Happiness, the New Way – Joe Hudson with Stephanie Harrison

Stephanie: One of the problems that we have is we think that a happy life is a life where you'll never be sad or never struggle. It's more so about that broad sense of my life is meaningful. My life has purpose. 

Brett: Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.

Joe: Hey everybody, it's Joe, and we're here today with Stephanie Harrison who wrote a book called The New Happy, and I have been a fan of her Instagram account. I just think the illustrations and the care and conscientiousness has put into the account has always been something that's fascinated me. And so we're having her on the program to talk about her new book. The book is called The New Happy. And my first question is, Stephanie, anything you wanna say about yourself before we get started? And then I have, then I'll have my first question. 

Stephanie: No you've done a beautiful job. Just ask away, ask me your questions. I can't wait. 

Joe: Okay. First, what made you write a book on happiness? What was the personal reason for writing a book on happiness? 

Stephanie: I think because I knew very deeply what it was like to be unhappy, and it was that personal unhappiness and misery that eventually compelled me to wanna study the topic to figure out what I was doing so wrong and where I had gone astray in my life.

And then ultimately, the more that I learned, the more that I wanted to share. But it really was kicked off with my own experiences of suffering. 

Joe: And can you go into details about what those experiences, like, how bad did it get? What was the bottom like? 

Stephanie: Yeah, I think, it was first really triggered by my experiences when I was in my early twenties.

I was living in New York City, which was my life dream. I had my dream job, I had this lovely apartment. I had everything I had ever wanted in many ways, and yet I was experiencing so much pain. It started with physical pain. So I started coming down with these rashes that would cover my whole body and my face and they were, agonizingly painful. They always came on when it was hot out and, these like really humid New York City summers and I was so embarrassed and ashamed of it that I would be wearing, turtlenecks and long sleeves in 90 degree heat trying to cover myself up because to know what was going on, and no doctor really could give me anything that would fix it. Ironically, a lot of what the doctors gave me actually made it worse, like the creams and all that kind of stuff. So I had no idea what was going on there. 

And then I started feeling a lot of emotional pain and suffering and having panic attacks at work or when I was driving in my car, commuting to the client I was working at the time. I started feeling an overwhelming sense of despair and sadness and it never really left me, no matter what I did. And I just tried to distract myself and, forge on and persevere and all of that fun stuff and it never really worked. And eventually, one night I had a breakdown and found myself lying on my bedroom floor crying. And it was at that moment that I actually was fortunate to have a kind of moment of clarity amidst the chaos, like the eye of the storm and thinking, something must be wrong here in the way that I'm living my life and I wonder what it is. And up until that moment, I had never questioned anything about what I was doing. I had never reflected on, hey, maybe these choices you're making aren't actually contributing to what you think you want or what you're trying to experience. And that little kind of moment of clarity was ultimately what sort of set me on this journey of trying to better understand happiness and wellbeing. 

Joe: Yeah. Our stories aren't too different that way. I was doing international stock lending, gosh, 1996 or something like that. I think I'm significantly older than you. And breaking out in hives. I was working 12 hours a day, making a tremendous amount of money for my age but absolutely miserable. I think as soon as I broke out in hives, I was like, yeah, this is done. 

Stephanie: Something has to change. 

Joe: We were like moving billions of dollars around every day. It was like this very crazy high stress situation and I was just like, yeah, this is not gonna work. 

Stephanie: Wow. 

Joe: For me, and I quit everything and moved out to the desert and recorded an album out of all weirdness to do. But that was, I think we have a similar story in that. Yeah. 

Stephanie: That's amazing.

Your job sounds way more stressful than mine, so kudos to you. I would've broken under that pressure, but I think it's interesting, isn't it, how it happens, like these moments that are so transformational. To me they often are related to these moments of suffering when you can attend to it and notice the pain and actually try to identify the messages that are within it. They hold these amazing treasures but of course I could never have really seen that at the time. 

Joe: Yeah. It's funny, I just did a Twitter post and I basically say, how do you drop a hot frying pan? All you have to do is feel it and you're gonna drop the hot frying pan. If you wanna drop bad habits, you just need to feel them, is the Twitter post. And I got more backlash from that Twitter post, I think, than almost any others. Like I had to block a couple people from the account because a lot of people were so offended that like their identity of an addict or their identity in the bad habit could be dropped just by feeling the pain. And it was interesting, like people get religious about politics and their food, but they also get religious about like the pain that they identify themselves with. 

