Hilary jacobs Hendel

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Hilary Jacobs Hendel: Psychotherapist and author

Full transcript

"Shame, like all these things that we're talking about, is a universal experience, but there's a kind of a healthy shame. When you think about how emotions have evolved for hundreds of millions of years, it turns out that humans survive better working in groups than an every-man-for-himself mentality. And so we evolved things like shame and guilt to cue us that we are doing something against what's good for the group. So it turns into a toxic type of shame, a kind of shame that debilitates our mental and emotional health when we are shamed or rejected for aspects of our core authentic self, like our emotions, right when we're told that we're bad for feeling a certain way. No, you're not bad for feeling a certain way. Emotions just are." – Hilary Jacobs Hendel

Madeleine: We might frequently think of certain people or professions as being creative, but rarely do we consider that our emotions are creative. 

Not only do we encounter a myriad of emotions from joy to anger in our day to day life, but often we are experiencing a range of creative manoeuvres to avoid, block or misplace them. We’re told to not to feel certain ways, or that it’s mind over matter. We procrastinate when we feel fearful, overwork to avoid emptiness, or experience anxiety when we are excited. 

But there is so much to learn from our emotions. As psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs  Hendel puts it, core emotions are programs for action, and these actions are meant to be adaptive to the moment. And of course because emotions are a purely internal processes - they don’t affect others unless we act on them. 

As she writes in her book, It's Not Always Depression: Working the change triangle to listen to the body, Discover Core Emotions and Reconnect with Your Authentic Self, “avoiding emotions doesn’t work in the long run. In fact, when we have access to our core emotions we have more vitality and energy as the thinking brain, emotional brain and body are all working together. 

We refer to the change triangle throughout the conversation, which in essence is a map of the mind that can get us reacquainted with our core emotions. 

There are lots of resources on Hilary’s website that I’ll link to in the show notes, but to give you a visual for this conversation, imagine an upside triangle – at the bottom corner, there are the seven core emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy, excitement and sexual excitement. Core emotions, our inborn survival emotions, tell us what we want, what we need, what we like, and what we don’t like.

In the top right corner of the triangle are inhibitory emotions such as anxiety, shame and guilt that block core emotions. Sometimes we block core emotions to get along with others and sometimes we block core emotions because they overwhelm us.

Then in the top left corner are defenses, such as perfectionism, negative thinking, overwork, sarcasm, smiling, prejudice. Defenses are the mind’s way of protecting us from emotional pain and being overwhelmed by feelings, but they can be destructive and keep us hidden from ourselves.

It might sound counterintuitive, but the antidote to our experiences of any of the core emotions is to allow them to flow. Working the change triangle in our daily lives and across our lifetime helps us to become more open hearted, or tap into the “sevens cs” – calm curious connected compassionate confident courageous and clear.

In this conversation, we talk about how emotions live in the body, why we avoid feelings and how to judging them, slowing down, the power of feeling, dealing and relating, the different types of shame, guilt and boundaries, moving through small traumas, how we are made up of parts, and how something as simple as learning to take a compliment can help us sit with emotions. 

In the book, Hilary talks about when asking the question “what emotion am i feeling right now and what is it propelling me to do,” and how the words “right now” are important. So, given our emotions ebb and flow, here is Hilary on how she is feeling right now… 

Hilary: You know, if you had asked me this question 20 years ago, I would have zoomed up into my head to try to figure it out. And now, as a as a seasoned, emotion-focussed therapist and sharer of emotion education, I'm now scanning my body from below the neck, pretty much head to toe, to toe to head. And what I'm aware of is, is several things. I have a little bit of a bit of a tightness in my chest. And I know that's a little bit of anxiety from the day. I also feel a lot of energy kind of streaming up from the base of my abdomen up. And I know that's excitement about the opportunity to share this information with you and your audience. I also notice that I have a big smile on my face, which tells me I feel it, I feel it all around the corners of my mouth and my eyes. And that tells me that I'm also very happy. Again, one of my favourite things in the world is talking about emotions and sharing the education with other people, because I just feel it is what helps people so immensely on an individual and also our collective well-being level so that we have a more loving and kind world where we all have some skills and tools to deal with things that make us uncomfortable, and to lessen those uncomfortable moments.

So a lot, I'm feeling a lot.

Madeleine: I don't know if I could actually answer with such detail and that's I suppose the question that I had for you is, reading the book and learning about the change triangle and learning that emotions are rooted in the body. I still sort of struggle to feel that. So I was wondering if that's a practice in terms of being able to notice all of those sensations in the body.

