How to Overcome Childhood Emotional Neglect with Jonice Webb

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Jonice Webb
It’s that attacking voice that can really get you into trouble and SAP your energy. But when you talk to yourself with encouragement and compassion instead, it really can turn things around.

00:00:17 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good. Wolfenheid thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jonice Webb, the pioneer of childhood emotional neglect awareness. She’s a licensed psychologist and has enriched and kindled discussion of this overlooked and under addressed topic by writing the first self help book dedicated to cen recovery entitled running on Overcome your childhood Emotional Neglect. Janice also continues to inspire thousands of people on her weekly blog on psychcentral.com comma and her work as an expert partner on yourtango.com dot. She’s been interviewed about childhood emotional neglect on NPR and over 30 radio shows across the US and Canada.

00:01:53 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Janice, welcome to the show.

00:01:54 – Jonice Webb
Hi, thanks for having me.

00:01:56 – Eric Zimmer
I am happy to have you on. We are going to be discussing your book running on empty overcome your childhood emotional neglect. And this is a topic I’m going to take a wager that nearly everybody who likes the one you feed podcast has some degree of this. That’s my guess. But you’re going to talk to us about a questionnaire where people can learn that. But I think a lot of our listeners are going to resonate with this. But before we get into that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who says to their grandchild, there’s two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:54 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, well, I really like this parable, partly because it conveys a really important thing, which is that it basically suggests that we all choose who we are and we choose who we become. And I think that’s something. It’s impossible to live your entire life and never really feel that power that you have to shape yourself because the world throws things at us and we have to deal with them. We don’t have control over what the world throws at us, but what we do have control over is our internal world. And how we respond to those things is what really determines who we are as a person. And in terms of the bad wolf, through the lens of psychology and I work in childhood emotional neglect, I would say the bad wolf is just a natural human part of us all, because there’s not a human alive who hasn’t felt all of those things and much more that they’re not proud of. Since we can’t choose our feelings, we’re not at fault for feeling that way, but we are responsible for what we do with those feelings. And if we run from them, that wolf will keep chasing us. But if we turn around and face it and let ourselves consider the fact that we’re feeling greed, we’re hatred and kind of process with our brains what our body is sending us, that’s our best chance to become the best person.

00:04:17 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a lot of things you said in there that I could run with, but I’m going to run with what you said near the end, which is it’s not our, how we feel, but we are responsible for it. And I think that’s a great way for us to lead into talking about childhood emotional neglect. And I want to define what that is a little bit more deeply in a moment. But that’s kind of the premise of your book, is, hey, a lot of things happened or didn’t happen. Often would be the case as you were growing up that have influenced the way you react to the world. So you’re not at fault for what happened to you when you were a child and how you were parented, but you are responsible for healing any of that that needs healed. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

00:05:05 – Jonice Webb
Yes, absolutely. A lot of children grow up in households that really don’t teach them that it’s okay to have the bad wolf or that it’s human or even either wolf. You know, there are a lot of families that discourage positive feelings and have low tolerance or pretend negative feelings. Don’t exist. And I call that childhood emotional neglect. It’s basically just if your parents don’t respond enough to your feelings as they raise you and if you grow up in a household that’s not really attentive or responsive to your feelings, you basically learn that your feelings are something to be ashamed of or to hide or ignore, because at best they’re useless. Right? But it’s when we don’t pay attention and we try not to have feelings or we feel ashamed of our feelings that really can interfere with your adult life. And, you know, you end up running from your actual internal self instead of owning who you are, owning those feelings and dealing with them.

00:06:11 – Eric Zimmer
So we’ve become a lot more trauma informed as a culture these days. Right? We talk more about trauma. We recognize that that trauma is very destructive. We’ve always known, and most people have known, like, if you’re abused as a child, you’re gonna have some impact from that. But I think what a lot of people do, and I was in this boat for a long time, is we sort of look at our childhood and go, well, I don’t think I was abused. Like, nobody was beating me or, you know, I wasn’t sexually abused. And so thus we conclude that, hey, you know, my childhood was fine, happy childhood, good childhood, move on. And what you’re talking about is that there are much more subtle layers of neglect that often happen. And not even, like, you know, when we say neglect, we don’t mean like, you were left on your own to fend for your own food, right? We’re talking about emotional neglect, but that it’s often a lot more subtle and that people who may look back and go, I had a good, happy childhood, everything was provided for, may still have had some developmental needs that simply weren’t met. Yeah.

