From Insight to Action: How to Face the Fear You Keep Avoiding

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I am so excited for this episode. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. We all have different fears that can lead to different behaviors. Maybe we're really afraid of what will happen if we stand up for ourselves or we put ourselves out there. That was true for me for a really long time. These fears can lead to different kinds of patterns like procrastination or people-pleasing or just shrinking our lives generally. These are different forms of avoidance, and we talked about this a lot last week.

0:40Forrest Hanson: Now, we might be very aware of these patterns, but that awareness doesn't seem to be enough. We might get right up to the moment of change, right up to the moment of trying something new. You've decided to do the thing. You're going to quit something. You're going to stand up for yourself. but it is just so hard to do that. And even if you do it, it seems like every time you do, it just goes so poorly. So today we're going to be talking about maybe one of the most important topics we will ever cover on this podcast, which is the practical science of how to change, how to take everything we've learned, all that insight, and all that self-awareness, and use it to actually change a pattern of behavior.

1:19Forrest Hanson: So today I'm joined by clinical psychologist and my dad, Rick Hansen.

1:24Dr. Rick Hanson: So dad, how are you doing today? I'm good. And I love this topic because it's so much about harvest. How do we harvest what we've sowed? And so I like that

1:35Forrest Hanson: topic a lot. Before we get into it, I do want to give you a quick reminder about Rick's upcoming online course on changing your mind. It's very relevant to this topic. It also focuses on these kinds of ingrained patterns that we'll be talking about today. And the course starts on August 8th. You can learn more about it at rickhansen.com slash changing and use coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25 % off discount if you're interested in that. So I wanted to start by asking you, Dad, last time we talked about the avoidance loop and the kind of person who is regularly told that they're so self-aware by their therapist, right?

2:10Forrest Hanson: But they still can't really seem to change what the actual behaviors are that are leading to more suffering inside of their life. And so as a longtime therapist, a clinical psychologist, I wanted to ask you, why do you feel like that insight or that self-awareness often isn't enough for people?

2:26Dr. Rick Hanson: That's a great question. I mean, it's kind of the little secret in psychotherapy that very often people increase their self-awareness, but it doesn't actually lift their mood or lead to behavioral change and different results in the world that they really care about. What is that about? it. It kind of goes back to, I love this advice from Frieda Fromm-Weichmann, the client does not need a new insight. The client needs a new experience. And so we need to have the lived experience of what we're learning. And also there needs to be retention. It reminds me a little bit of a conversation with David Sloan Wilson, a great evolutionary biologist, that evolution of any kind, including individual evolution, proceeds through three elements, variation, selection, and retention.

3:17Dr. Rick Hanson: So variation means trying new things and thinking in new ways, trying it on. And then selection means appreciating what is valuable, what is good for you and others. But then there's retention. And if it doesn't lead to a lasting physical change in your body, notably in your brain, there's no retention by definition. So how do you steepen your growth curve, your learning curve as you move through life. And that's what we're going to be exploring here. Totally.

3:42Forrest Hanson: And this also all reminds me of the idea of corrective emotional experiences. This comes from Franz Alexander and Thomas French in 1946. They were these psychoanalysts, and they were really exploring the idea of like, how does somebody actually change? And well, it's by having a different kind of experience with somebody than the one that you had in the past. And this is really the basis of therapy in a lot of ways. The idea is we can have a different kind of emotional interaction with our therapist where we open ourselves up and we're vulnerable in front of them. And we get a very different response from them than maybe the response that we got from somebody else, from our parents, from some authority figure, whatever it is for us.

4:18Forrest Hanson: And then we can learn from that different response and go like, oh, I actually can do this. And it is okay when I do this. And I had a kind of expectation that when I did A, they would respond with B. And instead, they respond with C or D or E or F, right? All of these other things. And we go, whoa, that really surprised us. And that's a bit what we talked about last time, this idea of an expectancy gap that's often used in exposure therapy. And we can kind of almost think of corrective emotional experiences as like this psychoanalytic precursor to that idea, which as somebody who's been around the block for a minute here, Dad, I'm sure it just kind of tickles you a little bit.

4:54Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, it does. And going back to my psychoanalytic roots, I want to name the ways in which people people come into therapy and they come into conversations with their friend too, wanting change, okay, but then they defend against the change because they associate that change with certain bad results. So when you say, and I know we're going to get into this further later on, why do people not change? Well, partly because they don't actually want to change. You know the old line about how many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change. And wanting the good change to win.

5:34Dr. Rick Hanson: In your mind, the classic metaphor, the two wolves in the heart, everything depends on which one you feed. If you broaden that out, we have these different points of view, for example, about ourselves and the world or different paths that are before us, the high road and the low road, heading north or heading south. And the question is, which one do you want to win? And are you prepared to back the one that you want to win and have that stance inside yourself.

5:59Forrest Hanson: That's really fundamental to all of us. For somebody who's dealing with something that feels really painful or uncomfortable to them, they're a chronic procrastinator. They just can't hit the gas pedal. They're a chronic people pleaser. They really struggle to say how they really feel inside of their important relationships. They might look at what you just said as like, oh, you have to really want to change and go like, well, of course I want to change, dummy.

6:21Dr. Rick Hanson: Like, what do you mean?

6:21Forrest Hanson: But part of what you're alluding to is that the mind's made up of layers. We have different stacks. They call this psychodynamics in psychology. And the idea is that we have these different sort of parts or impulses or unconscious desires that are all putting pressure on each other in different kinds of ways. right? And it's the sum total of all of those pressures that leads to our actual behavior out in the world. So we might consciously think, oh, of course this thing would be good for me. Of course I want it. But maybe there's sort of a deeper layer in there, whether that's just like a habitual pattern that a person has, or maybe that's like a fear that's down beneath the water line that we're not totally aware of, that's also putting pressure on our behavior.

7:03Forrest Hanson: And as you were

7:04Dr. Rick Hanson: saying, we'll probably talk about that more too.

7:06Forrest Hanson: So let's talk a little bit about how people have kind of mapped this out practically. And the big place to look for that is work on exposure, which we talked a little bit last time, because exposure is really dealing with the nitty gritty of a person doesn't want to do a thing. This thing that they don't want to do is a thing that people do. It's not like an insane thing for them to want to do, whether that's standing up for yourself and with other people, or that's leaving the house regularly because that's something you want to do. And so the idea is that underneath our avoidance behaviors are a bunch of predictions about what will happen if we attempt the thing that we're avoiding, right?

7:43Forrest Hanson: So if we attempt to stand up for ourselves, leave the house, whatever it is that we're trying to do, we have this prediction about how badly that will go, basically. And in order to remove the habit of avoidance, what we need to do is update those predictions. The only way to do that, here's the bad news, is by trying things and having experiences, and then seeing whether or not the predictions were validated by our experiences. But of course, the big problem is that avoidance stops us from doing that. So we're in this kind of rock in a hard place moment, right? The way that people go through this, like practically how they set it up when they do this stuff, is you name a prediction, you test it, and you try to see the gap between what you thought would happen and what actually happened and then learn from that gap.

8:30Forrest Hanson: Now, here's a really critical part, and I learned so much about this when I was digging into the research on this. I just thought that this was so cool, is that our predictions are made up of different parts. And people have a tendency to focus on the surface part of the prediction. So if I stand up for myself, if I say no to my parent who is asking me to do something that I don't want to do, and now let's say I'm an adult, they will get mad at me. That's the layer. So they test this thing. They say no to the parent. The parent gets mad at them and they go, ah, the bad thing happened. There's nothing to learn from there.

