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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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Today I m joined by the inimitable Kara Lowenthal, a recovering lawyer turned coach who is also the author of Take Back Your Brain.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context, the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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There are studies showing that like once your basic needs are met and you re not worried about losing your house, losing your healthcare, increases in money don t significantly increase happiness, right?
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So I think, you know, money helps alleviate the very real biological primitive fear of you re going to die if you don t have shelter and food and in our society, healthcare.
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But when it comes to things beyond that, I think that we have been sold the lie that money creates security.
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And it s a natural conflation because on a certain point for securing the necessities, it does, right?
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Obviously.
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And it makes other problems easier to solve also, clearly.
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But emotionally, money is not the solution to an emotional problem any more than food or having a certain kind of body or being married or not married.
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So says Kara Lowenthal, author of Take Back Your Brain, How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head and How to Get It Out.
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While Kara and I went to college together, I first met her when she was gracious enough to have me on her hugely successful podcast, Unfuck Your Brain, where I obviously fell in love with her brain.
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Kara is theoretically an unlikely life coach.
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She graduated from Harvard Law School, litigated reproductive rights, and ran a think tank at Columbia University before deciding that she wanted to go upstream and rewire our culture s thought process instead.
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Kara is fixated on what she calls the brain gap in women, the thought pattern so natural to us that keep us feeling anxious and disempowered.
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It s in that brain gap that we continue to both unconsciously support and reenact a culture that doesn t do great things for us.
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In fact, Take Back Your Brain is a cousin to On Our Best Behavior, one that s written with actionable insights by a life coach for getting to the root of the problem.
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I love Kara, and I loved this conversation, which we ll turn to now.
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Let s talk about the brain gap.
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It is, again, same hymnal, same fountain of so much of our own experience of the world.
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Yes, we should absolutely rail against structures and systems of inequity, but so much of this lives in us and is supported by our own unconscious behavior.
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So can you take us through this?
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Yeah, just start at the beginning.
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Just start having like a rail period, like just half an hour every morning, you just like rail at the universe.
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And then you re like, all right, time to get going.
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Time to get it together.
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So let s talk about in your introduction, you write about how
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we might be able to make all these inequalities disappear with a magic wand, theoretically, but that they will start to reappear because they are so rooted in our psyches and in our thoughts.
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So can you talk a little bit about how that shows up in your practice?
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Yeah.
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So in the book, I talk about this idea of the brain gap, which I define as happening on two levels.
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First, there s the gap between how men and women are socialized.
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So obviously, everything I m about to say, I am painting with a broad brush, but we re just talking about the themes.
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And I also always want to say, I believe there s more than two genders, obviously, but society still talks about things as sort of men and women in this heteronormative paradigm.
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So, in general, men are more socialized to believe that their value comes from either who they are, just existing, or kind of at worst, what they accomplish, what they do.
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And women are more socialized to believe that their value comes from the sum average of everybody else s opinion about them at all times, everywhere in the universe.
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So you have to be doing constant math and triangulation about what everybody thinks about you.
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And even if everybody you know thinks well about you, your brain will still at 3 a.m.
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be like, what about Becky from seventh grade who bullied us about our hair?
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She probably thinks we re not cool.
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So women are socialized to see that their value comes from serving other people, making other people happy, trying to manage everybody else s emotions and feelings and thoughts.
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and that it depends on what everybody else thinks about them.
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So that gap leads to the brain gap inside women s minds.
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All of us absorbed this socialization growing up.
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Then a lot of us maybe learned or were exposed to different ways of thinking as we got older.
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So you re in middle school or high school or college and you take a women s studies class and you re like, wait a minute,
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you know, I ve learned about the male gaze now.
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Like you have this kind of upper level learning and thinking about what women should be valued for and that women, you know, should be fully equal autonomous people and that our value shouldn t come from like what we look like or only childbearing or any of these kinds of social norms and structures.
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But
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that doesn t replace your earlier programming.
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So the way a lot of people will describe this, a lot of people socialized as women will describe this is like, well, I know this, but I just feel this, right?
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Like, I know I should be confident.
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I know I should ask for the raise, but I just really worry that people are going to think I m greedy or my boss is going to be mad or they re not going to give it to me or I m going to feel bad if I don t get it, right?
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Or my example that I use a lot for my life is before I discovered the form of coaching that I talk about and teach in the book, I had this in dating all the time where I would be like, as a 30-year-old with a fully formed prefrontal cortex, I understand that somebody whose last name I don t even know, who I went on one date with, who s ghosting me,
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is not really the main player in my life.
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And that person s opinion probably shouldn t be in charge of whether I think I deserve love.
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Logically, I know that doesn t make any sense, and I can see that.
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And I am nevertheless fixated to my phone like a mouse in a cocaine water experiment, cannot stop thinking about it.
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So it s that split brain experience is the brain gap in action where
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We have one set of things we d like to believe or like to feel, and then we have the actual things we believe or feel.
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And the way that I think about it is that the problem with calling that like, I think this and I feel this, is you re just kind of stuck there.
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What are you supposed to do about that?