Stephanie: I have noticed that as well. That's fascinating. I think, you're so right, and isn't most behavior in that way, a way to avoid the pain, right? Like addiction is a way to avoid dealing with the pain. And, burrying ourselves in work was my way of avoiding dealing with the pain and all of that stuff. And yeah, to suggest that you, face it is, I think, really scary for a lot of people and goes against so much of what they've had to armor themselves with over time.

Joe: Okay, so now I know that you have the three things about the old way of being happy in your book and the new way, so I don't want that answer, but we can go into that in a moment. What I would love is like a slightly different answer. So at the time when you realize that you were in this pain, you were suffering, you were breaking out in rashes, what was it about like right now, my guess is you could go and do that job again and not be miserable. Maybe you would still be miserable in that job, but not as miserable. Like your mental framing has changed. What is it that made it so hardcore for you, like the inner voice in your head, the inner critic, what was it telling you that you believed that made this shit so hard? 

Stephanie: I think that it was the inner critic, the voice in my head was saying, what the hell's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Why can't you figure this out? Why can't you hack it? Everyone else seems to be fine. Everyone else on your, all of the other people who are hired along with you are doing a great job and they seem happy and they're being successful and why? Why are you the one who's broken? That's probably like the deep down message that was creating so much pain for me.

Joe: Yeah. So it was the assumption that you were broken? The assumption that other people weren't broken. It was comparative mind. And it was also that you're supposed to be doing something. There's like this subtle, we teach something called the question the assumption, and one of the assumptions in all that is that you were supposed to be productive for some reason as if that was gonna make you a good person or something. 

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. If I could just figure out all of the, magical ingredients and assemble them into this stew, then I would finally figure out, the secret to pulling it all together. And the idea that there's something wrong with you as a person is so deeply painful, especially when you are put in an environment without the tools or the resources or support to know that might not be true. That maybe you're just somebody who's having a hard time or maybe you're not in the right environment and this place isn't the best fit for you. Or as you saying you like you have these beliefs that are driving you that need to be examined in some way. And for me, the core pain was in the kind of the experience that, oh I must be flawed and broken deep down. 

Joe: Yeah. So that's where our work really, I think, has the most overlap is in the deeper courses that we do. We talk about our inherent goodness and but our entire approach isn't self-improvement, it's self awareness. Our thought process is just the idea, self-improvement is shame inducing. It starts with the idea that there's something wrong with you. Self-awareness starts with the idea that there's nothing wrong with you, and the more you understand yourself, the more it works and it's just a matter of not understanding. And I think, so let's talk about the three things about, you say the old idea of happiness has these three fallacies. I think just generally there's fallacies that prevent happiness. But what would you what are those three things? And I think the first one we've discussed, but, go in, go into them a little bit if you'd like. 

Stephanie: Yeah, of course. So the first is as we've talked about, you're not enough. There's something wrong with you, which I think is really at the core of all of this and then builds off into these other things.

The second is that you have to achieve certain goals or pursue a certain outcome in your life in order to be happy. And then the third is that you have to do it all by yourself. You can never struggle. You can never lean on other people. You can never ask for help. And if you do, it means that you're weak and not worthy, which then takes you right back around to the beginning, into the cycle of trying to prove that you're good enough through our society's culture of achievement, which then contributes to aloneness and loneliness, and then again creates this pattern that I personally found myself stuck in and know that many other people do as well. 

Joe: Yeah. So let's go to the second one for a moment.

The achievement, back then, when you put yourself in the, rash New York City turtleneck era, what were you doing it for? What were you telling yourself you were doing it for, all the achievement? 

Stephanie: Yeah, really, like it was to be perfect, like I thought it was to be as perfect as I possibly could.

And of course, no matter what I did, never got close to being perfect. And part of that idea of perfection for me was grounded in achievements and the things that I was supposed to do in my life and the work and the progress that I was supposed to make there, and the way that my life was supposed to look to other people.

So the pursuit of these achievements became something that I used as a way to justify my self worth or to ground it in that, as though it was a fluctuating thing of, if I got the promotion that I wanted, then I'd be good enough, but then it very quickly, obviously it would lapse back to, you're not good enough anymore, keep going. 

