How to Accept the Parts of Yourself You Don't Like

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. One of the most common questions we get about self-acceptance is some version of, if I accept myself, won't that just make me not want to change anymore? It's a fair question, but there is so much evidence out there that it's actually the opposite. it. The more we accept, the more we're able to change in useful ways. Last time we talked about why that's the case, and today we're going to focus a bit more on how to actually do it. So in our previous episode on self-acceptance, Rick and I talked about what we're actually accepting when we accept ourselves.

0:43Forrest Hanson: And particularly, we sorted all of the stuff that people struggle to accept into two buckets. First, the authentic material that we've pushed away, and then second, the act that we've built on top of who we actually are. Today, we're going to be talking about how to accept the parts of yourself you don't like that much, what to do with the persona you've built to get through life, and how we can increasingly become a kind of author of who we are. So, as I already said, I'm joined today once again by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hansen. So, Dad, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, and I'm especially happy because I'm wearing my

1:19Dr. Rick Hanson: happy camper t-shirt.

1:21Forrest Hanson: Happy camper shirt in full effect. Is this a kind of self-acceptance practice that you're doing here, Dad, bringing this to the podcast, your true unfiltered t-shirt self? That's exactly right.

1:32Dr. Rick Hanson: And sometimes to really accept yourself, you have to push the pendulum a little far because then it'll settle back to normal. So yeah, I'm pushing it here. As I once said to you, standing in a supermarket line, you were maybe eight years old or something. I said, Forrest, I went to school a long, long time to be able to avoid wearing a tie.

1:52Forrest Hanson: Yes. Yeah. You've never been a tie guy. And I've also never been a tie guy. Yeah. I'm kind of grateful for that. The whole metaphor of choking yourself.

2:01Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm just, you know, just that feeds into gender, masculinity, roles, you know, stoic, numb inside. I just reject wholeheartedly.

2:11Forrest Hanson: I thought you were going to go to the metaphor of it as a kind of phallic symbol. and we were going to get Freudian up in here, but I'm glad that we dodged that one at the front end of this episode. So before we get into it today, I want to give you a quick reminder about one of Rick's upcoming online programs that we're actually really excited about. It's called The Healing Link, and it's a six-week live online course that's focused on teaching a specific technique of his called linking that helps us repair old wounds and change some of our most ingrained patterns. It is a very, very cool idea from Rick.

2:44Forrest Hanson: He actually did kind of a whole related study on an aspect of it where it was a preprint study at a smaller group, but the results were really cool. And you can learn more about it at rickhansen.com slash linking and use promo code beingwell25 to receive a 25 % off discount. So I wanted to give people a quick recap of what we talked about last time. Very, very quick here. I would also recommend going back and listening to that episode. But what is acceptance? Acceptance is a kind of receiving of what is. Steve Hayes has this great line, acceptance is receiving as if it were a gift. We don't always love the gifts that people give us, but we try to receive them and we try to go, oh yeah, this is a gift.

3:25Forrest Hanson: And hopefully give like a little, oh, thank you for this gift along the way, right? Even if you're kind of planning on returning it later. There's this great line from Suzuki Roshi, each of you is perfect the way you are, and you can use a little improvement. And that was kind of the episode in a nutshell, right? Holding those two truths at the same time. Then you gave this really good model dad of three layers of the self, the act, the scared self, and a kind of true self that we really are underneath it. And then we talked finally about the two categories that people really struggle to accept.

3:56Forrest Hanson: I'm going to call one of them group one just because, hey, why not? And that's the authentic stuff that we've pushed away because it makes us uncomfortable or typically because we just feel really vulnerable when we're exposed to that material. And that mostly lives in the scared self for people. And then there's group two, and this is the act that's become a kind of part of who you are. And importantly, that act causes some problems for you. So today, we're going to be focusing really on what to do with each of those two groups. But even before we do that, Dad, I wanted to get back to the question that I had at the very intro of the show.

4:33Forrest Hanson: If I accept myself, won't I get complacent? Or maybe another version of this, I need to be hard on myself in order to keep myself on track or to stay motivated. So as a longtime clinical psychologist, what do you think about this?

4:48Dr. Rick Hanson: This is one of the central questions that runs throughout human literature and folklore, runs throughout religion, runs throughout psychology. what is our human nature? And classically, humans are considered to be motivated by two great forces, avoiding pain of various kinds or the possibility of pain and approaching rewards or opportunities for rewards of various kinds. So the theory of the case that no pain, no gain, or if you're not beating yourself up every day, you'll become a giant slacker, does refer to the ways we could be motivated by that sharp stick in our back. The opportunity is to just start doing little experiments in which you disengage from the avoidance of pain motivation to consider the pursuit of the greater good motivation or being lived by your lovingness as it flows through you, your desire to make your gifts into the world.

5:48Dr. Rick Hanson: You want to make your offerings. You want to grow the good, not just avoid the bad, and see what happens. See what happens if you do that little experiment and then observe. Now, it is true, and I think this goes interestingly to research on free schools. One of the really cool books along the way was Summerhill about a free school in England, and AS Neal noticed that the longer that kids had been in conventional schools, which are often kind of punishment-centered, the avoidance of punishment, the longer it took them to actually find something they were interested in, in this free school, and then pursue it.

6:27Dr. Rick Hanson: So there can be a kind of rebound effect or reactivity if you've been motivated by fear of the negative. If you kind of disengage from that, you might need to sleep in for a few weeks, honestly. But very soon, you will find that there's so much more inside you that is motivating you and wants to live through you for expression in the world.

6:52Forrest Hanson: Yeah. I think a question that I would ask people with this is, do you think that you act better when you are being highly self-critical or when you feel kind of okay about yourself as a person? Or even enthusiastic about yourself

7:06Dr. Rick Hanson: and cheering yourself on.

7:08Forrest Hanson: Yeah. Or even better, like you feel good about yourself as a person, like which one actually motivates better behavior in the world? Because underneath this whole idea is a premise, right? It's the premise that when I'm highly self-critical, I act better, I do better. And I would just ask people, well, take a look, do you? Is that really true? And I think that for most people, the answer is clearly not true. Maybe they act safer when they're being highly self-critical. Maybe they act in a way that's more consistent with a larger group of people that they're kind of trying to placate or please.

7:44Forrest Hanson: Maybe they avoid criticism from others. but I'm not really sure if their actual behavior or like flourishing or whatever target we're going for here is better when we're really self-critical. I don't know if that's something that you've seen in your practice as a therapist or not, dad, but I would just ask people that question. Yeah, that's a great question.