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You just have a thought and a feeling that conflict and there s like no way forward.
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I really think those are two different thought patterns, one absorbed much earlier unconsciously that gets at your essential worth and value as a human, which your brain is naturally extremely fixated on.
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And then one is like a nice to know theory that you got when you were older, right?
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Nice to have theory of equality that you got when you were older.
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And so we have to close the brain gap by learning how to actually change the way we think bit by bit and rewire our brains to think in a different way.
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That s what the book is really about.
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Yeah, and we re not going to talk about men in this conversation, really.
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But what also happens is you start crashing into other people s conditioning, and then you sort of shore up your feelings about something.
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So in the example that you gave about
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I recognize that there s a pay gap.
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I recognize that I am certainly overperforming and delivering.
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You might have the confidence to recognize your own performance at work and yet have very reasonable anxiety about demanding a raise or asserting yourself or presenting as unlikable, ambitious, all the various words because
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Other people are also conditioned to see women who do that unappealing, right?
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Yeah, I talk about this in the book.
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Absolutely.
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Like the whole point of this book is that structural problems do exist, but that we can t neglect the way we ve internalized socialization.
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And there s so much focus on structural problems and very little focus on this aspect of it.
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And when it comes to things like, you know,
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a boss who is going to deny you a promotion because you decided to have a kid and he thinks he won t be committed to the business or whatever misogynistic nonsense you re running up against.
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I think that it is actually internalized socialization that, number one, makes us assume that, well, that means every boss in the world is like that, and so there s no point in me trying to find another job, and I wouldn t be good enough to get another job anyway.
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and, and, and, right?
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Part of the kind of pernicious socialization we get is the sort of belief that because things are structural or systemic, everything is like that everywhere.
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There are no
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other options.
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There s no point in even trying.
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I see this in dating a lot too.
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It s sort of like, well, yeah, this relationship isn t great, but we all know that no men are emotionally intelligent or available, and they re all going to want you to act like their mother, like all these stereotypes, right?
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And so that actually keeps us settling for, I m going to stay in this relationship.
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I m going to stay in this job.
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I m not going to look for another one.
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I m not going to whatever.
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So I use that example in the book of like, okay, if you have this goal that you want to make VP before you re 40, and then it turns out that you ve
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invested some years at a company where that s not going to be possible because of systemic sexism.
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The kind of true power of mindset work is developing the resilience to decide how to handle that.
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What are you going to do about that?
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How are you going to not internalize it, take it personally?
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Because we ll say out loud, yes, it s because my boss is a sexist, but because of the internal socialization inside, we re also thinking, I m not good enough and I should have been able to change their mind.
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I should have done it better and I should have blah, blah, blah.
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And all of that is changed when you change your thinking.
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Yes.
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And you are great at naming things.
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I m sure you know this, but you talk about how the gap creates something that you call socially programmed anxiety.
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I think that that is probably a very resonant term for many of us, and that also that women are socialized to have what you call conditional self-esteem.
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I bet there are also some
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Ding, ding, ding, ding, dings.
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But yeah, it hits these such core feelings.
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As you were talking, I was even thinking about anytime someone asks me, I don t have an employer at this point, right?
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I work for myself.
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And yeah, anytime anyone says, hey, do you have a minute?
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Hey, can you jump on a quick call?
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Or I get a text from someone I don t really know, my immediate feeling is, I m in trouble.
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I ve done something wrong.
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I m in trouble every time.
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I m a boss too.
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I have that thought about my employees.
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It s like my employee wants to talk to me and I m like, I m in trouble.
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Like that thought is so persistent because women are also socialized to basically believe that anyone having a negative thought or feeling certainly about you, but possibly even just like in your vicinity means that like you did something wrong and you re in trouble.
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I mean, so many women just have the default assumption that whatever area of their life you re talking about, they re doing it wrong.
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And that they re just sort of doing it wrong generally somehow where it is like life.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And then you sort of write about how there is this list of when you re coaching people and you are, I m assuming you re expert at hearing women articulate feelings or situations and then taking over responsibility for them.
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I mean, is that generally the instinct?
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Like you give examples like, I should make peace with this because I don t deserve better.
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I should learn to love this job partner, whatever, because I can t find anything or anyone better than this out there.
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It is kind of an over-responsibility, right?
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It s a weird, like, I m the biggest piece of shit that the whole world revolves around.
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But also, I m the only one who can do this.
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Yes, that comes up in coaching all the time.
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It s like, I m useless and don t know what I m doing and I m doing it wrong.
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And also, I have to do it all, which like, right, that doesn t make any sense.
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Yeah, I think it s a couple of things.
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I think in general, there s women s socialization.
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We hear messages that are about anything like be grateful for what you have or what you get.
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Like, you know, don t want too much.
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Don t be greedy.
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You talk about this, obviously, with your work.
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Essentially, just your job is to keep your head down and like whatever the world or someone else, especially a man, decides to give you, that s like what you get and you shouldn t want anymore.
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You get what you get and you don t get upset.
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There you go.
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You get what you get and you don t get upset.
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Yeah.