Joe: And what was perfection gonna get you? 

Stephanie: Happiness. 

Joe: So, yeah. Which I think is the, what I see with a lot of people, they think that happiness has to be achieved or earned or you have to be improved or something to that effect.

Stephanie: Yeah. It goes, yeah, it goes. I love what you're saying about your philosophy of self-improvement, because as you're describing it, if I can just improve myself into a more perfect person, then I'll be happy. It's almost there's this kind of dark side to the natural and wonderful quest to grow as a person can be very warped if you're not mindful of how you're approaching it.

Joe: Yeah. The way I think about it is like a, like an oak tree. That acorn is perfect and the young sproutling is perfect, and the full grown tree is perfect, like meaning that growth is part of our nature, it's our evolution. If we understand ourselves, then we grow naturally. It feels like the idea that we have to put effort into the growth is to some degree there, there feels like effort or there's like maybe leaning into difficult feelings, et cetera, et cetera, that are required. But the idea that like if you don't really try, you won't grow, I think is a fallacy in itself. 

Stephanie: Yeah. I love that metaphor. That's absolutely beautiful. And I agree with you. I think about, there was this theory from I think it was Carl Rogers that he called the OVP, the Organismic Valuing Process, which basically said that humans are naturally and instinctively motivated to grow and to move towards the things that matter most to them, that help them to express themselves and to stay aligned with their values. And really it's about clearing away the stuff that's in the way so you can grow. 

Joe: Yeah. You wanna hear something crazy? Now, I don't know if this is true, but there's a guy I know who worked with Carl Rogers apparently and I facilitated something with him like way back at this place called 1440 and he told me this story that Carl Rogers would have 500 people come into a room. 

It would be for this transformational weekend and he'd have 26 different like facilitators there and they just wouldn't do anything. And then eventually people would complain and bitch and the facilitators would come by and they'd be like, yeah, I really hear that you want us to start? I really hear that you're frustrated right now. Just give them unconditional love and make them feel deeply heard in their suffering. 

Stephanie: Wow. 

Joe: And he would, that's all they would do for three days. 

Stephanie: Wow. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. 

Joe: I do some intense shit at our retreats, no doubt, but that I just, I wanna try that out at some point. 

Stephanie: I really want you to, and I would like to be a participant so I can be on the other side and then we can have a debrief after, because I can picture the pain that, that would cause the participants. That's absolutely incredible. 

Joe: Yeah. It's the theory, however, is exactly what we do. And everything that we do is our job as facilitators is to hear people and give unconditional love to them. Because when that happens, the way I look at it is like, all the boils come to the surface, pop and heal just underneath that light. It's how we try to approach almost everything we do.

Stephanie: That's beautiful. Wow. 

Joe: Okay, the third one, can you remind us of the third one again? 

Stephanie: Yeah. You have to do everything by yourself. You're separate from other people, you're not connected to anyone or anything. 

Joe: Yeah. So this one is interesting for me because you have some studies on loneliness that you quote and, tell me what you like for you. What's the upshot of what you've learned about loneliness? 

Stephanie: I am really passionate about the topic of loneliness because I think that there's a lot that we're missing about it and a lot of different approaches that I think would be really powerful for people.

And the first one is that if you fundamentally believe deep down that you are an island, that you're separate from everybody else, then in many ways that I think you're always gonna have a pervasive sense of loneliness that sticks with you and clings to you in some way, even if it's at a low level. Because you believe yourself to be completely separate from others. And so at the end of the day, what only matters is what you do for yourself. And you can't really rely upon anyone else. No one's gonna show up for you, and no one will be there to help you when you need it. And that feeling is very vulnerable and very, I think terrifying, like vulnerable in a really scary way for people because what do you have to do? You have to build up your fortress of the self in order to overcome that, right? You have to earn enough money to always be able to take care of yourself or you have to earn enough power to be able to make things happen, even when people don't wanna cooperate with you. You have to always be prepared for the worst case scenario and know that you can be there to do something for yourself 'cause no one else will be there for you. And that extreme self-reliance that underpins a lot of our culture is, I think, really harmful for people and creates a lot of pain, and that to me is one of the contributors to our sense of loneliness and something that we have to reckon with if we wanna overcome it.

