the more we fight against ourselves, the more shame, the more regret,
the more powerlessness we can feel. It's the sort of I'm only going to ever eat.
lettuce leaves uh for for the rest of my life and that lasts for about three hours yeah and then
the part that wants to eat all the oreos takes over again and then we feel more and more shame and
more and more powerlessness and when we realize all these parts of us actually are much more
effectively healed and transformed when we actually get in relationship with them,
as C. Sykes would say, when we get in relationship rather than in control.
That, which is really consistent, I think, with biblical themes in particular of being in
relationship and that the relationship heals, that is transformational. And so moving toward these
parts with curiosity and compassion to understand what their story is. How did they first start
trying to help us in this way? That's not very helpful. How do they feel about having to do this
job inside of us? Is there anything they'd rather be doing? And it turns out that these parts of us
have their own unique stories, their own unique history of why they're doing the thing they're
doing. And when we get curious and even compassionate about that. they soften,
they take us over less and we gain access to that divine sort of our highest self inside of us,
the God image inside of us or our highest self. And we can then lead and engage in our lives from
that place rather than different parts of ourselves taking us over and driving the bus. I love it.
You know, it's funny that the longer I've done this work, you do see such the parallels in
parenting real life kids, right? And I love the example of addictions. And I'm thinking about, you
know, when we lock in a power play with a child, it never works. It just escalates.
It's exactly the same principle, right? And it's the same with the part of ourself.
It just escalates the tension, escalates the stress versus when you hold steady,
when you hold space, it deescalates. The the part of you or the child or the other person that is
is upset or acting out. So I how do you we're going to get there for the listener.
We're going to get to how we bring this into our real lives, because I think that's a really
interesting part of this this book. But before we get there, how do you help someone,
Jenna? I'm imagining someone listening who's like, I get this in concept. But in the moment,
how do I really show compassion to myself when I'm behaving in a way I hate?
What's the bridge? How do we bridge to compassion? There's a huge difference,
and I love that you're highlighting this, between how do I show compassion to myself versus how do
I show compassion to a part of me? that is feeling or doing this thing that I don't like.
And amazingly, it's a very powerful tool just to recognize.
And the three simple steps that I offer people in the Move Toward book are simply notice,
know, and need. And we can walk through that in a moment. But that first step of just noticing,
if we're triggered, if we're activated, if we're feeling a battle inside, noticing.
wow, I'm noticing there's a part of me that's activated that wants to eat all the cookies.
And I'm noticing there's another part of me that is pretty activated as well that has a lot of
negative judgment about eating all the cookies. And suddenly I can realize that neither of these
are who I am. These are parts of me at war. And that noticing allows them to kind of separate their
energy from us or their emotions, their thoughts, separate out so that we can reconnect to that
core, our highest self of who we truly are. And the curiosity sort of spontaneously emerges when we
do that. But it's not easy. It's simple, but not easy. So in my book. because I know people get
stuck on this a lot, I've included a little quick reference guide for the most common ways that
this gets stuck for people. And so if you're trying to notice a part of you compassionately...
really stuck, you can just reference that. And it tells you exactly what to do with illustrations
and step-by-step guidance. And so maybe we have a dissociative part of us that has taken over.
We're kind of checked out and we're trying to notice it, but there's nothing to notice. Well,
that's one of the common. common challenges. And I talk you through how to notice that.
And the way that we do that is to notice the not noticing, to notice the nothingness.
And so just some simple things like that, that help us with these hard moments of noticing with
curiosity. And it's also important to say that when we notice a part of us with curiosity,
we can go back to the example of working with addiction. We're not saying that what that part of us
is feeling or doing is okay. Yeah. Most of the time it's not.
What we're saying is the most effective way to help it transform is to get in relationship.
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I love that you made that distinction. We're not saying... And I think in our culture and I think
sometimes in the TikTokification of therapy, you know, it can feel like I'm saying just notice and
validate everything. It's not notice and validate. It's just, but you're so right. I love that you
said that. It's almost noticing, oh, I'm checked out right now. And it just opens the door to
awareness and in a powerful way, just being able to notice something.
I love that you start there. What's the second one, Jenna? The second step, once we've been able to
recognize this isn't all of me, this is just a part of me, and we feel a little bit of curiosity or
compassion toward it, then the second step is no, K-N-O-W. And from our higher self,
we just... kind of get curious with this part of ourself and just kind of internally check in,
what do you want me to know? Part of me that wants me to eat all the cookies, what do you want me
to know about you? And it's not weird. We're not hearing voices or, you know,
talking to ourselves, but we're just simply offering a question as we would if we were getting to
know anyone. Hey, Allison, what would you like me to know about you? I'm not going to ask you that
question and then say, you know, I think what you want me to know is that you're an amazing
podcaster, an incredible bestselling author, phenomenal therapist.
I would not do that. You'd be like, excuse me, you, you, you happen to be right, but you asked me a
question. Let me answer. And that's really what we're doing. We're getting to know this part of
ourselves. So we just kind of ask like. cookie eating part of me, what do you want me to know? And
just sort of wait. And what we'll notice is some images or thoughts or just a general awareness
will usually begin to emerge. So we might suddenly get an awareness. Oh,
wow, I was needing some soothing. There was a lot of stress in my life just now.
And this cookie eating part of me is taking over trying to provide a little bit of soothing,
a little bit of comfort for me. And we can just kind of start to get a little bit of information
about these parts of ourselves that really expands our compassion for them because we begin to hear
and know how they're trying to help. So that's step two is really,
really witnessing these parts, really getting in a conversation with them in a sense,
hearing what they want us to know about themselves. I love that because when you use the
illustration of a map, like even with me,
And just to pause on that power of that question, what do you want me to know about you?
When you just said that kind of as I was like, oh, what do I want her to know about me?
Tap something really deep inside and you're giving yourself that gift.
What do you want me to know? And not imposing it. And I just love how you linger there.
and again it leads to this deeper self-knowledge because we have all these ideas about ourselves
right we have all these ideas about why we're eating the cookies and usually they're negative
because i'm not disciplined because i'm you know i can tell you know i get through all of mine you
know like all of my inner critical but it's like when you really just like you would with a friend
what what do you what do you want me to know because it's always a younger part you know And I love
that. It's just like how you would ask a friend that. Give yourself that same kindness. Exactly.
We want to befriend these different parts of ourselves rather than fight them. That's really key is
transformation doesn't happen through battle and battling ourselves.
It happens through connection, care, and relationship. And no matter how negative the behavior that
the part of us is engaged in, when we begin to understand how it's trying to help us,
not saying what it's doing is good. A lot of times it's not, but it is usually trying to help in
some way or carrying some longstanding pain. And when we get to know the story of this part of
ourselves, all of a sudden we see how exhausted these parts of us are, how long they've been stuck
in these roles. The cookie eating part of me has been stuck in that role since I was being pretty
significantly bullied in high school. And every night, every day after school on the drive home,
I would drive past a little treat store. And if I stopped after making it through the entire day of
really intense social situations on the way home, I could stop and get a little something sweet.
And that part of me. learned in those moments gosh that worked for a hot minute when there was
nothing else that felt sweet in my life and no one else showing up in a sweet way for me and this
part of me took on that job and it turns out it's exhausted it doesn't actually like doing this
because it only works for 10 seconds and then it feels worse that is so powerful That is just such
a powerful connection to the past, right? They're there for a reason. So this leads us to the third
N, which is need. Correct. So what does this part of you now need?
Yes, this is a really, really powerful question because when parts of us take over and act out in
certain ways, so the cookie eating part of me takes over and makes me eat all the cookies. Well,
the cookies are not the need of this part. What this part needs is comfort.
And so once I hear this part's story, and so I've noticed it, I've asked this cookie eating part,
what do you want me to know? And then I ask this part, what do you need from me?
That is my highest self, not my spouse or my parents or my next door neighbor or the boss,
but what do you cookie eater? need from me to feel a little less activated,
a little more comforted. And again, we ask and we wait and we make it a sense.
We make it a sense of exactly what the part needs. And the need is usually something very
important. For example, the cookie eating part of me, when I asked that question,
what it needed was for me to deal with the overworking part of me. that was creating so much stress
in my life and as all of this overworking was creating lots of stress the cookie eating part would
get activated and jump in to try to create some relief and so it really helped me to gain insight
that the cookie eating would slow down if I could also do notice no need with the part of me that
was overworking these these parts of us are actually interacting in a system C.
Sykes, a wonderful IFS trainer, she says it's a system, not a symptom.
And I think that's really important. We often treat things like they're symptoms and we fight
against them. And that makes our suffering worse. When we recognize this feeling or behavior is a
part of a system. And we can move toward all parts of the system with curiosity and compassion.
It helps everything to calm and settle back and ultimately lays the foundation for their
transformation. Wow, I love that. And those needs, again, just to underscore and highlight,
I think often we impose what we think the part needs. And again,
that's like, and we've all had this happen to us when a friend's like, what you need is, and you're
like, well, I mean, even if it's true, that doesn't feel that great. You know, like what you need
is to like, just speak up for yourself. And it's like, well, yeah, I probably do. But like, and
it's kind of what we do to ourselves. And there's this, it's such a difference. I love how you're
saying that, like to wait for a minute and notice what comes up because it's often surprising to
your point. Right. It's like, well, actually, I, you know, I need a little more space from all this
overworking or whatever. And I'm always surprised by what the need is.
And I love that. That's that's a really lovely, just simple way to kind of just listen just as you
would, again, to a friend. Exactly. And it turns out that just like with a friend,
when we listen to them and find out what they want us to know and find out.
if there's anything they need from us, they calm down and they feel cared for and they feel seen
and less likely to become really activated. And the same is true in our inner relationships with
these parts of ourselves. It's very counterintuitive, but very powerful.
And it is the reason I tried to make this very simple, very clear,
very easy to remember is because Like you, I'm an IFS trained certified therapist.
I do this for a living. I know the IFS model cold, the internal family systems approach.
But when I'm out in the grocery store and all of a sudden I'm triggered, I can't pick up the phone
and call my therapist and do the entire model, even though this is what I do for a living. I need
something quick, something easy to remember, something accessible so that in that moment when we're
triggered. And an enraged part of us has taken us over or a dissociative part or a part that wants
to eat all the cookies or drink all the wine. I can immediately go, oh, notice no need.
I can do that. And I can help that part calm down, get a little clarity,
understanding of why it got triggered, how it's trying to help and what it actually needs so that I
can have more leadership of these inner battles that rage.
This is so good. Okay. So I love the image of being in the grocery store lane and how we're doing
this in real time. So in the book, you also spend some time talking about how this inner work
begins to change how we show up in our relationships, in our life, in our world, at our church, in
our marriages, in our culture, right? The whole world around us. And I think that's powerful
because the work doesn't just end inside of us. What are some examples of how you've seen this
inner work change how you showed up in a relationship?
And hypothetically speaking, I might know a friend who used this a lot in their marriage that was
incredibly transformational. This is strictly hypothetical. I can't relate to this whatsoever. But
a friend of mine said that when they would get into conflict.
I'll just out myself. It's me. Thank you. Hello. When I get, I've been married 30 years.
So, you know, when you've been in a relationship with someone for a long time, your parts know
their parts. Like when my husband shows up with an angry part, I get a appeasing part.
And our parts have relationships with each other. And that didn't used to go so well. When we are
reacting out of different parts of ourselves that take us over and try to run the show,
it doesn't. end well. And we wind up further away from our goals and not closer to them.
So what we do is first, we always do move toward, we always notice what is coming up in me.
Oh, I'm noticing a part that wants to appease, a part that's pretty mad, a part that feels
vulnerable, and a part that just wants to pretend there's nothing wrong so we can get past this.