9:02Forrest Hanson: But there's actually a whole bunch of other stuff that's kind of hidden underneath that first prediction. We've got how likely the bad thing is to happen. Then we've got how bad will the bad thing be if it happens. And then really, really importantly, if it happens, will I be able to handle it? this is a really key part of the whole equation because we can learn from any of those parts. And this is the answer to the question that we left the last episode with, which was, what if I try something and the thing I fear happens? The big learning for people is usually more about the dimensions of catastrophe, how bad will it be, and coping.

9:42Forrest Hanson: Could you actually handle it if the bad thing happened? I want to now take a quick pause here, Dad, and let you get into the pool and respond to anything that I've said so far.

9:52Dr. Rick Hanson: What a great summary of so many great things. Framework coming into this, even as we talk about change, and we're talking about change both on the inside and on the outside. Either kind of change is a form of action. Just looking at things newly as a kind of internal action that can really make a big difference for a person. So as we talk about change, it's really easy in the frame of this for self-criticism to come up and shame to come up and irritation at, well, everybody wants me to change, but it's hard. Okay. And we're not doing this. I mean, the framework here is that we adopted ways of being that made a lot of sense at the time.

10:33Dr. Rick Hanson: They have functions, they serve functions, they have payoffs, they work. That's why we do them. They work in certain ways. So it's in this context So we're talking here. That'll be very much part one. Part two, I loved how you broke it down for us in these predictions having to do with the likelihood of the, if I do X, what's the likelihood of the bad event Y? And then second, if the bad event Y actually occurred, well, how bad would it feel really for how long? And then third, if the bad event Y really did happen and it sucked, it felt pretty bad, how well could I cope with it actually? And what's really interesting is that we acquired these predictions when we were young when, number one, the likelihood of bad events was very high because we were stuck.

11:29Dr. Rick Hanson: We were a kid. You were stuck with me when you were young. you know.

11:34Forrest Hanson: Yeah, and that environment might have certain features like people being hypercritical to you or people being very judgmental or maybe your parent has a certain hang-up about a particular kind of thing and that's where our content comes from a lot of the time.

11:45Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, or your mom or dad are clinically depressed or your mom got abandoned by your father and she was struggling to be a single mom and the home environment was chaotic or you had a younger sibling with a health problem, you know, whatever. You were in there, plus your school and your neighborhood. And then throw in very, you know, proximal societal factors like poverty or racism, chaotic environments, lots of moves, changing schools routinely. You know, you are in certain situations. So we transfer into the present the expectations we acquired from our history in the past. So number one, here you are.

12:22Dr. Rick Hanson: The expectation is that, oh yeah, the likelihood of the bad event will be very high because the frequency of bad events when you were young was very high. And also, how would it land? Oh, it would be horrible because when you were young, it really was horrible. It felt terrible. You were a little kid. You didn't have good insulation, literally myelination on your axonal fibers in your nervous system. It is getting some technical neuroscience into your dad.

12:49Forrest Hanson: I love this. Okay. Where to drip it out?

12:51Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. It doesn't mature until mid-20s, roughly. And there's a lot of evidence that the intensity of upsetting experiences for a three-year-old is typically much greater than it is for a 30-year-old. So it felt horrible. And third, how well could you cope with it when you were three years old or 13 years old? Yeah. And coping comes in a lot of forms, including having a credit card that lets you get your own motel because the family gathering is really, really horrible. Or variations on coping in different kinds of ways. You learn new skills as an adult. You're able to do different things. You have a different power dynamic going on.

13:33Dr. Rick Hanson: You can cope better. So I really appreciate you bringing up these three things because they give us a way systematically to help ourselves not transfer so much, understandably, of our childhood learning into our adult lives.

13:50Forrest Hanson: Again, great, fantastic summary of a very complicated thing. And I think you did it a very tight way there, Dad. So I really appreciate that. And we're already starting to slide into what are some of the big impediments for people in going from insight to change. You already basically talked about shame, this idea that we might have shame about having a problem in the first place, plus then it's kind of second order shame, just about feeling like we're stuck and we haven't been able to change this kind of pattern. So we're trying to operate here in a very non-shaming way, both in how we're talking about this and hopefully for yourself in terms of how you relate to these kinds of experiences.

14:24Forrest Hanson: Doing that kind of narrative work that you were talking about there, dad, can help somebody see their patterns more clearly. This is where insight can be really great. You understand yourself a little better, you get where stuff is coming from, and then you go, okay, today, what's different now? How am I better resourced to all of that kind of stuff? Another big impediment is the kind of learning, childhood learning that you were talking about. We're sort of porting into adulthood this learning that we did in childhood when circumstances were very different. You also talked a little bit about what I would call ambivalence, which is not typically the way that people use that word.

14:55Forrest Hanson: Most of the time when people say ambivalent, they mean don't feel that strongly one way or the other about stuff. But ambivalence can also be you feel really strongly two different kinds of ways. And this gets to those different forces in the mind, right? We've got to pull really strongly in one direction, pull really strongly in another direction. How do we reconcile those different pulls? I want to name two other things here before we get into the what to do about all of this. First one, it can be really hard to see your patterns in real time. It's great to have insight about a pattern when you're sitting in the therapy office and you're like having a calm conversation with your therapist about something or you're listening to a podcast like this one, but it needs to become really personalized.

15:35Forrest Hanson: We've got these big labels like people pleaser or anxiously attached that have all of these words associated with them that people then take on as like personal meaning, right? But our version of people pleasing could look very different than the version that like comes in the instruction manual. So even though you've adopted a label of being a people pleaser, being a fawner, whatever's true for you. Well, you can adopt that and still not see how in the moment you're softening your opinion about something or pre-apologizing or saying yes to something before even checking in with yourself about whether or not you can do it.

16:10Forrest Hanson: And by the way, these are all tendencies I have had at various moments of time, so I'm intimately familiar with them. Then the last one I want to say here, big impediment to change. Action is really scary, and it's often genuinely disruptive for people. Change is threatening. It could threaten emotional pain. You're risking something that you really fear. You often have a lot of content attached to this fear. It sucks. It could mess up your relationships. People organize around a sense of who you are, and as who you are changes, they often don't like that very much, and you're probably going to get some pushback from them.

16:44Forrest Hanson: And then finally, it even can threaten your own kind of identity here. You're changing on a fundamental level, which includes, to put it a little dramatically, like your old self is kind of dying in a way. How do you feel about that? How do you relate to it? Is there some grief associated with that process? And this is all to say that this stuff is hard. And I don't want to downplay how difficult it can be for somebody to take this kind of stuff on. A lot of people say that exposure related stuff, in other words, just like trying stuff that's hard for them, is the toughest thing that they ever done in their life, including like traditional exposure therapy, which can be very challenging for people.

17:19Dr. Rick Hanson: The one thing that kind of comes up to maybe toss into the mix has to do with trauma therapy these days and the ways in which lots of wonderful teachers and therapists have pointed to the import of physiology. Steve Porges and others, if we're activated, that's a game changer. And one of the takeaways here is really important. It's called state-dependent learning. So very often when we have these lovely insights, you know, we're sitting on the porch or we're

17:52Forrest Hanson: with our therapist. This is a great point, dad. I love this. Yeah.

17:56Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. Listening to Forrest, we're walking the dog or hanging out. It's all really great.

18:00Forrest Hanson: Yeah. Yeah.