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It s so wild how many of us heard that growing up and how unlikely you would be to say it to your child now.
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It s such a generational shift.
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I mean, my parents didn t use that specific phrase, but certainly that general sentiment.
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So I think there s socialization around just like, you re not supposed to want more than you have.
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That s greedy and bad.
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That s sinful, going back to your work.
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And then there s that scarcity socialization of like,
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all employers are terrible, all men are terrible, everything s stacked against you.
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And I m somebody who came from the social justice world.
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I was a reproductive rights litigator before I became an academic, before I became a coach, been a professional feminist in one form or another my entire life since I was 18.
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And I ve done litigation and policy work, and I was a sexual assault advocate in emergency rooms.
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I come from the progressive social justice world, so I say this as a progressive with love for that world.
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there is a way in which the structuralist explanation of society leaves people with no agency to make their own lives better, right?
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I think there s a lot of people who maybe feel they have rejected like patriarchal beliefs about the world that are totalist and absolutist, but then they re believing structural leftist beliefs that are totalist and absolutist, right?
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That like reflection mirroring on each side.
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And so I think that s some of the most insidious way that patriarchy gets in our head is the belief that... So for instance, let me give you an example.
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I live in a larger body, a fat person.
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And so when I started to do body image work, it was like, well, okay, but I mean, even if I can believe that my body s okay, it s like fat phobia is rampant.
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No one else is going to believe that that s okay.
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So I m still going to be screwed.
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That s a thought society had taught me, right?
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Everybody will think you re disgusting.
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Everybody will think your body is gross.
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Nobody will want you.
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So like, okay, I guess you can try to feel better about yourself, but you ll have no options.
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But that wasn t true, right?
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That was an internalized belief that society had taught me.
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Were there some people who felt like that?
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Yes, of course.
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You just have to swipe Tinder in New York to see like, no fatties.
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Of course that s out there.
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And fat phobia is out there and it affects not just romantic relationships, but I know you just recently talked about this on your podcast, but economic, career, everything.
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That s true.
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And it s also true that there were a lot of people who were attracted to me and did want me and I wanted myself in a different way.
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And my sex and dating life got infinitely better when I stopped dieting, stopped binging and purging, accepted my body and did that work.
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So it is a little bit of a leap of faith.
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It s like you have to be willing to believe that maybe what society told you about what will happen if you dare to be different is wrong.
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But the alternative is to live your whole life constrained, trying to conform with these impossible expectations you can t even live up to that are like, parent like you don t have a job and work like you don t parent and never age a day in your life and never gain an ounce and be sexual, but not too sexual.
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I mean, it s impossible.
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You can t live up to it.
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But we try.
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We re constantly trying.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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It s part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.
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Join me on Wildcard, wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.
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We do try.
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But no, I think you articulated all of that so brilliantly, too, because I share that frustration with that sort of left progressive victim villain narrative.
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And again, yes, we have so much structural inequity that we have to address, but it can be
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a really toxic loop to get stuck in that.
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And it s incredibly disempowering to feel like somehow this system is holding you in a place that you can t shift from until it gives you permission.
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And it s never going to give you permission.
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But I think we start to transcend some of these ideas just by continuing to push and move forward.
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and show up for each other.
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Become more conscious.
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Do everything that you re talking about in this book.
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Be more aware of how our thoughts are driving our actions.
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And I think there s this really insidious message sometimes that like if you try to think more positively or have an impact on your life in the kind of more progressive world, like you re sort of
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being delusional, or that s like a privileged state, or it s almost like you have to be as disempowered as possible in order to prove that you agree with the beliefs and the systems.
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Which is why for me, I talk about in the book that a lot of my
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of perspective on this is shaped by Viktor Frankl, the philosopher and neuroscientist who, for those who don t know, lived through the Holocaust, literally lived through the death camps where most of his family died.
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And he wrote this book afterward called Man s Search for Meaning that talks about the idea that... I mean, I get chills every time I talk about it, even though I talk about it all the time, it s just like never worn off.
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I always butcher the phrase a little bit, but that the last freedom left to man is to choose his own attitude in any circumstances.
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And so the idea that that is somehow frivolous or shallow or only for privileged people or is denial of the true circumstantial realities of the world, I think is just misguided and incorrect.
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And this mindset work is actually a powerful liberatory practice because who has ever changed the world?
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Only people who had thoughts that were different from what society told them.
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That s literally what changes things.
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Yes, and correct me if you can if I m wrong, but I feel like Frankel, what was so profound too about that book is his fellow concentration camp victims, those who were convinced that the liberation was coming after Christmas, or whatever it is, like the more people were convinced that something
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was bound to happen or imminent, and then it didn t.
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Didn t those people just perish almost like they died of broken hearts and lost hope and that he survived in part by being consistently present with himself?
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And in a way that I think goes to what we were saying earlier about
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the way that we can get trapped into these systems, which is, oh, when this changes, when we exert enough pressure that this changes, everything will be resolved.
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And the reality is that s an illusion in some ways.
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Yes, things will start to improve, but we can t be dependent on these outside factors for our own internal state, which I feel like is also kind of one of the primary theses of your book.
