November 3, 2021 • 53 mins
In this keystone episode, Jess talks with her friend, psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb to define what ‘Dominant Stories’ are.
Lori is a bestselling author turned therapist who's been helping people challenge and change their inner monologues through the lens of storytelling for decades.
Lori has a gift for making complex ideas relatable and is the perfect person to explain the psychological origins of Dominant Stories.
Lori shares real life examples of how people's lives have been changed by shifting their inner narrative.
Expect to learn something about yourself, expect to laugh-- and as always-- expect to get some actionable tips that you can put to use immediately.
Jess and Lori are also joined by Lori's son, Zach Gottlieb who's becoming an advocate for young men and boys to talk about their feelings on his IG platform: Talk With Zach (@talkwithZach)
Please rate, review, subscribe and share Dominant Stories with everyone you know.
If you want to learn more about Dominant Stories and how you can challenge and change them, visit jessweiner.com or follow Jess on Instagram @imjessweiner.
You can also email us about your Dominant Stories and how you are changing them - podcast@jessweiner.com or leave us a voicemail at 213 259 3033
You can find Lori’s social media handles, and a link to her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone (along with the brand new accompanying workbook) on her website, lorigottlieb.com.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Shonda Rhymes and we're bringing you Dominant Stories, created
by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the Deft Self
Steam Project. People say like, there are negative feelings and
positive feelings. A positive feeling is joy, and a negative
feeling might be sadness or anxiety, or anger or even envy. No.
I always say like, follow your envy. It tells you
(00:20):
what you want. It tells you something about desire. Our
feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction
to go, and if we don't pay attention to them,
it's like walking around with a faulty GPS. You have
no idea where you're going. Hey, I'm Jess Weener and
this is Dominant Stories, the podcast that helps us reclaim
and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about
(00:44):
our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities. Hey, everybody,
welcome to the show. I am super excited for today's guests.
(01:05):
I am joined by Lori Gottlieb. She's an author of
this incredible New York Times bestselling book called Maybe You
Should Talk to Someone. It's really really good. Lorie's advice
is spot on. I feel lucky because I've known Laurie
for years. She was a writer before she was a therapist,
and now, in addition to still being in clinical practice,
(01:28):
she writes a weekly column and she hosts a really
popular podcast called Dear Therapist. And in our conversation today,
we're gonna dive into the psychology behind our dominant stories
to help us really understand and unpack where these stories
come from and how we are so influenced by our
(01:48):
family systems. Lorie, like me, believes that when we change
our inner story, our inner dialogue, we can really change
our life. Later on the show, we're gonna be joined
by Lori's fifteen year old son, Zach. He's a high
school sophomore and creator of Talk with Zach, which is
(02:10):
a really cool platform on social media where he is
talking with teens about their emotional health. I cannot wait
for you to hear this episode, and of course, please
let me know what you think of the show. Subscribe
and write me a review where wherever you're listening. I
really appreciate y'all. All right, let's dig in. This is
(02:35):
the conversation I've been waiting to have for this show.
Like you have no idea, I mean, and I think
we actually go back, like over a decade decade. Don't
tell people I know, but I was, you know, when
conceiving of the show and knowing the kinds of conversations,
who wanted to have You are like primo on my
mind because the show is about these dominant stories, right,
(02:56):
the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how do
we kind of unpack where those stories come from, challenge them,
change them? And we know that, as you often say,
this will change the trajectory of our lives. And so
I wanted to dive in with you because there's something
that you say often. You say stories are about one
person saying to another, this is who I am. Can
(03:17):
you understand me? Which I love? And when I think
about that, applying to the internal stories that we tell ourselves,
those dominant stories on repeat, what do those stories? What
are they telling us? Right? So? I think stories are
how we make sense of our lives. You know, we
tell people every day, here's what happened, how was your day?
Let me tell you what happened today? But they're also
(03:38):
the internal stories, like you said, the stories that we
tell ourselves about ourselves. And we are all unreliable narrators
and that doesn't mean that we're trying to mislead. It
means that we are telling our stories through a very
subjective lens, and often these faulty narratives keep us stuck.
(03:59):
You know. One example of this sort of internal story
gone wrong is just how we talk to ourselves every day.
The person that we talked to most in the course
of our lives is ourselves, and what we say to
ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful. And we
have all kinds of stories that we tell ourselves, stories
like I'm unlovable, or I can't trust anyone, or nothing
(04:24):
ever works out for me. And we don't even realize
that we're telling ourselves these stories, but they affect every decision,
every action, every choice that we make in the course
of a day. And so I had this therapy client
who didn't realize, you know, that she talks to herself
in this way with these stories, and so I often
say to people what I said with her, which was
(04:46):
go home, listen for the voice, Listen for the storyteller
in your head that you don't even know is there.
It's like a radio station or TV show that you
have on in the background that you don't think you're
paying attention to but you are. And I said, I
want you to write down everything voice tells you and
then come back and we'll talk about it next week.
And she came back the next week and she said,
I can't even read this. I am such a bully
(05:09):
to myself. And the stories that she told herself were
things like this, like she was typing an email and
she made a mistake, and she said, oh, you're so stupid. Now,
if her friend had done that same thing, she'd tell
a very different story, like, oh, my friend's human might
be the story, and it's based on a broader story.
So if your story is different, you're not going to
tell yourself these little mini stories during the day. But
(05:30):
she had this broader story of I'm broken, something's wrong
with me. Well, they say, you teach what you most
need to learn. And obviously my work over these decades
has been about unpacking and unraveling the stories that media
tells us about ourselves and broader culture and like our
family relationships. But truthfully, for me, dominant stories came up
for me after I had had a very for myself,
(05:53):
a very public breakdown that led me to a breakthrough
around how many dominant stories I had, that unreliable orator
that constantly beat me up around where I should be,
what success is supposed to look like. My dominant story
was my worth is my work? And I really deeply
fell into the unpacking then raveling of those stories kept
(06:15):
leading to other stories, and so I really understood them.
My connection to trauma, childhood trauma, and where some of
those stories were born for me in my early years,
and then obviously where relationships or experiences might reinforce those stories.
Will you talk a little bit about the psychology behind
why we have these stories and the origins of them,
(06:35):
where they come from, so that we can begin to
know where to begin to unpack them. Yeah. I think
you know. You mentioned trauma, and I think that comes
up so often because they think that people feel like
either they experienced something that was difficult and they've kind
of packed it away. They feel like, well, I've done
with that chapter. Except if it's unprocessed, it will come
out in other ways. It's sort of like the way
(06:57):
that our feelings. We say that, oh, I'm not really
going to pay attention to that feeling. That's what I'm
gonna do without feeling right. Oh, yeah, maybe I'm feeling
sad or anxious. But you know what, I have a
roof over my head and food on the table, and
I have this at that So it's really not that
bad as the story we tell ourselves. But it comes
out in other ways, these feelings, right, So they come
out in like too much food or not enough food.
(07:17):
They come out in like you know, too many glasses
of wine at night. They come out in insomnia, in
a short temperedness, and relational difficulties, in that mindless scrolling
through the internet. So people will say, oh, no, I'm
not feeling anything. No, you're actually feeling a lot because
feelings need air. And you know, I think that a
lot of people feel like numbness when they kind of
(07:39):
numb out their feelings. That numbness isn't nothingness. Numbness is
a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. So
you know what happens when you start to feel your feelings,
A lot of people feel like like you said, you
called it, I think sort of like a breakdown. But
I think like when people think they're breaking down, generally
they're breaking open. Yes, that's again like a reframe of
(08:02):
a story. That you're not breaking down, you're breaking open,
and that's the beginning of something really exciting. The way
that we frame our experiences matters so much in terms
of how we experience what we're actually going through. I
think it was for me the breakthrough, but also in
the in the breaking open, for me, it was also
a breaking away of a pattern, a long held pattern
(08:25):
that I had had in my life, of the way
that I formed relationships, the way that I positioned what
I valued, what my vision was for my life was
very externally motivated versus internally you know, connected, And so
we started that surface layer, right what you were saying
about your client, I'm so fat, I looked terrible, I'm
so stupid, all this this narrative um, but really trying
(08:46):
to reconcile how we break away from some of those patterns,
you know. For me, I went to a more intensive
impatient program to kind of help focus on some of
that trauma recovery and to repattern those stories, to tell
news stories, and and quite honestly, during the pandemic, I
upped my therapy to three days a week with my
therapist because I knew I needed that therapy more frequently.
(09:11):
And I wanted you to speak a little bit too,
how therapy as one modality is an option to help
us challenge and change dominant stories, Like how does that
work if somebody's listening and this has not been their
course of action yet. Yeah, I mean the whole reason
that I wrote maybe you should talk to someone right,
bring people into the therapy room and they get to
go through the experience. I wanted to disabuse people of
(09:35):
these misconceptions that they have about what therapy is, because
I think that the reason that so many people don't
reach out is that they think therapy is something different
from what it is. They think, Okay, you go to
therapy and you're going to talk about your childhood forever
and you're never going to leave. That's just not what
therapy is. You know. It's really focused a lot on
the present and of course how the past informs the present.
(09:58):
But we really want to get you to look at
the present so that you can construct a different future.
And so I think that what therapy really does. Maybe
the best example is if I talk about the difference
between idiot compassion and wise compassion. So our friends, when
we go to them with things they offer us generally
idiot compassion, and that doesn't mean they're idiots. It means
(10:18):
that you say, listen to what happened this person did this,
or here's what happened at work, or here's what happened
with my boyfriend or my girlfriends, or here's what happened
with my mom, right, and we're like, yeah, they were wrong.
You're right, that's terrible. You go girl, right, you know
you deserve better. And we love our friends so much
that we truly believe that, like they're in the right
(10:40):
and the other persons are the wrong, until you listen
to your friends over time and you start to hear, oh,
maybe they keep having this kind of problem over and over.
It's kind of like if a fight breaks out and
every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. We don't
say that to our friends, right, because we we don't
think that's being supportive. A therapist offers not idiot compassion,
but wise compassion. And in wise compassion, we hold up
(11:04):
a mirror to you and we help you to see
something about yourself that maybe you haven't been willing or
able to see. And and the short way of saying
that is we help you edit your story so I
feel like, you know, I was a writer for a
long time before I became a therapist of soil writer,
and I used my writing every day in the therapy
room because I feel like people come in with this
faulty narrative, and what I'm helping them to do is
(11:25):
to say, wait a minute, here's where the story is stuck.
Here's the missing part of the story. Or look at
the protagonist. Why is the protagonist going in circles instead
of moving forward? Who are the heroes and who are
the villains? And is that really how it should be constructed?
Who are the minor characters? Who are the major characters?
Do we need to reshuffle those a little bit? And
So what therapy does is it gives you a really
(11:46):
good second opinion on your life from someone who isn't
already in your life. Yes, And you know, it's so
funny because I was thinking about the length of time
that we've known each other and like and when I
met you, you know, this was not your career path
at the time, and and I've loved watching the evolution
of you bringing all of the wisdom that you had
in your writing and still having your writing obviously, but
(12:08):
out into this different modality, and I think something happened
for me internally about five or six years ago. I
think in my work Larry kind of asked some similar questions,
and your writing has actually really helped inform those from me,
which is am I the object of somebody else's story?
