"I'm so grateful I found Dr. Cook's work—she is the best of both worlds. I trust her and I don't even know her. Morally authentic and kind with really strong clinical chops. Thank you Dr. Alison for helping me to stay hopeful when I had almost given up."
"I can't say enough about this podcast and Dr. Alison. I have listened to every episode and can't wait for the next one. She has shed so much light onto my spiritual pain. . . I am learning how to heal and live the life God has planned for me."
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If the holidays bring up a lot for you, old roles, old emotions, or the pressure to keep everyone happy, you’re not alone. Christmas has a way of activating the patterns and survival strategies that once helped you feel safe, pleasing, perfecting, over-functioning, or shutting down.
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook shares how these patterns show up in her own life, why they resurface, and how you can gently find your way back to peace. You’ll learn:
- the three types of needs that get tangled inside
- why holiday dynamics awaken old wounds and responses
- a simple way to return to the place of peace at your center
- how to redefine “success” this holiday season
This Christmas, gift a loved one (or yourself!) Dr Alison’s latest book, The Best of You!
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
If you liked this episode, you’ll love:
Episode 131: Navigating Holiday Emotions
Episode 135: Tackling Holiday People Pleasing
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
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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.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Please hear me say this clearly. Nothing is wrong with you. Truly, this time of
year simply shines a brighter light on the inner world you carry every day.
You don't need a long quiet time or a perfectly structured ritual or long hours to
come back to center. Most days, all you need is two minutes. This is one of the
most beautiful truths of the spiritual life of Christmas. God doesn't meet us in the
performance of the season, not in the perfect gathering, or the perfectly managed
emotions, or the beautiful candlelit room. God meets us in the center of the storm
within ourselves, in the place inside where you can finally exhale and simply draw
near to God.
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Hey, everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. We are
quickly approaching Christmas. And I know so many of you, if you're anything like
me, are feeling the swirl of this season. The beauty, the charm. Yes,
but also the pressure, the weight sometimes of expectations and the emotional
complexity that tends to rise to the surface in December. This is the time of year
when we're told to slow down and savor the moment, and yet for so many of us,
our hearts feel anything but settled. Maybe you're feeling polled between family needs
or old dynamics that still tug at you the moment you walk through a familiar
doorway. Maybe you're carrying the invisible labor of making things feel magical for
everybody else, or you might be navigating loneliness, grief, or the quiet ache of
feeling misunderstood. And then there's the internal pressure,
that little voice that says you should be more present, more grateful, more joyful,
it's more spiritual. It can be a lot. And our hearts can end up feeling stretched
thin and pulled in every direction at once. Today,
I want to offer you something gentle. A simple, grounded practice that you can
return to any time you feel the swirl inside you start to rise, a way of gathering
all those scattered pieces of your heart and soul, and returning to a deeper
presence within, the presence of love that is with you even here.
As we settle in, I want to name something I see so often this time of year.
In my clients, in my listeners, and also, most definitely also in myself. It's what
I call the intertangle. You know that feeling when everything inside you starts
firing at once? Overwhelm creeps in. Your mind starts spinning. Your body feels
tight. And suddenly, the simplest things, a comment from a family member, a change
in plans, a moment of silence feels strangely amplified. For many of us,
Christmas doesn't just bring external busyness. It also stirs up the deeper layers of
our inner world. Old wounds can resurface moments when you felt left out,
unseen, responsible for holding everyone else together from long ago, long before the
current moment. Memories you didn't even know were still tucked inside you can
suddenly feel close to the surface and the different parts of your soul, they start
working in overtime. Maybe your inner pleaser jumps to attention.
Just keep everybody happy. Don't rock the boat. Or your inner perfectionist begins
tightening up the reins. Make it special. Don't miss a detail. It's all on you to
make it perfect for everyone. Maybe there's a lonely one inside of you who feels
the quiet ache of not being truly known, even when you're surrounded by people you
love, or a tired one who has simply carried too much for too long and feels like
she's running on fumes. These different parts of your soul aren't problems.
They're ancient feelings. Often they go all the way back to survival strategies you
learned in childhood long ago that come to the surface in seasons of stress and
also seasons of joy and overwhelm like Christmas. These parts of you are trying to
help you feel safe, loved and connected. And the holidays have a way of lighting
them up because this season is so rooted in memory, in nostalgia, in expectation,
in longing. So if you're feeling that intertangle rise, if you're exhausted, stretched
thin or suddenly emotional, please hear me say this clearly. Nothing is wrong with
you. Truly, this time of years simply shines a brighter light on the inner world
you carry every day. It brings these inner parts of your soul to the surface.
It awakens old patterns that once kept you safe. It highlights the places inside you
that still long for tenderness, for reassurance, for rest.
The good news is those different activation points, those little flares inside become
invitations. Not to shame yourself, but to pay attention and to meet your own soul
with compassion to return gently to God's loving presence.
We'll move toward that together in just a moment, but first I want to anchor us in
a spiritual reframe. As we notice this intertangle at Christmas,
I want to bring us back to a grounding truth, one that has anchored people of
faith for thousands of years. It's the invitation from Psalm 4610. I love this
Psalm. Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am God.
Most of us hear those words and immediately think of kind of an external stillness,
quiet rooms, candles, soft music, a pause from the noise, something that feels out
of reach for many of us in a busy season. And while those things can help the
stillness, scripture speaks of is something so much deeper.
It's within our bodies. It's within our souls. It's a whole body stillness that
starts within. Stillness is not passivity.
It's not shutting down. It's not pretending. Everything is fine. Stillness is inner
spaciousness. It's the gentle, courageous act of turning inward,
of noticing what's swirling inside and making room for God to meet you there.
This is one of the most beautiful truths of the spiritual life of Christmas. God
doesn't meet us in the performance of this season, not in the perfect gathering or
the perfectly managed emotions or the beautiful candlelit room, although those things
are beautiful. It's not in trying to hold everyone else together, right? God meets
us in the center of the storm within ourselves, in the quiet core beneath all the
pressures in the place inside where you can finally exhale and simply draw near to
God. When scripture says be still, it's not commanding you to shut down your
emotions or silence the ache inside. It's inviting you to return to the truth deep
within that God is already here. God is already with you. God is already beside
you, ahead of you, before you, and within you through the power of his spirit. God
comes to the middle of the storm. So this is where we're headed.
We're going to practice what it means to come home to that inner place of love.
The place where your scattered parts of your soul can gather, where they can get
bandaged up and healed and touched by love itself,
where God holds you steady, where you remember that you are not alone in this
season or in any season. It's just a breath away. There's nothing you have to
force. There's nothing you have to make happen. We're simply making space for God to
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Before we move into the practice itself, I want to show you a simple visual that
captures what so many of us feel during December. I found this so helpful. I call
it the three circles of presence. If you're watching on video, I'm going to hold up
a whiteboard showing you what I'm describing, but if you're listening, you can just
picture three overlapping circles, like a Venn diagram. And circle one up here at
the top is the circle of what others want from me. And you could even make a list
if you draw your own, all the things you feel like others want or need from you.
Circle two becomes what I expect of myself, right? These are those inner pressures,
our inner expectations. You can make a list of those, the different ways we put
pressure on ourselves. And then circle three down here at the bottom is what my
soul actually needs for me, right? What my soul actually needs.
And then right here at the center, I'll take a little sharpy here and color this
in. Where they overlap is what I call this place of peace.
I'm going to write that here. This is the place of peace at the center.
Now, I want to walk you through what tends to happen during the holidays. Most of
us spend a lot of time right here in circle one, right? This is what others want
for me, right? The invitations, the expectations, the family dynamics, the emotional
and we want to have expectations of ourselves, this isn't all bad, but it's the
pressure you tend to put on your own shoulders, to be cheerful, to be happy, to be
present, to make it meaningful, to not disappoint anyone. This is where your inner
achiever, your inner perfectionist, or definitely your inner critic tends to take
over, right? If you don't hold this in balance, insisting you hold everything
together. But Rarely, so rarely, do we pause long enough to notice Circle 3?
And this is what my soul actually needs, right? This is the longing beneath these
other outer expectations, outer and inner expectations. It's the place inside where
parts of you feel tender, parts of you carry grief from the past or from the
present, where parts of you might be lonely or exhausted or overwhelmed or maybe
want to sense your own sense of wonder in this season, right? You have your own
memories you're tapping into, right? So this is often the part of us. We're not
connecting to enough. And here's the thing. Peace, again, is found in the overlap.
It's not in abandoning people, right, or dropping every responsibility. That wouldn't
make us who we are. We're not that kind of person. We do care about other people.
We do care about our own standards. But when we gently step back and also bring
into focus what our soul needs, what my soul actually needs from me,
from others, from the season, from God, right? What my soul actually also needs,
right? This isn't also
conversation right your spiritual life lives in that center space this is the space
where we have to get still for just a moment not to ignore the needs of other
people around us not to ignore the expectations we put on ourselves but to connect
to the deeper longings in our own souls right This is where God meets us at the
center of who we are. As you look at this visual or maybe draw it out for
yourself, I want to imagine yourself slowly, stepping out of the outer swirl of
Circle 1 for just a moment today while we're together and out of the inner pressure
of Circle 2 and join me for just a moment in Circle 3,
where you connect to your own deeper longings this season.
We're going to take just a few moments to move into an inner check -in together.
If you're able, if you're not driving a car, you can close your eyes. Let your
shoulders drop for just a moment. Maybe unclench your hands close your eyes and take
a slow breath in and a long steady exhale out and just right now while you're
listening ask yourself this question who's present in me most right now
Just notice which part of you comes forward.
You might notice the pleaser, working hard to keep everyone happy.
Maybe it's the perfectionist, tightening her grip.
Maybe it's a lonely one feeling a quiet ache beneath the surface or the tired one
who's carried too much for too long.
Just notice which part of you comes to the surface and
then gently ask whoever shows up, what are you afraid of right now?
Listen for even the faintest whisper.
Maybe she's afraid of disappointing someone. Maybe she fears being left out or
misunderstood.
Maybe she fears being alone or feeling invisible.
Maybe she's terrified of letting something drop.
Whatever comes, simply honor it.
Now, as this part of you,
what do you need?
It's not what you should need, not what others need.
But what does this part of you need from you in this moment?
Maybe it's just a deep breath.
Maybe it's a boundary. She's aching for you to set. Maybe it's a moment of
stillness each day for just a few minutes like this.
Maybe it's reassurance that you see her, that you're with her.
Maybe it's to be minded she doesn't have to carry the weight on her shoulders
and now picture god turning toward this part of you with warmth not critiquing not
correcting simply turning toward this part of your soul With compassion,
imagine God bending low,
meeting this young version of you at eye level,
calling her by name and saying, I see you, you are precious to me.
You don't have to hold this alone.
let this part of you rest for a moment in that presence
this is the beginning of returning to that center of peace,
not by forcing yourself to be calm, but by tending to what is true and real inside
of you and allowing love to meet you there.
Take one more deep breath, and when you're ready,
we'll gently move forward together.
I want to share a little story from my own life here because this intertangle we're
talking about is something I know really well. When my kids were younger, especially
in those early years, I would make myself absolutely crazy over the holidays.
And I didn't know then that it was younger parts of me stirring up, but I can see
it so clearly now. I wanted to knock it out of the park for everybody else. I
wanted to create magic and memories to please every member of the family to fill
everyone with delight. This well -intentioned part of me just took it as her job to
be the Christmas fairy, you know, just sprinkling magic Christmas everywhere. And
underneath, all of that effort was this deep pressure inside myself. This belief that
if I could just get it right, everyone would feel loved and I would finally feel
at peace. But the truth was I was completely disconnected from my own needs.
This pleaser part of me was really young. She had needs that I wasn't aware of,
but she was running the show and my achiever part was right there with her task
list and her clipboard, you know, gift after gift after gift, just redoing and
overdoing and doing more and just running on empty. And deep inside,
there was a part of me who longed for rest and for connection. And I didn't
realize then that that part of me could never get those needs met through all that
effort out here. That that part of me needed God's love and needed me too,
right? That part of me also needed love this Christmas season.
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And here's what would inevitably happen by the time Christmas finally arrived or
maybe the day after, I would be exhausted, bone tired, run down,
and in some cases I'd get irritable or I'd completely shut down, right? I'd poured
everything out and there was nothing left and that didn't serve anyone. It didn't
serve my family. That's not what they wanted. It was an exhausted parent running
around and it certainly didn't serve me. Over time, year after year,
I had to learn how to find this place of peace we've been talking about, that
place in the center of the three circles. It included what others need, a desire to
please others at the holidays. That's a beautiful gift, right? When it's held in
balance with my own self -expectations, my own capacity, and also when held in
balance with what my soul actually needs underneath at all.
The shifts started small. I still remember the year it began to click for me. It
happened with gift buying. I realized one December that by the time I got to the
fifth or sixth present for the kids, those extra gifts weren't adding any real joy.
They weren't improving anything for anyone. They were coming from my pressure, not
their delight. My family, my kids were just as happy, maybe even happier with the
first one or two thoughtful gifts. Right? It seemed silly, but it was a huge moment
of reckoning. Like, I can just stop at a point. It was the part of me that was
overreaching that didn't need to do that. It wasn't pleasing anyone, least of all
myself. So I experimented with something new the next year. I stopped.
I set a boundary with a part of me who kept pushing for just one more. I thanked
her for wanting to create meaningful memories and then I gently told her, we're
good. We've done enough. Let's rest. And you know what happened?
Everyone was still happy. The joy was still there Christmas morning. And for the
first time in years, I had a little gas left in the tank. I was present. And that
small shift opened up a door for me. Over the next few years, I started applying
the same mindset to other places to my schedule, saying no to things that looked
lovely, but would ultimately drain me. I said no to some of my own expectations,
letting go of the image of the perfect Christmas, which, spoiler alert, when you let
go of that, you tend to find it in unexpected places. And to my inner soul,
listening for what each part of me needed instead of letting them run on autopilot.
And slowly, steadily, I began to discover that inner place of peace,
not by doing more, not by performing harder, but by coming home to what my soul
actually needs. And I share that story because I want you to know you are not
alone in this. This work takes time. It's a practice and every small step toward
that inner place of peace matters. It matters for you.
It matters for the people you love. And it's the place where God loves to meet us,
which is after all the whole point of Christmas, right? It's God coming into the
mess and meeting us right where we are. So as you hear my story and engage with
your own soul, I want to turn this toward your life, toward the real moments you're
walking through this December, right, as we head into Christmas. Because here's the
truth. You don't need a long, quiet time or a perfectly structured ritual or long
hours to come back to center. Most days, all you need is two minutes of awareness.
I call this the two -minute return to center. It's based in mindfulness, which is
based on the episode I did with Dr. Judd Brewer in last week's episode. So if you
want the deep dive, go back and listen to that conversation. It was such a powerful
conversation. But this is the simple three -step version. It's simple. It's repeatable
and it breaks the cycle of overwhelm right in the moment. You can practice this
every day or any time you feel overwhelmed, chaotic, or just notice one of those
parts of you that we tapped into earlier today. Here's how it works. Step one,
you just pause. Take a deep breath. If it helps place a hand on your heart or
your stomach, just enough to signal to your soul. I'm here.
I'm listening. Right? It's that simple. Step two, name the part of you that you
notice. I see a part of me that's worried, that's bracing,
that's lonely, that's overfunctioning, that's tired.
Whatever rises, name it. Naming brings compassion and differentiation into the room.
You're becoming mindful of what's happening in your own soul. You're getting into
that third circle, right? That third circle of what my soul actually needs.
And then step three, I want you to bless this part of you. Offer a simple
kindness. It makes sense that you're here. I get it.
You've worked hard. You're not alone. God is here,
too. As part of step three, you might invite God into this place in your soul.
God, meet me right here. Not to fix, not to change,
but just to be with. Right. This is the opposite of inner pressure. It's inner
welcome. Right. It's welcoming Christ right there into that place in your own soul.
Just those three steps. Pause. Take a breath. Place a hand somewhere over where you
sense that inner voice, right? Name what you notice.
Give it a name. And then three, welcome with a blessing. I bless you, tiredness.
It's understandable that you're here. You're welcome at the table of my soul. I
bless you, you inner overworker. Right. I get your good intentions.
Right. You're welcome at the table. I don't want you to take over, but you get a
place in my soul. And then as you take that breath, right, as you take that pause,
you might just check in with yourself. What's one thing I need today? Maybe it's
just a deep breath. Maybe it's to untense my shoulders. Maybe it's to take a short
walk, right? It doesn't have to be fancy or a lot, but you're just trying to
interrupt that loop in your soul. This simple practice can shift the entire tone of
your day. It brings you out of autopilot, out of old patterns, out of those loops,
and back into a grounded presence where God meets you, right in the middle of what
you're feeling. Here's what I want you to remember. Peace this season will not look
like perfection. It will look like presence, small,
grounded moments. It might look like saying a gentle no to something that stretches
you too thin, like leaving a gathering just a few minutes early without guilt,
like taking three slow breaths before responding,
like stepping into a bathroom or a hallway for just a few minutes to re -center and
listen to your own soul. It might mean letting go of the idea of perfection or
perfect memories and instead looking for what is because what is is is good and
beautiful. It might mean allowing a place for grief or loneliness to sit at the
table of your soul. It might mean honoring your limits without apologizing,
offering compassion to yourself, to others, instead of performance.
Peace is so much less like those flawless holiday photos. It's more like a steady
inner exhale. It's the quiet confidence that you don't have to run ragged to be
loved.
finds you. You are not alone. I promise you there is a place inside of you where
God is already waiting to greet you to welcome every single part of your soul with
love. Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Best of You Be sure to
check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can
find those on my website at dr. Allison cook .com. That's Allison with one L .cook
.com. Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss
an episode. And I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It helps so
much to get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday.
And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal
others, and you stay true to your God -given self.
If discomfort sends you into overthinking, numbing, or trying to fix what you can’t control…
If certain habits feel automatic no matter how much you try to change them…
You’re not alone—and your brain is more trainable than you think.
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with Dr. Jud Brewer—psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and New York Times best-selling author who specializes in habit change and mindfulness.
They unpack why we get stuck in these loops and a simple practice to steady your soul.
Instead of relying on willpower or self-judgment, this conversation invites you to:
- Notice your inner patterns with kindness
- Differentiate discomfort from distress
- Understand the habit loops that drive anxiety, worry, or doom-scrolling
- Apply the #1 tool to help you create real, lasting change
- Deepen your connection to God
This episode is a grounding companion for anyone navigating stress, emotional triggers, or the pull toward old coping strategies—especially in seasons that stir up more than we expect.
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
If you liked this episode, you’ll love:
Episode 75: Your Secret Weapon Against Stress and Anxiety
Episode 112: Navigating Anxiety
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
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- Check out cozyearth.com and use code BESTOFYOU to get up to 40% off.
- Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
*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.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Transcript
Anxiety is probably an evolutionary bottleneck in this respect because it pulls
together fear and planning. The more we worry, the less we're actually able to plan.
We can get stuck in these habit loops of distraction where we're not learning to be
with our unpleasant experiences. And if we're constantly running away from it, we're
not going to know how to deal with things that are uncomfortable in the future.
When we get out of our own way, when it's not about us, when it's about something
much bigger than us, suddenly we've got all the strength in the world.
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Hey everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of the best of you. As we are
heading into this Christmas season, so many of us brace ourselves, not just for the
busyness, but also for the emotional undercurrents that show up around family,
expectations, the pressure to feel joy when maybe we're not feeling so joyful,
and not to mention the constant stream of hard news in the world. It's a time when
our nervous systems can run hot, our minds can spin fast, and those familiar
triggers can flare. And in those moments, we often reach for whatever helps us cope.
It could be doom scrolling, stress eating, that extra glass of wine, small attempts
to soothe the nervous system that's overwhelmed and searching for steady ground. And
today we're talking about something that I love. It's just such a life -changing
topic, a lifeline for so many of us navigating these kinds of moments. It's
mindfulness. Research consistently shows that mindfulness can reduce anxiety,
improve emotional regulation and interrupt those unhealthy habit loops by strengthening
your capacity for awareness and self -control. This is a powerful, powerful tool.
But before we get started, I want to name something up front, especially for those
of you who've been tuning into the podcast these past few years. For some of us,
the word mindfulness can carry some baggage. For some of you, it might feel too
self -focused or too secular or even at odds with Christian prayer.
And we touch on this at the end of the episode in a beautiful way. But I know
that for some of you, it can bring up images of emptying your mind or practices
you've been told to avoid. And I want to begin this episode by reframing what
mindfulness actually is and what it isn't because it's so much more compatible with
Christian prayer and forms of spiritual practices than many people realize.
Mindfulness at its core is simply the practice of paying attention. Attention without
judgment, presence, without striving, awareness, without shame.
That sounds a whole lot like what this journey of learning to walk with Jesus is
all about. In the Christian tradition, prayer has always been about turning our
attention, our awareness toward God, being fully present to the one who is already
present with us. And while mindfulness doesn't require a spiritual framework,
Christians absolutely can and do practice mindfulness in a way that enhances our
spiritual lives. In fact, countless believers throughout history of practice forms of
mindful attention through silence and solitude, through breath prayer,
through reflection and contemplative prayer. Where prayer tends to connect us to God,
mindfulness helps us notice what's happening inside of us so we can bring that
experience into an awareness of God. It helps us slow down enough to notice,
where is my body tense? What emotion is surfacing? Which part of me feels threatened
or overwhelmed? What is this moment stirring up inside of me?
This awareness doesn't replace prayer, but it allows us to invite more of God's
presence to be with us in whatever we're experiencing.
It allows us to experience more of God's presence with us. And here's why today's
conversation matters. We are living in a time of constant triggers, anxiety,
overconsumption, stress eating, doomscrolling, numbing behaviors, emotional spirals. The
brain falls into habit loops when we're overwhelmed. And for many of us, those loops
are rooted in fear, stress or trying to self -soothe the best way we know how.
Mindfulness helps us interrupt those loops. It gives us tools to notice what's
happening in real time instead of getting swept away by old patterns. It helps us
learn to respond rather than react. And that's something every one of us needs right
now. And that brings me to today's guest. Dr. Judd Brewer is one of the leading
voices and
love about Dr. Judd's work is that he makes something as profound as mindfulness
incredibly practical. He breaks it down and helps us understanding what's happening in
the brain when we get hooked, whether it's by anxiety or doom scrolling or social
media or people pleasing, and he teaches us how small moments of awareness can
actually help us change those habits. So today, we're going to explore what
mindfulness actually is, how it helps us approach these triggers, especially during
stressful seasons and why our brains get stuck in habit loops and how curiosity and
small shifts in attention can help us create lasting change. And lastly,
we'll talk about how mindfulness can expand our practices of prayer, helping us to
gain access to an even deeper sense of God's loving, powerful presence right in the
middle of our struggles. This is such a rich and beautiful and encouraging
conversation and I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Judd Brewer.
Judd, I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast today. I'm just such a big fan of
your work and all that you're doing to help us understand mindfulness. Can you help
us understand first off, right? You're at the start what it is and maybe what it
isn't. Yes. So let's start with what it isn't. It isn't a judgmental stance on
life. You know, so it's really, there are two main components, awareness and
curiosity. And I would also add that with the curiosity, there's an attitude of
kindness. So this kind curiosity, if we could put it that way, that helps us meet
whatever we're being aware of in a different way than what we often habitually do,
which is judging our experience, whether it's judging ourselves, judging others,
judging the world. And so does it not only apply to awareness of myself?
Can we also apply mindfulness to our awareness of others? Absolutely. Oh,
interesting.
Gotcha. So it's different from maybe a sort of focus only on the inner life,
although that's part of it. It's not, so for example, meditation, right, where you're
trying to um that yeah flesh that out a little bit because i think that's a
misconception even i have absolutely well often you know meditation is seen as you
know the proverbial navel gazing or however you know however it's seen but really
it's about bringing awareness and seeing relationality so seeing our relationship with
ourselves which is internal but also seeing our relationship with others and with the
world, which is external. And I would even go as far as saying that's an artificial
distinction between internal and external. It's really about being aware of everything
in an ongoing flow. And it's, you know, to say internal and external,
it can be helpful to make distinctions at times and it can also develop official
dichotomies that can get in the way. Can you give me an example of even in a
moment like right now?
I'm aware we had some technology difficulties hopping on right.
And I've learned over time to be present to what's happening and what's real Versus
flipping into self -shame or self -judgment. Can you give me,
is there a form of mindfulness that speaks to even a moment like that,
a moment right now where I have some inner noise and there's a way I can be kind
toward what I'm noticing versus judging what I'm noticing. Yeah, absolutely.
So let's say that something isn't going as planned. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And when something isn't going as planned, we can get in the habit of judging
ourselves. We can get in the habit of judging some piece of technological equipment.
We can get in the habit of judging other people. We can bring awareness in and see
how we are kind of going down those spirals of the judgment,
internal, external, whatever, equipment. And we can also, so it helps us be able to
recognize that. And then also helps us be able to kind of meet that with this
curious awareness. So for example, you know, if something isn't working, like a
technological glitch in a podcast, we can We can go, oh, crap.
And when we do that, our mind, you know, whether it's judging ourselves,
judging the experience, judging whatever, that kind of closes us down and puts us in
this kind of constricted, contracted, frustrated mindset, which ironically makes it
harder to step back and problem solve, you know. And so there we bring flip that
oh no or oh crap to oh okay this you know this piece of technology isn't working
what um how you know and it opens us to be able to see all the possibilities much
more readily than if we were just locked into you know that you know must be that
or must be that that's really that's really at the heart of it is to is to bring
this playful curiosity even when things aren't going.
how society is collectively getting trained to use their phones.
Cornell West describes it as these weapons of mass distraction, right? And so all
over the place, whether it's my students at Brown University or people on the
streets or people in restaurants or just all over the place. People are just
constantly, you know, they're captured, their attention is captured by their phones.
And what I'm seeing is that when something unpleasant is happening, so somebody has,
it could be as simple as boredom, that I, you know, student might have some boredom
or a patient might feel anxious. And then this phone promises a distraction that
makes that, you know, they can temporarily distract them from that unpleasant
sensation or the emotion or the thought and we can get stuck in these habit loops
of distraction where we're not learning to be with our unpleasant experiences so
there you know there can be something that's uncomfortable and if we're constantly
running away from it we're not going to know how to deal with things that are
uncomfortable in the future. If we can't deal with them now, even if it's boredom
as a very minor example. So here, you know, I'm not seeing people learning to lean
into difficulty. I'm seeing more and more that people are being trained to go,
you know, be distracted by this shiny object, whether it's cute pictures of puppies
on Instagram or whatever.
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So how does that work? We're going into the holidays.
How does that work in a social gathering
where you're going to be, let's say, for example, at a family dinner or tough stuff
in the news,
a tough topic comes up. Or I guess these are two different things, but, you know,
even, you know, just news headlines themselves, right? How do we learn to stay
mindful, stay present without just going into sort of that distract,
avoidant, or fight, you know, even a fight -flight response, right? Because it strikes
me that what you're describing is the opposite of a fight -flight response. It's
staying present. Yes, it is the, well, yeah, I would say it's the opposite. It's
hard to say because fight -flight is really so instinctual.
This is, it's a different time scale. Interesting. So it's important just to be able
to distinguish those. So, you know, we're going to, if we put our hand on a hot
stove, we're going to, we're going to move that the way before the signal even
reaches our brain, right? It just is arcs through our spinal cord. Yep. And when
somebody has, you know, a fight, flight response, they're going to be reacting faster
than conscious awareness because we don't have time to sit back and process. You
know, you have, you got to move literally. And after that,
you know, in the after effect of that, we can learn. and that's really where
mindfulness comes in where we can start to first recognize how we are habitually
reacting in life so let's use the holidays just you know something might feel
uncomfortable and if our automatic reaction has been to you know turn away from the
discomfort one of my students I was just a couple of days ago in a seminar that
it
this is the first level of where awareness can be helpful. And I'm going to use
the word curiosity here because mindfulness is a concept. Let's just get right at
the, you know, so that people aren't confused or misinterpret at concept. Let's just
get right at the raw material here. So the raw material is curiosity.
And so if we can notice that we are habitually reacting and we have a habit loop
around turning away from discomfort, right? Because we don't know how to deal with
distress, right? This is where the distress comes in when we can't handle discomfort.
There's an eye in there, if that makes sense. Yeah. So it helps us recognize these
habit loops and then helps us be able to
that you know versus the experience so for example i work a lot with patients with
anxiety and i've had one person come in and say i feel like anxiety is deeply
etched in my bones that's how identified she was with her anxiety and so the idea
here is to see that i'm a person who has feelings thoughts sensations of anxiety
and just to be able to make that differentiation helped her distinguish between
discomfort I have discomfort versus distress where I am distressed the difference
between have and I am. Yeah, I am experiencing anxiety is different than I am an
anxious person or so this is where and I don't want to take a rabbit trail here,
but I do want to run this past you because my listeners are very familiar with
parts work because my background is in IFS.