18:01Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm never going to drink again. Yeah. I'm never going to yell at the kids. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to stop beating myself up. I'm going to realize this. Great. Love it. And then, but when you're learning that and you are learning it, your physiology is in state A. It's calm. It's centered. It's relaxed. It's happy. You've had enough food. You're not hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. H-A-L-T, the four big markers from Alcoholics Anonymous that suggest that you should think about W-A-I-T, why am I talking? Okay. From Holt.

18:39Forrest Hanson: I've needed to think about that once or twice in my life.

18:41Dr. Rick Hanson: To wait. There you go. So then your physiology is really jacked up. Let's say then you're jacked up. Your heart is pounding. You're flooded. Cortisol is released. Adrenaline is going. Even if your body is quiet and kind of frozen, you are plugged into the wall. All right. All that other learning that was state-dependent is living in a different silo. You have access to it when you're in a different physiological pattern, pattern A. Now you're in pattern B. And so it becomes really important twofold. Number one, to have enough of that 1 % of knowing that when you're cranked up physiologically, it's really important to settle that down before you even have the opportunity to access that learning and to give yourself time and a pause and ways to do that.

19:32Dr. Rick Hanson: Second, it's really important to acquire the learning in the states of physiological activation that are comparable to what you're going to have to be dealing with in real life. And in other words, and this is a really important thing because very often like in therapy, we're all calm, we're all mellow, it's all great, but it really helps people to find ways to know what they know is true when their body is really getting revved up. And so that speaks to ways you can actually do that for yourself. Get revved up, do some exercise, jump up and down.

20:06Forrest Hanson: You're already getting into the like how to do this effectively part. Yeah, yeah.

20:10Dr. Rick Hanson: Tune into some anger, whatever. Get into a physiological state that's like the one that's going to be happening when you're on thin ice and difficult, challenging situations that you want to learn related to and then remind yourself of what you really want to know and or work with people who are coaching you or doing therapy with you or just being friends with you to help you remind I didn't know that as well. As a weird metaphor, someone I know well, your mom was studying for a test in college one night, took some amphetamines like one does in college. I never did that myself. Some upper, some speed.

20:48Dr. Rick Hanson: When was this, Dad? Was this the 70s, the 80s, the 90s?

20:51Forrest Hanson: It was the early 70s. All right. So it was the Wild West is what I'm hearing. Okay. Anyways, go ahead here now.

20:56Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, I don't know if it's stopped.

20:58Forrest Hanson: Oh, this is still pernicious, and it's probably not a good thing that people do this. But like Adderall is the big one these days. People borrowing other people's Adderall. Yeah. Yeah.

21:07Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. I was just thinking of that. Yeah. Yeah. My roommate's Adderall. Great. Except when your mom.

21:12Forrest Hanson: By the way, we are not endorsing this. I just want to be really clear. Just like don't do this. Okay. Anyways. It's a cautionary note.

21:18Dr. Rick Hanson: And she would tell you that she really understood it all when she was taking those whites, those uppers as it were. You know. At two in the morning, she understood that stuff.

21:30Forrest Hanson: This might be too much self-disclosure.

21:34Dr. Rick Hanson: But when she walked into the test for the final exam later that afternoon and the amphetamine had worn off, she totally flunked. She had no knowledge of what – she had no access to the state-dependent learning that she'd acquired in that other way.

21:51Forrest Hanson: God, this is such a funny example of the thing that you're talking about here, Dad. But it's very memorable. I'm sure people will remember this part of the episode. So, okay. So in part, what we've been talking about so far is how do you get to the starting line, right? Like, how do you get to the point where you actually want to test a thing, change a behavior? Because we've got this kind of chicken and the egg problem a lot of the time, which is that people need to act in order to create change, including to like change the thoughts they have, the fears they have, the beliefs they have about themselves.

22:21Forrest Hanson: But those current thoughts and fears and beliefs and so on are all the stuff that's stopping them from acting, right? So like, how do you reconcile that? And the answer is a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, I think, whether it's developing insight in these different ways, appreciating your personal history, working on the shame story. This could get into some IFSE working with protector parts stuff. If you're into that or appreciating the function of the defense for you, that can be a really, really good one for people. Something that's been really big for me is when it comes to working with that shame part of it is appreciating the gap between insight and change.

22:56Forrest Hanson: Particularly, literally, there's this great Ira Glass piece for creatives titled The Gap, and you can go look it up. And it's essentially this idea that when we start learning about something, we cultivate knowledge, and therefore we cultivate taste related to it. But if you're a creative person, your ability to write is going to lag behind your appreciation of great writing. And so you see this gap between, wow, Hemingway is so brilliant, or for me, like Ursula Le Guin, Robin Hobb, whatever, like so brilliant. And then I read my own writing and I'm like, oh my God, who would ever publish this?

23:30Forrest Hanson: But that's the way it goes, right? Like I would. Yeah. I appreciate that, dad. We wrote a book together. So I certainly hope so. But you know, it did. They did. Fair enough. Fair enough. But anyways, the pain of catching that moment is actually evidence that you're going in the right direction. That's right. Because you're engaging with the process in that kind of way. So anyways, the point is that like, we've got these different levers we can pull that we've already talked about a little bit here that can help us get to the starting line. And now the rest of the episode is basically going to be about, okay, what do you do from there?

24:02Forrest Hanson: We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Huel. Out of every sponsor we have ever had on the show, I think that Huel is the one that Elizabeth and I have used the most. It's always been tough for Elizabeth to eat enough protein, and she's been trying to build some muscle recently. And, well, we're both busy during the day. It often feels easier to just grab something rather than taking the time to make something that's actually healthy. But what if you could do both? Huel, that's spelled H-U-E-L, has solved that problem for us.

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25:20Forrest Hanson: New customers only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show.

25:27Dr. Rick Hanson: Now, back to the show. That was fantastic, Forrest, and I kind of want to add two things I'm thinking about. The first has to do with a term from developmental psychology called scaffolding. It's the idea that But young Forrest, sitting there in the high chair, two years old, starting to learn how to eat mashed potatoes on his own, is doing this complex act of holding the spoon in his hand, reaching out, digging into the mashed potatoes, making it into his mouth successfully, good, and then putting the spoon back down. Well, that seemingly simple action could be broken down into 20 steps. And maybe Forrest, when he first starts, is able to do three of them.

26:09Dr. Rick Hanson: He's able to do step four, seven, and 11. All right? Mom or dad have to do the other steps. They scaffold in those other steps so that Forrest can then experience success with the whole trajectory of action. Scaffolding, beautiful idea. And then gradually as Forrest, little Forrest, becomes increasingly competent, and then he only has one step to go, and then he finally nails that step two, yay, the scaffolding is withdrawn. In much the same way, we can have the humility to realize that, you know, we need some scaffolding and to be able to risk the dreaded experience. So one of the primary forms of scaffolding, of course, is social support.

26:52Dr. Rick Hanson: It's really helpful to be able to have someone with us when we go do the thing or to be holding our hand while we do the thing or to talk about it in advance with us so we can kind of rehearse with them before we do the thing. Sometimes you need some help. Yeah, that's number one. The second thing I just want to add before we get into it, let's suppose that you want to risk the dreaded experience of telling your adult parent no about something important that they want from you and you don't want to do, you don't want to give them that, you don't want to spend the time in that way, whatever it might be.

27:25Dr. Rick Hanson: Okay, you don't want to do it, but wow, is that hard to do. Well, then you think to yourself, you know, it would be really helpful for me if I could be calmer in my body. Because I know that if I were calmer in my body, I wouldn't be so jacked up physiologically. And I'd be more able to access what I know is true and get on my own side here and be successful. All right. So I'm going to do some practices to develop greater trait calm in my body. Oh, but to do that, I've got to get in touch with my body. And that's really scary because I'm afraid of what I'll start to feel if I start tuning into my body.