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Yeah, I try to think of it as divorce from external outcomes.
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Partly, I think, because especially in the self-help and wellness space, things can get taken to really what I view as stupid extremes.
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I was trying to look for a more diplomatic word, but I couldn t find one.
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The idea that you create everything that happens to you in your life with your thinking, I just don t agree with that.
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I don t think you get cancer because you re thinking.
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That s very dangerous.
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Yeah, it can get taken so far too.
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And I also, because women are constantly socialized to doubt themselves, sometimes they come to self-development work or thought work and then they re like, okay, so if anything in my life isn t what I want or a problem is happening, it s like my fault because of my thoughts.
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So I always try to really like focus on the side of like,
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I m sure a multitude of factors led to people surviving or not surviving the horrific experience of the Holocaust, and a multitude of factors contribute to everything we experience.
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But the power is that part that you always get to control.
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And that doesn t mean always having a positive attitude.
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It s like your relationship with yourself.
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For me, some of the most powerful thought work I ever do is when I don t have a positive attitude, when I am being irritable or short-tempered or I m sad or I m having some other negative emotion, I m experiencing emotional suffering, the way that I approach and treat myself in that moment and what I make that mean and how I hold space for that is some of the most transformative work.
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It s not necessarily the times that I m practicing super positive thoughts and getting all those external circumstances to align the way I want.
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100%. 100%.
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All right, so take us to the Holiday Inn parking lot when you decide to abandon your JD and become a coach.
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You know, once I saw that automatic pancake machine maker in the Holiday Inn, I was like, this is the life for me.
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Forget everything I ve ever known.
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Forget reproductive rights.
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Yeah, fuck Columbia.
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This thing can make a pancake on demand.
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Yeah.
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I did not think that the path to, you know, true freedom led to a Holiday Inn outside of El Dorado Hills in California.
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But I think I was always, I don t like the term seeker because people usually have a spiritual sense they mean that in and I wasn t like,
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looking for divine communion with the universe.
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I m very pragmatic, from a Jewish family, pretty clearly.
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That was not what I was looking for, personally.
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But I was always, from a very young age, definitely a seeker in the sense of being like, most people don t seem to be really enjoying being a human or doing a great job with it.
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There s got to be a better way.
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Very early on, like when I was 16, I told my parents, I was like, I want to go to therapy.
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I was the first person to go to therapy.
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I was just like, there s got to be a better way than this.
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And you know, on the one level, I definitely think my intellectual preoccupations have evolved.
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But if you go back and read my high school yearbook, my senior page, it s like the same shit.
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What is the meaning of life?
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Everything is subjective.
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What are we doing here?
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So I was always interested in those questions, which really are, to me, philosophy questions.
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I talk about my work as being a feminist practical philosophy.
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When men talk about, who are we meant to be?
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What is reality?
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What are we trying to do here?
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That s philosophy.
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And then when women do it, it s self-help.
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Yes.
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So I was always interested in that stuff.
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And so I just, you know, I went through the middle, you know, the like 20 year old woman s journey, like yoga and meditation and talk therapy and like doing all these things.
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Right.
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And they were all helpful in different ways.
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But ultimately, I was sort of left feeling like a lot of people who end up coming to work with me now feel which is like, okay, I have a lot of awareness now of my
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personal psychological mechanisms, like how my family of origin has shaped me and where my patterns come from and whatever.
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But now what?
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What do I do?
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Okay, now I understand how my insecurity is leading me to go after emotionally unavailable men, but do we have a plan for that or do I just...
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doing that and then like marry one eventually.
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Do I chain myself to the radiator until I have a better attraction system?
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What s the plan here?
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So I have more awareness.
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So I was like watching myself do it being like, oh, there you go again.
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And I found the coach and teacher who taught me the coaching tools that I use, the sort of which I ve combined with my feminist lens and perspective, but from whom I learned the kind of cognitive tools of kind of how to rewire your brain.
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And
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I think I was on like episode three of her podcast and I was like, what the is this?
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Probably my poor talk therapist I had in my twenties is out there listening to this being like, I tried to tell you, you could change, you know, like you re not ready to hear it until you re ready to hear it.
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I m sure people have tried to mention this to me before, but I was not ready to hear it until I was ready to hear it.
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And then when I heard that, number one, you just think thoughts because of how your brain works, not because they re true.
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So your thoughts aren t necessarily true and you can change your thoughts on purpose and that will change how you feel.
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I was just like, this is the secret to life.
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Why have I been doing anything else?
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But I was not intending to do it professionally.
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I just wanted help for myself.
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But after a year of literally just practicing what I learned from her podcast, it s like, what you can do just from that?
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My life just changed so much.
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And there s a funny twist to the story.
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So in my mind, what happened was I listened to the podcast, changed my life.
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Then I woke up one morning, I had this revelation.
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I was like, I m going to be a life coach.
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strategize and I told my parents at like a family event so they wouldn t get too upset.
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I told them I m going to abandon this career path.
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I was about to go on the market to become a law professor.