And it strikes me from what you're saying. There's some overlaps because IFS is
teaching us to get curious about, for example, that anxiety as a part of me versus
as something I'm overtaken by. So there is some overlaps with mindfulness.
Maybe even you might say IFS is a specific form of it. I'm not sure. They're not
the same. But that's some overlap that I'm hearing there. Does that? Absolutely.
Right. So for example, somebody could bring awareness in to recognize that part of
that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which allows me then to tolerate the presence of it without
being overtaken by it. I'm curious, I want to touch on a lot of your work is
focused on addiction. Is that, is that right? Addiction and anxiety. Yeah.
And what have you learned about, you talk about habits, right? What have you learned
about these behaviors and why we get so hooked in the first place?
Because it strikes me that the instinctive response is the, you know, kind of the
first response. And then it's almost like you said, the mindfulness comes after when
we can come back to. So why do we get so hooked in the first place? Yes.
It's a great question. And it really boils down to these very strong evolutionary
learning processes that were set up or evolved to help us find food and remember
where it is and also avoid danger. So, for example, you know,
B .F. Skinner became known in the 50s for this concept of operating conditioning or
positive and negative reinforcement. And if you think about those processes, they're
very basic where, you know, three elements are necessary and sufficient, where,
let's think of our ancient ancestors, you know, they see food in the woods or in
the savannah. That's the trigger. The behavior is that they eat the food. And then
from a neuroscience standpoint, there's a reward, meaning that there's a dopamine
spritz in their brain. And I want to be very clear about this because reward can
be interpreted different ways. So to the brain, there are these reward circuits,
meaning the dopamine fires as a way to help somebody learn. So they're truly,
these reward circuits are set up to help us form memories. So we remember where the
food is, so we can go and get it again. We also remember where the danger is so
we can avoid it in the future. And those are the two flavors of reinforcement
learning. Positive reinforcement. Go do that again. negative reinforces.
be erroneous that this is where there's this is where there's a dopamine hit of
reward. So go back to it. Yes. Yes. And in fact, it's not something that is
genuinely giving me true relief. Is that right? Is that right? And yes,
absolutely. So let's take two examples. One is if you look at food and another
example is experience. So in modern day, we've had both food and experience be
really designed to be hyper -palatable, meaning, you know, we hear all this stuff
about hyper -processed food, which is hardly food anymore. The hyper -processed thing
that has calories that gets us addicted, that's really how these things became hyper
processed is because they get us hooked to eating them more. And the same is true
for social media, even news feeds now. They've been hyper processed to be hyper
palatable and also addictive. So there are a number of, we don't have to go into
all of the, there are a myriad different ways in which those, their elements brought
together to make them more and more addictive. But But that's, you know, a very
common example. And now I'll bring something more nuanced, which I never learned in
medical school or residency, but was probably the most important thing that I missed,
which was, or that none of us were taught, is that even experiences like anxiety
can be driven in that same reinforcement process. And Thomas Borkevaca psychologist
wrote in a two -page very humble paper back in the 1980s suggested,
he suggested that anxiety could be driven through negative reinforcement. And this got
buried in the Prozac lead because Prozac came out and everybody thought, oh, great.
You know, depression and anxiety solved with one pill. Yeah. Turned out not to be
the case. No. Not even close. And so his suggestion was that the feeling of anxiety
triggers the
that, it gives us a feeling of control. Yes. And I'll add one more,
which is that if people worry all the time and they solve a problem,
they're very likely to associate those two because they're worrying all the time.
And so they make this false association that worrying equals problem solving, but
it's that correlation that does not equal causation problem there where they're
correlated but not causal and the way I start you know exploring that with my
patients is to say well have you ever solved a problem when you weren't worrying
yes do you solve more problems when you're not worrying yes so yeah but it's just
when somebody has for example as somebody has generalized anxiety disorder and they're
worrying literally all the time the likelihood that they're going to be worrying when
they solve a problem is pretty high. Sure. It makes perfect sense.
So how do we knowing in some ways I don't want to, I don't want to say
negatively, but we're sort of working against to some degree these ways in which
we've been conditioned for a variety of reasons. So how do we begin to change those
pathways and how is mindfulness a part of that? Yes. That's the million dollar
question. That's the million dollar question. And it's not just a pill. And we've
learned so many things about, you know, and I think to some degree, these are
skills we have to learn, right? There's no, there's no easy button for it.
And also some of these things work. Right. Yeah. So let's use the example of
anxiety because that's what we've, my lab's been studying the most recently, but
we've done studies where this applies to smoking. We got five times the quit rates
of gold standard treatment for smoking, for example. So just showing that this
applies to other things. We, if you look at anxiety, there is,
and you look at any habit, these habits form through this process of reinforcement
learning that you and I have been speaking about. And there's actually a very simple
formula that was developed back in the 1970s by these two researchers last names
were Raskorla and Wagner. And this Raskorla Wagner formula is still in play today.
My lab still uses it. And the idea is that once we set up a habit,
by definition, it is something that we do automatically. And I just want to be
clear that most habits are actually helpful. So this isn't to demonize habits, you
know, imagine, imagine trying to live your life having to relearn everything you've
learned in your life every day. You know, we'd be exhausted before breakfast, you
know, we'd have to relearn how to walk, put our clothes on, make breakfast, and all
that stuff. So most habits are really helpful. So this is a good survival mechanism,
yet some of them get in the way. Anxiety is probably an evolutionary bottleneck in
this respect because it pulls together fear and planning.
So fear in the present moment is helpful, right? Because it helps us learn. And
planning in the present moment is also helpful planning for the future. But you
can't be afraid of the future in the sense that when we worry about the future,
we don't have control over it right now. So it actually, the research is pretty
clear on this. The more we worry, the less we're actually able to plan and,
you know, problem solve for the future. So it's this evolutionary bottleneck that
comes in. So going back to your question of how do we, how does mindfulness come
in here, if you look at that equation, for any habit to change, you have to bring
awareness back in to update the reward value. And the reason for that is, if
something's rewarding, we're going to do it again. Right. And if something's not
rewarding, it opens up that space for change. Let's use an everyday example. Let's
say that I have a certain reward value in my mind for mango habanero truffles,
which is true. Okay. My mother -in I love it. Yeah, these great mango habanernera
truffles at the holidays from the Seattle area, and they are delicious. Let's say a
new chaklariti opens up in my neighborhood, and I go in and I eat,
they have mango habinerd truffles. And I'm like, great, let me try one of those. If
I eat one, and it's just like mind -blowingly good, I get what's called a positive
prediction error, meaning that that was better than expected. I had a certain
expectation that it probably wasn't going to be as good as the ones that I get at
Christmas. And it was better than expected. So I get this dopamine spritz in my
brain and I learn this is a good chocolate. Go back and eat and get chocolates
there again. On the other hand, if they taste like cardboard, I get what's called a
negative prediction error, which said, where my brain's like, yeah, not as good as
expected. I also get a dopamine spritz and I learn don't go back there again.
Notice how there's learning on both sides. Yeah. And critical for learning, one
ingredient awareness. I have to pay attention. If I'm on the phone and I eat one
of those and, you know, my wife says, hey, how is the chocolate or G? I'm like, I
don't know. I just I don't remember what it tasted like. So I haven't changed that
reward value or that expectation when I haven't paid attention. So that's where this
comes in. And I want to highlight something. Notice how willpower has nothing to do
with this. Yeah. Nothing is critical because everybody, you know, if somebody's trying
to stop overeating, if somebody's trying to stop worrying. You know, there's, I don't
know if you ever saw this Bob Newhart skit from the 70s called Stop It. It's
amazing. It's hilarious. We'll post it. It's an amazing clip. It's incredible. But
back in the 70s, he was highlighting the problematic nature where there's all this
emphasis on cognitive therapies, like they were going to solve all our ills, just
like present. And the idea is we can't think our way out of a paper bag. And if
you look at it now from a neuroscience perspective, nobody knew this in the 70s.
Neuroscience was a very young field back then. If you look at it from a
neuroscience standpoint, this isn't about thinking. In fact, the parts of our brain
that are associated with cognitive control and willpower, you know, willpower is more
myth than muscle, but those go offline when we get stressed at or anxious. So at
best, we don't have access to these resources. At worst,
they're more myth than muscle. So wherever somebody is on that spectrum, you know,
that's not, that's not what I would go to to help somebody work with anxiety as an
example. That is so helpful. And I think what you're saying there, dovetails,
again, it's different, but what I found so powerful coming out of being trained in
more of a CBT area when I discovered IFS. Because I was like, oh, this actually
helps me. Yeah. And, and, um, interesting, Interesting, isn't it? Because I can think
about the, I know the logic. The logic is, you know, but that doesn't help me in
the moment. Right. And if you look at it, our feeling body is much stronger than
our thinking brain. Yeah. So logic is helpful to, you know, solve a logic problem.
Yeah. But logic doesn't solve emotional issues, right? And Reward value gets set up
as a feeling. It doesn't get set up as a logic problem. If it did,
all my patients would have quit smoking the first time I told them to stop smoking.
A hundred percent. I know I shouldn't smoke, right? How often have we? So just a
quick example. Let me see if I'm hearing you correctly, practically. I had never
been on TikTok. I discovered it. And it's like crack. I've never seen anything like
it. And I've noticed, and is this kind of what we're saying, I don't go, but I've
noticed, I'm like, some part of me, but despite all logic, if I'm stressed out to
click on that app feels like relief. And so I can't talk myself out of that with
logic. But what I might do, and I'm wondering if this is, is become aware.
What is going on in that moment that I want to push, click on that app? There's
something pulling me and it almost always is my own distress,
wanting a relief. I am getting a hit of dopamine. That's not untrue.
I'm curious if I'm saying this correctly. I don't have to talk myself out of that
by saying, no, this is bad for No, no, no, it, in some way there is a hit of
dopamine I'm getting, but if I can become aware, it allows me to make a different
choice and bring more of my,
finish that for me. What is, I'm aware that that's working, but I'm not sure why.
Ish. Yes. So here, and I diagram this, we did a series of studies a couple of
years ago now. We published these.
example, that we're worrying. And often people don't think of worrying as a behavior,
but it's a behavior, right? It says mental behavior. Some people are so habituated
to worrying. They don't even notice that they're doing it just because it's
automatic. It's a habit. So the first step is being able to recognize that we're
worrying. The second step is to leverage this reinforcement learning process that you
and I've been talking about by asking a simple question, which is, what am I
getting from this? So if we take this to your TikTok example, right, where TikTok
is the algorithm is dialed in so much that it is like the most, it's,
it's a more safely guarded secret than like the Colonel Sanders secret recipe for
KFC. You know, it's like this is this is buried in the vaults of wherever because
they did such a good job of algorithmically addicting people. And there was even one
of the ongoing lawsuits against TikTok where the, I think it was the Attorney
General of Kentucky, their documents were accidentally unredactable,
like where they could redact the redaction. And I think it was NPR that broke the
story where they found that the people are saying, you know, we can dial in, we
know exactly how long it takes to addict somebody. And it's like as few as 30
videos. It's a very short period of time where they're that good at that. So it's
not about telling ourselves, oh, TikTok's addictive, because we know it is. It's
about asking ourselves this simple question. What do I get from going on TikTok? And
that then gets to this piece where I think of this is we can develop these
disenchantment databases where if we're enchanted with something,
we're going to keep doing it, right? Because the reward value is high enough that
we keep doing it. If we become disenchanted, it's much easier to say, you know, why
would I do that? It's just, I'm just not into that anymore. And that's where asking
that question brings online or curiosity. We can go, oh, what am I getting from
this? Right. And It's not that TikTok is inherently bad, you know, like there are
plenty of entertaining short videos that whatever, I don't really, you know, whatever
people get, you know, are into in TikTok, there are lots of different things.
They'll, they'll get on TikTok. But if we find that we're spending every, you know,
two hours a day or five hours or eight hours a day scrolling on TikTok, or we're
turning to that as our distress tolerance, you know,
or avoidance mechanism. It's not a distress tolerance mechanism. Then it falls more
into the unhelpful spectrum. And so if we ask, what am I getting from this? And we
feel into our direct experience and we see, oh, you know, every now and then a few
TikTok videos, fine. But if I'm, if this is my ruling my life now, not so good.
And we become disenchanted with that. I think I call this the pleasure plateau. We
do the same thing with eating. We can do the same thing with all sorts of
behaviors. Yes. So we can find where it's fine and we can find where we're going
off that cliff of overindulgence. And then we can, the third step, just to finish
this quickly, the third step is to find what I call the bigger, better offer. And
this is where simply stepping out of doing the thing is better than being sucked
into it right so if we find that you know scrolling on instagram a couple of times
a day when we just need a mental reset is fine but when we find that we're going
to scroll on instagram instead of confronting our partner because we're you know
there's we're going to have to have a tough conversation not so fine right and we
can so we can start to dial in and see kind of get control back over where we
might be pulled to do something to distract ourselves and come back into reality and
learn to lean into discomfort. This is where discomfort does not need to become
distress. It can simply be discomfort because we learn, oh, you know,
curiosity is a superpower for this. I'll just mention one other thing, just applying
this, for example, to worrying. When we feel anxious, that feeling of anxiety could
lead us to worry, oh, no, what's going to happen? It could lead us to distract
ourselves by going on TikTok. Or we could learn to lean into curiosity and flip
that, oh, no, to oh. So let me ask you, which one feels better?
Oh, no or oh? Oh, this is interesting. I wonder what's happening here. Yes.
So powerful. So you're leveraging that same reinforcement learning mechanism.
You're leveraging it against itself. And that's where we're getting huge changes in
anxiety, for example. It's so powerful. You work with yourself. I really want to ask
you this. And if a lot of,
that is a huge bucket. So a lot of my listeners come from faith backgrounds.
And I am curious about how, and I know you've done a little study on this, I
think, how spiritual practices like prayer can function as a form of mindfulness.
Just from my own experience, what I find is some of what we're talking about can
apply in the sense of if I'm going to prayer as a sort of cognitive way to try
to pull myself up out of what I'm feeling, versus if I'm sort of going to prayer
as a way of inviting God to attune with me to what is. They function very
differently. Can you, are you comfortable speaking to that? Oh, absolutely. I'm trying
to get at in a very short amount of time. Well, I think you articulated it
beautifully. One example of this is centering prayer, which is a specific practice
that uses prayer to help people center. That's why it's called centering prayer,
but also be present. And so what it can do is help people really dial into this
strength of presence. Yeah. And that strength of presence, Talk about distress
tolerance. Yes. You know, when somebody knows that God has their back,
who needs to run away from anything? Yes.
And it's in, God has your back in it. Yes, in it. Not necessarily as an example.
Let me help you cover your eyes so you don't see it. Yes. Yes. Oh, that's such a
helpful centering prayer. That's a great connection there. I love that. And so that
is a form of bringing mindfulness into a spiritual practice. Yes. Yeah. And if you
look at many, I haven't studied every spiritual tradition out there, but if you look
at many religions, many spiritual traditions, they're going to use different language
for this experience. Yeah. Of being present, right? I love the phrase,
dying to the small self so God can,
world.
I love that. I love that. Can you let us know, let my listeners know where to
find out more about your work? I know you've written a couple of books. You've got
a lot of resources. Where can people find more information? I want to find all the
information myself. Sure. I run a program called Going Beyond Anxiety that actually
teaches these skills that we've been talking about in terms of helping people relate
to anxiety differently. I also have a website so that that's just going beyondanxiety
.com and I also have a website just Dr. Judd .com that has a lot of free resources
and also has my books on it like unwinding anxiety is most relevant to this
conversation but also wrote a book called The Hunger Habit if people struggle
struggle with eating, you know, emotional eating and that's That's just DRJUD .com,
Dr. Judd .com. Awesome. Yeah. Also write a substack, Judd Brewer dot substack.
That you can find me there. All right. We will link to all of that. I'm so
grateful for your time. I love this topic and I'm just so grateful for your work
in this space and all you're doing to bring these resources to people. So thank
you. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the best of
you. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in
the show. You can find those on my website at Dr. Allison Cook .com. That's Allison
with one L .cook .com. Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that
you don't miss an episode. And I love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It
helps so much to get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next
Thursday. And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God,
you heal others, and you stay true to your God -given self.
If you’ve ever found yourself wide awake at night replaying a conversation…
If you spiral through guilt after setting even the gentlest boundary…
If you carry everyone else’s emotions while losing sight of your own…
You’re not alone.
In today’s episode, Dr. Alison shares personally about these moments in her own life and guides you through a real-time reflective practice you can do right alongside her. It’s the most effective tool we’ve found to help when overwhelm rises, when you’re tempted to slip back into people-pleasing, or when conflict sends your nervous system into overdrive.
Instead of overthinking, overanalyzing, or pushing your feelings aside, this practice helps you:
- Notice what’s happening inside with kindness
- Connect with the part of you that’s working overtime to keep you safe
- Offer compassion to your own soul — the same compassion you extend so easily to others
- Invite God’s loving, steady presence into the places that feel tangled, tense, or afraid
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
If you liked this episode, you’ll love:
Episode 75: Your Secret Weapon Against Stress and Anxiety
Episode 112: Navigating Anxiety
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
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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.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
TRANSCRIPT
I wanted to give you a real time tool. The most helpful tool,
in fact, I've ever found to help me when I'm feeling chaotic, overwhelmed, and
anxious. And I'm so worried about the other person. This isn't healthy self
-sacrifice. This is a form of self -erasure and even self -harm. Anxiety,
overwhelm, grief, stress. These things don't mean you're failing.
These are invitations to connect more lovingly to this beautiful soul God has made.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. I'm so
glad you're here with me this week. This is our last episode before Thanksgiving.
So we're going to take next week, Thanksgiving off. And I wanted to record a sort
of special episode for you. I wanted to give you a real time tool.
The most helpful tool, in fact, I've ever found to help me when I'm feeling
chaotic, overwhelmed, and anxious. In fact, this last week I found myself exactly in
that place completely tied up in knots. In this case, it was over all things
conflict. I hate conflict with anyone. Now,
I've done a lot of work around trying to be clear, trying to communicate as well
as around healthy boundaries. I teach this stuff all the time. And yet, even after
all that work, there's still a deeply feeling, deeply empathetic part of my soul
that resins.
what I feel, what I think, what I need, I've already imagined exactly what I think
the other person must be feeling, right? It's like I'm carrying both of our emotions
at once. I'm carrying everything the other person is going through right alongside
and sometimes even before what I'm trying to work through. It's a familiar cocktail,
right? I write about this in the best of you, right? It's a mix of my own
personality style. I'm highly sensitive. I'm highly empathetic. My own childhood
conditioning and church messages that have told me to always think of others first.
These are not bad qualities and I'm grateful that I have them, but when I really
need to have the hard conversations, these qualities can get the best of me.
that drive to keep the peace, to make everyone else okay,
that's the place where a codependent part of me takes root in my life and starts
spinning all these catastrophizing and worst case scenarios where I'm worried more
about the other person, even though I'm not doing anything wrong. And I'm so worried
about the other person that I start risking doing harm to myself,
right? This isn't healthy self -sacrifice. This is a form of self -erasure and even
self -harm. And even now, it can still creep up on me. When I'm tangled up like
that inside, it tends to show up as anxiety. My heart starts raising. I feel a
rush of adrenaline. My whole nervous system goes into high alert. It's hard to sleep
and it can take a full day sometimes too for everything to begin to settle down
and then after I finally say the hard thing and speak up or even just set a very
gentle boundary another wave will hit a wave of guilt a wave of self -doubt that
feeling of did I do something wrong that really can still show up in my mind it's
like my body goes through the conflict twice. Once before I speak and once after.
I'm guessing many of you know exactly what that feels like. You wrestle and wrestle
with whether to say the hard thing, whether to pull back, whether to say no,
whether to show up, whether to not show up. And then when you finally make the
decision, there's a backlash, almost like your internal system can't believe you
actually stood up for yourself, right? And you start worrying about all the
implications. This is where my own inner work has been life -changing.
I can tell myself all the truths that I know. I can use logic on myself.
I can analyze the situation. I can even talk to a friend who reminds me of what's
real. And all of those things are important. But what has helped me the most in
these situations? The only thing that actually calms my soul and restores peace to
my body is when I turn inward and acknowledge the part of my soul that's in
distress. When I connect with this part of me like a person in my life in need of
care when I recognize this part of me is as deserving of my empathy and of my
care as everyone else out there. If you've ever found yourself like me wide awake
at night, replaying a conversation or caught in that loop of what ifs, you're not
alone. It's so deeply human. Anxiety is a part of being human.
Overwhelm is a part of being human. It happens to all of us. It's one of the ways
our soul signal that something inside is seeking safety,
connection, or care, right, where we can extend that same sort of empathy, that same
sort of compassion to an inner part of our souls that we're extending to other
people out there. In different seasons, this kind of anxiety can wear many faces.
Sometimes it hides behind perfectionism, right? You'll find yourself whispering. If I
could just get it right, maybe then I could relax. Or it shows up as chronic
people pleasing. If everyone else is happy, then I'll be okay. For some of you,
like me, it shows up from a fear of conflict. If I stay quiet, maybe I'll stay
safe. And for many of us today, it's triggered even by social media and technology,
right? The endless scroll that keeps us looped in a toxic,
anxious place in our minds. Over the past few episodes, we've talked about each of
these topics. What happens when other people push your buttons? We've talked about
that with Dr. Stuart Ablon. We've talked about anxious habits like doom scrolling
with Dr. Bethany Teachman. And I shared with you some of my own thoughts on
comparison. Today, I want to offer you something different.
to compare, a fear of conflict, worry about your own children, or worry about the
headlines. Whatever it is, if you're able, I want you to walk through this
reflection with me. Now, it means you'll need to be in a quiet space, so hopefully
you can close your eyes. So if you're driving in a car, go ahead and listen and
attune to what I'm saying, but keep your eyes on the road. But if you can, find a
safe place where you can close your eyes and join me in this exercise.
This isn't about fixing or suppressing or analyzing your anxiety.
It's about learning to notice what's happening inside of you with compassion and
inviting God into those anxious spaces in your soul. Because that's what I believe
mindfulness is. It's a sacred noticing. It's deeply tied to our spiritual formation.
It's slowing down long enough to observe what's happening within you, not to judge
it, but to be present to it and to invite God's presence to be with you too.
We're going to talk more about mindfulness after the holidays. Again, I think it's
such a helpful type of awareness to understand especially as we go into this holiday
season. But when you integrate it with a parts -based, God -centered approach,
something incredible happens. We realize we can notice the anxious,
tied up in knots, turned inside out, scared parts of our souls,
not as all of who we are, but as one part of us that's working overtime to make
us safe. And we remember that we don't face these things alone.
God is with us right here in the middle of whatever it is we're going through.
This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. As the days get shorter and the light
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So let's get to it. The next 10 to 12 minutes, I'm going to walk you through a
guided reflection, right? You can follow right along with me in real time.
You can hit the pause button on wherever you're watching, whether you're listening or
watching. If you want more time with each one of these prompts, I'm going to give
you. Ideally, you can get to a place where you can close your eyes and really
focus on what's happening inside your own soul.
in need of care. So often your attention is outward, caring for others,
caring for your kids, caring for your family, caring for the people with whom you
work, right? This is your time to care for your own soul in that same way.
I want you to bring to mind a situation that has stirred up stress or anxiety or
overwhelm recently. It doesn't have to be the biggest one,
just something mild or moderate, that has caused you some distress. Maybe it's an
upcoming meeting that you have. Or one that you had last week. Maybe it's a
conversation you've been dreading or one that didn't go so well.
Maybe it's something you saw on social media that stung or hurt or caused a mental
loop. Maybe you noticed your friends were getting together and didn't include you.
As you called to mind that situation, see if you can locate where that anxiety or
stress or tension lives in your body is
it in your chest your stomach your throat is it up in your mind you don't have to
change or fix it just notice it.
Now, as you notice this feeling, imagine that it belongs to a part of you.
A younger, hardworking part of your soul that carries anxiety on your behalf.
This anxious or overwhelmed part of you has likely been with you for a long time.
You might even picture it as a younger version of yourself, tugging at your sleeve
saying, please pay attention. I need you.
Take a moment and notice that part of your soul. How old is she?
What does she look like?
Let her know you see her, that you're with her, that you recognize she's there.
And notice how this part of you responds to your presence. Is their relief,
resistance,
tears.
Whatever you notice, just stay with this place in your soul that needs your care.
As you're connecting with this part of your soul, ask yourself this question.
What are you afraid would happen if this part of you didn't work so hard to keep
you on alert?
This part of you is there for reason. She's holding all that anxious energy to try
to help what does she fear would happen if she stepped back or softened just a
little bit
listen for whatever comes whatever you notice maybe this part of you is afraid
you'll be rejected Maybe it fears you'll fail.
Maybe it's terrified. You'll lose control. Or that someone will be hurt or
disappointed.
You don't have to solve anything. Just notice the fear behind all this anxious
energy. Listen to this part of your own soul as if you're...
for working so hard on my behalf.
Thank you so hard for working to keep me safe.
Notice what happens inside as you honor this hardworking part of your soul,
the one working so hard to try to keep you safe.
And now I want you to imagine inviting God.
or the face of Jesus, full of kindness, right there with you and this anxious part
of you. Not trying to fix you just with you,
present to you, connected to you. You might simply sense the presence of love.
Invite God to be near this anxious part of you.
And notice how this part of you responds to God's presence.
Is this part of you open to God's presence, or does it hesitate?
If you notice any reluctance or hesitance, that's okay. Some parts of us haven't yet
learned to fully put our trust in God. It's great to become aware of that.
And if you notice that, ask the part of you what it's afraid might happen If God
were to come closer, sometimes parts of us fear God's presence or don't trust that
God will accept us as we are.
Remember, God is never in a hurry. God's presence is patient and tender and kind
As you imagine what it's like to have God draw near,
notice what this anxious part needs from God.
Maybe it needs reassurance. You're not alone in this. Maybe it needs rest to lay
down the heavy burdens this part of you's been carrying.
Maybe it needs to know it's not responsible for holding everything together that this
part of you can let the ceiling fall.
Just notice what reassurances this part of you needs. You might picture God speaking
gently to this anxious part of you. my beloved child,
I see how hard you're working. You don't have to do this alone. You are safe in
my care.
Let those words wash over, this anxious place within your soul.
Let them sink deep into this place where anxiety lives within your body.
Now, take another deep breath and notice what it feels like for this anxious part
of you to be seen, not only by you, but by God.
Is there any small shift you notice any
sense of peace?
with kindness, with care, and with compassion.
Just rest a few more moments in this place of connection, where you're with yourself
and with the God who loves every part of you.
Ask God to help you remember to connect with this anxious part of you with
compassion to help you care for this part of your own soul gently the way you care
for so many other people.
When you're ready,
slowly bring your awareness back to the room.
This practice of noticing what's happening inside of you is an evidenced -based form
of mindfulness. It's also crucial not only to your mental health, as we'll learn in
upcoming episodes, but also to our spiritual health.
that's what we want from other people. So often we just want their presence with
us. More than we need their words of advice or their analysis, right, is we just
need their love, their steady presence with us, saying, I see that you're anxious
and I'm here with you. This is what we're doing with this part of our souls.
Instead of fixing and analyzing, we're saying, I get it. You're anxious. You're
scared and I'm here with you and you're no longer alone.
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Americans spend about 90 % of their time indoors, and here's the surprising part.
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-E -E -E -S -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -E -C, points to the whole...
his mind, his longings, all turning toward God in connection.
It's whole being, whole soul, whole body, connection with God.
So you might think of this practice as connecting with God from your soul instead
of just your head. You're connecting with God with all of who you are. So often,
even when it's well -intended prayer, can keep us in our heads. We come to God with
words, ideas, or requests. Sometimes we even come to God with analysis. And there's
nothing wrong with that kind of prayer. But this is a different kind of prayer. A
whole body connectedness where our whole being enters into the presence of God.
God meets us in the places that are still hurting, that haven't been fixed, that
don't want analysis that don't need more advice, that don't need more solutions that
just need loving presence. Analysis and insight and head knowledge are great,
but they only take us so far. Soul -based connection is different. It's slowing down
long enough to bring your whole self, your thoughts, your emotions, your body, your
nervous system into God's presence. It's not about saying the right words.
