tiny sparks, big changes

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time! Our next live meeting is Sunday, November 15th, at 11 am EST.

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’d like to become a member of our community, you get access to all past book club episodes for $5/month. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on finding who we are as we disidentify from old survival strategies. If we’re not fawning, people-pleasing, or being perfect, then what are we doing?! This is a very important exploration that arises during the healing process. If you’d like to try the values sort I mention in today’s episode, you can find a free values sort here.

If you’re curious to take a deep dive into creating transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

* Who am I when I’m not being perceived?

* What is my personality when I’m not trying to impress or please anyone else?

* What would I want for my life if I couldn’t tell anyone about it, if it wasn’t being judged by others?

Please vote in the poll for our next book!

The Drama of the Gifted Child

Setting Boundaries that Stick

(0:01 - 2:50)

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad At Me? It’s hard to believe that we’re coming to the end of this book. I’ve really enjoyed getting to dive into it with you and we’ll be starting our next book soon. Don’t forget that our live meeting is Sunday, November 15th at 11 a.m eastern time.

This will be an opportunity for you to ask questions about anything we’ve explored in this book, to share your own reflections. You can ask questions about past books too, and to just come and connect with others in this community. Right now I think we are between two books that several people have messaged me about, The Drama of the Gifted Child and The Boundaries book that I shared about last time by Julianne Taylor Shore.

If you have a preference, please be sure to vote in the poll and we’ll get started on that new book as we come toward the end of the year. So this chapter is called Who Are You? Yes You! Getting to Know the Person You Lost Touch With. And as I’ve done with all of these chapters, I’m going to put a little bit of my own spin on this chapter.

But in this chapter, Meg is talking about as you do this deep work of healing from people-pleasing, healing from fawning, you hit this point in the journey where you start to recognize, oh, so many of these things that I thought made me me were actually these adaptive, protective survival strategies. These ways that I learned to respond to the environment around me, to stay in connection, to have any sense of belonging and safety, and to make people around me happy. And that process of recognizing that those things are strategies, and not just us, not just our personality, can be pretty challenging.

Because it’s a little bit of this question of like, then who am I? Then what makes me me? Then what do I want? What do I want to do? It’s never too late. A lot of times people fear that they will find out that they are a different person, that they are not themselves. And it brings up a lot of fear of losing the people and the things in our lives that are important to us.

I think that I think of these strategies as much more like a suit of armor. And maybe you’ve been wearing that suit of armor for a long time, maybe even your entire life. And maybe as life has gone on, you’ve had to put more and more layers into your armor to feel safer and more protected.

And you’ve had to kind of hide your true self away, deep inside those layers of armor. But as those layers of armor come off, you’ll still be you. It was still you under the armor all along.

You’ll just have an easier time connecting with yourself, your authenticity, your values, your wants, your needs, and your desires. That doesn’t make the process any less scary. But part of this is reconnecting to ourselves.

(2:50 - 4:00)

In NARM, they call this process disidentification. In internal family systems and parts work, we might call it unblending. We know a lot of this is the updating that comes from memory reconsolidation.

As our brain takes in all of these new experiences we’ve given ourselves through this book of learning to connect to ourselves, learning to feel what we want and need, learning to feel like a separate individual from our parents and people in our lives. We know that as we have done that, we are actually updating these predictive patterns in the brain. And that means all those things that our brain told us was scary or bad or dangerous, or we should feel ashamed of them.

As those predictive patterns update, suddenly a whole new world opens in front of us. But that disidentification process can be unsettling. Maybe as a child you had those sort of muscular pains that they call growing pains, and it’s like, okay, it’s okay that you’re in pain, you know, your body’s growing, you’re getting taller.

It’s a little bit like that. It might not feel really great as you’re doing it. Just because you might not have the neural pathways, you might not have done it before.

(4:01 - 8:41)

Even if the old pathway isn’t there anymore that says, it’s terrifying to be seen as myself, that doesn’t mean it’s magically super easy to figure out who we are. But this is part of the process. As we disidentify, we get to figure out now, what do I want? We get to learn to trust ourselves, to connect to ourselves, to attune to ourselves.

We don’t have to neglect ourselves anymore by holding on to this perfect self, this quiet self, this caring for everyone’s self. We can be the attuned caregiver that we never got, who is so curious about what do we want? Who are we when we’re not being perceived? What is our personality when we’re not trying to impress or please anyone else or to be perfect? What would we want for our lives? You know, if we couldn’t be judged by anyone else, if we couldn’t tell anyone else about it, if we could wake up tomorrow and have just what we want, what would it be? And another thing that makes this disidentification process so challenging is the fantasy of the perfect self. And we’ve talked about this quite a bit on here, written some articles about this healing fantasy.

We know that that comes from adult children of emotionally immature parents, and we talked about it a lot when we went through that book. But very often when we have gone through emotional neglect or childhood trauma, developmental trauma, we have a fantasy that X thing will happen and then we’ll be safe, then we’ll be happy, then we’ll be ourselves, then life can start. And it can be a variety of t…

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time! Our next live meeting is Sunday, November 15th, at 11 am EST.

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’d like to become a member of our community, you get access to all past book club episodes for $5/month. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on boundaries, both inside ourselves and externally to others, and all the feelings that boundaries may bring up within us.

If you’re curious to take a deep dive into creating transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

* In what ways did you learn that in order to receive love, you always needed to give more and overextend yourself?

* Is there an area or a relationship in your life that you feel resentment about? What need of yours isn’t being met?

* What would it look like to practice boundary setting in this area or relationship?