00:07:18 – Jonice Webb
And that’s not something that you’re going to remember because our brains are geared to notice and record things that happen, and our brains are not geared to notice what doesn’t happen, especially when we’re kids, and to notice what’s invisible. Basically, I always say childhood emotional neglect is not what your parents did to you. It’s what they failed to do for you. And what they failed to do was to notice when you were sad, hurt, angry, upset, confused, nervous, afraid, or any other feeling and respond to that enough and name it for you and help you understand it. And if you grew up without having enough of that emotional instruction and education and response, then you end up being confused about feelings, and they’re such a major part of who you are. But you won’t remember what didn’t happen. So I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, I had a really great childhood. I had good education. I was driven to every soccer game I wanted to go to, but I feel so empty inside. I don’t understand.

00:08:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You say this is the danger of emotional neglect. Perfectly good people loving their child, doing their best, while passing on accidental, invisible, potentially damaging patterns to their children. In this book, the goal is not to blame the parents. It is only to understand our parents and how they have affected us. And I think anybody reading this book who is both a child, which would be everyone, because we’ve all been children, and is also a parent, is going to have a couple of kind of interesting reactions to this if you’re both those things, you know, if you’re a child again, which we all are, and you’re a parent, which I am, you’re reading this almost through two lenses. One of, like, what was my childhood like? And then the other inevitable lens for me was like, oh, okay, well, my child’s 23. What things did I do there or not do there? And, you know, do you think anybody gets out of childhood without some degree of, of not having emotions modeled perfectly well or some degree of this?

00:09:25 – Jonice Webb
I think some people do. You know, there’s been research and all kinds of writing about the good enough parent. And really, you don’t need to have perfect parents to turn out really well. You just need to have parents who are good enough. And I think this only becomes a problem if your parents weren’t good enough at this, if your parents had a blind spot in general when it comes to emotions, then they weren’t able to respond enough and give you enough education, validation of your feelings. And that is all it takes, even if you with everything else. But I think there are a lot of parents who are good enough and a lot of people walking around who don’t identify with this at all.

00:10:05 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting. We interviewed a couple times a gentleman by the name of Rick Hanson, who’s written a bunch of books about neuroscience and the brain and Buddhism. And he’s got a podcast now with his son. And it’s fun to hear his son say, like, I think my dad did everything right. You know, he knows all this stuff. And, you know, it doesn’t mean my life is easy, right? You know, he’s still a human being. And so I think that what we’re saying here, and I love that phrase, the good enough parent, is that everybody’s going to have some degree of difficulty and difficult emotions in life. That’s being human. But when there’s emotional neglect, there are some particular things that show up. And I don’t want to go into all the different types of parents who cause emotional neglect. You’ve got twelve of them. It’s a really great read. I just don’t think we can hit all twelve of them. But I’d love to talk about what are some of the symptoms of emotional neglect? What sort of things might we notice if this has affected us so one.

00:11:06 – Jonice Webb
Of the biggest signs of having childhood emotional neglect is having a lot of discomfort with feelings and emotions in general and confusion. And for some people this doesn’t show up until it’s time to find a mate or get married or once you’re a parent, then you realize you can just feel like, what is this torrent that’s been released on me? I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with all these feelings. So I call it alexithymia. It’s also another word for it is low emotional intelligence, which has nothing to do with regular intelligence. It’s really just how well you understand the world of emotion and can deal with it in a confident, reasonably capable way. So that’s one way that plays out over your adulthood. Another is quite a bit of self blame, self doubt, getting angry at yourself versus other people when it’s even if it’s someone else’s fault. So self directed anger, self blame, self doubt is rampant. And I think that’s because if your parents aren’t coaching you through mistakes enough and helping you understand your feelings enough, then a lot of kids develop this sort of harsh parental voice for themselves, and that just stays with you as your coping technique. But in the end it ends up doing a lot of damage. A lot of people with childhood emotional neglect or cen end up feeling kind of empty inside. And that’s because their feelings are kind of walled off. And because your feelings are such a deeply personal, biologically built in part of who you are, if your feelings are walled off, you notice it. There’s something missing. And that gives people that grew up this way the sense of being different from other people. I call it the fatal flaw, where you feel like you’re just kind of different and there’s something other people have that you don’t have. Some people call it emptiness, but different people have different words for it. So those are probably the main ones.

00:13:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. There’s another one you listed, poor self discipline.

00:13:08 – Jonice Webb
Yes. It’s kind of like a correlation between not paying attention to children’s feelings, you kind of miss when your child needs structure or consequences or limits. So certain kinds of emotionally neglectful parents don’t really end up teaching their children how to talk themselves through difficult situations and force themselves to do things they don’t want to do and stop themselves from doing things they shouldn’t do. And if you don’t learn those basic skills, they’re not really basic if you don’t learn them as a child. They’re only basic if you learn them. If you don’t, then you just have to teach them to yourself as an.

