Interview With Dr. Joan Rosenberg

Yay. Awesome. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Oh, my gosh. I'm so. That's awesome. Thank you. Joan. I'm so excited to be talking with you. Dr. Joan Rosenberg. Oh, my gosh. Exciting. Very exciting day here.

Let's see. I'm going to pull this here. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson, and I have Dr. Joan Rosenberg, who is a psychologist of 40 years in California. She not only does private practice, but she also is a professor at Pepperdine University, and she trains and she speaks. She's done a couple really successful TED talks, which I really encourage you to look up. But for now, Joan and I are going to talk about her book, which recently came out, and I'm so excited about, called 90 seconds to a Life you Love. And I've been reading the book and now reading it over again because I think it's so helpful. And so I just. It's such a joy to be able to talk it through with you. Thank you for joining me.

I'm thrilled. So I'm always touched by those who are touched by my work. So it's. I can't be. I'm just filled with gratitude. So.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I know. It's. When you've worked on something for so long and be able to put your thoughts into a book like that, there is something so rewarding about that. Right. And just to be able to have people finally soak it up in this way.

Right. Well, I did. It's been in my head for more than 25 years. And I mean, in different forms. Certainly the longer the time went, the more my ideas, I think, gelled together in a particular way. So I started to understand the pieces, how they fit together.

And again, that just took a while to really happen. But I'm grateful to one to have it out of my head. And I'd been using the approach for teaching graduate students, and certainly I'd been using the approach with anybody that I worked with. But I didn't know how, if you will, the lay public or the mass public would receive it. And the beauty of it is that it's being very well received. So I can't be happy.

It is. And I mean, I've been practicing for 20 years, and I do work especially helping people to understand how stress affects us and how to recover from stress. And so I've also read all the research on stress. And of course, a lot of the stress we experience is emotional stress on some level, emotional stress that may happen to us or emotional stress that we almost recreate within ourselves.

And.

And so I've read and interacted with a lot of people who help others to recover from stress. And when I read your work, I just have this experience that it's the most thorough but also the most simple at the same time. So that's why I see it as such an important starting place, even, or a person could pick up with your work at any point in their journey. But I think it really can create a foundation. Like, I love that. It's. It's about helping people understand our own brain and our own psychology. Otherwise, we can get. Feel like we're stuck in our brain. Right. And we almost need an instruction manual for our own psychology.

Yes, yes, yes. So, no, absolutely true. And again, that was part of the goal. I. I put a lot in it, and it's like there are little pieces that are left out. But I tried to give you the reader as much as I possibly could so that you could literally take the book and if you understood the concept, you could change what you were doing immediately.

Let's talk more about that, Joan, because I want anyone who's listening to really get a sense of what that could look like in their life. I mean, you're saying on the title 90 seconds. So that's like. I mean, 90 seconds that we've. We've, you know, that's it, like, pretty fast, you know, to have something change. And. And sometimes I think I know that. That I had it myself. It seems like when something's emotionally stressful, it can feel so heavy, and it can feel like it's gonna last forever, and we can. And maybe these are emotional stresses that happened years ago or decades ago in our life. So how could something like that be helped in 90 seconds? I don't know if you. What do you. How do you answer that?

Let's talk about that. Because the 90 seconds is really the method.

Yeah.

The focus of the book is really the subtitle. And the subtitle is how to master your difficult feelings to cultivate lasting confidence.

Authenticity. So the focus of the book is really mastering these difficult feelings, which I'll speak to.

But let's walk through the 90 seconds, and I give you a little bit of background on me that's probably going to put everything in context.

Love it.

Okay, so I started out as an exquisitely shy child and.

Started school really early and had the experience, who knows, for whatever variety of reasons, temperament, etcetera, That I won. I didn't fit in. I didn't belong. And. And it was like I didn't have the confidence to that I saw other kids, my peers having. So from a very early age, I would look over to, you know, cast the. My glance off to the side and see all my peers hanging together, laughing and belonging and seemingly so confident. So my first, first thing that happened for me is like, how does somebody develop confidence? Because it was surely something I didn't have. And it's like I wanted what they had. And so that kind of sat with me, but sometimes consciously, sometimes less than conscious, but it was something that was always kind of in the back of my mind.

You wanted. That was driving you to figure this out? Yeah, figure this out.

Right. And you know, there were other experiences I talk about the TED talk that I was called boring. And it was like, what? Right. So it was like trying to figure that piece out. And as I got into my professional life then it was what makes it so difficult for people to tolerate unpleasant feelings, to handle unpleasant feelings. And you know, I had that difficulty early in age, you know, as like that was probably part of the confidence piece. But I didn't realize that the more I spent percolating over those two ideas or those two questions, the more things started to come into focus. And years later, and it was about 25 years ago that this started. So I was already kind of well into practice my time in psychology. And so, you know, just to show how sometimes how long ideas take, I was probably 15 years in at that point. And so the. Actually longer the. And then what I realized is that the answer to the second question about unpleasant feelings actually helped answer the first question about confidence. So that's kind of the backdrop, if you will. And so let me jump right in the 90 seconds if you want.

Well, what I was going to just say is that I love. And this is what I also love about your book, is that you are looking at this big picture view that just like you're describing for yourself, you were just like you say, all humans are seeking a more expanded version of ourselves. We're automatically gonna want to have a more positive experience in life. And so sometimes it is because we're observing other people and we by that it's reflecting to us what we want, something about ourselves. And it's that thing that just acknowledging that that's normal as a human to have that experience, even as a psychologist, it's normal to have that.

It'S 100% human. And you know, I credit. Credit kind of Mary Morrissey at the very beginning of the book with my realizing through her words, it's like we're always seeking a freer, fuller expansion of our lives. And so we have two ways to go. We are going to either kind of drift towards apathy and atrophy or we're gonna grow. And most of us, most all of us, I think it's in our human. Probably human in our spiritual nature, if you will, grow. That's what we are, that's what we are here for, is to always evolve. So.