Am I the subject of my own? And how am
I re centering the narrative differently? And we can talk
(12:29):
about who started it, mom, you know, relationship, you know,
diet culture or whatever it was, and that there's viable
critical thinking. They're right, But the real power that I've
experienced and exploring in these conversations has been how we can,
as you say, edit these stories and the power to
change these stories. And so I was really struck when
(12:51):
you were talking about your Ted talk, which beautifully is
called how changing your story can change your life. You
talked about folks that were really invested in the stuck
nous of the story, and you call them help rejecting complainers.
Let's talk about that a little bit, because I'm sure
all of us listening either identify that as ourselves or
know somebody who is really committed to keeping up a
(13:13):
dominant story or an inner dialogue that isn't serving them,
isn't very loving, helpful or kind. But they really don't
want to give that up. Why yeah, you know, they
don't want to give it up because change is hard.
Changing your view of yourself, your self identity is hard.
Any kind of change we make us hard. That's why
New Year's resolutions tend not to work right, because there
are all these stages of change, and I talk about
(13:34):
those in the book too, And it starts with pre contemplation,
where you don't even know that you're contemplating making a change.
And then there's contemplation where you're aware that you are
thinking about making a change, but you're not ready to
do it yet. And then there's preparation where you're starting
to prepare to make the change, but you're still not
making the change yet. And then there's action where you
actually make the change. And then the most important phase
(13:56):
of change is maintenance. And maintenance is how do we
maintain the change once we make it. And the big
misconception there is that people think that you make the change,
you're done and you can easily maintain it. No, no, no,
built into maintenances, you're gonna slip back, you're gonna be human.
Change is so hard, and change is so hard because
(14:17):
we lose the familiar. So even if the familiar is awful,
Let's say the familiar is the story you tell yourself
about yourself. And if all of a sudden you say, wait,
what if I let go of that story? Then you
might say, well, who the heck am I right? What
does that mean? Humans don't do well with uncertainty. We
would rather take the thing that we know, even if
it's terrible, then go into this unknown place where we
(14:38):
don't know. It's like you're plopped into this foreign land
where like you don't know the language, you don't know
the culture, you don't know your way around, you don't
know the people yet, and it's supposed to be better
than the place you were, and maybe it really is,
but it's really scary because it's unfamiliar. So these help
rejecting complainers, they're just going to complain about the same
thing over and over, and any time try to help
(15:01):
them by broadening the story, they're like, yeah, no, that
won't work because you know, I can't do that because right,
and so they've always got a reason and at a
certain point, the only thing you can do you start
to feel helpless, and you're like, Okay, well, then I
guess there's no way out of this, even though you
you see that there is a way out of this,
but they don't want a solution. They just want to
be stuck in place. And I also think about when
(15:24):
I've had experiences talking to people like that, I try
to rationalize and communicate with that inner dominant story, and
I always lose, right because it's just so ingrained and
so entrenched and so familiar and so comfy. What would
you suggest a person do if they're trying to get
through to a help rejecting complain or somebody who's not interested, Like,
(15:45):
what are the actions they can take too? I guess
also protect themselves in that energy, because that's very draining
to go round and round with somebody who says that
they want help but but really isn't open to to
hearing it. The best way to deal with because it
is very draining, is to agree with that is to say, well,
then I guess I guess that's how it is, because
(16:07):
then they have nothing to come back with right there, like,
and then what they do is it's really interesting because
then what they do is they go, oh, but wait, wait,
what do you mean there's nothing. I'm like, well, you
just said there's nothing you can do, so I guess
every suggestion I gave you you said it doesn't work,
So I guess I guess that's how it is. Now.
They're not sort of like holding onto their story. No
one's trying to take their story away from them, because
when you're arguing with them about it, they feel like
(16:28):
you're trying to take away my story. I don't want
to give it up. But if they start to say
maybe I'm ready to start editing the story a little bit,
and no one's making them do it, because they're gonna
fight with You're gonna say, you know, like, well wait
a minute, maybe I could do this. You're like, oh, okay,
right right, But that's interesting. So you actually acknowledge or
(16:49):
affirm where they are or that you know what they're
saying is okay, there might not be options, and then
see or allow them to have some movement to get
to a space of haunting that change that they're going
to also start to come up with some options and
what you can do. You don't have to agree with
them that there are no options. You can just reflect
back to them what they're saying that it sounds like
(17:09):
you've you've exhausted your options, or it sounds like you
feel like you've exhausted your options, or it sounds like
you feel like there's nothing you can do. Okay, and
then you just move on to a different topic, so
they don't keep the complaint going. And the reason people
do this it's a protective mechanism. So let's say that
someone says like, I can't go and find a partner, right,
and here's why, And they'll tell you all the reasons,
(17:29):
and some of them are very legitimate, Like it really
is hard, that's true. There's a lot of like bad
dates you have to go on, it's true. But really
they're protecting themselves from having to risk and put themselves
out there. And so that's the part of the story
they're missing that you know, is all of this other
stuff true? Yes, But does that preclude people from meeting
people though people do it every day in the world.
(17:52):
When you work with the help rejecting complainers. You said
something really funny in your ted talk where you tell
them we're all gonna die. I tell me a little
bit about that. Yeah, so I know it a little
more delicately than I did in my time talk. But basically,
you know what I do say to people is you
get one life, and when you look back, and the
(18:13):
one story that does get written about us is called
an obituary. And when you think about that obituary, what
do you want it to say? You know, do you
want it to look like just this was your life
and here's what happened, and then nothing changed and then
you died. Or do you want to say I'm living
on borrowed time. We are all living on borrowed time.
(18:34):
Life has a mortality rate, and that is not just
for other people. We like to believe it, but it's not.
And so when you start to realize that your time
here is limited, maybe you start to say, I might
want to have a different obituary. I might want to
have a different story of my life. There's this great
moment in my book, and maybe you should talk to
(18:55):
someone where I'm with my therapist and I'm being sort
of this person who's saying I'm stuck in there's no
way out, and I'm trapped, and you know, it's this
very common thing you see in therapy, and the person
expects the therapist by the way to solve it for them.
And yet we all have the answer, we just need
a witness and a guide to help us access it.
So he tells me, you know what, Laurie, you remind
me of this cartoon, and it's of a prisoner shaking
(19:18):
the bars desperately trying to get out. But on the
right and the left it's open, no bars. So the
question is, why don't we walk around those bars? Why
don't we even notice that it's open? And it's because
freedom is scary. With freedom comes responsibility. If we walk
around the bars, we are responsible for our lives. We
are responsible for writing that story. And sometimes we don't
(19:41):
want the responsibility. We'd rather say, you go write the
story and I'll just come along for the ride, even
though we actually don't like that. And sometimes we've been
modeled that behavior too. We've seen our parents do it,
our friends, do you know, We've seen a lot of
folks do it. The reason why I loved that We're
All Going to Die part personally is because I didn't
other podcast show called We're All Going to Die Anyway,
(20:02):
and I launched it during the pandemic, and I did
it because I had had a tremendous amount of personal
loss in my life, and I was very much coming
to the space of like everything you were saying, there
was this question that was coming to me, which was,
what is the life that you've always wanted to create
that you've avoided creating? And then the pandemic happens and
it validated even more so the urgency. I think behind
(20:23):
those questions, the fragility of life is more front and center.
I had personal loss during this period. I lost my
mother in law and my brother in law to COVID.
You know, we right at the beginning when we kind
of didn't understand how the world was going to play out.
I mean, in some ways we maybe still don't, but
there was a lot of reckoning around the reality of time.
(20:46):
And I'm curious how in this moment grief or loss
is playing a role in the stories that you tell
or the stories that you hear people tell around grief
and loss, Because something really big that came up was
the story was right with grief, I'm never going to
not feel sad or I don't know who I'm going
to be without this person, and those dominant stories rise
(21:07):
pretty significantly when we're grieving. Yeah, I think there are
two kinds of stories that people tell themselves around grief
and loss, and especially during the pandemic, And I think
that one of the stories is the one you were
just talking about. And there's a there's actually a patient
in my book named John who has this tragic loss
with his child, and he was saying, at one point,
(21:28):
you know, I thought I could never be happy again,
that I would never find joy again, I would never
smile again. And just a week after his child died,
he was playing a game with his other child and
he laughed, and he couldn't believe, like, who is this
person who is laughing? Like, my life is over? I
am devastated. Life as I knew it will never be
the same. And that is true, life as he knew
(21:50):
it will never be the same. But people do experience
joy they think they never will. You know. It's kind
of like when people are in the middle of a
deep clinical depression and I always say to them, you
are not the best person to talk to you about
you right now, right true, because they're thinking is so
distorted in that moment they cannot see beyond the perimeter
(22:13):
that they have put around themselves at that moment. And
the thing about grief two is other people the way
they treat it. They think you're supposed to like be
over it by a certain point or there's a time
limit on it. People move forward, but they don't necessarily
move on. And I think the moving forward is the
making meaning of the experience for you in your life
(22:34):
and integrating that experience into your life. It's not you know,
people will say, like, it's been two years, why is
this person still feeling this way? It's because that person
is still dead, right right, They're still dead. Um, So
I think that that's important. But the other the other
thing about grief and laws during the pandemic that I
noticed was people thought there was sort of supposed to
(22:54):
be this hierarchy of grief, right, or this hierarchy of
loss that if it wasn't loss of life, loss of income,
loss of health, that would ever kind of loss you experienced,
you could not talk about that it didn't make it
on that hierarchy. And I think it's really important for
people to understand that there are all kinds of losses
(23:16):
in our daily lives that we experience, and they they
long to be felt in order to kind of move
forward in the story, and there are all these silent
losses that people have all the time, Like someone had
a miscarriage, right, and then people say, oh, but they
didn't lose like an eight year old, you know, or
they So that's what I mean by this hierarchy that somehow,
(23:36):
you know, some losses get more attention or more compassion
than others. You know, it's like it was a breakup,
but it wasn't a divorce of a twenty year marriage,
but it still hurts. So I think that when we
tell the story of grief, to go back to stories,
the story is that life comes with a lot of loss,
and that I think it's really important that people are
(23:58):
compassionate around it and of people the space to experience it.
Do dominant stories or these inner stories, do they ever
go away completely or do we just get better tools
around them, or do they just shift into something that
feels less intense. I think it depends how much work
you do around the story. I think that there are
(24:19):
people who have these very deeply ingrained stories from childhood
about who they are that we're told to them by
bigger people around them, that they very much believed and internalized,
and those can be really intractable until you start to
understand a little bit more about the people who were
telling you those stories and why they were telling you
those stories, and to realize that those stories actually had
(24:42):
nothing to do with you. And that's the part that's
so liberating to realize, like, all these stories that were
told about me and told to me about me were
about the storyteller and not the subject of the story.