00:13:46 – Eric Zimmer
Adult and this poor self discipline you might have discipline when it’s coming from outside structure. It’s just when it’s sort of you on your own, that’s where it manifests. Is that kind of the gist of it?

00:13:59 – Jonice Webb
Yes, absolutely. Most people with childhood emotional neglect are very functional. A lot of them do great in life in many ways, but they have this internal struggle where they feel like other people can’t see who I really am because I am not what I appear to be. I’m struggling all the time with self discipline, for example.

00:14:17 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I am someone who definitely, I think, suffered from emotional neglect as a child. Mom, if you’re listening, I love you. But many listeners know this story. I got sober at 24, heroin addict. So clearly I had some, some difficulties. And it was interesting, though, at that time when I got sober, it was 1995 in Columbus, Ohio. The world was a very different place. And the general theme in AA was, don’t worry about why, don’t blame your parents. Just take responsibility for your actions. And that actually was sufficient to get me sober and actually kind of saved my life. But a few years down the line, like you said, when I realized, like, oh, I’ve got a marriage that’s crumbling. I’ve got all these other things that are happening. I sort of went, oh, all right, I need to look into this. And that’s when I sort of got exposed to a lot of these ideas and sort of recognized, you know, despite my parents wonderful best efforts and their love, there was a lot of things that didn’t go well for me, particularly when it came to emotion as a child. And so I’ve been circling these topics for a long, long time. So I’ve got a lot of personal experience. So some of my questions are going to come from that place, and some of them are going to come more from, you know, somebody who’s maybe newer and exposed to these ideas. But I want to talk a little bit more about. Did you say it’s alexithymiathymia? I’m terrible at pronouncing things.

00:15:44 – Jonice Webb
Alexithymia.

00:15:45 – Eric Zimmer
Alexithymia. I’ve heard that described as the inability to feel, but you’re describing in a much more broad, nuanced way than that. Can you say a little bit more about that term? Because you do say that this might be the common denominator of people who have suffered emotional neglect. So you describe some of it as like, well, you don’t really know what to do with your emotions, but in my case, it seems to be more, not an inability to feel, but oftentimes not a lot of it.

00:16:20 – Jonice Webb
Not a lot of feelings. Yeah, that’s one of the primary symptoms of childhood emotional neglect. It’s part of what I call emptiness. Some people feel it as emptiness, some people feel it as numbness. Basically it is because when you’re growing up receiving all kinds of subtle, usually unspoken messages from your parents that your feelings don’t matter or are unacceptable or are a burden, your child brain knows just what to do and basically walls off, puts all your feelings over there so they won’t bother you, they won’t bother anybody, which can get you through your childhood. But then when you grow up, you really need to have access to your emotions because they are really what connects you to other people, tells you what things you’re passionate about, what to pursue, what to avoid, who you enjoy being with, who you should avoid. I making choices. And if you don’t have access to that really rich resource, you’re going to notice it, you’re going to feel it. Or maybe your spouse is going to say something’s wrong here. You say you love me. I don’t feel it. Or those kinds of things.

00:17:28 – Eric Zimmer
Do you notice people who have this? I’m going to try and say the word again because alexithymia. Yeah, alexithymia. More than two syllables. In my old age, I’ve given up on three syllable and beyond words. I get it. I understand emotions coming out in weird places. For example, any emotional scene in like a movie or a tv show will choke me up. And yet, when it comes to my own life again, I’ve done a lot of healing. I’m not the person I was, but I still notice lack of emotion in some ways. Is it common for people who have this, for those emotions to sort of leak out in other places in different ways?

00:18:06 – Jonice Webb
Anytime you have emotions that have been walled off or repressed, they will at times leak through, attach themselves to other things and give you emotional reactions that are out of control when you least expect it. And so a lot of people who have walled off emotions, the times that they do feel something is either indirectly, when it’s not about themselves, like watching a movie or something, or when some feeling gets so strong that it breaks through the wall and then it’s big, usually. So you might only have feelings about really big things. Part of my online recovery program and what I do with people in my office has to do with trying to reconnect with your feelings, with your physical, emotional feelings. And that can be done purposely. If you choose to, you can recapture those feelings and start processing them and using them at any time in your life.

00:19:25 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that I found challenging having alexithymia is, and again, I’m better than I used to be. And I’ve talked about this with my depression also, which is it’s hard to work sometimes with what feels like nothing, like when there’s strong emotion for me, it’s fairly easy to learn to process that, to use that, to understand it. I feel like I’m pretty emotionally literate in that way. What I found more challenging is working with what feels like nothing. So some of your work talks about identifying feelings and becoming, more broadly speaking, emotionally literate. Learning to know what you’re feeling, learning to express what you’re feeling, all that. What’s the path forward when what you’re noticing is a bunch of nothing?