8:02Dr. Rick Hanson: A little bit gets at what's your why, right? And is it their why or is it your why? And if you give up doing what you do because of their why, well, then you're not going to do it so much, right? You need to find your own why. And I think that this view is contextualized in a modern society in which I think most people are leading lives, as Thoreau put it, of quiet desperation, in which sometimes because they have to and sometimes, frankly, because they kind of succumb to it, in which they are enacting other people's agendas with the fear that if they don't enact the agenda of their boss or their family tradition or the expectations of others, then they will disappoint others and there will be negative consequences.

8:54Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, if that's the frame of your motivation, if that's predominantly your why, yeah, if that why starts going away, your performance will tail off. That's why I think it's really quite helpful to recognize the ways in which we can be inside certain frames in which we need to please our boss or we need to placate in the family system to get along and so forth, but we can reframe it into our own game, into our own quiet set of aims that we are pursuing for our own reasons from the inside out. And then while the behaviors may stay the same, we still go to work, we still make ourselves laugh at our boss's stupid jokes because that's what we got to do for whatever reason to keep the health insurance or whatever it might be.

9:41Dr. Rick Hanson: But we're doing it for our own reasons from the inside out. We're interdirected about it rather than other directed about it.

9:48Forrest Hanson: It's interesting to me that you're already combining, to an extent, act and authenticity, where there's like a kind of act, there's a kind of performance. You need to show up a certain kind of way at your job or whatever. And yeah, that might not be perfectly authentic or whatever word we want to use. But there's an aspect running under it of real authenticity because you've clarified the stuff that actually matters to you. One of the things I wanted to ask you about here today, Dad, was focusing on that more authentic material, like the stuff inside of us that we feel like we've pushed away a little bit over time.

10:26Forrest Hanson: This often happens for people when they're a little younger in terms of the origin point of it. But when you're working with somebody, people will often say things like, oh, just love yourself more. Oh, just accept this aspect. Like, Forrest, you're a sensitive guy. I'll use myself as an example here. Forrest, you're a sensitive guy. I love your sensitivity. Just love your sensitivity more or something like that. I have never heard that actually work. It certainly did not work with me because somebody saying, just love this thing that I don't like very much more is not going to get me to like it more.

11:01Forrest Hanson: There has to be some other kind of process with it. And I'm wondering what you think helps people get to that sense of liking it more.

11:07Dr. Rick Hanson: In order to do the kind of self-growth or change we're talking about here, I think it's really important to do a first step. And I encountered this a lot with my clients over the years in which we really have to give the critic its due. What I mean by that is that if a person is used to primarily motivating themselves through fear, I'm thinking of peak performers, sometimes in athletic contexts, who say things like, it wasn't that I liked winning, it's that I hated losing. So they're really motivated by the negative. That's what they know. And also, that's very often the internalization in the culture.

11:46Dr. Rick Hanson: Going all the way back to early childhood, I grew up in a home with loving, decent parents who were very quick to find fault. And so I grew up in a fault-finding home, and I hated having fault found. So I would then put an excruciating amount of effort into not ever enabling anyone to find fault with me, which led to overperforming in many kinds of ways and a fair amount of internal pressure until I, with your help for us, have gradually been working through that over the years. If that's the engine that you're familiar with, it can be very scary to contemplate walking away from it. And factually, it is a powerful engine.

12:26Dr. Rick Hanson: It can produce a lot of performance in people. The fear of falling short, let's say. On the other hand, what's the collateral damage? And over the long haul of a 20, 30, 40, 50 year, let's say career, that collateral damage can gradually degrade your performance. So you're less and less able, including potentially shortening your lifespan, you're less and less able to really achieve at a high level. That's why I think it's really important to be real with yourself and acknowledge inside yourself the forces of criticism and fear of punishment of some kind that are motivating you. You know, name that to yourself.

13:08Dr. Rick Hanson: Understand it. Understand the roots of it. And also, second, face the collateral damage. How does it create unnecessary pain for you? And third, might there be a better way? And one of the ways to understand a better way is to appreciate that in work environments, a lot of research shows that work teams that are living in fear of a critical boss tend to way underperform work teams that have a very encouraging leader who will point out room for correction, but on the whole is creating a lot of support and is focused on the positive, you know, aims of various kinds, both process aims and outcome aims along the way.

13:48Dr. Rick Hanson: And in much the same way, you can be that nurturing, encouraging, coaching, guiding, cheerleading figure for yourself, and then do those little experiments I was saying as you gradually shift into that other way of being.

14:00Forrest Hanson: It's a really interesting setup for this, Dad. That idea of starting with an appreciation for the aspects of the critic that keep you safe or that were functional, given the environment that you came up in, whatever that environment was like. And this takes me a little bit to some, again, classic for me, some Carl Rogers stuff, where he has this idea of like a growth-promoting climate. And this is the kind of situation that you want to create as a clinician directed toward your client in order to maximize your client's ability to get something out of therapy. And I was thinking a little bit about what about applying this growth-promoting climate to yourself,

14:37Dr. Rick Hanson: essentially, with regards to a kind of self-acceptance practice.

14:40Forrest Hanson: And the three pieces of it that he really emphasizes are genuineness. So this is seeing something as it actually is, as opposed to a kind of caricature of it. Then second, empathy, understanding what it was for or why it's doing what it's doing. And then third, really critically, unconditional positive regard, being okay with it, just as it is, without requiring it to change first. And so if we think about our own parts, like the parts of ourselves, I used my sensitivity as an example, that we've held at arm's length, one of the best ways in is to not start with, oh, just love the part more. Because that's just too much.

15:16Forrest Hanson: You just can't get there. You have views about the part, you don't like the part, the parts cause you a lot of pain and suffering. My sensitivity caused me a lot of pain and suffering as a kid. I did not want to get on a team with my sensitivity. And can you kind of zoom out a little bit around it in that way that I was describing, where there's this kind of seeing it for what it is and you feel a little empathy, understand what it's for. Okay. And this could maybe take you to some useful questions. What was this part trying to do for you? What was its function? What are the good aspects of it?

15:47Forrest Hanson: What role did it perform? How was it treated? My sensitivity was not treated very well by other kids at school. What was good in it? Like what are the aspects of it that you feel good about that are associated with that part that you're pushing away? And this is a classic Rick. What would have been good to hear back then? So this could include some purely positive communications. It could also include some version of, this is a real part of me, it makes sense, but these days we got to kind of do something different with it. Or these days, I got to put that part into maybe a different role in my overall system here.