It's about making space for God to meet you in what's real and what's happening
right now. When you connect with God from your whole soul, you move from talking
about God or even talking at God to being with God. You begin to experience what
the psalmist describes when they say, be still and know that am God,
right? That kind of knowing doesn't come from your head. It comes from that deep
inner place where your spirit and God's spirit meet in perfect connection in the way
that we were meant to walk with God and the way that we were created to walk with
God in the beginning where connection came easy before things got broken.
You get a glimpse of what that deep walking with being with God's soda soul really
feels like and God's presence brings that calm not just to your mind but to your
entire being and maybe your problems don't get solved in that moment right but you
get a glimpse of what that connection feels like the kind of connection,
that kind of partnership with God for which we were created is a glimpse not only
of the beginning in Eden, but a glimpse of where we're headed again,
a glimpse of heaven where we walk in harmony with God no matter what we're feeling.
God loves to bring his loving presence to be with us.
When you learn to attune to the anxious, overwhelmed places in your soul,
not just from your head, but from your whole being, you start to experience the
kind of peace Jesus showed us, the kind of peace Paul talked about,
the peace that doesn't depend on our circumstances.
out of a soul that is anchored in God's loving presence.
You learn to be with what is real and you learn to trust that God is with you
right here, right now, no matter what you're going through. That's why this practice
matters. You're not trying to make anxiety or stress or overwhelm disappear as if we
could on this side of heaven. You're learning to meet it differently. You're creating
space for love to enter the very place where fear lives inside your soul.
Anxiety. My friends, my listeners, my watchers, my fellow soul menders.
As we consider this upcoming holiday season, remember this anxiety,
overwhelm, grief, stress, these things don't mean you're failing.
These are invitations to connect more lovingly to this beautiful soul God has made.
It doesn't mean you're failing. It means there's a part of you longing for safety
and connection. Over time, as you tend to these parts of your soul,
you'll begin to notice a subtle shift. you'll notice less fear, less anxiety,
less reactivity, more grounded presence. And when the anxiety shows up again,
as it surely will, you'll know what to do. You can pause, you can breathe,
and you can say, I see you here, old friend, you're welcome here. God is with us
here too. This is the beginning of change.
It's not the absence of anxiety, but the presence of love in the middle of it.
The goal isn't to get rid of the anxiety. The goal is to change your relationship
to it. That's what this practice helps you do. You learn to meet anxiety and
overwhelm and stress, not with fear or shame or more criticism, but with compassion
and the power of God's loving presence. As you move through these next few weeks,
I hope you'll return to this practice. Whenever you notice anxiety or fear or
overwhelm start to rise, you can return to this exercise and we'll walk through it
together. I know I'll be doing it multiple times. Offer yourself compassionate
connection.
Find those on my website at Dr. Allisoncook .com. That's Allison with 1L .cook .com.
Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss an
episode. And I love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It helps so much to
get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And
remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others,
and you stay true to your God -given self.
Most of us think the goal is to get rid of anxiety.
But what if the key isn’t fighting it - it's understanding it?
This week, Dr. Alison talks with Dr. Bethany Teachman, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia and director of the PACT Lab, about what healthy anxiety looks like, why it’s actually useful, and how to stop letting it run your life.
Dr. Teachman explains how to know when anxiety is becoming a problem and shares practical ways to calm anxious thoughts, build resilience, and approach your fears with curiosity instead of control. She says,
“Anxiety is uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous, when you stop treating it like a threat, it loses its power over you.”
They also dive into how technology impacts anxiety - why doom-scrolling keeps us trapped in fear, and how digital tools, when used intentionally, can actually support mental health and resilience.
In this episode, we cover:
- The difference between healthy anxiety and unhealthy anxiety
- How to recognize when your threat response doesn’t match the situation
- Why trying to “get rid” of anxiety often makes it worse
- How reframing challenges as opportunities builds resilience
- Using technology intentionally to support your mental health
Resources Mentioned
- TYDE (Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment) — A University of Virginia initiative co-directed by Dr. Teachman focused on youth, technology, and mental health.
- MindTrails — A suite of digital and mobile interventions designed to help people manage anxiety and increase access to care, including.
I recently had the joy of joining my friend Steve Macchia from Leadership Transformations on The Discerning Leader Podcast. We talked about the deeper work of spiritual formation and what it means to lead from a centered and discerning heart. Leadership Transformations has been a shaping influence in my own journey—especially through their Emmaus program, a two-year cohort that deeply formed me in the practices of formational leadership. If you’d like to receive ongoing encouragement for your own soul—weekly reflections and practices for deepening your formation, discernment, and renewal—I recommend subscribing to their free weekly email, PATHWAYS, at leadershiptransformations.org/pathways.
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
If you liked this episode, you’ll love:
Episode 129: Understanding Your Anxiety
Episode 54: Can I Pray My Anxiety Away?
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT:
What is a healthy understanding of anxiety and at what point does anxiety become a
problem? Anxiety is uncomfortable but not dangerous. The level of danger is not
matching our threat response and our anxiety response. We can learn to recognize that
things can be challenges rather than threats. It completely shifts how we respond to
them.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. Today,
we have an incredible conversation with a renowned expert on anxiety, Dr.
Bethany Teachman. She's a leading researcher whose work sits right at the intersection
of psychology, technology, technology, and emotional health. She's a professor of
clinical psychology at the University of Virginia, where Bethany directs the program
for anxiety, cognition, and treatment. It's called the PACT Lab. And today,
you're going to hear just her take on what anxiety is, how it affects all of us,
how we learn to regulate anxiety and understand the difference between normal,
healthy anxiety, and the kind of anxiety that begins to debilitate us and take over
our lives. She talks about the thoughts and feelings that happen beneath our
conscious awareness and how we can begin to identify them and actually take control
or command of our anxiety instead of it taking control of us. At the PAC Lab,
Bethany and her team are asking some really interesting questions. Like, why do we
get stuck in patterns of anxious thinking or avoidance? How do these loops keep us
trapped in fear that is unnecessary? And most importantly, how can we learn to
change them? And what was so fascinating to me about this conversation is they're
not just studying these questions in a lab. They're using real life people, kids,
college students. They're in conversation with them and trying to figure out how to
pair good technology with real needs to help people understand their anxiety and take
charge of it in healthy ways. Their goal is to make evidence -based interventions
more accessible to anyone who needs them. And at the end of the episode, she's
going to share with us just where you can go to find some of these resources
yourself without the big barriers that we often find with things like cost and
accessibility and transportation or even the stigma that can come with seeking mental
health care. She has some really fascinating insights into doom scrolling and social
media and some of the compulsive poll we feel to keep reading the bad news or
staying online even when it's stressing us out. Her insights are really interesting,
reminding us that technology can be a big part of the problem, but it can also
become a part of the solution when we use it intentionally. She really gets into
how we can learn to not escape our anxiety. We wouldn't want to. We actually need
it to, but to better understand it, how to regulate, how to let it work for us
instead of against us. So please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Bethany Teachman.
Dr. Alison Cook (00:31.79)
Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing your expertise. You've got such amazing expertise on anxiety, which is just so important for all of us. So just first, I'm so thrilled that you're here.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (00:48.134)
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
Dr. Alison Cook (00:50.25)
Yeah, thanks for your time. So I would love to start, Bethany, at a really high level. One of the things I really appreciate about your work is that you normalize anxiety, that anxiety itself is not the enemy, that there's in fact a healthy level of anxiety. Could you start by kind of orienting us to what is a healthy understanding of anxiety and at what point does anxiety become
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (01:07.154)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (01:17.198)
a problem, whether it's for me or for my kids or for a loved one.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (01:21.21)
No, absolutely. It's a great question because anxiety is actually a very adaptive emotion. some people look at me like I'm crazy when I initially say that, because of course it doesn't feel very good, but it is our body's danger signal. So if a bear was chasing us in the wood, it'd be really good to get anxious, right? So that we can get out of the way and not be in danger's way in that sense. And the same thing comes up in our daily life, right? So anxiety serves to tell us that something is threatening and we may need to like mobilize some
resources to manage that threat. The tricky part is that beautiful alarm system that our body has sometimes goes off too often and we start to have a false alarm system. So what happens is that the level of danger
is not matching our threat response and our anxiety response. So we're overreacting to the level of actual danger in the environment and we're thinking there's danger when it's not really such a serious situation. And so when we move into the like clinical level where somebody has an anxiety disorder, that's where people are regularly having this false alarm that's going off. And we're seeing that they have a pattern of high levels of anxiety that are occurring frequently.
and that are getting in the way of them meeting their life goals. So it's really when we start to see that impairment that we really start to worry.
Dr. Alison Cook (02:44.908)
That is so helpful. I love the idea of a bear. There are times where we want that signal. So I was thinking about this interview and I was at the gym and I started going to the gym again. I haven't gone in years. have always, much of my life struggled with a certain level of social anxiety. I wouldn't have known to call it that. And there was a particular person I kept running into and I was aware, I became aware, my nervous system, and this is where I'm curious, it the...
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (03:03.004)
Sure.
Dr. Alison Cook (03:14.168)
thoughts in my mind, is it the feeling? But whatever was happening in my body was registering, I have to stop going to the gym. And I knew that was irrational. I just had to work through the awkwardness of, I'm running into somebody I know. I have to figure out how to interact with them in this space where it's out of context and I don't know, do they wanna talk to me? Do I wanna, you know? And all of that kind of ratcheted up to an over.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (03:22.673)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (03:31.836)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (03:41.185)
index on I can just never go to the gym again. And I know enough right now to know, well, that's silly. You know, I just have to figure this out. But it was, I was thinking about that. I thought that that can happen to people, right? Where that, that, so what is happening inside there? What piece of that is anxiety?
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (03:46.193)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (03:57.976)
Yeah, it all is and it's a
Dr. Alison Cook (04:01.495)
Okay.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (04:03.42)
I love the example you gave and your initial questions was is that a thought, is that a feeling, what's going on there? And the answer is it's all of the above. So the model of therapy that I tend to work from is cognitive behavioral therapy. And it starts with this kind of silly idea of a triangle and at one point is thoughts and another point is feelings and another point is behavior. And the reason is that they're all very much interconnected. And so you described your reaction as silly and I would say instead it's not silly, it's that it's sensible given the way that
Dr. Alison Cook (04:07.533)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (04:33.364)
you are responding to the situation. So whether you were perfectly conscious of it or not, you had a reaction when you saw that person at the gym of, I'm not going to know what to say, they're not going to want to talk to me, I'm going to say something really awkward, that you know, I don't know what your particular version was, but there's a flood of thoughts that happen in those situations. Now, if you take as sort of fact this idea that this person's going to evaluate me negatively, I'm going to mess this up, I'm going to be really awkward,
then it makes perfect sense that your reaction was, gotta get out of here. I don't want to go to the gym and be in this situation. Imagine instead that your reaction was, it might be a little awkward, but like I'll say hi and if it goes badly, like who really cares? The sun will come up tomorrow. Like I've had plenty of awkward conversations, right? So if we can reduce the importance of that, the likelihood that it's going to be catastrophic.
Dr. Alison Cook (05:07.404)
Yeah, yeah, good point.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (05:26.5)
then you stay at the gym. So it's not that your reaction is crazy in some way or silly, it's that because you're interpreting the situation in a certain way, because you're interpreting that physiological activation that you're having when you feel anxious, it makes you feel like you have to leave. And so if we can shift that initial like sense making of the situation, then you don't have the same feeling that you have to leave. So it's the thoughts, it's the feelings and behaviors all connected.
Dr. Alison Cook (05:50.562)
Gotcha.
So what I think I hear you saying is it's that initial reactivity or reaction, whatever that is, is in and of itself not the problem, it's how we make sense of it.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (06:05.286)
Yeah, so there is nothing wrong with getting anxious. So I'm a person who has a huge startle response and you know, my kids love to tease me and like, you know, jump scare me or whatever and I will every time have a big reaction. That's not under my control. I just do. So it was very challenging when my youngest was learning to drive. She did not want to practice with me in the car because I would have barely big reactions, right? Can't help it. But...
Dr. Alison Cook (06:11.019)
Okay.
Dr. Alison Cook (06:29.067)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (06:31.376)
What I'm able to do is recognize like, yeah, that's Bethany's jump scare reaction. It's not a sign that something is actually dangerous or that I'm under threat. So I don't escalate that alarm response. So we can't fully control all the time whether we have some alarm response.
Dr. Alison Cook (06:38.958)
Interesting.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (06:48.198)
but we can decide what we make of it and which ones we decide are meaningful alarms we want to react to and which ones we just say, okay, this is my awkward feeling at the gym, that's what happens for me, but not the end of the world because you've probably felt awkward in lots of situations. I certainly have, right? And so it's only if we think that's a terrible thing to have that experience.
Dr. Alison Cook (07:10.35)
did you get there? What are the steps from going? How do you walk people through that discernment? There's a discernment in that, right? Because it presumes that I can trust myself to know what is actually worthy of my fear response. There's danger, stranger danger, whatever it is, or, my kid who's learning how to drive is about to hit someone where I need to have a big response. And this is me.
This is just me, my system is more this way. You know, it's one thing, I guess, when you're driving in a car, kind of the examples we're giving, but there are situations, I think, where people aren't sure how to understand and trust the wisdom of their body. How do we start to build that with ourselves and with this normal anxiety that we all have?
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (07:49.362)
100%.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (08:01.732)
It's a skill and it really is a practice thing. So I talk to people about like you're building a new muscle and it's not going to be like easy and natural and all those kinds of things. But I encourage a few different strategies for people. So when you're trying to figure it out, ask, know, look around. What are others doing in that situation? What would you say to a friend in that situation? So there's things that we can do to help us recognize like where does our reaction fall on the continuum? But I actually think there's like three buckets of reaction.
Dr. Alison Cook (08:28.834)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (08:31.686)
we can have there. And so you're not limited to one strategy. And you know happy to go in more detail but there's things you can do to shift the thoughts that you're having in the situation to make them less catastrophic and less threatening. There's things that you can actively do to help you accept those thoughts so that you observe them but don't have a big reaction to them. And then there's things that you can do that make those thoughts not mean as much. So it's not that you don't have them or that you think they're great it's just that you decide they're not that important. So for example,
I bet some of your listeners at some point already in our conversation have had a thought of what am I going to get for lunch? When am I going to pick up this thing from the grocery store? You know, whatever it happens to be. Our mind has lots of thoughts that come through it. But we decide which are the ones we need to respond to right now, which are the ones we think are really meaningful, which are consistent with our goals and our values. So there's skills that you can learn that can help you decide in the moment, do I want to think about this thought in a different way? Do I want to accept it?
reacting in a huge way or do I want to say it's just not that important and so the premise behind this is like you get to be a mini scientist. It's trial and error you get to make the choice of like here's what I think is going on how would I gather evidence how would I test that is this working for me or not working for me so it isn't one skill we get a battery or repertoire of options to try to manage those hard feelings and hard thoughts.
Dr. Alison Cook (09:58.029)
Yeah, I love that. And you talk a lot about that skill of becoming your own scientist, sort of a student of your own anxiety, really. A key feature of that is curiosity, not self-criticism. Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (10:05.127)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (10:13.65)
Absolutely. Absolutely. So we want people to be curious about their own reactions and to figure out which of those reactions we really want to hang on to and which are ones that they want to shift. And also curious about others' reactions. So that can help us also when we're talking to someone who has a really different view than the view that we have. And so if we can approach it of trying to understand our and others' worldviews,
it becomes a lot less threatening, right? So if we look at thoughts as ideas to be played with rather than as like, if you have the thought, therefore it's true, therefore it's a fact, it takes some of the pressure off and bringing that viewpoint of curiosity is how we do that.
Dr. Alison Cook (10:58.712)
The thought is just neutral. It's just there. We get to assign meaning to it. I've heard you say, and I thought this was interesting, for folks who really, for whom their anxiety has escalated and they have panic attacks, they spiral into anxiety. I've heard you say, and I want to talk about that because number one, I think the skill takes time to develop.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (11:23.43)
Sure.
Dr. Alison Cook (11:26.498)
Well, I've got about three questions in this. I'm gonna give you a bunch of thoughts and let you break it down. Because immediately I went to, for folks who've dealt with anxiety for long time, it could feel like, can't do that. Like I'm too ratcheted up to be able to calmly observe my thought and understand what it is. So a couple of thoughts in that. One,
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (11:28.85)
You sure?
Dr. Alison Cook (11:49.325)
I've heard you say that when you've worked with people who have panic, they know they're getting to the point of probably not having panic attacks anymore when they realize the panic attack won't hurt them to some degree. Am I saying that correctly? How do you say that?
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (12:08.245)
absolutely. So what we teach people is anxiety is uncomfortable but not dangerous. And it's this idea and you know it's going to sound crazy but when I start doing a panic treatment for someone who comes in I say you're not going to believe me but
for this when this treatment is successful you're not going to care that much whether or not you have a panic attack because as soon as you don't care that much whether you have a panic attack you actually stop having them because you've taken away the control and the power because right now for people who have anxiety disorders often what's happening is that the fear of fear the fear of becoming anxious is a huge part of what's driving it and that means that you think anxiety is dangerous you have to make decisions based on anxiety it takes away your choice
Dr. Alison Cook (12:33.549)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (12:43.51)
Yes. Yes.
Dr. Alison Cook (12:49.698)
Yes.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (12:53.044)
all of those kinds of things. And if you learn how to see anxiety is just like a wave of emotion, it's got uncomfortable parts but it won't stay that way. And for those who are having false alarms, it's not really reliably signaling danger for you, then it doesn't have the same power over you. So it's not that I say you're gonna love the feeling of anxiety, none of us like it. But when you realize it's uncomfortable but not dangerous, unless there actually is the bear chasing you, which is pretty rare, then it stops having the same power over
Dr. Alison Cook (13:19.95)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (13:23.1)
you and then that is the best way for anxiety to come down. So when we actively say we must reduce anxiety, we have to get rid of this, it tends to actually fuel the anxiety because it's putting all this pressure on it and saying anxiety is this really bad dangerous thing that we can't handle and we teach people that you can actually tolerate anxiety and that's the best way to make it go down.
Dr. Alison Cook (13:46.777)
That's so good that it's uncomfortable, but not dangerous. And the fear of it, I'm thinking about kids, anxiety about school or making a new friend, or it is uncomfortable. It is, we are learning to tolerate the discomfort of it, which paradoxically begins to reduce the anxiety. That's so good.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (13:58.161)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (14:09.091)
Exactly.
And you know, one of the things that we do to help them, and we do a lot of different strategies, but one of the things we do, you talked about going to the gym. So I'm guessing your heart rate went up. I'm guessing you got sweaty at the gym. I'm guessing, you know, if you...
Dr. Alison Cook (14:21.866)
huh.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (14:25.83)
did a run you haven't done for a long time on the treadmill, your legs were a little bit shaky, right? So we're actually like pretty familiar with lots of the sensations that are associated with anxiety. So then we have to look at what meaning are you assigning to them? Because when you have those sensations at the gym or you get jittery after two cups of coffee or you know, whatever it happens to be,
Dr. Alison Cook (14:38.828)
Yes.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (14:46.98)
you have another explanation for the symptoms that you're feeling and so you don't panic about them. You don't escalate them. You're like, I'm feeling jittery because I had two cups of coffee. So if we can practice getting more comfortable with those sensations, not liking them, they still feel uncomfortable but realizing, this is my anxiety reaction but it's a false alarm, then it's not so different than the exercise leading to it, the coffee leading to it, or anything else.
Dr. Alison Cook (14:56.43)
Hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (15:03.128)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (15:09.612)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (15:13.344)
Yep. And it doesn't, it's not just because I have it doesn't mean I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing. And that's where it begins to drive our lives. I thought of another, I was thinking about you talk about it. There's a real parallel hood of resilience. It strikes me. You're learning. I was thinking that I just took the podcast to video. I've talked about this a little bit and you know, it's a whole new skill set. It's hard. My anxiety spiked. You know, I'm trying to figure it out. And I started thinking.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (15:19.566)
Exactly.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (15:27.154)
100%. 100%. Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (15:42.234)
I shouldn't do this. I've made a mistake, right? And then I have enough tools, I'm like, what if this is just hard? It's uncomfortable. It's a learning curve, which is such a powerful reframe.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (15:43.962)
Right. Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (15:52.252)
basically.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (15:58.034)
Absolutely, if we can learn to recognize that things can be challenges rather than threats, it completely shifts how we respond to them. I, you know, I do a lot of research and I teach and all those kinds of things and I half joke but I actually mean I'm in a job where I have the joy of feeling stupid every single day. I'm surrounded by people who are know things I don't know, they push me to like try things I don't know how to do, they ask hard questions, the work we do is
And I've learned to embrace that feeling of stupidity because it's a reminder to me that I am growing and learning and trying hard things. Because what's the alternative? If I feel comfortable all the time, it's probably not much change that's happening. There's probably not much growth that's happening, right? So that shift you made of going to video, like that's an example of like, you know, there's this really nice concept in psychology of desirable difficulty and it's this idea of like
Dr. Alison Cook (16:44.344)
Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Dr. Alison Cook (16:56.238)
Hmm.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (16:58.108)
there's a really beautiful sweet spot where we can take where we're at and move a level that feels hard for us to do but it's not wildly out of our skill set, right? So it's the like, I haven't been doing much running but I bet in like two months I could be ready to do a 5k.
Dr. Alison Cook (17:09.452)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (17:15.843)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (17:16.538)
If you haven't been doing running, don't say that in a month you're doing a marathon. Like that's a, you know, that's, that's not desirable difficulty. That's impossible. So, or pretty unrealistic at any rate. So it's that sweet spot of like challenging ourselves. And so that's what we do with folks is we help them realize like, what are the steps to keep adding to that desirable difficulty so that they learn? Cause I'm not going to convince them. There's no words I'm going to say that are going to magically make somebody believe they can do these things they didn't think they could do. But we introduce those
Dr. Alison Cook (17:20.856)
Yep.
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (17:46.404)
difficulty steps where they now start showing themselves that they are way more capable than they thought they were, that they could tolerate anxiety in ways that they didn't realize that they could and then that's what helps them decide maybe I'll take another step here.
Dr. Alison Cook (18:01.036)
love that.
I love that. It's a very much in motion and it makes sense because anxiety kind of keeps you stuck. And so it makes sense that the antidote would be small, calculated, smart, strategic steps through it. I want to ask you a couple of questions because you're in the research. You're right at the cutting edge of all of this. And there's so much about anxiety in the news on a couple of different fronts. Number one, I've heard you talk about this, but there's so much talk about sort of an anxiety epidemic.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (18:08.146)
100%.
Exactly.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (18:17.071)
Exactly.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (18:33.616)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (18:34.184)
so much of an uptick in anxiety, especially in our younger kids. What are your thoughts on that? Are we more anxious? Are we just naming our anxiety more? Are we diagnosing it more? What are your thoughts on that?
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (18:50.258)
think it's a really good and really tricky question. So my best guess is that we have a bit of both going on. So what I mean by that is there are some signals that suggest we are in fact having increases in anxiety in the last, you know, set of years, particularly among young people. And so that is a significant area for concern. Some portion of that increase appears to be actual increases in the prevalence rates. Some is likely also due to people being more open about talking about it. So that really
Dr. Alison Cook (18:56.993)
Okay.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (19:20.242)
positive side of reductions in stigma. We also have changes in our health care system that have led to more screening for anxiety and so we're more likely to catch those problems. From my perspective those are all really positive things that are leading to those numbers going up because we want to know that those challenges are there. We want to catch them early because we're better at treating if we catch things early. The other piece that I'm going to say is going to sound a bit contradictory which is that I have thought there was a
know, epidemic of mental health challenges for a really long time, not just since we've had the anxious generation come out or all the other things that have been in the conversation. Really, you COVID brought a lot of this conversation to light in ways that I think have been really helpful.
It's not actually a new problem. So yes, we have some increases, but it's not like it was okay before. For a very, very long time, we've had a mental health care system that hasn't been meeting the needs. In fact, we could literally double the number of mental health providers, double, and we still would not meet the mental health care needs.
Dr. Alison Cook (20:09.731)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (20:26.096)
Yeah, so again, you know, it's not that this is a brand new problem and we were doing super well before. So yes, there's an increase and I'm glad it's getting the attention that it's getting, but this conversation should have been happening for a very long time.
Dr. Alison Cook (20:33.037)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (20:42.24)
Yeah, that's so interesting because also when there's not, when you think about prevention, a lot of what you're describing is almost like when we don't have the basic tools, it also makes the problem worse, which makes the demand greater. Whereas you're right, it's not like so many of my listeners and I talk about this, we just didn't have any tools for emotional management or emotional regulation or anxiety regulation.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (21:05.884)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (21:10.042)
And it's not even that there needed to be a full-blown disorder. It's just, I didn't know how to manage basic. And so we're still missing, we're still barely catching up with basic education, let alone with where... So Bethany, when you say that, when you talk about this deficit of providers, it leads me into sort of the big thing of what you guys are doing there at UVA, is kind of trying to find, use technology to help people
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (21:16.017)
right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (21:21.625)
Exactly.
Dr. Alison Cook (21:40.225)
understand their anxiety, implement some of what we're talking about, get skills. So I want to ask you about that. And I also want to ask you, because you did a really interesting, there was, you've been quoted a lot on doom scrolling. And I'm very curious about that because, one of the things, so let's start there. One of the things, you know, we, you know, I think anecdotally tossed around, it's in the anxious generation is the intersection of technology and anxiety.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (21:53.894)
Yes.
Dr. Alison Cook (22:09.782)
Right? And this is why was so interested to talk with you because there's so much concern about whether it's social media, whether it's AI and our kids turning to chat bots or us people turning to chat bots in ways that aren't healthy, in ways that are spiking anxiety on one hand and then maybe not kind of caring for it on the other. And yet technology, just like with anything, can also be super helpful in
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (22:14.758)
Yeah, 100%.
Dr. Alison Cook (22:39.522)
filling in some of these gaps where we don't have enough providers. So talk to me a little bit, I just kind of threw all of that at you, but talk to me a little bit about, you're kind of on the cutting edge of the both and there, you what's not good about technology and what's really promising about it.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (22:46.768)
No, absolutely.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (22:52.401)
Yeah, thank you.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (22:56.315)
Yeah.
No, it's a great set of questions. So I'll start and then tell me if I'm not hitting on some of the pieces that you're interested in. So I have the great good fortune at University of Virginia to co-direct an initiative that's called Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment or TIDE. And it was started because of exactly the issues that you're talking about is that sometimes we sort of fall into camps of everything to do with technology is terrible and is destroying individual's brains or the category of, hey, if we just
Dr. Alison Cook (23:01.591)
Okay.
Dr. Alison Cook (23:21.719)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (23:27.124)
Digital technology is to solve all of humanity's problems and solve all of the mental health challenges. And I think that those conversations are not significantly nuanced and that actually we need to bring those two sides together and have a much deeper and more interesting conversation. And so Tide tries to look at two questions at the same time. The first is recognizing that youth in particular are spending so much of their time on screens and so we need to understand it better. And that means understanding the ways it harms us.
but also the ways that it helps us because it has been shown to also have benefits in addition to harms. And what is it actually just another developmental context and not, you know, having a huge impact. And then secondly, meet people where they are. So given people are using screens so much, can we leverage that as a way to increase access to evidence-based interventions that are going to help people? So with TIDE, we're really trying to do work on both of those sides and sometimes bringing them together. And a big part of what we do because we're
Dr. Alison Cook (24:18.326)
Interesting.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (24:26.93)
you know, we tend to focus on those teenage years, so adolescence and, you know, emerging adulthood, those challenging years where we know technology use is really high and it's the onset of lots of mental health challenges. And so we're trying to bring those together and really center youth's voice in figuring out what's going to work for them. So instead of, you know, having adults alone decide here's the way that social media should be regulated or here's what you need to do for your mental health, we're trying to partner
Dr. Alison Cook (24:40.674)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (24:56.98)
with teens to learn what do they think is actually going to work for them? What supports do they need? What will they actually use? And I'm happy to talk about different examples of how we're trying to do that. But again, you can take a problem like doom scrolling. That's a lovely example, right? Where people go down this rabbit hole and for readers who are less familiar with it, it's like you get you start on something negative and then you go story after story after story and it tends to really hurt your mood. It leads to us not sleeping well, all kinds of challenges and it kind of distorts
Dr. Alison Cook (25:19.96)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (25:26.92)
our sense of like how safe is the world, how much threat am I under, all those kinds of things. And so there are strategies, there's recent research that came out just in the last couple of weeks that shows that you can actually shift the algorithm and what your feed is by reliably starting out your day looking intentionally at some positive news articles, right? That hope scrolling idea. So there's things that you can do that may help in those ways. Tonight we are having our youth advisory board. So these are high schools
Dr. Alison Cook (25:29.571)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (25:45.974)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (25:56.612)
students who advise us on how we can do our work better in a way that will meet their needs. And we're developing with the youth an intervention that is designed to help youth make less negative social comparisons when they use social media. So one of the things that probably makes time spent on social media damaging when it does have those negative effects is when people do a lot of thinking, I'm not as attractive, I'm not as accomplished, I'm not as smart, I don't have
Dr. Alison Cook (25:58.424)
Mm.