Okay. So we notice, know, and need with all of our own parts. Then if we're in a largely a
goodwilled, you know, generally positive relationship where the other person,
you know, has connection to us and can offer some degree of listening,
we can say, whew, can I just, I just need to take a minute. I'm noticing that there's a part of me
when I sense this energy in the room between us that wants to take me over,
that wants to pretend like everything's fine. There's another part of me that just wants to do
whatever you want me to do so that this conflict will go away. There's another part of me that's
pretty mad that doesn't like that it's I'm always in the power down position and you're in the
power up position when you get mad. And there's a part of me that feels really actually vulnerable
that your anger could hurt me. And that feels really scary to this vulnerable part of me.
So that's what I'm noticing in me. What's coming up in you? And that's a very different approach
than all these parts taking us over and we're reacting out of them.
And it's called speaking for our parts. rather than from them. And it's pretty transformational
when we are in a largely goodwilled, generally safe and healthy relationship situation.
That, of course, is not every situation. And I speak to other ones in the book, but this can be a
game changer in our marriages and our parenting in so many different things.
And you can just feel the difference when you're speaking from that place versus yelling at the
person or escalating. Jenna, I'm thinking of the listener.
What do you suggest for folks who are listening, who are maybe doing this work or have some
understanding of that, but they are in that sort of toxic situation, whether it's a marriage,
whether it's a friend, whether it's a community, where it wouldn't be safe? to be that transparent.
How do you coach people like that how do you walk people like that in the book this is really
important because many relationships don't have that essential goodwill safe container and it
actually would not be wise when we're in a situation where there's toxic energy or boundary
violating or any type of danger in any way to sort of be that transparent and represent all these
different parts of ourselves it does open up a certain degree of um of intimacy that isn't wise to
offer to everyone. So an example that I see frequently clinically is working with betrayal trauma,
where a client may come in and their partner, their spouse has been compulsively using pornography
or acting out sexually in some way. They are suffering from Betrayal trauma.
Maybe they've just had a discovery or, you know, they're kind of trying to figure out what do I do?
And let's say they've confronted their partner and the partner is non-repentant.
They're not interested in working on it. They're gaslighting, blame shifting. Well,
if you were more sexual, I wouldn't have to look at pornography or, oh, don't worry about it.
All people do this or in whatever way, they're not really taking any ownership. They're deflecting,
blaming and refusing. to take responsibility or accountability.
And let's say that's been going on repetitively. Maybe there's been lies told, which is very common
in that work where the first discovery happens. I promise, I promise I'll never do it again.
Then the next discovery, then the next discovery. And so there's this chronicity of betrayal trauma
and the layers. So clients will often come in and say, what kind of boundaries do I need to have?
And this is key because in a situation where you no longer have the safety and genuine goodwill of
the container of the relationship because the person on the other side of the relationship, while
they may love you and you may love them, they're repeatedly lying,
blaming, and engaged in betraying behaviors. then what often happens with betrayed partners is they
react out of one part of themselves. So when they're in the therapy room, they'll say,
or when they're in the heat of a conflict with their partner, if you ever look at pornography
again, I'm leaving you.
Invariably, the person looks at pornography again. And another part of the betrayed partner shows
up. and actually is terrified of losing the relationship. And that part of the betrayed partner may
actually even want to go be more sexual with the betraying partner in an attempt to not lose that
attachment relationship. And so we've got, it's very common to have many different parts at war and
people are often very challenged. Like, why can't I hold boundaries? This is a situation where I
would say, Probably not the best thing to freely speak for your parts to your partner because
they're not able to safely be present for that. But you want to take a personal internal inventory.
You want to get internal consent from all parts of you and hear from the angry part that says,
if you ever, I'm gonna. And the part that says, but. I can't make enough money to support myself
and the children. What about the holidays? We got to listen to all the parts of ourselves that have
opinions around this. And then from that place of our highest self, as the leader of this group of
inner parts, we can make the wisest possible choice in the moment. That isn't perfect,
but it will be a boundary that we can state. with clarity and courage and follow through on.
And this would be an example where there isn't that genuine safety and goodwill.
And it might not be wise to speak for our parts, but it's very critical to listen to them and then
take our next step in the boundary from a place of that highest self leadership.
I love that. I think that's so wise. I want the listener to really hear that because often I will
hear from people, I'm sure you do too, sort of a self-criticism or an anger that they can't take
the action they feel like, a part of them feels like they should take. And what you're saying is so
important. It's that inner consent, inner witnessing of all the different layers.
There's a reason oftentimes people don't leave a marriage, don't leave a church, don't leave a
relationship, don't leave a... Because there's a lot at stake.
There's sometimes a high cost. And so I love what you're saying.
It may not at that point yet be about telling the other person all those different feelings,
but it is really honoring all of it within because that process will inevitably allow you when it's
finally time to take action, to do it with your whole self. which means it will be more
sustainable, more resilient, more, I love that. That's a really powerful, powerful way to,
it may take, you know, I know Kim and I said in Boundaries for Your Soul, and it always has stuck
with me. It's a slower way to where you want to get faster, right?
It's slower, but you actually get to where you want to be. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. And when we throw out threats, or attempts to control someone else's behavior from a
part of ourselves rather than a true boundary, which is about managing our own choices,
our own behavior, not someone else. Then we don't wind up disempowering ourselves because when we
throw out a threat that we're not going to follow through on. We disempower ourselves.
We actually train the other person to ignore our words even more. This is true in parenting.
This is true in betraying relationships. When we throw out a threat, if you don't do your homework,
you're grounded for the next year. And that's not what all parts of us are in consent with,
nor is it. necessarily a wise choice. We are disempowering ourselves because then when we don't
follow through, the person on the other end says, well, I don't have to listen to what my mom is
saying, my dad is saying, they're not going to follow through. They're just throwing out threats.
And we wind up being a much less effective parent, a much less effective self-advocate,
a much more dysregulated. individual in our interpersonal relationships.
So this skill turns out to be fairly transformational. Wow,
that's, that's such a helpful, hopeful view.
What if you are in a relationship with, again, we're back to this fairly healthy,
good, you know, enough safety, good enough safety? But the language of parts hasn't either
connected with that other person. So it's been super helpful to us. But that that.
It's almost like we're speaking a different language. How do you encourage people in those
situations where the language maybe is a little bit of a barrier? I love this question because this
comes up a lot. I think it's very important. And it's part of the reason that I specifically wrote
this book to be very accessible. I wrote the book very casually. So it's like I'm sitting down with
the reader having a cup of coffee talking about these things. And there's... examples that will
walk you through how to do this. I've got scripts, I've got journaling or group discussion
questions after every chapter so that there is a really, there's a little bit of this is what it
looks like and then here's how you do it, let's practice. And I think that's so important because
this issue of the language of parts comes up often when people don't like that language.
Sometimes some people really resonate with it. Some people really don't prefer it. And some people
think it's pathologizing. Like, are you saying I have what used to be called multiple personality
disorder? No, not at all. This is normal. We all have lots of different parts of ourselves.
It's just normal. So what I say to encourage someone in that situation is it doesn't matter what
language we use to describe this inner experience. We can. Call it anything we want.
So I say, let's use the language that feels most comfortable. So we might say something like, let's
say we love inner parts work, but our partner is really triggered by the word parts. Then we can
say, okay, can I take a moment? I'm noticing there's an energy in me that feels really enraged
that's trying to help protect me from this conflict. I'm noticing there's another energy in me that
wants to sort of caretake. And there's another energy in me that feels really vulnerable right now.
We don't have to use the word parts. It doesn't really matter what we call it. We're reflecting our
inner experience in a way that can be heard and received. That's great. That's great, Jenna.
I love that. I was having a conversation with, I don't know if you're familiar with John Acuff. He
does a lot of coaching. He has a book called Soundtracks. And I had a conversation with him a few
weeks ago. And he was saying, we were kind of talking about that. And he was saying a lot of the
men he works with really, would never respond to this idea of an inner voice.
But when you talk about a soundtrack that plays, they're right there with them. And I was like,
that's interesting. It's okay. We don't have to be literal about the language in our real life.
Just find something that works, that's a shared language for both of you to name these inner states
that we all have. I think that's really helpful. That's a really helpful naming.
Yeah, I really love that because that was sort of the heartbeat behind my very first book years
ago, Altogether You, that integrated IFS with Christian spirituality.
And there was a lot of challenge for people of faith to connect with parts because there was a lot
of translation that needed to be done. For example, that our highest self or, you know,
that essence that IFS would call self with a capital S. Most people of faith have a very visceral
response to that that's quite negative. That word self often connotes sinfulness.
So it's like the opposite of what IFS is calling it. And just helping people to make a translation,
well, actually, that's just the image of God inside of you. Don't use the word self, use image of
God. Like if we're talking about the same thing, we could call it concentrated awesomeness. It
doesn't matter. Whatever works for you to understand the essence of what we're describing,
then let's use that. I love that. Just as we're winding down here,
for someone listening who's newer to this work, but wants to take a step forward,
what would you say is, just even today, what's the first small step someone could take to begin to
do this work today.
I love that. So that's the whole last chapter is like, what are my next steps for how to apply this
in my life? So I think this is so important because sometimes it can be conceptually a great idea.
And then if we don't know kind of how to implement it, it can just be an interesting idea. And I
think that the first step, which seems simple and it is, but it's not at all easy, is beginning to
practice the art of noticing, which is step one.
noticing when a part of ourselves has gotten activated and taking us over. And that can be
challenging because we often are taught to think of ourselves as just one thing. So if an angry
part of us gets triggered and takes us over, what we tend to think is I am so angry. or if an
anxious part of us has gotten activated and we're feeling its anxiety, we'll think,
I am so anxious. And so this art of just step one, of just noticing,
ah, an anxious part of me is here. ah, I'm noticing an angry part of me is here.
Even just that can be pretty transformational because all of a sudden, just with that awareness,
just with that gentle noticing, we get a little bit of separation between the energy of that part
of us, whether it's anger, anxiety, whatever it might be, and ourselves. And we begin to realize
how multifaceted. how beautifully multifaceted we are inside and that is a powerful first step so i
would say even just beginning to practice notice notice notice and also noticing what is it like
when we are not taken over by parts noticing that calm that clear-mindedness,
those moments of clarity, of courage, of compassion, when parts haven't taken us over.
Because that's a different place, that connection to the image of God or the highest self inside of
us. And noticing that can be really valuable as well. Like, oh, that's actually in me.
Because sometimes we think, oh, I've done so many bad things or so many awful things have happened
to me. I don't actually have that inside of me. That's a common thought. There's no image of God
inside of me. There's no highest self. I've done too many horrible things or I've endured so much
trauma in my life. There's nothing good inside of me. And so noticing when we're not overtaken by
parts and that actually there is. this beautiful essence inside of each and every one of us,
that's very powerful as well. I love that. I love that. Jenna, you're just such a wonderful light
of... such clarity and the way you distill this, what can feel overwhelming into such simple,
usable skills. It's just so wonderful. I'm so grateful for all of your work. You've written a
number of wonderful books. We'll link to all of your past appearances on the podcast because I know
those have been among my listener favorites. But tell us where they can find this current book and
how to get in, what all that you've got going on now. Oh,
thank you. Well, this new book is just released at the time of our recording, and it's available on
Amazon, Kindle, audiobook. I had a fun time recording it in the studio. If you'd like me to read it
to you and you're an audiobook person, enjoy that wherever books are sold.
And I have lots and lots of free resources that I offer to people because I know this can be a very
different approach and people need some help and guidance. So if you come to my website,
which is JennaRiemersma.com, but if you're like... 99% of the people and you can't spell
Remersma. Not a problem. Some days I can't spell my last name, but if you also come to movetoward
.com, it'll get you to the same place. And I've got free downloadable journaling worksheets.
I've got free videos where I actually guide you through this process for a variety of things.
So I've got move toward for anxiety, move toward for addiction, move toward for betrayal trauma,
move toward to just check in with your parts, move toward for triggers, all kinds of things. So
lots of free resources there as well as on the Insight Timer app.