Joe: Yeah. The longest study that Harvard ever did is all about what makes people you know about it I'm assuming? 

Stephanie: Yeah. 

Joe: Basically it's saying that sense of community, that sense of togetherness is a huge part of what makes us healthy, physically and happy. And so my experience in lonely with this particular kind of loneliness, there's a depressed loneliness, which I think is somewhat different, but the, especially the loneliness that you experienced, my thing is that, that kind of self-reliant, super hyper achiever, loneliness, often comes from a parenting, like a parenting technique where we're taught that has happened. An example would be, I was with a parent the other day and this child came, two, 3-year-old, came scared. I'm scared mom. And okay, you need to be a big girl. 

It's like that kind of I'm not gonna be emotionally with you, is the, like that underpinning of, oh, I'm alone in this. Because to some degree that is what we're telling kids these days. My question to you is so we could call it culture, we could also call it the way that we're parented. My question to you is like how do you see those two things related, if at all? And what do you think, what is it about specifically the culture that you see creates that sense of loneliness if it isn't from the parenting? 

Stephanie: I think parenting is one contributor, but it also comes from, media, from institutions that we participate in, from the schools and the way that we're conditioned in terms of how we perform and what we do in order to get praise. So parenting is one of those that's, I think it's really hard for us to contemplate oh, this is the, my child is the person I love most in the world and the ways in which I'm communicating my beliefs that are below my level of awareness, which I in turn got from the culture, from my parents, or from whatever it is, could end up hurting them in the future. That feeling of, parents want their children to be self-sufficient, right? They want them to be able to navigate the challenges in their lives. They want them to be resilient and to bounce back from challenges and if all they know is the school of thought that says just buck up and do it yourself and like hide your emotions away and pull it together and then they teach that through those little moments like you're talking about, you're totally right. As a kid, you learn what you have to do, keep it all inside. Don't share it with anyone. If you do, they might leave you. They might think you're weak, they might not love you anymore, and what could be worse than that? 

Joe: Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. It's like we're teaching, the intention is to teach children how not to be abandoned and then yet we're teaching them that they're always abandoned.

Stephanie: Yeah and that their emotions are, something that's wrong with them again. So once again, if you're by yourself all the time, this is how I feel when I think about this for myself. So it might be different for you or for anyone listening, but it's like for me, if my emotions are too much for somebody, or they violate some unspoken rule of how I'm supposed to be, then every time that I feel that way, if I get angry or sad or despairing or frustrated, then I go right back to being not good enough. And then I wanna hide my real self from the people in my life who, if I wanna have real relationships with them, I have to share my real self with them and so it's such a tricky trap. 

Joe: Yeah. That's the core of our work is allowing, expressing, moving your emotions and what I notice is that it is not an intellectual process, obviously they're emotions, but the body actually has a lot more. You can tell somebody like, oh, you can feel your feelings, but if you've been told your whole life, say not to get excited or not get sad the body will say no to it, and then the mind will just come up with reasons and that there's actually a lot of work that can be done with the nervous system and with breath and everything that allows those emotional experiences to be able to come through. Sometimes we have the choice, but not always.

Stephanie: Yeah. It's so hard. Like I think, it feels, I'd be curious to hear about what you've seen, but for me, it's like there are certain emotions that are, we're just like no go areas. Like you cannot feel that those are out of bounds, like sadness might be okay, but anger, God forbid you get angry. It's almost like these little hotspots that you have. 

Joe: Yeah. I know it's very cultural and it's very sex dependent for which ones were not okay. So there's some cultures where fear is definitely the thing you could not express because you'd be prey in the neighborhood, if you were, if fear was shown.

And so parents are like, no, you can't show fear. In like upper middle class white culture, men being angry is far more okay. Women being sad is far more okay. But men being sad not okay. So there's different cultures and different cultures, different emotions.

But the interesting thing is it's the positive emotions that I find are actually the most challenging for people to feel. Meaning settle down, Jimmy. Settle down. Don't feel excited. Don't be exuberant. Those are feelings that are actually really hard and usually people start getting in touch with them once the they've moved through some of the negative ones that have been held back. I have a saying that says, joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome. 