Dr. Alison Cook (26:11.155)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (26:23.491)
Yep.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (26:26.536)
as many friends, don't, you know, all of those kinds of things. All the I'm not as good as.
Dr. Alison Cook (26:31.149)
Yep.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (26:31.812)
And so we've been working with teens and college students and they're actually developing a new intervention, a new app that's designed to actually help teens do less of that negative social comparison. So again, we're taking that same question of like, are the impacts of social media? When is it helpful? When is it harmful? And then how can we leverage that same time they're spending on screens to make it something that's more adaptive and helpful for them?
Dr. Alison Cook (26:43.31)
Hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (26:51.022)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (26:59.342)
Hmm, wow, so kind of trying to work with the, yeah, rather than, yeah. How do, so that's a good question. How do you, like, how would I, you know, think I'll use myself as an example, you know, if I grew up in a social media area, I think I would have struggled. I would have struggled with it. What are,
ways if we're parenting kids or we ourselves are struggling with that loop of negative comparison, you the doom scrolling, you know, I'll know if I'm really tired, it's almost like I'll go look for something, you know, it's almost like it's a weird kind of thing that happens on there. What are some tools that I love what you're saying about kind of try to jimmy your algorithm and actually feed yourself toward hope but
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (27:41.927)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (27:52.379)
Right, right.
Dr. Alison Cook (27:54.85)
But what are some other tools that you see working from that research?
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (27:58.834)
Yeah.
Absolutely, part of why we're doing this research is that we have a lot to figure out still, so I don't think we have the perfect answers. But I think, interestingly, some of the things that we do offline to kind of help with this can also help us online. So I had a graduate student, Alana Lattis, who did a project of trying to do an intervention of helping people to shift their thinking when they're doing those negative social comparisons online. So things that we do offline can also help us in those situations. But also, know, youth themselves are really good at thinking this through.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:02.39)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:20.276)
interesting. Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (28:29.188)
So, and it doesn't mean they don't need parental guidance and all those, you know, and regulations. They absolutely do. But, you know, my youngest daughter would say when she was with a group of friends and if they would sort of resort to like just sitting on their phones, one of them would say to the other like stop being a screen-ager and then they would kind of re-engage and you know, it's kind of cute or whatever and they don't do it reliably in all the best ways. But like they're figuring out also ways to increase what I call their digital literacy, right? Their ability to make tools work for them.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:32.366)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:48.994)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:53.613)
Right.
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (28:59.028)
Students are also telling me about creative things they do using like the brick or other methods that help them turn on and off certain apps for like times they want to use them, times that they don't, lots of people set alarms, all those kinds of things. But it's also some trial and error. So whether it's frankly teens or adults, because it's not like this is actually just a teen issue, even though that's what's in the media. The truth is this is like a human issue, right?
Dr. Alison Cook (29:09.955)
Yep.
Dr. Alison Cook (29:19.17)
Yeah, totally.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (29:23.728)
So, you know, again, just like I talked about before, I encourage people to do trial and error. So maybe it's that, you know, if your use of screens is making really interrupting your sleep, then set a time after which you're not using the device and don't keep it in the bedroom. If on the other hand, that's not really where the issue is, is that you're doing doom scrolling in a different kind of way, then you might decide that like the way you're going to get news is to like look at trusted sources for a period of time in the morning and a period of time after work and other
Dr. Alison Cook (29:51.064)
Mm-hmm.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (29:53.604)
otherwise don't look at news sources that are like making you feel really miserable. Like find that balance where you stay informed but don't go down the rabbit hole. So it's not a single solution that's going to work for people. We have to look at what are your vulnerabilities, trial and error of what's working for you, and then recognize that again we need to empower people to figure out what's going to work for them. And so from a parenting strategy a big part of that is like keep it an open conversation. So is the only time is a
Dr. Alison Cook (29:56.109)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:01.08)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:14.06)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:21.464)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (30:23.708)
you communicate with your child about their screen use is yelling and saying this is destroying you. They're not going to tell you when they struggle. They're not going to tell you when they hit the hard parts. So make it an ongoing open conversation about how are you using your device and what ways does it make you happy and what ways does it not? How is it helping you with social connection? How is it hurting it, right?
Dr. Alison Cook (30:29.326)
get off. Right.
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:41.74)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:46.604)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (30:47.184)
normalize that conversation and you have to have it a bunch because as kids develop what they're doing on their devices is changing a lot.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:55.054)
Yeah, and it could be different for different kids to your point. It's not a one size fits all. And so you just have to really stay in conversation with them. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, okay, so just kind of as we're, you know, I love this theme, you know, I'm hearing, you know, first of all, there's not a one, knowing yourself, you have to know your own inner signal.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (31:18.738)
Absolutely.
Dr. Alison Cook (31:23.254)
that again, and it reminds me even with the doom scrolling or the technology, like this doesn't feel good. There's anxiety here, whether it's, whatever it is, that is not, and again, I'm not shaming myself for that, I'm noticing that. then how do I, then my sort of the skill is how do I reframe what's happening?
So maybe again, it's not, I'm such, what's wrong with me that I can't get off social media? It's, you know, I wonder what's going on here. You know, maybe I could set it aside and try to get curious, have a conversation with somebody in real life about, you know, why am I drawn to it? What's not good about it? is, you know, again, it strikes me that there's a real process of self-awareness of,
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (32:06.034)
Absolutely.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (32:13.232)
Right?
Dr. Alison Cook (32:18.31)
recognizing the cues. Anything else you would add to that just sort of from as someone listening, even, you know, driving in their car, you know, like a pause, you know, what, what, how can we, because all of this, it strikes me, it comes back to, I think of, I think of my listeners, I think we talk a lot about the fruit of the spirit, right? When you know, you're kind of living aligned, right? With that, you know, and I think about the fruit of the spirit of self-control, not in a controlling, rigid way, but in a, I can take command of myself.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (32:24.293)
Absolutely.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (32:37.159)
Mm-hmm.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (32:47.986)
Absolutely, and no, I think you're exactly right. And know, two things tied to that.
Dr. Alison Cook (32:48.236)
Right? Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (32:53.87)
I think of it as intentionality and I think we're talking about something very similar. instead of it being about this just happens to me, three hours go by and I realize like all I've done is swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, That's not using it as a tool to work for you. That's letting the tool drive you. Intentionality is about, and whether it's in the screen area or in lots of areas of our life, is about thinking about what are our goals? What do we want out of this? How do we want to engage? And monitoring, is it working for us?
Dr. Alison Cook (32:56.088)
Hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:04.898)
Yeah
Dr. Alison Cook (33:10.595)
Yep.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:15.926)
Yep. Yep.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (33:23.814)
meet our goals or is it getting in the way of meeting our goals? So maybe I feel like you know what I just want to zone out for an hour. Fine, zone out for an hour. But at other times I'm like my gosh I have you know this project I have to do and need to you know make you know whatever else it is that I need to do. And so I want to think about
Dr. Alison Cook (33:25.826)
Yeah. Yep.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:32.406)
Yeah, sure.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (33:43.708)
What are my goals and the way I use technology like everything else, trying to think intentionally about how I want to do that. The other piece though that I think goes to the comments you were making about how we ask ourselves, how is this fitting in our life, right? Is it aligned with, you know, whether the spirit, the values, the goals, all of those pieces is, you know, one of the things we know is that it's not so much when we look at the technology space, it's not so much actually about like how many hours do you spend on a device.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:50.648)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:58.273)
Yeah.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (34:13.742)
It's about what are you not doing in the rest of your life because of the effects. So are you not, you mentioned like do you reach out to a friend in person. If you're not doing that, if you're not sleeping, if you're not exercising, if you're not in nature, if you're not relaxing, if you're not having fun, you know. So we need to look at do you have that balance of healthy activities in your life?
Dr. Alison Cook (34:16.674)
Right. Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (34:27.373)
Yep.
Dr. Alison Cook (34:34.894)
Yep.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (34:36.048)
Technology is one of the things that can interfere with that. It's not the only one, right? You'd say the same thing to someone who is working 18 hours a day of like, probably isn't healthy for you because look at, it's not that work is bad. It's look at all the things you're not having in your life that probably are needed for you to be a healthy, balanced person that feels like you're being fulfilled and living your purposeful life and all those things, right? So it's what's not happening is actually at least and probably more important than
sometimes what is happening.
Dr. Alison Cook (35:08.29)
Yeah, that's really helpful, both in our own lives. Am I at a balance? Like to your point, like if I'm scrolling for half an hour and it's kind of silly and laughing at funny TikTok videos and I'm living a balanced life, you know, who cares? Or our kids, you know, I could imagine, right? Again, to that point of just being really intentional. That's a great, a great word. How, know, Bethany, you guys are doing a lot of work to get in the PAC lab, I know is doing a lot of work to try to connect people.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (35:20.466)
Absolutely.
Dr. Alison Cook (35:37.785)
who can't get the care that they need for anxiety with web-based digital resources that are designed for this work. This is not just a shot in the dark. You're trying to get people really high level care when there is, when we can't get to a provider or a clinician, how could people connect to the work that you're doing or learn more about it?
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (35:46.865)
Right.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (36:06.544)
Yeah, so two things. I encourage people to go to Tide's website, is tide.virginia.edu. So it's T-Y-D-E. And you can see lots of information about some of the things that we work on there. And then they should feel free to reach out to me and I'm happy to share resources with them. We have a suite of digital interventions called MindTrails where we try to help people get connected and we're launching those at different times. We have previously had a website that, you know, we were fortunate, had a lot of folks visiting. It was used in
85 plus countries around the world of offering these anxiety interventions. We've now shifted to a suite of mobile apps so that we can actually personalize the interventions in different ways and we are developing different apps for different communities. So we have one for teens that's different than what we do for adults. We have one that's called MindTrails Espanol for those who are Spanish speaking. We're launching one for patients with Parkinson's and Huntington's disease who experience anxiety. So we're kind of developing these different digital
that can allow people to increase their access to care and get the sort of resources that they need in the moment that they need. And I should say I get to work with an amazing array of collaborators in engineering and computer science and education and nursing to help do this work and try to meet the needs of different communities.
Dr. Alison Cook (39:28.462)
I just love that you guys are working on that and trying to create something that is meaningful for people. And thank you so much just for sharing your time and the benefit of your wisdom with so many people and with us today.
Bethany Teachman (she/her) (39:44.084)
Thank you for the great discussion. appreciate it.
Dr. Alison Cook (39:46.274)
Yeah, thanks so much.
Dr. Alison Cook (39:53.999)
Well,
It can happen so fast - you feel grateful one moment, and five minutes on Instagram later you’re suddenly feeling small or behind. But what if comparison isn’t the problem itself, but a messenger?
Dr. Alison explores how comparison, when we pause to listen, can actually reveal our deepest longings and lead us back to connection with God, with others, and with ourselves. She explains why comparison is wired into us, what it’s trying to show us, and how to shift from competition to curiosity and compassion.
This conversation invites you to slow down, notice what stirs inside you when comparison shows up, and remember: your story is unfolding at its own sacred pace.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why comparison isn’t always toxic, and what it’s really telling you
- How to move from calibration to condemnation (and back again)
- The two types of comparison
- A simple three-step practice to use when you find yourself comparing
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
Here are some other episodes you might like :
Episode 37: The Problem with Toxic Thinking
Episode 140: If You Struggle with Guilt and Second-Guessing Yourself, This Will Set You Free
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
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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.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
TRANSCRIPT:
Honestly, comparison is so often a longing for something that we see reflected in
someone else, but that longing is so important for us to pay attention to. Where
comparison leads depends on how we relate to it. Again, it's not the comparison in
itself that's the problem. It's the fruit that it bears in your soul. When it's
healthy, it can help us tune in to our surroundings and find our place among
others. But it's when we move from that calibration to condemnation. When the goal
shifts from connection to competition, that we start to lose the grounding in who we
are. What is this longing trying to show me? What is it revealing about what
matters most to my own soul?
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It's funny how I can feel perfectly content with my life one minute, grateful even,
and then five minutes on Instagram later, I feel behind inadequate or invisible. It
happens so fast. Maybe for you, it's not social media. Maybe it's that friend who
seems to have the kind of marriage you wish you had, or the sibling who always
lands on her feet. Maybe it's someone in your church who seems to have endless
blessings while you're just trying to hang on. Comparison has a way of sneaking in
quietly. It shows up in our friendships, in our families, even in our faith. One
moment we feel grounded, connected, confident in who we are in the next, that inner
voice starts whispering, you're falling behind, she's better than you are. You're not
good enough. The truth is, Comparison isn't really about envy.
It's about longing. The longing to feel seen, valued, and secure in our own story
and in our own lives. So as we begin today, I want to invite you to slow down
for a moment as you're listening or as you're watching and notice, who do you tend
to compare yourself to? Who's that person that stirs up that inner voice of
comparison. And most importantly, what messages do you hear about yourself when you
notice that person? For those of you watching the video, you'll see a vase of mums
here on the screen. Some are in full bloom, right? These red ones took a while to
come out, and I love it when they come out in full bloom. They're so beautiful.
But you'll also see some of these buds haven't opened up at all, right?
A little while back, we had asked you to share about your experiences around
comparison, and we heard from so many of you, and here's what a few of you had to
say. Hi, Allison, this is Julie from Connecticut, and I was calling to follow up
about your question about where I compare myself to others. And one area I noticed
in working through some difficult relationships in the past several years is kind of
comparing myself to some people who are maybe not acting ways that would be healthy
and kind of constantly trying to criticize myself, like, see your acting just as
badly as they are. Hi, my name is Katie from South Mississippi.
I often compare myself to where others are in their spiritual journey,
and I know what God has placed on my heart and the future that he has for me.
I know it's great, but in the moment, in the mundane, I get lost in the daily
task of being a stay -at -home mom, and I would love to grow in faith and courage,
knowing that what God has shown me in my past for my future will come,
and I just need to trust and lean on now.
Hi, my name is Rebecca. I'm calling from Seattle, Washington. I was just listening
to your podcast on comparison. And comparison has affected me psychologically,
spiritually, for most of my life. I'm pretty new to the faith. I was saved by
Jesus in January of this year after a really long, painful,
divorce, trauma, death, grief. And I had this sensation that God was holding out on
me. I would look on Instagram and I would see people getting married and pregnant
and I'm divorced I'm divorced in a one -bedroom apartment trying to make ends meet.
In that oppression of comparison, one thing that's really helped me is reflecting on
few scriptures, like, I've seen the God who sees me, and just resting in the
assurance that God has a good plan for my life. I've been anchored in the knowing
that God is going to use this season of my life, wherever I feel lack for his
glory, for his redemption. So thank you so much for speaking on this. You can hear
the thread, the common thread of comparison and the ache. So many of us feel
beneath these stories. Comparison is never really about the other person.
It's something deeper going on inside our own souls. And honestly,
comparison is so often a longing for something that we see reflected in someone
else. But that longing is so important for us to pay attention to.
This is the work of what I call taking a U -turn and noticing what's happening
inside of us as we're comparing ourselves to others. And I love how each one of
these women who shared,
that longing and gently attune to the place inside your own soul that's speaking.
Here's the truth. Comparison is wired into us. It's not a flaw. It's part of being
human. Psychologists call this social comparison theory, and I write about this in my
book. I shouldn't feel this way. Social comparison is the instinct to measure
ourselves against others. It's a way of finding belonging and safety.
We look around us at others to gauge our own sense of belonging. It's like walking
into a room full of people and realizing you didn't get the memo. I do this all
the time and I hate it when this happens. But I look around and I see that
everyone else in the room is in jeans and t -shirts and I'm standing there in heels
and a cocktail dress and wanting to literally just run and hide because I'm not in
sort of coordination with the group. And that quick scan,
right, to see what's everyone else is doing. How do I measure up? Is your nervous
system trying to find belonging? It's how our nervous system once tried to figure
out, am I okay here? Do I fit in? Am I safe in this group.
Do I belong? Think about when you start a new job or step into a new community,
maybe a small group at church or a new job or a new workout class at the gym. At
first, you kind of find yourself scanning the room. How do people interact here?
What's normal? How do things work? Do people talk to each other? Do they not? I'm
trying to figure out What are the social norms in the room? And that kind of
comparison is just natural. It's not all bad. It helps us attune to our environments
and find our places in it. You're not judging yourself or others. You're just
gathering data, right? You're gathering the information. What are the norms here? How
do I fit in here? How do I feel safe and connected? In psychology, we call this
social calibration. It's how we learn the rhythms of a group.
others to orient ourselves. We don't want to care too much,
right, about what other people think, but we do care a little. It's part of being
human. You want to have some sense that you fit in, that you understand and that
you're part of the larger whole. And here's the thing. If you do want to stand
out, right, you do want to be different than the group. You do it knowingly because
you wanted to, because you chose to, because you understood the norms and you said,
this is how I want to be different, not because you misunderstood the assignment. So
here's the bottom line. Comparison itself isn't the problem. When it's healthy,
it can help us tune in to our surroundings and find our place among others. This
is part of our biology. It's part of our wiring. It's how God made us. But it's
when we move from that calibration to condemnation, when the goal shifts from
connection to competition, that we start to lose the grounding in who we are.
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There are actually two kinds of comparison, and we saw these reflected in the
messages today. One is called upward comparison. We tend to look towards someone who
we think is ahead of us in some way. That can either inspire us or it can leave
us feeling deflated, depending on how we relate to it. The other type of comparison
is downward comparison. When we look towards someone who seems to be struggling more
than we are, and that might give us a sense of comfort, but sometimes it can feed
a sense of pride or distance or false confidence rooted in superiority,
rather in a healthy self -examination. Here's the thing. Neither of these is all bad
or all good. Again, it's not the comparison in itself that's the problem.
It's the fruit that it bears in your soul. Upward comparison,
when you look to someone who you see as ahead of you, can become an inspiration.
You see someone who's excelling in a certain way, and instead of shrinking back, You
let it wake up something really alive.
descending way, but in a deeply human way, right? Instead of judging or looking down
on or distancing, you pause and you notice. You think, gosh,
I see that they're struggling and I feel bad for them. I also am grateful in a
way that I'm not struggling in that way. I'm not there anymore. And it reminds you
to be grateful for what you have. It brings a sort of healthy humility and a
healthy gratitude of, gosh, I'm not there. I've come far.
I'm at a different place in my life. And that can be another healthy form of
comparison. When it opens your heart and it awakens empathy as well as inspiration
and it brings you closer, both to God and to others and more fully into your true
self, where you want to go with your own life. When comparison brings a good fruit
of courage or inspiration or gratitude, it's healthy. But here's the thing.
So often, and especially in this social media age, comparison starts to bear the
fruit of envy, resentment, even desolation and despair, it can also bear the fruit
of pride again. When we're divided from our own worth,
from our own love, from our own passions, from our own gifts, that's the signal
that it's time to come back home to your own soul, that something's off,
that there's work to be done inside of you. Comparison becomes a signal,
a cue. Oh my gosh, I'm not being inspired. I'm not feeling gratitude. I'm not
feeling compassion or empathy. I'm just beating up on myself. I'm just hating on
myself. I'm just feeling, you know, sort of desolate inside of myself as I see
myself in comparison to others. That's when it becomes toxic. And that's when we
have to pause and pay attention. Because it's taking us away from our own sense of
belovedness. And we forget that like those moms, right? We have our own pace,
our own path. We will bloom in our own time, but we don't want to squash those
buds that aren't quite there yet. We want to give them the good soil and the water
and the nutrients that they need to bloom in their own time.
And this is when we begin to hear that phrase that so many of you have heard.
It's called comparison becomes the thief of joy. And it's really true.
But I'm not sure that comparison is only the thief of joy. It's also the thief of
connection. Because when we're comparing ourselves negatively to other people, whether
upward or downward, we're robbing ourselves of connectedness. Instead of seeing people
as other people with whom to walk, to be inspired to more greatness or to
understand our own gratitude for where we've come and have a sense of compassion and
even a desire to lift up someone else who's struggling. We become really self
-focused, right? We become focused on our own insecurities,
our own perceived flaws. And we lose connection with other people,
with ourselves and with God. If you think about comparison, right, on a line,
right, on a line, I'm holding my hands out here if you're watching the video. At
the top of that line is the word inspiration, right? In the middle is observation.
And at the bottom is despair, right? Where comparison leads depends on how we relate
to it. When it's observation, it's just neutral. I notice something about this other
person. I notice something about this other person. I notice where they're struggling.
I notice where this person is excelling. Right. I'm making an observation. When it
moves to inspiration, it helps bring out the best of who we are. When it moves to
empathy or compassion, it helps bring out the best of who we are. but when we
judge ourselves or judge someone else, it moves down to despair.
The invitation with comparison is to stay curious. When we notice that observation,
right, when we're noticing what's going on with someone else, is to ask ourselves,
what is this longing trying to show me? What is it revealing about what matters
most to my own soul. So we've talked a little bit about the psychology of
comparison, how it's wired into us, how it can lead us toward inspiration and
gratitude, or how it can lead us away from connection toward despair.
Now I want to bring this a little deeper into the language of scripture. I think
of Psalm 139. It's such a beautiful verse that we all know. It says you are
fearfully and wonderfully made. That's not just a poetic statement,
right? That's a grounding truth. That's an ontological reality of your being. You are
beautifully and wonderfully made. It means that your pace and your wiring and the
blooming that you are designed to do was formed with intention and care.
God, put that in you. It's there. It can't be taken away.
Right. So when you catch yourself comparing yourself to someone else, it's not just
an invitation to stop. It's an invitation to look to God,
right? To look to God as that ultimate compass. I think of the plum line, right?
If you're into building or if you're into construction or if you've renovated your
house, builders use these plum lines to make sure that lines are straight. And
there's sort of like a weighted magnet that pulls toward the center of gravity to
make sure that the line is straight. And that plum line of who you are and who
you're meant to become always has to be anchored vertically, first and foremost, to
God, the one who created your soul and designed you for a wonderful purpose and
with wonderful gifts to contribute to this world. And ultimately, that has to be the
anchoring for our ultimate comparison. So when you notice yourself observing something
going on and someone else, right, you take that as a cue and then you always take
it back vertically to God. And that's how you begin to bring in to check and move
toward inspiration, toward gratitude, toward connection, and away from those negative
components of comparison. This is about trust. And trust in God is not passive.
It's active. It's a partnership. Trusting God includes trusting the person.
God is forming inside of you. The person he's made inside of you.
Sometimes comparison reveals a longing, a spark of something sacred,
right? That longing might be pointing you toward a part of your story or a part of
your soul that really wants to grow. I remember a season when I was comparing
myself to a woman incessantly and it was negative. But I noticed it and I paused
and this was years ago. She was a writer. She had such a great lovely presence.
She had kids. She worked from home and she wrote books, incredible books. And I
just would notice myself comparing myself to her. And it had a little bit of tinge
of envy in that case. But when I paused,
that you want.
One of you wrote in, you didn't want to use your voice, but you talked about how
you compare yourself to others spiritually. And I thought, what a beautiful cue that
a part of you really longs for a spiritually vibrant life. You long for a
spiritually vital relationship with God where you're walking in harmony with God. What
a beautiful longing. And that cue that you're comparing.
from you. And in that way, comparison can become a signal about what our real
longings are. Lori, you mentioned how easy it is to compare yourself to your
friends. And I love that you're paying attention to that. Friendship can be such a
fertile ground for comparison for all of us. But it's also such a great place to
practice this attunement. What is that longing you feel and how is it actually a
signal to honor your own unique desire, something that's showing up inside of you
and that before God you could cultivate in the soil of your own soul.
Rebecca, you talked about how you've been comparing your stage of life when going
through a divorce, making ends meet, and comparing yourself to others on social
media, and it makes so much sense that you're feeling that way. I think so many of
us can relate to you. And we're in a tough season of life. We've just come through
something, right? And we see other people in a different season of life, and it's
painful. And I hope you know you're not alone that so many of us have felt that
way. I know I have felt that way in different seasons of my life. And that
longing, you know, for stability and the joy of a healthy relationship and to feel
like you've come through something and you're out the other side is so beautiful.
It's a sign that your soul is intact. It's a sign that your soul longs for
something God longs for you also to have. And I hear in your desire to trust God
and to acknowledge where you are, but to know that you also long for more.
Remember, your story isn't behind. It's unfolding at a pace that's right for you.
God is still writing your story, even in these chapters that feel uncertain and
different from others. Julie, you talked about comparing yourself to others with
unhealthy habits. I thought it was so interesting because in a way, you're
criticizing yourself in comparison to others. and sometimes that's how we try to feel
safe, right, by kind of looking at others and gauging ourselves in comparison to how
they're doing. But it's also a deeper longing. What if that longing is some part of
you that's kind of trying to tell you, I want to work on some habits. I want to
work on some habits. I don't want to beat myself up about them, but I want to
work on some habits in my own life. What's that deeper longing and how can you
take that longing and move it away from that horizontal comparison and toward that
vertical inquiry with God. God, what's this about? What part of my soul is speaking
to me and longing for something that actually has nothing to do with these other
people, but that is all about my own health and something that you're calling me to
into a deeper grace and the freedom to release this sense of comparison,
both toward others and this criticism toward my own self. So whether it's friendship,
faith, or life stage, or someone else's habits, each of these longings points us
back to the same truth. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Your timeline is not their timeline. Your story is not their story.
And the God who formed you is still forming you. So what does this actually look
like? Moving from comparison into a deeper sense of connection with ourselves, with
God, and with others. How do we take that moment of noticing, that observation, that
spark of longing, and turn it into something life -giving? Here's a simple practice I
often use. It's the name it, frame it, brave it model that I write about. And I
shouldn't feel.
name it and make a note of it, especially if it's recurring. Number two, frame it.
What messages do you tell yourself about this situation?
Are you self -critical? I should have been better. I should be more like they are.
Do you notice guilt messages? I shouldn't feel this way. Do you feel envy?
I want what they have. Do you notice self -doubt? I'll never be good enough,
right? The second part of framing it is to normalize it. This is part of being
human. Everyone compares. Everyone has moments of insecurity and longing, right?
This is part of being human. It's the sign that your soul is working. You're not
broken because you feel this way. You're alive, right? This is the sign of a
healthy soul. It's what you do with it. Right. So reframe it in your mind that
way. When you notice comparison, don't beat yourself up. But instead, notice that,
oh, this is it. This is, there I go again. That part of me is scanning for
belonging. And it's normal. And everyone does it. And then number three,
we get into the final step, which is rave it. Ask yourself, what is a step I can
take? I've kind of analyzed and thought about this observation, right?
I want it to move me toward inspiration, toward gratitude. So what is a step I can
take? Maybe it's showing you a value you hold, something God has placed within you
that wants attention. What's a step I can take toward nurturing that value. Maybe
it's showing you a need for rest. Maybe you need more encouragement. Maybe to find
a sense of purpose. Maybe to find more connection. What step can you take to
cultivate those things in your own life? Whatever it is, always bring that
observation, that comparison back to that plum line anchoring yourself in the love of
God. You might simply pray, God, show me what you're forming in me through this
feeling. Or you might just say, thank you, God, for the life you've given me today.
Thank you for what's mine to hold and what's mine to release. Gratitude doesn't
erase longing. It grounds it. It helps you see your own story with tenderness,
always in the light of God's love for you. When you put these steps together, you
start to rewire how your soul responds. Comparison becomes a cue for connection.
Longing becomes a doorway into greater relationship with God, and slowly you begin to
live from that deep, steady place inside, the place where you know who you are, you
know you are fearfully and wonderfully made take a moment as we close and just
picture that person you often compare yourself to notice what you feel inside maybe
it's tension maybe it's envy maybe it's sadness now bring that part of you your
comparing part of you into the light of god's love What does that part of you need
from God right now, today? As we close, I want you to remember this.
Comparison is a signal, not a sin. It's a messenger from your soul,
a sign that something inside you is longing to grow, to be seen, to be loved,
and God's plan has always included your becoming. It's not just about the
destination, right? It's about
restores your sense of enoughness. It grounds you back in your own story,
reminding you who you are and whose you are. There is such beauty in blooming right
where you are today. So as you head into your week, I want to leave you with this
affirmation. There is no timeline on your becoming. The same God who made you
uniquely is the one who's growing you at your own pace.