(0:00 - 1:53)

Hi and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad At Me? all about fawning and people-pleasing and finding our way back to being able to have healthy boundaries, engage in conflict, and take care of ourselves. If you can believe it, we are already almost finished with this book. We’ll have this chapter about boundaries, one more chapter, and then we’ll have our final live meeting for this book on Sunday, November 15th at 11 a.m. Eastern Time, 8 a.m. Pacific.

Then we will get started with a new book after Thanksgiving. Please continue to send me your ideas for new books you would like to dive into. A friend recommended a book to me called Setting Boundaries That Stick, How Neurobiology Can Help You Rewire Your Brain to Feel Safe, Connected, and Empowered by Julianne Taylor Shore.

That one looks pretty interesting. We’re going to be talking about boundaries today, so let me know if you would like to read that book or if you have something else in mind. As we dive into this chapter on boundaries, you might really see yourself in some of these experiences.

So many of us are used to overriding ourselves constantly and we’ve done it for so long that we don’t have any sense that we’re doing it, but maybe some of these thoughts feel familiar to you. If I say yes all the time, I’ll never disappoint anyone. If I never say no, I won’t fall behind in my closeness to this person and I’ll still be relevant to them, and maybe they won’t forget about me.

If I neglect myself and override myself, maybe I’ll be cared for by them. Maybe I won’t be neglected by them. These are some of the things that we might think consciously or feel unconsciously as we’re moving through the world and determining not just our boundaries to other people but our boundaries to and within ourselves.

(1:54 - 2:57)

Can we take care of ourselves? Can we rest? Can we say yes when we mean yes and no when we don’t? Can we say no even after we’ve said yes? All of these experiences lie within us and it’s not going to surprise you to know that our relationship to our boundaries, to other people, within ourselves, and about how we move through the world are deeply tied both to our early lives experiences and to those predictive patterns within our brain that we keep talking about. These implicit emotional learnings that came from experiences we had, yes in our childhood, but all throughout our lives, that taught us essentially what are the rules of engagement in the world? What’s expected of me to connect with other people and to be in the world and to be well? So we have that big book of rules up in our brain that are all based on past experiences. None of these rules that we learned about boundaries and connection are arbitrary or random.

(2:57 - 4:46)

They all have a direct connection, even if we don’t know it consciously, to an experience or experiences we had. Remember that the more frequently an experience happened or the more intense it felt to us emotionally, the more likely we are to have a very charged rule or prediction in our head that says no, I’m not allowed to say no. No, I always have to override myself for other people.

And so many of the learnings or rules we have about boundaries started when we’re young because things feel incredibly intense when we’re young. We don’t have the capacity to take care of ourselves, to support ourselves when we’re young. We don’t have the capacity to regulate our emotions, to meet our needs.

We rely on our caregivers and the environments around us to do that. So that’s very often why we talk about our early childhood experiences. It’s not that our adult experiences don’t matter as well.

And we very often do develop new implicit learnings out of our adult experiences. But as children, we’re developing so quickly and we have almost no agency or autonomy. We can’t run away and hide in a cave and take care of ourselves.

So we’re entirely reliant on the people around us to keep us okay. So we’re constantly adapting and figuring out, how can I fit myself into this world? And as we’re exploring this book about fawning, we know that things will come up where we say, do I have to say yes? And if the answer is no, I don’t have to. Then it’s do I want to? But that’s where we can press upon this feeling of the fawning, right? This feeling that the only way I have to maintain connection, the only way I have to not be abandoned, the only way I have to be good, to be loved, to maintain connection, is through doing what other people want from me.

(4:46 - 6:09)

Doing what I perceive other people want from me. Because we don’t really know, we’re often doing a lot of mind reading. We’re hypervigilant, we’re analyzing, we’re trying to figure out, how do they respond when I do this? How do I respond when I do that? Often that’s very unconscious, but all of that is stemming from us trying to figure out how to adapt to our environment, to stay safe and to stay in connection.

Now very often people will say to me, well that’s not rational. I know that I won’t be abandoned if I say no to going to this event I don’t want to go to. Okay, that’s great.

Our implicit emotional learnings do not live in the realm of rationality. They live in the experience of emotions and they come from our sense experiences. We learn to rely very heavily on rationality often in our world, but we do not live by the rules of rationality.

Even our thoughts do not fully live by the rules of rationality because they are impacted by other experiences within our brain. So thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, impulses, they’re all generated at once and they’re all impacted by our past experience and by trying to maintain safety and connection. So rationality really doesn’t have any place here and trying to convince ourselves it’s not rational to say yes even when you don’t want to because you think you’ll be abandoned.

(6:10 - 6:18)

It’s just another way we’re disconnecting from our own feelings and our own experiences. It’s okay if you do that. You may have learned that rationality was a safe place to be.

(6:19 - 7:37)

It was a way you could shut everything down and try to make yourself feel more secure, but right now we’re curious about the full response that you have and if some part of you is saying this isn’t rational so I shouldn’t do this, we can envision that as another part of you that’s trying to protect you from whatever feelings are coming up that feel like too much. So we can just notice that too. So Meg shares in this chapter that she thinks boundaries need a rebrand and I agree.

So much of what we see in boundaries on social media are these sort of cold corporate lingo scripts as Meg calls them, right? We might be able to see them and say, yeah, that’s a boundary I want to set, but that’s not necessarily what a boundary is. A boundary can often mean knowing ourselves, knowing our needs, but also being able to feel separate from other people. From a very young age, we are starting to learn that we are separate from our mother, our father, our grandmother, whoever our early caregiver is.

We start to learn, oh, I’m not my mom. I’m myself. My mom is her own person.