00:20:14 – Jonice Webb
There’s an exercise that is in my first book, running on empty, which it really just like walks you through the process of sitting down every day, focusing your attention inward and asking yourself, what am I feeling right now? And then really trying to tune in to. Because feelings are physical, you feel them in your body. Tune into your body and try to identify some feeling because you’re always having feelings. It’s just that you’re disconnected from them so that you’re not aware of what they even are, and you don’t notice them. They’re just basically non existent for you, even though they are happening in your body. So a lot of people will try that and they’ll say, I come up with nothing, right? And that’s fine, and it’s normal. You know, when you start, you’re going to get nothing if you keep doing it. Every time you do it, it takes a little chip out of that wall between yourself and your feelings because you’re reaching out, you’re trying to reach through the wall and get those feelings. And the more you reach, the more little glimmers will start coming through. So it does take some work and dedication.

00:21:21 – Eric Zimmer
I love that. And that aligns with a lot of the things we talk about here and our spiritual habits program and different things, which is this idea of little by little, a little becomes a lot, right? So if you just keep showing up to your feelings, even if when you show up, you’re like, there’s nothing there. I remember when I started doing, like, body scan meditations years ago, I’d be like, I got nothing here. You know, you’re telling me to feel my foot and there’s not much happening down there. You know, the person leading the meditation’s going on and on about the personality of his big toe, and I’m like, what is he talking about? I still don’t know what he’s talking about, to be honest with you. That said, though, the more I did it, the more I became aware of sensations that were in my body that I just had not been in the habit of paying attention to. And the more I paid attention to them, the more they developed. So I think you’re saying something very similar there. Let’s talk about IaA, which is not a retirement fund. Listeners may have heard a recent spot we did for AARP. I cannot believe I’m old enough that AARP wants to advertise on my show. We could talk about all kinds of emotions around that, but we’ll stay on topic here and talk about IaA, which is not a retirement fund. What is it?

00:22:39 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, AARP sends me letters all the time, and I really don’t like that at all. Just a little comment there.

00:22:45 – Eric Zimmer
Welcome to the club. Yeah.

00:22:46 – Jonice Webb
So at the suggestion of one of my readers, instead of calling it the IAA, which is very hard to say, I call it the I AAA.

00:22:54 – Eric Zimmer
So anyway, now I think it’s about getting my car fixed, but we’re better.

00:23:01 – Jonice Webb
There’s no answer. So it’s basically a way to process a feeling. It walks you through dealing with a feeling, and the letters stand for the steps. Identify the feeling that you’re having. Accept that feeling. Fully accept it. Even if it’s hatred, even if it’s greed. Whatever it is, however ugly it is, accept it. This is how I feel. Attribute that feeling. That’s the second a. Attribute it to a cause. So is this something from my childhood? Is this something going on now? Is this something going on now that’s touching off some old feelings from childhood? What is happening in my life right now that I would be feeling this hatred? And where is it directed? Who’s this hatred at? Or what is this hatred about? That’s the attribution. And then the last step is act. And that is basically, it doesn’t mean you’re supposed to always act on your feelings. It just means, what can I do? Or what should I do with this feeling? Or for this feeling? Every emotion that you get is a message from your body. It’s your body talking to you. It doesn’t mean your body is always right. So there are feelings that come up that are way out of whack because they’re from the past or they’re just not telling you something good or healthy to do. But then if you connect with it with your brain and think about it and consider, what is this hatred telling me to do? Is it telling me that I need to go strike out at this person and call them a name? Is it telling me, well, no, I don’t think I should do that. Maybe it’s telling me that I need to talk to this person or write a letter or connect it to what happened to me as a kid that has nothing to do with this person. And maybe I’m putting all that old stuff on them, or do I need to self soothe?

00:24:47 – Eric Zimmer
Whatever it is, let’s hang on to self soothe because I want to get there in a minute because I think that’s a particularly important area to talk about. I want to talk, though, about attribution for a minute. Attribution is another one of those things that can be sort of difficult, particularly if you don’t remember a lot from your childhood. So part of my challenge is with my childhood, there’s just not much back there to go. Like, this is a feeling from my childhood because I’m like, well, I don’t remember much of anything from back there. So how much time do you spend on attribution? And at what point do you sometimes just go, I’m not quite sure why, but it’s okay, I feel this way.