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And then like six months after this, I told this story to a friend of mine who I only see like once a year.
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She lives in California and we don t keep in touch a lot in between.
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And I was like, crazy news.
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You won t believe what I m, you know, and she was like, you ve been joking that you want to move to Costa Rica and become a life coach for years.
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And I was like, what the hell?
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That s true.
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I had been making that joke for years.
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But it was so unacceptable.
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It s like my conscious mind that I wanted to do that, that it had just been like coming out as a joke.
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And I had no awareness of that.
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So I felt like it happened in the parking lot with the pancake machine.
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But actually I think for a long time I had, and this is a great example of like how all these things intersect.
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I had all of this internalized fat phobia, even after I did the body image work for myself personally of like, well, okay, like, yes, it turns out there are people who do want to date and have sex with me and I can like my body more and feel better about it, but nobody s going to pay a fat life coach.
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I mean, obviously that means you don t have anything figured out or you wouldn t have the size body you do, right?
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So it s like so many layers to that socialization.
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Yeah, really deep.
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I mean, I talk about this in the book.
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I m not ashamed of it because I don t shame myself, but it s just like a wild thing that I did.
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When I was deep in that mindset, I remember going to see a famous meditation teacher teach who is a fat person.
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And half of my brain was like, well, I mean, she can t really, like if she s fat, she obviously hasn t really like whatever found enlightenment.
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I don t, you know, like, but that is so common.
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Like,
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Especially because everything gets co-opted to sell weight loss.
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Like people are totally selling you that if you meditate, you won t want to emotionally eat and then you ll be thin.
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You know, that programming was so deep.
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So that s how I ended up in the Holiday Inn Express.
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I went and got trained as a coach.
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I d never met my teacher before.
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And there was one girl there from Brooklyn.
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And I was like, OK, great.
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I m not completely off my rocker.
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Now my best friend, Rachel, who s an amazing coach who helps women change their relationship with alcohol.
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But she was like the person who was like me there.
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And I was like, we were both like, OK, well, if we are making a horrible decision, at least like another person.
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We re doing it together.
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Yeah.
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It was like we re the same type of people.
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We re doing it together.
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And here we are now.
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So this is your sort of formula, which is slightly adopted from Brooke, which is thoughts drive emotion, drive behavior, drive return.
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And it s interesting.
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I mean, what you were writing about too, because this is something I catch myself with all the time, is I police my thoughts, particularly when I m judgmental or cruel.
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And there might be no action.
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I might not have even said anything.
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And yet just the fact that I had this fleeting irritation at someone at a stoplight or passing judgment is enough for me to attack myself.
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Do you think that s specific to women, the ones who are primarily persecuted by our thinking?
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Or do you think that this is a genderless part of being human?
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I think it s both.
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A lot of things with socialization, I think, especially things that are evolutionary biology or, well, that s not socialization, but in the mind, or are general cultural, it s like everybody gets some of them.
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But with women, there s a booster shot because it taps into all the other
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ways we re socialized.
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So for instance, I think it s really a Christian belief that, historically, that your thoughts can be sinful, right?
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It s like you can be sinning in your thought, you can be sinning in your heart.
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It s not, I mean, we want to get really simplistic.
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It s like the Old Testament is about actions and the New Testament is like, it doesn t matter what you do.
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It s like, what s in your heart?
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Do you accept Jesus in your heart?
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You don t need to keep kosher.
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You don t need to do this prayer.
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So we have this belief that your thoughts can be virtuous or sinful or bad or good, and that they speak to your moral status as a person.
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So I do think everybody gets that socialization.
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I don t think men are exempt from that.
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But I think that women are socialized to be
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constantly self-evaluating, self-critical, self-vigilant.
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And I think that s because we re socialized to always be questioning our inadequacy and our worth and be rerunning the numbers on a moment-by-moment basis to see if we re allowed to live today.
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I think it impacts us more probably because it fits right into that already.
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And we have the socialization of you should always be nice, and you should always be kind, and you should always be patient.
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And that s what a good woman is.
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So a negative thought is going to hit up against that programming.
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People really lose their minds when I try to teach the idea that thoughts don t have moral value.
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It s like, they re with me for the ride, and then they re like, wait, what?
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Right?
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Like, that is a real sticking point.
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Yeah, as you say, like, berate ourselves, prove that we re bad.
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Meanwhile, it s like, we re human.
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Of course, we re sometimes bad.
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We re full of all of it, which I love this, the four word phrase that you use of how human of me.
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how human of me as a way of just stopping that over-processing or the way that we berate ourselves against these ideas of, I don t know, perfect behavior, good behavior, what a good woman is.
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And what I also loved is how you then take this thought, this negative thought, and you write, and I really want you to unpack this for me, but I think everyone will benefit
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You write, the wild thing about learning how to rewire your brain is realizing that your experience of negative emotions has mostly not actually been the experience of negative emotion at all.
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It s been the experience of resistance to negative emotion.
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You may have no idea what it feels like to have a negative emotion come up and experience it without any desire to make it go away, which means you don t actually know what a feeling on its own without resistance feels like.