So please feel free to take advantage of this. So they go to Jenna Remersma on Insight Timer.
Is that how they find you? Correct. And I've got a whole ton of free audio guides there that are
moved toward guides. And I even have one now that's a video. InSight Timer has just released videos
that teach us speaking for our parts rather than from them. So lots of ways that you can connect
with this if it interests you and you want to try it out. Please take advantage of all of those
free resources and try it out and see what you think. because it's really been life-changing for
me. And I'm so grateful to get to share this important and I think just really simple tool with
people. Well, Jenna, I cannot recommend your work, what you offer enough.
You are a trusted voice in this space and we are so grateful for your time and for what you're
putting into the world. Thank you for all the resources and just the gift of your wisdom. We're
really grateful. Thank you so much for having me back on the podcast. I always love being with you.
And I'm so grateful to have this conversation with your listeners. Thanks.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
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Episode Show Notes
When a diagnosis, chronic illness, or unexpected health challenge enters your life, it can divide your story into a before and after. And often, we don’t have language for what’s happening beneath the surface.
In this episode, Dr. Alison and Dr. James C. Jackson explore the concept of medical trauma—and how it impacts not just your body, but your identity, your relationships, and your sense of meaning.
Because medical trauma isn’t just about what happened to you physically.
It’s about what it begins to reshape internally—your sense of safety, control, and who you are.
If you’ve ever felt disoriented, overwhelmed, or like life doesn’t fit the way it used to… this conversation will help you understand why and what healing can look like.
You’ll explore:
- What medical trauma is and why it’s often overlooked
- The psychological impact of diagnosis, chronic illness, and navigating healthcare
- How suffering can reshape your identity—and how to gently reframe it
- The role of community in healing and why support matters
- What it means to live in the “both/and” of grief and hope
This conversation offers a compassionate path forward—helping you learn how to live with what’s hard without letting it define all of who you are.
More Resources:
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Want to go deeper? Join 80,000+ soul menders in our email community and receive weekly reflections and gentle practices on parts work here.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 64: Women’s Health—Menopause, Hormones, Depression and How to Advocate for Yourself Through Your Body’s Changes
Episode 19: My Stroke, A Process of Healing, and How I Began to Write The Best of You
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
When people are properly supported When they are steeped in resilience, when they can find a
purpose, they can endure hugely difficult things and they can come out on the other side,
not only surviving, even thriving. We don't get to decide for somebody else what is traumatic.
In the medical arena, those can develop in everything from getting a difficult diagnosis to being
in the ICU to struggling with a chronic illness to other things. I wanted to affirm people and give
a name to what they were feeling and then... for many is medical trauma.
Hey everyone and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of the Best of You podcast. I'm so
glad you're here with me this week for this conversation. Today's episode is for you if you've ever
found yourself facing something you didn't choose, something that changed your life in ways you
didn't expect. It might have been a diagnosis or a long season of unexplained symptoms,
or it might be walking alongside someone you love through illness or recovery.
Whatever it is, there's this moment where the life you had before and the life you have after no
longer feels the same, and it rocks your world. a little bit. It's disorienting. It's confusing.
It's uncertain. We don't always have language for what happens to us psychologically and
emotionally in those moments. We call it stressful, or we call it anxiety,
or sometimes we just try to minimize it or shove it away. But often, the right kind of name for it
is actually trauma. It's something we don't always have the skills to process in the moment.
And I've had moments like these personally, moments where something medical entered into my life
out of the blue, out of nowhere with no explanation. And suddenly there was a before and an after
the event. And this is exactly what today's guest, Dr. James C. Jackson,
is gonna share with us all about today. It's his area of expertise. He calls it medical trauma
because so often when we're dealing with a health issue, whether it's chronic symptoms or something
major that enters in unexpectedly, it creates not only a trauma in the body, it often creates a
trauma in the soul. That phrase alone, medical trauma, was so powerful to me when I first heard it
because it names something so many of us experience but don't always recognize at first. It's not
only going through the illness, it's navigating the medical system, the healthcare system, or even
receiving a minor diagnosis that changes our daily habits that shapes us emotionally,
psychologically. And yet so often we're expected to get through it, to stay positive,
to be resilient, to get back to normal, or to only focus on the physical aspect of healing,
as important as it is. But I want to talk today with our guest about how to move through painful
changes to our health or to the health of loved ones with intention and kindness.
and gentleness, and to ultimately learn how to live with what's hard without letting it define
everything about us. And this is where we're going today. I'm joined today by Dr.
James Jackson. He's a clinical psychologist and researcher, and he serves as the director of long
-term outcomes at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He focuses on helping patients recover,
not just physically, but emotionally and psychologically from critical illness, ICU stays,
and chronic conditions. He's worked extensively with veterans, with ICU survivors, and all kinds of
individuals like you and me navigating these complicated medical challenges.
What I appreciate so much about Dr. Jackson's work is that he brings together this deep clinical
expertise with a profound respect for the reality of human suffering. He's not here to offer us
quick fixes or to minimize pain or to rush us past the hard parts. Instead, he's helping us do
something much more meaningful. He's helping us learn how to live fully, alive,
the way God wants us to live, even when. It's hard. Jim is the author of a powerful new book,
Reclaiming Your Life from Medical Trauma, Recognize the Symptoms, Find Treatment That Works, and
Heal Your Brain and Body. He offers a practical, compassionate guide for navigating the emotional
aftermath of illness and finding your way back to a life that holds meaning and purpose and hope.
Today, we're going to get into what medical trauma actually is and the surprising and maybe not so
surprising ways it might be showing up. What happens psychologically when you receive a difficult
diagnosis? How to develop resilience in these unique situations?
And most of all, we're going to get into how to hold on to your identity when life changes in ways
you didn't choose and how faith factors into that, how you can rely on faith without bypassing
pain, but to enrich your experience of life in the way that God wants for us.
There's this phrase Dr. Jackson uses throughout today's episode that I want you to listen for. It's
this idea of both and. You can be facing something incredibly hard and still build a meaningful,
purposeful life. You can feel grief and still experience so much joy in your day-to-day
encounters. You can experience something that feels so unfair and still hold on to a sense of
goodness. and beauty and hope. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation today with Dr.
James C. Jackson.
I am so thrilled to have you today. You've spent over two decades or more walking with people
through really hard diagnoses of all different types.
We can talk about that a little bit more. I'm curious, just as we get started to frame the
conversation what have these experiences of walking with people through these life-altering
situations taught you about how suffering shapes us as people yeah it's a really good question and
you're right it has been two decades it's been almost 25 years of this work and it's taught me a
few things it's taught me certainly that We shouldn't be too casual about throwing around Bible
verses like Romans 8.28, right? It's taught me that, right? It's true that all things work
together for good. It's true. But in the process, people really suffer. And life with a chronic
condition, with a critical condition, it can be hugely difficult. So I've learned not to be casual
or flippant or... unserious or overly optimistic about how easy this journey might be.
I've learned that. I've also learned that when people are properly supported, when they have the
support they need, when they are steeped in resilience, when they can find a purpose,
they can endure hugely difficult things and they can come out on the other side,
not only surviving, but beautifully. even thriving. I've learned that. I witnessed that.
And that doesn't happen by accident. But it's a vision that I cast for my patients.
And it's a vision that many of them realize. And I've learned that people can thrive in the midst
of really difficult things, shockingly hard things. It's amazing. You use the phrase in your book,
medical trauma. And I thought that was a powerful naming. We talk a lot about trauma,
healing from trauma on the podcast, but this is a specific kind. A lot of people don't even realize
that illness of all different kinds of variety in and of itself, right? A diagnosis can become a
trauma. What do you mean by this term and how does it show up in people's lives?
It's a really important term. And I think where I started to think about it really.
was in my work at the Department of Veterans Affairs at the local VA hospital, where often trauma
is framed correctly in the context of combat,
PTSD after service in Iraq, after service in Vietnam, long ago after World War II.
Of course, that's trauma. But as I heard such strong emphases on trauma at the VA,
it occurred to me... that wasn't a term that we were using at all in the medical world writ large.
It was not a term we were using. And as I engaged with patients, I realized that even though they
hadn't been in Vietnam, even though they weren't in a foxhole in World War II, they had a lot of
the same symptoms. They were anxious. They were chronically hypervigilant. They were avoidant.
They were emotionally activated all the time. often by things that were quite profound,
profound birth trauma, major operations, but often by things that were easy to overlook,
often quite traumatized by things that we might not think would be that significant.
And I think that's how trauma works, right? Like we don't get to decide for somebody else what is
traumatic. There are things that are profoundly traumatic to me. that people seem to manage very
effectively and there are things that at a glance don't necessarily seem that traumatic and they're
hugely derailing. And in the medical arena, those can develop in everything from getting a
difficult diagnosis to being in the ICU to struggling with a chronic illness to other things like
being routinely dismissed by a well-meaning provider. I think that can be hugely traumatic.
So I really cast a broad net.
Everything difficult in the medical arena that happens, of course, is not traumatic. But many,
many things are. One of the reasons for the book was I wanted to affirm people and give a name to
what they were feeling. And that name for many is medical trauma. Gosh, just as you were going
through that list, I thought even in this day and age, working with health insurance companies can
become traumatic. Yes. Deeply, creating financial trauma and stress. And ironically,
the trauma then, especially, I mean, whether it's psychological or medical, it's all intertwined,
right? Because all of that cortisol and anxiety can also then interact with what's going on
medically. Yeah, absolutely.
so many contexts. But where I see it a lot is in avoidance. What I see is someone has had a bout
with cancer or perhaps they had a parent who had a bout with cancer and so they decide not to get a
skin check because they're afraid that that mole might be melanoma because their mother or father
had melanoma. So the painful irony is that by the time they've waited five years to get that skin
check, it's very likely that that actually might be the melanoma. And now they've got a brand new
challenge that they didn't have before. And then that makes them even more avoidance.
So that'd just be one example, that avoidance that has real world implications,
it can really derail people. That is such an interesting, right, that byproduct of a familial
situation. It makes a lot of sense. And we see this. Talk to us a little bit about...
When someone does find their way to you and they've received a serious diagnosis,
right, or they're facing a major health crisis, what do you typically see? So this is a person who
has faced, you know, for whatever reason, they've had to come face to face with this really hard
news. What typically happens psychologically in those first moments, those first weeks,
those first months? What's the trajectory to kind of normalize? Because oftentimes I think some of
this just isn't normalized, right? It's not normalized. And often what happens is people feel
incredibly out of control. I think that's the first thing. They feel incredibly out of control. So
there's a lot of value in simply saying, we've seen this before.
You know, people have had this experience before. And there are predictable, there are thoughtful.
There are data-centered ways to help you. And we're going to engage those, right?
We're going to engage those. We're going to help you regulate your emotions. We're going to help
you lean into social support. We're going to help you realize that there are ways to accept this
uncertainty that can be really empowering and beautiful. And there are ways to find meaning in
this. You certainly don't want to lead with, let's find some meaning in this, right? Like this is
hugely difficult. Let's find some meaning. I think that would be a very cruel thing to do.
And yet, down the road over time, people who tend to do well in the context of medical trauma,
they find a way to make some sense of it. They find a way to make some meaning of it. And people
who do well find a way to realize.
that that there is a I'm going to call it there is a both andness to things and that is people
begin to realize I can both have a chronic illness and I can live a really fulfilling life I can be
grappling with a frightening diagnosis and I can learn to be present with my family both and and I
think that piece is particularly important because on the heels of a trauma It's very easy to move
into this place of my identity shattered. My life is over. You know,
my future has been blown up. And those things might feel true. They aren't necessarily true.
And it's important to say to people, let's take a step back. Let's take a few deep breaths.
Let's reflect on what's about to happen. And let's find a way to embrace the both andness of
things. Yeah, I love that. I think you're saying something so important there. Maybe it's not the
first meeting. There's a lot of kind of normalizing and containing very real emotions initially.