Hilary: Yes, for some people and for other people, it just becomes a lot more quickly or naturally. But I would say that that working the change triangle is a lifelong process. Some people like myself, when I first saw the the triangle — which I didn't invent, I adapted it from the scientific literature —I immediately kind of became organised. I feel like in a moment my mental health transformed only because I stopped blaming myself for my feelings. And I felt so hopeful because anxiety and depression were the beginning of a story and there was a whole healing journey through emotions to ease and heal what I had been dealing with in my 20s and my teens. 

But for other people, it really doesn't come easily. And it's a struggle. But the key, I suspect Madeleine, if you and I were were in a room together and I asked you how you were feeling with a couple of tweaks, mostly really asking you to slow way, way down, because to perceive the body it happens much more slowly, almost like if you're driving in a fog and you're starting to come out of the fog and you see kind of diffuse shapes, but then as you go closer, they become more sharpened. That's sort of the way it happens, where if we really slow down and I prompted you maybe to check out around your heart area any sensation, words that you could put there or any sensation, positive or negative around your stomach or in your limbs. Do you feel calm? Do you feel numb? Do you feel dissociated? Do you feel tense? Do you feel hot or cold? Or is there a colour that is metaphorically how you experience, or is there air or do you feel confined? I have a whole list of sensation words that I share with people to help sort of get it going because we don't have language. It's like learning a new language. 

Madeleine: Yeah. And it's so evocative. In that moment, I could feel my shoulders kind of release, which indicated that there was some tension in them in the first instance.

Hilary: Excellent. So you did notice to something in your body right now!

Madeleine: Yeah, I love that it comes back to that slowing down. And I think that that can be the difficulty with, you know, crammed schedules and to do lists and that perpetual pressure to wear business as a badge of honour and for doing to be the measure of our worth. There's almost a fear that if you do slow down, you might actually find who you really are. And so what's been your experience? Can you relate to this perpetual doing?

Hilary: Oh, yes, and I still pride myself on doing a tremendous amount in a very efficient way, much to my family's chagrin. So I would say, you know, you really have to create time. It's a practice, the way people meditate or the way they go to the gym. You set aside time for yourself.

I mean, in theory, you know, if you're going to say, OK, I want to improve my emotional health, it would begin by having a basic education and learning the change triangle. And then you have to decide if if you think that will help you and then give some time and energy to it. So that's sort of one way to look at it. The other way in a sort of more practical way is beginning a practice of noticing when you're going through daily life and something happens and you're just thrown out of balance, one could call it triggered, if you like that word, one could call it getting upset. And that's a terrible feeling, and wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a reliable way to help yourself feel better in those moments and that for me was really the fuel that drove kind of counterintuitively me slowing down. Because I didn't want to be anxious. I had gone through two clinical depressions where I was given Prozac by a psychiatrist, and that helped cue me up. I used to think that I could go, go, go, go, go. And I could always just cram more in and I had control over my emotions, until they sort of the depression and the stress broke through and I felt very humbled and somewhat frightened by my vulnerability. And I think when I discovered this information on becoming a psychotherapist through just luck on emotions, I was hungry and ready for it because I wanted to feel stronger emotionally, even though I always thought that I was strong in a different way. So when that kind of fell apart, I was like, OK, I really start to have to learn and understand these emotions that happened so that I can take care of myself, so that I didn't get depressed again from situational stress.

Madeleine: Wonderful. So I think it's probably a good idea to delve into the components of the change triangle to paint that picture a little bit and how he can use it to build that emotional strength. And so there's the core emotions, the inhibitory emotions, the defences, and then hopefully that openhearted state that we can enter into. But with the core emotions, you've spoken so beautifully about how slowing down can help us make room for them. But I suppose I kind of want to rewind and look at the cost of avoiding them and why we might block these core emotions.

Hilary: Well, there's sort of two reasons. There's the there's why we do it originally in our childhood. Right. There's, you know, the sort of cliche about psychotherapy is going back into childhood and people wonder why you have to do that. But the reason is that the way the brain forms is we're sort of born with this with our genetics and our basic disposition like this unique who we are. We could call it the sort of the core of the authentic self. 

And then the brain starts to wire and then prune with experience, meaning we learn by experience. But it's different than the kind of learning where you're in school, learning, for example, how to add numbers together, or you're learning spelling, which is more in conscious awareness.