28:05Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, so now I need to increase my capacity to tune into my body without being overwhelmed. And it would really support me to do that to build up kind of a fundamental sense that my best friend is with me. or the divine is with me, something, somebody's with me. Okay, so I'm going to do, to be able to do them, the thing that I really want to do, which is tell my dad no, which took me into my mid-20s to be able to finally do, in my own case. And he was very chill about it, by the way. The internalized invisible cage was inside me. It wasn't enforced from the outside. But in any case, to be able to do that no, spoke, then you've got to be able to get in touch with your body.

28:53Dr. Rick Hanson: But to be able to get in touch with your body, you need to build up the sense that somebody who loves you is with you. And so you build up that sense, which then enables you to get in touch with your body, which then enables you to be calmer, which then enables you to finally say no.

29:07Forrest Hanson: So in classic Rick Hansen fashion, you are previewing other aspects of what we're going to talk about because you're talking about testing and experimentation. Like how do you know what are the things that I need? How do I know that it would be helpful for me to develop this capacity to get in touch with my body. It's like, well, we try things and we learn, geez, I really need the ability to get in touch with my body, as I painfully learned through my own experience with some of these issues as a reformed over cognizer. And I remain a bit of an over cognizer, but you know what I mean? That's my baseline tendency, but man, have I gotten more comfortable with the other stuff over time.

29:45Forrest Hanson: So how do we actually do all of this? And you had a strategy about it.

29:48Dr. Rick Hanson: You were strategic. That's kind of what I'm getting at in this bit about scaffolding and adjacent resources you were strategic about, including through dance, for example.

29:56Forrest Hanson: Yeah, totally, totally. And I figured out other ways to kind of get the things that I needed. So when people are doing this more formalized version of exposure work, and I already mentioned it in the previous episode, but just to say again, a lot of this comes from Michelle Kraske at UCLA, really fantastic researcher, has done super cool work in this territory. What we're trying to start with is some kind of a concrete prediction. Because again, we're trying to figure out what are all of the underlying beliefs and ideas that we have that are kind of sitting below the waterline when we decide, I don't want to do that, right?

30:32Forrest Hanson: Or I know it'll go badly. Well, what do we mean by that? I know it'll go badly is not very testable. Don't make them upset is not very testable. If I say I can't do it, they'll get angry at me is more testable, but it's still a little incomplete. plate. So this is where we want to drill down to those different layers that I was talking about a little bit earlier. So we've got the surface of the water. That's your prediction about what will actually happen. If I say I can't do it, they'll get angry at me. Then we go to the severity level. How bad will it be? It will feel awful. They'll be mad at me for days.

31:09Forrest Hanson: Then we go to coping, or how will I handle it? I'll feel so bad that I'll backpedal and I'll apologize to them. And I'll say, sure, I'll do it. Then we go to meaning. This will prove that I can't stick up for myself or something like that. If you're doing this for yourself, it might not make sense for you to go through all of those layers. But I would encourage you to go through as many of them as you can, as many of them as you're comfortable with. This is a big part of the protocol that these people create when working with these kinds of fears. When we only think about the surface prediction, we actually kind of set ourselves up for failure because yeah, sometimes a difficult person is gonna be mean to you.

31:48Forrest Hanson: Sometimes we update our prediction about how likely an event is to happen, like how likely they are to be mean to you. But it's just as important that we make updates to the predictions that are more associated with self and self-advocacy because that's the pipeline to real self-worth. When we start to build an idea of ourselves as a coper, which is something that I've heard you say in the past, Dad, somebody who is capable of coping in that way, all of a sudden the world starts to open up to us, right? We start going, oh, okay, maybe that bad thing will happen. But if it does happen, I'm able to handle it.

32:25Forrest Hanson: So that's kind of the first setup of this experiment that we're going to run.

32:28Dr. Rick Hanson: I love the fact that of those three, how likely is a bad event, how bad would I feel if it occurs, how would I cope with it, that you're emphasizing the third of these, because that's the one that's most under your control and frankly, most acknowledges the ways in which, as Alan Watts put it a long time ago, life is wiggly. I recently did this talk in my Wednesday meditation thing about radical helplessness, radical trust and radical acceptance. And there's an aspect of life that we are helpless about. Things happen and sometimes they feel horrible.

33:03Forrest Hanson: And still, we're left with your third focus, that we can cope with it.

33:08Dr. Rick Hanson: And very often, people really underestimate their capacity to cope. I'm thinking a little bit about a different kind of gap than the one Iron Glass talks about, the gap between our self-concept and who we actually are at this point. And in my experience, people's self-concept usually lags six to 18 months behind their current developmental status in terms of how they've grown, their growing edge. And if not, what, six to 18 years or decades, 180 years, I don't know. But anyway, behind how you really are currently. Yeah. So I love the fact that you're going there.

33:44Forrest Hanson: I think a part of this process is also just figuring out how to set up a good experiment where you are somewhat likely to get this new experience that you're looking for on one of these levels, right? So if we're doing some experimental design with this stuff, if we're really treating it like a scientist, we want to set up different, hey, scientific criteria for how we're going to engage in it, right? So first, we want that concrete prediction, something that's testable and ideally can be falsified, right? So if we set up a prediction that's like impossible for us to falsify, then it's going to be really hard to test it.

34:18Forrest Hanson: Second thing that comes to mind for me is making it right-sized. People talk a lot about uncomfortable but not overwhelming. So ideally, you want to be in some kind of a state of activation related to it because we're trying something hard, but we're not so activated that we're just totally overwhelmed or swamped by what's going on. And then ideally, again, this is a test that actually interrupts your patterns. You figure out a thing that is distinctly different from what you would have automatically done in the past, right? Because that's how we're going to get some new information here. Does anything else kind of come to mind for you here, Dad, as you're hearing me talk through this?

34:54Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, the first thing that's coming to my mind is how much I like listening to you.

34:58Forrest Hanson: So I'm talking a lot during this episode in part because I find this stuff so cool. But yeah,

35:04Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm getting high on our supply in the best kind of way, which is kind of good. And I really appreciate how you're unpacking the analytic to-dos of this. It's a little bit like a recipe. It's a little bit like a recipe. How to actually do it. I really appreciate that. Gosh, for me, there's a lot about this that's kind of emotional and it's endearing when people are trying things. It's plucky. It's noble. It's scary. It's courageous to help yourself learn, to be a learner, right? And it's also incredibly beneficial for others. And the person who is a learner in a group really can help draw other people along.

35:48Dr. Rick Hanson: A learning team, a learning organization, a family that learns, a couple, a marriage that learns. You and I, two podcasters, are we learning along the way? And to me, there's something just so admirable, not getting conceited about it, but just admirable about the willingness to launch into the undiscovered country of the future, to launch into the deep, dark blue and try new things in the service of your own learning. So I don't know. I just think that attitude is sweet and endearing, and it's the attitude that wraps around the really good specifics in the recipe of challenging our expectations.

36:29Dr. Rick Hanson: Totally, totally.

36:31Forrest Hanson: And to make this even more granular and practical for people, let's kind of walk through an example here. I've used this example of people-pleasing a couple of times during the episodes, so we're going to just keep on rolling with that one. So let's say that this person recognizes that one of their most ingrained patterns, one of the things they do just habitually is they don't state their preferences, right? And they go, okay, trying to state my preferences more frequently could be a nice little small step here. It'll be not habitual for me. I'll have to actually exercise some thought and some effort in order to do it.