That is her and this is me. And from that age forward, we’re starting to figure out, explore, and play with the fact that we are a separate person. We go through a process called separation and individuation.

(7:37 - 8:39)

It’s just a fancy way of saying we figure out we’re our own person and then we start to figure out what kind of individual we want to be. What makes us us? And can we still be loved and cared for and supported and connected in that process? All of those experiences impact our feeling of being allowed to have boundaries as an adult. To know ourselves and to know our needs, but also to feel that is another person and this is me, to have gotten to learn that that is okay and good and we are safe to be our own individual person has a deep impact on our capacity to set boundaries in the present.

Sometimes we had to feel separate way too young because there wasn’t anyone there we could safely connect with. And so we might always have unconsciously this sense of terror because we were left alone as a child, even if we weren’t physically alone, we didn’t have that connection that allowed us to feel safe. So we might feel very pulled back from relationships.

(8:39 - 8:51)

We might not want to engage in close relationships because it feels like too much. We feel exposed, so we go up into our heads. We might also not have been allowed to feel like our own person.

(8:52 - 9:08)

Again, these things are very unconscious often, but that we needed to be whatever our parents needed us to be. Instead of getting to be a separate individual, we were all kind of mashed together, woven together. So we felt everyone’s feelings in the whole family and they felt ours.

(9:09 - 11:07)

Everything we did reflected on our parents. We’re all mashed together like that and we don’t get to feel our own individuality and be celebrated and supported in that. Then we’ll also have struggle with boundaries and we might feel a lot of guilt.

Both sides of this might feel a lot of that fawning, that people pleasing, but it can show up in different ways. But the root of it all is this feeling that if I have my own wants, my own needs, my own experiences, if I don’t override myself all the time, I will be hurt, I will be unloved, I will be disconnected, I will lose everything. Again, it’s a felt-sense experience.

We know it’s not true in the present. So if you imagine you have a dinner planned with a friend and you get home and you’re getting ready to get dressed and you just feel so tired, so exhausted, you’ve really driven yourself hard that week and you have a busy weekend ahead, you think you want to cancel. Do you feel that you need to lie? You need to make up an excuse at the last minute? Or do you feel that you can share how you feel? Hey, I was really looking forward to tonight, but I’m so exhausted and I just don’t think I’m up for it.

Do you think we can reschedule? We just notice what comes up with us on both sides of that equation. And how would we have wanted someone to speak to us? Would we rather someone make up an excuse? Would we rather them be honest with us? What happens if someone cancels on us? Do we start fearing that they’ve replaced us with someone else? Everything that’s happening underneath, whatever we sort of land onto this experience, gives us some clues as to what we learned about connection. Are we allowed to take care of ourselves or must we take care of everyone around us? Are we allowed to be our own person or must we be what everyone else expects from us? Are we allowed to rest or must we be performing all of the time? This is these deeply hidden, implicit, meaning under our unconscious awareness, learnings, impact everything we feel about boundaries.

(11:08 - 15:02)

Our time boundaries, financial boundaries, physical, energetic, intellectual, spiritual, religious, sexual, all of these things are impacted by these experiences. Meg gives an example of a child who had parents who constantly overrode themselves, always putting taking care of others first, so she would watch her parents be resentful and tired, but then take a certain sense of pride in giving and giving and giving and being seen giving. So what would you learn from this? Boundaries make you bad.

Not having boundaries make you good. Suffering makes you good. It means you’re doing enough.

If you’re not suffering, then there are consequences. Over time, she watched her parents get burned out and grow bitter, lose their enjoyment of serving others, and that’s what happens when we’re constantly overriding ourselves, but we feel that this is what we must do to be good. And it’s really interesting to use the word pride here because very often when we learned that overriding ourselves and not having boundaries make us good, even if the boundary is like with ourselves, we’re just always overworking.

We never let ourselves rest. We will find a certain pride in that, but the pride is part of a bigger pattern, a bigger identity pattern. We learn to feel proud for being boundaryless, for constantly doing more, because if we let ourselves feel that this isn’t actually what I want but it’s what I feel I have to do, then we might feel really angry or scared or sad or alone or devastated, depleted.

Those feelings are so scary and overwhelming that we almost use the pride as a way to protect ourselves from having to see, hey, I don’t know if this is really what I want to do, but I have to do this to stay in connection. So in some way making, overextending ourselves, overworking, always being more and more and more and more successful, more and more and more good, is a way to cover up those deeper feelings. So we’re always being curious about how these learnings make sense, how they are protecting us from something, how they are getting us somewhere, and how they’re disconnecting us from our own wants, our own needs, our own experiences.

Again, because having our own wants, our needs, desires, experiences, resting, it means something. It is charged, written in our book of connection, the rules of how I connect. It says if I rest, it means I won’t hit that success that I wanted to hit.

And if I don’t hit that success I wanted to hit, then I won’t achieve my goals. And if I don’t achieve my goals, I’ll never get what I want. It’s like, well, what is it you think you’ll really get? And it’s like, well, once I get there, once I hit that goal, then I’ll finally be able to rest and have ease and be playful and, you know, just move toward the things I want.

It sounds good, right? It sounds good, but very often the finish line constantly moves. The truth is resting, being connected to ourselves, having boundaries for ourselves, and in how we relate to other people, that can happen at any time. If there’s some feeling you have that once I get X, then I can have a boundary.

Once I get Y, then I can let myself rest. We know we’re probably in a little bit of a survival strategy. We’re in a little bit of an implicit learning because we can have those things at any time.