But then the stress can be the thing that kind of gets us stuck, you know, almost like. Or these what you call unpleasant feelings we're going to talk about. But if we don't have the confidence to be in those feelings and to be in communication with others in our life with feelings, then we're stuck and we're not going to experience that expansion. Is that right?

Yeah, I would say yes, that is correct. That's going to. And it's the. So it's not only the stresses that have impinged upon us. We actually create stress within ourselves when we're not being true to ourselves.

Oh my gosh. And that's so huge, right? Like we. I'm so many of us, I know we experience this negative self talk, right? Just like either negative self talk that we just can't quite get that record to stop playing or, or maybe something happens during the day that stresses us and it might trigger something from the past. And we spend the whole rest of the day just experiencing those feelings and we just. It's like it takes over, right? And then you, you just, you can't quite move forward. And it does. It can lead to. I mean, I see it with patients either, you know, anxiety or depression and sleep issues. And of course, anything that's going on on that level then transfers over to physical symptoms as well. Greater likelihood of digestive issues, infections, autoimmunity, cancer.

Right.

We're all one body, one system. So if things are kind of jammed up on that emotional level, it can lead to other health issues. And I think sometimes we think, oh, the only. Like I was talking to a patient yesterday where, you know, she has a history of depression and she even said she's been to so many therapists, tried so many different medications, and yet she doesn't want to go that path anymore. She can see like, you know, that's not getting her where she wants to go. She's not getting that expanded self and, and she's really wanting to have more awareness and knowledge for herself of how to move forward in a different way. And I just think that's so amazing. And she and I talked about how, yes, she has, you know, like most of us, some. Some stressful, traumatic stories from the past. But there also can be other contributors to depression, like inflammation from within the body, either dietary or digestive. We know the gut brain axis is creating. Creating inflammation. So this just kind of maybe adds to the snowball effect of stress within our bodies, which we need to address. But if we can also be more present and address the feelings, it just opens it up. I just allows things to be able to flow. So anyway, so yes, as you can tell, I'm so excited about how.

I love it. I love it. So, yeah, I mean, and for me, the first thing that I. And to your. To the person that you were talking about, the first thing that I listen for, and I know you're listening for the biological elements, one of the first things I listen for is, is there a disconnect between that person and that person's feelings? Because, because for me, what that leads to is what I call soulful depression. And I think of soulful depression as a disconnect, basically a disconnect from our feelings.

I think reconnecting with ourselves is so important. Okay, so let talk, talk us through, I guess even just let's say what these eight unpleasant feelings are. So people have a sense of like, what are we talking about with these?

Sure. So the book is centered around one's ability to handle, tolerate, experience, move through, whatever you want to describe it. Eight unpleasant feelings. And the eight feelings are sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, vulnerability, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration.

Yeah, those definitely all sound pretty unpleasant.

Yes. Yes. And so the first question is like, why those eight? And we can get into a conversation about why not some other things. Because people would typically say anxiety and fear, which I, for very specific reasons don't include. But it's why these eight? Because these eight are the most common spontaneous, everyday, lived reactions or lived feeling reactions to things not turning out the way that we want or sometimes the way we think we need. So that's why these eight, they're common everyday reactions.

Well, and it's sometimes I think we're not used to even naming it. Like we might be feeling it in the moment, but we're not. We may not be even going, oh, I feel shame right now, or I feel even anger. I mean, sometimes we actually try to. We really try to avoid anger or kind of don't want to even admit that we feel angry.

Yes. And so to use your word, because your stress word for me is like the anxiety word for me, it's too Vague.

Right.

So somebody might say, I feel pressured or I feel stressed, but what they're really feeling is angry and disappointed. But because they don't want to feel the anger and because they don't want to feel the disappointment, they'll describe it as stress. And just keeping it that vague keeps it present but not experienced and moved through.

So you're just stuck there? You just stuck in being stressed.

Yes.

And so it's really having that awareness. Then you have a decision. Do I want to just be stuck feeling stressed and keep avoiding the process that I could choose, or do I want to go ahead and say, let me just feel this feeling? I know we all can say, okay, it's not. It's not pleasant. I mean, they're unpleasant feelings. So we can go, okay, we got to choose to experience these unpleasant feelings for 90 seconds or up to 90 seconds.

Right, right.

Okay, so how. I know in the book, you guide us through this, but how does someone do, like, can we. We can choose that just even right now, like, even without having something going on necessarily, can we just choose to say, hey, let me just feel anger for 90 seconds?

Well, there wouldn't be a. That's not really purposeful to do that.

Okay.

Okay. So. So if I. The only reason I would put somebody in that state is just to kind of notice where they, how, what and where they experience in their body. But I wouldn't have somebody for no reason just try to conjure up a feeling.

Okay. Okay.

It's just not. It's not purposeful.

So how, like, say I want to start getting more confident about feeling these unpleasant feelings. Do I just go about like on my day to day, becoming more aware when. When it happens, and then choose to do the 92nd thing?

Yeah. So think of it, think of it sort of as the mental equivalent to stubbing your toe.

Okay.

Okay. Or the emotional equivalent of stubbing your toe. You're walking barefoot, you bump into something, you stub your toe and you go, oh, and. And there's this pang for a while. Right. But it doesn't last permanently. It lasts just long enough. Probably no. Probably no more than 90 seconds.

Probably not.

Probably not. 30, 60, 90 seconds. And then you're on to the rest of your day. But you couldn't not experience it.

You couldn't choose not to because you stubbed your.

Whatever the reaction to that stubbed toe is both on a physical level and on an emotional level to be there. And then you moved on to the rest of your day.

It's useful even for Stubbing your toe, actually, because just to realize whatever feeling, even pain we experience, it's short term, we just have to endure it.