37:02Forrest Hanson: It's relatively small stakes. A preference is not that big of a deal. Other people can shoot down your preferences. You can walk back your preferences. Okay, good step. It's uncomfortable. it's not overwhelming. To make it easier to remember, they tell themselves something like, the next time that my fill-in-the-blank, my partner, my friend, my parent, ask them something. What do you want to eat for dinner? When do you want to meet up? What movie should we watch? You pick. They won't say something like, whatever you want, or I don't mind. Or if they do that habitually, they'll pause for a second, they'll notice it, and they'll go, oh, actually, fill-in-the-blank, I would prefer a thing.

37:39Forrest Hanson: I would state a preference. Even if they don't feel that strongly. They just want to get in the habit of expressing a preference. Then later, they might recognize a kind of bigger problem after running that trial. They might recognize that their impulse to self-abandon or their people-pleasing tendencies really comes up most when they're in conflict with a partner. And this could be a much bigger trial for that person. So the action that they would define would be smaller, more concrete, more controllable. When they notice a feeling inside of themselves that their partner is being short with them or is disappointed in them, instead of jumping into problem solving and just trying to resolve the issue, they will wait for some period of time, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, just to kind of sit with the feeling and let themselves ask themselves, okay, what do I want to do about this?

38:33Forrest Hanson: So this could be a kind of concrete trial that somebody sets up. They say, I have a behavior. I want to act differently about it. Here's how I'm going to set up the parameters for that test. So then we've got a really important question, which is what do we actually want to do when we're running this test, right? Like how do we want to make this go as good as possible? And this gets to a lot of really granular advice from this research about staying engaged and distracting yourself. This is something I've heard you say a million times, Dad. Attention is like a combination of a spotlight and a vacuum cleaner.

39:05Forrest Hanson: A lot of the time when we try to do this stuff, what we do in order to get through it is we just distract ourselves through it. The problem is that if we're distracting ourselves, we're not paying attention to that expectation gap. Yes. So we've got, again, a little bit of attention here. We've got a problem, right? Which is in order to do the thing, I've kind of moved my attention away, but now I can't do that anymore. So how do I stay with it? A lot of different pieces of advice here. First piece of advice, it's actually okay if you feel really bad while this is happening. And that's a tough one for people, obviously.

39:38Forrest Hanson: We don't want to feel bad. But it doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. Feeling bad is kind of the expectation here. We're trying something really difficult. We're trying something unnatural. You're probably going to feel bad a little bit. But we want to be able to stick with that for long enough to notice some other kind of gap in our expectations or our predictions, right? We can do some self-soothing stuff, though. That isn't just distraction. So a big version of this is affect labeling, where we just say to ourselves, what is it that I'm feeling right now? I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling angry.

40:11Forrest Hanson: I'm feeling hot. I'm feeling distressed, whatever it is. And there's some research that suggests that people who do this during exposure, and again, this is research done by Kresge and her colleagues at UCLA, the people who did that kind of affect labeling felt much better about the whole experience a week later than the people who didn't. So that's just one study, but it was kind of a cool piece of evidence that I bumped into. And if you truly get kind of flooded or overwhelmed here, then that probably means that we set up an experiment that was a little too big for you right now. Maybe you need to do some of the stuff that you were talking about, Dad, where you need to build more of that relationship with the body, or you need to find a friend that you kind of like talk it through before you go and do the thing, whatever it is, just to make that experiment a little bit more right-sized.

40:54Dr. Rick Hanson: I love this material, and I want to suggest a way to understand it that works for my inner nerd, which has to do with essentially the neuroscience of experience and the formation of memory. So I'll try to keep it succinct. When we're triggered, when we're plugged in, when we're activated, whether it's about a phobia to spiders or a collection of reactions about standing up to an authority figure, when we start to experience that, it feels like, oh, it's one whole package. Body sensations, emotion, mind, behavioral tendencies, feels like a whole package. But actually, the brain is so fast that it made up that package.

41:44Dr. Rick Hanson: It constructed that whole package from very efficiently stored, minimal necessary elements deep in the bowels of emotional memory. So it's not like an encyclopedia, an emotional encyclopedia is sitting there deep down in your brain and we're just pulling up the file. No, the brain takes a couple of seeds and then recreates that experience in total, point one. Point two, when that experience gradually leaves awareness and we move on to other things, that package gets reconstituted, reconsolidated, literally physically, deep in the layers of emotional memory. So we have the activation phase and then we have the reconsolidation phase.

42:35Dr. Rick Hanson: What we're trying to do, and you're laying out extremely skillfully what we're trying to do, is to disrupt the reconsolidation phase in two aspects. Number one, we're trying to associate corrective emotional experiences to the various stimuli that we're getting reactivated around, like being with an authority figure. So we're trying to associate those corrective emotional experiences. Great. And we're also trying to disrupt literally the reconsolidation of that total memory package. And there's a window of reconsolidation. It's about an hour or so long, maybe a little longer, during which the memory, the reinstallation of that emotional memory is labile.

43:19Dr. Rick Hanson: It's vulnerable. It's fluid. It's dynamic. It can be disrupted. So therefore, the bigger the benefit we want, we want to activate the full package because we are now trying to associate to it a very rich positive package of disconfirmation of the expectations and different emotional experiences, including an emotional experience of yourself as someone who can cope with things, right? So we're trying to get the full package of the negative material activated so that it can be matched by the full package of the corrective emotional experience and then associate to it and take those associations back with it down back down the memory hole.

44:05Dr. Rick Hanson: And the more that we activate the original whole package, the better it's going to be. And this is why it's really important as best you can to get in touch with the tip of the root, the tip of the emotional root of the weed, if you will, in the garden of the mind that has to do typically with layers of childhood material, even pre-verbal material, that's just somatic and emotional. It's not cognitive or language-centered. And you want to get that full package up into consciousness because then you can associate to it things that are helpful. If the full package is not activated into consciousness, you can't associate to that which has not been surfaced into awareness.

44:45Forrest Hanson: This is great, Pat. I'm glad that you're talking about how this actually works and consolidates for people, because it gets to the next thing that I wanted to focus on and ask you about, which is how this work on exposure really converges with the focus of your professional effort over the last 30 years-ish, which is the HEAL process, what you call the HEAL process, have, enrich, absorb, blink, and it's the practical basis of what you're talking about here. How do we actually learn from our experiences. Because we've talked about what to do before, how to set up an exposure. We've talked about what to do during, how to stay present.

45:21Forrest Hanson: We can self-soothe, but we don't want to distract. Right-sized experiments, all that kind of stuff. Now what do we do after? Well, we did the test, and it went however it went. Hopefully, we've really paid attention to those predictions that we had. Kraski's clinical protocol literally ends every exposure with structured questions, things like, what did I predict? What actually happened? How was I surprised? And then critically, what did I learn? And that surprise is the big focus, and it can operate at any of the prediction levels that we've been talking about. How bad would it be? How well would I cope?

45:55Forrest Hanson: How likely is it to happen? All of that good stuff. And then we get to learning, right? What did we learn from this whole experience? And this starts to sound an awful lot like HEAL and particularly the link step of HEAL, which you talk about holding these two experiences side by side in memory. You could talk about this more effectively than I could probably. And letting the kind of new one crowd out the old one in different kinds of ways. This is essentially an inhibitory learning approach, which is Kraski's whole thing with exposure, going from an extinction approach to exposure to an inhibitory learning approach to exposure.