This emotional learning, because emotions are all about survival and making sure that we live to see another day and also making sure that we move towards things that are good for us, nurturing, that are interesting to us, because that's another way that we survive and thrive. 

And so from the get go, we're born with these seven core emotions that I talk about in the change triangle: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement and sexual excitement. And those are there to get evoked when the environment presents itself in a certain way that it's going to trigger an emotion.

So, for example, if we if something scary is in the environment we need fear to tell us to run to safety. So that's why we have these emotions — core emotions are all about what is good for us and what is bad for us. And the whole purpose is that they activate the body so that we can take some some sort of adaptive action. Again, like when we're angry, we want to fight. When we're scared, we want to run. When we lose something we love or someone we love, we we feel sadness over the loss. And, you know, if we didn't feel sadness over loss, we really wouldn't feel love and connection, and connection and attachment are fundamental to human survival. 

So now we can go back to when we are born, our caregivers, our parents start to connect to us and we are wired also for connection. And so we begin to learn in that milieu and that environment of how to stay positively connected to our parents so that they take care of us. And if we show an anger to our parent and they don't like that emotion because of how they were raised and how comfortable they are with their emotions, then like let's say we let's say we're two years old and we say no, because that's what two year olds do, they begin to become a little bit more developing to their own person and they'll be very contrary. And if a little baby says no to their mother and the mother looks angry in return, don't say no to me, then that's going to register for the child that oh, we shouldn't show anger because we then feel abandoned. Our mom looks angry. That doesn't feel good. Or our mum cuts us off and goes to another room, or our mom punishes us or our mom criticises us. All of those things feel bad and they create anxiety and they create shame, it's not pleasing. So we learn OK, like as we go along, we're not going to show this emotion that much. We're not going to show that emotion. So we basically learn to stay in the good graces of the people that we need first, our parents, our families and our peer groups. Right. There's pressure to be liked. 

And this works fine, except when there's too much emotional exclusion, when we have to chronically bury emotions and the way the brain is wired to to bury our core emotions or avoid them is through that other corner on the change triangle, which has this other category of emotions called inhibitory emotions, and the emotions that counter core emotions. So if core emotion is what's good for me, the the inhibitory emotions are what's good for my relationships. They keep us connected positively and the inhibitory emotions, everyone out there listening is going they're going to recognise they are anxiety, guilt and shame. And anxiety and guilt and shame are fine, they're normal and we all have them, but in excessive amounts vis a vis blocking emotional experience, they're damaging because what we have is then this swirl in our body of the uncomfortableness of emotions kind of being blocked, we have these core emotions which are physical, and then we have these inhibitory emotions pushing them down almost like a pressure cooker. And all of that doesn't feel good. 

And so we then move to that other corner of the triangle, which is where we develop some sort of manoeuvre to avoid feeling discomfort or pain, and we do this in so many ways throughout our lives—we are very good at avoiding emotions. We can just kind of go up in our head and ruminate on our thoughts. We can dissociate, which is where you just kind of your brain just figures out a way to, like, not go there. But it's at a cost because it brings us out of our bodies and into a state that's somewhat disconnected from who we are and what we need from our wants and needs. Reaching for a drink is a defence and it works, right. Drugs and alcohol numb us, but they're not a good long term strategy because they hurt us. And there's a myriad of creative ways that we protect ourselves from emotional pain. And it's not a bad thing. In fact, when we develop these defences in childhood, we needed them and we really have to honour them and appreciate them. But what happens is that as we get older and we have more ability to manage emotions because our brains are more mature, we don't need those defences.

And if we keep on relying on them, we ultimately get very disconnected from our core sense of self, our authentic self, and we get disconnected from other people, because if you can't connect to yourself, it's very hard to connect to others. They kind of go hand in hand. As we get older, we really want to rely less and less on defences and more and more on being able to manage our emotions as we relate to other people and as we deal with the challenges that life brings. In ADP,  we call it feeling, dealing and relating all at the same time. And that's optimum.

Madeleine: Oh, that's brilliant. Feeling, dealing and relating. It's interesting that you refer to the defences as creative manoeuvres. It's just it shows how wonderfully creative we are as human beings. And yet that can be both healthy and destructive, that creative force.

It's also really interesting to see that some of the creative manoeuvres relate back so wonderfully with the creative process. I think that in my own example, I can see things like perfectionism or procrastination bubble up. And it was really so wonderful with the change triangle to see where those defences are stemming from and to see that actually underneath that defence is fear and also anxiety. And if I was able to sort of sit with those core emotions of fear, I would be able to find that action to take. And, you know, doing the work can often be the antidote to being afraid of the work. And I think that's what I really loved about the book and learning about the change triangle is to not attach judgement necessarily to any of the emotions because each has a purpose. I love that question of how are you trying to help me right now, whether it's a defence or whether it's a core emotion and trying to figure out that action, I suppose.

