385 - Shame and Psychosomatic Symptoms with Ellen Ronka

[music] It is Thursday, September the 18th, 2025. Welcome back to the Mind and Fitness Podcast. As always, I am your host, Eddie Lyndon Stein. Thank you so much for being here. Today, I have a psychotherapist that I interviewed not long ago. Ellen Ronka, who was brought up on the pod by a guest I had a couple months ago, Skyler Whitford. She had talked about going through Ellen's program and how beneficial it was. And then just out of the blue, I got an email from Ellen Ronka, and she was talking about shame, and that is a big part of today's podcast. I went a little longer than I usually like to go in these interviews, but she was so easy to talk to, so knowledgeable, so it was great having her on. So let's take a listen to myself and Ellen Ronka from a couple of days ago. As always, I'm your host, Eddie Lyndon Stein. Exciting to have the next guest because her name was brought up several weeks ago by someone that I interviewed, and I didn't actually even say that to you when we first got on the phone. But you were brought up as somebody, or I interviewed somebody who took your course, loved it. They had a lot of great things to say about you, and then by coincidence, you sent me an email not long ago. So Ellen Ronka from Port Smith, New Hampshire. Is that right? Did I pronounce it right? He did. Okay, excellent. Hey, thank you for being here, and thank you for reaching out. I appreciate it. You know what? Thanks for having me. This is so much fun. We're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, and it's, you know, I've heard enough of your episodes now that I feel like I know you a little bit, so it's fun to actually finally get to talk to you. Yeah, yeah, for sure. We're doing this on video. None of you will see this on video, but we are doing this on video. And so that's a funny thing is that a lot of times I do these episodes with video, but because it's very time intensive to do video editing on top of the audio editing, so I just never put it out. Occasionally, there might be something that you can find, but it's cool to be able to do this face to face, even though we're, you know, it's almost the evening where you are, and it's, you know, it's later in the day and all that kind of stuff, but I'm excited to jump in. Yeah, me too. So, you know, initially, you would kind of talk about some of these different concepts and things in your email. A couple of sentences really grasped on to me because the topic of shame is a large discussion. For, when I say for me personally, what I, what I mean by that is that people that are in my age group, people that have younger kids, people that have, you know, they're, we're knee deep in careers and all this stuff and this concept of shame, and what to do with it and how there's all sorts of shame. There's mom shame, there's dad shame, there's shame in general. There's, and then you're kind of in that weird point of life where like, you have your parents ahead of you, you have your kids below you, and you probably feel shame about both sides of it and you just kind of never escape it. So, it's always there. And this seems like it's something that you're more or less, that you're an expert on. I want to hear some of your take on shame, and then let's talk about what do you do with it? What are some roadblocks for people and all those kind of things? How's that sound? That's fabulous. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, kind of an expert on it because it was such an issue for me, but it was so hidden. That I think it took me a really long time to crack the code on shame, as I like to say. So, I'm going to start by saying what really turned the tide for me was landing on Brunei Brown's work. You've probably heard it, yeah. We might, this was a long thing in our house because I kept trying to get my wife to break away from her music streaming service Spotify and come to YouTube music and be on a family plan with me. And the whole reason that she was, she would not break away from Spotify is because Brunei Brown had an exclusivity agreement with Jess Spotify. So, she wouldn't leave streaming services because of Brunei's podcast. And then we went and saw her live. And we've, you know, so like, yes, we're very, we're, yes, we're very aware. I figured you were based on just, I can hear it in, and I can hear when people are at least on it. And when I listen to people talk, honestly, that's cool. And how fabulous to have a partner who is trying to crack the shame not to. So, you know, her long definition of shame and this is, this part really, I think matters. So, I'm just going to review it, especially if anyone of your listeners don't know. She, her long form definition of shame was, is an intensely painful universal feeling or experience that you are flawed. And she doesn't say therefore, but she means therefore unworthy of love connection and belonging. So, that's mouthful. Most people, I think, that I don't know if I had heard that definition, it would have made a whole lot of sense to me. But in the end, she boils it down to this, the fear of disconnection. And I think that definition is so profound because that is really what she's saying in the long form definition. But here's where I think why it matters and why people lose track of shame. I certainly did is that for especially high performing driven people, they don't relate to this sense. When we hear the word shame, we think worthless, right? I feel like total crap. I'm a terrible person. And that level of self-loathing really is relevant for some people, but not generally the high performing people. And so, I really missed the role shame was playing in my life and all my symptoms because I couldn't relate to that concept of belief and worthlessness. So, she says, you know, a feeling or experience of believing that you are flawed or unworthy, right? And flawed, yeah, we all are, right? Like, that's fine. But this idea that I'm worthy of love and belonging, that never felt like it didn't resonate for me. But if you understand, as I know you do, in pain or processing, any kind of mind-body healing work, by the way, I'll just say, I never use TMS because I didn't come into this world via John's side. Like a lot of people did. So, I often say mind-body symptoms or psychophysiologic and, you know, PPD or neuroplastic. But in any case, we're always talking about