Right? Right. So the same is true for everyday reactions. Somebody said that they would call you and they didn't call. Somebody said they were going to be at a certain place at a certain time. They weren't there. You were looking forward to being able to go to an event. It didn't happen. Your child is talking back to you. Well, it doesn't matter what it is, but you have a reaction.

Okay. And it's gonna. That reaction is one of these unpleasant feelings. Probably.

Yes. Yeah. Disappointment, anger, sadness, frustration, any one or more of the eight. And the idea here is you stay present to the fear feeling, to that reaction till it kind of, if there's kind of a wave, a bodily sensational wave that's connected to it. And you want to stay with that in the same way that you would stay with the kind of that stubbed toe reaction.

What are some of the common body reactions?

So, well, let's. So, so let me, let me give the piece for this so that you really understand this. And then, and then the physical reaction question so that. So the idea. There's two really key ideas here for me. And so to that first, to that second question, what makes it so hard for people to deal with unpleasant feelings? It's what I realized after all the neuroscience research started to be published.

Is that it's not that we don't want to feel. Actually, I need to take one step back. The first piece from the neuroscience research is to understand that when we feel, when we have emotional feelings. So sadness, disappointment, anger, or pleasant ones for that matter.

The truth of it is that we feel, we come to know what we're feeling emotionally through bodily sensation.

So think redness and heat into your face when someone's embarrassed. Or think like a heaviness at the chest when someone's sad or disappointed. I have a client that says she gets heat at the back of her neck when she's angry, and another one that gets heat in her arms when she's angry. So it doesn't matter how, where and what you feel, and it's unique to you. It's just to have the awareness first that what makes it seem so unpleasant to experience the unpleasant feelings and is that they just don't feel good in the bodily, in the body, and you're coming to know it through bodily sensation.

Okay, got it.

So that's, that's the first kind of mental shift to make it's like, oh, it's the bodily sensation I don't like.

That's, that is, that's really, I think that's really interesting, you know, that it, that it's, you know, sometimes we're again, I think less aware of that because we're kind of caught up in our head and we're caught up about thinking about whatever that was.

Right.

But to be able to kind of come back and go, what am I feeling? Is my chest tight? Is my heart racing, is sweating? Is it like what's going on here?

Right, yeah. So you're, you're paying attention inward, you're staying with it. So that one of the things that I am inviting people to do is to increase their awareness of what's going on in their body or with their body. So the second part of it then is I realized that and I always was talking to people about riding the wave. Riding the wave, riding the wave. But I didn't realize I was actually inviting them to ride the bodily sensation waves. Yeah, neuroscience research came out. So first thing is you want to be able to ride your bodily sensation waves of the bodily sensations that help you know what you're feeling emotionally. The second part is to understand that it was short lived. So that was the second thing I had to communicate. It's like, this is not going to last forever. You're gonna have to blow your nose, you're gonna have to go to the bathroom, you're gonna have to answer the phone, you're gonna, something's gonna stop. It's not permanent.

Right, Right. Which is because sometimes we think the worst. You know, somehow we're avoiding these feelings so much so as if it's gonna be like, you know, death or something. Right. We're like thinking like, there's no way I could possibly feel these feelings. I'd rather stick with just feeling stressed constantly than to do it.

Right.

And once we do it, you realize, oh my gosh, this is, this is not that bad. This I can do totally, totally.

So the two key things here for you to be able to change actually right away, as soon as you have the awareness of what I'm saying to you, you can change your whole approach. And that's part of the simple magic of it is. So two things here. If you've had trouble staying with your unpleasant feelings and dealing with them. One, be aware that it's the bodily sensation waves of whatever the feeling is that you've been avoiding and two, that it's short lived. So going forward you can stay present and aware of what it is that you're experiencing. Just like that equivalent of the stubbed toe. Just present to the bodily sensation. Let it ride it through and let it pass, just like you would do with a stubbed toe.

And what do you. What do you find? Do you encourage people to just breathe, or is there something.

Probably taking some deep breaths. So don't hold your breath and don't swallow, because those are two things that help you shut down.

Oh, interesting. Swallowing, even.

Okay, well, actually, kind of think of it. We never say feelings are coming down, do we?

No, we say coming up.

We always say feelings are coming up, body first.

Ah, interesting.

Right. Then we have the awareness of what's going on. So if you swallow, you're actually trying to push the body reaction down, back down.

Okay.

And if you hold your breath, you're doing the same thing. Wow.

Okay, so just think. Okay, I'm aware this feeling is happening. Let me start breathing.

Slow, deep breathing.

Okay.

Just keep it nice, even slow. And you'll stay much more present to what's going on. And then if you have a few more seconds, try to see if you can identify what it was that that was the catalyst or the trigger for the feeling.

Okay. Because. Because then from then what? Like, if you.

Then you're. Then you're. You're bringing thinking, you're bringing reasoning to the experience. And. And that can help you make sense of what's going on more clearly as opposed to just, oh, okay, I'm angry. And then, boom, I'm dashing on to something else. It's like, oh, I'm angry. Why am I angry? It's because this is the fourth time that the person said that they were going to meet me someplace and didn't do it. Oh, oh, I'm angry and disappointed. Huh. How do I want to handle this? Right. So it allows you to make better sense of what you want to do in your life. Mm.

Okay. So that's the part that's like the empowerment, but also the confidence. And I think too, what I find is the more I do this, the more I kind of am aware and then stop and allow the feeling to happen and need to experience it. Then I do find that there's a confidence. Like, it means that now when I'm walking through life, I can more trust myself to know that if something comes up, I'm ready. I have a game plan. I have this in my toolbox. And do you find that it's true that the more you do it, the more automatic it becomes?

Absolutely. 100% 100%. So you might start out here. If you're used to cutting off from your feeling, then it's going to take some time for your awareness to develop in the practice of that. And then it keeps on coming together. So it'll come together where it's spontaneous. It's in the moment. So depending on where you're starting from, that may take a little bit of time. Sometimes, you know, when people really were disconnected, it would take them a few days to notice that they had a reaction and then to make sense of what that reaction was, but that the more they practiced it, the shorter that time became until they were able to do it instantaneously. And we can't always do it. Sometimes we'll have a reaction to something and we don't really have the full awareness of it. But that's less common when we're in practice of awareness.