46:30Forrest Hanson: And I just thought that was so cool how you guys just converge from these different dimensions onto this big practical takeaway, which is, okay, the thing happened, now what? How are we actually going to learn from it? How are we going to update our predictions so we can then go and do a new experiment in the future?

46:48Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, for those people who are parents, just being appreciated by your adult kid for anything, including - It's a rare experience for starters. Yeah, make a spaghetti sauce. It's just a total five-star one. Now, this one's going in the memory box. Well, a couple things here. So, I find it really helpful to distinguish between developing inner resources in their own right, often because you know that you want to grow those resources so that you can eventually do the linking, the connecting that is essentially what you're talking about here throughout this whole episode. In other words, we're deliberately bringing to bear certain kinds of awareness and certain kinds of resource experiences.

47:33Dr. Rick Hanson: We're bringing those to bear with our so-called negative material so that we can actually change that negative material. I just want to note that for many people, they need to do some preliminary work first. And it's helpful to do some preliminary work that before you actually face the Gom Jabbar, you know, to use the metaphor from Dune, you can build up all kinds of strengths inside before you open the trap door to that, let's say, traumatic material. That's great. In its own right, you can really deepen the learning, the emotional learning of those resources, like, for example, feeling calm in your body without bringing into awareness any kind of negative material.

48:14Dr. Rick Hanson: And the first three steps, have, enrich, and absorb, really describe, you know, I did not invent these methods. I've invented the ways of framing them and using them and nesting them in an evolutionary neurobiological framework. But the methods themselves are very familiar and kind of universal. Have the beneficial experience of some kind, including just observing something newly. Like, oh, they don't yell at me if I say I don't want spaghetti for dinner. You know, they don't, actually. I thought they would, but they didn't. Okay, have that experience, but then especially learn from that experience by enriching it, making it big, and then absorbing it, really receiving it into your being, which helps it really lodge in your memory systems with physical change.

48:57Dr. Rick Hanson: Okay, fine. Here now, we're talking really about linking. We're talking about associating or connecting that old material. We want to update our priors, to put it a little different way. We're trying to update our priors that we acquired understandably. And often because they were helpful, we want to update our priors with new experience. And so you're exactly right. There's a convergence here between the material I developed in books like Hardwiring Happiness and you and I developed further in the book Resilient. There's a total convergence with that material and this wonderful new research from people like Professor Kraske and others.

49:36Dr. Rick Hanson: Back to the show after a quick break.

49:40Forrest Hanson: This episode is sponsored by Huel. Out of every sponsor we have ever had on the show, I think that Huel is the one that Elizabeth and I have used the most. It's always been tough for Elizabeth to eat enough protein, and she's been trying to build some muscle recently. And, well, we're both busy during the day. It often feels easier to just grab something rather than taking the time to make something that's actually healthy. But what if you could do both? Huel, that's spelled H-U-E-L, has solved that problem for us. Their Black Edition powder is a complete meal you have instead of food, not a shake on top of food.

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51:00Forrest Hanson: Now, back to the show. I now want to ask you a little bit about what helps somebody take that learning that they've done in that moment and make it as durable and sturdy as possible. And a piece of this that I'm personally curious about are experiences that I've had myself and also that I've really, you can really observe it in other people often more than we can see ourselves. Sometimes it's really hard to do this with self-observation. Where a person had an experience, there was some kind of an expectancy violation. Maybe it wasn't about whether or not the bad thing happened, but it was about how well they could cope with it or something like that.

51:38Forrest Hanson: And then when you're talking about it with them later, it feels like there's a real resistance to seeing the expectancy violation. There's a resistance to seeing how their initial prediction was untrue, essentially, or it wasn't quite so bad or whatever it was. And that's something that I've always been very curious about the ways that there could be like layers of the mind or parts or whatever, however we want to talk about it, that resist that update.

52:05Dr. Rick Hanson: Much as you did by unpacking things, it's really helpful to unpack, peel it apart. Yeah, there's the learning that's occurring in real-time situations. There you are, you tell your dad, no. You tell your mom, no, mom, I don't really want spaghetti for dinner with meatballs. I'm a vegan. Okay. That's a great opportunity. When it's real, that has the most intensity. That's where the greatest opportunity is for maximal impact, partly because, going back to that point about state-dependent learning, your body is most jacked up. You're most revved up. It's most, you're in the real. This is not training.

52:43Dr. Rick Hanson: You're not off stage. This is not on the practice field. This is your emotional Super Bowl. It is real. Okay, those are going to have a lot of impact. But we also have many, many opportunities to help ourselves transform and to gradually heal the layers of, quote unquote, negative material that are in us, understandably, but on our own, not when we're actually in the middle of the of the field of fire, the actual real experience. And so I just want to make that distinction right there. And then in terms of helping yourself, I find that when you're having that disconfirmed expectation, when you're realizing, oh, it isn't like that, it's really important, whether you're in the real of it in the moment or after the fact, to help yourself develop conviction.

53:33Dr. Rick Hanson: the emotional sense of conviction. Oh, I trust what I know is true. I believe what I know is true. It's not just intellectual and abstract. It's very visceral. And so you want to help yourself really believe what you know is true and push back against the doubting machinery in your mind that might undermine what you really know is true. Additionally, alongside that cognitive track, It's really important to bring to bear as much as you can an awareness of your emotions and your sensations and your inclinations, your motivations. That's a helpful model, in other words. And so it's not just that you're understanding things in a new way.

54:22Dr. Rick Hanson: Great. And with deepening, deepening conviction that you're associating to that ways of being because that's what we really care about. or a way of being, a way of being while talking with mom that you don't want her spaghetti with meatballs, that in your body you're settled in certain kinds of ways rather than flooded and scared like you used to be when you were little and she would yell at you. In your emotions, yeah, there's some anger there. But let's say also there's probably some love and compassion. She's trying to feed you and she grew up in a meat and heavy environment and okay, that's how she is.

55:02Dr. Rick Hanson: you know, emotionally maybe. And then in terms of behavioral, rather than shrinking your body and curling up, you know, if you're just listening, I'm curling up right here and pulling away and withdrawing or freezing. Instead, your shoulders are coming back, your head is coming up, and you're looking at her, you know, dignified and grave and calm and self-respecting way. So you're bringing in those elements, emotion, sensation, and motivation or an inclination along with your cognitive aspects. Now you're bringing the full package there with that other material. And you can even go further, and I talk about this a lot.

55:46Dr. Rick Hanson: You can feel that this new way of being is gradually sinking into. It's soothing and it's gradually dislodging and supplanting that old way of being, kind of like flowers spreading in the garden of your mind, gradually uprooting the weeds there.

56:02Forrest Hanson: That way that you talked about it at the end there, Dad, this idea of something new coming in and displacing the old material is a great way to think about it because that's the whole frame of this inhibitory learning approach, right? It's not that the old thing totally vanished underground. It's still there. It's just covered by this new prediction. and sometimes what happens when we're exposed to a new situation or a different level of stress or you know all the things that you were talking about is that that old prediction rears its ugly head and we backslide a little bit this is often associated with a lot of shame for people and a lot of self-criticism but what i part of what i like about this new model is that backsliding is kind of expected you know we fall off the wagon sometimes that old prediction reasserts itself we weren't prepared for this new situation we find ourselves in and we're scared, we're going back to that old habitual pattern that we had.