M H. I think people need to let that in, Like,
can you say at one more time that the stories
that were told to you they were about the storyteller
(25:06):
and not about the person in the story. That's a
heavy duty one to take on, I think, because anybody
who is surviving and working through childhood trauma and navigating
those stories that you know might have been told to them,
or issues that happened to the experiences that happen to
them that form those stories. It's so natural right for
(25:26):
a child to adapt to what's happened and make it
about themselves, like if I was better, my parents wouldn't
drink or fight, or they would be kinder to me,
or this wouldn't have happened to me. And I think
so many of us have grown up believing that we
could have some control over that story if we had
just changed ourselves. I have a podcast called Dear Therapists
(25:50):
where we do therapy sessions with people and then we
give them homework at the end and they have a
week to do it and they come back and tell
us how it went, so we can see how effective
the session was in shifting this story, because the story
that people come in with at the top of the
podcast is different from the story that they leave with,
just like a therapy session. And one that just came
to mind in particular was this guy who said his
(26:11):
father when he was young, he was so emotionally abusive
to him. He would tell him, You're stupid, you're worthless,
you know, all these stories that he really internalized, and
as an adult he had something to prove to the world,
not just to his to his father, but to the world,
like I am not stupid, I am worthy. And even
(26:32):
though he like married this wonderful person and has his
wonderful kids and is so successful in his life and
in a meaningful way and does meaningful things in the world,
that story was still there. And in the session with him,
we talked about how he's still at war, he's still
in this war with his father, and that the war
is over. He doesn't realize that he's been freed. Peace
(26:54):
has come, and he doesn't realize it yet. It was
so such a revelation for him to say, oh, wow,
wait a minute, it's peace time. The war is over.
I have nothing to prove to this man or to
the world at large. M And and it really changed
the way he started interacting with his wife, and it
changed the way he started interacting with his kids, and
(27:16):
it changed the way he started interacting with himself. The
way that he saw himself had shifted. And so I
think sometimes we don't even know that that narrative is
still in there, that little voice is still in there,
and it's not our voice, it's someone else's. Alrighty, I
(27:37):
called time out. Let's take a short break and listen
to these messages. You know what I need. I need
more of this epic conversation. Let's go. I wanted to
(28:00):
kind of talk about what people can do. So we've
talked a lot about like recognizing these stories, the impact,
the shifting that they can have in our life, the
way we can operate from those stories. But when somebody
has recognized that there fighting a narrative or repeating a
story that they don't want anymore. What are the steps
to start to replace that, Lorie, to start to reaffirm
(28:23):
a different narrative. Because we talked about changes hard, and
that's why some folks are stuck in their stories. But
what if you've got a willing, right participant who's like, okay,
I'm ready, I'm ready to shift this story. What do
those steps look like? There are a few. One is
that when you start to notice that voice that's not yours,
(28:43):
that's that old storyteller to really take ownership of your
own story, that you start to notice it, and you know,
like like I was saying with my client, right, that
story of oh, you're so stupid, right, And so when
you notice yourself doing that just on your own in
the world, what would a benevolent storyteller say in that moment?
(29:04):
How would the story sound different? And the more that
you can start to own your own story and not
let somebody else write your story. We want to create
our own autobiography. Yeah, and you want an autobiography that's accurate.
And so that's where therapy comes in, is, you know,
how can you help to get some of those faulty
narratives adjusted a little bit, make them more accurate, get
(29:25):
a little more clarity on where they come from. What
does my story actually look like? In November, we're putting
out a workbook too. Maybe you should talk to someone,
and the whole workbook is about rewriting your story. It
takes people through the process. I love that so much.
I can't wait to get my hands on that workbook.
And I love that you talked about summoning sort of
a benevolent narrator, because what I've been advised in my
(29:48):
practice and my healing has been to show up to
be the voice I want to have with this little
girl inside, or this younger woman inside, or even just
this person now, like, how would I handle this with
my own benevolence? And I actually practice saying out loud,
I almost combat the dominant story. So, for instance, the
other day, I was literally getting into my car heading
(30:10):
into a meeting, and I remember something had gone really
awry in the morning, a dynamic I didn't like in
the program of my day, and I was really ansy about, like,
it's not gonna work out today. It's not gonna work
out today. That was my dominant story. Right, like you
know this is gonna go wrong, it's not gonna work out.
And I literally had to disrupt or interrupt that moment.
(30:30):
Literally I was opening my car, was getting in I
over and over almost like a mantra, was like, whatever
happens today, I'm gonna be okay. Whatever happens today, I've
got what I need. Whatever happens toda, I'm gonna be
able to handle it. Like and I know it sounds
like and sometimes when I say it, I'm like, it's
sounds for people who get it like a little Stewart Smalley,
But for me it was so important because the repetition,
the kindness, that compassion and action was really important for
(30:52):
me because conceptually I understood that to be necessary and important,
but I needed to know, like what does that feel
like in my voice, in my body, what happens and
for me somatically, like I breathe differently, I do start
to calm down. It's like I soothed myself with those words.
And so that might not be for everybody, but I
know for me it's been one way to almost take
(31:13):
what's been on my page, in my in my worksheets
and and bring it into my everyday life. Right, And
what you're talking about is what people do so often,
which is they generalize a story. So something didn't go
well in the morning. Oh, the whole day is ruined.
In fact, my whole life is probably ruined. Just give
me a second, I'll get there. Yeah, exactly. So that's
that's the generalization. And you know, that's the futurizing or
(31:35):
catastrophizing we call that where you like, you make up
a story about something that hasn't happened yet and may
never happen, and you've turned it into a catastrophe. It's fiction.
It hasn't happened yet, so you just made it up.
You could make up another story. So we're talking about
how to counteract that. Make up a different story. What's
a story where actually things turn out okay later today,
(31:58):
but we don't tell ourselves that story. If we've a
choice between two stories, like I'm unlovable or I'm lovable,
and you have evidence for both, right, which one do
we believe? We believe the one that makes us feel bad,
that's what we do. We make up the story with
the unhappy ending. And so there's always a different story
that you can tell, but especially about the future. The
(32:21):
thing about the future is it hasn't happened yet, So
why even make up a story. You can just experience
it and see what happens. Mhm. Have you when when
you're at a place of rewriting, when when you've seen
your patients really master a new narrative for themselves and
and and start to craft that, what have you seen
(32:42):
change or happen? Differently, if we know that it could
change our life, what does that changing of our life?
Because I don't want people to also glamorize or imagine
potentially right like a movie montage where all of a sudden,
like everything is rainbows and sprinkles, but like, how what
does that actually look like? In reality? I think that
we navigate through the world much more smoothly. And what
(33:05):
I mean by that is that, um, you have a
disagreement with somebody and you see it from a much
more accurate perspective. The story you tell yourself about that
disagreement sounds very different. It doesn't take up so much
emotional real estate. And you also have fewer of those
disagreements because you're not telling all kinds of stories that
(33:26):
get you into trouble in your head. It looks like
being more clear about what gives you purpose and meaning
because you're not telling yourself all kinds of stories that
hold you back. It means not self sabotaging because the
story that you're telling yourself is a story that scares you.
In the podcast that's up today, in fact, the guy
(33:48):
who's on who's our guest and is going through a
session with us, the story that he was telling himself
was that nobody would want to be with him long
term in a monogamous relationship, that eventually he's going to
bore them, eventually they're going to leave. But then he's
with someone who loves him, who's completely trustworthy, and what
does he do. He sabotages the whole thing because it's
(34:10):
kind of like, you know, you can't fire me, I
quit m hm. So that's when you asked what does
it do for people? What it would do for someone
like this to change the story is it would make
him not sabotage something really good when it comes into
his life. I love that. You know you talked about
before the role of family and how a lot of
times if those early stories are are coming from our
(34:32):
family about us and to us, you know, we know
that dominant stories can get passed down almost like a
legacy in families. You can hear some of the same
stories right generation generation. I you know, knew you before
Zach was in this world, and I've obviously, you know,
been so inspired and excited to see who he's emerging
(34:54):
to be as a young human on this planet and
as a young man. And we're gonna bring Zack on
and a Szack. But before we get there, I wanted
to talk about you and your transition into motherhood knowing
what you know and doing the work that you do,
and how conscious or cognizant were you of making of
talking intentionally around these stories. Did you have conversations like
(35:18):
this with Zach as you were raising him? I mean
somebody I always imagine folks listening in are like, how
are you approaching motherhoo? Did you have stories about being
a mother? You know where you like, oh, ship, my
story is like I'm not going to be a great
mom like or whatever that is, Like what came up
for you if you don't mind sharing about like the
stories you told and maybe the way that you were
intentionally focused on having those conversations with Zach. I think
(35:40):
that you know in my history and I've written about
this that I always thought I'm going to do things
differently than my mother did, and then you have a
kid and you're like, oh my god, I'm doing some
of the same things that she did. And I always
promised myself I would not. But the difference is that
the story of my childhood was things didn't get talked
about in a meaningful way, and the story of Zach's
(36:02):
childhood is that even though you know I'm not a
perfect mother, nobody is that. There's rupture and repair. So
we know how to talk about it, we know how
to repair it, we know how to say, hey, I'm
really sorry, here's what happened. Just now we can talk
about feelings in our house. So for for Zach, it's
interesting because he was this kid who grew up with
a therapist mom. And I don't act like a therapist
(36:23):
at all as mother, but my heir is feelings. My
air is keeping things in the open, and so the
air in our household is always like, we talk about it.
That's just been his experience. He didn't know that there
are families where people don't talk about things. And I'm
really glad I think that that will give him the
skills that he needs for the relationships that he is
(36:47):
you know, has now and moves into as right now.
He's fifteen and and we don't get taught that in school. Yes,
the most important thing you can learn is how can
I love and be loved? And that means not only
with others, but how can I love myself? Up. There's
this idea you know that I was talking about earlier,
that there are people are afraid of their feelings instead
of using them like a compass. People say like, there
(37:08):
are negative feelings and positive feelings, Like a positive feeling
is joy, and a negative feeling might be sadness or anxiety,
or anger or even envy. No, I always say, like,
follow your envy. It tells you what you want. It
tells you something about desire. Does your anger mean that
you need to set more boundaries? Is that what it's
telling you? Does your anxiety means something has to change
that you're making a decision that you really don't feel
(37:28):
comfortable with. Does your sadness mean that something's not working
in your life? Right? And what is that so you
can do something different? Our feelings are like a compass.
They tell us what direction to go, and if we
don't pay attention to them, it's like walking around with
a faulty GPS. You have no idea where you're going.
I love that, And there's an emotional fluency that you
end up creating. And I can see that you've established
(37:51):
that with with Zach, especially in the work that he's doing.
So I want to we'll talk about that in a second,
but I'm curious, at what age do you, you know,
start talking about the rewriting of stories or the editing
to use your language? Is that even? Is that a
term that Zach knows from from growing up, and how
did you introduce that? Well? I think it started very
early on when I noticed that the culture was telling
(38:13):
a very different story than I wanted him to hear.
Anytime I would see little boys cry at the park,
and I would see like maybe their fathers or even
sometimes their mothers say like, oh, you're fine, you're fine,
don't cry, or you know, they were upset because someone
else got to go on the slide first or something,
and it's like you can say to that kid, oh,
I know, you're really upset that you didn't get to
go first, and then hey, let's you know, wait in
(38:34):
line and go, you know, whatever it is. But to
just acknowledge that the feeling is valid and it exists
and it's okay to feel that, and then kids know
what to do with those feelings. Kids are always talked
out of their feelings. Like a kid will say I'm sad,
and the parent who's really uncomfortable because you don't want
your kids to feel sad, well then say, oh, you know,
don't be sad. Hey, let's go get some frozen yogurt.