Welcome to episode two of my mini podcast series with Jolie Steele, Coach & Mentor. Join us for a deep dive into all the ways we find ourselves stuck and how to find our way back to ourselves again. From the perspectives of a therapist and a coach, we’ll explore why all of your patterns make perfect sense; how to identify your deeper beliefs and rewire those neural pathways; how to connect to your vitality and what you really want; how to let yourself be seen; and how to take action without abandoning yourself. If you have questions you’d like us to address in future episodes, feel free to leave a comment here or reply to this email. So glad you’re here!

P.s. - If you’d prefer not to receive these podcast episodes, feel free to unsubscribe from this channel by following these instructions to unsubscribe from this section, called How to Get Unstuck! You’ll still receive all my tiny sparks posts. Thanks for supporting my work in whichever way makes sense for you.

[Trisha Wolfe] (0:00 - 0:12)

Welcome back to our little podcast called How to Get Unstuck. I’m really excited to be here with Jolie to talk about why your patterns make sense, parts work, child parts, and the relationship to self.

[Jolie Stelle] (0:14 - 0:31)

Yeah, I’m excited. I was just telling Trisha, this is, you know, all of this is my hyper fixation, personal work and self-help, but parts work for sure for the last few years has really like revolutionized, I think how I relate to myself.

[Trisha Wolfe] (0:32 - 1:10)

Yeah, I think it is such a powerful tool to use and be curious about. And even though I think a lot of times people I work with, I don’t know about you, but have the familiarization with parts work through internal family systems. And a lot of times I referenced that inside out movie, you know, which if you haven’t seen, everyone should watch as a kind of intro primer to parts work.

Although it’s a little different than the way we as adults might relate to parts work, but really parts work is found within so many models of therapy and self-help and even the way we might relate to ourselves in a spiritual basis to just try to make sense out of the human experience.

[Jolie Stelle] (1:13 - 2:50)

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think we all have the intellectual understanding that our childhood impacted us in some way, shape, or form.

Like I think anybody regardless of their experience of therapy or psychology would be like, yeah, sure. Like how you were raised or where you were raised has an impact on you. I think the funny aha moment that I had with parts work, well, of course there’s many, but one of the funny things that I had, which I say this about every aha moment I have, it’s like the most basic realizations, but it’s like when they really become tangibly true for you when you live them for the first time and the aha moment for me was like, oh, I am a combination of every version of myself I’ve ever been. Like, oh, like who I am now is just a big conglomeration of all these other versions of me, not to get too like sci-fi filmy, but it’s just like, it’s every moment that I passed through time and processed things, like all of that is me.

And so it’s more than just my childhood impacted me. It’s like, I’m still the person that was there in that moment. And now that person is here in this moment.

And what do I know about that relationship of that version of me versus this version of me and all of that? Like it really fascinated me to think about the that who I was at 10 is still here in the fabric of who I am today now, good, bad, and ugly.

[

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time!

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

This episode is free to listen to to welcome all new subscribers, but for $5/month you can join our community and get access to all past book club episodes. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on conflict and the anxiety that many of us feel around it, as well as how stuck we can feel when we want to connect but need to maintain distance to avoid any potential conflict.

If you’re curious to take a deep dive into creating transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

What’s your current relationship to conflict?

When there is a perceived conflict, what do you fear will happen if you face it?

What do you need during conflict, whether it’s from yourself or the other person, that would feel soothing to you?

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time!

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on taking things personally and how our past experiences shape the meaning we make about things in the present.

If you’re curious about doing a deep dive into how to create transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

1. What’s a comment or judgment that you tend to take quite personally? What part of you is being activated by it? What is your brain predicting would happen if you didn’t take it personally and just let it go and moved on?

2. What does this part of you need to feel safe? What feels soothing to this part of you?

(0:00 - 0:29)

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? where we are diving into all things fawning and people-pleasing. This week we’re looking at chapter seven called Nothing is Personal and Other Terrifying Liberating Truths. If you’re new here, welcome to our book club where we read through various therapy and self-help books and I help translate them into how to use them in your daily lives to make long-lasting transformational change.

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time!

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on how fawning and other adaptive survival strategies impact our bodies, and ways we might reconnect with safety and presence.

If you’re curious about doing a deep dive into how to create transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

1. What’s your relationship to your body? Has it felt like a safe place in which to exist?

2. Close your eyes and see if you can notice just one or two sensations in your body. Describe them.

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time!

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on learning to be with emotions and to be curious about the messages they might have for us, rather than needing to fawn or freeze and shut our emotions down.

If you’re curious about doing a deep dive into how to create transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

1. What’s your current relationship to uncomfortable emotions like anger, sadness, and fear? How do you usually deal with them?

2. Recall a recent time when you felt an emotion that felt difficult. What was it telling you?

Trisha Wolfe: Hello and welcome. We’re just getting started. I just started the recording and so if you are here and you don’t want to be on the recording, you are more than welcome to turn off your camera and you can ask any question you would like in the chat and I’ll just read it out to the group. But thanks so much for joining whether you’re here live or watching the recording for a little group meeting where we can talk about the book we’re reading. Are you mad at me? all about fawning and people pleasing. Of course, I’m happy to answer questions about books from the past book clubs too. More general questions you have. I am really enjoying this book. You know, some of the books we’ve read have been quite academic. You know, just coming off unlocking the emotional brain, which I love, but is a quite heavy academic text. It’s really nice to read this one, too, which I think does a great job of taking these really complex ideas and putting them into simpler, easy to apply methods.