Hilary: Yes. And if we were together in a room and sometimes I pull out a piece of paper and a pencil and we can map your specific change triangle, if we did that, you know, we draw the upside down triangle and on the top left corner, we would put procrastination as a defence. Right? Again, not in a pejorative way, but just what you're doing to not deal with the emotion that you labelled, which we put on the top right hand corner. You mentioned anxiety that if you were to sort of face what you had to do, that there was some anxiety. So then we could ask, taking this example, if you tried to go beneath the anxiety, what core emotion might have been coming up in that moment? And so then we could work with the fear a little bit. I might ask you how you know you feel afraid. Like what? In your body. Right now, and you don't have to answer this if you if you don't feel but that that would be my next question to help you again and train you to know what fear feels like physically for you so that you could really get quite not only familiar with your fear, but almost like be able to tolerate the experience of fear so that you didn't have to avoid it. And you can sort of lean into it. And then we would have to see what we did with it, depending on if it was coming from the past or if it was sort of a fresh more of an adult feeling.

Madeleine: Hmm. Wow. I think that's so powerful. And I'd love to dive further into those inhibitory emotions, the anxiety, the guilt, the shame, because I feel like that they are such big ones, especially shame. And as you describe in your book, shame is universal and it's complex and it's painful, but there's different types. So I wondered if you could maybe speak to those and maybe how we can set ourselves free from shame.

Hilary: Yeah, it's a it's a really big topic. And I guess I first want to just say for for the you know, for the benefit of people listening, shame is a tough emotion because even talking about shame, even the mere mention of the word shame can create a shame experience, which is one of the most excruciatingly painful experiences that humans have. And it's the sense of like annihilating or disappearing or needing to crawl under a rock or getting smaller. And it's really a response to... if you think of a turtle poking his head out to see if there's anything nice out there, out there in the world and to feel like received by another turtle. And let's say this little turtle wants to play and then he finds other turtles and his parents want to play, and then it's safe for him to come out. But if he comes out of his shell and there's anything that is rejecting or threatening to his sense of self, he pulls right into the shell for protection. 

And that's sort of the experience when there's a lack of emotional safety, particularly when we're young. So we're not really born with shame about anything per-say, but we are all wired to experience shame. And shame, like all these things that we're talking about, is a universal experience, but there's there's kind of a healthy shame. 

When you think about how emotions have evolved for hundreds of millions of years, it turns out that humans survive better working in groups than an-every-man-for-himself mentality. And so we evolved things like shame and guilt to cue us, that we are doing something against what's good for the group. We want to be good citizens. We don't want to be banished into exile. So healthy shame is given in small doses by our parents and then our teachers on how to behave and get along.

It turns into a toxic type of shame, a kind of shame that debilitates our mental and emotional health when we are shamed or rejected for aspects of our core authentic self, like our emotions, right when we're told that we're bad for feeling a certain way. No, you're not bad for feeling a certain way. Emotions just are. But our behaviours have to be corralled so that we're behaving in proper ways. We don't hurt other people gratuitously. We try to be constructive. When we are rejected for our gender or our sexuality or for things that we love, let's say you're an art artistic type in a family of of science nerds and they don't get art. You know, they might kind of keep pointing you in another direction and you get a message, wow, I'm really not wanted for this artistic side of me. And you can develop a pocket of shame around that. That may not be the best example, but we all have aspects of our being that we feel are not OK. And those are the pockets of shame that we have to get curious about: the parts of us that feel bad about ourselves.

Madeleine: Oh, I love that. The getting curious and we can talk about maybe the seven c's in a moment, but something that really, really resonated - and so much did - but how shame is not a truth. And remembering that because it in those moments of shame, it can be really hard to decipher that, you know, your shame is something that separate, I suppose. And I was listening to his podcast yesterday that also really linked this idea of finding that balance between thoughts and feelings. And I feel like shame is one for me anyway, where the thoughts just perpetuate the feeling. But I was really keen to ask you about how do I identify the difference between a thought and an emotion? And then I was listening to this podcast yesterday which said, if you say something like, "I feel like..." that's actually a thought, if you're using the word like so I feel like I'm not good enough. That's a thought rather than a feeling. But I wondered how you define the difference?