16:22Forrest Hanson: That's a very IFS way of relating to it. And I think that the sort of objective nature of this process, where you're asking these evaluatory historical questions is sometimes a little easier for people to get into rather than escalating right up to warm, loving, emotional self-compassion. I just think that that's too high a bar for people with this stuff. Initially, it certainly was for me, and I think it is for most people. And there's a way in that's more about having a kind of understanding or appreciation or like soft compassion toward the thing, as opposed to trying to go full into this very loving relationship with it.

17:03Forrest Hanson: What do you think about all of that?

17:04Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I wonder, Forrest, what your relationship was to your sensitivity.

17:09Forrest Hanson: Like when I was a 13-year-old? When you were like, yeah, 13 or 15. Not great. I would say particularly in high school, I think I got the most not great. I think that when I was younger, I was more in my sensitivity. I'm thinking back to being, I don't know, you would actually know better than I would, but 7, 8, 9, 10, something like that, I was pretty sensitive and I felt sensitive. And then somewhere in there, I kind of went, screw this man. If this is going to be the result of feeling this way, then I'll just lean into a kind of shielding, which for me was really in being an intellectual person or being a kind of top-downy person.

17:48Forrest Hanson: It was a great way to defend against some, I don't know, things people said about me or more difficult emotions and things like that. You know, I had to go to therapy around it. So a formal process here can be really helpful.

18:01Dr. Rick Hanson: And what do you mean by sensitive?

18:04Forrest Hanson: Good question. Caring about what other people think and feel. Feeling like when I'm out of alignment with other people, it's quite uncomfortable for me. I think those are all kinds of examples. I really mean emotionally sensitive.

18:19Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I really appreciate you bringing this out. And I'm kind of struck by our kindredness. I mean, and I had many similar experiences in school. You were more sociable and visible. I already had learned by third grade kind of to be invisible and disengaged, which had its own pain there. It wasn't so evident with other people. I was already very disengaged and isolated and defended, but still quite sensitive, I think, deep down. Still am, still affected.

18:51Forrest Hanson: Totally.

18:51Dr. Rick Hanson: So it's kind of sweet that we're using this in both our case as a real example. And just to kind of recap and summarize what you've said, first step that we covered last podcast about accepting is recognizing the reality of it. Yeah. And trying to move past, acknowledge our judgments about it, which some parts of us are helpful, some parts are harmful, we like some more than others. Okay, fine. And independent of all that, the fact of it, oh yeah, I'm kind of a sensitive person. Oh yeah. And then I think second, we're saying it's really helpful to be mindful of our own attitude about that part.

19:36Dr. Rick Hanson: We're suppressing it. We're ashamed of it. We want to hide it. We have emotional associations to it to kind of unpack our own reactivity about that part. Okay, and then third step, really appreciate the functions that that part is serving. How is it trying to help us? How, and including ways in which sometimes that you realize, hey, it's just part of common humanity. And then there's some choosing around regulating, regulating in the fourth step. And sometimes regulating means realizing that in this environment, it's not safe to reveal this beautiful, wonderful part of me. But the problem is not with me.

20:15Dr. Rick Hanson: issues with the environment, and I'm going to redefine this as a game I can win at, so I'm at choice about this part. Or other times we realize, you know, this part is kind of too far. You know, in my case, I'm realizing over time that my, you know, strength of intellect, whatever, was too far. It was not good for others. It was not good for me. I needed to rein it in. You know, I needed to bring it in. Okay, then you work from there. But to me, those are the kind of steps. Those are the fundamental steps that we're describing. Facing the reality of it, yeah. Telling the truth about your own reactivity to it, appreciating its benefits, and then forth, moving into appropriate regulation around it.

20:56Forrest Hanson: We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. We spend most of our time on the show talking about the psychological side of being well, But sometimes our low mood, irritability, or foggy thinking has more to do with physiology than psychology, and you can't really figure out what's going on without doing some testing. I wanted to get a better sense of what was going on in my body, so I worked with our sponsor Function to do just that. Function gives you access to over 160 lab tests a year. This is five times more than the typical annual physical. Thyroid, hormones, nutrients, inflammation, and more.

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23:41Forrest Hanson: On Being Well, we've spent a lot of time talking about how affected we are by our environment, and particularly by the information that we take in. So one episode this season really caught my eye. In it, host Francis Lees, a clinical therapist, talks with Lisa Thalhammer, a journalist who burned out covering negative news every day, and who now studies what constant news exposure does to the people who are reporting it. Lees also speaks with Sherry Turkle, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and they look at the psychological costs of an always-on media world. Other episodes this season cover caregiving, parenting in the age of social media, starting therapy in your 40s, finding love again after losing a spouse, and a variety of other important topics.

24:29Forrest Hanson: Every story is different, but they share a common thread, support, community, and the hope that a turning point might be closer than it seems. Check out season six of Turning Points, Navigating Mental Health, a podcast from Tufts Health Plan in collaboration with Boston Globe Media. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the show. Yeah, I think that that point you made around regulating it is a huge one here. And it's one that I really want to emphasize. I think about myself, that a lot of my issues came because I had such a desire for social joining and social belonging. I really wanted to be a part of the group.

25:11Forrest Hanson: And I thought that I had these things that were kind of good about me, you know, strengths of very different kinds. And so I thought in terms of like, how can I present those strengths? So other people will go like, oh, yeah, I want that guy to be a part of my team. Or oh, yeah, I want that guy to be a part of my group. But turns out other 12 year olds or 13 year olds or whatever, don't always love it when another guy in the classroom is acting that way, or somebody is really trying to like join in that sort of aggressive way. And then that got compounded by my sensitivity. I felt bad when I felt pushed away by others.

25:43Forrest Hanson: and I really wanted to feel not pushed away by them. And so then you develop a story about the part. This is a part that causes me pain. So you stick it in the basement. And a much better story to develop about the part is this is a beautiful, wonderful part of who you are. And we have a circumstantial or situational issue. You are deploying this part in a way that is not good for it and it's not good for you. In other words, this all of a sudden becomes a wonderful boundaries question. Can we have kind of self-boundaries with aspects of who we are? And I think that that's like the magic moment here in the self-acceptance game.

26:19Forrest Hanson: When you get to a place where you're like, I'm able to accept this about me because I trust that I can have boundaries around it. And that combo is, I think, where all the cool stuff happens for people.

26:34Dr. Rick Hanson: And by boundaries, do you mean that you can regulate the degree to which it's expressed? Yeah, essentially.