56:57Forrest Hanson: That's okay. This isn't a failure. This is expected. It's documented. Now we just need to figure out a new experiment. Now we need to figure out what we're going to do from now on. So there's this kind of long game framing in the whole thing. There's an ongoing competition between the two predictions. That's kind of like exercising. It's not like you get to just do a lot of exercise for nine months and then say, I'm good on exercise for the rest of my life. It's an ongoing fight against entropy, and that's really okay. Then we can also bring in a lot of the stuff that you were saying actually earlier in the episode, Dad, about not just being comfortable in one narrow situation under one narrow set of circumstances when our body feels a certain kind of way, when we've got all this perfect scaffolding around us, all that kind of stuff, right?

57:40Forrest Hanson: We start to test the waters of different levels of activation, different levels of difficulty, different kinds of circumstances. Hey, maybe we experiment. We try it with the scaffolding for a while or crutches as they're sometimes called in the research. And then we learn, okay, I'm okay with the crutch. Now can I be okay without the crutch? Now maybe I'm not so dependent on rehearsing at 50 times before I go into the interaction or so dependent on having my friend that I really love with me next to me when I'm writing the email I'm going to send to the person or whatever it is. I can start to try to do this stuff under more and more trying circumstances because again, I'm building this underlying belief about myself that I am a coper.

58:21Forrest Hanson: I am somebody who can cope. I am somebody who can do this even when it's hard. I can bear difficult things, all of that kind of stuff. And as we've been talking about this, and also as I was digging into this material before we started recording, I couldn't help but ask myself a question over and over. What if all of your predictions are right. What if something feels bad, it is really overwhelming, and there are consequences from it? And sure, you can cope with it in the sense that you're not eradicated by it, but man, it sure doesn't feel good. But it's still important to you. It's still something you care about.

58:57Forrest Hanson: It's still aligned with your values. Then what? And for me, this is where we leave the world of exposure therapy, and we wander into the world of all of the more fuzzy psychological process that you're such an expert in, and particularly approaches like act. Because sometimes this isn't so much about identifying that our underlying beliefs were incorrect or predictions were incorrect. It's about going, wow, all my predictions were right, still I just really care about this thing. And so I'm going to act in a way that's aligned with my values. And that's a piece of it that I think is really important to include in this discussion.

59:30Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, it really goes there to your existentialist roots and also to, of course, the first noble truth of the Buddha that life is difficult. It has challenges. And that's not the entirety of life, but that's part of life. I also want to say for us that I learned a lot from you and how you play poker. In other words, I'm just very struck.

59:55Forrest Hanson: For those who don't know, this is how I found my way through college. But anyways, I played very seriously for a long time. Yeah.

1:00:02Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, and you were good at it. You were lethally good at it. And you described yourself. I had some game.

1:00:10Forrest Hanson: It's true.

1:00:11Dr. Rick Hanson: And your fellow mid-20s types is sort of like Barracudas, gradually interacting with the whales like me, who are typically late middle-aged men who would be prepared to lose a few hundred dollars at a session just to have a good time. And you all were just gradually harvesting from them as predators. so there you are. Anyway, my point being, you would say as someone who is by nature thrifty and thoughtful about your money, that you'd be routinely in situations in which there was, let's say, a 60-40 chance that if you went all in, you'd take the whole pot. And the wise thing to do, maybe the odds would be more like 70-30, I don't know, but the wise thing to do every single time would be to go all in, even though 40 % of the time or 30 % of the time, you'd lose the hand.

1:01:02You'd lose serious money for a young guy. And yet,

1:01:08Dr. Rick Hanson: this goes back to my background with probabilistic risk analysis and Bayes' theorem, given your state of knowledge at the time, your decision was the correct one. And that's a really kind of geeky way, yeah, but of understanding that we're going to make choices in this life based on the best odds, and a fair number of them are going to come up empty. They're not going to work out.

1:01:32Forrest Hanson: And that doesn't mean you made the wrong choice really critically. Yeah.

1:01:35Dr. Rick Hanson: That's right. And I think part of it here, it comes to something really tender for people about exposing themselves to emotional risks that come with investing in relationships. And this reminds me of a quotation from Jimmy Chin, the great filmmaker and mountaineer, very involved with the movie Free Solo, let's say Alex Honnold, Climbing on Capitan with No Robes, Jimmy said something like, to me, the greatest risk in life is to take no risks at all. And much in the same way in the heart, that to live a life that's so safe that we don't ever risk abandonment and disappointment and betrayal, including in ordinary friendships, let alone with a potential mate is maybe a much greater risk for a person than taking a chance, a prudent chance to be sure.

1:02:26Dr. Rick Hanson: But still, nonetheless, we can't ultimately control other people. We have to take chances in this life if we're going to have a good one. And to me, that's kind of a frame that wraps around what you're talking about here. Totally.

1:02:38Forrest Hanson: And I think that's a great note to close the main part of this episode on. I'm going to do probably a pretty lengthy recap here of what we talked about today because this was a really rich one. So if you're interested in more of a summary of everything we've talked about, that's going to be in the recap. But I really appreciate you taking the time today, Dad. This was really great. It was great to talk with you about it. I thought this was so cool as I was learning about it. That's part of why I was really chatty during this episode is that I was just super into this material. And it's actually going to legitimately affect my life in terms of how I approach situations like this.

1:03:11Forrest Hanson: Also, the advice I to give to friends about stuff like this. It's gonna be really cool and useful. And that big convergence between you and the intempatory learning exposure research I thought was really cool as well.

1:03:23Dr. Rick Hanson: That's neat. And I learned a lot in this process too. And I hope it's good for people.

1:03:35Forrest Hanson: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I really loved talking about how we can go from insight and self-awareness to action with Rick today. And if you enjoyed this episode, but you would also like to hear about this in more detail, for example, maybe we walk through some kind of concrete example of doing this, whether that's changing a belief that we have about ourselves or it's testing a particular behavior that we might have. I used people pleasing throughout this episode. Maybe we could use something different in the future. If you would like to see an episode like that from us in the future, please let us know.

1:04:06Forrest Hanson: You can leave a comment. You can send an email to contact at beingwellpodcast.com or, you know, find another way to get in touch with us and let us know that's something you would be interested in. So let's go all the way back to the beginning and recap this episode. We all have different kinds of behaviors, and some of those behaviors are really frustrating to us. Maybe we chronically don't stand up for ourselves. Maybe we procrastinate. Maybe we're really reliant on a certain kind of way of thinking or a certain kind of way of acting out in the world. And if we look at those behaviors closely, we'll typically find that underneath them are different kinds of fears that we have about what will happen if we do something else.

1:04:45Forrest Hanson: This gets really specific for people in the world of exposure therapy, where they're often focused on a more particular kind of behavior. This is often particularly when they're working with something like OCD. Maybe somebody has a fear that, you know, if they speak up for themselves, their parent will be mad at them, or other people won't accept them, or they'll be abandoned. okay. And if we look underneath that fear, what we'll find are a bunch of predictions about the world. Predictions of how likely the bad thing will be to happen, how bad it will be if it does happen, and then if it happens, will you be able to cope with it?

1:05:19Forrest Hanson: Will you be able to handle it? And what approaches to exposure therapy do, particularly modern approaches to exposure therapy, is they help us surface those different predictions and test them so we can figure out, okay, is this prediction really accurate? Or maybe is it less accurate than I think it is? One of the problems with insight is that it can feel like progress without needing to actually risk action. Cultivating more self-knowledge and your perfect mind palace is a fairly low-risk activity. Actually doing stuff differently out in the world, that is much spookier. And in our last episode, we talked a bit about framework collecting as one example of this.