Yes. But it's not where you have to stay. You got to feel that. You got to go through that. I'm
sure there's a lot of grief. There's a lot of processing. But eventually that process,
when you do it and you don't bypass it, we talk a lot on the podcast of what I think of as.
spiritual bypassing, right? And sometimes as believers, as folks who are people of faith,
we can too quickly get to the good news without first walking through,
this is hard. And that makes a lot of sense. So just to normalize, this is hard stage before we get
to the meaning and hope and future. Yeah, I think that's right. I love the poet Robert Frost among
all poets. I love poetry. And Robert Frost had a lot of quotes.
but to me, the quote that has landed most powerfully over the years has been, the only way around
is through. The only way around is through. No shortcuts, there's no magic elixir, the only way
around is through. And that process, that process of finding meaning in suffering,
that can take years, and often it does. For me, in my own life,
and I talk about this in my book quite a bit. I was diagnosed with OCD as a 50-year-old, late in
my life, 50 years old. And when I went to see my psychologist, I had one goal in mind.
And that was, let's get rid of every single OCD symptom that I have.
Let's just burn it down. Let's heal it. Get it done. And she said,
I'm not so sure about that. Jim, you're normally, I think, pretty thoughtful. You're a
sophisticated guy. You should know. can't just pull this out, you know, like a weed. And I said,
other people maybe can't, but I want to, right? I will.
And the way I was framing this, Allison, was that I needed to get rid of it because until I got rid
of it, I couldn't be okay. Nothing would be okay. That's the way that I framed it. And either or,
right? Exactly. Either is gone or I'm, yeah. Exactly. So I leaned into this therapy really hard.
And we talked about acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. We talked about living with it, all of
that. And I've got, you know, a lot of tools, I think, internally at my disposal. And it took me
about two years, two solid years, to even get to the place where I was willing to consider the idea
that I could have OCD and I could be fine. I could be okay, right?
And so sometimes I think... In the Christian arena, we're in a little bit too much of a hurry to
convince people that the Holy Spirit is about to make them a little more accepting or transform
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It's such a paradox. It really is. And it really is. I appreciate you sharing your personal story
because it does shape how we understand suffering. And when you've been through it, this idea of
suffering, you know, it's not the most popular trending term that we want to. But the paradox,
I'm thinking of my own life in the last few years, just. And I love how you're, as you were
describing trauma, it's big T or little T. I know for me, some of it has had to do as a woman with
coming to the terms with, I got caught in sort of this trap that's all over the headlines with
menopause, like how that affected me and how it affected my body. And it wasn't a major thing,
but I got trapped in some of the current conversations that.
negatively affected me, right? That have lasting effects, right? And so even at smaller scale or
larger scale, I hear your point and I felt it too, where it takes a while to wrap your mind around
the implications, what it means, who I'm becoming. And at first that can feel like a loss,
but it really is the path. to that freedom. The truth will set us free.
And I want to move into that a little bit, both from your own journey and from your patients,
because you talk about how the difference between people who somehow find the resilience,
find the meaning, find the health. And I've tasted that these last few years. You know,
I've tasted the front end of going, oh, my gosh, I was failed by a medical system. In my case,
this is really painful because it had real implications for me. Right. To a couple of years later,
making peace with it, not in a passive way, but in a very proactive way. Sounds like you've also
gone through that. So what what is the difference for those folks who are able to do that versus
those who really, to your point, you use the word identity and that kind of it steals their sense
of identity? Yeah, it's a great it's a great question. And I'll make a comment before I lean into
that. And that is that I think. the mental health system, psychology and psychiatry.
I think we have failed some patients, frankly, by communicating, and I don't think we've done this
deliberately, but by communicating that every problem can be nicely solved,
right? Like we'll improve your depression and we'll improve your anxiety, we'll improve your PTSD.
I think that's a lovely aspiration. And there are many people for whom that's not their story,
right? Like their mental health symptoms, they don't get better as thoroughly as they might like.
And for those folks, I think it's a little bit of setup sometimes because it's easy to think,
as I noted, that the only way things will be okay is if all of your symptoms go away.
So I think a better approach is to say, you can be okay if your symptoms go away.
You can be okay if your symptoms don't go away. And of course, that takes a long time. This issue
of resilience, how people get it, who gets it. It's a complicated question.
You know, I think that's probably the holy grail, which is how do we turn people into resilient
folks, right, who can walk through a fire, right? They can survive difficult things.
How do we turn people into resilient people? And I don't think we know the answer to that exactly.
I don't think we know how. But I do know that this quality of resilience...
happens, I think, much more effectively when people are surrounded by other people,
when they are in communities of people that are holding them up, that are challenging them,
that are bolstering them, boosting them. This is hard work we're talking about,
living with or recovering from trauma. And there aren't many rules, there aren't many axioms in my
work that I think are always true. But one of them that I see in this medical trauma space is that
when people are walking this medical trauma journey alone, they do less well.
And when they're walking it with others, they do better. And so one of the first things I think
that we want to do when we're helping support people in the context of medical trauma is we want to
try to move them from isolation to engagement. And it's not always so easy.
Sometimes it's more aspirational than something that can be realized. But I'm a big believer in the
idea that healing really occurs in the context of community.
We were made for community. And I think it's a little bit of a fool's errand when people believe
that they can manage these difficult things on their own. It's too much.
And so that's why at Vanderbilt, one of the things that we... really emphasized over the last five
or six years is support groups. We have a medical trauma support group. We have a long COVID
support group. We have a family members of ICU survivors support group that is meeting right after
this podcast. And it's because there is healing in community. And in this moment that we're living
in, people are pretty isolated. There's a great book that I love called Bowling Alone by Robert
Putnam, sociologist. And he says in that book, More people are bowling. That's great.
I grew up in Michigan, love bowling. But tragically, more people are bowling alone. And our goal
with these patients is let's stop bowling alone. Let's join arms and let's learn resilience by
watching, listening, seeing the stories of other people who are engaging in hard things and
believing that we can too. Yeah. That's powerful. I think that's such a word. I love that that's
the one axiom that kind of holds across. Here's a related question,
and I'm curious even how this has played out in your own journey,
if that's a fair question. There's the resilience question,
and then there is this identity question. um of figuring out who am i now and i think that does
happen a lot in community as you're kind of wrestling with um how did that play out for you that
that sense of what does it mean that this is now part of who i am versus i'm i've got to get rid of
this to be who i am yeah it's it's a really interesting question and i do think identity um is so
important it might be the single most important thing in the context of these issues, because often
these illnesses come on very suddenly. And for people, there's a,
there's a huge before and after dynamic where they look wistfully on their old life.
Right. And sometimes they frame it as more perfect than it was in contrast to this,
this, this field of destruction, which is my new life. And then they see this Delta.
And they feel like a failure. They feel broken as a result. So for me, when I was diagnosed with
OCD and began to battle OCD, I had a hard time integrating the pre-OCD Jim Jackson with the post
-diagnosis Jim Jackson. I moved quickly from I'm a person that I like. I'm a person that I respect.
I'm a person that I think can thrive in the world. To feeling like I was being knocked around by a
mental illness. And that was what defined me. I took on that mantle. Oh, wow. And it was really
hard for me. In time, I began to realize that two things were true. That I had OCD.
And that the things that always had been true of me were still true of me. I managed to find a way
to hold those together. And I think one of the really important things.
that I do with my patients in support groups or individually is to say, you know,
there's one John Jackson, there's one Bob Nelson,
there's one Beth Swanson, it's one person, right? Like let's push back against the strict
conceptualization of, hey, this is you before, this is you after. It's all you,
you know, it's you. So let's integrate this. And let's embrace this development that you have
cancer now, that you have Parkinson's disease now, that you have dementia, that you have a brain
injury, whatever. Let's embrace it as part of your story because it is part of your story. Let's
honor it. But let's really resist the tendency to make it all of your story.
Because it's not all of your story. Let's vigorously push back against the idea that it's all of
your story. Because I think if you... if you embrace it as all of your story, all of the
limitations that you associate with that are limitations that you begin to wear like a suit of
clothes. And that's really problematic because, in my opinion at least,
you're likely not as limited as you think you are. So let's integrate these identities and let's
resist believing that this is all of your story because you're more than your...
my case, OCD. That's really powerful. You don't want it to become your new identity.
Right. You have to integrate it with. You have to integrate who you thought you took yourself to be
and who. And at some level, that is the journey of life because we're all going to bump into some
of these things. But at that really heightened level of a tough diagnosis, you're figuring out how
to. Honor it. I love how you said that. Honor it while still honoring the person you still are.
Exactly. And that's what takes some time. Yeah, it takes time. And often what I've noted is on the
heels of a new diagnosis, in my case, OCD, but again, we can come up with 101 examples.
On the heels of a new diagnosis, often that new diagnosis and that identity is pretty thoroughly
embraced. And often that's a function of... Simple things. Now I'm spending all my time at the
cancer center. Right now I'm surrounded by cancer patients. Now I'm getting chemotherapy. It's easy
for that to become a huge part of my identity. But typically the process we would want is let's
shift you from making this 99.9% of who you are in the direction of something a little more full
-orbed. And most people can do that. But some people get stuck. Some people get stuck in this place
of this is the beginning and end of me. This is who I am when I wake up. This is who I am when I go
to bed. And I think it's incumbent on us as mental health providers or for that matter as pastors
to invite people, and this is important, invite, to invite people to think about it a different
way. It's not helpful to insist that they think about it another way. It's not helpful to try to
pull their jaws open. force feed them with these insights, but to gently invite them to even
consider the idea that this isn't entirely who they are. willing to even consider it,
I think we can work with that. So it almost sounds like there's some real practical ways in the
sense of almost what you're saying is when you're dealing with, you know, my own experience with
different things, if you're dealing with a diagnosis or an illness. Even just for the sheer fact of
you've got to be at the doctors a lot or you've got to, it's part of your weekly rhythms. It's kind
of a path of least resistance to build your life around it. And it almost sounds like you have to
work to an impractical level or it would be wise or invite yourself to the extent that you can to
continue to do some of the things that you used to do and not let it completely.
Maybe have conversations. And this is the thing about support groups, right? You want to find
people who can. identify with what you've been through, understand it in a way that nobody else
does. And I could imagine it might also be wise and in many instances to have a couple of people
who aren't part of that world. I mean, that's just one example. But I've kind of noticed that even
like sometimes you want folks who aren't talking about it or who are doing something completely
different because it kind of reminds you of the other side of yourself. Yeah, no, it's a really
that's a really astute point. And there's some research, by the way. that shows that the
underbelly, if you will, of support groups is that if not done properly,
they can reinforce some things that are unhelpful, which are,
this is where I start. This is where I stop. They can become an echo chamber.
And to the extent that they do that, I think it's really unhelpful. So it is about keeping that
tether to who you've always been. and recognizing that that's still true and i'm not a i'm not a
cognitive behavior behaviorist per se but but it it is recognizing you know what this is still true
you have a tether to who you were yeah even if it doesn't feel true right like even on the days
that you don't feel like you're the same person let's embrace the idea that in so many respects you
are and also i i think this is important sometimes when people have had a hard trauma they um they
look wistfully back on the good old days and sometimes they can inadvertently make the good old
days a little more perfect than they were yeah and that can kind of deepen the rift between who i
was and who i am and and certainly with trauma that can introduce brand new challenges and it's
true that there was never probably a time in your life when things were totally perfect. So this is
a new challenge, but it's not necessarily the case that it's the only new challenge.
Yeah, we can romanticize the past. Yeah, I love the both and, right? There's such a both and that
we're balancing here of acceptance, grieving and accepting. And let's talk a little bit here about
the spiritual component. of healing and doing this integrative work.