26:41Forrest Hanson: You can make choices around it. You don't feel at effect. You don't feel like if I let this out a little bit, I have to let this out all the bit. I can be at choice about who I show this to, when I show it, the kinds of circumstances that I let it out in, but I can still get the wonderful benefit of feeling these feelings when it's really appropriate for me to do that with a safe and supportive partner, for example. And we've, Elizabeth and I have had a whole process in our relationship around my kind of soft emotional avoidance. And it's not because I'm a truly emotionally avoidant person, quite the opposite.

27:21Forrest Hanson: It's because I'm very sensitive. So like emotions feel big. And sometimes I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want all of that or, oh, I feel a little uncomfortable with that. So there's this, she calls it the cringe, where I'll do this kind of, you know, there's a natural pushing away because it just gets a little big and a little intense and a little all that good stuff. And understandably, it says some version of, actually, I want to see you feel the thing that I said. I want to see you feel good about this thing that I did, as opposed to brushing it away or sidestepping it or being like, oh, sure, thanks, babe.

27:56Forrest Hanson: Keep it moving. And I think that that's the beautiful dance, is can you be with it and still be at choice about it? And I think that most people go to those very firm boundaries because they don't feel like they can develop that at choiceness about this aspect of personality. So I really love what you said in short. Oh, thank you. I'm going to let myself feel good about that. Yeah, totally. There you go, right?

28:21Dr. Rick Hanson: I wonder for you, is there a sense of injustice and or anger related to these pushed away parts? Not anger at them, but anger that they had to be pushed away. and an advocacy for them that has a fierceness to it, thinking about fierce self-compassion.

28:42Forrest Hanson: I think that could be really useful for people in general to get that sense of self-advocacy on behalf of kind of a wounded part. In my case, that comes up sometimes, but it's pretty soft when it does. And mostly because if I go back through the history, I see the stuff that I was doing with other kids as pretty fundamentally unskillful. And I don't blame myself for that unskillfulness. I was a teenager. I didn't know better by and large. And at the same time, that unskillfulness does explain a lot of the actions of other people. And so I don't feel as revved up on my own behalf about it. It's more like, wow, I feel really good about the fact that I've developed more skill over time.

29:27Forrest Hanson: or wow it's really cool to look back and see the distance between the person that I am and the person that I was while still including this sensitive part as a huge piece of that overall journey because it's also gone on a journey which is a really cool thing to kind of think about how even our parts change over time as they are exposed to different experiences different situations, things like that, where the sensitivity has become more well-rounded and less sharp and spiky. And I've developed better boundaries around it. And I'm more thoughtful about when and where I deploy it. And this all has allowed me to move into better contact with it.

30:08Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. In the range of motivations for how we treat ourselves, there's certainly a spectrum that's very normal and good. And you've described to me a very judicious, kind of wise 20 ,000-foot view, soft and fuzzy approach, beautiful. To name it as well, and I'll speak a little for myself, I know people do talk about and find use in, and I have, as you put it, something that's fiercer, has more of a sense of advocacy and sort of sticking up for parts of ourselves, and both sticking up for them in terms of just the impact of other kids or events, but also for the fact that sometimes other kids, other events, they had malintent.

30:54Dr. Rick Hanson: It wasn't just -

30:55Forrest Hanson: Oh, there's totally stuff that I look back on and I go, oh, that was messed up. Like that was not great that that other person did and feel a certain kind of way about it when in the moment I might've thought of it more as like, I feel shame or something like that. And so that inversion, it has absolutely been helpful for me periodically.

31:13Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. So as almost a practice, I think there's a place for retroactive advocacy. for yourself. And I literally visualize a little bit, a kind of spectral spirit of today, Rick, transporting back in a ghostly way with little Ricky there picked last in fourth grade, you know, because he was young and scrawny for some baseball team and feeling kind of wimpy and out of it, and sticking up for the kid retroactively and thinking about what it does to kids to have this kind of selection process just baked into the policies of PE, physical education, where you choose teams and their people get picked last.

31:55Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, what's the impact on the kid or kids, plural, who are picked last? Especially if, unlike me, as a skinny, bespectacled, shy kid, maybe they're not so ably bodied. Anyway, these are structural situations and there are other kinds of situations that we can have retroactively a feeling of loyalty to ourself and sticking up for ourselves and a certain fieriness about it. I probably tilt a little more toward fiery than you do. I think I have a little more Scottish blood. Maybe in the gene line, you're more on your mom's side.

32:30Forrest Hanson: I was a little more Norwegian or something. They're a little Swedish. Yeah, you got the Swedish thing going.

32:34Dr. Rick Hanson: Although, don't forget the Swedes are Vikings too. but anyway I just want to call that out for people to name that that can be in the mix as well to be clear you're not mad at the party yourself you're mad on behalf of the party yourself or fiery or feisty or direct

32:50Forrest Hanson: I want to ask you about something here because I'm thinking in the mind of a listener right now and I'm springing this on you for reference here Rick is not prepped for this particular question

33:03Dr. Rick Hanson: you're doing to me what I did to you so it's good

33:05Forrest Hanson: It's been known to happen. It's been known to happen. I got into deep self-disclosure. I'm going to make you be a therapist, you know, off the cuff here. So I'm thinking of somebody who's listening to this and who's thinking something along the lines of, well, sure, like I understand how in our Western culture you're socialized as a man and feeling sensitive and vulnerable could be like a challenging thing for somebody to accept. Like, okay, but I don't know, sensitivity is actually kind of fundamentally sweet and it's sort of a positive quality we think about it that way. I'm really struggling to accept this stuff that's just bad about who I am, essentially.

33:41Forrest Hanson: And so I'll give you a couple of examples here. Somebody who's like, I'm just not, I just don't think I'm very smart. I'm just not very smart. And I really like hate this about myself. How could I possibly accept that? Or another example, I just think I'm kind of like an angry person. I'm an angry person. And I feel this like violence that runs under it inside of me. And I have to really put that anger in the box and just control it. I couldn't possibly like accept that part of who I am, right? And so I'm wondering, Dad, somebody walks into the office and says this to you. Where do you go?

34:17Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I want to speak to three cases. One in addition to what you've said. So one, what if we recognize that in the distribution of talents, we are really at a certain place? Really. And what do we do about that? Okay. Another being recognizing our temperament, both innate and acquired of, say, anger. anger. And then the really hard case is what to do about the parts of yourself that are really mean, really even kind of evil. What do you do about those parts? Okay. So in the first case, my own view about it is that it's really understandable. And you start by tuning into the sorrow and the self-criticism related to feeling like you fall short, or you're just not that good.

