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 a solution to? What is the prediction our brain is making that says, if I’m not constantly ruminating, analyzing, hypervigilant, everything around me will fall apart, or everything in my life will be dangerous, or my parents won’t love me anymore, I won’t be okay. But we’re really going to get curious in this chapter about meeting these parts of us.

Right? So as Meg talks about in this chapter, thoughts are not the ultimate truth. We know that many thoughts will come in and out of our brain doesn’t mean that it’s true. Some of you might already say, yeah, yeah, I know that.

(5:54 - 9:48)

But for some of us, that can be a lot to come to terms with, especially if our thoughts were our safe place. Analyzing and thinking was a place we could feel like we had some sense of control, and feel like we could know what was going to come next. So when we start to recognize, our thoughts are just our thoughts.

They’re a piece of the pie, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, impulses. These are all generated by those predictive patterns in our brain that’s trying to create context to help us respond. What that means is when a situation happens in our present day life, our brain is very, very, very quickly filing through all the experiences we’ve had in our lives that it’s already cataloged to say, how should I best respond to this to feel good, to maintain connection, and to stay safe? To help us best respond, our brain will generate that same context.

Again, it’ll bring up the stories and thoughts, the emotions, ...