And I think it's such a resource, you know, to folks. We've talked about how we can spiritually
bypass, how it can be misused, but it is also such a resource. What kinds of spiritual questions do
you hear from people facing just really hard diagnoses or ongoing illnesses or,
you know, what kind of spiritual questions come up and how can our faith become that?
that scaffolding that resource for us it's a great question i mean the first thing i would say is
that many people and this is this is regrettable i think um many people in the throes of medical
trauma will tell me that nobody has really engaged spiritual questions with them at all right and i
think um i think it's unfortunate because uh that's a bit of a swing and a miss right like when
when people encounter trauma, certainly people in the South where I live, but in the Midwest,
really all over the United States, all over the world. It intersects with spiritual beliefs.
It intersects with their religious faith. I wish my colleagues would be a little more willing to
jump in the deep end of the pool with people, even if they don't know the answer and recognize
there's a spiritual dimension to this. And I think the spiritual dynamics in the lives of patients
can unfold. a few different ways obviously some people can be angry with god about such things as
timing and intensity and i didn't deserve this and all of that and i think um that's really
appropriate to affirm i think um i have grown in the context of this medical trauma work i have
grown in being very comfortable with um with mystery with with the idea that There aren't
necessarily any good answers to be had, right? That, again,
both and. It feels unfair. And at the end of the day, I believe God is good.
You know, it feels really strange. It feels horrible. It is really hard.
And I believe God is good. So helping people hold those things together and creating the space for
people to struggle. as much as they want and again um not trying to force feed them um this notion
that hey we're going to redeem this by making some meaning but trusting trusting that the holy
spirit has a plan and that he's going to get you to that place where you're going to find a way to
find some meaning when you need to you know in the in the religious tradition that i grew up in uh
went to a little kind of a fundamentalist Bible church in the upper Midwest.
And in that tradition, there was never much willingness for things to take some time.
You know, the idea was you better get saved today before you walk out of the building,
because if you don't, you might get hit by a car in the parking lot. And we know how that's going
to go, right? There was a lot of pressure on us. To do God's work is the way I would put it.
And in the more reformed tradition that I have been in in a while or for a while,
there's this idea that that God's sovereignty is at work. Right. And things will unfold as they're
going to unfold. And I don't have to drag a person along to get them to where I think they should
be. Instead. I can trust that the Holy Spirit is going to nudge them and help them get there.
It takes a lot of pressure off of us, I think, whether we're psychologists or pastors,
whatever role we're in. And so I try not to get ahead of my patients,
and I try to acknowledge, sometimes I'm pretty vulnerable about it related to my own story,
that these traumatic experiences, they don't just shake your faith.
your physician or your nurse practitioner or your insurance company, they often shake your faith in
God, right? They shake your faith in God. And giving people the space to struggle with that,
I think is so important. And in particular, avoiding sanitized,
easy answers that I think are not satisfying to anyone,
right? And doing what Job's friends... were willing to do with him, right? which is I'm going to
sit next to you in this ash heap, and I'm not going to say anything, and I'm just going to practice
the gift of presence with you, and we're going to walk down a winding path together,
and sometimes we're both going to shrug our shoulders and say, what on earth is going on? Do you
know? I don't know. Do you know? No, I don't know. But just being willing to sit in it, I think
that's quite a gift. i love that it it working at the pace of the spirit because we don't know and
that i love that both and of i think that's worth really double clicking on that both and of um i i
don't like this this feels unfair this does feel like more than i can handle this isn't okay and
god is good which is such a job that that is sort of the template we see in joe where it wasn't
that he didn't suffer. He, he was really not okay. And he was honest about that.
And I, I, God, you are God, you know, and, and somewhere in that the spirit finds its way and it's
such a paradox. Um, but it is, and I would, I would say this if I can,
you know, very often, well, for example, in the past five years or so,
a lot of my work has been in the long COVID space and in that space, There are huge numbers of
people that don't look that sick, but they really are that sick, right? They're hugely sick. And so
their family members, well-meaning, will say, I think you need to work a little bit harder,
right? Like, I think you need to eat a little healthier. Maybe you should exercise more. They're
very oriented, in a way, to what in the church we would call works righteousness,
right? Like, you've got to pray a little bit more, right? got to lean in a little more and so so
it's easy for that message you've got to do more to translate into people feeling like you know if
i just prayed a little more if i just went to confession a little bit more if i was just a little
better maybe god would hear my prayers a little bit more and i would stop struggling with fill in
the blank right this illness that won't go away and and um the truth is it's just not that simple
right it's not that simple And sometimes we don't have answers. And instead of throwing our hands
up and running away from the fact that we don't have answers, I think a better approach is to lean
into the fact that we don't have answers and find a way to make peace with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's a delicate. It is. Again, even that's the both end of doing what is within my control.
It always goes back to that serenity prayer, like what is within my control? Of course,
I'm going to try to do what is within my control to the best of my ability and release a lot that
is not within my control. And it's a balancing act,
I think, of figuring that out. As we close here, Dr. Jackson, I'm thinking of the listener who's
really feeling this. Maybe they've been in a long journey of holding something that's really hard,
whether it's physical or mental. What is one small step they could take just today,
that next step to move toward that reclaiming of life,
reclaiming of goodness, reclaiming of identity in what's true and good and not only in what's hard?
What would you say to that person? It's a great question. I think the one small step,
therapeutically at least, the one small step that I think for most people could be achieved and
could be helpful is to begin to even be open to the possibility that you can live a full and
meaningful life with fill in the blank, right? With ongoing birth trauma,
with... challenges related to cancer,
with challenges related to ALS, post-intensive care syndrome, whatever it is,
that with that, you can live a meaningful life. And I don't think people can get there overnight,
but it starts with being open. As you're aware, there's this approach called stages of change
theory, right? And in that theory, you go from pre-contemplation to contemplation to action to
maintenance. So you start thinking, I'm not ready to give up cigarettes.
I'm not even ready to think about it, but I'm ready to think about thinking about it, right? That's
pre-contemplation followed by now I'm thinking about it. I'm still not ready, but I'm thinking. So
what I would say is let's start with, I'm not ready to accept this.
I'm not ready to even think of accepting it. But I'm ready to think about the idea that one day I
want to think about it. Right. Because then I'm on the path. I'm not ready to consider that I can
live a meaningful life with long COVID. But you know what? I'm going to begin to think about the
possibility that maybe I could consider that. Yeah. That's a starting point for me, because if you
start there, then the dominoes start to fall and you move in a beautiful direction where eventually
you can see. Hopefully you can see the beauty in some things that you didn't ask for and you don't
want. And that doesn't make your life perfect or easy, but it does make your life meaningful.
And if you can find a way to make your life meaningful, Katie, bar the door.
All bets are off. You can find a way to really thrive. I love it. Wow, that's a great note to end
on. I love that. Just opening to the possibility. And I love the emphasis on meaning. Maybe it
won't be easy, maybe it won't be perfect, but I can find meaning. Tell my listeners about your book
and about where they can find it and any other resources that you have. Sure. It has quite a long
title. I'll just call it Reclaiming Your Life from Medical Trauma. It is in bookstores on April
28th.
In Barnes and Nobles, it's on Amazon currently. It can be pre-ordered. We talked about the word
practical earlier. And I think one of the really nice compliments that has happened as I've written
this book, as you know, you send a book to people and they provide you blurbs. You hope they'll
provide you blurbs, right? Some do, some don't. But the blurbs about my book that were really
meaningful to me were, Hey, this is accessible. This is practical, right? It's a practical guide
for people who are struggling with medical trauma. And I think it will take people in the direction
they need to go. I think it will be compassionate and hopeful without being all about rainbows and
unicorns, right? Like this is really hard stuff. And there are reasons to be hopeful. We have a...
have a research center at Vanderbilt. They can contact me there. I have a website,
jamescjackson.com. They can contact me there. They can send me an email. If you send me an email,
if I get 1,000 emails, it might take a while. But if someone sends me an email, I'll respond, and
it will be a privilege to do that. And if your listeners need a referral, if they need some
guidance, and I can, I'm happy to provide it. That's amazing. Thank you so much. We'll link to all
that in the show notes. I continually hear stories of folks who listen to an episode and it just is
exactly what they needed. And it's all over the country. And I just love that you're willing to
come on here and share these resources with us. And for someone out there, I know it's going to be
for many people out there. it's going to be a huge help. So we really appreciate your time and just
thank you for your work and blessings to you and all that you're doing. You're very kind and thanks
for the good work you're doing. You're thoughtful and delightful and people benefit because of the
work you do. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best
of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify,
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Remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true
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What if procrastination isn’t about laziness… but a disconnect between who you want to be and what you actually do?
So many of us carry goals we care deeply about: habits we want to build, changes we long to make, ways we want to grow. And yet, we find ourselves stuck in the same patterns, circling the same resistance, wondering why it’s so hard to follow through.
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook and goals expert and New York Times bestselling author Jon Acuff explore what’s really happening beneath procrastination and how to finally begin moving forward.
Because procrastination isn’t a character flaw. It’s a gap.
A gap between your intentions and your actions.
And over time, that gap can quietly erode something deeper: your trust in yourself.
If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed by your goals, or caught in cycles of starting and stopping… this conversation will help you understand why and what to do next.
You’ll explore:
- Why procrastination isn’t about laziness and what’s actually driving it
- The hidden impact of broken self-trust (and how to begin rebuilding it)
- How your “soundtracks” (repetitive thoughts) shape your actions and results
- The real reason discipline alone doesn’t work and what does
- The 4 key places people get stuck in the growth process (and how to move forward)
This conversation offers a practical, compassionate path forward, helping you close the gap between who you want to be and how you’re actually living, one small step at a time.
More Resources:
Make sure to grab Jon Acuff’s latest book Procrastination Proof: Never Get Stuck Again and then claim $97 worth of free bonuses.
Take Jon's free procrastination profile here.
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Want to go deeper with Dr. Alison? Join 80,000+ soul menders in our email community and receive weekly reflections and gentle practices here.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 199: How the Body Teaches the Soul with Justin Whitmel Earley
Episode 157: Braving Change—3 Ways to Get Unstuck and Transform Guilt and Regret
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Procrastination is just when your actions don't match your intentions. When there's a gap between
who you say you want to be and who you actually are. A goal is never just a goal. A goal is a
promise you made to yourself. And every time you break it, it gets easier to break the next one.
The things you think become the things you do become the things you get. And so there's a lot of
times where we over-focus on the results we want, but we never change the underlying thoughts so
we don't get new actions. Like, what does it look like for you to give yourself permission?
permissions that we found were the most valuable in this order were permission to dream,
permission to plan, permission to do and permission to review.
Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of the Best of You podcast. I'm so
glad you're here with me today for this conversation. Today's episode sits in a part of the growth
journey that I think is so important. So often here on the podcast, we talk about healing by
looking beneath the surface, by trying to understand our patterns, our pain, our stories,
the ways we've adapted in the places where we still need healing or repair. And this work is so
important.
truth about where we've been and what has shaped us. And it's all toward this wiser way of being
human. And there's also another part of growth that matters. It's equally important.
At some point, we find ourselves asking, now what? How do I move forward?
How do I make a change? How do I stop circling the same patterns, the same resistance, and actually
take a step toward the life I wanna live? We sort of move from the inside into the action. And
that's what today's conversation is about. I often get asked about the difference between therapy
on one hand and coaching on the other. And while there's absolutely overlap, between the two,
they're generally doing different kinds of work. Therapy is often about understanding our symptoms
and patterns and pain and relationships in the deeper context of our lives. Coaching,
on the other hand, tends to be more focused on goals, on action, on momentum, and helping you move
forward in a practical way. And both have incredible value. I think both are important and both can
serve us at different seasons of our lives. And part of wisdom is knowing which kind of help we
need in a given season. That's why I was thrilled to have John Acuff join me on the show today.