You said something else that for me, the first step to confidence, Donnie.

Is that when we stop disconnecting and distracting from the fullness of our experience. And in this case, I'm talking again about unpleasant feelings, because those are the ones that people tend to push away. Mm. That that first step of simply allowing yourself to stay present to truly what's going on gives you confidence because you're more congruent with yourself.

Mmm.

You're telling the truth of yourself to yourself. And the moment you do that, you feel more confident.

It just changes everything.

It changes everything.

That's why, to me, it's the foundational piece of this whole approach.

Well, and it's. I think that it does It. It anchors it. Because otherwise it can feel like this is, you know, maybe this is in some ways similar to, like, a mindfulness, too. Right. Like, yes.

Many people have said that the approach seems a lot like mindfulness. Or people have said, was it Bispasana, meditation or something like that? So.

Yeah, because it's a being in the moment, being aware.

Right.

What you're feeling at this moment. And then you're also saying, though, that the more you do that, the more you have an acceptance of self.

Right.

And a connection to self.

Yes.

That really brings that new level of. I like, in the book, I think you use the term emotional strength. Right. Like, I love that term because we don't usually think of, I guess, emotions as something that we can strengthen. You know, like.

Right, right.

If you're going to work out your muscles, you're going to go lift some weights. But how can we exercise our sort of emotional capability?

Right. Well, so lots of people will talk about not wanting to feel weak, right? So they're referencing emotional weakness. And I realized I put in the book that I was redefining emotional strength. But the truth is, I was probably defining it. I don't know that I've ever seen anybody talk about.

Gives me goosebumps, Joan. It really does, because I think that's so key. And for someone to be able. Just imagine walking through life knowing that if some. Whatever comes up.

You can trust yourself. You can trust that you. Even if in the moment, you're not getting to do it right away, but even later, you can go, oh, yeah, I'm gonna. Right? Because sometimes we experience an emotion. It's like, kind of going on, and then maybe now you're by yourself, you're kind of out of the situation, and you can still sit with this totally and just then be able to process it and to.

Do it in a way where we are connecting with ourselves. I mean, I see that a lot. Like, with patients also, on a physical level, we tend to want to try to avoid the pain or the discomfort in our bodies.

And so we turn to, if it's pain medications or.

Any kind of magic pill, basically, to try to turn off the symptoms, even if it's joint pain or a headache or stomach ache, right? We're like, how can I get this pain to go away? And we'll take any kind of pill to just knock it out. And sometimes I really sense from patients that they can even be almost angry with their body, that it's having this experience, you know, this symptom or this pain, you know, and we. It creates kind of a separateness from ourselves, right? Because we're. We're thinking that we're angry at our body, but the irony is that we are our body.

So.

And we can't go to the body store and get another body.

So there's really not a choice there. This is it. So the choice is not about, do I, you know, do I. Can I get another body or not? The choice is really, how am I going to choose to accept and work with the body I have, right?

And work with the pain that I have.

Work with the pain that I have. And now you're. You're showing us, here's how you can do it. Here's how you can accept the body you're in and feel the experience you're having. And by doing that, as much as we kind of get afraid to do it, but the experience of doing that, we can move through it.

Go ahead.

No, don't worry.

No, I Just shut that down. Go ahead. Yes.

Well, I remember, you know, back when I was training as a naturopathic doctor and a midwife, my research was in fear of labor, fear of the pain of labor. And of course there's a lot of, you know, psychological fear, fear around labor. But it's what I, what I found so interesting. There's a couple things I found interesting when doing that research. Is that the same concept that if we can. Because we can almost think of it as suffering or a lot of times, you know, just pain from any condition can be suffering and we tend to want to try to go around it or avoid it or something. But it's actually what the studies show is the more, more we can be with the suffering, so to speak, which in your case you're saying unpleasant feelings, but the more we can be in that, then we can actually move beyond it. There is a end to the tunnel. It's not like a forever tunnel.

Right, right. And in this case the notion is that any given feelings it's. And I talk about one or more waves. So I don't want to say you're only going to feel something once in that moment. You may have, you may have multiple waves of whatever the experience is. So it's your willingness to stay present to the.

Present to, by experiencing and allowing to move through just like you're saying. But it's short lived. The thing that makes it feel like it lingers is like there's two or three things that I describe in the book that I talk about that make it feel like it lingers. One is we actually try to suppress it. We try to, so we try to make it feel like oh, it's not, it's not going to be right or I'm not, I'm just not going to think about that. If I told you to not think of a zebra with yellow polka dots and a green background, you'd have to think of that zebra with that description in order to try not to think about it. It's impossible. So thought suppression doesn't work. And it keeps the experience, the feeling, feeling like it's lingering.

And then this tunnel feels like forever and, or we, or we distract ourselves. Right? We distract ourselves.

Right, Distract. So distracting ourselves keeps it feeling like it's lingering because it never, we never make sense of it. And another one is harsh self criticism, I think makes things feel like they linger. Feelings feel like they linger. And then the third.

Is just continuing to recall whatever the situation or event or episode was.

You got can it keep reliving it.

You re evoke everything that was attached to that memory, and that includes the feelings. So if you keep on perseverating and you keep on thinking over and over and over about the same thing, then it's going to feel like feelings are lingering as opposed to them being temporary.

And it can. I know that when you're in that experience, it can feel like you can't stop it. It can feel like it's just something's doing this to me, the. The reoccurring. But you're also saying, no, we can put a stop to that. We can choose. We can, once we understand that it's possible and actually choose to change that pattern. Notice. Oh, I'm doing that harsh criticism thing. I can stop and I can do the 90 seconds instead, right?