35:10Dr. Rick Hanson: And I think in a way, it's actually the hardest to, for example, have been the best athlete in the history of your high school who barely makes it onto a division one football team and never gets drafted for the pros. And what's that like for a person? And you can think of it in other domains, music, intellect, academics, and so on. So it can be really challenging to just be in the reel of how good you are at something. It's really important to make a distinction between how good you are at something and how good you are, period. I think that's part of reality. So you want to face that. You want to feel that.

35:49Dr. Rick Hanson: This is not something we talk about very much. We live in a society that's full of intense social comparisons. And to just name those and then make a plan. The reality is the reality. You're capable at a certain level, or maybe you were capable and you're getting older. And just facing that, there's no way around it. It's accepting reality, admitting reality, and then looking for other sources of worth and comfort and value and happiness. You got to do it.

36:19Forrest Hanson: I want to jump in here, Dad, because I think that for all of these examples that we're working with, the first part of them is what we said during the last episode on acceptance, which is acceptance is not approval. You know, being with, seeing clearly in the ways that you're talking about is not the same thing as liking it or not the same thing as thinking that it is a good thing. You're just being with it. That's like the first stage of self-acceptance. Can you be with the truth of what is? And I think that you're describing that here. A piece of this that I would also like to mention here is what I'll call self-complexity.

36:51Forrest Hanson: So sometimes people struggle to accept a part that they find problematic because they are kind of concerned that that part says something about all of who they are, right? If I am an angry person, it means that dot, dot, dot. If I am not that smart, it means that dot, dot, dot. If there's something about me that's really deeply bad, that means that dot, dot, dot. But the truth is that as I got from you years and years and years ago, we are not one piece of paper painted with all one color. We are mosaics with many different tiles made up of many different pieces of many different colors. And so appreciating that this is just a piece of who you are is always going to make something that's challenging to accept, easier to accept, because you've put guardrails around it.

37:41Forrest Hanson: You've made it just a part, not the whole darn thing. That's beautiful. And so, yeah, anything that you can do to think in that way, I think it's just generally psychologically healthy about literally anything, like any aspect of who we are. Same with self-criticism around like, oh, I'm not that smart. Well, what do you mean not that smart? What are the things that you're good at? What are the things you're less good at? I'm sure there are some things that this not-so-smart person is actually very capable at and very skilled at and very smart about. Maybe you've got a special interest that you're just really into and you know about.

38:12Forrest Hanson: Are you telling me you're not that smart? The point is it's more complicated than that.

38:16Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And also what really matters, especially in this area around achievement, is process, not product. In other words, abilities will definitely shape your product. But whatever your ability might be, you can bring your heart to it. You can make efforts within the range of what you can actually do. And you can learn along the way. and in terms of those standards, you can really be a success. I think, for example, playing tennis, I would play tennis sometimes back in the day, people who are vastly better than me, and they would always be better than me at tennis, but I could be as good at them, as good as them in the effort I brought to it.

39:00Dr. Rick Hanson: My flailing and lunging was as determined as any of their super skillful serving and topspin forehands. So it's about intrinsic values, process values, not just outcome.

39:15Forrest Hanson: Well, what about qualities you have?

39:17Dr. Rick Hanson: Maybe you're an irritable person. Maybe you're melancholy. Maybe you're anxious. Maybe you're sensitive. This is the way you are. Maybe it's how you got baked in at birth. Maybe you've acquired a fair amount of anger and reactivity along the way. What do you do with that? And I find here the same process is really helpful. Recognizing the realities, recognizing the shell of reactivity from yourself, including sourced externally by how other people treat you, but still, once it's inside your own mind, you are the owner, you are the author, it's your responsibility, it's yours. And so your shell of reactivity, then what are the benefits of it?

39:59Dr. Rick Hanson: What are the functions of it? And then what kind of guidance and regulation do you want to bring to bear? And same with anger.

40:05Forrest Hanson: Also just appreciating the simplest version of this, self-acceptance is what helps you do something about this. You have to see that it's real. You have to see that it's a true part of who you are in order to do anything thoughtful in relationship to it. That's the premise of what we're talking about here. So I think about taking this to an extreme. People who are like diagnosed sociopaths or things like that. This person needs to understand that these are their tendencies. This is their nature. In order to go, yo, I have to be deeply thoughtful about this and my relationships with other people if I want to act in any kind of like a moral, thoughtful way in the world.

40:44Forrest Hanson: And there are real people who have like, you can go on YouTube and find interviews with like diagnosed sociopaths who are like, yeah, I'm a sociopath. And yeah, I do not feel empathy toward other people. And here are these things I've had to do in order to make my life work and to not be a quote unquote bad person in my relationships with others. And frankly, I think that's like applaudable. That's a high bar for self-acceptance right there. That's right.

41:09Dr. Rick Hanson: You cannot regulate it if you do not own it.

41:13Forrest Hanson: Totally. 100%.

41:15Dr. Rick Hanson: You have to own it. And one of the interesting ways into this that I would do back in my personal growth days is to dramatize or enact disowned parts of yourself, even deliberately turn up the volume on them. So you really go into it. Like I would say with you, well, Forrest, just if you can imagine doing this, we're in my office here. It's totally safe. I'm not your dad. I'm not your dad. I'm some other fellow, let's say.

41:43Forrest Hanson: Okay. Okay.

41:45Dr. Rick Hanson: Let's really play act sensitivity. Let's really dramatize it. Let's really do it. Let's overdo it. And paradoxically, the overdoing it in this context doesn't reinforce it. It actually gives you more authority over it because now you really own it from the inside out. And you've also given it room to breathe. You've allowed it. And that also tends to settle it down some too.

42:12Forrest Hanson: You let the fizz out of the bottle.

42:13Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And then third category, kind of going to your example of sociopathy, what about those parts of yourself that they're just a mean streak? He just wants to hurt people, whatever, fill in the blank, and there's some stuff arising. I still remember this weird experience that arose for me once. I was just walking down the street, minding my own business, and there was this sort of older woman, grandmother kind of person pushing a baby buggy walking past her. And this urge arose. Why don't I just shove her into the gutter?

42:46Forrest Hanson: What? You experienced the call of the void before a grandmother walking down this street, Dad. Oh, my God.

42:53Dr. Rick Hanson: No, ego dystonic rather than ego's so-called sin tonic.

42:58Forrest Hanson: You had what we like to call a good old-fashioned intrusive thought, my guy.

43:01Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And like, what? And that's so kind of not me. On the other hand, You know, the shadow grows as we lurch east the shadow of west. Point being, what do we do about that? And there I do think that the same process is real.