John Acuff is a New York Times bestselling author. He's a speaker, a coach, and an expert on
overthinking goals and getting unstuck. He's written several books, including soundtracks,
where he explores the repetitive thoughts that keep us trapped. And he has a brand new book out
this week. It's called Procrastination Proof. And if you're anything like me, that procrastination
topic really resonates. What I appreciate about John is that he brings a lot of practicality to
this conversation. He's thoughtful. He tells great stories. he's really observant about human
behavior. And his work is so helpful in just helping us figure out how to take that next step.
Because the truth is, insight matters. Understanding your story matters. And sometimes you also
need tools. You need structure. You need language for why you keep putting something off. You need
help noticing the thoughts that are tripping you up. And you need help getting into motion again.
That's where today's conversation goes. We talk about John's own story of procrastination and what
led him to write this book. We talk about goals, what makes a goal meaningful, and how to think
honestly about the difference between a life-giving goal and one that might be driven by pressure,
perfectionism, or even fantasy. We talk about the inner scripts we repeat to ourselves,
the soundtracks, that's what John calls them, these soundtracks that keep us stuck, and what it's
like to start rewriting. these soundtracks. And toward the end of the episode, John shares really
personally about how he's rewired his own brain to think differently about God. So with that,
please enjoy my conversation with John Acuff.
All right, well, John, I am thrilled to have you here today. I've followed your work and feel like
we have these overlapping circles with your background in Boston and Nashville. So thanks for
joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. I want to just start kind of with your
personal story. Your book is so practical. It's about procrastination,
but it comes out of your own personal journey with procrastination. Would you start just helping us
understand your own relationship with procrastination and how things kind of shifted for you?
Yeah, a friend of mine who's a comedian said, I saw your new topic and I was like, oh, geez, this
guy, what does he know about procrastination? He's always getting things done. And that was a funny
statement because it meant he didn't know me the first 34 years of my life. I mean, I knew in the
third grade, speaking of Massachusetts, my... third grade teacher at Doyon Elementary School in
Ipswich laminated some poems. I knew in third grade I wanted to write a book, but I really was like
a lot of other people, pretty lost in my 20s, pretty aimless in my late 20s, pretty distracted and
frustrated in my early 30s, had a very up and down career, probably had six jobs in eight years,
like real jobs. pretty average marriage out of shape. And in my mid thirties,
I really started to tap into what mindset can do, what you can do with goals,
what you can do when you embrace this. really unpopular phrase in our culture called personal
responsibility. And I started to dial this in. And so I couldn't have written Procrastination Proof
as my second book because it wouldn't have been true yet. It would have been an arrogant 37-year
-old going, no, maybe this is the way. But on book 11 at 50, I feel pretty good going,
hey, I figured this thing out. And you don't have to wait to do the things you're called to do. And
there's some specific things you can do. So that's why I wrote it as somebody who had...
years, for decades, kind of started, stopped, started, stopped, tried a different thing, tried a
different thing, and never really gotten any traction. And so the last 16 years, I've released,
again, 11 books because I learned how to deal with what I would consider a mindset issue like
procrastination. Interesting. So how do you define it? How do you define this term procrastination
that so many of us are familiar with? Oh, yeah. My favorite definition that works for me is
procrastination is just when your actions don't match your intentions. When there's a gap between
who you say you want to be and who you actually are. And the flip of that, you know,
the opposite to me is a remarkable life. And that's when your actions overlap with your intentions.
Where there's almost the Venn diagram is so close that it's almost an eclipse. And so who you say
you want to be is who you actually are in a consistent, ever-growing way. And so,
yeah, procrastination is when there's a big gap between those two things. And an example of that
would be, according to the New York Times, 82% of Americans want to write a book. And if you look
at publishing records, less than 1% do every year. So 82% have this intention,
1% do the action. That's a massive gap. And so I like to use this book to close the gap with
people. Oh, that's such a great – this is what I love about your work. You take these sort of terms
and bring a depth to it because there's almost an integrity in what you're saying, right? There's
an integrity. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you use that word. I always tell people a goal is never just
a goal. A goal is a promise you made to yourself. And every time you break it, it gets easier to
break the next one. And you don't want to beat yourself up for breaking it, but there does become
this kind of residue and distrust. You start to distrust the person you spend the most time with.
And that's a really difficult place to be. Yeah. Yeah. You're building that, which is one of the
things. So on the podcast, we talk a lot about trauma and healing. And one of those very basic
building blocks is learning to rebuild that trust with yourself. So you went exactly where I want
to go. Before we go deeper on procrastination, let's back it up into goals. Because I think
sometimes we can beat ourselves up, right? And so we have a goal. We're not achieving it.
And a lot of times, I think what fills in the gap is shame. Right? Oh,
yeah. Which doesn't help at all. You know, I just beat myself up that I'm not the person I wish I
was. So talk to me a little bit. You're really big on goals. How do we,
and I know this ties into procrastination, so take this where you want to go, but how do we begin
when we've got a, you know, you talked about how you kind of had this pile of things you weren't
proud of. And I think sometimes we can get overwhelmed if we set the goal as,
something that we're not going to achieve. And then, then we feel more shame. Like, how do we just
start? How do we get out of that stuck place? Yeah.
A lot of my work is kind of the opposite of what's popularly said right now,
meaning like people go, go big or go home. But I know through experience with helping a million
people with their goals, most of them go home. And so a lot of what I do at the outset with
somebody is where they go, I want to change every part of my life. Or I want to run a marathon.
I'll always go, have you ever run a half marathon? Have you ever run a 10K or a 5K? Even just a K.
Get like a tiny little medal. And they go, no, I heard an Eminem song. I'm inspired. I bought a
carbon fiber bike. I'm going for it. And I know that's not sustainable. And so sometimes it starts
from a good place, like wild optimism. Or you see somebody online that tells you, you should 100x
your sales. And you go, well, I have to do it this way. And we feel like the little things don't
count. the little steps, the little progress. And then we do get into that shame where we're so
unfair to ourselves. I'll give you an example. I was talking to a real estate agent and she was
saying, I'm just not doing as many sales as I used to do. I'm not crushing it. And I said, well,
has anything in your life changed lately? Is there anything different? And she said, no, not
really. And I kept asking. And eventually she said, well, I mean, I am taking care of my dad who
has early onset dementia for about 20 hours a week. And I said, that's a massive shift.
The soundtrack that I gave her, and soundtrack is just a phrase I use for a repetitive thought, was
new seasons deserve new scorecards. New seasons deserve new scorecards. You're in a new season and
you're judging your current results against the season a year ago when you didn't have a dad that
you were trying to take care of. And it's the same with young moms when they have kids and they go,
yeah, I'm just not performing the way I want to. And I go, yeah, you have twins. You have two,
three months old. That you're wearing clothes is amazing. Like we're going to have to change the
bar. So I do spend a lot of what I do helping people. Be kind to themselves,
not beat themselves up, you know, not regret that they haven't made faster progress.
But it's just I've never met somebody whose tool for long term sustainable change was shame.
Like it's just not it's it's not a good like you can whip yourself into shape temporarily.
It's a really interesting conversation about. I meet CEOs and executives who used anger as a fuel.
Yeah. And the problem with anger as a fuel, it will get you some places. It will. It'd be silly to
not say otherwise, but it's kind of like when. When they launch a rocket, they have a certain type
of fuel that helps it break through the atmosphere. But then once it does that, they drop that fuel
because that fuel is not sustainable. It's too dangerous. You can't steer it. You can't actually
use it. They have to use a more stable fuel. And so I try to get people to go like, I get that
you've used this fuel to get somewhere. I'm just telling you. it's long-term,
it's going to ruin your marriage. Long-term, it's going to ruin your health. Long-term, you're
going to get some rewards, but you're not going to even enjoy them because you've burned yourself
up. I love that. You've got to meet yourself where you are as you're rebuilding that trust.
And I think that, and this ties into the procrastination conversation. I think a lot of people
think, to your point about the real estate agent you were working with, think that procrastination
is laziness. Oh yeah, no. What is actually going on beneath it then?
The people I know that work the hardest deal with procrastination the most. And the reason I say
that, like I always tell people that listen to podcasts like yours, by the way, congratulations,
you're a high performer. You're a high performer. They always go, no, that's other special
different people. And I go, no, low performers don't listen to podcasts like this. They don't even
know this category exists. They don't read books like these. That you're even in this conversation
means you're already. trying to change something. And so the people I know who go, Hey,
I want to do more. I know I'm capable of more are often doing a lot already. They just need to
tweak something. So no procrastination isn't a laziness problem and therefore hard work won't fix
it. Like discipline won't fix it. The big thing for me with discipline, I still haven't met
somebody who changed their life just because meaning they said, John, today I got up and decided to
have grit today. I just decided to have sacrifice or willpower. It's never that. It's usually one
of two things. There was a desire or disappointment. One of those two things got loud enough to get
their attention. There was something they wanted or they didn't like where they were. Like no one
willingly leaves the comfort zone. And you shouldn't. It's comfortable. The only reason people
leave the comfort zone is something outside of it is worth being uncomfortable for. And then you
go, oh, so for me, desire always leads to discipline, not the other way around.
And if you think work harder, if I just work harder, if I buckle down, I got to get my life
together. Like if you kind of try to wipe. knuckle that change, it's not sustainable. You don't get
the real change you want. So this really does, everything you're saying leads into this last book
you put out. I feel like there's a part one and a part two here, which was this, right? I mean, I
don't know if that's how you're thinking of it, but the soundtracks, which you mentioned, it's what
you're thinking. So tell us what you mean by soundtracks, because what I'm hearing and what you're
saying is your soundtrack matters to your motivation. Oh my gosh.
Yeah. So mindset's really easy. We've made it kind of woo woo in our culture where you think you're
going to light a sprig of sage in a drum circle and kind of manifest the universe. Like there's a
lot of like woo woo language around it, but mindset's very practical. Your thoughts turn into
actions. Your actions turn into results. The things you think become the things you do become the
things you get. And so there's a lot of times where we over-focus on the results we want, but we
never change the underlying thoughts so we don't get new actions. So for me,
mindset and goals are kind of like peanut butter and jelly. They just go together. And so what
you'll see is often somebody will do a couple different actions, but they haven't changed their
underlying thought, and then they don't actually perform the way they want to. And sometimes it's
they inherited an old soundtrack. from a family of origin. Sometimes it's they were told a certain
thing and believed it. Sometimes it's because they had never taught how to think. I was never
taught how to think. Like in eighth grade, I didn't have a mindset class. In high school, I didn't
have a, here's how to think about yourself in stressful situations so that you don't add shame to
the feeling of stress. You know, thoughts were something outside of us that just showed up on their
own. And then the older you get, hopefully you start to go, wait a second, I think I can control
what I think. I think I can renew my mind, if you will. I can take every thought captive.
I can think of what's noble and true and beautiful. And what if I actually did that? What would the
results be? And so for me, that's... That's what's really, really fun because then you can take
some simple steps. And here's a simple exercise every listener can do. It's my favorite when it
comes to mindset. All you have to do is, number one, write down a goal. And it can be any goal. It
can be I want to lose 10 pounds. It can be I want to write a book. I want to move to Boston. I want
to know my kids better. Any goal. Write down the goal. And the second step is listen to your first
thoughts about that goal. Listen to your reaction to that goal because every reaction is an
education. It's educating you about what you really believe. And then just say, Are they positive
or negative? When I wrote that I'm going to start my own podcast, what are my first thoughts? Oh,
you should. You've got so many interesting things to say. There's not enough podcasts yet. You
should do it. Or were they negative? Who are you to think you could do a podcast? You don't know
anything about the technology. You already missed the boat. And what you find is the majority of
those first thoughts are often negative. I still haven't met somebody whose problem with
overthinking is they overthink kind thoughts about themselves. Where they go, yeah, my main issue,
John, is I'm too nice to me. I'm too... I'm so quick to forgive myself that it's a real hassle.