00:25:25 – Jonice Webb
I think you should only do that if you really just absolutely cannot figure it out. But even then, I think you should file it away and watch for that feeling in the future and see if you can start to figure out you have this feeling often. For example, why do I have this feeling so often? Because every feeling has a reason. And figuring out that reason, I mean, I’m not suggesting people get obsessed with this thing because of course we’re going to have feelings that come and go that we’re not able to process this way, but if it’s a strong feeling and it’s bothersome. I think it makes sense to try to figure that out as best as.

00:25:59 – Eric Zimmer
You can before we move away from alexithymia. I wanted to hit one other thing because you said, I’ve observed that many people with alexithymia have a tendency to be irritable. And irritability is one. It’s probably the tendency in me I most wish I didn’t have. I’ve gotten pretty good at managing it. But, you know, my partner Ginny knows when I’m irritable. I mean, you know, it’s not like it’s hidden. She also is emotionally astute enough to know it has nothing to do with her and she can set it aside, but it’s still something I would love to have less of. And I’ve looked around a lot for, like, well, what causes irritability? And so my ears kinda of perked up when I read that. And irritability is a strong family trait. It is a very strong family trait. What do you do with irritability? Because that’s the one that when I try and get to attribution, I just kind of go, I got nothing here. I got nothing for why all of a sudden you making a noise, filing your fingernails, makes me want to claw my eyes out today. Whereas yesterday, that didn’t really bother me. It’s not constant. And I go back and I’m like, well, if somebody’s coughing, am I getting upset because my brother had asthma and it used to scare me. And I mean, there may be some of that, but the irritability is the one that feels very difficult to attribute anywhere and feels very difficult to work with.

00:27:28 – Jonice Webb
Yeah. So the reason I think that people with childhood emotional neglect end up with irritability. Some people are more on the active side, have more anxiety, and others have more irritability. And either way, the answer is to not stop with naming your feeling irritability, because irritability is a catch all trash can. It’s like all of your feelings have pooled together on the other side of the wall. When they all mix together, that’s what they come out as. So if you don’t let yourself use that term, irritability, and instead you say no, what are you really feeling? Because it’s probably upset about something that day in your current life that you’re not dealing or aware of the feelings that you’re having, and that’s what’s making you irritable. If you go beyond the word irritability, you might be able to name, well, I’m feeling frustrated that this podcast guest canceled at the last minute and this up. Obviously, I’m feeling worried about how I’m going to fill in that slot in the future when that slot comes up. And now I’m angry because that puts me in a spot where I have to, like, really, you know, go and find somebody else. So then you’ll get a lot further with it, and once you figure out what you’re actually feeling, then you can go through the action part, like, and just going through that tributing, figuring out what you’re feeling and why is a really important part of how to take away a feeling’s power. It could make you stop being irritable.

00:29:01 – Eric Zimmer
I love that idea of it, you know, thinking of it as a trash can. I think the other trash can feeling, for me is tired. Sometimes it is tired, right? I mean, sometimes it’s legitimate. That’s a physiological thing, but I think sometimes there’s maybe more under there. I want to dig a little deeper into this. Feelings always have a cause thing. I’ve read about and talked about people who are considered, like, highly sensitive, like their nervous system is tuned in such a way that sound is hard for them to tune out and can cause irritability. And, you know, I’ve often sort of thought of myself as that. One of the things that defines me is that I’ll be in a room and there’ll be background noise, and other people will just be carrying on, and I’m like, there’s a buzzing up there that is difficult to tune out. So those things seem neurological almost, or physiological more than emotional. Do you think that there are emotions that are driven from neurological or physiological or physical causes that are not necessarily attributed to events in your life and things that are happening or happened?

00:30:08 – Jonice Webb
I wouldn’t really go about thinking about it quite in that way. Okay, so let’s take the buzzing microphone as an example. I wouldn’t call that irritability. If you are in a room full of people and people are talking and everyone seems fine, but you are really bothered by that microphone, that is a physiological response that you have because of the way you’re wired, where your nervous system is wired, and it’s perfectly legitimate, it’s how you’re built. And I don’t think there’s anything you can really do about that. It’s not a matter of processing a feeling. You can’t do anything except act, which is, what do I do about this? I can’t focus on anything.

00:30:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:30:48 – Jonice Webb
Instead of letting yourself get irritated about it, you could say, what am I going to do to cope with this? Is there something I can do? Maybe I can ask them to turn that microphone down. Maybe I can unplug something. Maybe I’m just not going to be able to stay in this room. But it doesn’t have to become irritability if you understand what’s going on and just deal with it in the best way you can.