43:22Forrest Hanson: Face it. Face it.

43:24Dr. Rick Hanson: Like I've had to sort of face inside myself. Some of these parts are so-called near enemies. So, for example, let's say, going to what we said earlier, that there's a part of a self that's quite fiery and loyal. Really sticks up for friends, for family, and for maybe put upon parts of oneself. Okay. The near enemy of that feisty, justice-seeking fireball can be cruel, punishing, and vengeful.

44:03Forrest Hanson: Kind of close. So, you know, pay attention to that part.

44:06Dr. Rick Hanson: So you face it. Then you recognize your reactive shell around it. Third, how does it serve you? What is its use? I think it's possible that that capacity for vengeful cruelty in the complex soup of the brain-mind process might add a little fuel to virtuous loyalty, maybe. I don't know. And then regulation. And the more powerful that force, the more it's important to regulate it. A lot through prevention. Back to the show after a quick break.

44:46Forrest 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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46:05Forrest Hanson: Now, back to the show. So I was planning on talking with you at some length about group two, which is the act that started to fuse with our sense of who we are, and we ran a bit long on group one there. But I think we still have enough time to do some of this, And I don't want to split the episode here because I think that we can apply a lot of what we've been talking about to this aspect of it as well. So now for this like group two material act that started to fuse with our sense of who we are. Is there a kind of process that you think tends to help people? In my experience, having worked a lot with people around the act and including myself, often at first there's quite a lot of shame.

46:51Dr. Rick Hanson: It's embarrassing. And one of the personal growth exercises we would do back when I was leading these workshops in my early 20s, who knew? We would have people sit facing each other, like the 30 people in a workshop would set out 30 chairs, two by two facing each other, two rows. And you would interact with someone for a couple minutes, they'd interact with you, and then you'd move down to the next person. And the way it worked is that when you were facing someone and you got to know them over the course of the workshop, you would start to mimic them in a humorous and kind way. It was very important to do it kindly.

47:30Dr. Rick Hanson: And so they would kind of do you, right? And then they'd move down and then the next person would kind of do you. And of course, you were mimicking them as well. So they were getting mimicked one after the other by the people down the road. Wow. It became very funny and it was also kind of squeamish. Talk about a cringe factor. And then you would sort of get over it. Like we all have an act. We all have an act. We all present ourselves. Everybody sees it. Like we're all in the room. We all see it in each other. And you get much more accepting of it. But to get there, and I'm not saying people should necessarily do that exercise, although it's an example of something that was pretty cool.

48:11Dr. Rick Hanson: We have some fun photographs of it involving your mom and me and some other people.

48:16Forrest Hanson: I took a theater class in high school where you were supposed to walk behind a person and start walking as they walk. And one of my lingering memories from high school, and then you exaggerate it. You turn up the volume more and more, so it becomes this kind of stylized version. I will never forget people walking as I walked. It is burned into my memory with both a laugh and a cringe associated with it. So I totally get what you're talking about here. Yeah.

48:43Dr. Rick Hanson: So I think there's a place here to just kind of come to terms with it. And as you move past maybe the embarrassment about it or the shame, then what often comes is sorrow. You feel sad that you had to put on that act. You feel sad about the effort it took. You feel sad about the distance it created between you and other people. You feel sad about the larger forces that made others put on similar kinds of acts. There's often a sorrow that you kind of come through. And then in my experience, after you kind of open to that sorrow and you allow it, and it will often soften into understanding and compassion and getting on your own side, that sadness opens up self-advocacy and tenderness and compassion.

49:37Dr. Rick Hanson: then more and more you become more prepared to risk the dreaded experience of lowering the act, of stepping out of patterns that you're used to.

49:47Forrest Hanson: Performance mode, yeah.

49:48Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. Totally. And be more vulnerable, more open, and more rested in experiencing your experience as you express

49:59Forrest Hanson: your experience, not just reporting on your experience, like a dispatch from a distant

50:05Dr. Rick Hanson: journalist from a war on the other side of the globe, but you're actually in your feelings as you name your feelings. You're in the state of being as you describe your state of being to other people. And then there's no act. Right there, there's no act. There's simply what's real for you. And it could be angry. It could be loving. It could be sensitive. It could be sweet. It could be a kind of perplexed longing for the good and wondering why people are so mean to each other, an experience I often have. Whatever it is, it's real.

50:41Forrest Hanson: I think with all of this, going even back further, you've got to kind of figure out what the act is, right? What are we labeling as a part of act for me? What are the more performative aspects of what I'm doing when I feel seen by a group of people, right? And then I go pretty quickly to history and function. How did this act come along? And what kind of a purpose is it serving for me when I'm in different kinds of settings? Part of the reason I've been thinking about this recently is because I'm working on an episode that I'm, the working title of it is like escaping the panopticon or something like that.

51:20Forrest Hanson: And slightly joking, we're probably not going to actually put that in like the megaphone podcast player. I don't think people would understand what they were clicking on if I put it that way. But basically, the idea is that we've really internalized the sense of being watched by others, the sense of constant surveillance. And act is driven by a sense of perception. People are seeing us, and we want them to perceive us in a certain kind of way. So that means that all act has a function. And that function is almost always driven by different kinds of beliefs about the self. So if I show up a certain kind of way, people will fill in the blank.

52:01Forrest Hanson: If I show up vulnerable, people will take advantage of me. If I show up strong, people will listen to me. If I show up friendly, people will fill in the blank. And all of these acts are kind of based on that. And I think it'd be really helpful to take a look at those underlying beliefs and go, huh, huh, is it really so that way? Am I really so certain that if I'm not pleasing these other people, I'm not safe? Is that really true these days right now? Because as we've talked about on the show over and over again, that it might've been true back then. Those beliefs might've been right on at one moment in time.

52:41Forrest Hanson: But these days right now, in the circumstances and situations that you're in, are they still true? And it can be really helpful to just go through a process of going like, hey, maybe I'm a little bit less certain about that. Hey, maybe I should be a little less sure that I have to be that way around other people in order to be loved, valued, appreciated, whatever it is for you.

53:00Dr. Rick Hanson: What do you think are the intentions or the whys, the reasons behind the act? I mean, what's there for me is to reflect on, is your intention sincere? and if you have sincere intent, then all that follows is what would be most skillful in the accomplishment of that wholesome intention.

53:26Forrest Hanson: That tends to undermine acting.

