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, and the body sensations to help us respond. What that means is what’s happening in the present is not always accurate based on the present. It doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It doesn’t feel true to us, but it’s often the past landing onto the present. So thoughts are just thoughts. We don’t have to always buy into them, but rather we can be curious about them.
So if we have this idea, this thought that comes in that says, I’m unlovable, and I’ll be alone forever, we can recognize that that’s likely the past landing onto the present, but it’s a thought that we will get much more hooked into because connection is at play. And if connection is at play and attachment is at play, us never being lovable, then our brain feels like our survival is at stake, our safety is at stake. So of course, the context around that thought might be that you feel really anxious.
You start to guilt yourself to try to be better. You try to manage yourself. That context is very strong, and it really tries to elicit a response from us versus the thought, I’m worthy of being loved exactly as I am, including my messy parts.
We might not have a basis for that thought. When it enters into our brain, our brain says, no, that’s not true. What’s true is I’m unlovable.
If I think that I’m worthy of being loved exactly as I am, then I have to feel and accept all the parts of me that are angry, sad, and hurt that I didn’t get to feel loved as I was in my childhood or in my relationship or whatever it was. So the context that comes up from that thought will say, this thought that I am worthy is actually unsafe, because it’s trying to counteract the idea that I’m not worthy, that I always need to be trying hard. And that is the idea that keeps me safe and loved.
So I hope you see it creates a little bit of a loop inside of our mind. So instead of trying to convince ourselves that we’re worthy exactly as we are of being loved, instead, we’re being curious and observing, where did we learn that we were unlovable? What feels like it would happen if we believed we were loved, we were worthy of being loved? What would it be like to walk through the world in that way? And your brain might come in and say, well, you’d be too cocky, or you’d, you know, you’d make a mistake anyway, and then you’d find out it wasn’t true. So it’s much safer to just hold the idea that you’re not worthy of being loved.
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That’s what we’re continuing to emphasize here is just this observation and getting deeper into the layers. So we know, again, that rumination, that hyper vigilance, those anxious thoughts, it plays a role. It gives us a faux sense of control, an illusion of control.
And it’s something that developed in environments that felt outside of our control. So we know thinking about the worst case scenarios doesn’t actually alleviate our stress. It increases anxiety, it increases stress, it increases our bracing.
But oftentimes, when we were young, that’s all we had. Right? All we could do is go up into our brain and analyze and ruminate. Because the environment around us didn’t feel safe, it didn’t feel like our emotions could be met.
(9:49 - 22:48)
And so it’s a way that we learn to manage and try to keep ourselves safe, to try to hold on for a sense of control at all costs. And that’s really what fawning is too, right? Like fawning and people pleasing is us trying to give ourselves a sense of safety by making other people around us feel okay. And so Meg talks about how these anxious thoughts, this rumination is managing this feeling of discomfort underneath.
And that’s something we’re really going to be curious about. Because we know, of course, in our adult brain, it’s not dangerous to feel anxious. But for many of us, the context our brain is generating based on the environments we did grow up in is huge terror, huge rage, huge grief, huge disappointment, huge overwhelm.
And underneath it all, a deep sense of aloneness in those feelings. So there’s kind of a split experience where an adult part of us might say, well, I know these thoughts aren’t dangerous. I know I can sit with the discomfort of being anxious.
But when our brain is literally generating the experience that says, it’s deeply dangerous to feel this way, you will lose everyone if you let yourself feel the anger, the rage, the fear, whatever it is, then that’s why we have to start with getting to that deeper learning rather than trying to manage the thoughts and convince ourselves that it’s okay to feel discomfort. That step has to come after we meet and work with that deeper learning, that deeper experience. And I know we might want to jump to that step because we’re ready to be free of the anxious thoughts.
We said, let’s just feel the discomfort and get through it. But that’s counteractive, right? That’s trying to convince our brain with all our might that it’s not unsafe to feel our feelings. But when we had a lot of experiences in our early lives that taught us feeling our feelings, making mistakes, being ourselves, will make everyone around us mad, will make us in a way, will make the environment feel more unsafe.
Then we have to work with that deeper learning first of what our brain predicts would happen. Like what would happen if I could never be anxious again? If you woke up tomorrow and your brain could never, ever, ever feel anxious again, never think about making others happy, never think about making mistakes, just you being yourself and following your instinct and what you want for yourself, what would happen? And a part of your brain might say, oh, that would feel really good. I really want that.
But when we really slow down and let it sink through the layers, that’s often when the deeper experience comes in that says, no, that wouldn’t be safe. I would miss something. I would make a mistake.
I would miss the tiger jumping out and it would eat me, metaphorically, right? So we’re really curious about how that anxiety and those anxious thoughts feel like they’re load-bearing. And we want to figure out what that load is it’s bearing, what it’s protecting us from, what it protected us from in the past. And so what Meg calls conditioned beliefs in this chapter, we’re going to continue to refer to as emotional learnings, parts, and schemas, because we know they’re not just beliefs, they’re actually learnings.
I mean, we acquired them through experiences, right? We acquired them. We had over and over again, repeated experiences where we learned when people are in a bad mood, it’s my fault. No one will like me if I’m myself.
So that gets deeply embedded in your brain, through your memories and your emotions, as a learning, as a prediction. And those predictions entirely shape the way we see the world. So again, as Meg talks about, we kind of view these parts of us, like if you remember when we read No Bad Parts, that we can have many parts of us that serve these protective functions, trying to keep us safe based on the past, trying to keep us in connection based on the past.
And they’re like lenses, glasses through which we see the present. So those predictions from those learnings are always shaping the way we feel, the way we think, and the way we behave. So sometimes it’s helpful for us to envision those parts as younger, our younger selves, and other times it’s not.
No matter how you like to visualize it, you can think about these anxious parts of you, these critical parts of you, these perfectionist parts of you, as bundles of neural pathways in your brain that are trying to keep you safe based on the past. But you’re the one who can see them, and you’re the one who can see what’s actually happening in the present. And little bits at a time, you can help your brain learn from the present and not stay stuck in these old learnings from the past.
We know that inner critic is a really big part of early attachment failures, early developmental ruptures, because it’s all about, inner critic is all about shame, and shame is all about keeping a lid on the pot of bigger emotions that didn’t feel safe. There’s an example in here of someone who, every time she shares her work, she just makes fun of herself and said, oh stupid, it’s just a little side thing I do. And then that underlying learning might be that I need to deflect so people know I’m humbled and good, and then no one will feel threatened by me because I’m just a nobody, right? So again, there’s that sense of safety, no one will feel threatened by me.
But we know that the learning of as long as I am a nobody, as long as I’m humble, I can’t be hurt because no one will feel threatened by me, that that is the learning, right? So it’s not just about not being good enough, it’s about how that learning was protective, how that kept you safe. Because if you didn’t believe that, if you believed that you were actually worthy, then you might have felt threatened. You might have felt like, oh I am worthy and my family can’t see that, so now I’m furious.
But it doesn’t feel safe for us as children to feel furious at our parents. We might feel, oh I am good enough, but my parents just can’t recognize that because they’re so wrapped up in everything that’s happening for them. And that feels so deeply sad and hurtful, that that feels too overwhelming to feel.
It might feel terrifying to think, I can’t be myself and be good enough, because every time I try to express myself, I get sent away, or everyone gets tense, or another fight erupts, and that feels really scary, right? So holding on to this idea that like, if I believe I’m good enough, then I will threaten my family, and they will collapse, they will leave me, they will hurt, whatever it is. It gives us then a sense of safety and a sense of control to tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, to make fun of ourselves. It puts the lid on the pot and allows us to control all those swirling emotions of anger, grief, disappointment, loneliness, that feels like too much, right? That is what happened in the past, but now we’re observing what might be true in the present versus what you learned when you were younger.
And all of this comes from observing. Remember, we won’t be able to observe live in the moment, right? We won’t always be able to feel like, oh, I’m feeling anxious right now, and it’s because when I was a kid, it was really hard for my family, when I had emotions, or when I had needs. We won’t be able to do that in the present because our brain is generating all that context, and we’re feeling overwhelmed.
So we can do this retroactively, right? We can look back at any time. It doesn’t matter if it’s minutes, hours, days, or weeks after a stressful experience happened and you’ve been criticizing yourself. You can pause at any time and watch the tape back and observe and be curious.
What was happening? What was my brain predicting was going to happen? What was happening in the present? Because fair enough, there’s always things happening in the present. There can be stressors and hard things happening in the present. But what is coming from the past and landing onto the present and getting projected into the future? That gives us the information about these deeper learnings or parts that we need to meet, observe, get curious about, and then give ourselves a new experience to help update our brain.
So in that same example, we might come to the end of the day, and maybe we were, I don’t know, you know, spending time with a new friend, and we were thinking, oh, I’m not feeling very good. And we’re looking back and we’re saying, oh, yeah, you know, my new friend was really cheering me on about my graphic design business, and I felt like I had to just keep deflecting and saying, oh, it’s stupid. It’s just a little side thing I do.
You know, I needed to make sure she knew I was a nobody, that I’m not good enough. And that feels really bad. And as I observe that right now, I can just remember how important it was for me to not make anyone in my family feel threatened, to not make them feel like I was better than them.
And as I notice that right now, I just think, oh, my gosh, that must have been so hard for me. Yeah, well, no wonder I feel this way. Right? So do you see how observation allows us that wildlife documentarian capacity to observe and say, that makes sense? We don’t have to jump to self-compassion.
We don’t have to say, oh, I love that part of me, although we can. But instead, just by observing and getting curious about that deeper learning, we shift our brain back into the present instead of being stuck in the past. And that actually gives us a new experience, too, of what is it like for someone to validate our experience, tell us that it makes sense, be curious about our inner world.
So that inner attachment is a very important piece of this, too. It’s also very common when we grew up in environments like this to really feel a lot of fear about our thoughts. We’ll feel shame about being critical of others.
We’ll feel afraid that by thinking something, we’re going to make it happen. And that makes a lot of sense. That’s the experience of a child, right? When we’re children, we really feel like things are magical, like our thoughts have power.
But we know instead, thoughts are just thoughts. When we can observe them and be curious about them, that’s really what slows things down. Right? So when you were stuck in overthinking, ruminating, intellectualization, it can feel like you’re bad for having these thoughts that are making something bad happen by worrying about it.
Right? But instead, we’re just observing, like, oh my gosh, this part of you that is just so scared. Instead of trying to shut them up, right, and resist them and say, nothing’s going to happen when I get on the plane. You know, stop causing difficulty for me.
I know flying is safe. But we try to resist those thoughts, because they’re scary, and they’re overwhelming. And they might feel like they’re getting in our way.
Instead, we can just notice them and be curious. Like, yeah, some part of me is really scared about this experience of getting on this plane. I don’t know why.
Maybe I do know why, but I don’t really know what the deeper learning is. But I don’t have to try to resist this thought. I can just notice it and be curious about it and observe it.
And over time, get more and more clarity about what’s really underneath that thought. Eventually, as we do so, we might step into even soothing or meeting those parts of us. Saying, I know you’re scared right now.
It’s okay, and I’m here. You’re safe now. I’m here, and I’ll take care of you.
I see you’re overthinking again. That’s okay. Thank you for trying to protect me.
You’re allowed to be here, and I’m not trying to get rid of you, but you don’t need to work so hard. Sometimes we’re able to say those things, and they feel really soothing to us. But other times, they’re counteracting that deep survival learning that says, I can’t stop overthinking.
Overthinking is the only way I can stay safe. So we really can use these statements more as curiosities. If I’m stuck in ruminating and hypervigilance, and I say, I see you’re overthinking again.
That’s okay. Thank you for trying to protect me. What happens? Do things slow down? Do I feel a little relieved by that? Or does it feel like I’m really still secretly trying to get rid of that part of me and say, yes, yes, things are okay.
Thank you for trying to protect me. Move along. That’s the difference between embodied compassion and intellectualized compassion.
And it takes time to practice observing, to get clear about when being kind to yourself or meeting yourself is actually thinking through the layers versus when it’s just you trying to manage yourself in another way, right? Intellectualized self-compassion. But we really want to use everything as an experiment to be curious. What happens when I say this? What happens when I try this on? What happens when I do this? Because that observing is going to give us more and more data about those deep core learnings from our life.
So as we’re practicing this observing, that maybe we’re thinking about it like this mindful experience where we’re noticing. And we might have this expectation that we will feel calm, that we shouldn’t have anxious thoughts if we’re observing, if we’re being mindful. But really, we know we’re going to have the full depth and breadth of the human experience, which means there will be many emotions and many thoughts.
And instead, we’re just noticing them. Right? Meg suggests labeling, you know, saying, that’s just what’s happening. I’m overthinking.
(22:49 - 27:01)
Oh, I have this anxious thought right now. Oh, I’m criticizing myself right now. And I think that’s a really good curious practice.
That’s why I always talk about the wildlife documentarian. We’re taking notes. We’re just noticing.
We’re really gathering data about our experience because we don’t really know ourselves. We might know our learnings. We might know all of our survival strategies.
But we don’t really know what’s happening underneath. We want to gather more data to learn not just what we can see, but what else might be happening, what else might be true. And so Meg uses this acronym NICER.
Notice, invite, curiosity, embrace, and return. Right? So notice is that observing what’s happening internally. Invite the experience to be here, allowing it to exist, saying this is okay, even if there’s discomfort.
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Bringing in some curiosity. What part of me has been activated? What is it that I’m feeling? Can I label or notice what the experience is in my body, in my emotions, in my thoughts? Embrace this part of me. Wrap it in a protective blanket and say, I see you.
Thank you for trying to help me. And then return to what’s real and true right now. The sensations of the breath, the sounds of the room, the feeling of the feet on the ground.
Right? So this really interesting mindful practice to help come back to the present. So let’s use that NICER acronym over these next few weeks as an experiment rather than as a mandate, rather than as something you must do and then you must feel better after you do it. Let’s use it as an experiment.
When something comes up, you criticize yourself, you feel anxious, you notice you were fawning, you notice you were overthinking, whatever it is. What happens when you notice it just as soon as you can, even if it’s the next day, the next week? What happens when you observe it? What is it like? Do you start to criticize yourself more? Can you notice that? Can you remember how that’s a lid on the pot, that there must be some bigger feeling that isn’t feeling safe to feel? This invitation of allowing it to exist without immediately trying to fix it or change it. What’s it like to consider that? Does that make you feel more anxious? Do you start to feel numb? Does it feel unsafe? Does it feel like maybe you’re not ready to invite it to be there yet, but maybe you can shift to curiosity? What’s happening in that moment? What is my brain predicting when I notice that? Does it make sense that I don’t want to invite this in because it feels like it will take me deeper down into terror? Does embracing this part even feel possible? Do I even feel separate from this part? Or does it feel like, no, this is just me, this is the truth? We don’t have to embrace the part.
We can just be curious about noticing. Embracing the part can become counteractive if we do it before we’re ready, because it’s us trying to tell ourselves something is okay when something might not be okay, right? It might not feel okay to accept ourselves for who we are, if that means that we will settle down, we won’t be overthinking, we’ll be present. That can feel really dangerous to a part of our brain.
So we don’t have to jump to embracing, we can use it as a curiosity. When I imagine embracing this part of me, thanking this part of me, letting that part of me know it’s safe, what happens? And then when I try to return to what’s present, what happens then? Does it feel safe? Does it feel scarier to try to bring myself back in the present? As this book and with everything, we just use these things as a curiosity, an experiment, to learn more about ourselves and to see what happens. When we can do so without creating pressure that, oh, I have to practice this nicer thing so that I can come back down into the present and stop overthinking and feel a little bit safer, you see, then that’s just going to create another thing that we have to be good at.
But when we can use it as an observational experiment, it’s really us being curious about ourselves, which for many of us is a new experience that we didn’t get that helps update those learnings in the brain and then can help lead to more action, more safety, more presence, more agency, more choice and flexibility over time. So thank you so much for being here. I think this is a really rich chapter.
(27:02 - 27:24)
I would love to hear how you try on observation in your life. Have you tried mindfulness before and felt that it was just another way for you to pressure yourself? What’s the difference for you in your mind between observing and being curious and having to be mindful? Let me know what you’re noticing. Let me know what you’re thinking.
I hope you have a great rest of your week or weekend ahead and I’ll look forward to seeing you for chapter five.
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