Yep. Yep.

Okay. That's.

That's it.

That's really something. I mean, in. And the thing I also found with researching women in labor is that we need a certain amount of. Like, we can't. Sometimes we wish that, or we think that somehow we could go through life without unpleasant feelings or without stress.

And really, in women in labor, what we see is that we as humans, for things to work right, we need a little bit of what we call stress. We need a little bit of cortisol. We need a little bit of adrenaline order to be walking around and doing our thing. So it's about a balancing act. You know, it's not just that we need to squelch, you know, experience of stress and stress hormones altogether. We just need to learn how to walk the line, how to, you know, how to do it in a way where it's not throwing us off.

Right.

How do you describe that? Well, I'm sorry, how would you describe that? How would you. What do you think of that concept of just how to optimize your experience of stress?

Well, I think in this case, again, for me, one of the things I would do is I would change the language.

Yes, please do.

For me, it's not letting yourself get away with saying, I'm stressed, even.

Yeah, okay.

Or if you use the word I'm anxious, not letting yourself get away with using the word I'm anxious. Think of those. Think of the words like stress and anxiety when they're really vague. And 15 people are going to give you 15 different answers. Mm. Then. Then those are kind of words you want to. You want to kind of uncover and.

Dig down into and see what is it really? I'm sorry, so you're asking yourself, what.

Is this really exactly. So Don't. So don't let yourself get away with just saying I'm stressed, okay. Or I'm pressured or anything that sounds like that. It's like, alright, let me, let me dig a little bit more, more deeply into this and what more specifically going on. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? What am I needing?

That are what seems unresolved to me, those four questions.

Okay.

Love it. What am I thinking? Feeling, needing. What seems unresolved, that if it were to resolve or I would. To get those, you know, if I would get the focus of those thoughts, feelings and needs addressed, that the stress wouldn't be there. Mmm. So you can. You get four questions and you can. And you can dial it right on in.

You can find your way through it. And to realize that it's not that we're saying that we shouldn't be having these feelings, you know, it's not that you're saying, oh, we shouldn't be feeling shame or we shouldn't feel embarrassed. It's. No, these are feelings that humans have.

Yes, it's part of, it's part of our human experience. So it's like get. It's like get used to it. None of us escapes that.

And you know, the funny thing for me, Donnie, is that, is that, you know, I get excited about this. All this stuff around unpleasant feelings and people. I feel like people kind of laugh at that, but I know how liberating it is once you have awareness of this. It's like, this is so liberating.

Well, all of a sudden they. They're not so heavy and scary, right? It's like, oh, we can do this.

Totally. Totally. And when you realize the impact of being able to handle that, you feel emotionally stronger, you feel more confident, you have resilience, you're able to be more authentic in the world. It's like life just gets more alive and feels better. So it's like, so for me, it's. I just, I have to laugh because it's. It's like unpleasant feelings. Who wants to go there? It's like going there liberates everything.

So it's like this, this doorway that we've been avoiding. And when you walk through that doorway, you find what you really were searching for. You didn't know where it was, but you're like, here's the door right here.

Just go through the store. You can do it. And you're gonna just be so surprised. You're gonna be so. Like you say in your title, live the life you love. Get to this now this opportunity to, to maybe have a goal that you. It was maybe you weren't able to even set the goal or achieve the goal before because you were stuck not realizing how to move forward because of maybe avoiding unpleasant feelings. So now that you know how, you know, oh, I can handle if there's an unpleasant feeling or sometimes it's an unpleasant conversation. Right. Like it's. I love that part where you talk about, once you know you can be with these feelings, it means that you can be in conversations and communications that maybe previously you were also avoiding.

Correct? Right. Yep. I can speak. I can dig into that for a moment.

Yeah. So for me, the foundational piece for me is being able to experience and move through these eight unpleasant feelings. But the single next most important move is to be able to speak with ease. Which means that you can say what you need to say, with whom, when you need to say it, the whole thing. But I put caveats around that and that it's done with discretion and it's done from a positive kind and well intended place. So this is. You don't get to go willy nilly, like just go spew. I'm gonna tell you something really honest and be mean about it. That's ill intentioned and that's not, it's not for the best interest of the other person. So. So the whole thing is I want it done with integrity. And so there's caveat around the speaking piece. But what I found again is like, what made it difficult for people to speak up. But if you stop and think about it, which I of course had years to do.

So the. If you stop and think about it, what ends up happening is that I'm not going to speak up to say something to you. And it could be. So get this, get this. It could be saying, donnie, I was disappointed that we didn't get to talk on Monday. Right. It could be something like that or it could be something like, hey, Donnie, you know what? You are like a boatload of fun. I'd like to spend more time with you. I want to be. I want to develop a closer friendship. So it doesn't. It can be both sides of that continuum. It's both the. The unpleasant stuff, but it's also the.

Joyful, intimate, pleasant stuff that's also easier to communicate.

Yes. That people get afraid to do. And so it's like. But again, what makes it difficult? Well, if you start to use my phrase for the third time, so I'm conscious of that. It's my own embarrassment.

What ends up happening. Is that people. I don't want to use the word fear. People are reluctant to speak up because they don't want to feel the emotional outcome of speaking up. Because if I tell you something and I want you to go do something or not do something.

And you ignore me, I'm going to be left with what unpleasant feelings? Which ones? Oh, one or more of the eight.

So then we just end up not saying it because we're trying to avoid those feelings. Feelings.

Same eight feelings or same thing? I tell you I want to spend more time with you, and you go, yeah, not so much. You're not a great deal of fun for me. Right. So I get same thing. Outcome. I put myself out there. Vulnerability, one of the eight, and it doesn't turn out. And now I have to experience one or more of the other seven. So why it's difficult for people to speak up is because they don't want to handle the emotional discomfort.

Of first, their own discomfort of it. Right. So it's this, the discomfort of your own emotional discomfort, and then the discomfort of someone else's emotional discomfort simultaneously.