00:31:11 – Eric Zimmer
And so if what comes out of that is irritability or frustration, then it is attributable in that case. Right. I can say there’s this thing happening. It’s grating on me. I don’t have the ability to turn it off. So I’m feeling frustrated. And now I can attribute it, is what you’re basically saying. I think that’s helpful. All right, so let’s move to self soothing. I’ve interviewed a lot of people for this show. When I look at psychological responses, the literature out there, the different approaches that are out there, and I see this in both psychology and in spirituality. I see a cognitive approach and I see an emotional approach. I see, on one hand, people saying, hey, look, you’ve got these feelings. Those are coming from thoughts. And if you change your thoughts, you’ll change your feelings. And then there’s another approach, more bottom up. Start with what your feelings are, allow those feelings to be there, and oftentimes the emotion is causing the thought. How do you think about that?

00:32:13 – Jonice Webb
I don’t think it can be nailed down to an either or thing, because I see it going both ways. I think you can get yourself very upset about something by continually cranking on it in your head. You know, you can increase your feelings that way. You can also manage your feelings by involving your head. It can go both ways, and I don’t think it makes sense to address it from just one direction for most people. I think most people need to deal with the emotional part and the cognitive part together.

00:32:45 – Eric Zimmer
And which of those you do first might just depend on the situation and what works for you.

00:32:51 – Jonice Webb
I really believe in starting with the feelings, because we’re much more comfortable with our thoughts in general, because we can control them much better. They’re more understandable. We can put our thoughts into words much better. Feelings are a lot more mysterious, and we get the sense that they just come, and so we feel like we have no power over them, but that’s what makes them so powerful. We’ve got the cart before the horse. I think when we start from the cognitive so much. And so that’s why I really encourage people to start with the feeling part and start working out your feelings. Pay attention to your feelings, apply your brain to your feelings, and that’s what’s going to make the biggest impact on your life and who you are.

00:33:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And so, as I look at the I AAA process, right, I think the second a attribute is when I start to bring in at least some degree of cognitive, because I’m trying to figure out where is this coming from? What caused it?

00:33:47 – Chris Forbes
Right.

00:33:47 – Eric Zimmer
At that point, I am slightly cognitive because I’m trying to make a connection. I know what the feeling is. It’s anger. I’ve identified it, I’ve accepted it. Maybe I’m even feeling it in my body and becoming more familiar with it. Now I’m moving into something more cognitive. Would you agree with that?

00:34:04 – Jonice Webb
I would call it engaging your brain. Yes.

00:34:07 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. I would say so, yeah. Yep, yep.

00:34:09 – Jonice Webb
Even this first step of identifying what you’re feeling requires your brain as well, because you’re putting words to what you’re feeling. And if you cannot stop at the big words, like I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m anxious, I’m irritable. If you cannot stop at those big umbrella words and instead try to drill down and name it more specifically, anger can become helplessness and hurt and all kinds of things.

00:35:03 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about self soothing, because one of the things I’ve noticed for sure in myself and others is that if the emotional storm is really strong, you’re not going to be able to cognitively work with anything. Right. You’re overwhelmed by it. So I assume self soothing is the ability to at least turn that down enough that you can work with your emotions more skillfully. How would you describe what self soothing?

00:35:30 – Jonice Webb
Self soothing to me is having a series of things that you can choose to do that will basically what you said, start giving you more control over what you’re feeling. A series of healthy things. So, different things might work in different situations, but the whole IEEe is part of self soothing because it requires you to actually sit with your feeling and process it. And that’s the single most powerful thing you can do to take control of a feeling. But sometimes even that doesn’t do the trick, and you need more. And so I really encourage every human being to have a list of things that they know helps them feel better. It could be laying down with your pet and petting your pet. It could be taking a walk outside, looking up at the sky, you know, calling a friend or going to visit your favorite store. As long as you don’t overspend while you’re there. For example, cooking, cleaning. You know, it’s different for everybody.

00:36:33 – Eric Zimmer
I love that idea, and I’ve talked about it before, having this sense of, like, knowing what things have worked for me in the past and having them written down. Because the problem that I’ve experienced is in the moment, if I look at any of those things, I go, that’s not gonna help. Are you kidding me? Like a walk. So I just need sort of, like, just do it, you know? The other example I make is, I know, for me, music is very helpful in those moments.

00:37:01 – Jonice Webb
That’s a great one. Yep.

00:37:02 – Eric Zimmer
And yet, what I also know is that, particularly if what I’m dealing with is sort of a really low mood or depression, if I go to my music, I’ll be like, none of it will look like it sounds good. I’ll be like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And so what I’ve got is a pre made playlist of things that I know help, and so I don’t have to figure it out. I just go, all right, just turn on the playlist. Hit, shuffle. One of these songs should do it, you know? So I love that idea of having sort of written down. As a recovering person, I certainly talk about this with other recovering people and certainly early in my recovery, which is, what are you gonna do when a craving hits?

00:37:38 – Jonice Webb
Yes.