Stephanie: Oh, that gives me full body goosebumps. That's stunningly beautiful.

Joe: So it's actually a question that I wanted to ask you too, which is, what makes it happiness and not joy and what's the difference for you in those two things? 

Stephanie: It's a really good question. I think it's so interesting. I'm gonna be reflecting on that saying of yours. I really like the work of George Viant, who was the, before Robert Waldinger led the Harvard study and he wrote a book about, what he calls the spiritual emotions and he talks about joy in there and what he learned from his research and he says that joy is connection. And I think that is really, to me, like sums up the heart of it. He talks about the different forms that connection can take but the image that he writes about that always really stuck with me is the joy of a child running to its mother with her arms open, waiting for her, right?

Like I just, I love that image because it's so pure and beautiful and sums up that feeling. And then happiness is more zoomed out from that emotional experience, I would say. It's the feeling of I am happy with the way that my life is going overall. I experience joy, but I also know how to experience all of my other emotions as well.

A happy life has room for every feeling. And as a sidebar, I think one of the problems that we have is we think that a happy life is a life where you'll never be sad or never struggle or never have a hard time, right? That's what I used to believe. I thought, okay, I have to get rid of all this pain, then everything will be okay.

But I think a happy life includes space for every feeling. And it's more so about that broad sense of my life is meaningful, my life has purpose, my life is full with relationships that matter to me. I get to grow as a person and I embrace the challenges that I'm a part of, and I embrace the good parts of my life. And I am interested in continuing to live in this way. That's how I would describe the experience more broadly. 

Joe: Oh, interesting. So you're using happiness in a bit like a stateless state, meaning no matter what I'm feeling, no matter what's going on in general, I can take one step back and go, oh, this is I feel satisfied in this overall experience?

Stephanie: Yeah, I think so. I think it's that broader evaluation of one's life and if I'm having a really hard day and like really struggling with something, like I had one of those days last week, right? Really just one of those experiences where I got overwhelmed and didn't show up for myself in the ways that I wanted to, and then it spiraled from there and all of that stuff.

Just a difficult day like we all have. And, I could still take a step back as you're describing and think, okay I'm happy with my life, like I'm not happy in this moment, I'm not experiencing like a feeling of profound joy or excitement or contentment or anything, but I know that it's there once the emotion, almost like once the wave of the emotion passes, like what, what remains? What is the experience for you that remains after that?

Joe: Yeah. So if you were describing the gifts of what we would call negative emotions, the sadness or anger or anxiety or fear, you could listen to what you just said and say, oh, they're just, there's something that yet they're gonna happen and you're gonna deal with them, but it's still something that is not wanted or you could say, oh, like there's a gift in anger, there's a gift in happiness, there's a gift. 

Stephanie: Yeah. 

Joe: If it is the second what are the gifts that you see? If it isn't the second, tell me how you see it. 

Stephanie: I think it is the second. So I think that, sadness is what connects us to people. It's what helps us to be empathetic and compassionate. Anger helps us to protect our physical and emotional bodies, as well as the communities that we care about. Loneliness is physiologically designed to help us to reach out to other people, to reconnect to them. Anxiety or stress indicates that you're doing something that you care about, something that matters to you.

All of these emotions are a part of living a good life because, how could you have meaningful relationships or meaningful work or work towards an accomplishment that matters to you without experiencing all of those feelings, you couldn't. So you'd have to give up that pursuit, and therefore we have to embrace the journey and the process of experiencing them.

Joe: Yeah. So for me, connection is, I mean our like foundational course is the connection course. And I have never heard that quote. It's such a lovely quote. It's connection is joy, is that, yeah. And for me, connection means a lot more probably than most folks. And the fact that there's connection to self, which is an important thing, connection to reality and connection to each other. And that they're all reflections of each other is what I notice. My ability to connect with myself is a reflection of my ability to connect with you. The question I have is, in the book, I didn't see that you really deeply go into connection but I see you go into helping people, like that there's a really important part of helping. So can you tell me about how you see those relate, or how you see them as different? 

Stephanie: Yeah. 

Joe: What do you notice between connection and helping? 

Stephanie: I think that connection is the heart of everything as well. I think it's the heart of happiness, it's the heart of wellbeing, it's the heart of health.