(38:56):
Let's go to Disneyland, right, you know I supposed to like,
let's talk about why you're sad. Or they'll say like,
I'm really scared. And you hear parents all the time
say like, oh, don't worry about that, there's nothing to
be scared of. It's like, but they're actually scared, right,
And so the message that kids get is, oh, there
are certain feelings that I am not allowed to talk
about because they're bad. They're bad to feel, they're bad
(39:18):
to talk about as opposed to just they're just a
normal part of life. So with Zach, I always tried
to be like he's mad, he's sad, he's anxious, whatever,
let's give it some air, let's talk about it. I
love that. I think emotions are energy in motion. They
need to move through your body, they need to come out.
I love, love, love this concept. And Zach is doing
something I think really quite important for his generation in
(39:42):
his community and using his medium, which we're going to
get to talk about in a second. So I want
to take a quick break, and I want Lorie to
stick around because we're gonna bring her incredible fifteen year
old son, Zack on in just a moment. Hey, hey,
we're back. Now, let's get into our convot. As a guy,
(40:13):
you know a lot of times and I've had emotions.
People have told me to like man not as if
like having feelings and all things it's bad, but it's
really not. In fact, hiding your feelings is horrible for
your mental health and means all sorts of serious problems
down the world. So don't had a feeling, guys. That
(40:35):
was a clip from Zach's Instagram page Talk with Zack,
where he talks about toxic masculinity and boys emotions and
he answers questions from teens. We have Zach here with
us now, Hey, Zach, welcome, Thanks for having me I'm
really excited to do this, Zack. I'm curious as you
listen back to that, tell me a little bit more
(40:55):
about the origins of Talk with Zach. What made you
want to create a platform for this kind of topic
in particular? So during COVID, I was noticing that a
lot of times, like the media was telling kids to
talk about their mental health, but I noticed that it
was especially difficult for boys. And the reason why that was,
(41:15):
or I think is because from a very young age,
men and boys are told to like sort of toughen
up and like be strong and not like talk about
what they're feeling. Like a year ago, my my grandpa
passed away and I was really close to them, so
I was like upset about that, and one of the
things I heard was like sort of like man up
and like be strong things like that and like pushed through.
(41:38):
But I feel like it's important to like recognize their feelings,
you know. And one of the things I'm trying to
do is just like raise awareness about that, because the
only way to really change that is to start talking
about it. What kind of feedback did you get from that,
What kind of comments or questions or feedback from your
friends listening or others listening. Did you get from introducing topic?
(42:01):
You know, a lot of people are like, wow, like
I've been thinking the same thing, and like I've really
wanted to talk about my feelings, um, but I just
feel like I can't, And this video shows me that
I'm not alone. I'm curious if you notice different kinds
of questions coming from different sorts of folks. Some people
are struggling with like coming out, and some people are
(42:21):
talking about like how do you deal with a breakup?
So yeah, it's like a broad range. Do you ever
go to your mom to talk through some of those answers,
because that's also like some heavy duty topics to know
how to navigate through them. Curious where you get, where
you get your support as a team, Like I sort
of like know what will resonate with my friends, and
(42:42):
I know what resonates with me, so I really like
look for those and pick them out. My mom is
obviously an adult UM and she was a teen um
not so recently. I don't want to make it seem
like you sound old, but you know, times have changed
a lot. He doesn't act like it's it's sort of
the opposite where I've gone to him with like my
(43:03):
Dear Therapist column and I will see them just because
it's about fluency and feelings. Like I will say to him,
like what do you think this person should do? Right?
But when teens write to him, he knows much better
than I do what's going to resonate with them. I
love that it is true. And also these things are
so universal still, right the issues that we a lot
of the stuff that your mom and I dealt with
(43:24):
is young people still exist. It's just that you also
have this you know, you have this other world now
where you have an audience in a way that I
didn't have an audience when I was growing up. Yeah, definitely,
I was a little nervous at first, but I'm really
glad that like people have really responded about to this.
I think the timing is really important too. You know,
there's a twenty nineteen study that I often quote a
(43:46):
lot from p Research that's tracking about nine percent of
teens that say that depression and anxiety in their community
has become more of an issue, especially during COVID. A
lot of those feelings have become exacerbated. Lorie, would you
say that you're seeing that too? Across like patient conversations
that some of those you know pre existing conditions, and
(44:07):
that anxiety and depression can really ratchet up during a
time like this. Yeah, it can, But I also feel
like people who have dealt with depression and anxiety often
have tools to deal with it, and the people who
were not used to it struggled in a different way
because they really didn't know. Okay, here's what's helpful, Here's
what I can do, here's how I can manage this.
I would say for teens, when I'm seeing in Zack's generation,
(44:29):
and I think Zach can speak to this, is just
how much pressure there is on teens. We had a
sixteen year old girl who wrote into our Dear Therapist
podcast and we did a session with her, and she
was talking about the pressure of achieving and succeeding an
identity and what does that mean, you know, if if
your whole identity is wrapped up in a number on
a test or a grade or what college you get into.
(44:53):
And I know that Zach gets a lot of he
gets a lot of questions in his anonymous form that
he has on his talk quizac Instagram, this question of
you know, people are really feeling the pressure. Kids are
really stressed out. Yeah, do you feel that, Zack? Yeah, yeah,
I feel like, especially like in high school, there's so
(45:14):
many pressures, Like there's academic pressure, which like is so bad,
like right now, it has gotten so much worse, like
over the years. And on top of that, there's social media. Yeah,
and and they're good things about social media, like communication
and talking to friends and all that, but there are
also a lot of things that make people really insecure
(45:37):
about themselves and feel really bad about themselves. Well, you're representing,
i think, a really positive part of the internet. I'm curious, Zach.
It's special. I think the upbringing you've had with a
mom who is you know, said to me earlier that
emotions were like air. That was her air, like getting
emotions out. And about what's something great that you think
your mom did for you in helping to kind of
(45:59):
create eight more emotional fluency or like a connection to
your feelings, Like is there one or two things that
come to mind that you think, like, I'm really glad
you did that, mom. I feel like just like creating
environment or like talking about feelings is okay. I'm probably
talking about my feelings more than I want to, which
(46:21):
in some some cases can be a good thing. So
I feel like, yeah, I feel like that is something
I'm grateful for. If you could give a piece of
advice to somebody listening right now who might want to
open up a conversation like this with their kids, what
would be one effective thing that they could do. Mind
(46:42):
place for a parent wanting to open up. Two, make
sure that your kid knows that it's like a safe
space and that they could come to you with anything.
How do you know if it's a safe space, Like,
how do kids feel it's a safe space? Could you
talk a little about that. If you feel like your
parents gonna have a huge reaction and you're going to
(47:02):
get in trouble and you know it's just going to
be like a whole thing, then you're not really going
to want to open up. But if you know that,
if you're open and honest that you're going to have
a discussion about it, you're gonna have a conversation that
can really help too. Got it, And Lorie, what would
you say? I think to those that are listening, if
(47:24):
they're dominant story in the past has been like I'm
not good at talking about my own feelings. How am
I going to teach my kid to talk about? There's like,
what's something you think we could leave people with today
to think about passing down the legacy of challenging and
changing dominant stories. What's something good for folks to remember?
I would change that story from I'm not good about
(47:45):
talking about my feelings too. I don't have a lot
of practice talking about my feelings. And then what do
you do with that? Well, you practice. One thing I
want to really emphasize, and I think that Zach has
taught me. You know, I've learned so much by being
his mom mom, And one thing that he's taught me
is that it doesn't have to always happen in one conversation,
that you don't have to get it right in every conversation.
(48:08):
I mess up all the time. But the point is
then we come back and we have a different conversation.
Just knowing that to say to yourself, I didn't get
a lot of practice doing this, and I experience a
lot of discomfort. But I don't want to pass my
discomfort around feelings onto my child. So I'm going to
take a leap of faith and I am going to practice,
and I'm not going to hold myself to some standard
(48:30):
where I have to get it right every time. And
by the way, there really is no right having the
conversation is doing it right no matter what that conversation
looks like. But I think what Zack said is so
important that if you go to your parents and your
parents freaks out, you're not going to go to your parents.
And so it's not just making space for your kids feelings,
but knowing that you need to manage your own feelings.
So if you have a reaction to something that your
(48:52):
kids says, you've really got to work on what is
going on for me internally. So I don't project that
onto my child because they're going to shut down practice
and not perfection on this for sure. Um, Zach, where
can listeners go to learn more about what you're up
to in the world. Listeners can check out my instagram
it's at Talk with Zach done a little bit of
(49:15):
tick talk too. It's also talk with Zach there. And
I'll be announcing more opportunities with my website as they
come and then your future. Thank you so much, And Lori,
where can listeners go to learn more? To get their
hands on that new workbook? They can get the workbook
anywhere they buy their books. They can go to an
independent bookseller, they can go to Amazon, Bards and Noble.
(49:35):
Wherever they get their books, they can get the Maybe
you should talk to someone workbook companion to the book.
Maybe you should talk to someone amazing. I feel so
honored to have this conversation with both of you. Thank
you so much. Oh, thank you so much for the conversation.
I always love talking with you. Yes, likewise, likewise, thanks Zach,
It's so nice to meet you. Yeah, thanks so much.
(49:56):
I really enjoyed this. Ah so much wisdom from Lori
and from Zach. I think something that's going to stick
with me for a while is when Laurie said that
if we're wrestling with those dominant stories, if we're thinking
about things we might have been told about ourselves as
a child, for example, to really remember that the stories
(50:21):
we were told about ourselves are really about the storyteller,
They're not about us. Just think about that the stories
we were told about perhaps our worthiness, our loveability, our appearance.
Even when people are telling you a story about you,
it's likely really about them. Also, something that really stuck
(50:42):
out for me is the rewriting our stories. So when
we are stuck in that loop of dominant stories and
negative self talk, try to imagine what a benevolent storyteller
might say in that moment, Somebody who's a little kinder,
a little bit more compassionate, perhaps a little bit more
of active. Introducing that benevolent storyteller and interrupting that dominant
(51:05):
story can be one way to start to rewrite yours.
And then I think both Lori and Zach said this
really well. These things in our lives that we want
to change, they only start changing when we talk about them.
So remember it's all about practice and not perfection. Let's
practice talking more about these nuanced and sometimes complicated stories.
And then maybe I'll make one more plug, which is therapy. Baby.
(51:29):
It has worked for me. I know it may not
be for everybody, but I do want to encourage if
you need to talk to somebody, I really really support
you in doing that. If you want to learn more
(51:50):
about dominant stories and how you can challenge and change them,
you can join me for a workshop learn more at
Jess Weener dot com or you can follow me on
Instagram that I'm Jess we Ner. I love that we're
building a community around this conversation, and if you'd like
to tell us about your Dominant stories and how you're challenging, changing,
and rewriting them, we'd love to hear from you. You
(52:10):
can do that in two ways. You can email us
at podcast at Dominant stories dot com. We're already getting
some great stories from y'all, or you can leave us
a voicemail at two one three nine three zero three three.