Yeah.

Write back down to the same eight feelings for you or for someone else. And then the deal is, if you know that you can experience and move through those eight unpleasant feelings, then you can go start having the conversations you want to have.

That's amazing. It really is. And then it makes sense why from there you really have more of that feeling of freedom to do what you want to do. Because no longer are you just getting stopped over and over by these. By this just, oh, anticipating. Right. We anticipate, oh, this person might react this way.

Right.

So I'm going to choose something else or I'm gonna avoid that conversation. But that's. But, you know, sometimes to really get where your. Your purpose in life and your goal to get there, you. You likely are gonna need to have some conversations. And. And it also allows you then to have the other person have their experience instead of. In some ways, when we're trying to avoid it, we're actually controlling. So controlling the situation.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah. No, and I mean, the speaking chapter. I mean.

All of the book is important, but I will, hands down, tell you that from my point of view, that speaking singularly is the most important thing you can do to change your confidence and your resilience and be authentic in the world.

It's like, I think of speaking, and I don't have any way to prove it yet, but I think speaking actually changes our molecules. I think it changes. It's because when you. When you start to speak up, if you go from being a person who hasn't spoken up to starting to speak up and testing it out, then it changes you.

Wow.

And so it's a central piece of emotional strength. I think it solidifies and acts sort of like super glue to confidence.

Helps you live more authentically and congruently, which, again, adds to more confidence. And it's not a situation where you. Where you go, well, when I'm confident, I'm gonna speak up. It's like, that is not the way confidence works. The way confidence works is. And it's not. It's not that you know yourself and then you're gonna speak. It's not that you're confident and then you speak. It's as you speak. So it's through speaking. Not only do you come to know yourself better, but that's how you develop confidence. It's through speaking.

Wow.

Same is true for action taking. It's not that we're confident and take actions. It's that we take action and then.

We develop confidence by doing it.

By doing it.

It's by, you know, just diving in and choosing it on having these tools so that when as you're choosing it, then you know you have. You can get through it. You know, you can handle what comes up. And.

I also want to mention here how you encourage people to ask for help. And maybe this is part of it, is the more you can kind of have that awareness and that ability to speak about what you're. What you're doing, or what your experience is, then the more likely you are to be able to ask for help and have resourceful too.

Right? Right. So. So those were my kind of. My 2. The two definitional pieces of emotional strength. So when I think about emotional strength, it comes down in my mind to two things. Feeling capable and being resourceful. And so think of feeling feeling capable in the world. This is what I found. People started to feel more capable once they knew they could handle the eight unpleasant feelings. Think of feeling capable equaling your ability to tolerate experience and move through those eight unpleasant feelings. That's when you start feeling more capable in the world. The second part of emotional strength is resourceful. And being resourceful is basically kind of accepting the. We have both an independent and dependent side of our nature as humans. So it's actually accepting that we depend on people. None of us succeeds in life alone. Period. End of story. None of us. So once we can wrestle with that and go, oh, okay, then the idea here is that we acknowledge the dependent side of our nature. We also acknowledge that we have certain needs and limitations. And then we ask for help. And anytime we ask for help, we're being resourceful. Resourcefulness leads to greater confidence. We're never alone. Somebody's always there to help me solve the problem. Well, okay, then that's always going to help me feel more confident.

So it just like a feed forward.

It just totally, totally. And you know, I dig into the whole thing around asking for help too, that it's a compliment to others, it's never a burden, it's almost always a compliment to others. And so, yes, so their emotional strength is being capable, experiencing and moving through those eight unpleasant feelings and being resourceful or asking for help.

I just think it's, it's so, it's, I mean, it's again, it's simple. Like I think anyone hearing this would go, oh yeah, that makes sense. I, maybe you've even experienced pieces of it. But now to be able to go. But it's also profound because sometimes we overlook these things or we think we're supposed to be able to do it on our own. We're used to kind of, you know, thinking, oh, I'm supposed to be able to do everything on my own, you know, and be this super mom or super dad and take it all on and figure it out myself. And to realize actually what helps us be more successful and helps us even experience more joy and love in our life is to have that experience with others. But I think it's the being capable, being confident part that helps us to do that better. You know, because like, because otherwise you might not have great experiences asking for help. Because like you're saying you might be anticipating the negative feeling or the unpleasant feeling.

Right. Or somebody says no, and now you're disappointed and you've been disappointed multiple times. So why would I want to ask for help?

Yeah, and then you just see how isolating that is, you know, and because I wanted to touch on. How do you, how does someone know when they need help with this? And maybe this is part of it, is if you, if you're feeling isolated, if you're feeling stuck in your life or talk us through, what are other ways that person might go, oh yeah, this could help me because I'm experiencing.

This in terms of, in terms of this approach. Is that what you're asking?

Yeah, yeah.

So what we know there's a. Can I direct you to a spot in the book?

Yes, yes, I love it.

So if you go to chapter one. Yeah, yes, Chapter one. Yes. Life do you love? There is a list and I want to say it's around page 24.

Okay. Yes, yes.

Is there a list there?

Do you have following statements or sound familiar?

One page before.

Okay, let's see.

One page before. Yeah. Emotional strength and weakness. Low confidence individuals.

Right.

Okay.

So if you read that list, then anybody who hears themselves. So if you hear yourself in this list, then this approach is going to help you.

Okay. So it says disdain, uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings. Doubt or question. Most things say or do. Are hesitant to take risks. Often feel anxious. Tend to worry about being a burden to others. Worry about what others think of them. Believe they have to do everything independently. Hate asking for help. Make other people's needs and feelings more important than their own, which so much of, like we're almost taught to do that it seems like. And it almost feels like it's bad to make ourselves our feelings more important. Right. Are not emotionally expressive to keep from feeling vulnerable. Don't want to show any signs of vulnerability because they might be perceived as weak. Diminish their hard work and accomplishments. Hide their successes or devalue appropriate recognition of success and achievements. So kind of downplaying or kind of almost being humble, but in a way where it's, you know, preventing them from being seen. Okay. Refuse compliments is the last one. So say someone gives a compliment and then their reply might. It may not be thank you. Right. Not receiving it.