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Oh my god, can you talk about this?
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Yes, I m happy to expound on this.
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So there s a couple of different entry points into this.
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So one of these is like there s obviously some kind of structural similarity here to what some Buddhist traditions teach about pain versus suffering, right?
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That pain is a
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natural and unavoidable part of human life.
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We could call that your actual negative emotion.
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And then suffering comes from the story we tell about it, the meaning we make of it, our attachment or belief that it shouldn t be happening, that the world should be one way and it isn t, or we need to have this thing and we don t, or whatever.
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So the way that I think about it in terms of the body and the brain is that say you have a negative emotion, which is a set of sensations in your body, right?
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You re having a thought like, I don t have a partner and I want one.
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And then you feel sad, right?
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That feeling is going to be a set of actual physical sensations in your body.
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Like probably for a lot of people, sadness is like you feel kind of heavy.
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Maybe the pit of your stomach feels like it s sinking, right?
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Maybe you want it.
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You feel prickly behind your eyes.
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You want to cry.
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I m going through this in detail because I feel like so many people have been told to feel their feelings and they don t know what that means.
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It looks like it s literally just tuning into and noticing the physical sensations that are happening in your body.
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That s what feeling your feelings is.
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It can be challenging, but it s not some complicated abstract thing you can t figure out how to do.
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Like that s what that is.
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So, if you have that thought, and the thought just goes through your mind, and that emotion happens, and you have no reaction to it, generally will not last that long.
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I think I say in the book, I think it s 90 seconds is the theory on how long an emotion will just last.
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You can think about a small child, right?
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They can seem so mercurial because it s like they re devastated one moment, and then 90 seconds later, they re like,
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okay, let s play.
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You re like, oh, okay, we re done.
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All right.
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And then like 10 minutes later, they re so angry.
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And then like a minute later, they re cheery again.
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And it feels discombobulating because as adults, we don t usually experience our emotions in that rapid succession.
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But that s because we ve been taught as we grew up
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how we should react to our emotions, either explicitly or implicitly, right?
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Maybe we were told, like, don t cry.
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It s not that bad.
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It s not that important.
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You shouldn t be upset.
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Maybe we were told, like, oh, little girl shouldn t get angry.
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That s unladylike that you just yelled, right?
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Maybe we were taught whatever we heard.
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And then we just saw also what other people around us did.
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We saw if our parents were clearly mad, but stuffed it down and said everything was fine.
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Or if when we got in trouble and they were upset, they then told us that we had done it and there was something bad about us and we were ungrateful or we were wrong.
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We got all of this learning about, okay, when an emotion comes up in my body, how am I supposed to react to that?
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And implicitly, most of what we learned was either,
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Like shove it down.
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It s bad.
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You shouldn t have it.
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It means something bad about you.
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Right.
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And so all of that develops resistance, meaning we don t want to have that feeling because we re like the feeling means something bad about me and or the feeling means my thought is true.
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Like if I do feel sad, that really means I will never find a partner.
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It s like a vicious cycle.
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So I don t want that feeling to be here.
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And then there s also just, you know, even without all of that, like humans are kind of hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
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Okay.
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So what happens in your brain is that the emotion comes up, you start to be like, I don t want that bad.
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And now you re basically signaling to your brain that there s a danger inside your body that you can t get away from.
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It s like, I m having this feeling in my body and that s bad.
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It might mean I m a bad person.
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It might mean I m being rejected by somebody.
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That s very scary.
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And now your brain is like, there s a lion inside.
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There s a bad thing happening.
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And then your brain just spins out and freaks out.
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So it s really like you ve told your brain that there s something dangerous in your body.
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The call is coming from inside the house.
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You can t run away from it.
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So you re like creating a stress response to the feeling.
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And then you really don t want to feel that.
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You re like doubling down, right?
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And that s why all of us have experienced spitting the fuck out in one way or another, like anger, anxiety, whatever.
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And then like two days later being like, I don t know what that was really like.
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Why was I that upset?
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Right?
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Like you think the thought again and you re like, that was not that big of a deal.
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But we call that whole process the emotion.
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So we call getting a little anxious, then freaking out that the anxiety shouldn t be there, and trying to get rid of it, not being able to get rid of it, and getting really freaked out that we are.
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And then we start thinking, oh my god, I m always so anxious.
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I m always going to feel like this.
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I m never going to feel better.
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I have to make this go away.
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I have to get rid of it.
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We call that whole thing anxiety, when really, anxiety was like 20% of that, and the rest of it was all of that resistance and reaction to the emotion.
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And that if we could retrain ourselves to just
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have the feeling it moves fast.
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Yeah, but it s really important to understand that because when I say to people, OK, you re going to have to learn to process your emotion, experience it, what they think is, I m going to have to feel like I m at a nine.
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And I m like, well, no, it s actually only going to feel like you re at a two or a three.
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Or if you re at a nine, it s going to be for like 90 seconds.
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But also, most of us, our feelings go on for so long because we re not ever letting them out.
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It s like if you have to pee and you just pee, then you re done.
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If you have to pee and you don t.