Take a few minutes today to journal or pray about one area where comparison has
been whispering to you lately and ask God, what are you showing me through this
longing? Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Best of You. Be sure to
check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can
find those on my website at And Allison cook .com. That's Allison with one L .cook
.com. Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss
an episode. And I love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It helps so much
to get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And
remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others,
and you stay true to your God -given self.
When insecurity takes over, most of us double down on self-improvement. But what if freedom doesn’t come from focusing more on yourself - but less?
In this powerful conversation, Dr. Alison and author of Free of Me and Gazing at God, Sharon Hodde Miller, discuss the promises and pitfalls of self-esteem culture - and why a bigger story of belovedness, stewardship, and connection sets us free. We talk about how self-preoccupation doesn’t improve self-esteem, why “just love yourself more” can reinforce the problem, and how beholding God (not abandoning yourself) recenters your life with humility and purpose.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why self-focus can erode your confidence and joy
- The difference between self-esteem and self-preoccupation
- What it means to de-center yourself without losing your worth
- How wounds can masquerade as pride or insecurity
- The freedom that comes from remembering: you are not the hero of the story
Get your hands on a copy of Sharon's books! You can find them here:
📚Free of Me: Why Life Is Better When It's Not about You
📚Gazing at God: A 40-Day Journey to Greater Freedom from Self
Here are some other episodes you might like :
Episode 99: I Shouldn’t Feel Like My Spirit is Broken
Episode 67: The Inextricable Link Between Faith & Emotional Healing with Cindy Gao
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- If you’re looking for a Bible that helps you live the Word, not just read it, then grab this beautiful one I’m currently using at NIVapplicationbible.com.
*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.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Transcript
“Self-esteem culture” would be good in the title of this. . .
Sharon, I have admired your work for a long time. We've followed each other, you know, online. You're always posting really nuanced, thoughtful things. It's interesting because at face value, someone could look at our books and think we are coming at things from a different direction.
Right, your book, Free of Me, is all about kind of stop looking at yourself, look at God, gazing at God. Did I say that right? That's the other way. know, gazing at God, right? My book's the best of you. You know, it's all about you, right? Boundaries for your soul. Now, that's face value because that is not what either, I actually, as I look at your work and I look at my work, we're both after wholeness. We're after.
Sharon (01:04.798)
Mm hmm.
Sharon (01:10.766)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yep, that's the devotional. Mm-hmm.
Sharon (01:22.093)
Yeah.
Sharon (01:33.538)
Right. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Alison Cook (01:34.353)
health, right? And you're focusing on, in my mind, I think about, you know, the greats, know, Augustine, I always go back to Augustine and Calvin and whatever you think of their theology, the soul cannot be separated from God, God cannot be separated from the soul, the two go hand in hand. They're two sides of the same coin. And you're making sure we're staying connected to God. We're not trying to look at the self absent of God. And I'm saying, yes, 100 %
Sharon (01:50.284)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Sharon (01:57.048)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (02:02.748)
And sometimes we have to look inward. We have to understand the contents of our own soul to heal and to understand what we're bringing to God. can't exile the self. We can't bypass the self in the work. Right? that was a long-winded way to say I'd love to just that I'm so excited about this conversation because I think we're so like-minded and there's so much that we're both trying to get at that's so important. And I want to just
Sharon (02:13.805)
100%. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Sharon (02:28.527)
Yeah. And I quote you a bunch of times in Gazing at God and I think that's what people will be surprised. It's a devotional about freedom from self. But the first two sections are about the self and about the goodness of the self. And so I drew on you heavily for those sections.
Alison Cook (02:41.828)
Yes!
Alison Cook (02:45.744)
100%. You are absolutely, I mean, there's just such a yin yang to the work that we're doing. Before we get into the deep end of all this stuff, I want to ask you personally, was there a moment or a season of your life where you realized that your faith was becoming too much about you that prompted you to write Free of Me, that prompted you to move in this direction?
Sharon (02:51.447)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (02:55.767)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (03:11.501)
Yes. So rewind to maybe 15 years ago. So that's a while ago now. At that time, I was in ministry. I was writing. I was speaking. I was doing a lot of the things I'm doing now still. And at the time, I found the work to be inherently meaningful. So I just I especially really love teaching the Bible. That is one of my favorite things that I do is just to teach the Bible.
And so I love doing that. I loved doing it for God. But over the years, something inside of me started to shift. And the way that I've often explained it is scripture talks about faith as a race. That's a metaphor that scripture uses. And at some point, I started looking to the people running next to me and I started comparing myself to them. And then I started looking at the people who are a few paces ahead of me and needing
approval and acknowledgement and affirmation from them. And if I didn't compare well, or if I didn't get affirmation, I became really fragile, really insecure. It was no longer enough just to do a good job for the glory of God and the good of the church. I took all the joy out of my work. And so I became really insecure. And I remember there's this
this key moment one day where I had written something and it didn't get the reception I thought that it would. And I was just crying and my husband was holding me. And I said to him, you know, what is going on with me? I've become this really insecure person. How did I get here? And so I'm I'm a researcher. And so I started reading books about insecurity, blogs, articles. I also started just
searching scripture for what does it say about me and just affirming myself and remembering what is true, you know, what God thinks about me, how he loves me, his purpose for my life, all of that. So I do this for six months to a year, maybe. And at the end of it, realized it had not worked like it hadn't helped at all.
Sharon (05:31.429)
And I think a lot of people have this experience of experiencing insecurity, but not getting any traction in it, even though you're kind of like doing all the right things. And so I realized that whatever was causing the insecurity, this approach of just affirming myself was actually not touching that thing. And to make a really long story short, and this is what Free of Me is about this journey of discovering.
Alison Cook (05:50.288)
Mm.
Sharon (05:56.959)
is that there was something else that was causing my insecurity. And the way that I often describe it is that I see there being kind of two different causes of insecurity. One is the one that we're most familiar with, which is low self-esteem. And I would define that as seeing yourself in a way that is incorrect, like out of sync with how God sees you or what he declares about you to be true. And the answer to that absolutely is the truth of God's word and his unconditional love for you.
Alison Cook (06:18.328)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (06:26.166)
But what I realized through this journey is there is another cause of insecurity that I'd never even heard of, which was self preoccupation. That when you make yourself the center of the story, when you make something about you that's not about you, whether it's your marriage or your parenting or your job, or in my case, my ministry, it then turns that thing into a referendum on your value and on your worth. And when that thing is going well,
then you feel great. But as soon as that thing is not going well, then your confidence just falls through the floor. And so for me, I realized my self-esteem was actually fine. I was not struggling to believe God's love for me. was not struggling to believe any of those truths. That wasn't the issue. The issue is that I had taken something that was meant to be about God and I had made it about me.
Alison Cook (06:56.378)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (07:22.629)
Hmm.
Sharon (07:23.018)
And it started to crush me as a result. And so that's that's what free of me is about. And one of the questions that I mentioned to you before we started recording that I've really been anxious to talk to you about is in free of me, I go into the self-esteem movement and where it originated, how we tend to blame millennials for being kind of the like trophy kid generation. But it
It actually traces its roots back to boomers, which was really interesting. But kind of the like central wisdom at the heart of it is if you just knew how special you were that this would like set you free. And so it's basically this alternative gospel. And I think that for me, what happened was I I approached my insecurity the way that that self-esteem culture
Alison Cook (08:23.311)
Mmm.
Sharon (08:23.532)
And I think the way the reason that what I also get into and free of me is that the self-esteem culture did not deliver on what it promised. And my the thing that I wanted to know is I kind of have a theory about why, but I'm I wanted to test it with you because you're you're an official expert.
Alison Cook (08:35.14)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (08:42.669)
I want to hear. I love it. I love this stuff. Yeah, let's hear it. I love it.
Sharon (08:49.28)
So my theory about why the whole self-esteem movement ultimately failed, I mean, I think there's probably multiple reasons. But my theory about why it failed is I think that the self-esteem culture on the one hand was putting its finger on something really important. Coming out of generations where children are kind of like seen and not heard and we are taught.
not to engage hard emotions and we just bury it and we hide it like whatever it is. I think the self-esteem culture was a needed correction to that problem. Where I suspect it ultimately failed is that its purpose, its goal for our lives ultimately is just too small.
Alison Cook (09:24.665)
Yep. Yep.
Sharon (09:40.799)
I think it's it has essentially told us that the thing that will set you free is this kind of self actualization that as long as you you yourself are whole and you love yourself and accept yourself that that that is you will have arrived. And I think that for Christians, we can agree with.
the goodness of affirming the self. And this is where what you write on and what I write on in Gazing at God absolutely overlap is that yes, yourself is good. Yourself is a reflection of the image of God in a unique way that nobody else reflects. And also that is not the end point of your life.
that it doesn't all just end there. It's not all going to that place, but instead you your healing is one step into this much larger purpose of loving God and loving others. And so my theory has been that part of the reason the self-esteem movement failed is it handed people a purpose that was too small for their souls and ultimately created its own sickness as a result.
And so what I need from you is to tell me if I have been misleading people all this time or if there's some validity to my theory.
Alison Cook (11:03.618)
I think that's backed up by a lot of research we're seeing as well as just the truth. I agree with you and how I think about it as a clinician, as a psychologist is I'm focusing on the psyche, which is the self in my work. But if I ever get out of balance in focusing on that too much,
Sharon (11:09.782)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (11:23.03)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (11:31.894)
out of connection with God or out of connection with community and others, we have a problem. And you could say the same thing, know, part of my draw to the field is almost the opposite of yours. I knew, I felt, I knew so much about God, I knew nothing about myself and I needed to go through a significant period of time of focusing on the self, not as an end, but as a means to deeper healing.
Sharon (11:59.318)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (12:01.355)
never away from God or out of partnership with others, but because there were wounds that needed attention. But I do think, I think you could almost, with everything you said, we could almost replace therapy culture with self-esteem culture, right? In that overcorrection of hyper focusing on the individual, and hyper focusing on the self, and hyper focusing on self-esteem as the end game.
Sharon (12:16.47)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sharon (12:22.924)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (12:31.427)
That's to me exactly what you're saying. That's the issue. There's a piece of it that's important, but it's only a piece of the larger whole. So I couldn't agree with you more. And that's why I love how your work starts there with honoring the self. And I love because you're in ministry and because you're a pastor, I want more pastors to have that holistic. And I think more pastors are getting that. And that's one of the things I think therapy has, I always say I was just at a,
Sharon (12:31.519)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Sharon (12:35.98)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.
Alison Cook (13:01.199)
conference and they're like, you know, it was a bunch of us more in this, you know, psychiatry, psychology, therapy space. And they were saying, what does this have to do for the church? And I was like, gosh, I'd love to see more, not churches becoming therapists, but more of this holistic understanding of the soul in churches, because you, what can happen on what I've seen happen is people replace communal embodied togetherness with others and with God, with therapy.
Sharon (13:18.956)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (13:26.465)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (13:31.212)
Mmm, mhm.
Alison Cook (13:32.056)
And that's that hyper individualistic, it's kind of a riff on what you're saying, right? It creates that hyper individualistic, I get all my needs met here, but I'm not really kind of knocking up against other people and figuring out my purpose in the larger whole. That's not actually true self-esteem. If we want to take it right back there, that's not actually true sense of my belovedness of God, even as I honor and celebrate the belovedness in each and every one of these other people.
Sharon (13:36.032)
Yeah.
Sharon (13:41.611)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (13:49.845)
Right.
Sharon (13:54.124)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (14:01.259)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a huge validation coming from you and I will continue to repeat that theory elsewhere now that I have your blessing.
Alison Cook (14:02.287)
So I agree with you. Yeah.
Yeah.
Alison Cook (14:12.161)
Yeah, I love how you're saying that. And I love, Sharon, how your work comes out of your own journey of recognizing, and let me see if I'm hearing you correctly, recognizing that this self-focus was leading nowhere good to kind of eroding your sense of worth and your self-esteem and that therefore a solution that focused on more self-focus, right? Just love yourself more.
Sharon (14:26.058)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (14:30.656)
Mm-hm.
Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.
Sharon (14:40.021)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Alison Cook (14:42.241)
was not the correct solution.
Sharon (14:44.167)
Exactly. It was reinforcing the problem instead of correcting it. Yeah. And part of what really helped me to even see this is, you know, I shared with you that initially I went to scripture asking, what does it say about me? But when I realized that that wasn't helping me specifically and again, there is a place for that. I want to be really clear that that for some people, if
Alison Cook (14:47.875)
Yeah, that make-
Alison Cook (15:03.503)
Mm.
Alison Cook (15:13.22)
Yes.
Sharon (15:13.533)
If you had a lie spoken over you as a child or some wound that is shaping you and keeping you in bondage to shame or whatever it is that the truth of God's word is is really important and is bondage breaking. And so I want to be really clear about that. But when I reapproach scripture and ask a different question, which was when people in the Bible who had insecurities brought those insecurities to God.
What did God actually say to them? That was really illuminating because I looked at people like Moses and Jeremiah and Gideon and Moses is a really great example of someone that God appointed for this calling and he pushes back and says, actually, I don't think I am the person for this job. I don't speak well. We don't know if he had a speech impediment of some sort. We don't know what the reason is, but he thinks
Alison Cook (15:44.751)
Hmm.
Sharon (16:12.765)
He is not equipped for this. There's something flawed about him that he's bringing a sense of inadequacy to God. And I think if Moses were my friend and he came to me, what I would say to him is, actually, Moses, you are the best person for this job. you just strictly resume speaking because he was raised in the palace. He was groomed to be a leader. Like if anyone in Israel, really just on paper.
is probably the best person for this job. But that isn't what God says to Moses. Instead, God says to him, Moses, who gave human beings their mouths? Was it not I, the Lord? And I really love in her book, Women of the Word, Jen Wilkin, she describes this interaction as God changing the subject off of Moses's inability and onto God's ability.
And I think that's such a great just in a nutshell of what it is we are often craving when we feel our limitations, when we feel overwhelmed, when we feel inadequate for the task before us, is we have centered ourselves in a way that is making the burden heavier than it needs to be because we think we're the hero of the story. We think it rises and falls on us. And we need to be reminded that
No, in fact, God is the hero of the story. You are not the center of it. It does not rise and fall on your shoulders. And that is a much freer way to live. And so that was really that was also just really honestly liberating for me personally, not just in the instance that I described, but that's something that I have carried with me. We planted a church about seven years ago and it is so easy to think.
this thing rises and falls on mine and my husband's shoulders. And when we feel that way or if people leave the church, know, whatever it is, and I start to feel just crushed by the weight of that, I remember, wait a second, A, this church does not rise and fall on my shoulders. I'm not the hero. I'm not the savior of this church. But also my job is not to win people to me.
Alison Cook (18:08.047)
Hmm.
Alison Cook (18:24.943)
Hmm.
Sharon (18:32.35)
But that's not what my job is. My job is to point people to Jesus and I can succeed at that whether they go to my church or if they leave my church. I can still succeed at that. And that has just taken such a weight off of my shoulders when I remember I am not the center of this story.
Alison Cook (18:32.578)
Mm.
Alison Cook (18:49.199)
Mm.
Alison Cook (18:56.783)
Gosh, there's so much in what you're saying. It, it's such a paradox. What I hear you saying is when you when you don't center yourself, it's actually freeing. Like the whole it's not about you. It's actually not about me. It's about a larger story. It doesn't diminish your sense of worth or your value or your self esteem. It actually makes you feel lighter.
Sharon (19:25.63)
Mm-hmm. Yes. And it's because the reason it doesn't diminish you is because when you center yourself, you are actually forgetting who you are, which is you are not God. And so to de-center yourself is not to diminish you. It is to be restored to who you actually are, which is a human with limitations.
Alison Cook (19:25.935)
And freer?
Sharon (19:52.691)
And that is not a diminishment at all. That is just reality. And so that's why it's not a diminishment.
Alison Cook (19:59.6)
So it's so interesting because I'm imagining someone listening who has felt, has never felt centered.
Sharon (20:12.471)
Mm, mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (20:15.651)
And well, let me, I'm gonna delete that before I go there. Everything you're saying I think applies in so many settings. So first of all, as a parent, how freeing is it when we have those moments of realizing this is not all on me? I cannot be the perfect parent. I cannot be omniscient. I cannot be all knowing. I am not God. Thank goodness God actually cares about these.
Sharon (20:31.625)
Right.
Sharon (20:35.625)
Yeah.
Sharon (20:41.554)
Yeah. And that your your children already have a perfect parent and it's not you.
Alison Cook (20:45.931)
Yeah. Yeah, and my job is to do the best I can and point them, but it doesn't diminish my role. And I think intuitively as parents that we feel that freedom. I'm thinking about vocationally. I think that's a tricky one. Vocationally. And I'm curious about your thoughts on this. We need to feel a sense of place in the world that our lives matter.
Sharon (20:53.183)
Right.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sharon (21:01.172)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (21:11.252)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (21:13.763)
that our work matters to me, it's one of the biggest toxins that social media has brought is there's just this ability to compare yourself to people you never should have been comparing yourself to, right? It takes away some of the dignity of just my place in my local embodied world. there is that, there's that delicate tension that we're holding, right? So I'm thinking of you as a minister, I get what you're saying.
Sharon (21:26.568)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sharon (21:32.328)
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Sharon (21:39.444)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (21:44.182)
My job matters. Like what I'm doing in this community really matters. There's a sense of healthy pride and dignity in this work. And also paradoxically, it's not about me.
Sharon (21:46.142)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (21:53.118)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
Yeah, so that is actually why I wrote Gazing at God. So I wrote Free of Me and I wouldn't necessarily change anything about that book. But after I released it, I started to notice that, especially in pastoring our church, oftentimes when people were struggling with self-focus, self-preoccupation, it wasn't
Alison Cook (22:03.993)
Good.
Sharon (22:29.394)
because of pride or vanity. Very often it was because of a wound. There was a wound there. And the metaphor that I've often used is of like a physical wound. If I were to walk outside my office and trip on the curb and turn my ankle over, I would give all my attention to that ankle. I would go to the doctor. I would ice it or heat it or whatever they say to do. would take ibuprofen. I would wear a brace.
Alison Cook (22:36.622)
Yeah.
Sharon (22:58.866)
It would change the way that I walked. know, everything would be about this ankle because it was hurting me and that is really healthy. Your pain demands your attention and that's really healthy. Right. And so I think there's that's a great way of understanding that our souls are that way, that very often what is pulling our attention inward is often pain. And so to say to people,
Alison Cook (23:08.719)
Yes, not selfish. Yeah.
Sharon (23:28.052)
there is freedom and focusing on God and focusing on living, know, loving God and loving others without addressing the fact that the thing that is pulling your attention back inward could be a wound of some sort. It felt like there's kind of a missing step. And so part of what I wanted to do with gazing at God was to name, like give attention to what is happening in your interior world so that you can better understand it because
Alison Cook (23:41.027)
Mm.
Sharon (23:57.266)
Another piece of this and you have done, this is why I think we connect so well is you've done a great job of identifying the ways that self-denial, which is a Christian teaching, we get it from Jesus himself, but the ways that self-denial has been poorly, badly taught in ways that are either unbiblical or theologically problematic where
We are saying self denial, but what we really mean is self rejection or self abandonment or self neglect. And so between those two things, I felt it was really important to start with that interior work that our self esteem culture, therapy culture, whatever you want to call it is is equipping its resourcing people well to pay attention to what's actually going inside myself. And then to also.
start with a biblical affirmation of the self, that the self bears the image of God in some unique and important way to equip people with an understanding of stewardship, that self-neglect is actually bad stewardship because God has put things in you that not only glorify him but are for the good of your community.
And so for us to neglect whatever God has put in this goes back to your question about vocation to neglect what God has put in you is actually bad stewardship. And so all that to say the reason that matters in this conversation about self forgetfulness and self denial is if we can start with an affirmation of who you are in Christ, who, God made you to be what
Alison Cook (25:31.437)
Yeah.
Sharon (25:48.402)
that does is it keeps us from running to these other things, to our vocation, to our role as parents, to affirm this thing that we lack. We don't lack it in Christ. And so it gives us this healthier relationship with those things that we tend to over identify with to make up for what is actually missing inside of us.
Alison Cook (26:10.607)
That's great. That's well stated. instead of, it's not a false binary of I look to God and so don't care about this. It actually puts it in proper relationship when you behold God. I want to touch on gazing at God because I love this behold idea and beholding God is very different than what many of us have understood and I think that's part of where
Sharon (26:19.825)
Right. Mm-hmm. 100%.
Alison Cook (26:40.083)
that misalignment arises, right? It's sort of a bifurcation. I'm either thinking about God or I'm thinking about myself. What have you found in your own life and as you've worked through gazing at God with others about this idea of beholding God? Talk to us a little bit about that.
Sharon (26:48.787)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (26:55.899)
Hmm. One story in scripture that I think captures what it is I'm trying to communicate with gazing at God is the story of Peter walking on water. So we have this famous story in the Gospels where Jesus is in the waves. There's a storm. Peter has the courage to get out of the boat, unlike the rest of the disciples. I think he's not commended enough for that. He gets out of the boat.
he starts walking towards Jesus, but then he lowers his gaze onto the waves. And as soon as that is where his focus is, he begins to sink. But as soon as he locks eyes again with Jesus, he realizes that he is secure. And I think that that story is
A metaphor for many things, I think it's a metaphor for what it is we're doing whenever we worship is we are adjusting our gaze and remembering what really defines our reality. What really defines our security is not the storm kind of happening around us. It's Jesus. But it's also just a metaphor for the power of our attention that very often what we give our attention to is going to influence our
interior worlds, it's going to influence our direction, it influences a lot. And so this isn't about neglecting the self. It's really self forgetfulness is the freedom from being preoccupied by the self. Like I can't help but run everything through the filter of self, not because the self is bad or because the self doesn't matter, but because the self cannot ultimately be
Alison Cook (28:32.943)
Yeah.
Sharon (28:43.165)
the foundation of our security. It has to come from something outside of ourselves and that is Jesus. But that's how those two things fit together.
Alison Cook (28:52.781)
Yeah, I love that. And in that passage, he still has work to do. He's still part of it. Sometimes I like the idea of partnering with God. That's that alignment. When we're with God, everything just is more aligned. We're still doing our part. There's still meaning and purpose. And again, that healthy sense of, know, I'm in this. I'm in this. I'm part of this. But it doesn't end and rise with me.
Sharon (29:01.523)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (29:11.71)
Right?
Sharon (29:17.807)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Alison Cook (29:22.223)
I love that. How has do you have a what's your time like? know we chatted for a while. So are you do you have a hard stop?
Sharon (29:30.057)
I'm free until 1 30 my time. It's 12 45. So I've got about 45 minutes left.
Alison Cook (29:34.957)
Okay, so you have a little bit of time.
What would you say to someone who's listening, who feels fragmented? Maybe they feel they want to honor God, but they can't sense God's presence and they're sort of just in that mode of trying to hold themselves together, right? What first step or what really, what's a simple step someone could take
Sharon (29:52.617)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (30:02.279)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (30:09.773)
that isn't that kind of self. I love how there's all these words. want to, don't want to say, let me say that again. What's a step they could take that isn't that sort of dishonoring of self, but is moving toward that gaze of God. What's a practical step that you do in your own life to reorient that maybe isn't always like, I just suddenly feel God, right? But that is a
Sharon (30:22.44)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (30:33.319)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (30:37.692)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (30:38.744)
I'm taking a step toward God in a very practical, tangible way.
Sharon (30:43.592)
So one just very early step, this is early in gazing at God as well. And this is going to feel probably a little bit distant from that step towards God. But I think it's actually really important is I talk about noticing your scripts.
Alison Cook (31:03.247)
Mm.
Sharon (31:03.472)
noticing the language that you're using. One thing that I learned in my research that I'm sure you already know, but there's a number of studies around people who are experiencing depression tend to use more me centered language. And I thought that was so interesting. And for me, when I'm noticing a lot of I language, a lot of me, a lot of mine, when I'm kind of in these spirals of
Alison Cook (31:19.3)
Yeah.
Sharon (31:32.465)
Why didn't they text me back? Why didn't they invite me? Why did they treat me that way? Are they mad at me? That's a kind of a yellow flag for me that I'm not OK. Like this is actually a symptom that something is something deeper is going on and to kind of step back from that spiral that I was in the middle of.
Alison Cook (31:47.663)
Mmm.
Alison Cook (31:55.395)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Sharon (31:57.959)
And so that has been a really helpful practice. then another practice for me. And this is this one takes a little bit more nuance depending on the situation. And so I want to be really, really careful. And you might even be able to help me nuance this a little bit. But I have stopped fighting my insecurity and treating it like a threat and that I need to if I feel insecure.
Alison Cook (32:23.887)
And that I need to.
Sharon (32:27.546)
I need to kind of puff myself up or make myself big or not do whatever I can to not feel humiliated in this moment. But I've really learned to receive when I experience insecurity to get kind of curious about it and ask what information does this have that I need to hear? Because if I'm feeling insecure, it probably means I'm not standing on something secure.
What am I standing on that is shaking right now? And that's really important information for me to have to know that I've actually rooted my identity, my value, my worth, whatever it is on something that shakes. And how can I name that and then do the work of rooting my identity on Jesus instead? And so that's how that really honestly has
Alison Cook (33:17.935)
Mm.
Sharon (33:23.256)
very little to do with whether or not I feel God in any given moment, but it is work that has been really powerful and meaningful to me.
Alison Cook (33:27.279)
Mmm.
Alison Cook (33:34.314)
Yeah, I love those steps because it does bring that curiosity piece about your own soul, which again, we think about David, you why are you downcast? my soul, right? There's that sense of noticing not in a fixation way. How do I fix it? How do I not feel this way? Which isn't good psychology and also not doesn't take us, but it's that more spiritual practice way of, I noticed this.
Sharon (33:46.152)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (33:51.751)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (34:02.551)
in partnership with God. And also what you're saying, Sharon, I love it's right. That's right out of, you know, boundaries for your soul, right? Getting curious about the part of you, not trying to make it go away, not trying to fix it with a false, you know, you're doing great, which, you know, parts of us that's not just noticing. And what's that about? And where did I start to maybe care more about what this other person thinks of me than
Sharon (34:04.476)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (34:13.116)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Sharon (34:27.718)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Alison Cook (34:30.989)
You know, so I think that's a beautiful reframe and I love the practicality of those steps. How have you, how's your own journey with God? You know, right now as you're kind of, I know when we write these books, right? It's often very much in our, in our own space, right? How has your own journey with God been shaped?
Sharon (34:52.262)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (34:57.379)
by this work? What do you notice in your own soul as you, you you talked about where you started? Is it easier for you now? Is it more intuitive for you now? What do you notice about your own practice of gazing at God?
Sharon (34:57.564)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sharon (35:06.098)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (35:11.976)
It definitely is easier. Like it comes faster. It's not that I don't struggle with insecurity anymore, but I have I have tools to process it and kind of understand it and where to sort of place it. And so that has been really helpful. I have been really helped by no longer fighting opportunities for humility. And when you plant a church,
Alison Cook (35:14.031)
Mm.
Sharon (35:40.936)
There are so many opportunities for humility. You know, I really cannot I could not have written a better book to shepherd my soul through the journey of planting a church because so much goes wrong. So much is out of your control when you plant a church. It's primarily volunteer led. And so if someone drops the ball, it looks bad on you as the leader. You look incompetent and obviously you're not going to just throw this person under the bus. And so you just have to kind of take it.
Alison Cook (35:50.745)
Wow.
Yeah.
Alison Cook (36:02.937)
Yeah.
Sharon (36:09.721)
But I recognize now those opportunities that are embarrassing or humiliating are for me a very needed course correction of remembering what are we doing here? Like I said earlier, I'm not winning people to me. That's not the point of the church. And so if they think I'm not a very good leader,
Alison Cook (36:23.555)
Big picture.
Sharon (36:32.955)
That's actually okay, as long as they still love Jesus and are growing in their relationship with him. What they think of me doesn't really matter. And I look so often to the example of Paul and Philippians where he's writing from prison, he's facing imminent death. And yet this is the most joyful of any of his letters. And then you have this moment where other Christians, these rival Christians,
are competing with him, are preaching the gospel for the wrong reason, are sort of delighting in his imprisonment. I mean, talk about church hurt. Like I would become so bitter, so cynical about Christianity if I was treated that way. And for him to say instead, you know what? It was never about me. I didn't do any of this for me to win people to me. And so
Alison Cook (37:12.429)
Yeah, good.
Sharon (37:31.056)
If as long as people are still coming to Jesus, I'm I'm good with that. That is actually still a success. And we have it's such a portrait of freedom because on the one hand, he is in chains, but his interior, his soul is so, so free. And I look to that a lot. And it is it's such a source of comfort for me, because as a leader, you constantly disappoint people, especially.