Right. Not receiving. Yeah. Really dismissing them.

Dismissing compliments.

Yeah. Not taking them in.

Wow. So that's, That's. I think a lot of people could relate to those, even if even a few of those on the list, like.

And we could add. We could add your language too. We could add stressed.

Ah, feeling stressed.

Right, right.

Yeah. Yeah.

We could add perfectionism in there.

Okay. So feeling like everything needs to be perfect.

We could add.

Trying to be. Trying to control everything.

And so I mean, I could keep going on and on in terms of the list.

In terms of what would that. How in terms of somebody finding this material useful, all that stuff.

And I think it's important because sometimes, you know, it's. It really points to what is the experience in the moment, you know, so in that moment, if you noticing or if you're all of a sudden, you just get to a point in your life where you're like, oh my gosh, I never have time for myself. I'm totally exhausted. I feel like I'm, you know, I'm unhappy because I don't know how, you know, I can't Figure out how to, you know, feel better or solve this for myself. Right. And I'm taking care of everyone else. And sometimes that is, I mean, I hear that all the time. I think a lot of people have that experience, men and women and even children. And to be able to realize, oh my gosh, this is actually something I can change. Because in that moment, maybe it is almost that helplessness of feeling like I can't do anything to solve this for myself and actually to realize there's something I can do. I can turn this around. I can. And it's not that you become self centered or it's not that you become uncaring of others or. Right. It's that you just become more connected with yourself. And by doing that, you can actually be more present for others.

Actually that's, that's, that's actually how it works. The more we care about ourselves and take care of ourselves and the more we are connected internally with ourselves, the more empathic, the more empathic we are with others, the more caring we are for others and the more connected we are able to be with others. So yeah, it's actually a process that works from the inside out, not from the outside in.

Isn't that something? Because.

For some reason I think it's not automatically something we. You know what I mean? It's not what we automatically would think.

And so to realize actually where I'm trying to go because I think we probably all want that. We want to feel comfortable, we want to feel connected, we want to feel love. But we sometimes just can't figure out how to get there. And what we've been trying isn't working.

You know, that's. And I, and I will. I mean, I'll tell you, when I was, when I was really young, I was looking outside myself for the answers, right? And you know, the truth, the truth is that the answers are on the inside, they're not on the outside. So we have to, we have to deal with what's going on with our, us. And the more, the more we can stay present to our own experience and work with that and solve the things or resolve whatever needs to be resolved to the degree that we can resolve it and then move on, then that's how it happens. But it's an inside out. Growth is an inside out experience.

Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, again, Dr. Joan Rosenberg, I'm speaking with about her book 90 Seconds to a Life youe Love and her approach and her protocol. The Rosenberg reset really is what it's called, right? And we can do this reset anytime, any day, whenever it needs to be used, whenever it needs to be used. And you can, you can master it. You know, it may. Sometimes it takes practice, right? Like anything, just a little practice.

And so I'm really excited for listeners to give it a try and give us, you know, tell us more about what you notice as you're practicing this reset 90 second method of just choosing to be with your feelings or in your feelings. And I know the studies show that it's. That actually as we are experiencing our feelings, then it helps us with, you know what I would say it helps us with stress. You explained us why.

This is exactly why. It helps us to move past the stress or move through the stress and recover. And it's not about eliminating or avoiding. It's about being and choosing and having this awareness and confidence allow it to develop within us.

Yes.

So I think it's. I really think it's awesome. Thank you so much for talking this through with me and sharing.

I. Yeah, I just, I really think it's awesome and amazing and powerful and I'm really hoping that, you know, I know that it's gonna help a lot of people.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm. Well, like I said, I'm deeply touched by your interest and support of my work and I'm excited that you're excited. So it's, you know, I was touched by what you said to me on Monday about it, and so I'm just looking forward to more. And if you want to do more conversations like this, I'm all in.

Okay. Well, I think too, I was saying that it's. I think sometimes when patients are in a healing process, even on a physical level, sometimes we can. This situation can come up where we.

Again, are attempting to avoid an unpleasant feeling, whether it's being directed physically. Yeah, maybe it is like some digestive upset that happens, or you might. Then as we're healing, sometimes we then all of a sudden have opportunities to be in conversations we weren't in before.

That's true.

And it can get. It can kind of get us stuck in the healing process because we're not quite sure how to navigate that. And we're thinking, oh, we start to doubt ourselves. You know, can I. Is it even possible for me to feel better? And if I feel better, what does that change about my life and my world? And all these what ifs start happening, that's really just an opportunity to sit with it and go, wait a minute, what am I feeling here? And how can I feel that Feeling and then be able to. So that you can stay on the healing journey. Because otherwise, if we run into these bumps on the healing journey and we just end up abandoning the journey, that's really not the option. Right. Because we want to be able to recover from whatever health condition. You know, maybe it's migraines, maybe it's joint pain, maybe it's autoimmunity, and those are not necessarily easy things to recover from. It's going to take time. It's going to take each day waking up and saying, I'm going to eat differently, I'm going to take care of myself differently. I'm going to take whatever supplements I need to take or whatever process I need to go through. And to actively choose that healing process each day is necessary. But it's also. We're going to hit these moments where we're having unpleasant feelings along the way, right?

Oh, yeah, definitely. No question. And what's interesting to me is that, you know, again, if I kind of differ to my friend Mary, she says what. What doesn't get emotionalized often gets physicalized. Okay, so, so. And the beauty of this is the more you actually deal with what's going on emotionally, sometimes what you'll find is that your pain decreases and some of the other problems that were more present physically on a physical level actually abate. They change. So, and you know, and I know often if you talk to people who've experienced cancer, there's often a lot of emotional, if you will, kind of emotional awareness pieces that come out of that. I wouldn't say it's just with that disease process, but certainly the idea is to almost think of your body like a metaphor. And so what is that part that is hurting? Trying to tell you on an emotional level.

