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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...