CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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CIIS: This is the CIIS public programs podcast featuring talks and conversations recorded live    by the Public Programs Department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit University in San Francisco. To find out more about CIIS and public programs, like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media at @ciispubprograms  

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Elizabeth: Welcome Karla. So glad to have you here with us today.  

Karla: Hello 

Elizabeth: So I know we're all here to talk about embracing anxiety. And these are certainly anxiety-provoking times. But before we dive deep into anxiety, I'm hoping we can just talk a little bit about how you got into this work and the broader topic of emotions and your grand unified theory of emotion. So where should we begin? 

Karla:  Where do we begin with emotions? Emotions, I have come to see, are the foundation of everything we do. Everything we think, all of our behaviors, our actions, our ideas, but we have been taught to deny suppress overexpress ignore or or treat emotions as a problem in and of themselves and what I have come to realize is that emotions are not the problem emotions come forward to bring you the gifts and skills you need to deal with the problem. So when I think there's been for many centuries what I call the fundamental attribution error of emotions, which is when there's trouble there's a lot of emotions, right? So you would think trouble-emotions. Let's get rid of the emotions and the emotions come to help so looking at it that way you're like “look at all the skills I have, look at all this genius” rather than “Go away you terrible emotions”. So um each emotion has its own specific gift and skill and form of intelligence and so my work Dynamic Emotional Integration or DEI is about connecting with the emotions again, even though we've had centuries of training in how to well distrust them and sometimes hate them.  

Elizabeth: Thank you. It's it's magnificent work that you're bringing forward into the world. You know, I'm curious. I'm imagining if I'm listening to your work out there and and hearing that emotions are in fact our friends. Um If I were to play devil's advocate, part of me wants to say but they're so painful sometimes right if someone were to say: “Karla, how could this be good? it hurts so much.” What might you say?  

Karla: I would say a lot of things. But the first thing I would say is, for instance, let's say grief. Grief comes forward when someone or something that you care about or love has died is gone forever. There's nothing you can do about it. You didn't choose it. It's done and grief is a very very powerful emotion, as you know, and people are feel pain and they attribute the pain to the grief. Rather than attributing the pain to the fact that the person or the idea or the thing with a job or whatever has died and it will never come back and so grief comes to help and a lot of people look at the grief and say: “Get away. You're horrible.”um and so each emotion has a lot of people have these this relationship with many emotions in that they they attribute the trouble to the emotion rather than understanding that the emotion comes to help with the specific trouble and sometimes more than one comes. So if you don't like emotions very much and there's trouble you may feel that the emotions are just making your life miserable, right?  

Elizabeth: Yeah. Can you give some more examples of how emotions help maybe specific emotions and what they help us with? 

Karla: Each emotion has its own gig that It does. Um, I'll start with anger. Anger helps us understand what we value and it helps us set boundaries around what is important to us? And that's anger's job. Now how we learn to work with anger is completely up to us. Although is it really up to us If we've never been taught thing one about it? Right? So how I say what's valuable to me and how I set boundaries around it, that is on me to develop skills if I can. You know, where do you develop these skills, right? so I can set boundaries with violence. I can refuse to set boundaries and I can be very passive or I can set a clear boundary so that everybody knows what's going on with me and me and my anger are we're we’re pals right? Right? Another one is fear. Fear gets a terrible rap. There's so many terrible messages about fear, but it's basically your Instincts and intuition about the present moment so fear helps you key into what is happening. What what's happening there? Are there changes? is anything different? is anything making a transition? I'm my fear’s is aware of the present moment and fear unfortunately is um squished together with anxiety and panic.  

Elizabeth: Hmm 

Karla: And so when people think of fear they usually think of like *frantic inhale* like that. Which that could be but that's usually panic. Panic is the emotion that comes forward when your life is in danger. And so it brings that intense fight for your freeze emotions. Very powerful emotion, but it's not fear. they’re different emotions and then our poor friend anxiety gets squashed in between fear and panic and anxiety’s job is to look toward the future and bring you the energy and intelligence you need to gather everything you need to show up in the future skillful and well resourced and you did your job and your tasks are completed and you hit your deadlines and sometimes anxiety can be very intense because you got nine deadlines tomorrow, so you may want to be calm at that point, but I would I would question why if it's all due tomorrow, right? I would also question. Where's your delegation skills? Why do you know? Why don't you set a boundary around any of that sort of thing. But but each of these emotions kind of gets treated as a problem when actually the emotions are coming to help you with the problem.  