It'S another way to kind of start to work with whatever the physical stuff is that's causing the pain and the stress.

Well, I can see that it can really assist when someone's in a challenging healing journey. You know, where it's, you know, where they're going. They might then have symptoms coming up, or maybe the symptoms aren't resolving as quickly as they would like them to.

Right.

So there's going to be. Can be frustration, there can be the anger, there can be the helplessness. Those feelings can happen in that. In that process.

Absolutely.

And we tend to want to lay like, okay, I give up. This isn't working for me. I gotta go find some other way to do this. Really, that's just, again, an avoidance of the unpleasant feeling instead going, okay, I'm not gonna abandon whatever I'm doing. I'm instead going to feel this feeling. What is it? Oh, it's a helplessness. It's a. It's a. It's a frustration with not feeling better as fast as I want and realizing when you get through that, you go, oh, okay, what can I do to help? Or what can I do to. Or maybe it is just taking a little longer than I'd like, but that's just the reality, and I need to just be resourceful around that. How can I choose to support myself?

That's true. Absolutely true. Yes. Yep.

And I think it's. When I see the patients who are most successful moving forward, I think they're already applying some of this for themselves. Right. Like to be able to. I see people going, oh, okay, I'm going to ask for help when I feel stuck, when I have this. This unpleasant feeling. And being willing to say, you know, even to your practitioner, you know, because sometimes we feel afraid to say to a practitioner, I feel frustrated because I'm not getting better fast enough. But being. Right, that's that speaking part. Speak. Feeling willing to say, I feel frustrated or I feel angry with my body or whatever it is, because then you can have that, you know, that. The support to get through it.

Right. That's exactly right. Yes. So, again, see both parts of it. So this is, again, the idea of emotional strength. It's being able to stay present to those feelings of frustration or helplessness like you were speaking to. And it's also staying present, if you will, to the asking for help part so that you're not doing it alone. And that makes a huge difference in a healing journey.

It really can. Because then your practitioner can, you know, have the opportunity to be there and provide you more assistance, and then you get that experience of success getting through it.

Right.

And only helps you get through the next. I tend to refer them to, like, little bumps on the. On the journey. Whenever that next bump happens, you're ready. You're like, okay, I've done this before. I know what to do.

Right.

But you can stay more focused on your main goal.

Right.

Instead of constantly trying to divert and go on detours.

True, true.

So it's. I really. Yeah, I'm. I can see how it can, you know, really help people in that way, too, just to really be able to. Because I think more and more people are realizing that they want to learn how to resolve and support their bodies to heal without necessarily just taking some. Taking a pill or going for a quick Solution. It's like, no, I really. But. And it's. It can feel a little scary. It can be, you know, but. And you can feel like you don't know how you're going to do it or who's going to help you. But with these tools, it's essential. I think it's essential to that. Choosing a different way of being and healing and staying healthy in our world.

Right. Yeah. I think the one piece that I would add to everything you've just said, Donnie, is that along with.

Elements in the book that kind of address, if you will, more immediate kind of reactions. One thing I was also intent on doing was helping people make sense of and resolve kind of the old trauma stuff.

Yes.

We might want to save that for another conversation. But.

There'S a whole chapter that's devoted to. To helping people do that. And it's. We can't. We can't make sense of the senseless things that happen to us. We can't make sense of the senseless.

Right.

But we. But we can make sense of the impact that senseless. So it's so that I just want to. I just don't want to highlight because I know. I know that old stuff can also foster that. That stress that you work with.

It pops up. It just pops up right there.

I just want people to have an awareness that there's a whole. There's a lengthy chapter, if you will, again, on helping people kind of make sense of what they've been through.

Yeah. And thank you. I mean, I think that's huge because sometimes that is the thing that. The kind of elephant in the room that, you know, that that may be also preventing progress or preventing people from really being able to experience what they're hoping to experience is and to be able to know, hey, here's something that can also help on that level. Help with that big stuff, not just the small stuff.

Right. Yep.

Amazing. So if someone wants to find out more about you, it's. Your website is at drjoanrosenberg.com like Dr.

K O A N R O S E N b e r g dot com.

Okay. So drjoanrosenberg.com and this is her book, which you can get at Amazon and everywhere.

Barnes and Noble. Amazon, if you're in the east coast, books a million. So.

And it's also audio. You did audio of it all.

Nine hours of listening. I did the audio of it, but it took me more like 24 to 32 hours to do nine hours. So.

Wow. I mean, thank you for doing that because I think a lot of people like to listen to books, and I think this is especially a book that, you know, you could listen to while you're doing something else and really, you know, learn from it. And, like, what I'm doing is just now I keep going back to certain sections, so, you know, you can. You can really use it in a lot of ways, and I think it really is a. Yeah, just makes sense. Sort of a. I was going to say a culmination of all of your work.

Right, right.

Yeah. What I realized is for an individual, it really can take you through a journey of enormous healing and. And for a clinician, especially in the psychology field, beyond that as well. But certainly if somebody's in more one of the mental health disciplines, that it can act as kind of a clinical guide, even doing therapy.

So, yeah.

I'm going to, you know, I'm going to encourage that the patients that, you know, that I work with, that they use your book, read your book and use your book to help, because I really think it. It's going to make a big difference again. So, anyway, so thank you. I know we'll have to talk again because obviously we got to cover some today, but it's just such important information. So thank you.

Thank you so much. I'm thrilled.

All right.

Honored and thrilled. Thank you.

You're welcome. It's my pleasure. And it just, yeah. Amazing to be able to share the information. So thank you.

You bet. You bet. Thanks.

Thanks, John.