00:37:38 – Eric Zimmer
Because in the moment, the emotion, as you say, is so strong. Do you have any other sort of go to self soothing tools that people might consider beyond naming your emotions? And you listed a couple other really good ones, but did any others come to mind? I feel like giving people a good menu is really helpful.

00:37:54 – Jonice Webb
Yeah. One of my favorites that I forgot to mention is sitting down and writing. And I think you can use your computer or your phone or whatever and type, but I think it’s best to have paper and pen because there’s something about your brain, to your heart, to your hand, to the paper, and then it’s visually there in your own writing. You can write a letter to the person that you’re upset with that you’ll never send, or you can just write down. It’s called automatic writing. When you just write, write, write, write, write, write, write everything that comes into your head. I think that’s a great coping technique.

00:38:25 – Eric Zimmer
I got a ton of mileage out of that one. At different points in my life when I had a lot of anger, my first marriage ended in a very hurtful way to me. I’m not saying I didn’t have a role in why the marriage wasn’t good, but I mean, I just wrote the most hateful letters. I mean, you know, things that I’d be ashamed to say out loud, but that’s what was coming up. And I just would write and write and write and then I would just destroy it. You know, it was so helpful to me as a way, particularly of processing anger. That is a great one. As we’re talking about attribution, I’m going back to that for a second. You say, one way to get to the real heart of a matter is to practice vertical questioning in addition to horizontal questioning. Could you explain what vertical versus horizontal questioning is?

00:39:13 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, this is a communication technique. Usually when I talk about it, it’s talking to someone else.

00:39:18 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.

00:39:18 – Jonice Webb
So it’s really a good way to form or deepen a friendship or a relationship or even with someone you just met. So horizontal questions are about facts and details like the weather, the traffic, things that you’ve done, activities you’ve done. And vertical questions are more thought provoking questions that require a person to focus internally a little bit and consider themselves and maybe even consult their feelings. So instead of what did you major in in high school or college, it would be how did you choose that for yourself? And what is it about that that captured your passion like that? So really the whys that help someone think more deeply and that enable you to connect with them more?

00:40:05 – Eric Zimmer
It strikes me that that’s also a horizontal question in like a conflict with someone else. And I’m just more or less thinking out loud now. But a horizontal question could be kind of about what are the facts of what actually happened here? And then the vertical question is how do we both feel about it? But I often feel like conversations with people, particularly conflict, are almost diagonal, right. Those two questions get mixed into the same thing. And it can be very helpful if you can tweeze them apart and be like, well, hang on a second, here’s what actually happened. Can we agree on that? Like, I did not take out the trash. Okay, agreed. We both did. Like, now how does that make, you know, how do we feel about that? Versus combining them into the same sort of conversation?

00:40:45 – Jonice Webb
Oh, absolutely. Especially couples do that. It just, it all gets mixed together. And considering every two people has a different perception of everything, it’s really important to keep your perceptions of the facts separate from your feelings about it. Usually the solution lies in the feelings part.

00:41:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. We’ve sort of talked about healing this and you’ve said that the primary thing is to get more comfortable and literate with my emotions to go seek them out and inquire more deeply into them and learn more about them and welcome them. What else is there that we haven’t talked about that you feel like would be important for healing this emotional neglect?

00:41:29 – Jonice Webb
Well, the first step is figuring out whether this really applies to you or not. And I think for most people that have a significant case of emotional neglect, like, if someone’s listening to this podcast and they feel like, oh, my gosh, this sounds like me, I think that is a really good indicator. And that’s the first step in healing, is really owning and understanding. Okay, this is how I grew up. This is how it affected me. And a great place to start that, because most people can’t remember emotional neglect. So a good way to find out whether you have it is to go to my website and take the emotional neglect questionnaire, which is just a series of yes or no questions about your current life now. So take that test, then start learning everything you can learn about emotional neglect. There are lots of free resources available on my website. And, you know, I think the biggest part of healing is about just changing your own relationship with your own emotions and starting to view them as your friends instead of just irrelevant or enemies, and starting to just treat them differently and live differently with them. And then once you’re doing that, you start getting more glimmers of emotions and more and more feelings, and then you can start learning what to do with those feelings. And that’s the emotion skills that you didn’t learn in childhood. You kind of have to be having enough feelings to apply the emotion skills to.

00:42:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:53 – Jonice Webb
And then the final stage is applying all of that. You have more depth, you have more feelings, you have more skills, and you can start putting all that into your relationships. When you get to that point, people in your life start to notice that you’re actually kind of different, and it’s pretty cool.