Elizabeth: Got it. So what I'm hearing is that fear is about right now and anxiety is about the future and that anxiety's job is to mobilize you to pay attention to the future and engage to take the steps now that make for a good future. Do I have that?  

Karla: Yeah 

Elizabeth: Right? 

Karla: Yeah, if you do if you and your anxiety are good friends, I call it time travel that works. *laughs* It's it's the, you know, you can look back and you go: Thank you Karla from the past. That was awesome. 

Elizabeth: Right! So like a scout that gets out ahead and reports back and says here's what we need from you from the future. 

Karla: Yeah 

Elizabeth: Yeah  

Karla: Yeah finish that thing and put it in the file and you know organize the spices and alphabetize things, right? And then you show up you're like, it's all alphabetized. It's Magic. Well, 

Elizabeth: Well some people love alphabetizing things and some really don't and you know you write in your book about people responding to anxiety in very different ways. Can you share more about that?  

Karla: Yeah. There's um some beautiful work by uh Mary Lamia who teaches in Berkeley and she is a psychologist and a professor and she wrote a book called What Motivates Getting Things Done and it's all about anxiety, but it's not anywhere in the title because you know how people feel about anxiety and um she identified two different kinds of anxiety responses or responders. One is what is called a task oriented person. This is a person who likes lists alphabetizing bullet points, right? They want to go from thing to thing and they work with their anxiety at kind of a slow boil almost just like they're in got anxiety is just continual. The other person is deadline focused and they may relax up to a deadline and then hit a very intense level of anxiety which works for them and then they do it the night before that person is generally called a procrastinator and we have put procrastinators in the shadow and underneath the rug and most procrastinators have learned to feel ashamed about the way that they work with their anxiety. And I think a lot of us have looked at procrastinators and thought you are both lazy and lucky right? We don't see it as a valid way to work with anxiety. And so that was just such a brilliant piece that you know, I talked about Mary Lamia in the book but to know if you are a procrastinator that that is a perfectly acceptable way to work with your anxiety and you've got skills and you've got magic in the way that the alphabetizing, you know list maker does. But actually it could be that procrastinators are a bit more chill. Like they can just chill up to a deadline. Whereas I'm a task person. So I'm tasking tasking tasking tasking. I don't chill. So I've had to learn to chill like it's a skill now to chill and my anxiety’s like “what about that list?” and I’m like “Stop it! I made a list” *laughs* 

Elizabeth: Got it. So what I'm imagining then is that you know, maybe a week out anxiety is very faint. It's like a whisper and and the task oriented people kind of hear it at a whisper and and get in action around it and that the deadline oriented people actually like to wait until there is the the energy boost the adrenaline even that fuels them into brilliant and rapid action and and easy for the task oriented people to look and say you're doing it wrong but but really that's not the case. It's just an entirely different approach. 

Karla: Yeah, this helped my relationships a lot because I have deadline focused people who work for me and my husband is deadline focused and I would come with my task-oriented. You know, I've got this going on. I've got everything worked out and I was so frustrated with them and reading this this difference that procrastinators are they have their own form of Genius. Now, I look at them like look at you relaxing. You are, you're like a mentor for me on how to do this. The idea is we can't change our types, but I've been trying to procrastinate. I've been trying to intentionally procrastinate. I'm still not very good at it. I'm very clumsy, but I'm getting better.  

Elizabeth: Well, I think I still need to work on that. Um, so you mentioned in your writing that that when an emotion comes up we have opportunity of options about how are going to work with it and I think you name me we can express them. We can repress them and we can Channel them and I'm wondering if you can share more about that as it relates to anxiety 

Karla: With anxiety, I think a lot of people because they haven't really um identified it as itself its squished up with panic that when anxiety comes people may feel this increase in energy and focus and get stuff done and just want to shut it down. They would want to repress it and just calm themselves the frak down, right, you're going to breathe in joy and breathe out anxiety and your anxiety’s like why is Joy here? This is not a joy situation. We got some stuff to do so a suppressing or repressing or or intentionally down regulating an emotion. That's an option, but you're not working with the emotion you're working against it. And let's say your anxiety is very high and you don't really know how to work with it. So let's let's go express it. So you're going to run around the house. Did I turn off the stove? UmI think we need to do wallpaper in here. And then, you know, you're just spinning around and where did I put my checkbook? Damn it! Where's my checkbook? Right so that would be expressing it without um consciousness, right? You you and your anxiety or on a trip to the moon.  

Elizabeth: Right and you're probably driving everybody else crazy during the process. 