00:01:08

Trisha Wolfe: So, it’s nice to have a little mix. You know, we read healing developmental trauma, which is more academic, no bad parts, which is a little more for the individual. Adult children of emotionally immature parents, same for the individual, and then unlocking the emotional brain. Back to Are You Mad at Me? So, we’ve really gotten to have quite a wide variety, which is so much fun. I do have a question someone sent in that I’m going to discuss, but since you’re here live, are there any questions any of you have? And again, you’re welcome to put it in the chat or just ask it with your video off or whatever you would like to do. But since you’re here, I would love to answer any questions you might have. And there’s no pressure. Okay. Well, if questions come up as we go, you’re more than welcome to ask them. Usually, this time is a time for me to answer a question. So, I can always talk a little bit about the book if I’d like, but please feel free to ask anything.

00:02:13

Trisha Wolfe: It doesn’t have to be related to this book. But the question that we had that someone was talking about from the most recent episode where I was talking about this idea of if you remember chapter 4 was about you are not your thoughts. So it was about noticing this inner voice and talking about some of these ways that we can start to observe for example the inner critic and challenge our perception and kind of not be as fearful about our thoughts. And then moving to soothing and labeling what’s happening. And you might remember Meg uses an acronym called nicer. And nicer stands for notice, invite, curiosity, embrace, and return. So she uses this throughout the book. And this is her process of observing. So first starting with noticing, right? Maybe you’re noticing that you’re overthinking. Then you invite, meaning you let the experience be there. For many of us who have a history of attachment failures and developmental ruptures, we might get scared and want to push away the experience, which makes a lot of sense.

00:03:18

Trisha Wolfe: But eventually, we get to a place where we can allow the thoughts, the feelings, the body sensations to be there. We bring in some curiosity and we might notice what part of us has been activated, what feeling is here. Can I put a label on this? that we embrace, you know, we bring that part of us in and then we return to the present, whether that’s feeling the seat underneath of us or looking around us. So, I was talking about in the episode this idea of inner attachment, you know, of how we can give ourselves transformational experiences with how we relate to ourselves rather than trying to counteract ourselves. So, just to refresh your memory, counteractive strategies are things that are managerial. They are often behavioral, whether it’s trying to manage our behaviors themselves or manage our cognitions or manage our emotions. And they have a time and a place, right? When we’re doing this depth work where we’re working on some of these deeper patterns, we need usually to have some counteractive tools for stabilization, which might mean settling ourselves back down, which might mean feeling the chair underneath of us, which might mean learning how to challenge our thoughts.

00:04:26

Trisha Wolfe: But all those things are counteractive, meaning they’re trying to go against a predictive pattern that the brain has. So the brain is predicting if I feel my feelings, people will not love me and they will pull away from me. And so if we notice that happening and we might say, “Hey, you’re allowed to have feelings. It’s okay. Let’s sit with the feeling.” That’s attempting to counteract, that’s attempting to show the brain like, “This isn’t true. You can do this anyway.” And there’s a time and a place. But we’re also curious about transformational experiences of getting to the root of that predictive patterning, getting to the implicit emotional learning. If you remember from a mocking the emotional brain so that we can update that through memory reconsolidation. So in are you mad at me? There’s a mix of counteractive techniques and transformational techniques. And what I was talking about is we don’t always have to have a good external response for it to be a new experience for the brain. For it to be an experience that can update old learnings.

00:05:28

Trisha Wolfe: So the example I always kind of use is if you go you go get a coffee and you see the barista has made your drink with cow’s milk. You can’t have cow’s milk. You ordered it with oat milk. The idea would be, well, this is a great time to try on having needs, having boundaries. You can let the barista know that they didn’t make your drink correctly. They’ll update it. All will be fine. Well, we can’t promise that. First of all, we don’t know if the barista might be having a horrible day and might yell at you or kick you out or whatever it is. But more importantly, the response of the barista isn’t required for it to update a learning in our brain. Because if we go in and we say, “Hey, sorry. I can’t have cow’s milk. I asked for oat milk.” And the barista says, “How dare you speak to me that way? Get out of here.” It can still be a new experience for parts of us who feel

00:06:17

Trisha Wolfe: we’re not afraid to have needs when it comes to how we relate to ourselves, how we observe the experience. So if we leave of this this barista kind of going off on us when we tried to have a simple meal of a drink we paid for, we might start to go into like, see, you can never get it right. you really can’t ask for what you need because everyone’s just going to attack you or you must not have asked for it in the right way. This is why you shouldn’t even try. You always mess everything up. And that’s part of the learning, right? Having needs means people will get upset at me. People get upset at me because I’m too much. Kind of becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. But the way we can be curious about implementing this observation that Meg is talking about and you’ve heard me talk about quite a bit is to notice what’s happening and then to get curious with ourselves of how we relate to and treat ourselves. If we start going down the like you always mess everything up train, we can pause and we can say, “Hey, this really sucks. That barista was really rude and I really don’t feel very good right now.