Hilary: You know, feelings, again, are are body-based. In fact, you know, we really don't have feelings in our brain, although we might think that we do. So if I ask you a question like, "what are you having for dinner?" The movement is that up into your head, right, to kind of contemplate something and then whatever you say, I might say so as you think about having chicken for dinner, what's that like inside your body? And then you might say, well, I love chicken, so my mouth is watering. That's a feeling in your mouth. My stomach is churning. I feel joy at the prospect of of getting to eat chicken. Or you might be disgusted. I am disgusted at the thought of having chicken, and that is a feeling about the chicken. So to me, I delineate it most by am I in my head or am I in my body and the combination, like you said before, is so important.

One thing that I've been really trying to add to my messaging of teaching emotion education is that learning about emotions does not mean that you wear your emotions on your sleeve and that you have an excuse to behave badly, like just crying all over the place, crying at work or raging, behaving in ways that are counterproductive to the environment that you're in. It really means bringing a balance back so that we're not all in our head all the time. And we're tuning in every so often to the emotions that we have that are either creating the thoughts or creating anxiety and other problems and that we're trying to honour and name and validate what's happening below the neck and use the two. 

Because even in therapy, once I help a person get very familiar with their emotions and we we let them move and see what the impulses are. So if you're angry at your partner, you may want to punch him in the nose. Well, we don't do that. That's destructive behaviour. But we may act out or we may give a lot of space and talk about that feeling and imagine. And that's one way that I help people release anger is using fantasy. And this is like a pretty technical pointed way, but it's after that somebody fully experiences their emotion that we then bring on the thinking brain and think through what is the most constructive way to use this emotion out in life. And it may be that you express your anger to someone in in a way that they can hear it. You know, that really pissed me off when you called me dumb the other day that hurt my feelings and it made me angry and I don't want you to speak to me that way again. Or, it may be that you just process the anger on your own because you know that it's a trigger for a repetitive thing from childhood where there's sort of a confusion of how you felt towards your mother or your father or your sister or your brother, something in the family of origin that is kind of a sore spot and it keeps coming out in your in your current relationships and therefore you want to work on it from the origin of it. And then often those triggers go away and the current relationships improve. 

Madeleine: Yes, to return back to that inhibitory emotion's corner, where there's the inhibitory emotion of guilt, which is another big one, and you just mentioned there relationships. And I think that what can be tricky about guilt is how it does interplay with our relationships and things like setting limits or setting boundaries and how that can be the very thing that triggers something like guilt.

Hilary: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's one of the hardest things to do is to assert needs and boundaries, to say no. And one way that I help people tolerate guilt is actually by leaning into the feeling in the body, which may be counterintuitive, that you don't have to avoid something that you can tolerate. And getting used to the sensations that our emotions create is a real great way to become kind of a Zen master and to be able to do that feel, deal and relate that I mentioned before. 

Because if we can't deal with the feeling of guilt, then we tend to go back on what we want to do, which is we do the thing we don't want to do. So we don't have to feel that feeling of guilt. And so it's hard. I mean, emotions are are hard, but they're much, much harder when we don't have any education in what they are and how to use them for good. So that's why I love kind of sharing emotion, education as a starter pack, like basic stuff that we should be getting in high school. And then you can decide if you want to kind of begin to learn how to process your emotions.

Madeleine: Well, yeah, it just makes me think that would be incredible if everybody had access to that starter pack, because then these things like setting limits and boundaries and maybe communicating with each other would be a lot easier. 

Hilary: That that was my hope. I really tried to make - and you could tell me whether I pulled it off - but my book I really thought of as sort of a basic emotion education with a tool, in a box. And that was my hope that partners would read it together, families would read it together and go through the exercises and kind of play around with it. And, you know, not only have the education, but start to really connect to each other in a in a deeper way in relationships when they're emotionally connected can be so healing as well as processing emotions is a catalyst for healing all the wounds of our lives and moving forward.

Madeleine: Hmm. Will you absolutely did pull it off because it really crystallised for me what it would mean to be okay with emotions rather than judging them and and to see that emotions just are is definitely the message that really, really sunk in. 

I suppose that's a nice segue into sort of what can happen if we have this toolkit, if we have this understanding of emotions in a box and it seems like that can lead us to an open-hearted state. And I wondered if you could explain what that is and how it links into to various emotions that we can tap into.

Hilary: People feel their best self when they can kind of tackle the challenges of life and move forward in the direction of their wants and dreams.