00:43:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And we’ll have links in the show notes to your website and to that quiz. So, listeners, you can just click right through the show notes and get right there. We’re back on self soothing here. But you said self talk is probably the most useful and versatile of all self soothing strategies. So talk to me about what good self talk looks like.

00:43:31 – Jonice Webb
Good self talk is compassionate, but it also holds you accountable for how you act. But basically it’s encouraging and helpful. So it can be all the way from, you know, you can do this. You absolutely can do this. Talking yourself through something that you’re worried or afraid of to you didn’t do that on purpose. You know, that you didn’t, but you still have to take accountability for it and deal with it. You know, now you just have to deal with the fallout of that mistake, but you didn’t choose it. It’s not your fault. You know, things that are reasonable and compassionate. I think that’s one of the traits of cen people that I didn’t mention, is low self compassion. And it’s that attacking voice that can really get you into trouble and SAP your energy. But when you talk to yourself with encouragement and compassion instead, it really can turn things around.

00:44:29 – Eric Zimmer
What’s the difference? Or how do you tell when you are giving yourself encouraging and helpful self talk and when you’re trying to sort of minimize an emotion internally? So, for example, let’s say I’m feeling afraid I might do some self talk about like, hey, you don’t need to be that frightened of this. You’ve handled this before. So is it really, as you said, I start with the recognition, I’m afraid it’s okay that I’m afraid. The reason I’m afraid is this situation. And then the self talk sort of falls into that act, the final a a little bit, which is like, okay, Eric, you got this. You’re okay. You know, you’ve been through this before. If it goes that way, you can handle it, that sort of thing. Is that where it would slot into that?

00:45:15 – Jonice Webb
Yes, and I wouldn’t call that minimizing a feeling. I would call it managing a feeling. And there is a big difference.

00:45:22 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, there is. How do you know the difference? I love the distinction. What are some ways of knowing the difference?

00:45:27 – Jonice Webb
Minimizing is basically when you’re trying to escape or deny that you have a feeling. One of the factors that plays in is whether the feeling is useful or not. So if it’s a feeling that’s telling you not to jump off a cliff, then pretty useful. Pay attention and listen to that feeling. Because it’s, if you used your brain to process it, then you certainly don’t want to minimize that or manage it because it’s a healthy feeling. But if it’s an unhealthy feeling telling you to do something that could be bad for you, then use your brain to process it. But instead of trying to tell yourself that that feeling isn’t important or you don’t have it, actually take it on and say, what do I do with this feeling? What does it mean? What should I do with it? How do I manage it?

00:46:13 – Eric Zimmer
So it sounds to me like if I’m talking about being afraid. The difference is not, you shouldn’t be afraid of that. You know, don’t be scared. It’s more, I’m afraid. Here’s why I’m afraid and I can handle it. It’s subtle, but it is a definite difference in I’m allowing the feeling instead of saying, you shouldn’t have that feeling, or there’s no reason to feel that. It’s, I do feel it. That’s okay. Here’s how I’m going to respond.

00:46:39 – Jonice Webb
Yes, you just said that way better than I did. Thank you.

00:46:43 – Eric Zimmer
Well, we’re going to end with something that you said really, really well, though, and then I’ll let you respond to it, which, when you’re talking about self talk, you said, and I just, I love this line, remind yourself of simple, honest truths which will help you keep things in perspective. That is so well said. Simple, honest truths. So give me an example of a simple honest truth or two.

00:47:06 – Jonice Webb
Well, some we’ve already given it would be, you’ve done this before, you can do it again, or you know you have the skills for this, or you know you didn’t do that on purpose. Every human being makes mistakes.

00:47:18 – Eric Zimmer
Hmm. That’s a good one.

00:47:20 – Jonice Webb
You’re just a human being trying to think of different examples or situations. You deserve this. You’re worth it. Trust yourself on this.

00:47:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. One I love also is some version of like, well, whatever happens here, you’ll be able to handle it. If I’m fearing an outcome, I can even go, well, even if that outcome comes okay, I can handle it. That’s one that helps me a lot, is sort of reminding myself of my ability to cope.

00:47:45 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, some of those things, if they’re ones that you need to hear a lot from yourself, just turn it into a mantra and have it right there in your metaphorical back pocket, ready to grab out and use whenever you need it.

00:47:56 – Eric Zimmer
Awesome.

00:47:57 – Jonice Webb
I think most people need to have a mantra or two.

00:47:59 – Eric Zimmer
They are very helpful. All right. Well, Janice, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. There’ll be links, as I said in the show notes to your website to where people can find, find the questionnaire, find your book, and all your other work. So thank you so much. It’s really been enjoyable for me, too.

00:48:17 – Jonice Webb
Thanks for having me on. I’ve really enjoyed it.

00:48:35 – Chris Forbes
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