53:28Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. On the other hand, looking back on myself, if my intention was to prevent any possibility of criticism, that's going to drive a certain kind of an act. If my intention is to be impressive and to win approval from people, that's going to drive another kind of act. If my intent is to avoid attack from a dominating group, then that's going to drive another kind of act, right? And so I think it's helpful for people to kind of maybe reverse engineer a little bit from their prevailing predominant acts. And then imagine what would it be like in your life to operate more freely from your own sincere intentions?

54:16Forrest Hanson: What's your why? And if your why is more along the lines of wholesome contribution and self-actualization,

54:26Dr. Rick Hanson: if your why is increasingly self-referential in a positive, healthy way, not narcissistically or arrogantly or sociopathically, but in the sense of releasing the gravitational pull of the objects, as it were, in your life, the people you're trying to please or fawn in the face of or get the approval of. So more and more, you're listening to the beat of your own drummer.

54:50Forrest Hanson: Underneath what you're saying here, Dad, is a premise that I want to make explicit, which is that you are to some extent creating the person that you are in the future. You are authoring this act. You're making choices about it, right? You're looking at, oh, okay, it was doing this in the past, but what's a better way for me to get the cheese in the future? What are the aspects of this that are useful or authentic? And what are the aspects of it that I'm going to edit a little bit to cause some better outcomes for myself? and that stance that you can do stuff that changes things is totally fundamental to you and the reason I know that it's fundamental to you is because I absorbed it as a kid.

55:37Forrest Hanson: You know, I really grew up in an environment where I was taught in many ways implicit and explicit that I could do stuff that affected things in positive ways, that I could be different tomorrow than I was yesterday, and that was fundamentally okay. This is what I will call self-authorship. You get to have a hand in the person that you are becoming. And it sounds kind of obvious, and at the same time, I think it's really absent in a lot of people, that they don't have experiences in life or they aren't taught how to have a frame of the self as something that they're creating and changing over time.

56:15Forrest Hanson: Act just feels like who I am. These parts of me that I've pushed away, just feel like things I have to keep away because I can't establish good boundaries around them, as we were talking about at some length. And I think that this is the piece that makes self-acceptance both easier and harder. It makes it easier because accepting something is easier if you feel like you had a role in its creation. And it makes it harder because the premise is that you have responsibility. And responsibility is kind of spooky because it exposes us to feeling more at fault about whatever happens next. And I just think that that's a really interesting part of this whole thing.

56:56Forrest Hanson: And I'm wondering if there's anything that you think helps people move into that sense of self-creation a little bit more over time.

57:05Dr. Rick Hanson: What a deep question, Forrest. And I'm quite touched that you would name that from your childhood because I can say it wasn't a kind of explicit.

57:13Forrest Hanson: This was explicit. Yeah, totally. Pursuit from mom or me.

57:17Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, good for you that you could establish that for yourself.

57:22Forrest Hanson: You created a growth-promoting climate, Dad. That's really sweet. I'm going to do a classic Rick here, and I'm going to break this into some stages and steps. First step of self-authorship, I think, is self-acceptance. Being with what is. Can't change something if you can't see where you're starting. Second step is some amount of responsibility taking. I influence who I am from now on. That can be really difficult to be with. That can be really challenging to be with. You might need to change some old narratives about people, about yourself. But it's true. We do have an influence over who we are from now on.

58:01Forrest Hanson: Third, some kind of vision is what I'll call it. Who do I want to be? What's the picture that I want to paint? How do I want things to be different? And that's influenced by the fourth part. values. What do I really care about? Like you were talking about, Dad, what's the game I can win here? How can I define the terms of the game? What are the things that I care about deeply? Who are some of those avatars that you were describing that you want to be a little bit more like? What are their values? What does that really look like? A lot of ways into this process. The one thing I would say is to be a little careful with the vision part of this whole thing, painting the beautiful picture, because of something called the arrival fallacy.

58:39Forrest Hanson: we love to think that we will feel good when fill in the blank we will feel good when we get there we will feel better when we have finally achieved whatever the thing is and in actual studies of this stuff it turns out that they normally don't feel better that actually i hate it because it's an aphorism but the journey really is the destination like that's the whole thing that we're doing here hold it lightly pursue it passionately so that's how i would break it down into this very sort of simple step-by-step thing that in practice can get pretty complicated and intense for people. And another thing I've been talking about a little bit in coaching with people is this idea of doing an emotional audit.

59:19Forrest Hanson: So what are the people, places, and things that you leave feeling better? And what are the things that you leave feeling worse? And how can that influence how you think about yourself, how you want to be in the future, and the kinds of environments you want to put yourself in? and that's a way to feel a little bit more authorship tomorrow. It's something that you can do short term. You can do it pretty quickly and you can figure out, oh yeah, I just keep on doing this thing that never makes me feel good. Sometimes it's been revealing for me myself when I've gone through that kind of a process.

59:49Dr. Rick Hanson: This has been a very interesting conversation. Yeah, I think it's been a cool one.

59:54Forrest Hanson: This is one of my favorite ones recently. Oh, that's good because we got really quite personal

1:00:01Dr. Rick Hanson: and I'm just kind of taking a moment to feel into that, a kind of claiming and reclaiming of, yeah, I can trust myself. I can trust myself even to manage it if I'm kind of awkward and sloppy because I'm real. You know, I was disclosing, I was impulsive, I just let it out and yeah, I needed to edit it later. Hemingway put it, write drunk, edit sober. All right, I got to do some sober editing later, but I can trust myself to do the sober editing, and I can trust that which generally flows out of me, even if it's kind of awkward and clunky and impulsive. It's not so bad. It's okay. It's kind of endearing, actually.

1:00:41Dr. Rick Hanson: Anyway, that kind of reclaiming of self-trust, I think, is really central to this process of self-acceptance.

1:00:48Forrest Hanson: Thank you, right on. And I also think that we've been talking for a little while, and we should probably bring this one to a close. So I totally agree with you, Dad. I think this was one of my favorite ones that we've done recently. And this is a really core important topic, I think, for people as they go through any kind of figuring myself out process, whatever you want to call that, whether that's formal therapy or that's more of a kind of general personal improvement, self-help-y sort of process that people do. And I hope that we've shared some stuff during this episode that people find genuinely helpful.

1:01:22Forrest Hanson: and that they're able to really use to feel a greater sense of self-acceptance.

1:01:28Dr. Rick Hanson: So it's all about balancing those different parts of it.

1:01:30Forrest Hanson: So thanks again for doing this with me, Dad. I really enjoyed it.