And the way that we are able to do that is by being calm. And what we would say in the jargon is that we want a regulated nervous system. When our nervous system is regulated, we tend to feel calm, we tend to want to be more socially engaged, we can be curious in things. We tend to find it easier to be more compassionate to others and ourselves. And we feel more confident. 

When we are anxious and ashamed, as everybody can relate to, it's sort of common sense, we we sort of have a crisis in confidence and then you kind of want to go kind of more hiding, more inner stay at home. And so how do we move from unregulated or disregulated states where our nervous system is either hyper-aroused, like in a fight or flight, like an anxious state where we're kind of all sort of jittery and and sped up or shut down. Right. Those are the two of those hyper-aroused and hypo-aroused where where what that means is that we're just like we're not we're not ourself, that something is upset us and we have to get back in this kind of even balanced state where we have just access to our sort of full capacities and we can think and feel again. It goes back to feel, deal and relate at the same time. So there's all these different metaphors for it.

Now, if we had a lot of childhood adversity and part of what I wanted to share is this in the book and in my writing is not only sharing emotions, but this kind of new concept of what trauma is, which is not just the catastrophic one time events that happened to some of us, but it's the many transgressions that happen just from surviving our childhood, where it accumulates to a point where we have emotions that are blocked up and we have these kind of experiences that are cordoned off. If you visualise like a neural network, like a tree, like a tree branch. They hold all these feelings that we can't cope with and it's as though they become separate. That's when we start to work with child parts, which you may remember from the book, where we're trying to integrate the brain and and allow ourselves to be able to think about the past without being hijacked by emotions. 

And all of this is how we we become regulated and calmer. And the change triangle is the tool to get there. And it's really based on the idea that when you work your way down the triangle to core emotions, it's the core emotion is the pathway to the regulated state by by processing that emotion. And what it means to process an emotion is to allow yourself to experience it. And what it means to experience an emotion is to be able to one know that you're having it, to be able to name it, OK? Right now I feel sad. Right. And and then to be able to say, okay I know, I feel sad because I can label these sensations in my body. I feel a heaviness in my chest. I feel something behind my eyes that lets me know I'm on the verge of tears. And then the final ability to stay with those sensations of heaviness in the chest or the feeling behind your eyes, just noticing what those sensations feel like with a stance of radical acceptance, compassion, curiosity, and really trying hard not to judge or evaluate the emotion.

When we can attend to that emotion and notice the sensations, it tends to move them through. There's something about attending, giving attention, which comes from the the cerebral cortex part of our brain to a physical experience, which is from the middle of our brain. It's almost like a surgeon has a scalpel and that's what does their work. Focussed attention is what allows the brain to change. So when you bring attention to an emotion, a pure core emotion, and you stay with it, you'll notice things moving.

If we breathe and stay with an experience, the emotion will come up like a wave, then crescendo and then calm down. Similar to the experience we've all had, you know, when you stub your toe and you don't feel the pain yet, but you know it's coming. So you're kind of waiting for the pain to get more and more and more. And you hope you can bear it, and then thank goodness it switches and it starts to go down. And that's what happens with an emotion. And we know from, you know, with practise of experiencing our emotions, the various ones over and over again, it's like, okay, even though this sucks and it hurts, I know what this is and I'm not frightened of it and I know I just have to go through it and I'll feel better. 

So when we can experience fully to completion the emotion, we then drop into this open hearted state of the authentic self. And this is that regulated state where we feel calm and curious. It's notable and marked by all these C words: calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, creative. 

And so that's where we all want to spend more and more time. It's not that we're there all the time. That's impossible. But by working the change triangle throughout the day, and over a lifetime, we learn to process our emotions and spend more and more time in those calmer and regulated states. And it also doesn't mean that we don't have an emotion while we're there. 

So after practising this for over a decade, I sort of have connection to my what feels like kind of a solid self. And I am also aware when I'm deeply sad and can can facilitate my crying, or deeply angry and can facilitate processing my anger and moving through it. But I don't get lost in it. I always have some connection to this kind of authentic self. I kind of teach people to be their own good parents, to relate to their emotions and to their childhood traumatised parts in this way where you can self process and when you can't do it on your own, then you need a therapist or a counsellor that helps you get through the hard parts so that you can do it more on your own.

Madeleine: It just makes me think that this process, as you said, it is over a day and a lifetime, it is something we have to delve into again and again. What I was reminded of reading the book was the fact that we contain multitudes. So part of us could be changing and learning and making its way through the change triangle, potentially. But we might have another part of us that feels differently and how change and growth is actually quite complicated and we can feel really conflicted by it. So I wondered if you could speak to this idea that we're made up of parts.