Karla: And where’s your checkbook right? or you may focus yourself with your anxiety and get stuff done so hard that you forget to eat, right? You don't take care of yourself. Okay, I can't exercise today and you just put your head down and you put your nose to the grindstone you go, right and in that way you're kind of working for your anxiety with the suppression you're working against with. With too much expression that is not you know, you're really not conscious or aware you're working for but with channeling and by channeling, I mean when you create a channel for something and it goes the way that it needs to go. So by channeling, I mean understand what each emotion does and then pair up with it as its friend and help it so if anxiety comes and brings you all this energy to get things done, then there's a question to ask of It which is: what brought this feeling forward ?and you just sit uh okay, this this this this this this this and then the next question is: what truly needs to get done? and the truly is a kind of a down-regulation. It's a kind of a grounding but it's not a down regulation that's oppressive or repressive. It's a down regulation that drops you into the wisdom of the emotion and so with each of the emotions we have questions that are that are focused on that emotion’s job and uh that way you and your anxiety can work together as as partners and then you can um you know up take all the brilliance and genius and all of that energy of anxiety, but also take care of yourself at the same time. So you're not spinning and you're not working yourself like a draft horse then nobody loves  

Elizabeth: Mhmm. Yeah wow, you're painting a beautiful nuanced picture of how an emotion could arise and we could say oh a messenger or welcome friend. Let's let's have a conversation or I'm so glad you've arrived to be with me here today and as a clinician and just as a human what I often see in myself and others is that an emotion comes up and my thought is this shouldn't be happening or I don't want this here. And then before I know it I'm suffering about suffering right? There's a compounding of the of the emotion. 

Karla:  Yeah. We call it, you’re having a feeling about a feeling. You're having emotions about emotions. You’re afraid of fear, you're anxious about anxiety, you’re anger, angry about anger and a lot of times there's like an emotion pile up for instance if we're taught to see anxiety as a disease or a character flaw and we feel anxiety. We might also feel angry or afraid or ashamed right? And now we've got four emotions. They all came to deal with the trouble. They all came to deal with the problem. Now, we've got four emotions. Do we have a practice for any of them? Right? and so for when that happens to people, I can understand why people say, you know who wants emotions, they're a mess because when you get an emotion pile up like that, yeah, it feels like a mess. It just there's no other word for it. It feels like a mess.  

Elizabeth: Mhmm Mhmm, Yeah, and you know as a professor of counseling psychology, I like it or not. I'm teaching my students the DSM right the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of all the ways that mental health challenges emerge and how we classify them and um I'm curious about your thoughts about the sort of the pathology paradigm being a dominant in our mental health discourse versus this more empathic valuing paradigm that you’re promoting. How do we reconcile these? 

Karla:  It is very difficult to reconcile them. My idea of the empathic paradigm came from the neurodiversity paradigm, which I studied in my Master's thesis. And it's the idea that there's all kinds of different minds and that there's neurotypical minds and there's neurodivergent minds and they're all they're all acceptable forms of ways that minds are. The but the pathology paradigm is that only a neurotypical mind is the right one. And so an ADHD one that's broken and an autistic one that's broken. And here's all the things we do to to these people to make them normal, which is obviously a form of violence but it's the same with emotions for instance anxiety is a DSM category, right? So like here's a human emotion. Slap it into the DSM, you know Panic is a DSM category and um depression is a DSM category. So we're taught in the pathology Paradigm that when these emotions come up, they themselves are the trouble they themselves are the problem. And so the only way that we have to work with that is to somehow get them to go away to somehow shut them up and make them go away and the empathic Paradigm is: These emotions are here for a reason. So what is the reason? How do we support them? How do we grow and evolve into people who can function as emotional beings in a world that has taught us to distrust and hate emotions right 

Elizabeth: Right and to think of emotions as inferior to reason and intellect and science. 

Karla: *laughs* Sorry, I grew up with um geniuses and I have to say if people think that they've never met geniuses *laughs* people who are I call them head cases people who are too thinky and not connected to their emotions can create these, you know, really intricate things that no human could live in. 

Elizabeth: Mmm 

Karla: Because they don't have that that emotional, you know, emotive understanding of the world so I just made fun of geniuses. *laughs* 

Elizabeth: *laughs* 

Karla: So I just put I put geniuses in the pathology paradigm. Excuse me. I'll pull them back out. *laughs* 

Elizabeth: Well, I appreciate you sharing just a little bit about your own origins. And I wonder if there's anything you might share about how you growing up in a family of geniuses came to be a deep expert in emotion.  