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And gaggling.
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Yeah.
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It just gets worse.
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Like you re on a long car trip.
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It just gets worse and worse and more and more all consuming.
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It s like the only thing you can think about.
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And your whole body is uncomfortable.
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And then you call that having to pee.
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Well, that s not really having to pee.
3
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That s when you have to pee and then you don t for two hours.
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That s what you re experiencing.
3
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So for people who are listening, you take us through sort of many different domains.
3
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I m assuming these are, they seem like the most present probably in your coaching practice.
3
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body image, sexuality, pleasure, money.
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Let s talk about money.
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I m coming back to this onion in my own life where I was talking to a friend who sort of is like an adjunct therapist.
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I do pay her, but I also love her.
3
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But we were talking about, I think, scarcity.
3
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And I was saying, I don t really care about money.
3
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I just need to support my family.
3
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And she was like, honey, money is at the center of your life.
3
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It s the only thing that you think about.
3
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And that was a shocking revelation, because it s true.
3
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You re like, rude?
3
SPEAKER_00
What?
3
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It s rude.
3
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But she s someone who just tells me the truth, in part because she s not officially a therapist.
3
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But consumerism isn t at the center of my life.
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and I don t want things that I don t have, but I certainly am obsessed with safety and security and making sure that everything is okay, which is what money secures, right?
3
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Theoretically.
3
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It signifies to us, certainly, yeah.
3
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And what we ve been taught it will give us, yeah.
3
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Yeah.
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And so, but anyway, so I m starting to acknowledge that I am so far from done
4
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with that piece of work.
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I just love that you re modeling also that, like, we can be so wrong about ourselves and our self-description can be, like, so far off base.
4
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And that s fine.
4
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Like, that s normal.
4
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And, like, part of being a human, it doesn t mean that you did something wrong or you missed something.
4
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Because women are so perfectionistic, there can be so much shame or resistance to it.
4
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And it s like, no, that s such a beautiful thing.
4
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You just learned you were not who you thought you were in some way.
4
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And often we tell ourselves we re the opposite of how we really are.
4
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You point at some of this very deep work, I think, for women in this section, because you re writing about the way that we re socialized or conditioned.
4
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And I think that the way that women relate to money is quite different.
4
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And there are dimensions to it that are very, I think, beautiful and necessary, that it is more grounded in reality and less abstract and less
4
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growth, growth, growth, and up and to the right and anyway.
4
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But you write about sort of women s proclivity and you put yourself in this camp for nonprofit work and this idea to sort of what I was saying to Anne of money is not the center of my life and I don t care about money slash consumerism.
4
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And this way that we distance ourself, I think, from what is a very real driving need to have enough.
4
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or secure our needs, or just want more money.
4
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And women are good with money and need more money and are philanthropic and all of those things.
4
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But it s a real bind.
4
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So can you talk about how that really presents?
4
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Yeah.
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I mean, I actually am not sure that anybody actually cares about money.
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What people care about is the feeling they think that money will give them.
4
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And that s true whether it s like for safety security, whether it s for status, whether it s to believe I m a good businessman, like whatever it is, right?
4
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Whether it s I want a yacht so that I feel adequate because my brother has a yacht, like whatever, not my brother personally, just theoretically.
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Probably your brother too, just kidding.
4
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No, my brother definitely does not.
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He would never.
4
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He s so frugal.
4
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My brothers and I are definitely examples of like you can grow up in the same household and come up with very different thoughts about money and what to do with it and how to spend it.
4
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So I think that money in and of itself doesn t have a meaning, right?
4
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It s the meaning that we give to it.
4
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So, it can obviously be used to purchase things and there are, in this sort of capitalist economy, obviously, you need it for things that keep you alive, like shelter, housing, healthcare, etc.
4
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We also know, and it s well known now, that there are studies showing that once your basic needs are met and you re not worried about losing your house, losing your healthcare, increases in money don t significantly increase happiness, right?
4
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So I think, you know, money helps alleviate the very real biological primitive fear of you re going to die if you don t have shelter and food and in our society, health care.
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But when it comes to things beyond that, I think that we have been sold the lie that money creates security.
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And it s a natural conflation because on a certain point for securing the necessities, it does, right?
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Obviously.
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And it makes other problems easier to solve also, clearly.
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But
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Emotionally, money is not the solution to an emotional problem any more than food or having a certain kind of body or being married or not married.
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And in my work, what I see is people have different things, but everybody who hasn t done this work has a thing that is like the thing.
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that is going to just, if they get it right, make them feel safe forever.
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It can be getting married.
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It can be having a kid.
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It can be making a million dollars in your business.
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It can be money in the bank or whatever.
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But everybody has a thing.
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And I will say that I coach people who made
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$75,000 a year and joined my coaching program when it was a $10,000 program and were happy and felt great.
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And I have multi-million dollar business owner colleagues with millions of dollars in the bank who are so emotionally afraid around money still and who feel like they are going to die every time a launch doesn t go well.
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You only need to spend time around rich people to realize that money will not solve your emotional safety.