Hilary: Yes, so parts is just a very helpful concept to to understand and to try to work with conflicts that are irreconcilable and and opposite emotions at the same time.

And parts refer to really childhood memories that kind of stay with us because, again, they carry big emotions with us so that if we had if we were bullied, let's say we were bullied at the age of eight. We may be triggered from any time somebody does anything that's remotely reminding our brain of that bullying will be transported back to eight years old. And you know it because you've had the feeling that you've been here many, many times before.

And so someone might come to me getting into trouble in their current relationship because it keeps bringing up this eight year old part of them. And we can heal that part, which actually is integrating the brain. We're trying to kind of build connection between the present day self and the eight year old part by providing safe resources. 

And what I mean by that is as a trauma therapist, I don't like to re-traumatise people so we don't go back into history and just let them re experience something that was miserable again and again. What we want to do is keep one foot in the in the present with me and and I sort of stay connected with my patient as together we tend to this eight year old child back in whatever scene the patient lands on. Right. Because usually through an emotion we can travel back in time and end up at a memory. And then we let this part of us tell us what it was like. We become a witness to all that that part experienced. And we're completely with that part without any judgement in an empathic and loving way. 

And then we see what that part needs now as though it's happening in the present because parts and these are traumatic memories, they don't seem to have a sense that this is finished. Right. They live on. There's no time in this kind of right brain memory experience so that we can be triggered and feel like, oh, my god, I'm there now. I'm having those same shameful feelings. I'm having that same feeling of wanting to run away and hide. And I don't want to go out. I don't want to go back to school again. And so by by connecting with that part and visualising it down to the detail — I'll ask someone, if that part of you that feels so ashamed right now could come out of you and sit with us and you tried to see that part through your most confident present day eyes. What do you see? How old is that part of you? What is she wearing? Where is she? Is she alone? Where are the adults that could have helped her? What were they doing? And then we can use imagination and all sorts of techniques to build in resources to help that part feel something new and better and then take it back into us. And the beautiful thing about trauma work is the brain really doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality. It's quite incredible. And they know this from fMRI studies where you can imagine running and the neurones that light up when you're actually running will also light up when you imagine running. But we see it every day in clinical practice where I did what's called a rage portrayal with somebody, some gentleman that I'm working with recently where he was able to stand up to his humiliating father and when he was a young lad and we sort of had this this beautiful imaginal fantasy. And then when I saw him a few weeks later, he said it's as though I actually stood up to my dad, even though I never really did. And I feel stronger and more confident as a result of that. And it really is like we're adding something. And that's how you're integrating the brain by creating these new neural networks, these new bridging between the present and the past so that it dilutes the trigger. It's no longer as intense, really turn the volume down on these parts of us that are that are painful and causing us problems in our current life.

Madeleine: It's such a powerful tool. Both as something to tap into every day as it's almost something that we build into our routine or our daily lives with those wonderful examples of slowing down like you mentioned earlier. But it also strikes me as a very powerful tool to help when we are in, I suppose, those times of a rut or a life crisis. And yeah, I wondered, given that emotions do have that ebb and flow, how you would define it a rut?

Hilary: I mean, for me, it's a sense of like stuck. I think like you just said, I don't feel kind of the ebb and flow of life with all its joy and excitement and sorrow and and fear. It's like being almost like stuck in a static state. And it's a state that craves novelty. And this is so relevant. Right, with this terrible pandemic that's going on where it's like every day is very similar and there's not a lot of new things happening, at least here in the U.S. right now. 

So to me, it's just feeling stuck in a state that I don't want to really be in. And when I feel that way, I kind of think of how can I get out of this? What's something that I can sort of inject into my into my life, even if it's very, very tiny to shake things up a little bit.

Madeleine: Is there anything that comes to mind? I know you wrote a really lovely article about hugs and the power of hugs. While hugs might be tricky for some people in a pandemic, I wondered if you did have any other ideas about things that can inject a little bit more spontaneity into our life, all the things that might help get us out of a rut, something as simple as a hug.