Karla: Well, one of the reasons I talked about that is we we had a lot of genius in our family and so we would name things like you are the waffle-making genius and you are the genius with buying cars and you psyche we would move genius around and one of the areas of genius that always made everybody laugh uproariously was emotional genius um and we would say an emotional genius? That's not even a thing, right that that you couldn’t have someone who was who could maintain genius or be a genius and be emotional because emotions are the anti rational you're out of control, you know, look at the DSM uh 5 of the seven deadly sins are emotions the sixth is an eating disorder. The seventh is sex. What is that about? *laughs* Okay, what is going on? So my first book the first book that I wrote about this was called Emotional Genius because I thought I'm going to take that. I'm going to take that back and I'm going to find out how could a person use genius and find the genius of emotions in a world where the emotions are so um unloved.  

Elizabeth: Wow, and you have really framed emotions as not mistaken or broken but as sources of valuable and important information or truth about the world And you know if we dare really get into current events, we are in times where there are things beyond our control covid-19 being one of them that are anxiety provoking and and I'm curious about what what when you have a lot of anxiety and there's not something you can immediately do to make it better. 

Karla:  List making. Something I've noticed is that people are dealing with many multiple emotions right now that are necessary but are difficult if they don't have a practice for even one of them is what I see is fear, anxiety, and panic coming together. Fear to help you be aware. Where's my mask? you know, where's my hand sanitizer? Am I going out? Do I have everything I need? Anxiety, uh what more do I need to buy? You know, what what do I need to do to plan for the future. Do I have enough masks that sort of thing and also panic because people are dying. This COVID is it's not a joke. It's people are getting sick and being sick for months and being injured even if they don't die and people are dying. So panic is very much welcomed in this in this situation to help us save our lives. To help us make those decisions. And so the problem is there's so much uncertainty. Although people are trying to push certainty before they should so the re-opening like we're going to get back to normal. Um and the problem I see is that it's no it's realistic. It's increasing panic and people are getting more and more angry and more and more, you know, frustrated and more and more fightey because they're not listening to these three emotions. So just like slap slap slap. I'm not scared, you know, don't panic don't be anxious now go out there. You don't need a mask. That sort of thing and all of these emotions are like “ahh, geez” there should be like a support group for people's panic and anxiety and fear right now there really should all these emotions should get together and talk about their owners just like really? 

Elizabeth: That reminds of the movie Inside Out, you know, you could have a whole you have pain anxiety and anger-xiety. They could have a whole convention. 

Karla: Yeah, like you wouldn't believe what my person just did. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you a story. *laughs* yeah. 

Elizabeth:  Yeah. Yeah. Well, the other thing that we are in the middle of right now is of course a massive and much overdue uprising around Black Lives Matter and you wrote so beautifully about The Chronic activation of anxiety and vigilance that is necessary and appropriate in marginalized or oppressed populations. And I wonder if there's anything you might want to share about that. 

Karla:  I think that's become so evident to us and maybe we didn't know it or we didn't need to know it before but just the level of um unwelcome and unsafety that people of color, lgbtqia people, disabled people, elders - that it's really not a safe place if you're at all vulnerable and these people I would call sort of sort of anxiety and panic experts because there's a way that that you need to learn to live with these emotions and you learn you need to learn to read social situations and try to keep yourself safe in whatever way you can but how do we support people who are dealing with that level of activation all the time and a part of it is um uh working for social justice and voting out the racists and you know changing this from the top down um doing as much as we possibly can but also taking some of this on ourselves as white people taking it on and um and uh feeling it and claiming it uh claiming the racism claiming, the sexism, claiming the transphobia, claiming everything that we haven't had to claim before. Um but I would say um there's so much going on about offering soothing practices to help people who are in these situations, whether it be yoga or mindfulness or breathing or something so that they can have a sense of being able to down-regulate not as a repressive act, but as a self-care act and yeah 

Elizabeth:  Yeah, thank you. You know it occurs to me that in order for us to be able to take these things on we need a certain level of skill in working with our emotions. And I wonder if we could just start talking about okay with this wisdom. What can we do? 

Karla:  For me the emotions that I see people who are holding on so tightly to the old ways are inability to grieve. To see what has happened. I see a difficulty working with um Shame.  

Elizabeth: Hmm [Text Wrapping Break] 

Karla: Shame is huge.  