1:05:59Forrest Hanson: Insight without action often just transforms into rumination. So what we really want to do is figure out how we can move into testing, particularly testing these different predictions. One of the things we really focused on was shame and how shame can be very immobilizing for people. Shame about having the problem, plus then this kind of second-order shame about being stuck. Rick also talked a bit about the difference between seeing a pattern and talking about something in a therapeutic context. You know, your therapist is being nice to you. It's a very comfortable environment. versus the kind of live fire demonstration that is real life.

1:06:32Forrest Hanson: This then took us to a pretty lengthy conversation about how to do these kinds of exposure practices skillfully. First, we started by talking about making things concrete. You want to be able to name the macro pattern. So this could be, I'm a people pleaser, or I'm an avoidant person, or I'm a procrastinator, whatever that is. And then you want to figure out what the micro behaviors are that are associated with it. So people-pleasing is the macro, but the micro might include, I say no worries when there actually are worries, or I over-explain every request that I make, or I apologize before asking, stuff like that.

1:07:10Forrest Hanson: And what this is trying to take us to is a concrete prediction. So something you can actually test. Don't make them upset isn't very testable, but if I say this thing, they will get really mad at me is a bit better. What's even better than that is if we try to look at the different layers, the different layers of prediction that we have and move through them and go, okay, how do I actually feel about each of these different layers? So on the surface, maybe this is your prediction about what will actually happen. How likely is it that the person will get mad at you? Then the next layer is severity.

1:07:46Forrest Hanson: How bad will it be if they get mad at you? Then coping, how will you handle it if they get mad at you? And finally, meaning, what does it say about you if they get mad at you? And this is one of the big mistakes that people make because expectancy that actually gets violated isn't just about whether the feared event happens. It's about the catastrophe and the coping dimensions. So your expectations are kind of multi-layered in this way, right? And the strongest learning that people have is typically more about how bad will it be and how well will you cope with it. Particularly over time, we're trying to go from a view of ourselves as somebody who struggles to cope and therefore needs to avoid the experience.

1:08:26Forrest Hanson: So I really struggle with the experience of standing up for myself. So I just need to avoid it. To a view of ourselves as somebody who can tolerate that experience, I'm capable of standing up for myself because even if it goes poorly, I'll be able to deal with it. We then talked about setting up particular criteria for the test, so we want the predictions to be concrete and testable. We also want the experiment to be the right size for us, so not too big, not too small, and we want it to be able to actually interrupt our patterns. So we're trying to do something that we wouldn't naturally have done in the past.

1:09:01Forrest Hanson: I also want to add another thing here that I didn't mention during the episode, but it's really important that the test not be inherently self-sabotaging. Sometimes people seem to almost deliberately bite off more that they can chew to kind of prove that their concerns are really real. You know, if you belly flop into the pool before you've learned how to swim, yeah, you're going to demonstrate that the pool is scary, but that's not really an effective test. There's also a lot of really specific advice and insight that comes from the research on exposure. For example, one of the findings from the research is that pre-exposure shrinking of the prediction, so saying things like, oh, it won't be that bad, maybe they'll be nice this time, that kind of thing can actually be kind of counterproductive.

1:09:42Forrest Hanson: It's actually better for the person from a learning standpoint if they really think the experience will be awful, because then whatever the actual experience is, it's probably not quite that bad. So they can really notice the gap between their prediction and what actually ended up happening. Another one gets to this idea of scaffolding that Rick talked about, how a lot of the time in order to get ourselves to the starting line, we need to bring some kind of a crutch with us. This could be mentally rehearsing a conversation over and over, bringing a friend with you whose presence really helps you out, holding the phone that you will disappear into if things get truly bad.

1:10:19Forrest Hanson: All of that kind of stuff could be a crutch. But the issue is that if the feared thing doesn't happen while you're using the crutch, the learning that we get is, oh, the crutch saved me. And if you're ever in a situation that in the future that's a little bit different, when the crutch isn't there, you go, oh, no, I don't have my crutch. I can't possibly make it through this experience now. So over time, we want to reduce our reliance on those kinds of crutches. So now we can kind of walk through this in a sequence. Before we're running the test, we want to start by naming our predictions and holding them in mind.

1:10:48Forrest Hanson: A great way to do this is by writing on a piece of paper, I am about to do X. I predict that fill in the blank will happen. Don't argue with it. Don't try to talk yourself down from the scale of the prediction. The discomfort of really being with what you think will happen is part of the process. Then during the test, we want to really stay engaged with it. We want to keep our attention on what's happening. So we're not moving into distraction. We're not pulling our attention away from what's going on. We're really being with the experience. In order to do that, it's totally okay to self-soothe, but we don't want our self-soothing to be dissociation because we're really trying, again, to pay attention to our predictions and what was true or false about those predictions.

1:11:31Dr. Rick Hanson: Then afterwards, we need to really take things in.

1:11:35Forrest Hanson: And this is where all of Rick's material related to the HEAL process can be hyper, hyper relevant for people. So you can walk through a series of questions here. What did you predict? What actually happened? How were you surprised? And then what did you learn? And I thought it was so cool how Rick's have, enrich, absorb, and link, which is how he approaches learning. So you have a positive experience. You want to make it really big in your mind. That's enriching. Then you want to feel it kind of sinking into you. That's absorbing. And the last one linking is you're holding basically the positive experience that you had, if it was positive.

1:12:08Forrest Hanson: In this case, we're holding our kind of like different expectation experience. So how was the actual experience different from whatever the old material was? We're holding those at the same time, the new experience with the old prediction. And we're letting the new experience kind of crowd out that old prediction. We then talked a bit toward the end of the episode about two situations. For starters, how to make the learning as durable as possible. And then I asked Rick a question about situations where it feels like somebody is almost resistant internally to absorbing that there was a difference between their prediction and reality.

1:12:42Dr. Rick Hanson: I've definitely experienced that one myself.

1:12:45Forrest Hanson: Finally, we closed with a really important question, which is what do you do when all of your predictions are basically right? When the situation was really bad, when the feared experience really did happen to you, when you weren't able to cope with it very effectively, but it's still something that you really care about. You still really want to do things differently in the future than you did them in the past. Well, now we're going into the world of values for me, and this is where approaches to therapy like ACT have a lot to say. You do the thing you care about while being willing to have the feared experience, because a life that is organized around preventing that feared experience is a smaller life than the one that you want to live.

1:13:28Forrest Hanson: That becomes the motivation. It's not so much about updating your predictions or seeing how things weren't actually that bad or seeing that you're a great coper. Although along the way, normally in the act process of doing this stuff and living a more values-oriented life, we do find that we are a good coper and we can deal with so much more than we thought. And the learning then becomes, oh, you learn that you're the kind of person who can act based on your values even when it's hard. So even there, we're updating our predictions. Bottom line, the core shift that we're going for here, the big change, is we're trying to move from being a person who has to prevent the feared thing from happening to a person who can have the feared thing happen and be okay anyways.

1:14:15Forrest Hanson: I really loved doing the prep for this conversation. I learned an enormous amount. I hope you learned something while you were listening to it. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the show yet, if you could take a moment to subscribe, hit the like button if you're watching on YouTube. write a comment, maybe leave a rating and a positive review if you're listening on Apple and Spotify, something like that. The best way you can support the show is by telling a friend about it. It is the absolute best way that we have to reach new people. And I love hearing about people sharing episodes of the show with their friends.

1:14:45Forrest Hanson: Very quick reminder here about Rick's new course. This is on changing your mind. It starts on August 8th. And it also focuses on working with the kind of ingrained patterns that we were talking about during this episode. You You can learn more at rickhansen.com slash changing and use coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25 % off discount. If you'd like to support the show in other ways, you can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. Until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.

1:15:28Thank you.