Hilary: Yes, that is so lovely. It's so funny because I'm thinking of something different. But I love that idea. I ask for hugs all the time. Like any time I'm upset. That is my go-to, to ask my husband for a hug. And I have to just say that I had to really teach my husband how to give me a therapeutic hug, and that is something that we can really use in the pandemic because it's not about a hug. It's a non-sexual hug that is meant to calm anxiety, shame, depression, fear. And it's done not by strangers, but by people who we live with and who love us. And it's a very specific way of hugging for an extended period of time that makes people uncomfortable sometimes. You really have to, again, like practice it and breathe through it so that you can stay longer and longer. So I love that idea. 

I was thinking more for me, a rut is like a stuckness. So what I may want to do is, is do something that kind of gets me a little like I want to say, like scared or anxious in a good way, like I'm testing myself. I'm doing something that, you know, maybe I would I would write an article on something risque that I haven't written about. Like, I haven't written a lot about sexual excitement, I think, because I've played it a little more down the middle. But I'm going to publish something soon on Psychology Today about that.

And maybe I would do something a little adventurous, like go for a hike that has a little more of a cliff, which scares me to death, you know, just something that I could feel good about that I tested myself. But I really I love that idea of of a hug to get out of a rut.

Madeleine: Yes, me too. Thank you for the inspiration. This podcast really is looking at how we spend our days and and how to, you know, to take away the judgement from the days that go off track just as much as the ones that might stay on track. So I like to just ask how people measure a day well spent. 

Hilary: Oh, wow. Everybody I feel gets to decide that for themselves. And I would see my role as helping someone define that. For me, it's feeling purposeful and having a balance of work and relaxation. I'm really a proponent and lying around doing nothing, when you can. Now I realise my children are grown and so I have the luxury to be able to at the end of a workday, lie around and do nothing. That's not the case when you have young children or children. And it's also not the case when you're working three jobs and whatnot, but I am grateful that I have that ability to have this kind of balance between work and really nurturing myself in in the ways that feel good.

Madeleine: Hmm, and it sounds like without guilt, I think productivity-guilt can be such a thing, whereas lying around doing nothing should be seen as something to cherish.

Hilary: Yes. And something that's okay. And I do think those things, like I had parents that also they were my parents both work they were hard workers. My dad was a psychiatrist and my mother was a big shot interior designer in New York City. But they on the weekends, they lied around and I was never told I had to get up and get out. We all kind of like lied around on the weekends. But my husband came from a family where he feels a little more guilty when he's lying around. He talks about himself doing nothing. And I say, no, you're doing something. You're taking care of yourself, you're resting.

So it really I think a lot of this depends on what was modelled for you. But we can also shift and shift in the ways that we want. And that has to do with processing emotions, which we can do. You know, I work the change triangle on a daily basis pretty much. Over a lifetime it's a nifty tool to use when you want to get curious about when you're stuck in some place, like, again, not being able to relax enough or relaxing too much or those things to kind of question what is that. Or judgement, judging yourself, which I think of as a defence, like if I didn't judge myself, what would I be feeling? Maybe really good. Believe it or not, a lot of people struggle with feeling pride and joy and excitement and really letting their bodies have those expansive experiences.  

Madeleine: Yeah, that was something that I did want to ask you about, is that identity crisis that can come along with a good feeling and how maybe even an anxiety can mask excitement.

Hilary: Absolutely, it totally does it. Anxiety masks excitement and a lot of times pride in the self. Like, I don't know if you noticed, like when people get compliments, if you like observe people getting compliments, you'll see so many defences: shrugging, eye rolling, saying, no, no, no, no, no. Like, these are all the ways that we block the actual feeling of when we hear something nice about ourselves. And it's so important to work to take those in because that's how we build confidence when we didn't get enough of of that kind of self-esteem, nurturing as children, we can build it. But if we don't take a compliment and we don't feel those sensations in our body and let them expand in a way that's manageable for us it's like there's a hole in our in a bucket. You know, the compliment goes in and then it goes right out and we never sort of fill up. 

Madeleine: Hilary reminds us that feelings just are. 

As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “We are about as effective at stopping an emotion as we are at preventing a sneeze.”

As she talks about in her book, they flip on and they flip off depending on what the environment needs. Sometimes they linger, sometimes they become a rut, but we can also use the change triangle to shift us from a rut. Just like a sneeze, sometimes it’s better out than in! When we learn to let our core emotions flow without judgement, we feel calmer, more balanced, and our confidence can grow. We can slow down, we can recognise what might be shield by our defenses or shame standards, experiment with how we process them and learn to tolerate and even get curious about our internal experiences.

As Hilary writes, “Ultimately the goal is to communicate our wants, needs, fears and boundaries confidently and effectively.”

So let instead of judging your emotions or yourself, let them be a guide.