And don't worry if he didn't write this down, I'm
gonna put all this information in the show notes. Next
week we're gonna be speaking with actor Debbie Ryan, going
(52:33):
from a child star to now directing her own shows.
Debbie is rewriting her definition of success and she's opening
up about fame, identity, and the real power of influence.
Thank you so much, and don't forget to write a
review wherever you're listening. It's super duper helps us out,
(52:54):
and remember always learning, always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess
Winer is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit
(53:18):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Shonda Rhymes and we're bringing you Dominant Stories, created
by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the Deft Self
Steam Project. People say like, there are negative feelings and
positive feelings. A positive feeling is joy, and a negative
feeling might be sadness or anxiety, or anger or even envy. No.
I always say like, follow your envy. It tells you
(00:20):
what you want. It tells you something about desire. Our
feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction
to go, and if we don't pay attention to them,
it's like walking around with a faulty GPS. You have
no idea where you're going. Hey, I'm Jess Weener and
this is Dominant Stories, the podcast that helps us reclaim
and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about
(00:44):
our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities. Hey, everybody,
welcome to the show. I am super excited for today's guests.
(01:05):
I am joined by Lori Gottlieb. She's an author of
this incredible New York Times bestselling book called Maybe You
Should Talk to Someone. It's really really good. Lorie's advice
is spot on. I feel lucky because I've known Laurie
for years. She was a writer before she was a therapist,
and now, in addition to still being in clinical practice,
(01:28):
she writes a weekly column and she hosts a really
popular podcast called Dear Therapist. And in our conversation today,
we're gonna dive into the psychology behind our dominant stories
to help us really understand and unpack where these stories
come from and how we are so influenced by our
(01:48):
family systems. Lorie, like me, believes that when we change
our inner story, our inner dialogue, we can really change
our life. Later on the show, we're gonna be joined
by Lori's fifteen year old son, Zach. He's a high
school sophomore and creator of Talk with Zach, which is
(02:10):
a really cool platform on social media where he is
talking with teens about their emotional health. I cannot wait
for you to hear this episode, and of course, please
let me know what you think of the show. Subscribe
and write me a review where wherever you're listening. I
really appreciate y'all. All right, let's dig in. This is
(02:35):
the conversation I've been waiting to have for this show.
Like you have no idea, I mean, and I think
we actually go back, like over a decade decade. Don't
tell people I know, but I was, you know, when
conceiving of the show and knowing the kinds of conversations,
who wanted to have You are like primo on my
mind because the show is about these dominant stories, right,
(02:56):
the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how do
we kind of unpack where those stories come from, challenge them,
change them? And we know that, as you often say,
this will change the trajectory of our lives. And so
I wanted to dive in with you because there's something
that you say often. You say stories are about one
person saying to another, this is who I am. Can
(03:17):
you understand me? Which I love? And when I think
about that, applying to the internal stories that we tell ourselves,
those dominant stories on repeat, what do those stories? What
are they telling us? Right? So? I think stories are
how we make sense of our lives. You know, we
tell people every day, here's what happened, how was your day?
Let me tell you what happened today? But they're also
(03:38):
the internal stories, like you said, the stories that we
tell ourselves about ourselves. And we are all unreliable narrators
and that doesn't mean that we're trying to mislead. It
means that we are telling our stories through a very
subjective lens, and often these faulty narratives keep us stuck.
(03:59):
You know. One example of this sort of internal story
gone wrong is just how we talk to ourselves every day.
The person that we talked to most in the course
of our lives is ourselves, and what we say to
ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful. And we
have all kinds of stories that we tell ourselves, stories
like I'm unlovable, or I can't trust anyone, or nothing
(04:24):
ever works out for me. And we don't even realize
that we're telling ourselves these stories, but they affect every decision,
every action, every choice that we make in the course
of a day. And so I had this therapy client
who didn't realize, you know, that she talks to herself
in this way with these stories, and so I often
say to people what I said with her, which was
(04:46):
go home, listen for the voice, Listen for the storyteller
in your head that you don't even know is there.
It's like a radio station or TV show that you
have on in the background that you don't think you're
paying attention to but you are. And I said, I
want you to write down everything voice tells you and
then come back and we'll talk about it next week.
And she came back the next week and she said,
I can't even read this. I am such a bully
(05:09):
to myself. And the stories that she told herself were
things like this, like she was typing an email and
she made a mistake, and she said, oh, you're so stupid. Now,
if her friend had done that same thing, she'd tell
a very different story, like, oh, my friend's human might
be the story, and it's based on a broader story.
So if your story is different, you're not going to
tell yourself these little mini stories during the day. But
(05:30):
she had this broader story of I'm broken, something's wrong
with me. Well, they say, you teach what you most
need to learn. And obviously my work over these decades
has been about unpacking and unraveling the stories that media
tells us about ourselves and broader culture and like our
family relationships. But truthfully, for me, dominant stories came up
for me after I had had a very for myself,
(05:53):
a very public breakdown that led me to a breakthrough
around how many dominant stories I had, that unreliable orator
that constantly beat me up around where I should be,
what success is supposed to look like. My dominant story
was my worth is my work? And I really deeply
fell into the unpacking then raveling of those stories kept
(06:15):
leading to other stories, and so I really understood them.
My connection to trauma, childhood trauma, and where some of
those stories were born for me in my early years,
and then obviously where relationships or experiences might reinforce those stories.
Will you talk a little bit about the psychology behind
why we have these stories and the origins of them,
(06:35):
where they come from, so that we can begin to
know where to begin to unpack them. Yeah. I think
you know. You mentioned trauma, and I think that comes
up so often because they think that people feel like
either they experienced something that was difficult and they've kind
of packed it away. They feel like, well, I've done
with that chapter. Except if it's unprocessed, it will come
out in other ways. It's sort of like the way
(06:57):
that our feelings. We say that, oh, I'm not really
going to pay attention to that feeling. That's what I'm
gonna do without feeling right. Oh, yeah, maybe I'm feeling
sad or anxious. But you know what, I have a
roof over my head and food on the table, and
I have this at that So it's really not that
bad as the story we tell ourselves. But it comes
out in other ways, these feelings, right, So they come
out in like too much food or not enough food.
(07:17):
They come out in like you know, too many glasses
of wine at night. They come out in insomnia, in
a short temperedness, and relational difficulties, in that mindless scrolling
through the internet. So people will say, oh, no, I'm
not feeling anything. No, you're actually feeling a lot because
feelings need air. And you know, I think that a
lot of people feel like numbness when they kind of
(07:39):
numb out their feelings. That numbness isn't nothingness. Numbness is
a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. So
you know what happens when you start to feel your feelings,
A lot of people feel like like you said, you
called it, I think sort of like a breakdown. But
I think like when people think they're breaking down, generally
they're breaking open. Yes, that's again like a reframe of
(08:02):
a story. That you're not breaking down, you're breaking open,
and that's the beginning of something really exciting. The way
that we frame our experiences matters so much in terms
of how we experience what we're actually going through. I
think it was for me the breakthrough, but also in
the in the breaking open, for me, it was also
a breaking away of a pattern, a long held pattern
(08:25):
that I had had in my life, of the way
that I formed relationships, the way that I positioned what
I valued, what my vision was for my life was
very externally motivated versus internally you know, connected, And so
we started that surface layer, right what you were saying
about your client, I'm so fat, I looked terrible, I'm
so stupid, all this this narrative um, but really trying
(08:46):
to reconcile how we break away from some of those patterns,
you know. For me, I went to a more intensive
impatient program to kind of help focus on some of
that trauma recovery and to repattern those stories, to tell
news stories, and and quite honestly, during the pandemic, I
upped my therapy to three days a week with my
therapist because I knew I needed that therapy more frequently.
(09:11):
And I wanted you to speak a little bit too,
how therapy as one modality is an option to help
us challenge and change dominant stories, Like how does that
work if somebody's listening and this has not been their
course of action yet. Yeah, I mean the whole reason
that I wrote maybe you should talk to someone right,
bring people into the therapy room and they get to
go through the experience. I wanted to disabuse people of
(09:35):
these misconceptions that they have about what therapy is, because
I think that the reason that so many people don't
reach out is that they think therapy is something different
from what it is. They think, Okay, you go to
therapy and you're going to talk about your childhood forever
and you're never going to leave. That's just not what
therapy is. You know. It's really focused a lot on
the present and of course how the past informs the present.
(09:58):
But we really want to get you to look at
the present so that you can construct a different future.
And so I think that what therapy really does. Maybe
the best example is if I talk about the difference
between idiot compassion and wise compassion. So our friends, when
we go to them with things they offer us generally
idiot compassion, and that doesn't mean they're idiots. It means
(10:18):
that you say, listen to what happened this person did this,
or here's what happened at work, or here's what happened
with my boyfriend or my girlfriends, or here's what happened
with my mom, right, and we're like, yeah, they were wrong.
You're right, that's terrible. You go girl, right, you know
you deserve better. And we love our friends so much
that we truly believe that, like they're in the right
(10:40):
and the other persons are the wrong, until you listen
to your friends over time and you start to hear, oh,
maybe they keep having this kind of problem over and over.
It's kind of like if a fight breaks out and
every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. We don't
say that to our friends, right, because we we don't
think that's being supportive. A therapist offers not idiot compassion,
but wise compassion. And in wise compassion, we hold up
(11:04):
a mirror to you and we help you to see
something about yourself that maybe you haven't been willing or
able to see. And and the short way of saying
that is we help you edit your story so I
feel like, you know, I was a writer for a
long time before I became a therapist of soil writer,
and I used my writing every day in the therapy
room because I feel like people come in with this
faulty narrative, and what I'm helping them to do is
(11:25):
to say, wait a minute, here's where the story is stuck.
Here's the missing part of the story. Or look at
the protagonist. Why is the protagonist going in circles instead
of moving forward? Who are the heroes and who are
the villains? And is that really how it should be constructed?
Who are the minor characters? Who are the major characters?
Do we need to reshuffle those a little bit? And
So what therapy does is it gives you a really
(11:46):
good second opinion on your life from someone who isn't
already in your life. Yes, And you know, it's so
funny because I was thinking about the length of time
that we've known each other and like and when I
met you, you know, this was not your career path
at the time, and and I've loved watching the evolution
of you bringing all of the wisdom that you had
in your writing and still having your writing obviously, but
(12:08):
out into this different modality, and I think something happened
for me internally about five or six years ago. I
think in my work Larry kind of asked some similar questions,
and your writing has actually really helped inform those from me,
which is am I the object of somebody else's story?
Am I the subject of my own? And how am
I re centering the narrative differently? And we can talk
(12:29):
about who started it, mom, you know, relationship, you know,
diet culture or whatever it was, and that there's viable
critical thinking. They're right, But the real power that I've
experienced and exploring in these conversations has been how we can,
as you say, edit these stories and the power to
change these stories. And so I was really struck when
(12:51):
you were talking about your Ted talk, which beautifully is
called how changing your story can change your life. You
talked about folks that were really invested in the stuck
nous of the story, and you call them help rejecting complainers.