1:01:40Forrest Hanson: I thought this was a great conversation today with Rick. I really enjoyed him taking the time to do this one with me. And we spend most of today's episode talking about the aspect of self-acceptance that's accepting the parts of yourself that are authentic that you've pushed away. I used my own sensitivity as an example throughout the episode. I hope that people found that helpful and not like I was excessively self-disclosing, but it gave us a good way into talking about a lot of the bigger themes here with self-acceptance. Self-acceptance starts with an appreciation that you don't need to approve of the stuff that you accept.

1:02:16Forrest Hanson: You are just seeing it clearly. You're just with it. You're moving out of resistance to something and into a frame where you're like, oh, okay, this is just the way that things are. Acceptance is just seeing clearly and living in reality. And this includes seeing the things about ourselves that we want to change, which got to the very end of the episode when we talked about self-authorship. It's normally a lack of self-acceptance that keeps people the way that they are. To quickly summarize that group one category, this is working with the parts of ourselves that are authentic that we've pushed away.

1:02:50Forrest Hanson: We can get awareness of those aspects of who we are, which we've covered in many other episodes. We understand the reason that it was hidden. This could get to conditions of worth or the unique circumstances that you grew up in, the kinds of experiences that you had early on in life. Then we try to take it in. We don't approve of the part necessarily, but we receive it. We go, oh yeah, this is really true. Then we appreciate its function. Why is it doing the things that it's doing. And then we try to look for some strengths amid the different flaws. With self acceptance work, people often try to start in too emotionally intense a place.

1:03:29Forrest Hanson: If you've struggled to accept something about yourself, it's probably because you don't like it very much. So it's not going to feel very authentic to move right to these practices of, ah, throw your arms around the part or just love yourself more, that doesn't feel real. This part has caused real problems for you in life, maybe, the way that I felt that my sensitivity caused for me. And it would feel weird for me to just like immediately go to joining with that aspect of who I am. I wouldn't really be able to do that. But we still might be able to form some kind of a relationship with that part of who we are.

1:04:04Forrest Hanson: Maybe by seeing it more clearly, maybe by appreciating its history, I walked through a series of questions. The first one was, what was this part trying to do for me? The second was, how was it treated? And was that fair? The third was, what was good in it? And then the fourth was, what would have been good to hear back then? This is a classic Rick question. And these are some objective, kind of slightly abstract questions. These questions are deliberately a bit more abstract or objective than emotional. As I was saying, trying to just lead with a lot of warmth directed at something about ourselves that we don't really like, it's probably going to be pretty tough for people.

1:04:39Forrest Hanson: Establishing that this part of who we are was mistreated in some way, that it didn't deserve whatever happened to you, can also be really helpful. And Rick even took this in a direction of talking about a kind of anger or frustration or fieriness on behalf of this part. Thinking in terms of like, oh, if I as an adult were teleported to back then, what would I say on behalf of this part? This then took us to a really important point that Rick made that I absolutely loved. And he was talking about regulating this aspect of who we are, that it can be easier to accept something about ourselves if we also feel like we are in control of it to some degree.

1:05:17Forrest Hanson: And a lot of the time, people struggle to accept parts of who they are because they feel like they can't regulate them. In other words, they feel like they're not at choice about when this part shows up and when it doesn't show up. And the only way that they can be confident is if they stick this part fully in the basement of who they are. And so as we develop the ability to actually do something with regards to regulating this part, feeling like we can take some of it but not all of it, or feeling like we can apply it in some circumstances but not others, it becomes so much easier for us to let a little bit of it back into our lives.

1:05:54Forrest Hanson: We then talked about working with the act. This is the inauthentic forms of performance that we've built up around the authentic part of who we are in order to defend ourselves or perform some kind of social function or just kind of get on with life. And again, I think this is a place where we can start with almost a little cognitive diffusion, a kind of labeling practice. What are we labeling as act? What do we really mean when we talk about the act or this inauthentic part of who we are? because also act is a kind of cloud in the sky of our whole personality. It's a piece of it, it's weather, it moves through, it covers it over.

1:06:31Forrest Hanson: You know, I love a rainy day, but the overcast is not the sky itself. This is another place where I think there's a ton of value in exploring the story that the act is built on. So what's running underneath it? What are the kinds of assumptions that we have about the world or other people or ourselves that are really driving that act? Because the act is normally shaped by the beliefs that we have. We believe that if we stop pleasing other people, then they won't love us anymore. Or we believe that if we're not aggressive and really assertive on our behalf, then other people will just walk all over us.

1:07:06Forrest Hanson: And we can start exploring, well, do we really have to be that aggressive and assertive in order for people to not walk all over us? Or is it really true that we have to please everybody all the time in order for us to be loved by other people. And one of the ways into this that I think is really interesting, we didn't talk about this during the body of the episode, but I like to sometimes save something for the outro, came from Robert Grozak in the mentalization episode that we did, where he talked about challenging beliefs from inside of them. We normally try to attack our beliefs by arguing from the outside of them.

1:07:41Forrest Hanson: We like argue against them, right? The alternative is to go in first and then work from there. So close your eyes, fully access the felt sense of the belief, and then while still feeling it, start posing questions or scenarios that put some pressure on it. So let's say that a person has a belief, my career determines my worth. Can you imagine never getting a certain job and still having worth? Can you imagine getting that job and still hating yourself or still feeling bad about, you know, your overall career trajectory. That's really interesting, particularly that second one. This then took us to the end of the episode where we talked about self-authorship.

1:08:25Forrest Hanson: And this is the feeling that we're creating who we are as we go. We have an influence on act. We have an influence on bringing back the parts of ourselves that we've pushed away over time. And I think that this really gets back to a kind of active choosing of who we are. I don't actually have a problem with act, as long as the person is choosing to act the way that they're acting. I don't even really have a problem with somebody deciding that some aspect of who they are is not the right fit for whatever situation that they're in right now, as long as they're actively and volitionally choosing that.

1:09:01Forrest Hanson: There's nothing wrong with that. It's just about function and about choice. Is this going well? Is is going poorly? Am I choosing it? Am I not choosing it? The problem for people is when they feel like they just don't have a lot of influence over what they're doing or over the way that they're showing up. And that's what we're trying to change. Quick reminder at the end here about Rick's new upcoming online program. It's called The Healing Link. It's a six-week live online course, and you can learn more about it at rickhansen.com slash linking and use the promo code beingwell25 to receive a 25 % off discount.

1:09:35Forrest Hanson: If you've made it to the end of this episode and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, we'd really appreciate it. If you took a moment to subscribe, it really helps us out. You can also find us on Patreon, patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast, and you can look for me on Substack as well. I'm writing over there more regularly these days. So until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.

1:10:03Thank you.