All of the things that matter most to us. When I was in grad school, there's this quote that is, that comes from the founder, one of the founders of positive psychology Christopher Peterson and he says that positive psychology could be boiled down to three words, other people matter. 

And I spent a lot of time reflecting on that quote and starting to think about if I was to go deeper into that quote, what does that really mean? Like why do other people matter? What is it about it? And what I landed on is that it's other people matter, and relationships matter because that's where we give and receive.

That's what our relationships are made up of is I offer you something, you offer me something back, and then through that experience, we create a greater relationship or we create value in the world, or we create a product or something that had never been made before. There's everything is fulfilled through this interaction of giving and receiving and, to me, I think the secret to happiness is that if you wanna be happy, try to help other people to be happy. And the best way to do that is by using your authentic self to share who you really are and to offer up your unique gifts and talents. And that experience of giving and receiving is so taken for granted, even though it's at the heart of everything else.

And so it's almost to me, the way I perceived it was that we take our relationships for granted, right? We just view them as the fundamental fabric of the world and if we're not careful, we can destroy them because we do that. And then we lose what matters most to us, but they're so a part of our lives in every possible way that we can't imagine a world without them.

But then at an even deeper level, we take for granted the fact that those relationships are based upon this act of sharing and of receiving. And to me, the more that we can embrace the fact that we are here to help one another, that involves me offering what I have and you offering me what you have and receiving it, then the greater happiness we can create, not only for ourselves, but for other people at the same time. And so the kind of heart of this message is like, where can you help? What can you do to uniquely help? And that will be what leads to your own happiness and fulfillment. 

Joe: So I might have qualms with this, but I might not, so I want to explore it a bit, which is, and qualms is strong, but the first one is that I see is there are some folks out there where giving is from guilt or obligation or because they feel like they have to and I don't see that kind of giving, actually make people happy. I see that kind of giving actually create a disempowerment and a fear because unless the giving actually is something that, so to me it's like to give is useful because it creates the desire to give, right? But the real happiness comes from giving through the desire to give, not just giving, that there's an actual like intent.

And then the second part of it is that I noticed that a lot of people need more help learning how to receive especially those self-reliant folks. Actually learning how to receive is act more of a challenge for them than giving. 

Stephanie: Yeah. 

Joe: So I'm wondering like, how do you make sense of that given the book?

Stephanie: I think those are wonderful points and I agree with both things, both points. Real giving is not something that I. If you wanna give and get the benefits, it can't be forced, it can't be done through a sense of shame or guilt. That's not what I'm referring to at all. I say in the book, service is not self-sacrifice, it's self expansion.

And I think that this is something that's really important for us to recognize, because if we're being forced to give, then it's not really a gift, right? Like it has to be self-determined to be able to get those benefits that you're looking for and that's why I really want people to expand the way that they think about giving.

I say these things and I think people assume, okay, like that means I need to go spend my weekends volunteering, or I need to quit my job and work at a nonprofit. And if that calls to you, fantastic. Go do that. But if it doesn't that's great too. There are so many other ways that you can give through your work and in your family and in your community and to the greater world.

And it's really about finding the ones that bring you joy at the same time. So that would be my first point there in response and then the second, yep, people really struggle to receive. It's really hard for a lot of us and again, you brought it back to the point that I make as well, which is it all comes back to this kind of individualistic sense of self that we have that I can't ask for anything. I can't lean on anybody else. And what I would say in response is that all of this idea of us being connected, it's grounded in this idea of interconnectedness. We are all connected to one another. We all need each other. We're a part of this ecosystem. And if you shut down your part of interconnectedness. If you're just like a one way giving everything away that you have and never accepting anything in return, you're not a real part of it. You're not actually really participating in the ebb and the flow of what's involved and for you to deny somebody else the chance to help you you're actually denying them the chance to be happy. If help helping other people is what leads to happiness. And so if you actually, if you wanna serve others, if you wanna be somebody who's a giver, you have to let them help you at the same time. And so I think that takes time and practice and, coaching and support and all of that, but we can learn how to be more open to accepting and receiving, especially for those who might be, like over givers who really wanna show up for others. This can be a new way for them to, to conceive giving. 