00:07:21

Trisha Wolfe: That was a really hurtful experience for me and I actually am allowed to have my needs I think but more importantly I can be with what I’m feeling right now which is sad and confused and angry and hurt and just noticing the feeling and letting ourselves be in that experience. So even though the other person didn’t say of course you’re allowed to have means I’ll fix your drink. We can still be with like, wow, that did not go the way I liked and I’m allowed to be upset with the way it went, but my life isn’t in danger. My primary relationships are not in danger. I’m not going to be voted off the island. That’s really the experience we’re trying to give our brain because now the primary attachment relationship is not with our caregivers, our partners, whoever it is. It’s us to us. So when I was talking about this inner attachment, there was a question about these interactions and how sometimes the way we treat ourselves can be soothing or transformational or counteractive. And so this person asked, “In your experience, have those genuinely soothing interactions created a mismatch experience for those parts? Does just being met with genuine love and attention allow any part no matter the

00:08:34

Trisha Wolfe: manifestation to have a corrective experience? So this is a great question and the answer is sort of like it’s not that simple but also yes. When I think about doing this work with individuals the way we treat ourselves and our inner attachment is foundational to the work. So whatever parts we identify and remember what do we mean by parts? We mean schemas, we mean survival strategies, we mean implicit emotional learnings. Really, what we mean is a bundle of predictive patterns in our brain. So, no matter what part you’re dealing with, intellectualizer, people pleaser, perfectionist, critic, etc. Part of the foundational experience of how we update that learning is us learning to observe and respond to that part of us. Because so often when we’re trying to manage ourselves, for example, if we try to say like, “Oh, well, you just feel anxious about that. You don’t need to overthink it.” Now, stop overthinking. You know, look around the room, name three things you see, go distract yourself, whatever. Again, there’s a time and a place for that.

00:09:43

Trisha Wolfe: But what we’re doing is we’re trying to push that part of us away. We’re trying to manage that part and say, “You shouldn’t be feeling this way right now. Everything’s fine. You shouldn’t be thinking this way right now. Everything’s fine. We need to manage ourselves.” But what’s really underneath is turning and looking at like how do you feel about this part of you, this experience you have where you get anxious and you overthink things. What feeling might be underneath of there? What did you learn about treating yourself when you’re scared or anxious? How did your parents, your teachers, etc. treat you when you were scared and anxious? How have partners and friends in your adult life treated you when you were scared and anxious or hurt? Because what we’re really curious about is if we can explore and play around with how we treat ourselves, then that goes into the world when we’re interacting with other people because we can never promise ourselves that the outcome we get from the world will be the good outcome.

00:10:40

Trisha Wolfe: So many times when people hear this idea that like you need new experiences to update your nervous system, they want to jump to taking action. They want to say, “Okay, I need a new experience. Then I’m just going to go set this need. I’m going to go reach out to this person. I’m going to set a boundary. I’m going to make myself do the scary thing.” Again, there’s a time and a place for exposing ourselves to the scary thing. But you’re jumping to the action before you’ve done the work to identify what learning are you even trying to address. What part of you is even popping up in these moments? What emotion, body, sensation, story does that part of you hold? and how do you respond to and treat that part of you? So, is it entirely internal? Like we can just completely update all of our learnings from the way we teach ourselves. Well, no, because we’re in the world and so we’re always interacting with the world.

00:11:32

Trisha Wolfe: And yes, of course, part of it is connecting with ourselves so that we can connect to others. But I do view that internal mismatch experience as the foundation. And it’s very often a safe place to start when we’re told we have to heal in community and connection. So you have to go out and find people who can give that to you. It’s correct. We are made to be in connection. We are pack animals. We are made to have connection and community. But when all of your trauma centers around attachment and relational connection, you usually don’t even have a strong connection to yourself. And so when you go to try to seek these interactions with others, you will go into the criticism, the overanalyzing, the anxiety, the fear, the panic because you have not yet developed the new lenses to even see relationships as safe. So, I hope that helps understand that like these internal mismatch experiences are necessary and often the best place to start because no one else is involved.

00:12:39

Trisha Wolfe: We do want to move to having other people involved, but other people are very unpredictable. We can usually gather enough data about ourselves to start to learn to predict what’s going to come, the prediction our brain is making and how we want to be responded to. It stacks, right? Because if part of what we want is for someone to be there with us when we’re anxious. We never got that. We yearn for this connection, this protective energy, etc., then us learning how to give that to ourselves by being compassionate sounds good. You might think the mismatch experience is us being compassionate to ourselves. But it can start to stack and we can say, well, being compassionate to myself brings up another learning which says, I can’t be kind to myself because I’m actually secretly a very bad human. and if I’m kind to myself, I won’t be trying so hard all the time and everyone will find out that I’m bad. So, we we kind of find one learning and then it pings pongs to another learning and we’re almost looking for what is the most accessible place to start.

00:13:36

Trisha Wolfe: So, when we read about this idea of being compassionate toward the critic, yes, love it. That’s an internal mismatch experience. But is it even safe to be compassionate toward yourself? Is the critic a loadbearing wall, quote unquote, in your survival system? Is it something you learned you had to do to be safe and alive in the world? Then self-compassion becomes a counteractive tool. It becomes you trying to go against your brain’s survival system. Please know that I am not anti-self-compassion. I’m incredibly pro self-compassion. But we can’t start with self-compassion and assume that it’s just a learnable skill. Self-compassion can be learned like any other behavior. But if it’s counteracting a predictive survival learning that says I have to maintain my attachment by criticizing myself all the time so that no one finds out I’m a bad person, for example, then you have to work with that before you could ever like you you have to even consider the possibility of neutrality before you would ever be able to move towards self-compassion.

00:14:38

Trisha Wolfe: That’s why when you see people with this very strong inner critic and they and their intellectualizers, they know everything about self-compassion. They even say it to themselves. They can say all the words. They sound super adult. You know, they sit in their self-compassion meditation, but they don’t see a change. When push comes to shove, they will go back to criticizing themselves. That’s because you’re not getting at the core. Right? So, you know me, I love a long-winded answer, but that’s kind of my long- winded answer to why internal experiences are key. And we don’t need to worry too much about the tools. The tools come later. You’ll be ready for self-compassion the moment you feel compassionate towards yourself, if that makes sense. Like the first moment you consider that maybe possibly potentially you’re not a bad person at your core, but you lived in an environment where you had to be responsible for everyone else’s experiences. Maybe just that moment of noticing that and saying, “Whoa, maybe that is possible.” That’s your first little drop of self-compassion.