And so then you go, okay, well, once you identify some negative broken soundtracks, you can do
something about them.
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Okay, this is so good. You are just speaking the language we talk a lot. My background is in parts
work. And so right, these are these parts of us this inner family of voices we have where one part
of us really wants to make this change. And I love what you're saying. Another part of us still has
this broken, you use the word soundtrack, this broken record. And the first step is just to notice
that. You're speaking right out of the therapy playbook. It's just that awareness, right?
It's not to... that. It's to notice it. That's what I'm hearing you say. Just to start to see how
common it is. I mean, even just in conversations with my wife, I told somebody, my marriage is so
easy when I don't add you idiot to the end of sentences my wife is saying to me. So when she says
like, hey, did you remember an umbrella? And I overreact. And I go, of course I have an umbrella.
I'm the king of umbrellas. I've always bringing umbrellas. I've added to her sentence, you idiot.
are forgetful you're not detailed you're gonna get wet you're gonna look whatever and her intent
was really just hey We both are going to get wet if we don't have an umbrella. But for me to notice
that and go, oh, wow, I just overreacted to a thing that didn't require that amount of energy, that
amount of emotion. And so for me, self-awareness is a superpower.
And so the three steps of soundtracks, it's very simple. I just teach people, retire your broken
soundtracks, replace them with new soundtracks, repeat those new soundtracks so often they become
as automatic as the old ones. So it's retire, replace, repeat. And it's been so fun for therapists
to reach out. I've had so many therapists go. Soundtracks, the book, is such an easy on-ramp to
conversation with people because it's really simple. It's really funny because I use a lot of
humor. Like I just know if I had named the book Soundtracks Inner Voices, men wouldn't have read
it. They just wouldn't have. Like because men don't want to admit they have an inner voice. But
I'll speak to 1,000 plumbers. I do 50 events a year. It'll be 1,000 plumbers, 98% male room,
and they'll admit they have soundtracks because the – allows them to talk honestly.
Okay. Ladies who are listening. This is for, that's a good tip for your husband who won't take the
therapy speak, but might take the soundtracks. That's a really, it's wild. I talked to 4,000
cattle ranchers the other day. I was at a cattle con, the world's largest beef event. And it was 4
,000 ranchers and they were willing to go on this, like, Oh, why am I holding on to my ranch and
not turning it over to the next generation? What's the broken soundtrack that I have about that?
That's holding me back from allowing my son or my daughter to step into this. And again, And if I
had named it inner voice, it would have been a non-starter. But because it's soundtracked, it's a
really easy conversation. I love that. So I heard you on a podcast share some research that just
stopped me in my tracks. And I'd love for you to share it with us. It had to do with some research
you ran across when you were researching soundtracks about improving at free throws. Oh,
yeah. That's crazy. It's crazy.
And there's so many studies like this. When you start to dig for them, there's just so many. So
this is Research Quarterly did a study where they had – on college students because it feels like
we're always testing things on college students. And so they wanted to test could you improve free
throws by just thinking about getting better at free throws. And so they had two different groups
and one – actually practiced. They went to the court, they shot free throws,
they held a basketball, they did all the things. And one just thought about improving their free
throw. So they'd imagine, okay, I'm shooting a free throw. Oh, I missed that one. Let me, let me
try again. Oh, let me change the arc. And at the end of the 21 day study, the group that had
actually used the balls improved by 24% and the group that had just thought about it improved by
23%. And, and so there's so many, and I mean like the other study that I sometimes reference is,
There was two student groups where they were supposed to form sentences out of a word bank,
like come up with some sentences, and one group had words related to being old, so retired,
slow, bald, Florida. And so they do this test for 45 minutes, and then they say the second part of
the test is down the hall. Please walk into the hall. And the scientists secretly timed how long it
took each group to walk to the end of the hall. And the students who had read the words about being
old physically acted old. They walked slower than the other group. And so you just see that over
and over and over again where the things you think are very important.
And then you go, why don't we talk about this enough? Like, why don't we have practical tools?
Why don't we, like... know, again, every eighth grader, every ninth grader you think about because
they pick these soundtracks up and we'll carry them for 30 years. Yeah. And then it's really hard
to kind of change them in your 60s, your 70s. But like, what if we could learn along the way? Yeah,
it is. It is a sort of mental rigor. And it's not like you're saying,
it's not magic. We are rewiring those neural pathways. And even as you are older, it is possible.
It's like you said, it's I'm thinking of the listener that, you know, it's like catching those old
messages of I'm not good enough or I'll never X or. Or your labels.
Yes. And just it's not magic. It's not. Sometimes I think we think of it like an incantation, like
you're saying. It's like building a muscle. And the neuroscience,
you know, you're genuinely kind of... slowly sometimes, but you're repaving a new neural pathway.
Wait a minute. There's that. I just went down that path. What if I took a right turn? What if I am?
And a lot of times I notice with folks who have them, they're really deeply ingrained. Sometimes
it's just what if I'm right? Just what if there's a possibility that I can,
you know, it doesn't even have to, I don't even have to be totally bought into it yet, but I can be
open to.
Well, and it's a practice too. That's the other thing. Like you have to see mindset as a practice.
I mean, that's why, you know, the third step for soundtracks is to repeat them. Sometimes like I
remember. When the book came out, 48 hours after it came out, people would email me and say, hey,
John, I retired my broken soundtracks. I replaced them with new ones, and it's just not working.
And I would say, well, the book's only been out for two days, so I know you haven't had a chance to
repeat them. Yes. And we want fast progress. So one of my soundtracks I tell people, because what
will happen in diets is people go, this exercise isn't working. I'll say, well, how long have you
done it? They'll say three weeks. They'll say, how long did it take you to gain the weight? They'll
say three years. So you gave the problem three years to develop, and the solution only. three
weeks. That's so unkind to yourself. Never give the problem a year and the solution a week. So like
some of this stuff does, and some of them can disappear in a, in a day. Like there's some that can
just unravel of course. Um, but there's some that like, One of my core broken soundtracks is around
the idea that the true test of talent and ability is to just be able to do things immediately.
No prep, no planning. Planning is cheating. Like the prodigy kind of, like I had this broken
soundtrack of like, we love the underdog story. Like there's a reason why Susan Boyle's audition
for Britain's Got Talent has 50 million views and Carrie Underwoods only has,
you know, a million. Because she didn't fit the mold and we all want to be like, oh, here's this
underdog story. And so I had to learn as a writer, like, no, planning is good.
It's actually good because every time I spend a lot of time on something, I would hear this broken
soundtrack to go, you must not be talented. If you're talented, this would be easier. You wouldn't
have to prepare. This is cheating. Like you really, you shouldn't, it shouldn't take this long. And
I thought, oh, that's interesting. And my definition of talent includes no prep. Boy,
you don't get to run a good business with no prep. Instant success. So the soundtrack that helped
me, and it's not my own, Keith Cunningham said it this way. not smart enough or talented enough to
be unprepared. And that really helped me. Like I'm not smart enough or talented enough to be
unprepared. So now I'm kind enough to myself to give myself preparation time so that I can perform
at my best. But I had to first notice that. You and I are both from... new england so we can bring
up tom brady but i think that's part of why we love the tom brady story is it wasn't an oh yeah
success barely drafted yeah yeah he was you know we he was he had to work he worked for everything
he has i mean obviously a lot of talent too but so let's bring this all back to procrastination
right when someone says because i we've kind of so i i do think a lot of what's underneath it is
our soundtracks are You know, there's more to it. But so so what how do you if someone is kind of
listening, going, I have these things I've wanted to do, you know, whether it's like you said,
you know, whether it's be a better parent, whether it's in the work arena, whether it's in the
relational arena or even just self growth. You know, I want to I want to get out of this stuck
place. And they're not seeing that. What are some. First steps,
what are some, what are you finding really can help us get into the,
out of the just can't get started phase? Yeah, I mean, it's what we've talked about for centuries,
I feel like. It's the small start. I think part of the pressure we put on ourselves, especially
around New Year's resolutions, is that we commit to doing something for a year we've never done for
a day, which is like marrying the person you just met at speed dating. And so I always tell people,
maybe just audition something. Like let's just do a small audition. Let's take all the pressure
off. So if you found 15 minutes a day for the next seven days to try something, let's see what
would happen. And maybe you love it and you double down at the end of the seven days or end of the
two weeks. Or maybe you realize, no, I really don't care about this. Like I've been carrying around
an old goal like some sort of baggage. I have to write a book. And you go like, no,
I tried writing for seven days. I didn't enjoy any of it. Turns out I don't need – and now you're
freed from this thing that – started from a good place, but it's become this anchor around your
neck. So I always try to get people to kind of start small. And then the book,
the core of the book is about how do you give yourself permission? Like what does it look like for
you to give yourself permission? And the four permissions that we found were the most valuable in
this order were. Permission to dream, permission to plan, permission to do, and permission to
review. So when I sit down with somebody, I try to get a pretty quick sense of like, where are they
stuck in that process? Because it's not complicated. So if it's, is it dream? Like they got so many
dreams, but they don't know how to pick one. And they're afraid if they pick the wrong one,
something terrible will happen. And so they're kind of frozen there. Or is it planning? Like they
need to do a little bit of planning and they don't know how to do that. Or is it the doing? And so
that's where I try to get people like, and we have a quiz that does that. It's at johnacoff.com
slash quiz, which is a couple of questions to go, Hey, which of these four spots are you going to
get stuck in? And what can you do about it? I love that. It's, it's deeper than just name it and
claim it there. There's a process. Oh my gosh. No. Yeah. I am so practical. I,
my favorite thing is to simplify complicated things and to add action to things that are kind of
like fuzzy and name it and claim it. is very fuzzy.
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I'm curious about that review step, not to give away everything you've – because I almost hear when
you're describing the start small and you're describing this process, a little bit of mindfulness
in it. Stay mindful because your goals might shift. I know I found that to be true in my life. I'll
have a goal, and then I'm kind of into it, and I'm in the right direction, but I'm like, the goal
changed. Actually, I don't want that thing. It's evolving. Is that something you run across?
Yeah, and it takes the pressure off. like perfectionists are worried that once they commit they
have to commit for the rest of their life i have to do this until i'm dead yeah and so what the
review does is it gives you a pause to go is this still the direction i want to go am i getting the
results i want to get is this still worth the time? Does this still serve me,
this particular goal? So yeah, the path is really, really easy. It's just four different people get
stuck. Dreamers get stuck in the dream stage, obviously. They have a thousand ideas, zero actions.
Perfectionists get stuck planning. They're going to change the world just as soon as the plan is
perfect. I just need a little more data. And there's no end to the data you can get right now,
unfortunately. The hustlers are who get stuck in doing. Hustlers hate a plan and they hate to
review. They just want to go, go, go. They never want to look up. They want to skip right from
dream, right into doing. Sales teams are amazing at this. Sales teams I work with will say things
like, I don't have time to fill out this paperwork. And the leadership will go, it's three fields.
We need to know the name of the customer you sold the product to. And they're like, get me back in
the streets. I'm a salesman. I just want to hustle. And then analysts tend to get stuck in review.
They overreview the mistakes from the past and predict failure in the future. And so they're really
good at going. That's not how we do things here. We tried that before and it didn't work. I'm
hearing that a lot right now with leaders in AI. They'll go, oh, we already tried AI. It didn't
work for us. And I'll go, when? And they'll go, four years ago. And I'll say, for how long? And
I'll say, about a week. We told our most technical guy, Gary, at the office to explore AI. It's
just not for us. And I'll say. it's changed a lot. Maybe we need to do a deeper review and figure
out what to do. But yeah, it's super simple and super fun, but the review is very valuable.