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Yeah, and I think that s so wise, and it s not well understood, and it s why I think when people see any of these, you know, billionaires or trillionaires, I don t know what they are.
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I feel like money has also become irrelevant.
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Wait, do we even have trillionaires?
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Is that a thing?
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Maybe now.
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But when there s a quest for more that we see these men make... Right, it s obviously not rational or about what you can buy.
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It s not rational.
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It s not a financial decision.
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Yes.
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It s not about money.
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These men are still plagued by some intimation of not enough.
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and it s very deep.
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It s very deep.
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It s really a one-two punch because if your thing is money and security as a woman, you re also been socialized to think that you don t understand money, you can t make enough money, like money is for men.
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It s also not okay to want money.
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So it s like a real bind you get yourself into there where, you know, you can talk growing up that money is safety for you, but then also you re supposed to believe that you can t get money.
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You re not good at that.
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And money s not for you and you don t have any control over it.
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So now you re really screwed.
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Yes.
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So in my book, in the Greed chapter, I teased apart the difference between worth and value and yada, yada, yada.
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I love that you essentially, sort of from a cognitive processing thought basis, are like, everyone stop.
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You write about how much you hate this idea of being recognized for your worth or your value.
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And I love words.
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So I m like, there s a difference.
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And you re like, yes, there is a difference.
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And yet, don t ask your brain to decouple these ideas.
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Just stop using this type of language, which I think is really wise in the financial context.
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It s the conflation of, yeah, not necessarily saying different things.
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It s like the conflation of your financial worth and value with your worth and value as a person, right?
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100%.
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And I was like, here s how to think about it.
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Like, this is the value part and this is the worth part.
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And I like, though, that you re like, actually, that s just too much energy for the brain to think through the differences.
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And so, no, but I think it s right.
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Because I also get completely still twisted, even though I m like, I ve done the etymological work.
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Wait, that s got to be a bumper sticker.
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I get twisted even though I ve done the etymological work, which I totally thought was going to resolve this emotional issue for me.
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I had to go to etymology summer school and I still had to find coaching, but I don t think it doesn t totally do it.
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That s what I was doing when I was like 14 was summer school for etymology because my parents were a real good time.
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Oh God, it s too good.
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It s almost like if two people who went to Yale have a podcast, they end up talking about the etymological derivation.
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Yes, there s a disclaimer that we went to college together, but we didn t know each other.
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We were looking up different etymologies in the library.
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I know, we were in Beinecke.
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I was a recluse, though.
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I think you re more extroverted than I am.
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everybody thinks I m extroverted.
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I can turn it on, and then I go home and I m just like, the fact that I now live with a person, I mean, I lived alone for so many years, so I m engaged, and he has children half the week.
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He s extroverted and he always wants to talk, and I m like, you have to understand, I lived so long, when I went home, there were no other humans in the house.
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I didn t have to speak to anyone.
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And now, there s always a human there.
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Like that already is using up 75% of my social battery.
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Yeah, now I get it.
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Having two children of my own and having an introverted husband, we sort of try and stake claims and opposite sides of the house.
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Are your children introverted?
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Because one of my favorite stories that s very unhelpful for me is that if I d had biological children, maybe I would have gotten an introverted one and then it would be easier.
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It s somewhat hard to tell.
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My youngest will be on a FaceTime phone call with his buddies for hours if we let him, just mindlessly talking.
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But my oldest can spend a lot of time alone, but he likes company and he likes to just have a one-sided conversation.
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and just give you like 800 facts about acid rain or... Familiar with both these phenomenons.
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I was a kid who just wanted to be like left alone to read.
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So I m always like, well, maybe I would have had one of those, but I have no extrovert.
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No, neither of my children read.
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It feels like a really perverse, karmic.
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I don t understand, and this is an ongoing conversation where they re like, we know you like to read, we get it, there are books everywhere, but we don t like to read, mom.
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They re like, we re familiar with the concept, and we say no thank you.
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SPEAKER_00
Say no thank you.
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SPEAKER_00
You need to come back.
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Anytime.
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This is such a joy, and thank you for your book, and it s so related to my book, but it is actionable, which I think people really need.
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Kara is a force.
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I love her work, and she has a podcast, she coaches, as clearly, and then her book, Take Back Your Brain, really is in some ways a sister or cousin to Honor Best Behavior, and the two are very related, but she puts it into
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a coaching framework and then addresses many topics that I think are quite acute for so many of us like body image and sex and pleasure, money, dating.
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We didn t get to touch on so much of the content of the book but the basic thesis
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She writes, without changing those thought patterns, even if we waved a magic wand to reset the external circumstances of the world, the way we ve all been taught to think would have us taking actions that would replicate the hierarchies and inequalities we were trying to escape.
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I could not agree more.
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That s what I m also so passionate about in my work.
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Because I think that the more we can change ourselves, the more the world in turn will shift.
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And that waiting for the world to shift first, it s just gonna take too long.
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It s too hard and
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We ll still need to do work on our parts to meet it there, otherwise old patterns reemerge.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Allie Brockman, and the entire Kedans13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Duval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.