Elizabeth: Hmm  

Karla: And I see a difficulty working with panic and fear and anxiety um someone on Twitter and I wish I had grabbed it said that this isn't an information processing issue people don't need more information. This is a terror management issue. And so we're not seeing people's I'm gonna put the finger quotes rational behaviors. We're seeing their emotional behaviors or lack thereof. And so giving more information to people when they're that activated is not going to do anything. It is connecting, humanizing, and bringing in those emotions. If the people don't know how to feel them. I'm doing that a lot now for a while I was like taking people out on Facebook. Don't tell anybody. But *laughs* I'm now going in and working with moving in and and sort of befriending people and bringing in grief and I can settle a whole Facebook thread it is fascinating. I mean some people still going off but there will start to be a room for grief and it will become a little bit of a grief shrine in this Facebook thread where people are fighting about masks or Black Lives Matter, whatever it was and so I'm learning. I think we're all learning. Which emotions do we need to bring to this because the whole anger and rage that's not working anymore. Also telling people telling people what's what that's not working anymore  

Elizabeth: less effective. Perhaps. 

Karla: *laughs*  

Elizabeth: Yeah well, I am so curious about about really what it is that you do that can settle a contentious and escalated conversation. How is it that you bring in emotional wisdom? 

Karla:  I mean it's sort of you working with all of the different emotions, but um and this is something um Dr. David Campt is working with. There's a course that he has called Empathy is Your Superpower: How white allies can be better at talking about racism to other white people and his idea is get people out of their ideology. Like don't fight ideology get people into their stories and ask them. Tell me a story about when you decided that all lives matter was it was an important thing for you? Right? And so what I'm doing then is I'm working with my sadness which helps you let go. I'm working with my grief understanding that there's something that has happened to this person that makes them unable to empathize across lines of of race and conflict. And so that's where you know, I'm actually calling to my emotions to help me um work the situation and what I'm finding is that people don't want to be fighting like that. It's exhausting and as soon as someone um witnesses them and ask them a question the whole thing settles and then I can tell a story and we can come together not going to change things right away, right, but I'm not going to push them further into their terror management problems, and I'm not going to push them further into their ideology. Because if I fight, I mean, I don't know if you've ever had a strong ideology and people are fighting with you. It just strengthens. You just like bring it because now I'm 1,000% of this ideology. Right? But if someone asks you a question, there's an opening in that cement that you've put around yourself begins to rehumanize. 

Elizabeth: Hmm. Mhmm. Yeah, I think you know, it's sort of common dogma and counseling psychology that people need to feel understood and I would I would actually say I'm hearing something beyond that that people need to feel felt beyond the intellectual content of their position. They need to feel that you are getting and resonating with the actual emotion behind their perspective. Do I have that right? 

Karla:  Yeah. Yeah, they need to be empathized with and that means getting getting into it having a relationship with people and that's what I see. I mean that started happening. Before 2016 but people were very proud about unfriending people and they still are and I'm like, where does this go? Where does this go? I know that if people are very very toxic and we need to protect ourselves, but it wasn't that level of emotion that I was seeing people were saying “Hah!  I unfriended that person!” It was very um yeah, there was a lot of intensity not not not sorrow. And I think I think people just don't know what to do with their intense emotions or how to be in conflict in such a way that they maintain their humanity and the dignity of the other person. I know I didn't. 

Elizabeth:  Yeah yeah, Well that's that is a goal worth striving for right if our humanity is in fact at stake I'm imagining the audience is entirely enrolled and saying okay Karla I'm sign me up. But but I didn't grow up being taught about emotion. Right? None of us got emotions 101. So, where is this the first step I imagined for most people there's some emotions that they're comfortable with and and others they'd rather never touch. What do you think we do to begin our own emotional education? 

Karla:  Well, the best part of this is that it's really really simple which is to keep a stronger emotional vocabulary. And just doing that will help people learn to regulate their emotions. That's so funny. You know that it doesn't have to be difficult. But what we need to do is understand emotions at many different levels of activation so that we can start to locate ourselves when our emotions come up instead of I feel bad, right? What is what is in in bad right to develop many many different levels of articulation about emotion and so over the years I developed an emotional vocabulary list on Facebook and my website and and I put it up on my website for free so that everybody could have access to it and I mean free not internet free where you have to you know, trade me your email address. No, no, I mean free um but uh you know people have challenged me about that, but I was like, there is no downside to more people having good emotional vocabularies. There’s there's no loss to me at all. It's all valuable. So yay.  