Let's talk about that a little bit, because I'm sure
all of us listening either identify that as ourselves or
know somebody who is really committed to keeping up a
(13:13):
dominant story or an inner dialogue that isn't serving them,
isn't very loving, helpful or kind. But they really don't
want to give that up. Why yeah, you know, they
don't want to give it up because change is hard.
Changing your view of yourself, your self identity is hard.
Any kind of change we make us hard. That's why
New Year's resolutions tend not to work right, because there
are all these stages of change, and I talk about
(13:34):
those in the book too, And it starts with pre contemplation,
where you don't even know that you're contemplating making a change.
And then there's contemplation where you're aware that you are
thinking about making a change, but you're not ready to
do it yet. And then there's preparation where you're starting
to prepare to make the change, but you're still not
making the change yet. And then there's action where you
actually make the change. And then the most important phase
(13:56):
of change is maintenance. And maintenance is how do we
maintain the change once we make it. And the big
misconception there is that people think that you make the change,
you're done and you can easily maintain it. No, no, no,
built into maintenances, you're gonna slip back, you're gonna be human.
Change is so hard, and change is so hard because
(14:17):
we lose the familiar. So even if the familiar is awful,
Let's say the familiar is the story you tell yourself
about yourself. And if all of a sudden you say, wait,
what if I let go of that story? Then you
might say, well, who the heck am I right? What
does that mean? Humans don't do well with uncertainty. We
would rather take the thing that we know, even if
it's terrible, then go into this unknown place where we
(14:38):
don't know. It's like you're plopped into this foreign land
where like you don't know the language, you don't know
the culture, you don't know your way around, you don't
know the people yet, and it's supposed to be better
than the place you were, and maybe it really is,
but it's really scary because it's unfamiliar. So these help
rejecting complainers, they're just going to complain about the same
thing over and over, and any time try to help
(15:01):
them by broadening the story, they're like, yeah, no, that
won't work because you know, I can't do that because right,
and so they've always got a reason and at a
certain point, the only thing you can do you start
to feel helpless, and you're like, Okay, well, then I
guess there's no way out of this, even though you
you see that there is a way out of this,
but they don't want a solution. They just want to
be stuck in place. And I also think about when
(15:24):
I've had experiences talking to people like that, I try
to rationalize and communicate with that inner dominant story, and
I always lose, right because it's just so ingrained and
so entrenched and so familiar and so comfy. What would
you suggest a person do if they're trying to get
through to a help rejecting complain or somebody who's not interested, Like,
(15:45):
what are the actions they can take too? I guess
also protect themselves in that energy, because that's very draining
to go round and round with somebody who says that
they want help but but really isn't open to to
hearing it. The best way to deal with because it
is very draining, is to agree with that is to say, well,
then I guess I guess that's how it is, because
(16:07):
then they have nothing to come back with right there, like,
and then what they do is it's really interesting because
then what they do is they go, oh, but wait, wait,
what do you mean there's nothing. I'm like, well, you
just said there's nothing you can do, so I guess
every suggestion I gave you you said it doesn't work,
So I guess I guess that's how it is. Now.
They're not sort of like holding onto their story. No
one's trying to take their story away from them, because
when you're arguing with them about it, they feel like
(16:28):
you're trying to take away my story. I don't want
to give it up. But if they start to say
maybe I'm ready to start editing the story a little bit,
and no one's making them do it, because they're gonna
fight with You're gonna say, you know, like, well wait
a minute, maybe I could do this. You're like, oh, okay,
right right, But that's interesting. So you actually acknowledge or
(16:49):
affirm where they are or that you know what they're
saying is okay, there might not be options, and then
see or allow them to have some movement to get
to a space of haunting that change that they're going
to also start to come up with some options and
what you can do. You don't have to agree with
them that there are no options. You can just reflect
back to them what they're saying that it sounds like
(17:09):
you've you've exhausted your options, or it sounds like you
feel like you've exhausted your options, or it sounds like
you feel like there's nothing you can do. Okay, and
then you just move on to a different topic, so
they don't keep the complaint going. And the reason people
do this it's a protective mechanism. So let's say that
someone says like, I can't go and find a partner, right,
and here's why, And they'll tell you all the reasons,
(17:29):
and some of them are very legitimate, Like it really
is hard, that's true. There's a lot of like bad
dates you have to go on, it's true. But really
they're protecting themselves from having to risk and put themselves
out there. And so that's the part of the story
they're missing that you know, is all of this other
stuff true? Yes, But does that preclude people from meeting
people though people do it every day in the world.
(17:52):
When you work with the help rejecting complainers. You said
something really funny in your ted talk where you tell
them we're all gonna die. I tell me a little
bit about that. Yeah, so I know it a little
more delicately than I did in my time talk. But basically,
you know what I do say to people is you
get one life, and when you look back, and the
(18:13):
one story that does get written about us is called
an obituary. And when you think about that obituary, what
do you want it to say? You know, do you
want it to look like just this was your life
and here's what happened, and then nothing changed and then
you died. Or do you want to say I'm living
on borrowed time. We are all living on borrowed time.
(18:34):
Life has a mortality rate, and that is not just
for other people. We like to believe it, but it's not.
And so when you start to realize that your time
here is limited, maybe you start to say, I might
want to have a different obituary. I might want to
have a different story of my life. There's this great
moment in my book, and maybe you should talk to
(18:55):
someone where I'm with my therapist and I'm being sort
of this person who's saying I'm stuck in there's no
way out, and I'm trapped, and you know, it's this
very common thing you see in therapy, and the person
expects the therapist by the way to solve it for them.
And yet we all have the answer, we just need
a witness and a guide to help us access it.
So he tells me, you know what, Laurie, you remind
me of this cartoon, and it's of a prisoner shaking
(19:18):
the bars desperately trying to get out. But on the
right and the left it's open, no bars. So the
question is, why don't we walk around those bars? Why
don't we even notice that it's open? And it's because
freedom is scary. With freedom comes responsibility. If we walk
around the bars, we are responsible for our lives. We
are responsible for writing that story. And sometimes we don't
(19:41):
want the responsibility. We'd rather say, you go write the
story and I'll just come along for the ride, even
though we actually don't like that. And sometimes we've been
modeled that behavior too. We've seen our parents do it,
our friends, do you know, We've seen a lot of
folks do it. The reason why I loved that We're
All Going to Die part personally is because I didn't
other podcast show called We're All Going to Die Anyway,
(20:02):
and I launched it during the pandemic, and I did
it because I had had a tremendous amount of personal
loss in my life, and I was very much coming
to the space of like everything you were saying, there
was this question that was coming to me, which was,
what is the life that you've always wanted to create
that you've avoided creating? And then the pandemic happens and
it validated even more so the urgency. I think behind
(20:23):
those questions, the fragility of life is more front and center.
I had personal loss during this period. I lost my
mother in law and my brother in law to COVID.
You know, we right at the beginning when we kind
of didn't understand how the world was going to play out.
I mean, in some ways we maybe still don't, but
there was a lot of reckoning around the reality of time.
(20:46):
And I'm curious how in this moment grief or loss
is playing a role in the stories that you tell
or the stories that you hear people tell around grief
and loss, Because something really big that came up was
the story was right with grief, I'm never going to
not feel sad or I don't know who I'm going
to be without this person, and those dominant stories rise
(21:07):
pretty significantly when we're grieving. Yeah, I think there are
two kinds of stories that people tell themselves around grief
and loss, and especially during the pandemic, And I think
that one of the stories is the one you were
just talking about. And there's a there's actually a patient
in my book named John who has this tragic loss
with his child, and he was saying, at one point,
(21:28):
you know, I thought I could never be happy again,
that I would never find joy again, I would never
smile again. And just a week after his child died,
he was playing a game with his other child and
he laughed, and he couldn't believe, like, who is this
person who is laughing? Like, my life is over? I
am devastated. Life as I knew it will never be
the same. And that is true, life as he knew
(21:50):
it will never be the same. But people do experience
joy they think they never will. You know. It's kind
of like when people are in the middle of a
deep clinical depression and I always say to them, you
are not the best person to talk to you about
you right now, right true, because they're thinking is so
distorted in that moment they cannot see beyond the perimeter
(22:13):
that they have put around themselves at that moment. And
the thing about grief two is other people the way
they treat it. They think you're supposed to like be
over it by a certain point or there's a time
limit on it. People move forward, but they don't necessarily
move on. And I think the moving forward is the
making meaning of the experience for you in your life
(22:34):
and integrating that experience into your life. It's not you know,
people will say, like, it's been two years, why is
this person still feeling this way? It's because that person
is still dead, right right, They're still dead. Um, So
I think that that's important. But the other the other
thing about grief and laws during the pandemic that I
noticed was people thought there was sort of supposed to
(22:54):
be this hierarchy of grief, right, or this hierarchy of
loss that if it wasn't loss of life, loss of income,
loss of health, that would ever kind of loss you experienced,
you could not talk about that it didn't make it
on that hierarchy. And I think it's really important for
people to understand that there are all kinds of losses
(23:16):
in our daily lives that we experience, and they they
long to be felt in order to kind of move
forward in the story, and there are all these silent
losses that people have all the time, Like someone had
a miscarriage, right, and then people say, oh, but they
didn't lose like an eight year old, you know, or
they So that's what I mean by this hierarchy that somehow,
(23:36):
you know, some losses get more attention or more compassion
than others. You know, it's like it was a breakup,
but it wasn't a divorce of a twenty year marriage,
but it still hurts. So I think that when we
tell the story of grief, to go back to stories,
the story is that life comes with a lot of loss,
and that I think it's really important that people are
(23:58):
compassionate around it and of people the space to experience it.
Do dominant stories or these inner stories, do they ever
go away completely or do we just get better tools
around them, or do they just shift into something that
feels less intense. I think it depends how much work
you do around the story. I think that there are
(24:19):
people who have these very deeply ingrained stories from childhood
about who they are that we're told to them by
bigger people around them, that they very much believed and internalized,
and those can be really intractable until you start to
understand a little bit more about the people who were
telling you those stories and why they were telling you
those stories, and to realize that those stories actually had
(24:42):
nothing to do with you. And that's the part that's
so liberating to realize, like, all these stories that were
told about me and told to me about me were
about the storyteller and not the subject of the story.
M H. I think people need to let that in, Like,
can you say at one more time that the stories
that were told to you they were about the storyteller
(25:06):
and not about the person in the story. That's a
heavy duty one to take on, I think, because anybody
who is surviving and working through childhood trauma and navigating
those stories that you know might have been told to them,
or issues that happened to the experiences that happen to
them that form those stories. It's so natural right for
(25:26):
a child to adapt to what's happened and make it
about themselves, like if I was better, my parents wouldn't
drink or fight, or they would be kinder to me,
or this wouldn't have happened to me. And I think
so many of us have grown up believing that we
could have some control over that story if we had
just changed ourselves. I have a podcast called Dear Therapists
(25:50):
where we do therapy sessions with people and then we
give them homework at the end and they have a
week to do it and they come back and tell
us how it went, so we can see how effective
the session was in shifting this story, because the story
that people come in with at the top of the
podcast is different from the story that they leave with,
just like a therapy session. And one that just came
to mind in particular was this guy who said his
(26:11):
father when he was young, he was so emotionally abusive
to him. He would tell him, You're stupid, you're worthless,
you know, all these stories that he really internalized, and
as an adult he had something to prove to the world,
not just to his to his father, but to the world,
like I am not stupid, I am worthy. And even
(26:32):
though he like married this wonderful person and has his
wonderful kids and is so successful in his life and
in a meaningful way and does meaningful things in the world,
that story was still there. And in the session with him,
we talked about how he's still at war, he's still
in this war with his father, and that the war
is over. He doesn't realize that he's been freed. Peace
(26:54):
has come, and he doesn't realize it yet. It was
so such a revelation for him to say, oh, wow,
wait a minute, it's peace time. The war is over.