I almost hear in those different types. I think, again, there's a lot of freedom in that,
recognizing we're different kinds of people. I almost hear Enneagram types a little bit, or kind of
our predispositions. We're going to get stuck for different reasons. And so I love that idea of
kind of finding yourself in those four. Where do I tend to get stuck? I had a friend tell me, she
was more of a perfectionist and also maybe a little bit of a doer, but I'm trying to place her in
that. But she was telling me recently that she wrote a paper and it was like a perfectly formed
paper. It was like perfectly laid out, but she got a, it's graduate school. She got a bad,
you know, the teacher said, this is a perfect paper, wrong topic. So essentially she was
formulating all these ideas in the wrong direction. And maybe that's a doer thing where you're
working really hard, but you're not actually going for the thing you want. Yeah. You're making tons
of progress right off a cliff. You're running. There's tons of momentum. There's tons of –
I would say I have friends that I would call success voyeurs,
meaning they'll tell you the 20 leadership podcasts they listen to, but they don't change their
life. They'll tell you the 30 books they read by CEOs of billion-dollar companies, but they're in
debt. And it's their –
guzzling leadership content, but not changing their own life. And so it looks like hustle on the
out. And where I got in trouble with that is one year I read a hundred books and I realized at the
end of it, oh, I did that because I like to tell people I read a hundred books a year. Like I did
that for like the wrong, that's the wrong reason. And two, it was easier to read other books and
write my own. And so I was using a lot of outside on the looking hustle to avoid something that I
really needed to focus on because it was easier to be like, no, I'm just such a great reader. Like,
look at me go. And so that was a form of avoidance for me that actually looked like a lot of
effort, but it wasn't getting me to where I wanted to go. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I think we
even see that in therapy culture. We talk about on the podcast where you can have a ton of
knowledge and a ton of insight. But that doesn't always translate,
which is part of why I wanted to have you on the podcast. At the same time, we can have all of
that, and we still have to put one foot in front of the other toward rewiring the soundtracks,
right? Toward taking the steps. We still have to do the work. And you can get caught in all of the
knowledge that we have access to in this day and age. So that makes a lot of sense to me,
what you're saying. Yeah. It can be pretty, it can be, it's a good, it's a very, we call that a
noble obstacle. Like I've just have to finish. I have to master this before I change some part of
my life, which is like saying I have to read 10 books on swimming before I get wet. That's never
how it, like if you've read five books on difficult conversations, but you haven't started a
difficult conversation and like, it might be time to, to start some degree of difficult
conversation. Yeah. How do you, as we're kind of winding down, John, how do you,
see all of this work in your own life and the fruits of it overlapping and intersecting with
spiritual growth and spiritual formation oh yeah I mean my faith is my most important thing to me
so you know the I think there's a lot of people that when they read my books,
will recognize things like, oh, this is renewing your mind. Yes, that's what I hear. Yeah,
and so for me, they're hand in hand. They're not really separate in any way.
I can tell when I've forced an idea versus received an idea.
Meaning, you know, like I feel like writing is an act of worship for me. Figuring out these ideas
is an act of worship. And so I love when something shows up that I don't have to go.
I don't know where it came from. I'm just like, oh my gosh, God, you're so generous. Like what a
fun idea. Or like a very small example that would be the prodigal son story is probably one of my
favorite stories in the Bible. Absolutely love it. And I've read it probably 500 times. And one
time I read it and I realized that the father never talks to the son. And I'd never heard anybody
mention that. So if you read it. The son asks for his inheritance, and if you haven't read this
story, it's about a son who asks for his inheritance, blows his life up, and still gets
forgiveness. Son asks for his inheritance. Father doesn't say anything, just gives it to him. Son
comes home. Father hugs him and says to the servants, go get the robe, go get the fatted calf,
doesn't talk to the son. And so often as a believer, when God feels quiet, we think he's mad,
he's disappointed, he's frustrated. But what if he's just busy planning your party? He's got you
embraced, and he's busy. planning your party. And that kind of thing, I go, oh, that was a really
fun idea that I feel like I received from a generous God who loves giving ideas.
And so, yeah, for me, writing is a big part of that. But yeah, this is, you know...
It's fun to see the fruit of the work, and it's fun to also see the celebration when things happen.
The other parable I love is the talents where there's five, two, and one given, and then... they
double them and come home and there's a celebration and there's a lot of hangups I had from my
faith background about success. Um, that success was evil. Um, and that,
you know, Jesus rode a donkey, like your, your car should, should be, you should have a terrible
car. You should be, you should live in abject poverty because that's the only way that Jesus loves
you. And so over the years to see that I can be successful and still be generous,
that can be successful and not idolize it, that I can be successful and use my gifts to the full.
extent that I have them, that's been very eye-opening. And of course that fits in with personal
development and goals and numbering my days and having a clear vision and all the things that I
feel like God tells us again and again and again. Well, what's so interesting is everything you
just shared is a little bit of a changing a soundtrack.
Oh yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I use them in my own, like that's what I don't think people
understand. I'm a very negative person by nature. Like my natural bent is pessimism,
cynicism, sarcasm. And I always say it's because I grew up in Massachusetts and we're wicked cold
people. Like when Noah Kahn said that he's mean because he grew up in New England, the singer
-songwriter, I was like, I get it. it dude so am i um but over time what happened was i learned
that positivity has a better roi than negativity yeah like when i'm positive i have more friends i
feel better physically i'm a better husband i'm a better dad i make more money so now i just
practice positivity and a big part of that practice is soundtracks. We made a soundtracks card deck
because I was carrying cards around in my pocket so much that said the soundtracks I wanted to
remember. I don't want my brain to have to remember to be positive or to remember this.
So like when I plan my week, I plan my soundtracks. I go, hey, I got a tough meeting on Tuesday and
it's going to be easy for me to roll into that meeting with that person as if they're my
competitor. Like I'm frustrated and when I'm frustrated, I make people my competitor. not my
coworkers. So I need a soundtrack on a post-it note that says, Brian and I want the same thing.
Brian's on my side. Brian is not my enemy. And I'll put it by my laptop. Like as I do the Zoom,
because I'm not going to hope I kind of sort of remember, I'm going to have that reminder and I'm
going to practice that repetition. And the meeting is going to go so much better versus me coming
in as like, I've already got my guard up and I'm fighting this person versus like, no, what's true?
What's true is this. Okay, well, let me remind myself of the truth in easy ways. That makes it so
much easier on me. I love that. And again, I'm also hearing in that.
We can't. You could do that. You could almost substitute for Brian, God.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah. Totally. We could retrain the soundtracks we have spiritually.
Oh, I thought God was a jerk for most of my life. Like most of my life. I was like, he likes,
he loves me, but he doesn't like me. Like he, he loves me at an obligation. Like we have a
contract. He's kind of a jerk. He wants the worst for me. Like, oh my yeah.
Name a bad soundtrack about God. And it's like, and then you add other people's like to the money
thing. I had a musician, I live in Nashville and I had a Christian musician say, if you buy a,
$90,000 Chevy Suburban. People go, good for you. It's a family car. Good for you. If you buy a $90
,000 BMW, they go, hey, the church probably needed that money. Wow. What's it like to worship
Mammon? Same amount of money, different perception. So then of course you go,
oh, well, success must be bad. And I always tell believers, the enemy only wins one of two ways,
when you abuse your gift or you don't use it. And so when you abuse it, you're achieving things
that like, it's not, they're not meant for you. You're hurting people, but not using it as just as
toxic out of a false sense of humility of like, I'm really good at this thing, but I don't want to.
And like, mine is like a big part of my mission is like, let's grab a shovel. I think you buried a
talent. And I think God's way better. Like I saw a guy wearing a shirt once at Costco and it said,
God's in a good mood. And that stopped me in my tracks as like, Oh, I don't. I don't know if I
believe that right now. Like I think he's kind of, kind of grumpy. And so that,
yeah, it's been a long process of that without a doubt. I love it. I have to say on a personal
note, because I love the sort of New England curmudgeonliness. I grew up in Wyoming as we were
talking. And when I first moved out there, even when I went to college, I went to college up in New
Hampshire, in New England, all the way from Wyoming. And I would just walk around smiling and
waving and greeting people by name. And people just kind of like look at me like, you're weird.
They don't want that. Just culturally so. different but over time what i learned is there's also
this um just this uh and again it's sort of a changed soundtrack right of like but gosh if someone
says they're going to show up they show up You know, right. So you don't have as much of the
superficial kind of smiling and let's get together and let's be best friends. Not, you know, but
but you have that real there's it's a different kind of integrity.
So I think that's interesting context for your own story, because who I think most people know you
to be is very positive, very forward looking. But there's that cultural thing that shapes us.
I can't lose it. Like when I'm in New England now, I'm still smiling. And I just it's part of how I
small. you know, Wyoming, you know, everybody by name, everybody's your friend is part of me.
I've had to actually learn a little bit, not to make go negative, but like, oh, you can't trust
everybody. You know, I've had to learn a little bit of healthy skepticism,
not hopefully cynicism, right, but just healthy. And almost in the opposite way,
you know, you've had, you know, some of that stuff is. it's, it creates those soundtracks, right?
You have to just, um, but, but I think that's interesting. It does. Yeah.
You've done it for years. Like that's the other thing is like, give yourself grace. Cause you've
practiced a certain way of thought for 15 years, for 20 years. My situation was the reverse. I grew
up in Massachusetts and then I went to school in Birmingham, Alabama. And nobody, nobody told me
like, Hey bro, that is not the South. That is the deep South. And I loved it.
But that first year was really hard because people would say to me, like, how's it going today? And
I was kind of like, what's it to you? Because in Massachusetts or New England, the stop and shop
cashier doesn't care how your day is. No, she's not going to ask. But like you, what I realized is
in New England, there's a townie. there's a townie loyalty, like your townie friends will be your
townie friends forever. And they'll link arms with you. They'll get through stuff, stuff with you.
So it's not that one is bad or good. It's just, they're so different. And yeah, I, that was a real
like whiplash for me. Um, but again, like the point being, you're really good at the things you
practice. And I'm just saying, I think you can practice something else. So like you can practice
permission, like giving yourself permission to go like, you don't have to like perfectionism. Great
example. I always preach the day after perfect. A perfectionist really needs to be deliberate on
the day after perfect, meaning they had a streak going, and it was amazing, and they missed one
day, and that'll wreck three weeks for a perfectionist. That'll wreck a month because the streak
ended. They start to beat themselves up. They're like, I can't believe I forgot to do blank,
whatever. I'm like, no, the day after perfect is coming. What permission are you going to give
yourself on that day? The permission to start again? The permission to go like, oh, okay. You know,
like back on the horse, like, oh, man, I wonder how long the next street can be like that. That
permission matters for that type of person. And it's OK that you practice the other way a long
time. Let's just practice a different way. I love it. I just think it's so helpful. And where can
my listeners, you know, I think a lot of. A lot of my, you know, it's like, how do we take that
next step? You have so many resources. As I think everybody's heard today, there's just a lot, a
wealth of wisdom, of practicality, of spiritual anchoring. Where can people find you?
And what kinds of things? I love the quiz sounded really interesting. Where can people find you and
get connected with what you're doing? Yeah, so the quiz is just joanacop.com slash quiz.
It's a free, super easy quiz. I have a podcast called All It Takes a Goal. The thing I'm really
passionate about right now, too, is we're doing small, intensive events in our office. We have a
beautiful office now in downtown Franklin for people who want to be speakers and writers. Because
for years, people have said, hey, I want to figure out how to do that. I want to do that more. So
we've got small events we do around that. And then, yeah, the new book is Procrastination Proof.
It's out everywhere books are sold. and I read the audio book and there's tons of bonus content in
it. So yeah. And then LinkedIn, I mean, everywhere that there's other than like Etsy, I'm not on
Etsy. I'm not doing anything on Pinterest right now, but other than those two things, if you type
in John Acuff, I'm probably doing something. Well, this is fun. Thank you so much for doing this.
Thanks. having me thank you for joining me for this week's episode of the best of you it would mean
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