Joe: Yeah, there's this interesting thing is one of the things that I notice is that in Ayurvedic medicine or in traditional Chinese medicine, they have this thing where if there's an imbalance in your system, you should be able to find it by looking at the eye or by looking at the fingernails or by looking at the lips or the tongue or that the imbalance should be able to be seen in all the parts or or at least a lot of the parts. You should be able to see the imbalance. So you can find out what's wrong with the kidney by looking at the tongue, for instance. And I noticed the same thing, if you just watch two people have a conversation and you can see like how much they're in the other person and how much they're in themselves, and are they in that balance? Meaning are they giving completely in the conversation? Are they receiving completely? Are they not allowing, giving or receiving in the conversation? What's interesting is that like you can see this in all the conversations and to some degree it's what we're teaching when we're in the connection course where we're teaching about how to communicate. We're going to the same level that you're going to just in a very different way. We're doing it like right now, right here. Here's the moment where you get to practical. 

Stephanie: That's amazing. I love the idea that the conversation is a microcosm of the relationship. That's absolutely brilliant and is such an insightful way to approach that, almost as a diagnostic. That's incredible. 

Joe: The other thing that's interesting for me also is, it's also about the relationship with the self that's been like, meaning how the voice in the head treats you, how you can give and receive to yourself. Because typically what I notice is like there's a voice in the head, it's critical, and there's not a lot of giving and there's a lot of trying to please the voice in the head. 

Stephanie: Yeah.

Joe: That kind of internal relationship reflects out into the way that someone does the job. It reflects into the way that I'm supposed to be of service to this voice in my head, then I'm supposed to be of service to the job then I'm supposed like, and so it's a very interesting thing how it reflects both in the inner dynamic, but also in the two people. 

Stephanie: Yeah. That's something that's so true, so insightful. 

Joe: Yeah. So question for you is, what are some of the daily practices that folks can do? So you've got these big, broad things like look at, the fact that you're not broken, but that might not be something that someone can just go, oh, I'm not broken.

Stephanie: Totally fine. I'm fine now. 

Joe: Everybody's here supporting me, like they have a hard time getting from like A to B. I don't have to work to feel valuable. I don't have to produce to be valuable. What are some of the daily things that you recommend to help folks to make it practical and like the conversation? Like what's the daily thing that if they work on it there, it's gonna show what's happening in the rest of it? 

Stephanie: Yeah. One practice I think that can be really helpful to your point about the relationship with the self and the voice in your head and how that can ripple out is something that I do on a daily basis as well and have found great value in is, every time that you make a mistake or something goes wrong, or you know you feel a difficult emotion, anything that violates your idea of what you're supposed to be and the perfect version of yourself try and catch yourself before you make this leap to I'm unworthy as a person because this thing happened. It's really silly, but think about a time that you dropped a glass and it shattered everywhere and there's, like it's all over the floor and you're late for work and instantly the voice in my head would go, God, you idiot. You're so stupid. How could you do something like this?

And instead, what would a kinder way to treat myself that valued myself be oops, I dropped a glass. Mistakes happen. I'm a human. Sometimes these things happen, right? Anything that helps you to separate your self-worth from the outcome or the behavior that occurred that you deem as less than acceptable will help you to start rewiring your brain a little bit to be treating yourself with more of that unconditional acceptance that we're really looking for and that kindness that will then be able to ripple outward. And the thing I love about this is like everyone is really busy. Everyone has a lot on their plate. I don't wanna add things onto your day, but these mistakes and human moments, like I like to call them, like they happen no matter what. They're always gonna happen. So when they happen, how can you use them for good as a way of improving your relationship with yourself? That's one practice that seems so small, but has really had a profound impact on me in the way that I perceive and understand my self worth.

Joe: Yeah I have a practice that's similar where your voice, we do it like, similarly so the voice in the head will say whatever it's gonna say, but how you relate to it can change dramatically. So you're an idiot. It's oh, could you manage me better? That's really bad management.

Or you're an idiot. And, oh, okay, I'm an idiot. Or you're an idiot. Like I'm an idiot. What are, or oh, I love you. I see that you're really scared and that I'm gonna make a mistake. And that's okay. You can be scared. There's a thousand different responses that we can give to the voice in the head, and it seems like it's pretty similar in the ideas behind it. 

Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. It's like instead of the default response of, like cowering or shaming yourself, you can change it. You're empowered to shift your response in that way. I love that. 

Joe: Often easier to shift than the voice in the head because it's so automatic. 

Stephanie: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. 

Cool. Awesome. Oh wait, there's one more question I wanted to ask you. So you went through the negative emotions for us, moving anger is a huge thing. Typically I see repressed anger as a big part of depression and a big part of anxiety. I see anger itself as love.

We don't get angry at anything that we don't have a deep care for. There's like even we might get angry over the coffee machine not working, but that's not what we're really angry about but what we're deeply angry about. And so I was just wondering how has your journey been with anger? Like in your process did you have movement around allowing anger? Was anger part of something that changed or is it just always just been in the background and not accessible? How has it been for you? 

Stephanie: I think that I grew up repressing any anger that I felt and feeling as though it was a real sign of badness of being unlovable and unacceptable.

And the idea that anger is love would've been really freeing for me at the time. So I thank you for that, really. It's a very healing way to look at that emotion, I think. And I didn't really come to terms with my anger until I went through a really difficult experience over the last few years when my partner got sick out of nowhere and came down with this incredibly debilitating illness that left him bedbound and I had to become his full-time caregiver when I was in my twenties.

And I had to confront my anger. I had to, I had a lot of anger about it. I was like, I was angry at the doctors who couldn't fix him. I was angry at the plane that broke his wheelchair. I was angry at the people who were able to walk down the street when he was stuck in his bed lying in the dark. I was angry at myself for mistakes I made when I was caring for him and I had no idea how to like, give him a shot of his medicine and I accidentally ended up hurting him. I was angry at everything and I had to go on a real journey of learning how to accept that and to figure out how to process it out of me. And it took me a while to even realize that anger was like such a difficult presence within me, right?

Just after that, years of suppression and thinking. And then of course, the other thing about it is I layered on top of it this idea of the perfect caregiver that I was supposed to be. And perfect caregiver would never get angry at anything, right? They're just always pleasant and calm and competent and all that stuff.

And so I started processing it really through movement. That was the first way that I was able to access it. I would literally spend 10 minutes punching my pillow or like doing furious, like jumping jacks or something like that, just trying to express it. And I got really into like high intensity workouts because I felt like it was a way for me to express that emotion in some way.

And then as I did that, I started to become more and more comfortable with it and like then I could touch on it through journaling and through expressing it in that way with free writing and all of that. And then eventually I was able to like finally process it more cognitively through talking about it but it all started with more of a bodily practice. 

Joe: Yeah. I find the most profound way when you can get to it is physical, punching, beating, something like that with words. That process it the quickest with people. Not just the physical, not just the expression but altogether, that's been my experience with our folks.

Stephanie: Yeah. It's such a, it was so difficult, right? Like I would never have a problem crying. Like I would never have a problem being sad. And to your point about, being a woman like sadness was never a problem. But God forbid you get mad at something that would be really out of line. And so reclaiming that anger has been really valuable I think. And I was also really I learned a lot from reading about how men process anger and like their relationship to it as well. And I think it's almost like we have a lot to teach each other about like our different emotional experiences in different ways.

Joe: Yeah. So I do a lot of teaching with my wife and whenever we do an anger demonstration, she always is the one to do it because to watch, a 50-year-old woman have more access and clarity with her anger than like a 25-year-old boy, it is like this thing that like, it immediately shocks everybody into oh, shit, there's something here that I can't. I thought I knew, but I didn't know because there's like that's a louder sound, that's a bigger movement. That's like a more embodied experience of anger than what I see in society to be angry. 

Stephanie: Wow. Gosh. 

Joe: That's really, it's really cool to watch it. 

Stephanie: That sounds very very profound and very moving.

I would love, I would be honored to, to witness that someday. 

Joe: Yeah. It's cool. It's, I always like looking at the faces when she does it, I just sit back and I just look at everybody's faces and see them go, what the fuck just happened? 

Stephanie: Absolutely amazing. I love that. 

Joe: Awesome. A pleasure to have you on the call or on the podcast. Yeah. 

Stephanie: Thank you so much for having me. It was so wonderful to talk to you and learn from you. 

Joe: Yeah, very nice. And I really appreciate learning from you as well. 

Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you. 

Joe: Thank you. 

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