00:15:39

Trisha Wolfe: It doesn’t have to be this like I honor my inner critic and I love this part of me. If that resonates with you and it genuinely sinks through the layers and feels good, that’s amazing. But what we have to be so careful with, especially if you’re here because you like my Intellectualizer content, child consciousnesses can walk like an adult and talk like an adult, but they are not adult. They are not embodied. So we can say the words of compassion, of presence, of curiosity, of noticing. But when you say it, you have to pause and notice. How does it really feel when I say this to myself? How does it really feel when I sink through the layers? Because cognitively you might love self-compassion and eat it up because you know it’s the good or right thing to do. And some part of your brain might believe it’s true. But again, those deep implicit emotional learnings, if we sit with it for a moment, will come up and say, “Well, no, you’re not allowed to do that.” And now I’m going to make you really numb and go take on another project or now I’m going to make

00:16:42

Trisha Wolfe: you scroll on your phone for 9 hours or whatever the brain does to protect us. Yeah. So that’s why, you know, as Meg is talking here about observing ourselves, and you know, with these books, they’re short, right? So they have to put a lot of information in a short period of time. what she’s done here in chapter 4, what she’s laid out here could be the work of years and that would be totally normal if you had developmental trauma. It’s not hopeless. All of those years will have steps forward. But I just want you to understand the reality of working with some of these learnings. Now, when we can get to the root of the learning, you might remember from unlocking the emotional brain, they can reorganize quite quickly. But when you really have grown up in developmental trauma, it’s like a big tangled web of yarn. So when you pull one learning, another learning pulls, right? They’re all tangled up within there. So that’s why we might not see that kind of spontaneous updating magic that we read in some of the cases of unlocking the emotional brain and why we always always always come back to that observing the metacognition.

00:17:43

Trisha Wolfe: If you’ve listened to all five or six books with me, you’re like, is she going to talk about observing again? Yeah, because it’s like the number one thing. and and it’s such important work to tease apart true observation with this analytical intellectualizer part that sounds adult and can say all the right words. So that’s really my challenge and curiosity for you. You know when you get to this section at the end here about nicer where if you want to try this on try it on more as an experiment rather than as a thing you must carry out. Right? So when you notice that your mind starts spiraling and you’re overthinking, just noticing that that could be as far as you get. What happens when you notice that? What is your instinct to do in that moment? How do you feel toward yourself? How do you feel about the world? What emotion is happening? How does your body feel? What is the next impulsive behavior you want to take?

00:18:40

Trisha Wolfe: What feels right about overthinking and ruminating? What does it feel like would happen if you woke up tomorrow and you could never ever ruminate or overthink again? We turned off the gene. Wait for the part of you that’s like, “Yes, yes, that’s what I’m dreaming of.” And then let it sink through the layers and wait for the part of you that’s like, “That would be so dangerous. I would miss something. I would get hurt or someone I love would get hurt or everyone would find out that I’m secretly this bad, horrible person. Whatever it is, that’s enough. That’s the process of this internal attachment. I don’t think I’ve talked about this in the book club yet, but I’ve been talking a little bit on Instagram and Tik Tok about what it’s like to grow up with parents who love you as best they can, but were never curious about your internal world. So, they might say, “How was school?” or they might, you know, take you to your soccer games, but they never really were curious about your emotions, your hopes, your dreams, what was happening inside of you, how it felt when X thing happened, how it felt when your friend moved away, etc. And that can happen with parents who are stressed, who don’t have enough money, who are emotionally immature, who have their own trauma.

00:19:49

Trisha Wolfe: And then you never learn that it’s safe to be curious about your internal world. And so that’s part of this, too. This inner attachment update is really learning to be curious about yourself rather than manage yourself. And so that’s why I say with this book and with every book, whatever the tools are that are being introduced, we put them in our toolbox of experiments of curiosities rather than things we must implement. Right? If you need counteractive tools, use counteractive tools. But don’t lose sight of the relationship to yourself, the curiosity about your experience, and getting more to the root of how all of your behaviors are solutions to some deeper experience. So, that was a wow, I really made that answer last 20 minutes. So, that was a very in-depth answer to that question, but I think it’s it’s really nuanced and so much therapeutic content online because we’re trying to make it as accessible as possible doesn’t have room for nuance. In a 90-cond TikTok, there’s not room to understand this kind of nuance.

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change.

We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time - our next live meeting has moved to Sunday, August 2nd at 11 am EDT so that we have a few more chapters under our belt before we meet (a recording will be available if you can’t attend live!). If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, join my upcoming class: 5 Steps to Change on Sunday, July 26th.

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on learning to observe our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations and get curious about the story they tell rather than getting hooked into them and believing they are 100% true in the present.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

1. Take a moment to imagine your inner critic. What does it look like? Maybe it’s your scared younger self, or maybe it’s a character who represents your younger self. How is criticizing yourself a solution? What would happen if you didn’t criticize yourself?

2. Recall a time when your anxious thoughts told you a story that wasn’t true in the present. How might those thoughts have been trying to protect you? What did you learn in the past that might be coming up here in the present?

(0:00 - 2:11)

Hi and welcome back to our read-along of Are You Mad At Me? where we are deep diving into fawning, people-pleasing, perfectionism, intellectualizing, and all the different survival strategies that develop when we grow up in environments with emotionally immature caregivers, attachment ruptures, and environmental failures. This week we will be diving into chapter four called You Are Not Your Thoughts. We know for many of us who grew up in these environments that our brain continues to make predictions into the present about what has happened in the past.