Elizabeth: Great! so so just can you give us an example of that? I'm imagining with anxiety there's there's a whole scale of intensity. Can you orient us to that just a little bit 

Karla:  Yeah in the book. I have the emotional vocabulary list a with each of the families. And so I have the the list and soft medium and intense presentations of that emotion. So Soft anxiety might be apprehensive. I'm concerned um medium anxiety might be edgy um anxious um nervous and intense anxiety might be um um uh overwrought um super energized that sort of thing so that you can identify where you are in the in the continuum of anxiety and especially with anxiety there has been research that suggests that if you can just say to yourself. “Okay. I'm anxious.” You can calm down your whole organism because many of the the sensations that go along with anxiety also go along heart attacks if it's really high. So if you can tell your body, this is anxiety about a go. Okay, that's that's great. Because a lot of people will show up at an emergency room with a heart attack. That's anxiety and panic. So knowing what your emotions are could save you a lot of time and money. *laughs* 

Elizabeth: I believe it and yes, we're so familiar with that cascade of sensation and then a thought that's catastrophize and then more sensation and more thought and pretty soon. You have a panic attack. 

Karla: *laughs*   

Elizabeth: Yeah. Okay,  just to play Devil's Advocate again: What if somebody is saying to you Okay Carla I can name my emotions. I'm feeling Terror. I'm feeling angsty. Um It doesn't make it go away. What what might you recommend when someone is just struggling to be with it.  

Karla: Yeah. Well with terror which is a which is in panic, there are first of all we check and see are is your life endangered right now, right? We orient is is there something is there a tiger in the room? right. So take care of that first and if there is and if there isn't any danger right now then we generally think of this as panic or terror that come from something that happened in the past where a person was overwhelmed and the best approach to that that I found is somatic um somatic approaches specifically somatic experiencing which is done by Peter Levine where you go back and find that traumatized and and terrified person as yourself and help them come out of whatever frozen state they're in so it's really important. It's crucial that you emotions tell you that this has happened that there's a part of you that's trapped but it's it's very uncomfortable and as you know, but it should be uncomfortable because there's a problem and so your emotions are trying to tell you friend friend or like this Karla Karla Karla Karla Karla “shut up!”, but with each emotion there are there are practices for each emotion that deal with that emotion’s needs and situations.  

Elizabeth:  Wonderful. Well, I know we don't have infinite time here, but I'm wondering if we could if there's a practice that we could do together. How could we give people an experience of working empathically and intelligently with emotion?  

Karla: Let me start with one simple meditation and if people um could you can have your eyes open or closed, get yourself comfortable and wherever you're sitting or standing and what I'd like you to do is just lean forward a little bit. You can open your mouth a little bit if that helps and listen for the quietest sound where you are. My voice is not the quietest sound. But listen through my voice. To the quietest sound. And you'll find yourself going through the different sounds around you and finally finding that one quiet sound and congratulations you have accessed the softest activation of fear. It's that capacity to orient to change and novelty and my talking was also your capacity to orient around annoying things, capacity to focus and keep focusing and refocusing even though I am intentionally making noise and a lot of people don't have any kind of physical awareness that that's fear they would only no fear when it rose to a level of you know, at that point we're near panic and we're near feeling, you know, if there's a sense of dread or dange, then panic would need to be there because your life may need to be saved right but fear is just that what's going on around me and I'm orienting to it. So that is one of my favorite ways to sort of get into the emotional realm because everybody's working with fear all the time every day and they don't know it because fear has been, you know, squirreled together with panic and um with anxiety too so there's this like “err” there so people can't bring it out. So if you're feeling fear and anxiety and panic the questions are what's happening right now is anything need my attention? No, it's all good is am I going to be murdered right now. Nope. Okay so panic maybe from the past. There's nothing to watch out for right now. Anxiety: What do I need to prepare? Right? And so that's a way to work with all three emotions by connecting with what each of them does. So it's very simple. We've been working with our emotions our whole lives, but we don't have language for it and we don't know how to identify the emotions because they've been so pathologized  

Elizabeth: Hmm,mhmm. Right? You're almost describing a sort of a cabinet of allies or of of um yeah companions on the path that can offer you different resources as needed. 

Karla:  Yes. Yes for Instance some people don't have enough anxiety and be like you need to get your anxiety in there because this is due tomorrow. Let's go! and that's a very unusual way to think about it. Right because most of you would say, I don't want any of that nonsense. 

Elizabeth: Yeah yeah. Well you describe another practice in your book. I think it's conscious questioning that that helps bring some insight to whatever emotion is arising. That might not be of obvious utility in the moment. Is this something you could share with us or want to talk through. 

Karla: I can talk through it and um yeah, let me just talk through it. It is in the book and gee what what page is it on? Here we go um so conscious questioning for anxiety leans into the skills that anxiety brings you and the specific genius it has so if you are listening and you can grab a something to write with and paper or your tablet. Think about something that you're anxious about right now something that is nagging at you and on the paper or tablet write down the answer to these questions. There's more questions than this, but I'm just going to ask a couple indifference to time. This is on page 85 of Embracing Anxiety first. What are your strengths and resources? Second: Are there any upcoming deadlines? Third: Have you achieved or completed something similar in the past? Fourth: Can you delegate any tasks or ask for help? And Fifth: What is one small task that you can complete tonight or today? Just something small. there are more questions in this in this practice, but basically what we're doing notice that none of them were about artificially calming ourselves and stepping away from the anxiety. They were all leaning into the anxiety and treating anxiety as if it had its own intelligence and was here for a reason to help us or as Rumi says “All of the emotions have been sent as a gift from beyond.” Welcome them all. Anxiety is a lovely. It's a lovely unloved misunderstood emotion. And we literally couldn't get anything done without it um it our confusion about it, It's connection to panic. I have a whole chapter on panic and anxiety and we call it pan-anxiety. We just make up words for emotions that like to hang out together. But also in this chapter about conscious questioning what happens if you do conscious questioning and your energy drops? What happens if you get more anxious? What happens if you feel depression coming on, what happens if you're confused then I send you to a chapter where we look at those other emotions as well. So um it doesn't mean you're bad at anxiety. It means there's another emotion they're trying to help you.  

Elizabeth: Thank you for that experience. I'm looking forward to hearing how our listeners experience that and with their feedback might be um a question that came up for me was about the so-called positive emotions and I don't want to I don't want to say emotions are good or bad but joy, contentment, what should we know about these experiences? 

Karla: *laughs* Um one of the first things that we learn in DEI is that there are no negative emotions and there are no positive emotions and that's really hard for people because that's the that's probably the only thing people do know about emotions. There's good ones and bad ones the positive emotions, you're right happiness contentment and Joy or or permutations there of there's three lovely motions and they're so valuable and so beautiful and they have just really specific jobs that nobody seems to understand because people want to slap these emotions on top of everything. All right, I'm feeling anxious: “breathe in joy” and joy is like “what are you even talking about right now? I don't even know where you're going with this but okay” and anxietie’s like “really?” so so that the positive emotions tend to get overused and even in some cases abused we tend to behave and abusive ways toward these emotions because we are not taught to see them as three members of a seventeen member family band and none of which is more or less important than the others and I have a um group of 17 emotions. Of course, there's all these, you know, gradations of emotion. So there’s all these words but I'm like sort of this is anger. This is hatred, this is sadness. So we have 17 like Big Daddy categories um *clears throat* but happiness, contentment and joy tend to get overused for almost everybody unless people are dealing with depression or other uh emotional states where these emotions can't pick their head through but thinking of them as positive causes- If I tell you an emotion is negative and you feel it a lot. There might be an emotion pile up because shouldn't do that. So you're going to have shame and fear and sadness and grief and depression just about this one emotion. But if I tell you an emotion is positive which means wanted which means pro-social which means pleasant and you don't feel it very often. You are also going to have an emotion pile up of depression and shame and fear and know da-baba. So just saying that emotions are negative and positive makes people essentially emotionally incompetent right away. They can immediately. I'm going to make you emotionally incompetent um and so we end up chasing after the three positive emotions as if they’re prizes at the fair instead of emotions that live inside side us and accessible in every moment and we throw away the 14 supposedly negative emotions as if they are character flaws or bugs that we don't want and what we end up with is a very arid desert where there should be so much water and so much emotion and all this genius and gifts and skills and we end up having this very barren landscape. And so when an emotion comes up all we need to know all we know how to do is run to happiness, contentment, and joy. And so I think we're going to have to like like happiness, contentment and joy are going to have a strike.  

Elizabeth: Well they do go on strike sometimes right 

Karla: You go on strike because like we had it with you. We have had it with you. You're the worst boss we've ever had. “Are we getting paid extra?”, “No, we're not.” 

Elizabeth: Wow okay, emotionally incompetent fundamentally as a society. Um I want to ask you for your message to different populations. So I'm sure there are parents out there going “Oh my goodness. Am I raising emotionally incompetent children?” What is it that parents can do to support emotional nuance and generosity with their children? 

Karla:  That's difficult what I in I've written a children's book, but it breaks all the rules of children's books. So I'm going to have to find like a really brilliant agent to help me with this but I did put the anxiety part of the children's book in the back of Embracing Anxiety and what I teach is help kids develop a vocabulary for their emotions and teach them to play with their emotion when they're calm so that you have a way to talk to them about their emotion when they're just hanging out and you have a way to play with emotions. So here's some of the things you would do with the kids pretend that you have to clean your room if you want to go camping this weekend, but you keep putting it off and off and off ask your anxiety to help you get moving pretend that you have a ridiculously hard job, like building a working bicycle out of marshmallows. Where do you start and who could help you? Right? So we give I give the kids an anxiety situation and then have them develop skills around that so that you can say when the kid is running around and it's just too much like remember the bicycle made of marshmallows. Are you asking for help or something along those lines so that you develop a language with kids around their emotions?  

Elizabeth: Beautiful! And I imagine our doing our own work as parents is essential to being able to model that for children. Not just telling them what to do, but actually showing them with our own process what what channeling emotion looks 

Karla: And what's so nice about kids is they will call you out every time you make a mistake.  

Elizabeth:  Okay. Well then here's a different question. You know, this is CIIS. There are probably a lot of therapists and students becoming therapists in the audience and um as clinicians we get the request all the time: My emotions hurt. Can you make them better? And I wonder what wisdom you have for folks who are professional feeling making betters or at least that's sort of how we get identified.  

Karla: Yeah, I would say that there are things that you can do to a person become more comfortable like learning. I have I think six or seven skills. You can hear for learning how to ground yourself, how to set boundaries, how to focus, how to soothe yourself, how to choose and work with the emotions intentionally, right? So that it's not all just let's have grief and anxiety and panic all day. Yay. *laughs* but but to learn ways to care for yourself that are not emotionally suppressive. Because many self-care activities look for happiness, contentment and joy, and so they are overusing those three emotions and not working with the others um and so yeah, there's a lot of what I call empathic mindfulness skills in my work because I want people to work directly with emotion so that they have that experience like that focusing practice is a part of grounding the the listening. So now we're working with fear and the other part of grounding is working with sadness. Boundaries is anger. You know, there's all different ways that we can work with emotions and become friends with them so that people if they're dealing with very painful emotions help them find where that emotion is at that listening place where fear is help them drop down and then learn the skills and gifts of that emotion and why is it so high in you? What's its purpose? What is it doing there?  

Elizabeth: Thank you. Well, I want to take this line of questioning one step further if somebody said okay Karla McLaren for President. We are so enrolled in what you're up to here. We're going to put, you know, several billion dollars into making the world better because we now have this understanding of emotions. What might we do, what might we Implement What's Your wildest dream here? 

Karla: Let's get my children's book published. Yeah, I mean I would say to the extent that we can let's get everybody a healthy emotional vocabulary and let's learn to welcome emotions as the genius that they are because we've tried it the other way and look where we are. Look what happened when we were taught to be cruel to a foundational aspect of our own psyches.  

Elizabeth: Wow, and if we're cruel to aspects of our own psyches, it's not such a big leap to be cruel to another human or to an animal. So are you suggesting that sort of the starting place is within our own psyches becoming welcoming and honoring and respectful of what shows up there? 

Karla: Mhmm. And then you can sort of spread it out into your networks. As long as you don't act like a jerk on Facebook like I did. I got over it okay, I was just pissed off. But I tried it out. I mean when I say acting like a jerk, you wouldn't even know it, but I know that I'm acting like a jerk. You’re like well Karla you like you're making sense. I was like nah scoring points. Hmm. I was being a jerk.  

Elizabeth: Yeah, Well Karla I've asked you so so many questions and I want to just say what have we not touched on? What is important to surface here today? 

Karla:  Just I think that everyone is an emotional genius underneath all of our bad training. You can see it when there's a death and suddenly there's a beautiful grief ritual that just springs up out of nowhere. Where do people get the candles? I don't know right? Where do those flowers come from? Why do they know to walk quietly and sing? We know inside ourselves emotions are here and they've been talking to us our whole lives long. They are ready and willing and able to help us shift and it's not difficult. You would think it's really really hard. It's not difficult. You do have to kind of remind yourself. Wait, depression is good? Depression is useful?  because it feels like crap. *laughs* but but to understand that emotions are never the problem. They come to help us deal with the problem. 

Elizabeth: Hmm. Thank you so so much.  

Karla: Thank you 

Elizabeth: You you grace us with your Insight here.  

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Thank you for listening to theCIIS public programs podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. Podcast production is supervised by Kirsten Van Cleef at CIIS public programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at desired effect. The CIIS public programs team includes: Kyle de Medio, Alex Elliot, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts. Visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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