Alison Cook (37:51.119)
Hmm.
Sharon (37:58.768)
Back when we were leading in 2020, I mean, it was impossible. There was no way to please everyone. And so to remember at the end of the day, I'm not winning people to myself. That was something that fundamentally sustained me during that season.
Alison Cook (38:11.193)
Yeah.
Alison Cook (38:15.275)
It's powerful and that therefore then I can go on because I understand this isn't ultimately about me. This is, it's such a beautiful paradox. It's such a beautiful paradox. It's what then allows us to do the work. And it's that upside down sort of beauty of, think what following Jesus is all about, right? It's that, and I love it. I think of Adam Grant always talks about
Sharon (38:28.356)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Sharon (38:37.083)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Cook (38:42.979)
I love that used the word humility. You humility is actually rooted in confidence. Like we have humility when we have a sense of the gifts that we bring. Again, it's that paradox, right? And I love that's what you're saying. You're not saying this sort of false, you know, we hear this, right? This fault, it's not about me, it's only about God. And it's like, I'm always like, well, it's a little about, you know, it's a little about us in that sense that we are bringing the gifts that we have.
Sharon (38:53.063)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Alison Cook (39:11.423)
and God is using them, but it's always in that healthy alignment, right? That healthy alignment, and it's so freeing and sustainable, and I see in your face, I mean, I can't imagine it's easy to lead right now in our world. And if it was all about your own accolades, it would be excruciating, but when you can keep your eyes on that larger focus, you can run the race.
Sharon (39:25.041)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (39:32.017)
Right.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, because absolutely just.
As an example of the noticing my scripts, like this is a this is a season of leadership because of everything that's happening in our nation. This is a season of leadership where it is really tempting for me to spiral saying things like how could they misunderstand me? Don't they know me? Don't they know my commitment to Jesus or how rigorously I study scripture or how devoted I am to be
Alison Cook (39:58.67)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sharon (40:10.888)
being theologically integrated, like all of these things that I want to say, how can they still think this about me or why did they hear me saying it that way? And when I find myself just running through these scripts of wanting to defend myself, because that's really what it is, is I want to defend myself to stop and say, this is why you feel like garbage right now. Because you're running it through this filter.
Alison Cook (40:35.108)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sharon (40:39.674)
that there is no life there. It's not going to set you free. And so to remember, OK, are have I been a faithful witness to Jesus? Are they still good with Jesus? And sometimes that also means asking the question, do I even if I'm mostly right, is there anything that I need to apologize for so that they can still have confidence in?
Alison Cook (40:39.822)
Yeah. There's no life there. Yeah.
Alison Cook (41:03.482)
Hmm.
Sharon (41:09.434)
the church capital C, know, church leaders generally, even even if they're not good with me, I still want them to be connected to Jesus and his community. And so that also means a lot of like dying to self of like wanting to defend myself and my reputation in their eyes. But it's the better way.
Alison Cook (41:11.162)
Mm. Mm.
Alison Cook (41:20.398)
Yeah.
Alison Cook (41:26.457)
Yeah.
Yeah. that's, that's incredible. I let my readers know where to find your work and find all the things you're working on because I just, my, my, let my listeners know where they can find your work and all the things you're working on. Cause I just, I just think we need more people like you, Sharon. I love what you're doing.
Sharon (41:49.584)
Thank you so much. am pretty active on Instagram, Sharon H Miller, and then my books, Free of Me, which Free of Me re-released this year with a new cover that's on Amazon and Engaging at God, which just released in August, are both on Amazon.
Alison Cook (42:05.87)
And I just want to say to my listeners, these are resources, as you've heard in this conversation, that are going to integrate. You're going to find that integrated piece. You're not going to go into these feeling like I've got to set myself at the door. We get to bring ourself into this work. And I just love that you're doing that. And I think it's so powerful and so beautiful. So thank you for sharing the benefit of your wisdom with us.
Sharon (42:14.81)
Mm-hmm.
Sharon (42:30.852)
That means a lot coming from you, so thank you.
What do you do when relationships feels risky after you’ve been hurt, betrayed, or let down, yet you still crave real connection?
This week, Dr. Alison is joined by speaker, and author Toni Collier, for a powerful and honest conversation about healing through community and learning how to trust again after deep pain.
Toni shares her story of betrayal and loss, and how she discovered the power of safe people - the kind who can hold your heart without judgment and help you rebuild when life falls apart. Together, they unpack what real friendship looks like and why isolation, while it feels safe, can slowly destroy us.
You’ll walk away with language for repair, courage to take off your “strong friend” cape, and practical wisdom for finding (and becoming) the kind of people who can walk with you through both heartbreak and healing.
This episode explores:
Why healing requires safe people, not just safe spaces
How to build a community that can hold your story
The difference between isolation and refuge
The courage it takes to say, “I need help”
The three steps to finding and keeping trustworthy friends
You can find Toni’s powerful book here:
📚Don't Try This Alone: How to Build Deep Community When You Want to Hide from Your Pain
Here are some other episodes you might like :
Episode 104: Overcoming the Fear of Vulnerability
Episode 76: Finding the Faith & Strength to Move Forward after Loss & Heartache
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
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Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. Here we
are on video. I still kind of can't believe that...
go it alone. I can just do better by myself. I won't risk being hurt.
And if that's you today, today's episode is, I hope, just a hand on your shoulder,
a quiet, honest, non -shaming, gentle invitation back into community.
Today I'm joined by someone who has lived this message in real time, Tony Collier.
Tony has been on the podcast before. We love Tony. She's so real. She's an author,
a speaker, and the founder of Broken Crayan Still Color and the Still Coloring
podcast, where she invites honest stories of healing and resilience. And Tony has a
brand new book out. And since we're on video, for those of you watching, I can
show it to you. It's called Don't Try This Alone, how to build deep community when
you want to hide from your pain. It's something we can all relate to. And it's
such a tender, courageous guide based in Tony's own story, which she's going to
share a little bit with us about today, about finding the kind of people who can
help you hold what feels overwhelming. Some of the worst life experiences are
mitigated when we have people who can come around us. It's how God made us to live
in this world that he's created. And also, we're going to talk about how to become
that type of person for others. In this conversation today, Tony and I talk about
why safe spaces are really made by safe people. The three key steps needed as you
build authentic, safe friendships and what it looks like to walk through betrayal,
rupture, and repair without losing your own soul in the process. And Tony gives
language to things so many of us have felt but haven't known how to name. A few
highlights I want you to listen for today is how Tony talks about living on
offense, not defense. She had built this community before the crisis hit.
So there was a net to hold her during crisis. It's such an important thing I want
all of you to have. Is that safety net in place. God forbid a crisis does come.
You want it to be there, right, to hold you when that crisis hits. She talks about
the difference between isolation and refuge, right? Hiding can feel protective, but
healing requires presence and how repair is a skill. And it isn't the rupture that
ruins relationships. It's the absence of repair. And she offers practical, gracious
language for coming back to the table when things get bumpy. If you're new to
Tony's work, you'll hear the same heartbeat that runs through all of her work, this
conviction that your story isn't over and that beauty can emerge right in the middle
of the mess. And if you've been following her for a while, you're here the deep
wisdom that has been formed in her through these last few years and some really
personal confessions and stories that I was just, well, it brought both of us to
tears, to be honest. I also want to say as someone who cares deeply about the
integration of faith and psychology, I think Tony's new book is a real gift. It's
honest about pain and equally honest about hope. So if you've ever wondered, where
do I find people who can help me hold all that I'm going through? How do I become
a safer person for other people? This conversation is going to meet you there.
So let your shoulders drop while you're listening and maybe invite God's spirit to
just tap you at whatever part of your soul needs to hear something from this
message. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation today with Tony Collier.
What I think is really powerful about don't try this alone, the title in and of
itself and the book itself is it's really about the importance of safe, authentic
community for healing. And we know this. And so we'll get into the how you find
that if you don't have it and how to create it. But I want to start with your
story because the impetus right for your need of this community, which thank goodness
you had the scaffolding for when the crisis hit which doesn't always happen was a
betrayal in your marriage a significant betrayal that led to a divorce yeah can you
share with us about the moment you learned about the betrayal it was out of the
blue as i understand it yeah um and and just how that played out yeah so i i
will never forget the day it's september 19th 2023 23. You know, oftentimes we
remember big dates where we celebrate things, and then we remember really painful
dates as well. And so September 19th was that date for me. I was actually in
Nashville. I live in Atlanta, but I was in Nashville filming for a TV network for
this beautiful Christian TV show that I get to do. And I got a call in my hotel
room from my now ex -husband, and he was like, I've got to confess some things. And
I'm like, no, no, no. And the reason why I kind of already had some just knowledge
and understanding of what he was going to confess is because this wasn't the first
act of infidelity in our marriage. It was just the first one that I was aware of
in a long time. The infidelity originally started in the second year of our
marriage. And we'd gone to counseling and there had been some forgiveness and trust
kind of rebuilt. And so this call was a shock, but also it was familiar.
And so my ex -husband confessed to being extorted by someone that he'd hired for
sexual favors. And there was a video out there. And it just was devastating and
surprising. And in the same breath, as soon as I got off the phone with them, I
called two of my closest friends that are in my confessional community, my group
therapy group, because they had been on this same Christian network filming the same
show the day before. And I say that part of the story because I just want to
testify to someone that what I went through was extremely painful. And God has a
plan for our pain. And the plan that day was to have two of my closest friends
who knew a bunch of my story, a lot of my pain, who was right there.
I mean, in person. We live in different states, so that's not a normal thing. But
we were in the same state, in the same city, in the same hotel room, on the same
floor. And they came for me. And I just, I got to say, I just don't know how
well I would be today if I didn't have my people saying, hey, this is really
painful and it's really heavy. And alone, it could crush you. But with us, it
won't. And so, yeah, that's a little bit of context on the story. I really want to
get into the community piece because that's the thrust of the book is how that
carried you. Before we get there, I know one thing I often tell people when they
receive news, crushing news, especially in the form of a betrayal, is wait. Don't
make big decisions out of the big emotions.
Yep. How did you navigate that as you process this betrayal?
And I understand it was it almost though in some ways because it had happened
before and you'd work through repair. Yeah. To have it resurface in that way.
You know, it's almost even more. I mean, you can't, we can't compare what's right
but that it's all just devastating but yeah how did you navigate the emotional
aftermath that allowed you to get to a place of clarity because so often with the
betrayal you have to make big decisions in the middle of big emotions right when
you're parenting you're trying to figure out a relationship yeah tell us a a bit
about how you process that in the immediate aftermath. Yeah, I love what you said
about the waiting and about the pace because I do agree. I think in that moment,
it could have been so easy for me to respond to my ex -husband and say, well,
it's over, bye, don't talk to me ever again. It's over. I'm shutting this thing
down. I think I've just learned over the years that I just, I'm not the smartest.
I don't have all the answers. I don't always make the best decisions. And so I
need people to help me wait. And so for me, what that looked like is I just
rallied all the troops. And I said, listen, I need y 'all to walk with me through
this because I want to run. This is painful. I want to run away from this. I want
to scoop up my kids and take them to safety. I kind of sort of want to move to
a different country. Okay. Like, I want to leave the situation, and at the same
time, I've been intentionally using more ands, less butts, okay, because we can hold
all of this together, right? Like, and I want to do this well. Children are
involved. I can't move as quickly as I probably want to. I can't run away from the
reality that I have a public platform. And at the time, we were both pastors,
church planters, planting a church, like, I can't run away from that community, I
have to be wise. And sometimes wise means low. And so for me, my confessional
community, they're so sweet. They kept calling. We did some emergency zooms. I added
a couple of people to what I now called my freedom board. It was like an advisory
board of women who either had walked through this before or had wisdom and
understanding of being a leader and being in public and going through betrayal and
divorce. And I just didn't make any moves without them. Every single question,
feeling, everything that I wanted to process, I called someone. I did not dare do
it alone. And I think, if I'm honest, that's the reason why we're still standing
with such goodness and grace and freedom in our story. That's why it didn't
completely set everything ablaze and our whole lives were crazy. I think it's because
I did it with people and I moved so cautiously cautiously with them.
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Oh, that's so interesting. What I hear you saying is what allowed you to wait.
And again, not that any of those immediate reactions aren't warranted in these cases,
right? You know, I really want the listener to say, you know, sometimes that is the
immediate reaction. But in these big life relationships, there has to be some sort
of process. And what I hear you saying is it was your community that became the
holding place for the big emotions. Right. I want to right right now reach out and
just shred him or, you know, move to a different country. So I'm going to go to a
safe person with those feelings. And those people become the holding,
the regulating with you. Can I say this too? I loved that you highlighted the safe
person aspect because I think in our day and age, people are using the phrasing,
you know, this is a safe space and we built a safe environment for you. And the
truth is that is beautiful. But we don't build safe spaces.
We connect with safe people. Like, that's what, it's the people that gets you
through. I think it's easy for us to say, well, I just need to lay in my bed all
day because it's the safest place to be. And maybe for some of us, that's a
reality. But the truth is, I just think safety is built in the context of
relationship. And that's what I had. I didn't want to run to a safe space and be
isolated because I think sometimes when we're isolated, that safe space doesn't, it
isn't safe anymore. because it's just you and your thoughts and your emotion.
held you when you were. Yeah. I call it living on the offense, not the defense.
I'm a, you know, I'm from Texas. I'm a wild girl. I kind of just run. I don't
really walk. Slow is not my vibe, okay? But over these last couple of years, as
I've been healing and healing in public, which is even heavier, I've just learned
that It's just better to be prepared. I honestly feel like I sound like my dad. If
my dad listens this, he's going to be like, I've been telling that girl that for
years. But I just, I've been trying to live on the offense and not the defense.
And this confessional community came about because of one singular human being that
said, I don't want to live a life isolated. I also don't want to live a high
level life. I want to live a deep life, an intentional life. That's our, my friend
Jessica Honiger, who you know, and I'll never forget. She called me in the airport,
and she's like, hey, I want to do this thing. It's a group. We're going to meet
every single month, and we're going to go real deep. We're going to talk about our
trauma. We're going to hold each other accountable, and we're going to confess. And
I was like, don't want to do that. I'm not really sure what you're talking about
here. And I prayed about it and thought through it. And I was like, no, I want
that too. I actually think it's the antidote to a lot of things, not just betrayal
and divorce, but also accountability. I think it helps prevent addiction. I think it
helps to address addiction. I think it helps to curate language around your feelings.
I also think it gives us so much confidence and security in ourselves because we've
got a group of people here who is committed to a life of sharing, a life of
confessing with you. It's not one -sided. Everyone's in it. And every year we meet
in person for a retreat and we go super deep and we're there for like three days,
but it feels like three months because we are crying our hearts out and tending to
each other and contending in the spirit for each other. But then every single month
for three hours, we meet via Zoom. You've joined us on one of those calls and made
me not crying from all my friends as we did some part work. And it's that,
you know, I just, it's what I believe at least Jesus had with the disciples, these,
these, these, these, this.
when crisis hits, we have people, but we haven't tested that piece. Because sometimes
people can't, and it's legitimate. Sometimes, you know what I, right? And I love
that you said that, the capacity to hold the weight of pain. And that had been
tested before. Tony, for the listener who's listening to you saying,
that sounds amazing. I don't have that. Yeah.
How can somebody go about cultivating that with the, because I hear you saying there
was a lot of, there's structure to it because to hold, to have the capacity, we've
got to have structure. There's got to be some norms. There's got to be, because
it's hard. I know. Oh, my goodness. So how does somebody go, there's two questions
in that one is how does somebody go about beginning to develop that kind of safety
net yeah and what might they anticipate what scaffolding is needed so that that
safety net will hold because we are human and it gets hard yeah so i think there's
a couple of things i think the first thing is that we have to be brave enough to
admit that we need that type of community yeah and i think for some of us It's
going to require bravery because for some of us, we've been the strong friend for a
long time. We've been the one that everyone comes to. I get tender about this
because I've been the strong friend for a long time. And it took a lot of humility
and bravery on my part to say, I just, I'm not the strongest all the time. I need
breaks. I need help. I need people that'll say, I got that for you.
I see you're struggling. And I've especially needed that over the last two years.
And so I think for some of us, we've got to take that cape off and we've got to
start leaning in. I think the second thing that's super, super important is that we
have to transition friends that are currently there that don't have the capacity to
hold the weight. I can remember around 24, I really started to get serious about my
faith. I got saved at 21, but I was just a fan of God, not a follower. And at
24, 25, I was like, no, I really want to get serious about this. And I remember
the Lord prompting me to start really taking a deep dive, look at my community, my
current community, because they were, you know, people from college, from my past,
party girls, while doing living life together, partying. And that wasn't the life I
wanted to live anymore. And so unfortunately, I wasn't strong enough to have deep
connection with people that still live that lifestyle because then I would end up
doing it myself. And so I remember doing something very brave and vulnerable and it
was asking the Lord to help me transition friends and help me to find new friends,
which is childish when you think about it. Like it's embarrassing a little bit like,
Daddy God, can you help me find friends, you know? But I kind of think that's
required of us. And I think the third thing is that it's anticipating that as an
adult, this is going to be really hard. When I was writing the book,
Don't Try This Alone, I was doing research on why it's so difficult for us as
adults to develop friendship and why it's so easy for kids to do it. And two
things came up consistently in all of these research studies and it was number one.
Kids don't have so much baggage in their stories. They don't handle or process shame
in the same way as we do as adults. So when my daughter goes to the park and 52
seconds later, she comes up to me and she's like, I got a best friend now. Her
name is such and such and her and I plan a playday together and I gave her your
number. Like, I'm like, what is happening right now? Like for her, for Dylan,
my daughter, she doesn't have so much shame. So she goes right up to a person.
She's like, you're going to be my friend and it's over. The second thing is our
parents and guardians were curators of community for us. So our parents brought us
to the park around kids and jumpy places around kids. They put us in school. So
literally the community was curated for us. Even all the way up to college when we
think about it, we're literally in a saturated small campus with other people that
are like -minded, there for the same reason. And so we have to find those places
now as adults. We have to go to church sometimes.
are in your area. Like you can just actually get on an email list with different
events that have different people interest in the same thing you're interested in.
And I would say the last thing is this, we've got to lay our personality types
aside. The biggest thing that I've heard as I've released this book is, well, I'm
an introvert, so this is hard for me. Well, I'm an eight, so I don't really like
people. Well, I'm this, I'm a that. I'm so sorry to break it to a couple of you
out there, but your God -given design was to be connected with other people. And
your personality type, I think, comes after that. Okay? So you're going to have to
lay that down and really start viewing yourself as a person that needs deep
connection, a person that needs deep community, no matter what day, month you were
born, no matter what wiring you have, no matter what emotional color you are, you
have to start thinking of yourself as a person that needs deep community like you
need water yeah yeah i love that and on that last point it can look differently
for different people and i but i love that you're saying that self awareness all
that means is that that that might dictate a different approach to finding the
people or i would prefer a group of three over a group of 12 you know you know
but but but but but but it the baseline need is universal so i heard three things
and i want to tony because it's so good and i really want the listener to hear
this so first well the first thing i heard you say is this is a universal need it
doesn't matter we have to have this it doesn't come naturally yeah and and so i
love this humility i need this yeah it's part of my god -given design the second
thing i heard you say essentially was discernment it's not just anybody i can have
a great friend that i love to go out with on friday nights that doesn't necessarily
become my safe people yep and i heard you say you went through a pair you had to
get really discerning yes and and i just i want to give a practical tip here
because i have gotten so many messages about this from people like, okay, but how?
Like, do I just like peace out like you're dead to me? I'm like, no, clarity is
kindness. The conversation that I had just give you, I'm going to give you guys a
script right now. Yeah. The conversation I had with one of my friends was, hey, I'm
getting ready to go on a healing journey. I'm really pressing into my faith and
relationship with the Lord. And so my friendships are going to look different. It
doesn't mean I don't love you. It doesn't mean I'm upset with you in any way. I
just want you to know that you may feel a little bit more distance and space
between me because I'm getting stronger in the things that I do. I'm battling some
things with addiction. Like, I just need some space and time to really get more
healthy. And I can't do that in close proximity right now. Wow. So that's like...
How did that go with most people? Okay. So one friend was like, hey, I totally
understand. I'm here if you need me. And I'm like, keeping that as a mental note.
You're a person that I'm transitioning right now, but I could actually maybe
transition back in later. You're pretty safe. That's actually a sign of safety.
You're mature. There was another friend who is like, what are you even talking
about? If you don't want to be my friend, just tell me. And it was in that moment
that I, you know, had continued the conversation and said, hey, truly, it's not
about that at all. I am just personally not strong enough to be in deep friendship
with you right now because I really would like to stop cursing. I want to stop
drinking so much. I just had to provide more and more detail and more and more
clarity. And that's okay. It's okay to give people that, honestly, that respect of
saying, I'm not going anywhere. I just, I had to change some things about my life.
And, you know, unfortunately, our friendship never attached into a really deep,
intimate friendship. And she has great, lovely, beautiful friendships and so do I and
we're both still standing and we're fine but sometimes it's hard and that's okay
it's yeah it well and that leads to the third point which I hear you saying is
courage the brave it it takes to deal with the shame that might come up the guilt
that comes up I always talk about the guilt that follows a healthy
like there's that courage that that piece that kids have kind of more net but that
piece to be like this is what I need and and I've got to lean into it and people
some people may not like it
but it's how I'm figuring out this path yeah I also will say that a big question
I get all the time and this is for the listener is, well, how can I trust again
when I've been so betrayed? Yes. Because of my story and because of the public
betrayal and divorce, I get this question a whole bunch, like, but how can I trust
again? Yeah. Like, I've been so deeply hurt. Like, people, when people look over the
context of their story, they're like, when I'm in the most pain, it's, if it's not
a physical thing or a disease or anything in my body, it's because of people. And
so the question is, how how do I get back up again? And I think I get a little
bit feisty with this question because I know for me the first year after divorce
was, it was difficult. But I didn't have a choice. I had two kids.
I had to move out of my house. I needed help moving a crib that was twice my
size. I needed help furnishing my new house. I didn't have any income coming in
because I got off stage to heal. Like, I had no choice. I had to accept help.
And I just think that it was the kindness of God to remind me that not it doesn't
matter what happened in the past, but it can't matter so much that we jeopardize
the future of our relationships. The people that hurt us, betray us,
broke our trust, caused the need for us to go to counseling. They don't get to
have our future. It's just not something I'm willing to compromise on.
And I don't think it's something that you have to compromise on. And when I think
about the way of Jesus, I think about this idea that he had 12 disciples and all
along, even when choosing them, he knew two would betray him. He knew Judas was
going to rat him out. He knew it. He's omniscient. He's omnipresent. He's all
powerful. He knew this was coming. He also knew that Peter, one of his closest
disciples, would deny that he even knew him. And yet, the betrayal of the two
wasn't more powerful than the beauty of the ten. We have to walk like that just
because my ex -husband betrayed me doesn't mean that God hasn't created and put other
people in my life who I need, who won't betray me, who I can trust, who are safe.
And if I allow one human being and my experience with that one human being to tell
me or influence me not to open up again, I would have lost so much connection,
so much love, so much help when I really needed it. So I just want to encourage
you, and I want to be honest with you that this journey of community,
of curating it, the ebbs and flows of moving to different cities and being hurt and
being rejected, it's hard. I want to name it.
I don't want to be one of those people that's like, It's so beautiful.
it's not yep and I want the listener to hear that that the odds you can you can
bump into and we can do our work to figure out our patterns and figure out if
there's anything on our side of the street that we can yeah need to do about how
we're choosing sometimes it's not our fault at all sometimes we are not oh yes
right I can affirm that you can do all of that and when with all of that There
will be safe people out there. There will be. 100%.
And I don't say 100 % about anything. Yeah. But I've witnessed it. Yes.
Not only in my own story. Yeah. But in the countless amount of stories that I get
to hold from listeners, watchers, viewers, people in real life when I get off stage
like, no, Tony, I had this happened to me and this really hurt. I lost all these
friends. And now I'm in a beautiful community. And now I'm thriving. And now I know
what it looks like to have a real good friend. So I've just witnessed it. Like I
just, I'm a believer all the way. 100%. I
love it. I want to, Tony, just in this kind of final segment, how once you found
people, you have this confessional community, you find people, you find these people
who are people you can trust, there are still within safe friendships,
this process of what we call rupture and repair, in healthy marriages with our kids,
right? So one of the things I think that happens to people when there's been a lot
of broken trust, a lot of betrayal, is then when you encounter a bomb,
lie that these people are going to hurt me. They're going to betray me. I know
what pain feels like. I don't. I mean, it just for the first time my whole life,
I battled with forgiveness. I battled with anger. I am a telotubby on the inside.
So I felt anger and rage for the first time in a very long time. And so it was
hard. And in that, I leaked that pain, that anger from my divorce leaked into my
friendship. And I want to talk about a specific moment. I won't get in too much
detail. But in our confessional community, we had a rupture. And I was right at the
center of it. Something was said that triggered me, not intentionally at all. These
are beautiful, safe people. This is why I just want to affirm, like, even in the
healthiest, most safe environments, these things happened. I got triggered. I was also
battling a little bit with alcohol. I just want to be open and transparent about
that. And I'm now sober. I'm a part of the sober community. I'm not even playing
around with it. I wasn't like drunk, crazy, addicted. But it was something I started
using to numb. And I just, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be that
person. And so I quit completely. But at the time, I hadn't quit. Motions were
high. I wasn't sleeping at all. I was on sleeping medicine, anxiety medicine. There
was just not good. And something was said in our confessional community that deeply
triggered me. And I left. I walked out of the room and I left everyone.
And it makes me emotional because one of the phrases that we have in our
confessional community is that we're never leaving the room. And I just was in so
much pain that I left. And about three months later, I felt so convicted about it
and not in a shame -filled way, but I was the one that needed to repair the
rupture. And I needed to lean in and I needed to explain what happened and why I
felt this way and what responsibility I needed to take because repair requires
responsibility. And so I got everybody on a Zoom call and I just apologized.
I didn't use my pain as an excuse. I took it on as a responsibility to
And that's repair. It's saying,
I'm sorry. I value this environment. I value you guys so much.
I value this friendship. I value what we've built. And I won't let my pain take us
apart. I won't let the pain cause a rupture that doesn't get repaired. Because the
truth is, Alison, and you know this and you've said this like it's not a rupture
that ruins a relationship it's the lack of repair that does and i'm here to testify
because i've witnessed it and i've been responsible for the rupture um that repair
is possible and it requires humility and it requires discernment and it requires
courage that's so good tony i i just want to honor your willingness to share that
story. One of my, my favorite things is when the thing that brings me closest to
tears is when someone raises their hand and said, oh, I was the one. That takes a
lot of, because I can imagine there were,
there were reasons. You were triggered. People hurt us, even when they don't mean to
hurt us. words are so feeble. I feel this way all the time when trying to be with
someone through pain. I'm so aware. I'm like, oh, words are a landmine. But we have
to use them. Yep. Right? There's no way out. And we misstep.
And boy, I just, and we do get hurt. And I just, I hear in you just such to
yeah um that's a that's a big deal to be able to because three months is an
insignificant amount of time yeah it suggests the level of the hurt to be able to
really dig deep and go yeah what happened i have to look at my side of this it
doesn't mean yeah again we're not going to talk this through and someone else might
not say hey i need you to know this is what I meant, you know, that's the repair,
but I have to show back up at the table. And I just, I appreciate your sharing
that. That's, that's going to really speak to someone listening, right, whether it's,
we're the one that has to say, it's me, I, or whether we're the one that has to
be the one that says, it's okay. But sometimes I think that part is a little bit
easier. Yeah. It's It's almost in the repair. I see it in marriage.
Yeah. Oh, it's so hard. It is so hard. It's so easy to justify. I could,
and I, you know, I know in marriage I'll say you can be right or you can stay
married. You can stay married. Surprise, guys. Right. You know what's interesting is
that when I look at the formation of repair in our lives when we were just
children, We weren't trained on that. No. You know, I think... It's not a skill we
were taught. Yeah. I mean, I think about like, well, my parents said when my
brother hurt my feelings or whatever, they were just like, say sorry to your sister.
My brother, sorry. And that was it. Now we're playing again. Now we're on the
Nintendo, you know? And we weren't taught to say, hey, I just noticed that there's
some distance between us. You know, when you're ready, do you mind talking to me
about it? Is there something that I said or did that you can help bring awareness
to so that I can fix it? Help me understand that more. The story that I'm telling
myself is that you said that because of this, this, this, and that. Those are
tools. Those are functions. Those are, that's a part of a framework that a lot of
us were not exposed to. So when we cause pain to someone and they're upset with
us. Everything else takes the front seat. Our insecurities, our shame, our denial of
it, like our running. We run away from repair. Our attachment loans. Right.