So even if we know as adults that we can feel our feelings and we won’t be hurt if other people can’t see them and respond to them, our brain still predicts that feeling our feelings is going to make people upset, it’s going to make everyone tense, it’s going to make mom and dad fight with each other. So we feel a lot of anxiety, numbness, shutdown whenever we have feelings that we might deem as unacceptable, whenever we have needs, whenever we make mistakes. Those all come from those past predictions that our brain is using to predict the present and the future.

Learning how to observe, which you well know if you’ve listened to my content, is my belief the number one most important thing, the foundation for all work of healing from developmental trauma, is learning how to observe. And this book is going to go a little bit more into how to observe your thoughts. Now a quick note before we begin, I am going to be doing a mini podcast series with another creator who specializes in working with women who feel stuck in their lives, who have a loud inner critic, who maybe grew up in very rigid or controlling environments, and who struggle with intellectualization, perfectionism, self-criticism.

And we’re going to be looking at some of those major issues and how to get unstuck. So if you have questions, if you resonate with that description, and you would like to know specifically, how do I address this issue? Or how do I get unstuck from this issue? Please feel free to respond to this email or leave a comment as we are shaping up those episodes. We would love to know what you would like to hear about learning how to meet yourself, get unstuck, and move toward the life you want.

(2:11 - 5:54)

So as we start this chapter, we will see that Meg has a very similar mindset to me, which is that our thoughts and our experiences are not something to try to fix. So as you can see, as we start this chapter, Meg has a very similar insight to me, which is that awareness, aka observing, is an incredibly important part of healing and getting back into our lives. And so it’s really important as we explore this chapter that we remember a lesson we learned in our last book, Unlocking the Emotional Brain, about counteractive behaviors versus transformational experiences.

So in counteractive behaviors, what we’re essentially trying to do is to counteract our brain with willpower, with habits, with behavioral management. And so what that can look like is tools, tricks, and strategies to try to convince yourself that what’s happening is okay. So if you have the thought that making a mistake means everyone will hate you, everyone will be upset with you, you’ll lose your job, or whatever it is, a behavioral approach might be to give yourself evidence and say, well, you made a mistake before and nothing happened.

It might be to try to settle yourself down and say, it’s okay to make a mistake, it’s okay to feel anxious. All of those things are attempting to counteract a story your brain is telling, a prediction your brain is making, that says making a mistake will upset everyone around me. I could lose my connections, I could lose everything.

And there’s a time and a place for counteractive approaches, counteractive approaches where we try to manage the anxiety, the thought, whatever it might be, because we want to be able to live our lives. But we know in the long run, from all the science we read in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, we can’t just use counteractive approaches. Because then for the rest of our lives, we’re really going to have to use a lot of management, a lot of willpower.

And there’s going to be some white knuckling time where we’re trying to counteract our brain. Instead, while we’re using counteractive techniques to try to get a little space in the present day, we also want to be using transformational techniques that come from the Unlocking the Emotional Brain again, where we’re observing ourselves, but we’re also getting clear about the underlying story, learning part, schema that is present in that story, so that we can use processes like memory reconsolidation, where we give ourselves a new experience to update that learning. So I know it sounds a little esoteric, like what does that really mean a transformational experience? And if you weren’t with us for the last book, I really invite you to go back and listen to some of those episodes.

But we’re going to be curious in this chapter as we practice noticing and observing where things might feel counteractive, which is just fine, and where we might be able to dig a little deeper to offer ourselves a transformational approach. And so we know we often have so much urgency to want to fix ourselves, to get rid of that loud, anxious inner voice. But again, that is counteractive.

Instead, we want to meet that part of us, meet that voice, get curious about how a loud, anxious inner voice is a solution. What is it …

(0:00 - 3:50)

Hi and welcome back to our book club where we are diving into the book Are You Mad At Me?, all about fawning and our survival strategies from childhood. This week we’re going to be reading a chapter that addresses grief, anger, and emotional loneliness. These are feelings that will be very familiar to those of us who grew up in environments with developmental ruptures and attachment failures.

Maybe we had emotionally immature caregivers or other forms of early developmental trauma. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ve likely heard me talk about the big three of the emotions, and that is anger, sadness, and fear. These are normal expected emotions that all humans will feel, and there are many emotions that kind of branch off from there.

Of course, hurt and grief and rage and annoyance, frustration, disappointment. There are many ways we might experience emotions within that spectrum, but those emotions are also very present when we have experienced these attachment ruptures in our lives. And there’s a difference between feeling those feelings in the present and feeling those feelings as a child and being all alone in them.

And so this chapter is going to be curious about how we as adults can start to feel things like grief, like anger, to identify our feelings of loneliness that can often create feelings of being very afraid because it’s terrifying for a child to feel that they are disconnected, and how those things impacted us as a child versus how we can be with them as an adult. You know by now if you listen to some of the other books, like Unlocking the Emotional Brain, that many of our parts, our schemas, our patterns, what we might think of as core beliefs, are actually emotional learnings. So many of these things that say, if I want other people to love me, that I need to be good, that I need to be meeting all their needs all the time, I can’t be myself.

These are unconscious learnings stored in our brain, and they are rife with emotion. So when we are a child and we have this experience of when I’m my playful, silly, messy, emotional self, it upsets my parents, or they seem to fall away from me, or they seem more stressed, or they fight more. We might feel in that moment very scared because we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe.