Episode 97 - What I'm Learning

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[Music] hey everybody welcome to the liturgist podcast a non-judgmental place where we explore topics through the lens of science art and faith or lack thereof my name is michael gunger and i'm the co-founder of the liturgists with mike mccarth otherwise known as sciencemike and usually one of the hosts on this program today is a special episode though it's in a little different format than normal this is an intimate and vulnerable conversation between science mike and hilary mcbride about what the two of them have been learning lately in life these are two of my favorite human beings on planet earth and i really enjoyed listening to just them talk for a bit i think you will too so welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] mike do you journal i used to and i feel like i should pick the process back up because journaling really helped me work through some difficult periods of my life for sure why did you stop i got busy making podcasts like this to some degree i do journal publicly and i know that sometimes i'm trying to reflect on what's been happening in my life or or because of my kind of interesting relationship with memory try to understand literally what has happened and when in my life i go back and listen to podcasts and that kind of helps me remember what i was thinking in the past but as a a chronology tool journaling is superior because it's much more searchable than a bunch of audio sitting on the public internet and as open as i am there are things i will put in a journal that i won't say to the world on on a podcast yeah you journal i do yeah and kind of like you i've had these these points of time in my life when i have or haven't and have started again the last little bit but journaling differently so i think gosh if i think back in my teenage years i would journal a lot and it would be these kind of long soliloquies complaints um trying to write down information or sort through things that were painful and and now i think about journaling as a way to to capture and expand on the things that i'm learning to to do therapy on myself in a way look at look at things read things see what i'm writing see what's coming up do a little bit of analysis but also keep note of of the things that are coming to the surface for me different seasons of my life so i guess as i'm i'm listening to you and then also as myself i really like the idea of journaling in a in a different medium like through audio through podcasts or the way that you tweet or put something on instagram so for the purposes of this of this conversation maybe it's going to feel a little bit like a like an audio journal perhaps something something that captures maybe where you you and i are at at this point in time and some of the stuff that's coming up for us that's always interesting to me like the way we experience our life as being like a consistent person across it because we share memories with ourselves you know across the arc of our lives but boy i'm a radically different person today than i was say 15 years ago in a lot of ways and the person i was 15 years ago was very different than the person 15 years before that and so i'm always fascinated looking at snapshots of kind of my internal landscape in the past because it reminds me it's really important to remain open to the person i am becoming and how different i might be 15 years from now yeah can you can you give us a little bit of a flavor for the inner landscape in the past like 15 years ago and then 15 before that oh gosh 15 years ago i was so legalistic and rigid in my thinking and in my living i was very convinced that i knew the best way for people to live without qualification all people like i had life figured out and if other people would be smart enough to listen to my wisdom they would have better lives too and that's you know i think 15 years ago the notions of intersections of identity would seem like nonsense to me because we're all just people made by god and all the same in god's eyes and that if we would just focus on that many of the world's problems would would fade away but i also experienced kind of a saccharine sanguine mood all the time i was so reticent to engage pain or grief that i had this plastic smile that convinced me as much as anyone else that everything was okay all the time and it's only like recently that i've looked back and seen how many signs i missed in emotional dynamics that ended up playing out in really significant ways in my life but i've also kind of found out that the way that i was 15 years ago was a response to the way i was 15 years before that because as a child i was an exquisitely sensitive and emotionally open person and that kind of posture wasn't rewarded or validated by my peer group at all and so my entrenchment into a fundamentalist form of christianity where i knew it was right and what was wrong and that my feelings were less important than than believing the right things and acting in the right ways kind of let me shield that sensitive child from the world by locking them away yeah but you know we do what we must to survive and function and i'm trying to hold a charitable view at my legalism because it was such a scaffold that supported me in a time that i didn't have the emotional intelligence to reconcile my sensitivity with trying to fit in with you know a culture that can't always accommodate it i'm so i'm so pleased to hear you say that you can be charitable towards that i think it's so easy for us to look back and feel shame about ourselves because naturally as is the process of development throughout the lifespan we know more now about the world and about ourselves than we did however many years ago and it's so easy for us to look back with judgment and criticism and say gosh i i can't believe i said that or did that or thought that or was that way in the world and while it's really important that we continue to grow and expand and develop it doesn't actually do us any good to look back and shame those parts when exactly as you're saying they probably developed in some way in fact i would likely say that they most certainly developed in some way to protect the parts of us that were not welcome or to shield us from the fears or the questions that we don't know how to answer and and those defensive structures or those ways of coping are just that ways of coping and not necessarily things that we did on purpose to hurt ourselves or other people but it is a kind of interesting thing to be able to look back and and see with more insight something about our lives that at the time felt so certain so absolute and to now be able to see that it was just just the structure the shield that we needed for actually something that was younger i like the idea though of of naming this process of continual growth not that there aren't seasons where we rest and and savor and delight in what is and what's happening for us in that moment but i don't i don't necessarily think we ever really arrive and i think that one of the things that probably happens to you and maybe increasingly me now just because of how how many more people have access to my work is that there's an assumption of of knowing things or having certainty or having figured something out that doesn't leave room for the fact that we are also still learning and still growing and and that maybe in five or 15 years from now you and i will look back on this conversation and say oh my gosh i can't believe who you you know we thought that about this oh my goodness wow how how little we knew and so in the spirit of modeling the continued process of unfolding and growth i'm curious if you'd be willing to share a little bit more about what it is that you're learning in life right now some of the things that are coming to the surface or maybe some questions you're wrestling with when i saw the title of what we'd be talking about it caught my breath a little bit um i know things that are happening in my body right now that i wouldn't have six months ago um i can feel my tear ducts filling with water and i can feel uh both a an excitement in my stomach and a little bit of fear in my chest because i've learned a lot this year and not all of it is is my story to tell so i'm going to do my best to only talk about my parts and and and just hope that that's enough to make sense of things for people listening um think i'd probably start with toilets okay my interests peaked go i have a profound aversion to toilets toilets make me uneasy as i get closer to them they make me afraid i literally get a revulsion that shakes my body if i have to break the plane of a toilet which is i mean an invisible boundary between the seat and the bowl itself so when i clean a toilet with a toilet brush like i my body shakes and quivers and i've always thought like what a strange thing to be like afraid of toilets and last week i realized i'm afraid of toilets because my head got stuck in them so often when i was a child like it's just completely it seems so obvious to say it aloud but it's been 31 years since anyone has put my head in a toilet it's been a very long time but the fact is some part of my brain and my body learned to view a toilet as dangerous and for good reason what seemed to me today as a silly superstitious reaction was actually my brain and my body keeping me safe and it's a silly example i suppose but it's so uniquely evocative of the journey i've been on ever since like i kind of blacked out at one of our retreats yeah when things came to a head and it sounds like it was from what i remember hard to ignore that all these things were were in there somewhere all these problems and traumas so i've spent the last several months driving across la to go to a therapist office in beverly hills and do weird therapy like the therapy i'm used to is talking and storytelling for an active listener who tells me that's normal that's okay and i love that kind of therapy i really enjoy it but this therapy is different this is uh a man who who i say very few words and he stops me and says how does that feel and then i say something and he says that's a thought how does it feel and then i just have to like sit and listen to my body which is uh hasn't historically been easy for me to do but i have found so many wonderful things i i'm learning that people both men and women don't pay enough attention to their feelings it's not just a masculinity thing but our our culture validates such a thin palette of emotional expression and then actively or passively socially restricts all the others and that has serious consequences in our life and relationships that i didn't know we're there i'm a pretty shy person i think that surprises a lot of people who listen to the podcast but i am i'm very withdrawn and and the closer i am to people the more withdrawn i tend to become and in the last oh i don't know 14 or 15 days i've learned to listen to my body when i have the same reaction to a human person that i have to a toilet what happens to me is i feel drawn to people and i care for them and it's a power the more powerful that feeling is the more powerful i get an instinct to withdraw and to physically flee and they they almost sit perfectly balanced on a teeter-totter and my approach to relationships has been to to push down really hard on one side to basically fight through fear to fight through a desire to withdraw in order to be present with someone and i do a good job of that when i'm with people people experience me as very present but if i try to send someone a text or an email or call without their physical presence i can't i can't push down hard enough on one side of the teeter-totter and what i what i've kind of learned through trauma therapy is to stop trying to push down on one side of the teeter-totter to listen to this terrified toddler inside of me who didn't know about autism spectrum disorder and why adults and authority figures behaved in such terrifying ways and to listen to the the eight-year-old in me that was really bullied and doesn't believe that social relationships can ever be safe and even to listen to the teenaged sexual assault survivor in me that all of these moments still live in my brain and the sense of fear and withdrawal and the panic attacks that i have are all those parts of my brain trying to protect me and my new strategy and i mean just the last couple of weeks has to been to pause to listen to those voices of fear in my body and to say thank you i appreciate you i'm so glad that you've worked so hard to protect me but this is jenny we're married to her she's never hurt us and so i'm just i just want you to know that right now we are here and not then and right now we are safe and when i do that i can actually feel the fear start to drain slowly out of my body and after 30 seconds or 60 seconds i feel safe and i don't have this muscular effort to try to force myself to be engaged and not withdrawn by listening to the fear by validating the fear by understanding the way the fear has kept me alive my whole life i'm able to integrate those wounded parts of myself into relationships and so really just for the last couple of weeks i i feel like i might be experiencing relational intimacy for the first time in my life both with my spouse and with my friends that makes me so excited for you [Music] i'm so excited for you [Music] yeah it's nice it's nice and you've gotten to that point too in the in the healing process and journey where where some of the goodies start to show up okay i often talk with people um in therapy about how much hard work goes in to sifting through and re-experiencing and learning new skills before the benefits of that start to show up and as we learn to to slowly deconstruct some of the old ways of being and ways of thinking about ourselves sometimes it can feel like um be constantly being confronted with uh like a sense of inadequacy or inability and mixed with all of the pain that we've ever been through and then at some point we hit a critical mass where all of those skills really start to collect and work together and they're integrated and then all of the good things start to show up and we can see them and experience them in a new way and i'm just so excited for you because it's it's going to be even more of this but i i hear what you're saying about paying attention to all this new information and as you started talking you listed off some of the somatic markers some things that were going on in your body and i'm struck with how much more information there is to contend with when you're paying attention to your inner experience than when everything is shoved down and that must be kind of overwhelming at first or maybe it still is to have all of these new data points to pay attention to it is very overwhelming and my approach out of necessity has been to slow everything down yeah you know if i'm in a conversation with someone and all wow well holy cow there's a lot of body stuff i just say hey i need a moment to process i'll be right back so that people aren't confused while i'm sitting here and then you know because of what i'm feeling is going to be related to what they've said and the time we're having together once i've let my brain and my body kind of integrate and commune i guess seems like weird language to use i'll usually tell the person like what happened and why and i have found that that sharing really invites uh an intimacy and a trust in a relationship you know i've always been really forward with my feelings when i knew i had them yeah but i'm becoming aware of just how often i have feelings and how often i have feelings that um on some level i don't approve of so i'm learning to to give those those feelings space too like how do i with no experience in my life experiencing and expressing anger in a healthy way like how do i learn to be angry in a way that doesn't frighten or alienate someone else how can i let that anger be instructive in this situation i have a lot more to learn for me anger is not just uh suppressed it's in like a sarcophagus like they put around the the fall outside in chernobyl and how often that's led me into really unhealthy relationship dynamics with close friends like times that something made me angry i actually should have acknowledged the anger and responded differently to the person in the moment so that i wasn't you know passive aggressive or stubborn later right as a way of trying to like protect myself and it's just so overwhelming how many feelings we have and how fast they are compared to our thoughts yeah i often feel like when trying to respond to my own feelings that talladega nights scene where after ricky bobby has wrecked his car and he gets on the course again and the other cars go screaming by because he's going 30 miles an hour he goes is that the other cars is that my feelings like wow they are going so fast they are processing the world so much quicker than then my temporal lobe can create a story and so the only response i've been able to find is just slow down slow down and give my brain a chance to catch up yeah and i'm sure you're finding this maybe already or if you haven't that you will that that when you slow down and start to experientially rehearse a new way of being with yourself that it won't always take that long like if you think about how often and how long you practiced the kind of shoving down or the numbing out or avoiding and how good you got at that to the point that you didn't know it was happening at times like i imagine that because of how adaptive our brain is that it can work the other way too where the more we practice the staying with of the feelings and the kind of the parenting yourself in a way when they come up to help you sort through what's from the past and what's the present that that becomes so much more intuitive and so much more comfortable i here to hear two things that i think are so significant that right really resonate with me personally but also with so many people i know who are doing healing work and one is that having understanding about how the brain stores memory and how trauma works in the body makes it so much easier to go towards those things as they come up instead of to shove them down or flee them because there's this underlying assumption that my body is good and that everything that's happening is meant to keep me safe and so i can i can go towards it i can be kind to to it this kind of impulse to keep myself safe and i can also through calming myself and connecting with myself override that initial impulse if it's not necessary now but the underlying assumption is this whole thing is good so i don't need to i don't need to fight it i might need to soothe it and then do something else but the impulses aren't bad and in fact they're very very good considering what i've been through [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's better help betterhelphelp.com liturgists hilary what did the process like you obviously learned all this through your studies your your work in the academy in your training to become a therapist and a researcher but what does this look like for you to kind of encounter this information maybe more in a classroom setting and then apply it in your life because i you know i am very fortunate uh in that you know i get to talk to you and you you'll tell me ideas and then and you're a good friend but then when it comes time to like do the work like you helped me find my therapist which i'm very grateful for and then my therapist was able to guide me through the process for you as um an actual therapist like do you have the space to be guided through this or is it is it more self-assembly i'm just curious about what your process looks like yeah that's such a good question because i i come to some of this information differently than a lot of other people do but i have been in therapy for so long like for so so long and i've had a wide range of therapists with varying degrees of skill and insight and from different theoretical frameworks so different ways of approaching how to help a person heal and understand what's going on with them but truly the most significant information about my healing came from the experiences that i had that left me feeling differently then in going through grad school and learning about the neuroscience of change and what actually helps a person feel different in their life is a lot different than some of the things that had happened for me in my early experiences of therapy especially in inpatient and outpatient treatment for an eating disorder there was a lot of um like think think this way and you'll be different because the thinking that you have is what got you into this problem and if you think differently then the result is that you'll behave and feel differently and it didn't really match up with my felt experience of how i was changing or healing and and then i came across some of these theories and results empirical results which really communicated how the experience of being with someone in a particular way is what changes our brain and what changes our felt sense of ourselves and that it's really hard to do that on our own using information so learning all of this stuff i went back to therapy and found spaces for myself to practice some of the skills that i was learning about so i had this new intellectual insight to make sense of past experiences but then i knew i needed a space to practice the skills that i hadn't been practicing that i didn't know and what i think is so so important for me is the space to pay attention to myself because i found that it's a really convenient job to be a therapist i it feels more like a calling than a job but it's convenient because it gives me the sense of doing something meaningful without necessarily ever having to look inside and in a way i've learned so much about how to support people's interpersonal processes and intra-personal processes and healing and growth but have at times used that as a way to try to circumnavigate the pain and the healing that still needed to be addressed in my own life so going back to therapy and finding people who could help me create that space for myself and teach me how to go inside and do that work allowed me to have a little bit more of an experiential roadmap of what that looks like so then i could start doing it on my own because of the way that i practice therapy i believe that when i'm most connected to my body and to myself that i actually do better work so i think that there's a kind of integrity when we're doing good clinical work which means that i'm not just saying to my clients do this specific thing but i refuse to do it myself so often in session i get extremely connected to my body into my inner experience instead of being this kind of objective detached observer i am fully in myself in the room with someone and that makes it so much easier to notice if something shifts to notice at the end of the day if i'm feeling tired because instead of putting myself aside for the clinical work i'm trying to bring my full self to it [Music] i think for a lot of us our gift with language or story is one of the armors we've used to protect ourselves from the world but also one of the mechanisms to control and suppress our feelings and the therapeutic process saying no give it the space at first i was like well this is a great way to just milk money out of me because i'm sitting here and nothing happens you know the fir the first times that i was told to to be still and and to listen to my body i would just make up because i didn't i didn't feel anything happening uh and i didn't want to i didn't want to look like i didn't want my therapist to think i was not doing the work or that i was dumb and so i would i would make something up about what i felt in my body and what feeling that could be and that happened for gosh several weeks did you tell him that you were making it up heck no well i told him later you know this is like why good friendships are important i went to dinner with some friends and um was very uncomfortable i was trying to hide it but they could tell and it i didn't want to talk about my life and my feelings at someone else's birthday party uh but i basically said you know my therapist is an idiot and i only keep going because i trust hillary and they're like well tell us more about that and i told them like i don't feel anything and i don't know what to do and they said well we'll tell him that you're wasting your money if you go to therapy and aren't honest with a therapist that's like what therapy's for but i thought if i told him i have all these weird internalized experiences where i see literally diagnostic error codes during my therapeutic session uh he's gonna think i'm not worth working with but i went in because my friend said you know we know that you'll say you'll do it just to get us to leave you alone so my friend jayden said i just wanna want you know i'm committed to asking you about this multiple times a week forever so it's gonna be easier for you if you go and you and you true up in your next therapy appointment so i went in and i told my therapist about look you tell me to look at my body nothing happens and sometimes when you tell me look into my body there's a cognitive approximation of a computer operating system that literally tells me you're not allowed into those spaces i i did catch a micro expression of puzzlement on his face but he caught himself quickly and he said that's great just all i ask is that when those things happen in this room you just tell me what happened and he said i might not understand it he said you might not understand it but knowing it's there can help us work around it and so we started talking about some life things in that appointment and sure enough i got like an access denied message and i told him and in four more questions he'd rather all the way around it and kind of tricked that reflexive defensive action into not giving him access to the feelings but giving me access to the feelings right and but that's it's really hard i guess on on behalf of someone who tries to do the work required in the therapy session as the client that rapport it takes time to build it really it really is a slow process it doesn't matter that there's a certificate saying this person is board certified and an email address you can contact for oversight right all the credentials in that room it's another person again and there's the question can i trust you will i be judged when i pull the weirdest stuff out of my internal process and disclose it and are my feelings okay they're not okay with me so how can they be okay with you well that was my curiosity listening to is when when he you saw the micro expression of puzzlement and then he responded with like really compassion and openness and curiosity i wonder if that that was kind of strange because it sounds like it was so not what you were expecting i didn't know what to expect but i was impressed with his ability to just roll with the weird and to unlike me if you if someone told me something like that i would have a million questions all i would be like now i've never heard of human cognition doing that i would want to understand more about what human minds are capable of and in doing that i would like really stop seeing the person and his ability to set the the presentation aside and focus on the person really moved me and that's really the moment that there was like a a trust level established beyond his obvious credentials and experience where i said okay no this is a person this is a human being that i can trust and it and and in some ways and in some moments in therapy i've had to trust him more than i trust me hmm yeah that would probably be a necessary part of going somewhere new i've had um i've had a lot of pain issues over the last few years and i remember getting some insight about therapy by actually doing physical therapy and going to my physio appointments and how with a chronic shoulder issue my physiotherapist would say like i can i can rub your arm i can rub your shoulder i can put nice creams on it but actually the only way you're gonna get your mobility back uh after the you know the injury and all of the ways that the muscles and the tendons and everything the fascia constrict to protect the only way is to make these kind of micro tears in that defensive structure around your shoulder i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to move your arm and it's it's gonna hurt but we're gonna do it together and you can tell me when to stop and i'm not gonna go so much that it's unbearable and in that moment i thought oh my goodness that's what therapy is there has to be a measure of discomfort for us to grow i mean i imagine there there also has to be safety too it's not just discomfort there is the trust piece but it means doing something new and sometimes when we are locked in this the defensive structure like i think up on my shoulder which is like frozen in place it takes someone on the outside to say i know how to move it i know how to help it i know how to get you from where you are to where somebody else is but you're going to have to risk with me because it's going to hurt a little bit and and that truly is i think the only way that we change especially when we're kind of locked in these patterns of the holding patterns that we've learned over time to keep us safe and my shoulder moves now right and it's this beautiful analogy of how how the trust and the discomfort and the safety and the risk all together create this opportunity for something new or to get back to something that we had before before we were hurt that is beautiful and instructive and helpful and more than an analogy i know that you've had i guess what i'd call pain on pain you've had kind of chronic pain conditions and then additional incidents that have created new injury and new pain while you're still dealing with existing pain physical pain but in my life in my experience when my body hurts especially with a chronic pain i'm just a real grouch um it affects that word and it's just true i get so grumpy so irritable so hard to be around and i know that a lot of people listening to us are dealing with chronic physical pain what is it like for you learning to cope with ongoing pain in your body but still having to live and show up each day thank you for asking it it acknowledges my lived reality which also feels validating and i think for a lot of people who struggle with pain issues in their body it's invisible it's forgotten um the little things are hard and people don't know that so the acknowledgement also feels really good oh good you like you see me i'm not forgotten in this um i have a history of being pretty violent towards my body and that was something that that in a way i was i participated in i was a part of um and that was cognitive and behavioral and and emotive as well or affective and in the journey of healing from this this wounding i was carrying within myself i learned to tell a new story about my body that my body is good that i am good that i am my body all of these things that my body is is my best resource that my body is is a temple quite literally this is where the divine lives that that um that i am sacred right all of these things were so instrumental in my healing and then a bunch of stuff happens that i i don't choose right there are accidents and pain and pain as a result of that which has really called into question all of these things that i learned so i was struggling too can i can i embody these stories that i've learned these new realities these new ways of being when it hurts all the time to sit to walk to stand to sleep waking up in the night because of nerve pain like is my body still good and is my is my learning is my growth still intact or am i back where i was do i have to fight some of the same stories again and crawl my way up from this pit of antagonism towards myself and i have found that although pain is uncomfortable and is something that at times i have been really good at not feeling and not paying attention to that the pain that i'm dealing with right now and i want to give a caveat that this is not the case for everybody and and won't apply and might actually be aggravating for some people to hear but it has brought me more into my body and more into compassion with myself and ultimately more into presence i have learned that i cannot escape the present moment when the sensory information that's constantly fed to my spinal cord and up to my brain is saying like alert alert alert notice me right now in this moment pay attention and learning how to juggle that with all of the other information that we have to deal with in a present moment to be in conversation or to make sense of information that's coming in has been a process but i have never felt more present than when i felt pain because i cannot leave the moment so it has been and this is in part my choice and a gifting of my training and the things that i have worked with other people on in their healing journeys but it has been an invitation into mindfulness it's been an invitation into extending the things that i've learned about my body long before i was experiencing pain issues and it has given me so much more compassion for other people like in a way that i i didn't know truly until i've been through these experiences and i think more recently i have found myself at times saying gosh pain like what are you doing go away and kind of focusing on pain as the primary source of my distress and have engaged in shifting that discourse on the inside for me to sound something more like thank you for all of the ways body that you have tried to keep me safe because of when there have been traumas and you're tight because you're trying to protect my spine and you're tight because when you were loose that's when the injury happened when you were least expecting it something happened so so now you're on guard and i have chosen to shift my awareness away from the the story about the frustration of pain to the appreciation of what my body is doing and then not unlike what you were describing earlier being with myself in a new way so when i'm feeling sad or frustrated instead of turning that against myself or dissociating from my body or being angry at what happened i've said to myself i know you're frustrated what you went through was so scary and it's been so hard and i am not going to leave you and you're okay you lived you made it through you're safe but sometimes it's hard for you to remember that but in the time being i'm going to keep reminding you that it's over and you lived and i'm here with you and that you're good [Music] and that that dialogue has meant that the pain truly has been this gift again i i don't think that's the case for everybody and i think that i would never say that i wish it would happen on other people but i can say that when when hard things have happened in my life i have been supported and resourced to be able to see what i can learn and how i can respond in ways that don't further cause pain towards myself and that has allowed me to experience these things that i've been through in ways that create a sense of of healing in in an interior way i'm not doing to myself what the traumas to my body did which is further violation and further wounding i'm doing something that's opposite to that which is connecting and joining and comforting and soothing and affirming and that means that on some level i am also reminding myself that that i am safe with me that no matter what happens in this world no matter what happens to me that in my response to myself that i can be safe for myself and that builds trust and that builds a sense of safety and comfort and companionship that i carry within myself at all times that means that i i can acknowledge what's going on for me even if other people don't and that helps me yeah be present to myself and then to others as well [Music] what's it been like with your travel schedule and having chronic pain yeah i'm doing a lot less and um needing help from people i have for so long carried so many shame stories about myself that i think learning to be extremely independent and self-motivated and determined has allowed me to some extent to not really rely on people in ways that would be enriching for me because i i can do it all on my own and if i do it all on my own then maybe i people won't experience me as a burden that was a story for a very long time and interestingly in with being in pain and trying to do travel and trying to do things that kind of stretch myself a little bit i have enjoyed the benefits of realizing my needs my needs for other people my needs to check in and pay attention to myself and anticipate what things will be hard or not and then make necessary requests of others enough myself and so interestingly the travel has brought up all of these other things that i'm learning the boundaries and the needing people and the asking for help and and that has been stretching and uncomfortable at times and also i think ultimately really really good for me to learn maybe i'm maybe i'm the eternal optimist or it's kind of my my existential perspective but i think that suffering is a part of life i think that suffering is inevitable and while there is a painful reality to that i think that it invites us to then ask the question instead of like how do we get rid of suffering to say so when suffering happens what do we do in response and when suffering happens what's the story that i tell about that and i think primarily in my work with people who suffer and in my own experiences of suffering throughout my life in a variety of ways having that perspective of the inevitability of suffering means that that we can move beyond asking the why did this happen to me question and and move into the how do i how do i connect with other people through this how do i allow this to transform the way that i experience other people's suffering and join with them and that how do i grow where are the places that i'm realizing i have resistance to pain and to feeling that and and that means that i'm doing less fighting on the inside when the painful things happen and more allowing myself to be with it and then begin the healing process or the grieving process or whatever it is [Music] do you still have pain from your motorcycle accident yes [Laughter] but it's it's gotten so much better that i have to look for it or it takes a particularly cold day for me to remember that's there i mean i guess the biggest thing i took away from my motorcycle accident is like how long healing takes to figure out the new me brain wise took like two years wow about two months like two years and you know if you look at the timelines they'll give you in a doctor's office on what healing looks like i think they're usually talking about some percent threshold of restoration of function when they call you recovered but when we really hurt our bodies including our brains it takes a long time for those systems to establish whatever a new equilibrium may be and i've been like seeing how that that kind of applies in all of life like the things that change us the most or that we enjoy the most they come with uh some kind of cost so the therapeutic process for me was just shitty for months months of getting worse and not better but then there's this thing on the other side where i feel more present and more open and less afraid the goodies as you spoke of earlier yes the goodies but like then also my favorite things cost me i love to get in a room with people and talk there's usually a stage involved but not always and it's like my favorite thing about this work is going and talking to people and being open hearted and seeing people's hearts open in response and then i'll do two three four hours of talking to people after an event and i love every moment of it and as an autistic adult with a brain injury the cost for that thing i love is enormous it can take me days to recover from a single event and when i'm traveling regularly it might take me months to vaguely feel like myself again after all those experiences and as you talked about like the inevitability of suffering and how we respond to it i was just so struck at how nuanced and difficult those decisions can be mm-hmm um because if i if i if i just said well i know i know what what doesn't bring me suffering and that's if i stay at my house all the time and never leave i really don't suffer uh until i get so lonely and bored that my house feels like a cage and so we're constantly facing this decision like what brings me joy what's the cost of that joy right and how do i care for myself in that process yeah well the cost-to-benefit analysis of of affect mixed with meaning mixed with past experience and hypothetical future self kind of report of what what the thing was like all of that mixed together makes it so hard to know what things are worth it sometimes and sometimes i think we can get so paralyzed by by any of it that it is easier to stay insulated within the context that feels most safe and convenient if lots of things in life are hard what are the things that also also bring me joy so going out and doing a speaking event like you're saying there is a um a level of demand that that place is on you that has consequences after but the joy or perhaps the meaning is significant to such degree that it's worth it and sometimes we don't know what is worth it so to speak until we've done things a few times and realized that the idea of how it sounds is better than actually what it feels like during or after or vice versa that it feels exhausting but when we do it it's so rich and it's so has added so much to our life i know that in periods of my life where i was extremely depressed that doing little things felt like it would take so much energy that just thinking about them and planning for them felt incapacitating like truly debilitating and i mean through various cognitive strategies and behavioral approaches and whatnot being able to do said thing whatever it was meeting a friend going for a hike getting some air outside always felt better after and the ability to know down the road i'll be glad that i did this specific thing now is something that i've heard called prospective hindsight so in the future being able to appreciate that we made the choice that we did now helps us sometimes assess like is this the space that i want to spend energy because if it's all going to take energy from me what will i be glad in the end that i did or didn't do it takes a particular amount of foresight and maybe a past experience and knowing of oneself to be able to do that but i found that really helpful for myself it's a joy knowing you hillary no it's just a joy to know you i feel that way so much about you mike i didn't want to make you uncomfortable but i almost left you a voice memo every single day this past week and i don't know why i didn't i was like it might be too much for him i think the dosing the dosing might be too high i'll just little note in the mail and you can read it on your own oh boy yeah i did that feel a shy reaction i know i was like oh wow okay okay okay i just have this like this impulse within me whenever i'm with you to like lavish you in the most rich and excessive affection that i could ever draw within me i just have so much for you but i also realize that that that works for me so there's one of my uh i often say with my supervisees that we have to we have to dose we have to dose whatever it is the affection the intervention the uh the input the insight so that it works for the person getting it so anyway i feel overwhelmed with the gratitude that you're in my life and that yeah that you helped me in the ways that you do i am the personification of the blushing emoji [Laughter] wait let's go let's go back to where we started what what happens on the inside when i say all of that oh i feel um warm i feel affection i feel gratitude just a deep gratitude for being seen i feel shame because the parts of me that believe no one could ever really like me uh scream at me that i have tricked and fooled you and then i feel fear at being discovered and that all becomes this cyclone of complex emotion [Music] and so i just try to listen to the the gratitude and the affection while understanding the place that the fear and the shame come from but i definitely see it's so easy when um there are great displays of of affection or tenderness uh that i've still got work to do in learning to regulate and cope with my own feelings yeah thanks for sharing that i had this curiosity pop and pop up in that moment of i wonder what i wonder what and i also can't wait to find out what it will be like for you when things like this happen where people share their affection for you like in another five years or something what the inner experience will be like and what will what will be happening with that shame part and i like that we as people keep growing and learning and that none of that is a condition for our belonging our worth or value but when we're in these conditions or contexts where we feel seen and known how how easy it is for us to keep flourishing or moving towards flourishing or noticing the things in us that stand in the way of that and then hopefully also having the places to then work through those things but you're so loved you're so so loved and yeah i can't wait for for the times when you can take that in without there being as much competition on the inside and for me too right i think i can't wait for in a few years from now when i've continued to do the work that i'm doing to be in the experience of having more ease with caring for myself and reaching out and asking for help and practicing the kindness and the compassion with myself that i so readily give to others and i know that because of the conditions that i have around me of being so seen and loved by people like you mike and the people who walk us alongside me in this life that that that that that work is possible and the learning and the growing that comes with the safety is makes some of the discomfort more bearable makes it more possible and even perhaps um exciting i look forward to that too hillary i uh [Music] i know that there are a lot of people obviously in the public who think a lot about you but i've seen in person how badly people want to be there for you in times of need or struggle because you have you do live such a a vibrant rich way i mean the way that you relate to people and people feel seen and feel accepted uh there is this this massive artesian well of love and gratitude for you among everyone i know who's a mutual friend and we also see the ways that when you are in real need uh those might be the times where the least likely to hear from you and so i would just say with some personal experience in this that your life is full of people who desperately want to be there for you because they love and value you so much we love you we hope you've enjoyed today's episode when i am learning your hosts have been science mike and hilary mcbride this episode was produced by victory palmisano edited and scored by me michael gunger a special thanks to our patrons who support us on patreon for making this show possible aside from the normal discussion thread that we post with every episode there'll be a special unedited version of this conversation up on patreon please let us know what you think about the episode either on patreon and discussion thread on mastodon of course on social media at the liturgists thanks for listening everybody you