I mean, everything. And what are we going to do when all of those things come up?
Okay, we're going to have a strategy. We're going to have language in place. We're
going to be practicing conflict when conflict is not happening. We're going to be
living on the offense, not the defense.
there but I don't know how and sometimes it's bumpy reentry is bumpy and we're
afraid of that and so the path of least resistance to get back to what we were
saying is just to stay isolated versus the bumpy road of I don't know how to do
this and maybe that's just a way to start when you need to repair I don't know
how but I need you to know that what I'm trying to do is reach out you know and
I also love that you said bumpy. I just got this visual.
I always tell my friends, like, we're all on a bus together, guys. And we're going
to have some bumps in the road. But instead of just ignoring those bumps, we're
going to just make a little U -turn. We're going to go smooth out that pavement.
And then we're all going to get back on the bus and have us a party. And I just
think, like, that's the reality of what's happening. This is not all of us on a
beautiful sailboat, on a beautiful day, smooth sailing all the way. No, it is a
bumpy, sometimes hot, smelly bus that we are all on. I think about like a field
trip. We're all on the way to have so much fun together, so much life together,
but we may hit a pothole, we may run out of gas, we may have to pull up on the
side of the road. Somebody's not going to get their favorite seat. But we're on it,
And we're not getting off. We're going to be on it together. And it's beautiful.
And here's what I will say too, because I hear someone saying, don't want to get
on that bus. Don't want to get on the bumpy road. I'm not down. I'm going to get
car sickness. Like, we're going someplace beautiful. Yeah. Like,
we're going to the places where fun can actually be had, where freedom can actually
be experienced, where deep connection happens. We're going somewhere fun.
Yes. Get on the bus. Yeah. Where the joys are all the much more joyful and
celebratory for the having gone through the bumps, right? You don't get one without
the other, right? Yeah. So sorry. That's another hard reality that we have to face
that in order to experience the greatest amount of joy, we have to be open to
experience the greatest amount of pain. It's, I don't like it.
I don't want to do that. Even just saying it, I'm like, I don't even know why I
said that out loud just now, but goodness. And it's so worth it. It's worth it.
It's worth it. It really is. Yeah. Tell us about, so this is your beautiful new
book. Don't try this alone. Tell it, tell my listeners where they can find it, why
you wrote it, and what's in it for them as they're resonating with everything we're
saying. Well, you can get the book anywhere. All the books are sold, Amazon, Barnes
& Noble, Christian books, all the things. Audible's so fun. I got to record the
book this time. It's fun. It's like action -packed. I get to laugh a little bit.
Like, it's just a cool little thing. And it's actually really interesting, Allison,
that the audio book has sold more than the physical copy. And I don't even unheard
of. I love it. But it's just a super fun way to digest the book. And as far as
what you're going to get out of it, I mean, it is truly everything we've talked
about. It is how to transition friends that you need to put in a different, more
safe space, how to identify real good, godly friends. What are the traits and
characteristics we should be looking for? How to be honest about what you need as a
friend because that's a huge and big deal. Like if you can't name the things you
need, how someone should treat you, talk to you, then you're going to inevitably end
up with friends that hurt you that talk to you in ways that you don't appreciate.
So you have to know you in order for them to know you. Right? And shout out to
the best of you. Okay. I understand.
And one of the things I really love is the ending of the book because I kind of
turn it on you. We want good godly friends and we're not good godly friends
ourselves. And so we're going to talk about what that looks like right at the end
of the book for you to be a friend worth having friends. So that's the part I
really love because I do believe that we deeply desire the things that we're not
willing to work for. And so we're going to have to do our work to get real good
godly community and that's going to start with us. But I love it. I hope you get
it. Don't try this alone. It's great. You're so real, Tony. I always love our
conversations. It's, no, you just have this authenticity. You're so real and it
really tracks. And I just appreciate, even letting us into the bumpiness of your own
experience, it's, it's what this is about,
right? It's what this is about. There's, we have to keep our real souls. It's
ongoing work and I just so appreciate you and I'm so grateful that you shared your
wisdom with us today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm so grateful. Thank you
for joining me for this episode of The Best of You. Be sure to check out the show
notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can find those on my
website at Dr. Allison Cook .com. That's Allison with one l .cook .com.
Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss an
episode. And I love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It helps so much to
get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And
remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others,
and you stay true to your God -given self.
What do you do when someone you love - whether it’s your kids, a spouse, or a friend - keeps doing the same maddening things?
This week, we’re tackling how to approach the most frustrating dynamics in any relationship. Dr. Alison is joined by award-winning psychologist Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder of Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.
He shares a game-changing mindset shift: most challenging behavior is about skill, not will.
If you’ve ever thought, “They just don’t care,” about someone you love, this conversation provides a proven, practical path to real solutions.
This episode explores:
The five core skills that drive every behavior
The real reason most people struggle
How to keep your cool and trade judgment for curiosity
The exact words that lower defensiveness fast
Why boundaries still matter—and how to set them collaboratively
A step-by-step walkthrough of Collaborative Problem Solving in action
For more from Dr. Stuart Ablon, check out his many free resources:
💡For free access to an interactive, self-paced course for parents, go to:
https://thinkkids.org/Self-Paced-Courses/Parent-Caregiver-Course/ Use code: BestofYou
🏥 Think: Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital
📚Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work
Here are some other episodes you might like :
Episode 86: Embracing Conflict—Why It's Essential & 4 Simple Ways to Tackle It
Episode 70: Mastering the Art of Emotional Intelligence—How to Harness the Power of Your Emotions to Improve Your Relationships
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Head to cozyearth.com and use my code BESTOFYOU for 40% off!
- If you’re looking for a Bible that helps you live the Word, not just read it, then grab this beautiful one I’m currently using at NIVapplicationbible.com.
*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.
Editing by Giulia Hjort
Sound engineering by Kelly Kramarik
Music by Andy Luiten
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.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week’s episode of The Best of You podcast.
Today we’re exploring a mindset shift that can transform the hardest moments with the people in your life—whether that’s a child melting down, a partner who shuts down, a colleague who stonewalls, or a parent who pushes your buttons.
The shift is the idea that: most challenging behavior is about skills, not will. When someone repeatedly does that maddening thing, our brains tend to assign motive—“they don’t care,” “they’re being difficult,” “they’re trying to get their way.” But what if, instead, we asked: Which skill is missing in this moment? And how might we work with them to build it?
My guest today has spent three decades showing families, schools, workplaces, and systems how to do exactly that. Dr. J. Stuart Ablon is a clinical psychologist and one of the leading voices on understanding and changing concerning behavior in any setting. He’s the Founder and Director of Think:Kids in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He’s the developer and leading teacher of Collaborative Problem Solving®—the approach behind the mantra you’ve probably heard: “People do well if they can.”
Stuart is the author of several terrific books, including his latest, Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School and at Work. His work is practical, compassionate, and incredibly effective because it builds skills and preserves relationships.
We're gonna touch on a number of topics today, but here's what you'll hear that you can apply to anyone who's frustrating you, but also to yourself. You're gonna learn the five core skill areas that sit underneath all behavior and how crucial these skills are for all of us. You're gonna learn how to stay regulated yourself and swap out judgment for curiosity when dealing with the difficult behavior.
We're talking about why boundaries still matter. We're not throwing those out, but how to reach them differently and more collaboratively. And you're gonna learn why understanding another person's concerns, another person's perspective helps us arrive at real solutions, solutions that are realistic and mutually beneficial at home, at work, and everywhere in between.
I am so thrilled to welcome Dr. J. Stuart Ablon to the podcast today. This is truly a life -changing conversation. I have thought about it so many times throughout the day since recording it, and he's also brought along a gift for our community. Think:Kids has a self-paced online course for parents and caregivers to learn Collaborative Problem Solving step by step. For listeners of this episode, you can access it free of charge with the coupon code bestofyou. It’s available in English and Spanish. We’ll put the direct link—and the code—in the show notes, along with more ways to connect at thinkkids.org.
I’m so thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Stuart Ablon.
Alison Cook (00:00.264)
you know kind of say let me let me give that another shot or if technology falls out we'll be we'll be just fine okay all right everything is recording that's the hardest part of all of this and just quickly i mentioned to you in the in the email that it sounds like you know dr paula rausch yeah
Dr. Stuart Ablon (00:01.731)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (00:05.912)
Sounds good.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (00:20.876)
Yes, yes, we went to the same college. We worked in the same department here at Mass General for a long, long time. So I've known her forever, yes.
Alison Cook (00:31.144)
Yeah. Did you know Lisa Krivikis by chance? Different field. She was a physiatrist, that's how at MGH and that's how we got connected to Dr. Rausch. They were friends and colleagues. so we've had a kind of a, our family has been really personally gained so much from PACT and what she's done there. and yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (00:35.958)
No, I don't think so.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (00:45.432)
Got it.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (00:56.088)
Good, okay, yeah, and she does incredible work there and a unique and a program that's so needed, so yes, yeah.
Alison Cook (01:05.236)
Yeah, yeah, I love what you guys are doing. of you collectively is just amazing. well, I would love to just get started. Dr. Ablon, for my listeners who aren't familiar with your work, and I hope all of them are going to grab a copy of this book that you've written. It's just so helpful. So wise and practical. But tell my listeners a little bit about your work specifically, where you focus and this background that you have working not only with children, but with really unique cases with
kids that are really struggling.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (01:36.558)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, you know, I've spent my whole career at this point, which, you 30 years or so, really mostly around trying to help people understand kids and adolescents and why some of them have a hard time managing their behavior and what to do about it. And, you know, I've been able to, as you mentioned, work in some really challenging circumstances where, you you've got kids
with severe trauma histories. You've got staff who don't receive much training in trying to support these kids, and it can lead to some really difficult situations. And we've been fortunate to be able to try to help a lot of different organizations and kids and families in some of those toughest of settings. So I'm talking about in residential treatment facilities and hospitals and detention centers and things like that.
But the lessons that we've learned over time can be applied to every parent's interaction with every child. Not necessarily a child who struggles severely, but all kids can have a hard time managing their behavior at some times. And as parents, we all struggle to figure out the best way to parent our kids.
Alison Cook (02:43.061)
Yeah.
Alison Cook (02:54.633)
I think there's something so compelling and I found it in my own work, both as a therapist, but also as someone out in the community and the service work that I do that when you see that there are principles and truths that apply across the board. And this leads me to one of your biggest, I think the things that you emphasize that I think is so crucial and I want you to unpack it for us, but you really emphasize the importance of skills.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (03:10.114)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (03:23.619)
Yes.
Alison Cook (03:23.657)
that when anyone, it could be a kid, it could be an adult, it could be a spouse, it could be a parent, anyone in our lives is struggling when we find ourselves bumping up against this like, why? Why does this keep happening? Whether it's someone else, maybe in ourselves, that we tend to default to this idea of willpower. If I only tried harder, I could fix it. If they would only try harder,
Dr. Stuart Ablon (03:45.027)
Yes.
Alison Cook (03:50.997)
they would fix it and you found that to be a really problematic framework. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (03:51.0)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (03:54.479)
Yeah, well, it's sure, it's mostly problematic because it's wrong. know, forever the conventional wisdom has been that, particularly with kids, that when kids aren't sort of behaving the ways that we as parents or teachers or other adults want them to, that they're sort of doing that on purpose. And they're doing it to either get things like attention or, you know, get their own way or things like that. And actually,
When you study kids who have a hard time managing their behavior, what you realize is it's not about that at all. That something we've learned now, there's probably 40, almost 50 years of research that has shown that kids, or as you point out, anybody for that matter, who struggles to manage their behavior, they don't really lack the will to behave well. It's not that simple. What they struggle with are the skills necessary to manage their behavior.
And that's a new way of thinking about things, relatively new, but it makes a lot of sense. When you think about your average day, whether you're a kid or an adult, there's a whole bunch of skills you need to be able to employ to behave yourself well. You've got to be flexible. You've got to tolerate frustration. You've got to do good problem solving. And if those aren't skills you're good at, what it leads to is you sort of acting in ways that other people don't want you to act.
Either doing things people don't want you to do or not doing things that people want you to do.
Alison Cook (05:23.069)
It is such a paradigm shift as I've read your work and engaged with it to apply it. Even again, you can apply it with your kids, but even with someone in, you know, a sibling or where it's like, why are they doing that? They must not care about me. You know, we impute a sort of moral cause in a way, almost, and understandably sometimes because the impact is that it hurts.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (05:43.896)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (05:51.629)
Well, so that's, think, a really crucial point, which is, so why do we tend to believe that behavior is under people's control and they just must not be trying hard enough, or if they're doing things that are harmful or hurtful to me, that they're doing it on purpose? I think it's because when somebody's behaving in a challenging fashion towards us,
We're not in the best position to be able to really understand what's going on, because we get frustrated. We lose our ability to think straight. When somebody's being difficult, when they're not doing what we want them to do, when they're disrespecting us, when we don't feel like an authority figure with our child, or worse yet, when we feel scared, when we feel unsafe, we don't respond with the smart part of our brain. Instead, we react more impulsively, and we want to
Alison Cook (06:22.357)
Yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (06:44.558)
trying to regain control. And the way we humans tend to do that is reaching for power.
Alison Cook (06:50.335)
Yes. that's so well stated. It sort of pulls out the worst of us. We default. And again, that's not to excuse the behavior. And it's not to say that there isn't something that needs to be dealt with out here. But it does remind me, again, I mentioned to you right before we jumped on that my background is in the psychology of religion. It reminds me of, frankly, one of Jesus's teachings when it said when
Take out the speck in your own eye first, right? It's an opportunity. I talk about it in IFS language to take a U-turn. What's happening inside of me and my default is to go to blame and judgment, which doesn't help. And that's actually more of a reflection of what's happening inside of me than it is what's happening inside of them.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (07:30.156)
Yes, yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (07:35.087)
Correct. Correct. Well, it's a reflection, I think, of both because there's a fundamental truth, is that dysregulation, sort of losing our ability to think straight, is contagious. And so if you're a parent and your child is beginning to lose it, it's contagious. And we begin to lose it too. And now, the nice thing, though, is on the flip side, regulation, keeping your calm, maintaining control.
Alison Cook (07:49.767)
Yes!
Alison Cook (07:55.817)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (08:05.388)
That is also contagious. And it's in fact why many children develop skills to be able to manage their emotions because they've had a lot of experiences with a parent that helps them see what that's like. They co-regulate, if you will, and develop the skills themselves.
Alison Cook (08:22.177)
Okay, so let's break this down because so there's a couple of things going on here for the listener, right? So we have to, especially as parents, but again, in any relationship, someone else's misbehavior or frustrating behavior, it gives us an invitation not to, like you said, grasp for power, grasp for control. It gives us an opportunity to practice being regulated, right?
And so we have to engage this process of our, we have to have our own skills in place to be able to do that because we have to model it. That's how we're going to best model it, especially for our kids, but really in any relationship. So what is that skill that I need? Right? What are those skills? You've mentioned a couple of them, but suddenly it's like, I know I can't just be angry. I know I can't just try to grasp control. I've kind of figured out enough to know that, but what is it that I do need to do? Because what I
Dr. Stuart Ablon (08:55.384)
Yes. Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (09:11.98)
Right. Right.
Alison Cook (09:18.549)
to learn inside myself is what I'm ultimately modeling, especially for my kids. So what is that? What is that regulation? How do we unpack that in ourselves first?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (09:29.442)
Yeah, well, so first off, I would say that what's really helpful to equip parents or anybody with is a guiding mantra, if you will. And the notion of skill not will is helpful. But I think a more powerful version of that is the philosophy that we teach, which is kids do well if they can. Not kids do well if they want to, but kids do well if they can. And same is true of parents, any adult.
Alison Cook (09:50.943)
Mmm.
Alison Cook (09:57.718)
That's good.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (09:58.595)
People do well if they can. If you can try to remember that whoever you're dealing with that might be frustrating you, it's really hard to imagine that that person is setting out to behave poorly on purpose. You know, look, all of us want to do the best we can. I mean, isn't that true fundamentally of all of us that we're trying the best we can to handle whatever the world is throwing at us with the skills we have? And if you can remember that, people do well if they can, it can position you in a more empathic place.
Alison Cook (10:27.871)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (10:28.246)
And the reason that's so important is I think empathy is the cornerstone of regulation in interactions between us humans. What I mean by that is when your kid is starting to escalate, as opposed to getting pissed off and frustrated with them, if you can maintain some mindset of curiosity, of non-judgmental interest in what's going on, what are you having a hard time with, and how can I help? And if you can...
Alison Cook (10:34.955)
Mmm.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (10:56.622)
have that kind of a stance, that's the beginning of staying regulated yourself and then helping to regulate your child in this case.
Alison Cook (11:05.471)
that's so helpful. That's so practical. So even just that subtle shift from what's wrong with them to I'm curious what's, which is exactly what we're trying to do in the work of getting curious about parts of ourselves. We don't like, like, again, it translates to instead of beating myself up that I'm acting in a certain way, what we respond to is, that's so interesting. I just had a reaction. I wonder what that was about. We're extending that.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (11:21.229)
Yes.
Alison Cook (11:34.933)
to the people in our lives. I'm curious, I wonder what that's about.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (11:36.121)
Yes. Yeah. And curiosity is part of empathy, right? People, think, misunderstand the concept of empathy, the word empathy. People often think empathy means just sort of show you care or something. But actually, when I talk about empathy, that's not what I mean at all. I mean the actual definition of the word empathy, which means to understand. And if you work really hard to understand where somebody else is coming from,
Alison Cook (11:42.068)
Yes!
Alison Cook (11:59.68)
Hmm
Dr. Stuart Ablon (12:06.05)
their concern, their perspective, their point of view, what's hard for them about a situation, whether you agree with it or not, you don't have to agree with it. Just trying to understand it, that's really calming. It's very regulating. And I often say, I think it's the most powerful human regulator we have is trying to understand somebody else's perspective or point of view.
Alison Cook (12:30.145)
That's so well stated. doesn't necessarily mean even feeling sorry for. It doesn't mean I agree with. It means or disagree with. It means I get it. I get why. And that can be a process that can take a little while. So is this kind of leading into this collaborative problem solving that you talk about?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (12:36.29)
No, or disagree with. Right.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (12:50.85)
Yes, yes. Yeah, you know, I mean, we talk about this notion of, look, people do well if they can, we're all doing the best we can with the skills we have. This is about skill not will. We help people, by the way, get clear on which specific skills somebody might be struggling with, whether that's my child or myself. And there's, you know, there tends to be sort of five core areas. But then we teach people, okay, well, so now if you've got a problem with your child or anyone else,
You know, you got to think about your options, which is how you're to handle that. And what we teach people is generally you have three options. You can try to make your child do what you want them to do. You can sort of do it the way they want it or handle it the way they want it. Or you can try to work it out with them and the work it out with them. call collaborative problem solving. And that's where we teach a very specific process that starts not surprisingly with empathy, understanding your child's perspective or point of view.
Alison Cook (13:45.675)
Got it.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (13:49.987)
before you go anywhere near sharing your perspective or point of view. Not your solution, by the way, to the problem, but your perspective, your point of view, what you're worried about, your concern. And seek first to understand, and by the way, if you understand your child first, they're gonna be much more likely to listen to your point of view. And the reason I always do this with my hands is it's my way of reminding myself and others, this is how you know you're collaborating. You have two sets of concerns on the table. Not just your child's, not just yours.
Alison Cook (13:59.99)
Seek first to understand. Yeah.
Alison Cook (14:09.281)
That's right.
Alison Cook (14:16.129)
Mmm.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (14:19.532)
But both. You've heard them out. You've asked them to hear where you're coming from. Now you can collaborate. Now you can invite them to problem solve.
Alison Cook (14:25.601)
So, okay, I love this. want you to walk us through a tough example of that, but before we get there, could you give me those five skills?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (14:37.078)
Of course. Yeah, yeah. And there are really five areas of skill with a bunch of skills embedded in them. So the first one is language and communication skills. And this is why we say, look, the two-year-olds, we call it the terrible twos. One of the reasons we call it terrible twos is they don't have great language and communication skills yet. They're not able to let people know what's bothering them with subtlety. They're not able to articulate their concerns, their perspective, their point of view to engage in verbal back and forth to solve a problem.
Alison Cook (14:40.107)
Okay.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (15:05.97)
Language and communication skills are crucial and not just for little kids. This is true of us adults as well. So that's one category. Second category, attention and working memory skills. know, sort of making your way through the world and managing your behavior well requires a lot of focusing on things that people need you to focus on at certain times, whether you want to or not.
Alison Cook (15:09.665)
Yep.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (15:30.893)
and then shifting to other things and shifting back and holding a bunch of information in your head at one time, that's a whole set of skills that's crucial. Emotion and self-regulation skills, which is fancy way of saying your ability to manage or control your emotional response to stuff and your ability to control yourself, like your impulse control, for instance. Can you stop and think before you act? That's the third category. Fourth category.
Alison Cook (15:38.635)
whole set of skills.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (15:58.615)
cognitive flexibility skills, fancy way of saying flexible thinking. You know, are you somebody who tends to be a bit more rigid or concrete or literal in your thinking, more black and white, or can you see the grays? Are you somebody who does great as long as everything goes according to the plan, the routine, the schedule, but if you throw a wrench into it, if there's something unpredictable, you know, novel, you have a hard time. know, flexible thinking is so important when it comes to managing our behavior.
Alison Cook (16:25.567)
Yep.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (16:27.662)
And then the last category is social thinking skills. There's so much that goes into adaptive behavior in social interactions. From basics like how do you start a conversation? How do you gauge whether somebody's interested in what you are engaging in? How do you know how your behavior impacts others? How you come across? To empathy, that skill we've talked about before, which is a very complex social thinking skill.
And those are the five categories. And I'll tell you what, show me any kid or any adult who really struggles with their behavior. And I will show you somebody who's struggling at least one, if not five of those areas. And if they're struggling in any of those areas, it's just confirmation that this is about skill, not will.
Alison Cook (16:58.145)
Smile.
Alison Cook (17:18.649)
that. So listening, first of all, if I put my parent hat on, I almost feel overwhelmed because kids don't come into the world. We do not come into the world knowing these things. We have to learn them. And many of us arrive at adulthood with deficits in many of these areas. So number one baseline, I think we can all feel empathy. That's a lot to
Dr. Stuart Ablon (17:34.531)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (17:39.426)
Yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (17:43.279)
It is a lot. And the good news is a lot of times kids develop these skills despite the fact that we don't consciously try to practice those skills and help them build them. So that's the good news. But many times you're right. know, kids, they don't acquire those skills and many of us adults struggle. by the way, I don't think any of us gets a clean bill of health on all five of those categories, right? Like we all have our relative strengths and weaknesses.
Alison Cook (18:08.895)
Yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (18:12.75)
on that list.
Alison Cook (18:14.623)
That's well put. Some of them may come more naturally than others, and some of them we have to work at harder than others. Okay, so now take me into this. So we've got that as our baseline. This is what sort of the ideal... When we have some level of skill across all those five categories, we may be able to function fairly well, not perfectly, but we may be able to go through those normal relational where we can problem solve, where we can...
honor somebody else's perspective, where we can speak up for our own perspective, all of those things. But where we see a, let's say with a child, let's say where we see a real behavioral breakdown, a real issue that is causing dysfunction, how do we come along collaboratively? Can you give me an example?
of maybe an actual example from your own practice or on own life where you've detected, here's what we're missing. And it can't be academic in that moment, right? You have to engage starting with that step of curiosity. What would that look like?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (19:18.338)
Yeah, well, so the first thing you want to do if you're going to practice this kind of collaborative problem solving is you need to clarify what problems you want to try solving. And I always tell people, you can't solve a behavior, but you can solve a problem that leads to some kind of a challenging behavior. So as parents, the first thing I do in my practice is I have people list, OK, so what are the types of situations
where the behavior that you're not so wild about comes up. Is it trouble waking up in the morning to get down to breakfast and go to school? Is it spending too much time on the computer in the afternoon? Is it not getting down to their homework? Is it refusing to eat what you've served at dinner? The list goes on and on and on. And what you want to do is you want to get as specific as possible, because that's your list of problems you want to solve.
and you wanna pick one at a time and you wanna try to work on them proactively, which is very important. Don't wait until the problem starts to happen, okay? So if this is a child who isn't getting up and out in the morning in time for school and making the whole family late, the worst time to work on that is in the morning when you're all running late. Pick a time where a kid is calm and accessible, you've had some time to think, and that's when you wanna start doing this collaboration.
Alison Cook (20:45.153)
So I love that that's a reframe of don't try to solve a behavior.
try to identify a problem. Again, that requires our own regulation to not react in the moment to the behavior, but to kind of notice that's a problem.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (21:02.028)
Well, you can, you don't even have to do it in the moment though. You know, you can do it when you, when you, you know, are about to hop into bed at the end of the night exhausted. can say, okay, why am I so exhausted? What were the, what were the challenges? Where were the meltdowns today? Where did we have these conflicts? Let me list a few of them and let me think about what the patterns are here so I can get ahead of this and just start small, start in one place, pick one problem to try to practice collaborative problem solving.
Alison Cook (21:05.078)
Yeah.
Alison Cook (21:18.976)
Yep.
Alison Cook (21:29.385)
Okay, then could you walk me through, so the first step is to kind of notice when you're in your own regulated place, and then you gotta go to your kid.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (21:37.431)
Yeah. And when you go to your kid, you want to be very careful not to bring up the behavior and have them on the defensive immediately. OK. Well, they're going to get defensive if you bring up the behavior. And this smells like a lecture about how they need to change their behavior. But if you bring up the problem you're wanting to solve with them and immediately confirm that you're curious and you're interested and you want to help, it's not magic.
Alison Cook (21:43.515)
Exactly! That's the first thing I thought! They're just gonna get defensive! So what-
Alison Cook (21:51.986)
Exactly!
Dr. Stuart Ablon (22:06.06)
but it's gonna sound a little different to them. And in my experience, they'll wanna hear a little bit more. So what does that look like? In the example I gave, instead of like, hey, I wanna talk to you about morning time, because we cannot be late anymore, because your behavior is making everybody, who wants to participate in that conversation? If I'm the kid, I'm out of there too, right? But what if I started the conversation by saying, hey, you know what? I've noticed that the morning routine's not working so great so far.
And I feel really bad about that. And I'm sure there's a good reason why. What do you think's going on with the morning routine? And notice the sort of little clinical trick that I'm using there, which is I'm making the problem the problem, not the kid or the behavior the problem. The problem's the morning routine, not the kid's participation or lack thereof in the morning routine. And I'm being curious, and I'm asking for their engagement. I'm asking for their perspective.
Alison Cook (23:00.169)
Okay, that is a profound shift, what you just said. And it strikes me that it really means we have to not go with an agenda, because kids will sniff out our agenda. Especially because again, I think a lot of my listeners, and think a lot of people in general, Dr. Ablennon, I've heard you speak about this as well, are kind of caught in that punishment reward, whether we're gonna go, well, we're gonna have a consequence, right? Or we're gonna reward you if you have 10 days of...
getting to school and you're really kind of, you're kind of coming in, no, none of that. It's more of a genuine curiosity, which is what's happening here? I'm curious. Nada, let's fix this.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (23:38.979)
Yeah, and that's your agenda. You are coming in with an agenda, but the agenda isn't to impose your will upon your child. The agenda is to try to figure out what's going on. And if your kid looks at you skeptically, like, what are you trying to do? The great thing about this process is you can be totally transparent. You can say, what I'm trying to do is do a better job of trying to understand what's going on instead of just reacting. And I really want to listen to you and hear from you.
Alison Cook (23:43.894)
Yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (24:05.836)
And I think maybe if we learn some stuff together, we may have some better ideas about how to handle things in a way that'll work for both of us.
Alison Cook (24:12.862)
Yeah, that's, that is that I mean, just listening to you even as an adult, if someone came to me and I really felt like they were trying to collaborate with me, I would respond completely differently.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (24:24.716)
Yes. Yeah, you know, it's funny, do when we do trainings and we do these role plays and people want to role play a kid getting really upset and see sort of how I would handle that situation. If you approach it with curiosity and collaboration, it's really hard, even if you're trying to manufacture being angry to be angry. If somebody is saying, hey, I just want to understand what's going on and I want to see if I can help. Now, sure, are there cases where
You know, a kid has had so many conversations like this that they're suspicious. And so you say all the right words and they say some version of, right. I don't want to talk. You don't care. Something like that, right? That's quite possible that they'll do that. And this is where I give parents, you know, any adult for that matter, a bunch of guidance about what I think are the sort of tools of empathy. And not just because I've studied this for a long time.