I have nothing to prove to this man or to
the world at large. M And and it really changed
the way he started interacting with his wife, and it
changed the way he started interacting with his kids, and
(27:16):
it changed the way he started interacting with himself. The
way that he saw himself had shifted. And so I
think sometimes we don't even know that that narrative is
still in there, that little voice is still in there,
and it's not our voice, it's someone else's. Alrighty, I
(27:37):
called time out. Let's take a short break and listen
to these messages. You know what I need. I need
more of this epic conversation. Let's go. I wanted to
(28:00):
kind of talk about what people can do. So we've
talked a lot about like recognizing these stories, the impact,
the shifting that they can have in our life, the
way we can operate from those stories. But when somebody
has recognized that there fighting a narrative or repeating a
story that they don't want anymore. What are the steps
to start to replace that, Lorie, to start to reaffirm
(28:23):
a different narrative. Because we talked about changes hard, and
that's why some folks are stuck in their stories. But
what if you've got a willing, right participant who's like, okay,
I'm ready, I'm ready to shift this story. What do
those steps look like? There are a few. One is
that when you start to notice that voice that's not yours,
(28:43):
that's that old storyteller to really take ownership of your
own story, that you start to notice it, and you know,
like like I was saying with my client, right, that
story of oh, you're so stupid, right, And so when
you notice yourself doing that just on your own in
the world, what would a benevolent storyteller say in that moment?
(29:04):
How would the story sound different? And the more that
you can start to own your own story and not
let somebody else write your story. We want to create
our own autobiography. Yeah, and you want an autobiography that's accurate.
And so that's where therapy comes in, is, you know,
how can you help to get some of those faulty
narratives adjusted a little bit, make them more accurate, get
(29:25):
a little more clarity on where they come from. What
does my story actually look like? In November, we're putting
out a workbook too. Maybe you should talk to someone,
and the whole workbook is about rewriting your story. It
takes people through the process. I love that so much.
I can't wait to get my hands on that workbook.
And I love that you talked about summoning sort of
a benevolent narrator, because what I've been advised in my
(29:48):
practice and my healing has been to show up to
be the voice I want to have with this little
girl inside, or this younger woman inside, or even just
this person now, like, how would I handle this with
my own benevolence? And I actually practice saying out loud,
I almost combat the dominant story. So, for instance, the
other day, I was literally getting into my car heading
(30:10):
into a meeting, and I remember something had gone really
awry in the morning, a dynamic I didn't like in
the program of my day, and I was really ansy about, like,
it's not gonna work out today. It's not gonna work
out today. That was my dominant story. Right, like you
know this is gonna go wrong, it's not gonna work out.
And I literally had to disrupt or interrupt that moment.
(30:30):
Literally I was opening my car, was getting in I
over and over almost like a mantra, was like, whatever
happens today, I'm gonna be okay. Whatever happens today, I've
got what I need. Whatever happens toda, I'm gonna be
able to handle it. Like and I know it sounds
like and sometimes when I say it, I'm like, it's
sounds for people who get it like a little Stewart Smalley,
But for me it was so important because the repetition,
the kindness, that compassion and action was really important for
(30:52):
me because conceptually I understood that to be necessary and important,
but I needed to know, like what does that feel
like in my voice, in my body, what happens and
for me somatically, like I breathe differently, I do start
to calm down. It's like I soothed myself with those words.
And so that might not be for everybody, but I
know for me it's been one way to almost take
(31:13):
what's been on my page, in my in my worksheets
and and bring it into my everyday life. Right, And
what you're talking about is what people do so often,
which is they generalize a story. So something didn't go
well in the morning. Oh, the whole day is ruined.
In fact, my whole life is probably ruined. Just give
me a second, I'll get there. Yeah, exactly. So that's
that's the generalization. And you know, that's the futurizing or
(31:35):
catastrophizing we call that where you like, you make up
a story about something that hasn't happened yet and may
never happen, and you've turned it into a catastrophe. It's fiction.
It hasn't happened yet, so you just made it up.
You could make up another story. So we're talking about
how to counteract that. Make up a different story. What's
a story where actually things turn out okay later today,
(31:58):
but we don't tell ourselves that story. If we've a
choice between two stories, like I'm unlovable or I'm lovable,
and you have evidence for both, right, which one do
we believe? We believe the one that makes us feel bad,
that's what we do. We make up the story with
the unhappy ending. And so there's always a different story
that you can tell, but especially about the future. The
(32:21):
thing about the future is it hasn't happened yet, So
why even make up a story. You can just experience
it and see what happens. Mhm. Have you when when
you're at a place of rewriting, when when you've seen
your patients really master a new narrative for themselves and
and and start to craft that, what have you seen
(32:42):
change or happen? Differently, if we know that it could
change our life, what does that changing of our life?
Because I don't want people to also glamorize or imagine
potentially right like a movie montage where all of a sudden,
like everything is rainbows and sprinkles, but like, how what
does that actually look like? In reality? I think that
we navigate through the world much more smoothly. And what
(33:05):
I mean by that is that, um, you have a
disagreement with somebody and you see it from a much
more accurate perspective. The story you tell yourself about that
disagreement sounds very different. It doesn't take up so much
emotional real estate. And you also have fewer of those
disagreements because you're not telling all kinds of stories that
(33:26):
get you into trouble in your head. It looks like
being more clear about what gives you purpose and meaning
because you're not telling yourself all kinds of stories that
hold you back. It means not self sabotaging because the
story that you're telling yourself is a story that scares you.
In the podcast that's up today, in fact, the guy
(33:48):
who's on who's our guest and is going through a
session with us, the story that he was telling himself
was that nobody would want to be with him long
term in a monogamous relationship, that eventually he's going to
bore them, eventually they're going to leave. But then he's
with someone who loves him, who's completely trustworthy, and what
does he do. He sabotages the whole thing because it's
(34:10):
kind of like, you know, you can't fire me, I
quit m hm. So that's when you asked what does
it do for people? What it would do for someone
like this to change the story is it would make
him not sabotage something really good when it comes into
his life. I love that. You know you talked about
before the role of family and how a lot of
times if those early stories are are coming from our
(34:32):
family about us and to us, you know, we know
that dominant stories can get passed down almost like a
legacy in families. You can hear some of the same
stories right generation generation. I you know, knew you before
Zach was in this world, and I've obviously, you know,
been so inspired and excited to see who he's emerging
(34:54):
to be as a young human on this planet and
as a young man. And we're gonna bring Zack on
and a Szack. But before we get there, I wanted
to talk about you and your transition into motherhood knowing
what you know and doing the work that you do,
and how conscious or cognizant were you of making of
talking intentionally around these stories. Did you have conversations like
(35:18):
this with Zach as you were raising him? I mean
somebody I always imagine folks listening in are like, how
are you approaching motherhoo? Did you have stories about being
a mother? You know where you like, oh, ship, my
story is like I'm not going to be a great
mom like or whatever that is, Like what came up
for you if you don't mind sharing about like the
stories you told and maybe the way that you were
intentionally focused on having those conversations with Zach. I think
(35:40):
that you know in my history and I've written about
this that I always thought I'm going to do things
differently than my mother did, and then you have a
kid and you're like, oh my god, I'm doing some
of the same things that she did. And I always
promised myself I would not. But the difference is that
the story of my childhood was things didn't get talked
about in a meaningful way, and the story of Zach's
(36:02):
childhood is that even though you know I'm not a
perfect mother, nobody is that. There's rupture and repair. So
we know how to talk about it, we know how
to repair it, we know how to say, hey, I'm
really sorry, here's what happened. Just now we can talk
about feelings in our house. So for for Zach, it's
interesting because he was this kid who grew up with
a therapist mom. And I don't act like a therapist
(36:23):
at all as mother, but my heir is feelings. My
air is keeping things in the open, and so the
air in our household is always like, we talk about it.
That's just been his experience. He didn't know that there
are families where people don't talk about things. And I'm
really glad I think that that will give him the
skills that he needs for the relationships that he is
(36:47):
you know, has now and moves into as right now.
He's fifteen and and we don't get taught that in school. Yes,
the most important thing you can learn is how can
I love and be loved? And that means not only
with others, but how can I love myself? Up. There's
this idea you know that I was talking about earlier,
that there are people are afraid of their feelings instead
of using them like a compass. People say like, there
(37:08):
are negative feelings and positive feelings, Like a positive feeling
is joy, and a negative feeling might be sadness or anxiety,
or anger or even envy. No, I always say, like,
follow your envy. It tells you what you want. It
tells you something about desire. Does your anger mean that
you need to set more boundaries? Is that what it's
telling you? Does your anxiety means something has to change
that you're making a decision that you really don't feel
(37:28):
comfortable with. Does your sadness mean that something's not working
in your life? Right? And what is that so you
can do something different? Our feelings are like a compass.
They tell us what direction to go, and if we
don't pay attention to them, it's like walking around with
a faulty GPS. You have no idea where you're going.
I love that, And there's an emotional fluency that you
end up creating. And I can see that you've established
(37:51):
that with with Zach, especially in the work that he's doing.
So I want to we'll talk about that in a second,
but I'm curious, at what age do you, you know,
start talking about the rewriting of stories or the editing
to use your language? Is that even? Is that a
term that Zach knows from from growing up, and how
did you introduce that? Well? I think it started very
early on when I noticed that the culture was telling
(38:13):
a very different story than I wanted him to hear.
Anytime I would see little boys cry at the park,
and I would see like maybe their fathers or even
sometimes their mothers say like, oh, you're fine, you're fine,
don't cry, or you know, they were upset because someone
else got to go on the slide first or something,
and it's like you can say to that kid, oh,
I know, you're really upset that you didn't get to
go first, and then hey, let's you know, wait in
(38:34):
line and go, you know, whatever it is. But to
just acknowledge that the feeling is valid and it exists
and it's okay to feel that, and then kids know
what to do with those feelings. Kids are always talked
out of their feelings. Like a kid will say I'm sad,
and the parent who's really uncomfortable because you don't want
your kids to feel sad, well then say, oh, you know,
don't be sad. Hey, let's go get some frozen yogurt.