Alison Cook (25:19.668)
Yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (25:22.606)
And it's not rocket science. What it is is you ask questions. If need be, you take some educated guesses if you're not getting much from your child. But if they say anything to you, you let them know you heard them by repeating it back in your own words. And if need be, they get upset, shut down, reassure them that this is not some tricky attempt for you just to impose your will. So in other words, if they said to you, don't wanna talk about this, I'm sick of talking to you, you're not gonna help, you don't care. You know what I would say? I would say,
Wow, it sounds like what you're saying is, doesn't feel like a conversation you want to be a part of because you really don't think that I mean what I'm going to say. Am I hearing you right? All I did was reflective listening. And here's reassurance. I would say something like, and you know what? If I felt like that, I wouldn't want to have a conversation either. So I totally get where you're coming from.
Alison Cook (26:12.872)
Yeah, yeah, you just stay in that curious space no matter what comes. Now, what is the role of boundaries with this? Whether it's with kids or with, I can just hear this question, right? Well, what if I do need to actually, I just can hear this question coming, you what if I do need to stop a behavior that is dangerous or if someone is,
Dr. Stuart Ablon (26:24.407)
I'm
Yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (26:36.948)
Absolutely. It's funny though, the reason I laughed was it's funny how we conflate collaboration with a lack of boundaries. Which makes no sense to me. It's like, I mean, when I talk about collaborative problem solving, I'm not talking about anything goes and you're just there to do whatever your child wants and you have no structure, there's no limits. No. In fact, the reason I'm doing collaborative problem solving
Alison Cook (26:48.018)
Okay, talk to me about this.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (27:06.574)
is because I have concerns as a parent. I have a perspective, I have a point of view, I have things that need to be addressed, but imposing my will is not the way I wanna get them addressed. boundaries, limits, every bit is important. mean, the whole reason you're having this conversation we're talking about right now is because you need to get to work on time and the kids need to get to school on time. That's the boundary, that's the limit. How we're gonna go about achieving it? Collaboratively. But the boundary's there, the limit's there.
Alison Cook (27:08.862)
Yeah.
Alison Cook (27:22.057)
Yeah.
Alison Cook (27:35.38)
That's good. That's good. That's good. It's a different strategy. Again, it's a skill. You're teaching us the skill that we're trying to model for them, right? Which is it's different skill versus yelling, badgering, and it's a more effective skill.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (27:49.101)
Yes. Well, look, I mean, in my experience, most families try, you know, the sort of the basics of trying to cajole or impose their will or use a bribe or a consequence to try to get the kid to do what they want them to do. And they only tend to fall back to collaboration when those things don't work. I wish some of our first responses were more collaborative and curious when something's going wrong.
Alison Cook (28:09.876)
Isn't that interesting?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (28:18.958)
Because that's really ultimately another skill we'd like to teach the next generation of adults, which is when you have a problem with somebody, instead of just lining up and seeing who's more powerful and if you can impose your will, what if the fallback, what if the immediate reflex was, let me see if I can understand where you're coming from. And then I want you to try to see where I'm coming from so we can put our heads together.
Alison Cook (28:19.156)
this.
Alison Cook (28:40.754)
It's so interesting when you say it like that, because it is often our last resort, or I throw my hands up in the air. But the word that comes to mind is humility. There's a humility in it. And humility is actually rooted in strength. Grasping for control is actually rooted in our own ego, which is understandable, but humility is actually, I'm confident enough and strong enough that I want to understand you.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (28:51.278)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (28:57.315)
Yes.
Alison Cook (29:09.152)
Tell me, Dr. Ablon, if we can have just a few more minutes of your time. As I'm listening to you, I'm sitting here thinking, this is a skill, what you're teaching us, this collaborative approach that feels very lacking even on a larger stage in our inner culture. Could you speak to it? Because I love how you just said this isn't have anything to do with not having boundaries or not having your own perspective. Could you speak to that?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (29:13.006)
Of course.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (29:26.318)
Yes, sadly, yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (29:36.835)
Yeah. Well, so I think we've gotten worse and worse as humans at listening and trying to understand where somebody else is coming from when we don't agree with their solutions. And what happens is we get into this mode of like dueling solutions. They've got an idea for how they want to go about things. And I think that's the wrong idea. Here's the right idea. And that doesn't lead anywhere good. And it leads to more and more polarization.
And what I try to do, and this has come from my work with some pretty tough kids, is I say to myself, I may not love their solution to the problem. I may not be wild about that. But you know what? I bet there's a good reason behind it. I bet they have very good concerns. And if I could unpack the concerns underneath the solution that I'm not wild about, it might open up some other potential solutions.
Alison Cook (30:16.757)
Yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (30:34.306)
that would still address their concerns, but would be okay with me as well. And that's really the skill that I think is missing right now in this polarized world that we're in, which is being open-minded to, I don't love your idea of how to go about this, but you've got a good reason, and I wanna hear what that reason is all about.
Alison Cook (30:54.56)
That is so, you just nailed it. It is that skill of understanding. I almost want you to say that again. I don't love your solution, but I understand.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (31:05.134)
I don't love your solution, but yeah, but I'm sure you've got a good concern there, right?
Alison Cook (31:10.89)
There's a valid reason underneath it that I can probably at the end of the day understand and even empathize with.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (31:16.738)
And I say that all the time to kids and families I work with, I'm sure there's a good reason. I just want to understand what that reason's all about. And if we can understand, and by the way, the same applies for adults where they may be choosing how to handle things with their kids in a way that I don't love. I don't agree with. But you know what I say to myself? I bet there's a good reason. I'm sure there's a good reason. And if I can understand what the good reason is, and I can express my concerns as well, maybe there's a different way that will.
Alison Cook (31:32.617)
Dr. Stuart Ablon (31:45.279)
address their perspective, their concern that will accomplish what they want without some of the challenges that come with the way they're approaching it right now.
Alison Cook (31:54.047)
Yeah, so that is the, just to summarize, in any relationship, I'm kind of hearing a couple of mantras here, a couple of takeaways that one is, it's any behavior that is frustrating to us is skill, not will, not to impute will, or to me, there's a moral connotation there, right? They're willfully trying to do this thing. Yes, yes.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (32:15.426)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's a judgment about their character almost, right? When, no, you know, every, I've yet to meet the kid or the adult who prefers doing poorly to doing well. We all wanna do well. And so if we're not, it's usually because we're having a hard time applying the skills that would be needed in that moment to handle the situation better.
Alison Cook (32:29.406)
Yes. Yes.
Alison Cook (32:39.776)
So reshifting our brain to saying to ourselves, what skill don't they have? And then I love this, this kind of correlating piece that you're saying is there's always a reason, there's something underneath there, that curiosity, if I can get to the root of why, or understanding their reason, why they're doing this, I may not love the outcome, but at least I'm starting with that empathy. And that's gonna take me so much further in the relationship.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (32:54.414)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (33:05.228)
Yeah, and I...
Yeah, and if I can identify the concerns that are underneath the solution I'm not so wild about, it opens up the opportunity for collaboration as long as I don't identify the child's concern and then impose my own solution, which would be awfully ironic because what I want to do is I want to say, OK, I got beneath the solution that I wasn't wild about to understand why. Let me give you my why now, what I'm worried about, not my solution, but
My why. And now we both have our whys on the table. Let's see if we can come up with a solution that will address both our concerns. In other words, it's mutually satisfactory and obviously realistic and doable too.
Alison Cook (33:49.485)
That is light. That is unbelievable. If we could all do that. That's yeah.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (33:54.689)
And it's not easy. It's not easy. But I will tell you this. We talked about having these conversations proactively. If you go into a proactive conversation being really crisp, really clear on, what am I worried about? Not what's the outcome I want, because I shouldn't have that agenda. But what am I worried about? And I can put that in my back pocket for now while I just concentrate on unearthing, uncovering my child's concern or perspective. Then.
Alison Cook (34:22.528)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (34:23.404)
When the time's right, I'll whip out my perspective. And now we're ready to collaborate.
Alison Cook (34:28.65)
That's amazing. How can people, I know you had mentioned you have a resource for my listeners, but how can people learn more? They're listening and they wanna learn more about this collaborative approach in your work. What's the best way to find you and what you're doing?
Dr. Stuart Ablon (34:43.532)
Yeah, sure. So I am very proud to direct a program, which is here in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, called Think Kids. And at Think Kids, we support parents, teachers, all kinds of folks in trying to learn this approach. And we actually have a self-paced course for parents and caregivers where they can learn in detail.
about this approach and have it applied to their own particular family and kids. And we can provide a link for that. And if people want to use a coupon that we've created for this episode, best of you, they can plug that coupon in to be able to access that training free of charge, whether that's in English or Spanish. And there's all kinds of other resources, including parent classes.
all kinds of things that are right there on our website at thinkkids.org. That's probably the first place I'd suggest people go and people can easily find my personal website and resources too on the
Alison Cook (35:51.403)
That's amazing, thank you. These resources are so needed and I'm so grateful for all your years of research, your work in the trenches, everything you do is informed by both things, right? Your work in the trenches and in the research and I'm just grateful. I'm grateful for your wisdom and we will link to all of that in the show notes and just grateful for your time. Thank you for, know, most of my listeners are not necessarily in Boston and...
can get to this. So the fact that you're making so many of these resources available digitally is just amazing. Thank you.
Dr. Stuart Ablon (36:24.386)
Well, my pleasure. appreciate you having me on and sharing some of these ideas with your audience as well. The more people who can be exposed to some of the basics of this, the better for kids, for the next generation of adults, for us parents right now. So I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having me.
Alison Cook (36:43.361)
Yeah. Thank you. All right, I'm gonna just.
What if you weren’t meant to trust blindly—but to trust wisely?
Trust is sacred—and when it’s broken, it’s easy to shut down or swing toward over-trusting. In this episode, Alison explores how to cultivate a steady, discerning trust—one that honors both your boundaries and your desire for connection.
In this episode, Dr. Alison explores what it means to build wise trust: the kind that’s discerning but still open to love. You’ll learn practical steps to protect your heart without hardening it, and how to partner with God in cultivating grounded, courageous trust that leads to real connection.
In this episode, we explore:
How broken trust impacts our nervous system and relationships
The difference between naïve trust and wise, grounded trust
How to protect your heart without closing it off
Practical steps to rebuild trust - with yourself, others, and God
Why choosing openness is one of the bravest things you can do
If you’ve been hurt, disappointed, or afraid to let people in again, this episode will give you language, perspective, and hope for what it looks like to trust wisely - and love freely - again.
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
Here are some other episodes you might like :
Episode 22: How to Build Trust With Yourself.
Episode 117: Healing in the Messy Middle
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Transcript
From the moment we are born, we are wired to rely on others for safety.
Kind of the shared trust. If I drop my kids off at school, right, that they're
gonna be safe and that the teachers are gonna be safe. That kind of trust that is
being eroded every single day we need that shared trust. When trust is broken,
something inside us fractures inside, shrinks. We pull back. Here's the good news and
I want you to hear me say this trust can be nurtured, it can be grown and it's
our job to keep our hearts open.
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day and
this year we're saying thank you to therapists. BetterHelp therapists I've helped over
five million people worldwide take a step forward through brave questions, a safe
space to cry or a small win that changes everything. If something's keeping you up
at night, talking to someone can help. For me, one simple question from a therapist
can help me completely transform how I approach a problem or a situation and that
clarity changes how I show up for myself and the people I love. With better help,
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Hey everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. Today
we're diving into a topic so many of us are struggling with right now. It's trust.
To be honest, I felt pretty disoriented lately, especially when it comes to our
national and global culture. I don't always know who to believe in the news.
I don't always know who to trust from the pulpit, in politics, especially not on
social media. I do know who my safe trusted people are in my real embodied life.
But if I keep my eyes too long on that larger world outside of my own local
sphere, it can feel really disorienting and overwhelming. And I hear this from a lot
of people that I talk to, we're living in a time where this broader sense of trust
is unraveling and it makes us question, sometimes it makes us question ourselves,
what or who can I really trust? It ripples down from the global environment into
our own souls. And I think that's a little bit of what we're seeing happen with
these polarizations in our larger community, because we don't have that sense of
shared trust of common humanity. And so it forces us sometimes or prompts us,
I should say, sometimes to build up walls in our own souls, maybe inadvertently,
right? We wanna pull in. I don't trust anybody. I don't trust anybody except for
maybe a couple of people and God, or on the other hand,
sometimes we outsource our trust. We feel disoriented, we don't know who to trust,
so we latch on to a tribe, right? Like a group of people or a speaker or one
person, we say, I'll just go all in with this person. It's safer to go in with
this group, right? We sort of outsource our trust to a larger group because it's
just easier. It's just too scary. We don't know where we fit. We don't know who to
trust. We kind of lose our own discernment. And neither of those extremes is
healthy. It's not healthy to sort of pull in and just stop trusting altogether, but
it's also not healthy to sort of put your allegiance in with one person or one
community and one group and trust them blindly and not have discernment that starts
inwardly, that starts in your own soul. I want to start with a working definition
of trust. Trust isn't just a belief. It's a felt knowing. It's in your body.
It's embodied. It's the confidence that someone or something is reliable,
good, and safe enough to lean on, that their words and their actions will align for
the most part. Nobody's perfect, but consistently over time. When you trust someone,
you place something of value in their hands. It might be your ideas,
it might be your work, it might be your vulnerabilities, it might be some family
member, it might be your children, But you believe that they will honor and value
what's precious. Here's what I think most people don't understand about trust.
It's not static. It's not a one -time transaction. It's dynamic. It's relational.
It's always evolving. Trust can be broken. It can also be rebuilt. And it's always
earned over time. So I want to give you a picture. For those of you watching, I
have this heart figuring that a friend gave to me in my hands. It's breakable,
it's fragile, and let's say it represents my soul, right? Everything precious inside
of me. Trust isn't about handing this soul,
this literal heart to someone and walking away and assuming it's a one -and -done
kind of thing, right? "Yep, you've got my heart. It's yours. Take good care of it."
That's not exactly what trust is. Instead, imagine you hold something precious.
You hold your soul. You hold your heart in your hand. You learn to hold it a
little more loosely. Over time, you might start to show more of yourself to someone
else. Over time, you recognize this is someone who will help me hold it,
right? Their hands come underneath yours. There's a shared holding.
Over time, as someone proves steady, you might relax your grip a little bit. You
might even let them hold more of your heart. Right? At the same time,
you're also holding their heart. On a larger scale, more people might come in.
There might be many hands holding your heart, and you're holding many other people's
hearts too, right? It's a shared holding. We don't give trust away.
We share it. We hold it together with other people. On a larger scale,
trust works this way in our communities. Social scientists call this kind of shared
holding the glue of society. Without it, our families fracture and our communities
kind of fall apart. Rachel Botsman, she's a researcher on trust. She calls this a
confident relationship with the unknown. And I think about this every time I call an
Uber, like I'm kind of the shared trust that I'm going to get into this Uber and
I'm going to be safe and my Uber driver is going to be safe. Or if I drop my
kids off at school, right, that they're going to be safe and that the teachers are
going to be safe. Or if I send an email to a colleague that, that that colleague
is going to hold what I've shared with honor and with respect. That's a shared
trust in our communities and it's that kind of trust that is being eroded every
single day. We need that shared trust and it doesn't mean that everybody has to
believe the exact same things we believe but we need that shared trust as the
fabric of our societies. Scripture places trust at the very center of life.
Over and over we hear in the Bible, "Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and
lean not on your own understanding." That's that shared trust. Trust in the Lord.
The Lord's hands are so big to hold your heart with you. Trust begins with God,
the one who is always steady when everything else shifts. But Here's the thing,
guys, the Bible doesn't stop there. Trust isn't only vertical. It's also woven
horizontally. Paul writes that love always trusts.
Loving communities hold hearts together. Throughout scripture, God's people learn trust
not only through their prayers vertically, but also through the ways they lean on
one another. Israel in the wilderness, the church and in acts, right? The households
that Paul greets by name in his letters, there's a shared trust between Paul and
those communities. Trust is always personal and communal. In other words,
you can't compartmentalize trust. You can't say, I'll trust God, but I won't trust
other people. It's not how trust works, or I'll trust these people who all believe
the same way I do, but not these other people who I share a community with. It's
not how trust works. Trust has to be shared in our friendships,
in our churches, in our neighborhoods. And where this idea of shared trust is
practiced, right? This is where it's practiced in these places. It gets broken, it
gets wounded, and it can also get prepared. This is why broken trust cuts so deep.
It's not just disappointment, right? It strikes at the core of what we're made for.
We are made to live in this sort of shared trust. Trust is an luxury. It's a core
human need. From the moment we are born, we are wired to rely on others for safety
and nourishment. When trust is broken, a betrayal by a friend, a leader,
misusing power, a loved one letting us down, something inside us fractures inside,
it shrinks, we pull back, we pull that heart in, it's understandable, we might pull
our heart in or our nervous system might kick into hypervigilance, our stomach can
turn into nuts, we might have a hard time sleeping, our hearts start to race, we
want to go into protection mode, right? We grip tighter. We want to control
everything. Sometimes we want to withdraw. We want to just hide our hearts, our
souls out of sight so no one can hurt us. Sometimes we just numb, right?
We inject our hearts with whatever it is that will take away the fear and the pain
and the anxiety of broken trust. I've noticed these tendencies in myself.
sometimes I've wanted to just tuck my heart completely away. If no one can see it,
no one can break it. You know, that's been my motto at different times in my life.
It also happened spiritually. Distress can make us really cynical. It can make us
subtly apathetic toward God. Or we might grip tighter to religious certainty to the
leaven of legalism, Judgment and criticism of others, that's actually coming from
cynicism by the way, or we might withdraw slowly, stop practicing our faith and just
slip away because we just don't trust God anymore. And the problem is that while
distrust might feel safer in the short term, it always is costly in the long term.
It keeps us from God, it keeps us from others. It keeps us from the joy and the
goodness and the beauty that God designed our souls for and that our world so
desperately needs from us. So if trust is feeling hard for you right now,
I want you to hear me say this. You are not failing. It's not weakness,
but it is a signal that I want you to pay attention to. Whether you're tempted to
sort of cling to certainty or Whether you are tempted to just kind of give up all
together, please hear me say there is another way forward.
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Here's the tension. We can't afford to trust blindly. We don't want to be naive.
That wouldn't be wise. But we also can't afford to live without trust. So what do
we do? Well, for me, when I started noticing this disorientation in my soul,
I started to just ask myself a simple question. Where does trust come easy in my
life? Like, where do I almost not even have to think about it? I just trust, you
know, my husband, my kids. There's just some people in my life that are bedrock.
There's just a sturdy foundation of trust. And then I started noticing, where in my
life does trust come hard? I just find myself getting cynical. I find myself getting
disoriented. I'm like, I don't know what to trust. Oftentimes for me, that's when
I'm online. It's with social media, sometimes the news, sometimes the larger political
landscape. That's just where I can get sort of tempted to get cynical.
And so once I started to notice that, which just helpful to me because it gives me
a simple and quick way to go, "I'm going to move toward the things and the people
I do trust when I notice that cynicism," right? That's when it's time to turn off
the news or turn off social media or not listen to podcasts for a while and just
really focus on my embodied life, my neighborhood, my closest circle of friends,
the work that I do, this work that I to these embodied, tangible places that feel
more real, more grounded, more trustworthy. So often for me, that's my local
neighborhood. That's my local environment where I can be a part of change even when
there has been broken trust, but I can also kind of know in an embodied way where
trust really lives. It also means doubling down on trying to be trustworthy myself,
I want to, what I bring into the world to be trustworthy is best that I can,
I'm not perfect at it, but to try to be true, to try to be authentic, to try to
be someone whose actions align with what I think. And when I focus my attention on
how I can become a more trustworthy person, it helps me kind of counterbalance or
counteract that cynicism, right? because I'm not focusing on trusting out there. I'm
like, how do I become a more trustworthy person? So that's a little bit of what
I've been trying to do, move toward what feels trustworthy and try to become a more
trustworthy person myself. I wanna leave you with three practical steps you can take.
And they're based on the name it, frame it, brave it model from my work in my
book, I Shouldn't feel this way, you might think of it in that context. Maybe
you're telling yourself, "I shouldn't feel so cynical. I shouldn't feel like I can't
trust anyone. I shouldn't feel like I'm struggling to trust God." Right?
Just start there with the naming. With compassion, don't beat yourself up, but just
noticing. I noticed that I'm getting kind of cynical. I'm getting kind of untrusting
of anyone around me. Start there. For some of you,
naming it might mean naming that you're trusting too quickly or too easily.
That maybe for you, you take that heart, whatever object it is that represents your
soul and you give it away too fast and you wind of getting hurt and part of your
naming is I think I'm I'm too quick to outsource my trust and and maybe for me
I'm I'm not really doing my part of co -carrying right co -carrying the weight and
and I need to figure out how to do that right maybe that's how you're naming where
you are on this trust journey. Secondly I want you to move into framing right
Framing, whatever it is that you notice. Framing is the work of discerning with God,
getting curious about what this is about for you. When you're framing a relationship
with trust, you might ask yourself, similar to what I was asking myself, things
like, "Where does trust come easy for me right now? What people do I trust fairly
easy? I know they're going to be there for me. Where does trust feel really hard?
Where are those places where I'm just like, not, not going to trust that person,
right? Just again, notice that and just ask yourself what that's about.
Is there validity to that, right? Maybe there's wisdom in that. And so it's not
that you're being distrustful. It's that you're being wise, right? I'm not trusting
there for a reason. Now, if you notice that, acknowledge that with God, you know,
God, I don't think those are trustworthy places. So I need to filter them out. This
is what boundaries work is about, right? But it's not because you're cynical,
cynicism comes when we kind of keep trusting people and they continue to betray us,
right? But healthy trust comes when we go, I don't actually think that's a
trustworthy person or a trustworthy place. And so I'm going to remove myself from
it. I'm going to protect my heart from that place or that person in a healthy way.
Because then I move toward the people I do trust, right? I'm not going to hide or
withdraw or numb. I'm going to share my heart and my soul with people who have
proven Worthy. That's healthy trust. That's not cynicism,
but that requires a process of discernment, right? Am I withholding and withdrawing
and retreating, but not really moving toward healthy trust? That's the work of
framing is really taking the inventory of the people in places you do trust, move
toward them with intention, right? You're building where you don't feel trust,
where you're not sure, where you've been hurt repeatedly and setting healthy
boundaries in a healthy way, releasing those folks, not giving them access to your
soul or to your heart. Not because you hate them, not because you're angry with
them, but because you've acknowledged through wisdom. That's not a healthy place for
me. You're giving yourself the gift of agency when you do that. You're building
trust with yourself, with God, and you're moving toward healthy co -sharing of trust.
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And then finally we get into the braving step, and this is especially for those of
you who feel like your heart's been shattered. You just feel like, I can't trust
anyone, I'm barely hanging on trusting God, let alone another human, right?
My heart just feels so shattered, I just kind of want to hold it so tight so no
one ever hurts me again, right? For those of you who feel that way and I get it
and there's no shame in it, the braving step is all about what I call microsteps.
Not big, bold gestures. Don't give that heart away, but microsteps of trust.
And those very simply might just look like letting someone carry a very small task
for you, you know? It's almost like testing, not to put someone on trial,
but just to test, just, you know, I'm just gonna see if that person, if I ask
them to do something, or if I invite them to something and it's tiny, there's a
little bit of risk, not very much. See what happens, you know, they seem
trustworthy, I don't know, I'm scared to trust anybody, but I'm gonna take a micro
step toward trust or maybe you share one semi -vulnerable truth about yourself you
just take a small risk you know I'm gonna I'm gonna share with this friend a real
thought that I have you know it's I haven't been really vulnerable for a long time
you might even label it for that person listen this is hard for me but I I want
to tell you something I've been thinking about and here's what it is and and then
you notice How do they respond? Do they hold your heart well or not?
And if they don't, you don't have to share that trust with them again, right? You
can pull back and then you can take a micro step in a different direction. Maybe
trust for you is giving yourself permission to try something new like I'm doing with
this video, you know, where I'm like, okay, I'm going to put myself out there. This
is hard, you know, maybe it'll be a big flop, right? I'll be okay, right?
But I'm going to put myself out there and take a step and see what happens. See
who ends up holding this space with me, right? Giving yourself permission to take a
risk, right? And don't go so far with something that's going to shatter you again,
but a small calculated risk that you go, you know, even if this doesn't go well,
I'm going to be okay, right? But I'm going to try something because I do want to
grow. I want to grow more hands around this heart of mine, whether it's my work,
whether it's my heart, whether it's my beliefs. I want to see if there are more
people who can hold it. That's what we do when we take brave steps. Trust is not
all or nothing. It's not. It starts with these small openings, these micro steps,
these tiny steps of a little bit of vulnerability that over time build strength.
You start to see who's trustworthy with your heart and with your soul and with your
mind. I want to just close here with the word about digital trust because so much
of our world is digital and we do have to figure out who to trust out in the
digital space. Here's the thing that's true. Our brains and our nervous systems are
wired for cues, right? Trust grows in repeated interactions and shared environments.
And that's really hard to replicate online. It's really hard to replicate digitally
where there's no real feedback loop, right? That intimacy can feel real,
but it's one -sided, typically. We don't know how that person would respond to us in
real life. And so it can be tricky to discern trustworthiness online. There's a
couple of things you can look for. I think it's, it's not impossible, right? There
are things we can look for to, to develop a sense of who we trust and who we
don't. What are the ones that I think about is who's this person accountable to,
right? Who do they, what systems and, and what checks and balances do they place on
themselves, right? Do they admit when they're wrong? Are they consistent over time.
Do they honor shared wisdom? Do they turn to scripture? Do they look to science?
Do they look to other experts, to community, or do they set themselves up as the
only authority?
How do they treat the most vulnerable? The widow, the orphan, the poor? How do they
speak about people who are vulnerable? You know, even if they have differing opinions
about how our governments should treat folks, should treat folks, what's their posture
toward those who are hurting the most? I think that's an important measure of
trustworthiness. But just to be discerning, be discerning. People it's so important
for us to be discerning about who we expose even in the digital world that hurts
our minds and our souls too. We are living in tough times when it comes to trust,
we just are. But I will say this, the fact that we feel that actually is a good
sign. It means that it matters. It means that our souls are intact, right? The fact
that our souls feel fractured, the fact that our souls are longing for something
more beautiful, more good, co -sharing, right? The fact that our souls want places of
work, schools, universities, institutions where we can trust that for the most part
we'll get each other's backs as human beings. The fact that we long for that and
the fact that we're feeling a little disoriented and shattered right now is a real
good sign of health to be honest. So take heart in that sense if you're feeling
some of that cynicism or some of that fragility don't let it become cynicism but it
is a sign of a soul that's intact. We were designed to live in community with
other people who care for us and for whom we care. That's part of God's design for
our souls. Here's the good news. And I want you to hear me say this. Trust can be
nurtured. It can be grown. And it's our job to keep our hearts open, not blindly,
not naively, but open to trust. And here's what I want you to consider this week.
I love this for you and I'm excited. I'm going to do it with you. I want you to
find an object of your own that represents your own heart, just like this one I'm
holding here. It can be anything. And I want you to reflect on it this week
prayerfully and ask yourself, who is holding your heart represented by this object?
Who's holding it with you right now? What people or communities have shown themselves
steady and trustworthy in in your life. Just notice that with gratitude and give
thanks for those people.
And also notice, where do you notice distrust rising up, where you're tempted to
tuck your heart away, to hold it back to withdraw and maybe even grow cynical. And
I want you to also notice that and name that and talk to God about that. And then
I want you to ask yourself What's one small step you can take this week toward
building trust? Maybe it's leaning into a relationship that has proven to be safe.
Maybe it's creating distance or setting a boundary where there hasn't been safety,
right? To prove to yourself and to God that you are trustworthy with your own
heart. Maybe it's taking a break from social media, maybe it's taking a break from
the news to protect your heart and then moving towards someone in your real life to
have those conversations with instead of doing it online. My hope is that this
space, whether you're listening or watching, can be one where your heart feels held
and that together we can keep growing in trust in God, in each other,
and in the deepest parts of ourselves. Thank you for joining me for this episode of
The Best of You. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links
mentioned in the show. You can find those on my website at drallisoncook .com. That's
allisonwithonelcook .com. Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that
you don't miss an episode. And I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review.
It helps so much to get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next
Thursday. And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God,
you heal others, and you stay true to your God -given self.
Stay connected all week long
The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