(38:56):
Let's go to Disneyland, right, you know I supposed to like,
let's talk about why you're sad. Or they'll say like,
I'm really scared. And you hear parents all the time
say like, oh, don't worry about that, there's nothing to
be scared of. It's like, but they're actually scared, right,
And so the message that kids get is, oh, there
are certain feelings that I am not allowed to talk
about because they're bad. They're bad to feel, they're bad
(39:18):
to talk about as opposed to just they're just a
normal part of life. So with Zach, I always tried
to be like he's mad, he's sad, he's anxious, whatever,
let's give it some air, let's talk about it. I
love that. I think emotions are energy in motion. They
need to move through your body, they need to come out.
I love, love, love this concept. And Zach is doing
something I think really quite important for his generation in
(39:42):
his community and using his medium, which we're going to
get to talk about in a second. So I want
to take a quick break, and I want Lorie to
stick around because we're gonna bring her incredible fifteen year
old son, Zack on in just a moment. Hey, hey,
we're back. Now, let's get into our convot. As a guy,
(40:13):
you know a lot of times and I've had emotions.
People have told me to like man not as if
like having feelings and all things it's bad, but it's
really not. In fact, hiding your feelings is horrible for
your mental health and means all sorts of serious problems
down the world. So don't had a feeling, guys. That
(40:35):
was a clip from Zach's Instagram page Talk with Zack,
where he talks about toxic masculinity and boys emotions and
he answers questions from teens. We have Zach here with
us now, Hey, Zach, welcome, Thanks for having me I'm
really excited to do this, Zack. I'm curious as you
listen back to that, tell me a little bit more
(40:55):
about the origins of Talk with Zach. What made you
want to create a platform for this kind of topic
in particular? So during COVID, I was noticing that a
lot of times, like the media was telling kids to
talk about their mental health, but I noticed that it
was especially difficult for boys. And the reason why that was,
(41:15):
or I think is because from a very young age,
men and boys are told to like sort of toughen
up and like be strong and not like talk about
what they're feeling. Like a year ago, my my grandpa
passed away and I was really close to them, so
I was like upset about that, and one of the
things I heard was like sort of like man up
and like be strong things like that and like pushed through.
(41:38):
But I feel like it's important to like recognize their feelings,
you know. And one of the things I'm trying to
do is just like raise awareness about that, because the
only way to really change that is to start talking
about it. What kind of feedback did you get from that,
What kind of comments or questions or feedback from your
friends listening or others listening. Did you get from introducing topic?
(42:01):
You know, a lot of people are like, wow, like
I've been thinking the same thing, and like I've really
wanted to talk about my feelings, um, but I just
feel like I can't, And this video shows me that
I'm not alone. I'm curious if you notice different kinds
of questions coming from different sorts of folks. Some people
are struggling with like coming out, and some people are
(42:21):
talking about like how do you deal with a breakup?
So yeah, it's like a broad range. Do you ever
go to your mom to talk through some of those answers,
because that's also like some heavy duty topics to know
how to navigate through them. Curious where you get, where
you get your support as a team, Like I sort
of like know what will resonate with my friends, and
(42:42):
I know what resonates with me, so I really like
look for those and pick them out. My mom is
obviously an adult UM and she was a teen um
not so recently. I don't want to make it seem
like you sound old, but you know, times have changed
a lot. He doesn't act like it's it's sort of
the opposite where I've gone to him with like my
(43:03):
Dear Therapist column and I will see them just because
it's about fluency and feelings. Like I will say to him,
like what do you think this person should do? Right?
But when teens write to him, he knows much better
than I do what's going to resonate with them. I
love that it is true. And also these things are
so universal still, right the issues that we a lot
of the stuff that your mom and I dealt with
(43:24):
is young people still exist. It's just that you also
have this you know, you have this other world now
where you have an audience in a way that I
didn't have an audience when I was growing up. Yeah, definitely,
I was a little nervous at first, but I'm really
glad that like people have really responded about to this.
I think the timing is really important too. You know,
there's a twenty nineteen study that I often quote a
(43:46):
lot from p Research that's tracking about nine percent of
teens that say that depression and anxiety in their community
has become more of an issue, especially during COVID. A
lot of those feelings have become exacerbated. Lorie, would you
say that you're seeing that too? Across like patient conversations
that some of those you know pre existing conditions, and
(44:07):
that anxiety and depression can really ratchet up during a
time like this. Yeah, it can, But I also feel
like people who have dealt with depression and anxiety often
have tools to deal with it, and the people who
were not used to it struggled in a different way
because they really didn't know. Okay, here's what's helpful, Here's
what I can do, here's how I can manage this.
I would say for teens, when I'm seeing in Zack's generation,
(44:29):
and I think Zach can speak to this, is just
how much pressure there is on teens. We had a
sixteen year old girl who wrote into our Dear Therapist
podcast and we did a session with her, and she
was talking about the pressure of achieving and succeeding an
identity and what does that mean, you know, if if
your whole identity is wrapped up in a number on
a test or a grade or what college you get into.
(44:53):
And I know that Zach gets a lot of he
gets a lot of questions in his anonymous form that
he has on his talk quizac Instagram, this question of
you know, people are really feeling the pressure. Kids are
really stressed out. Yeah, do you feel that, Zack? Yeah, yeah,
I feel like, especially like in high school, there's so
(45:14):
many pressures, Like there's academic pressure, which like is so bad,
like right now, it has gotten so much worse, like
over the years. And on top of that, there's social media. Yeah,
and and they're good things about social media, like communication
and talking to friends and all that, but there are
also a lot of things that make people really insecure
(45:37):
about themselves and feel really bad about themselves. Well, you're representing,
i think, a really positive part of the internet. I'm curious, Zach.
It's special. I think the upbringing you've had with a
mom who is you know, said to me earlier that
emotions were like air. That was her air, like getting
emotions out. And about what's something great that you think
your mom did for you in helping to kind of
(45:59):
create eight more emotional fluency or like a connection to
your feelings, Like is there one or two things that
come to mind that you think, like, I'm really glad
you did that, mom. I feel like just like creating
environment or like talking about feelings is okay. I'm probably
talking about my feelings more than I want to, which
(46:21):
in some some cases can be a good thing. So
I feel like, yeah, I feel like that is something
I'm grateful for. If you could give a piece of
advice to somebody listening right now who might want to
open up a conversation like this with their kids, what
would be one effective thing that they could do. Mind
(46:42):
place for a parent wanting to open up. Two, make
sure that your kid knows that it's like a safe
space and that they could come to you with anything.
How do you know if it's a safe space, Like,
how do kids feel it's a safe space? Could you
talk a little about that. If you feel like your
parents gonna have a huge reaction and you're going to
(47:02):
get in trouble and you know it's just going to
be like a whole thing, then you're not really going
to want to open up. But if you know that,
if you're open and honest that you're going to have
a discussion about it, you're gonna have a conversation that
can really help too. Got it, And Lorie, what would
you say? I think to those that are listening, if
(47:24):
they're dominant story in the past has been like I'm
not good at talking about my own feelings. How am
I going to teach my kid to talk about? There's like,
what's something you think we could leave people with today
to think about passing down the legacy of challenging and
changing dominant stories. What's something good for folks to remember?
I would change that story from I'm not good about
(47:45):
talking about my feelings too. I don't have a lot
of practice talking about my feelings. And then what do
you do with that? Well, you practice. One thing I
want to really emphasize, and I think that Zach has
taught me. You know, I've learned so much by being
his mom mom, And one thing that he's taught me
is that it doesn't have to always happen in one conversation,
that you don't have to get it right in every conversation.
(48:08):
I mess up all the time. But the point is
then we come back and we have a different conversation.
Just knowing that to say to yourself, I didn't get
a lot of practice doing this, and I experience a
lot of discomfort. But I don't want to pass my
discomfort around feelings onto my child. So I'm going to
take a leap of faith and I am going to practice,
and I'm not going to hold myself to some standard
(48:30):
where I have to get it right every time. And
by the way, there really is no right having the
conversation is doing it right no matter what that conversation
looks like. But I think what Zack said is so
important that if you go to your parents and your
parents freaks out, you're not going to go to your parents.
And so it's not just making space for your kids feelings,
but knowing that you need to manage your own feelings.
So if you have a reaction to something that your
(48:52):
kids says, you've really got to work on what is
going on for me internally. So I don't project that
onto my child because they're going to shut down practice
and not perfection on this for sure. Um, Zach, where
can listeners go to learn more about what you're up
to in the world. Listeners can check out my instagram
it's at Talk with Zach done a little bit of
(49:15):
tick talk too. It's also talk with Zach there. And
I'll be announcing more opportunities with my website as they
come and then your future. Thank you so much, And Lori,
where can listeners go to learn more? To get their
hands on that new workbook? They can get the workbook
anywhere they buy their books. They can go to an
independent bookseller, they can go to Amazon, Bards and Noble.
(49:35):
Wherever they get their books, they can get the Maybe
you should talk to someone workbook companion to the book.
Maybe you should talk to someone amazing. I feel so
honored to have this conversation with both of you. Thank
you so much. Oh, thank you so much for the conversation.
I always love talking with you. Yes, likewise, likewise, thanks Zach,
It's so nice to meet you. Yeah, thanks so much.
(49:56):
I really enjoyed this. Ah so much wisdom from Lori
and from Zach. I think something that's going to stick
with me for a while is when Laurie said that
if we're wrestling with those dominant stories, if we're thinking
about things we might have been told about ourselves as
a child, for example, to really remember that the stories
(50:21):
we were told about ourselves are really about the storyteller,
They're not about us. Just think about that the stories
we were told about perhaps our worthiness, our loveability, our appearance.
Even when people are telling you a story about you,
it's likely really about them. Also, something that really stuck
(50:42):
out for me is the rewriting our stories. So when
we are stuck in that loop of dominant stories and
negative self talk, try to imagine what a benevolent storyteller
might say in that moment, Somebody who's a little kinder,
a little bit more compassionate, perhaps a little bit more
of active. Introducing that benevolent storyteller and interrupting that dominant
(51:05):
story can be one way to start to rewrite yours.
And then I think both Lori and Zach said this
really well. These things in our lives that we want
to change, they only start changing when we talk about them.
So remember it's all about practice and not perfection. Let's
practice talking more about these nuanced and sometimes complicated stories.
And then maybe I'll make one more plug, which is therapy. Baby.
(51:29):
It has worked for me. I know it may not
be for everybody, but I do want to encourage if
you need to talk to somebody, I really really support
you in doing that. If you want to learn more
(51:50):
about dominant stories and how you can challenge and change them,
you can join me for a workshop learn more at
Jess Weener dot com or you can follow me on
Instagram that I'm Jess we Ner. I love that we're
building a community around this conversation, and if you'd like
to tell us about your Dominant stories and how you're challenging, changing,
and rewriting them, we'd love to hear from you. You
(52:10):
can do that in two ways. You can email us
at podcast at Dominant stories dot com. We're already getting
some great stories from y'all, or you can leave us
a voicemail at two one three nine three zero three three.
And don't worry if he didn't write this down, I'm
gonna put all this information in the show notes. Next
week we're gonna be speaking with actor Debbie Ryan, going
(52:33):
from a child star to now directing her own shows.
Debbie is rewriting her definition of success and she's opening
up about fame, identity, and the real power of influence.
Thank you so much, and don't forget to write a
review wherever you're listening. It's super duper helps us out,
(52:54):
and remember always learning, always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess
Winer is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit
(53:18):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com