fear, right? Yeah. But I think it's the fear of disconnection that drives every other problem with neuroplastic symptoms because in most of the time we don't realize it. You know, we talk so much about repressed anger, so much about, yeah, repressed emotions. Why do we repress them at all? Because we have shame about them because we can't accept ourselves in the context of them, right? And so, or it's hard to, anyway. And so, we sort of automatically shove them off into the corner. And we don't let ourselves feel them. Or we do a whole bunch of what I call shame avoidance behaviors. And in PRT, pain repressencing therapy, we talk about pain avoidance behaviors, right? It meds, avoiding the stairs, avoiding foods, like all the things we did to manage for the pain. I think shame just honestly as just another symptom, a mind-body symptom. Interesting. I have to clarify that and say, I think it's part of our human equipment. Shame is just an emotion. However, when it's pervasive, when it's, when it keeps coming, when it's really driving a lot of our behavior, then it's, it's like chronic pain, right? You can have any given sensation and it's no big deal. It's when you freak out about it or try to avoid it or make more meaning of it than it deserves. That's really the problem. So, I think of shame as a continuum. It's just an emotion, but sometimes we can just dabble in it or flirt with it. You know, walk on the edge of it. Sometimes we take a fast train to shame land and stay there for days or months. These are a depressive episodes, right? We can sit in a vat of self-loathing. Sometimes people really get stuck in that. So, in other words, shame is just an emotion, but if we don't usually, and here's the biggest thing that I think, the connection that I made, Brunei Brown's definition has, you know, this feeling that we're unworthy of love and belonging. It is, she defines it as a feeling, but it really is experienced as thoughts. And that's the problem because if you reject the thought, I'm worthless, which I did because I was high performing. I was doing fine. Until I wasn't right, like until I got all these mind-body symptoms and then I couldn't do anything. But even then, I wouldn't have said my spiritual worldview would have said, "Of course I have worth. Of course I do." But because it shows up as thoughts, we either believe them or we don't recognize that it's actually an emotion. And if we just recognize that it's an emotion, it's not nearly as dangerous, then we just respond to it like any other sensation that could come. So I really believe we can. can shri an out of it. - Give me, so give me an example, break this down a little bit. Something that, are you familiar with Nicole Sachs? - Yeah. - So in a lot of her literature, one of the things, in AHA moment that she talks about having is this sort of, I don't know if realizations, the right word, but almost like this light bulb moment, and this was, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago kind of thing, where it was, I hate my kids, but then it became, I hate being a mother, but then it morphed into, I hate myself, right? So there was kind of this three step. Can you talk about that as an example, your opinion, and it doesn't have to be about Nicole specifically, but I think that that progression is not foreign to just her. I think there's probably a lot of people that have that progression. Can you talk about that with its connection to Shamir and the confines of Shamir? - Absolutely. That's a great question. I mean, the first thing is I would say, the reason why it probably took her so long to get to, I hate being a parent or I hate my kids, is because she has a shame about it. - Yeah. - Right? So the emotion in that situation is, like when she's hating on them, like she's just angry or worn out or any number of things, right? But it's the shame about that sense, that emotion, that would keep you from acknowledging it. But once she acknowledged it, then it's really tricky to have that emotion and not get mired and shame. Like what kind of mother hates on her kid? - Yeah. - Like, right? So that's shame. And the way I think about, I call it messy emotions journaling, it's probably very, very similar to journal speak, although I think I've gotten a little more exact about how to use my journal. But then maybe she ever did, I don't know. But the most essential thing that you can do in your journal, to me is actually, the kind of journaling journal speak or my messy emotions journaling, MEJ, is it's being with your emotions refusing to judge yourself. Which by the way, judging yourself by definition, if you're judging yourself or you're worried about someone else judging you, by definition you're in shame, right? Because that says, shame is all very often, not always, but very often projected onto the person that you're feeling shame and reference to. 'Cause it's a relational thing. I mean, Brené Brown's definition was fear of disconnection, right? We're wired for connection and we're worried that we're gonna get rejected somehow some way, right? So in other words, back to Nicole Sachs, I think the journal exercise that is so powerful for so many people recovering from my body stuff. And this is key because I think I journaled for years and years and years without realizing this. So I don't think my journaling is all that helpful. You have to do it with a commitment. You don't get to judge yourself. - Yeah. - But second thing, and this to me feels like the, I've heard plenty about that in the mind-body space. This is the part that I don't hear that much about. The antidote to shame usually because it shows up as a thought, usually people argue with the thought. And that does not work. I tried for years at affirmations and no, really you're not that bad. No, you've got plenty done, it's okay. Whatever does not work. - Yeah. - Because here's the problem with that. From a therapist, really, when thoughts, shame-based thoughts are pervasive, you could call that an obsessive process. And OCD, the very worst thing you can do is respond to the obsession by trying to self-port. - Yeah. - So if we're word that our hands are dirty, that's the most obvious thing. Follow me and it doesn't really mean to shame. So washing your hands as the compulsion is the thing you have to train yourself not to do. Otherwise, sessions just get more and more intense. So for me, I wasn't making my shame-based thoughts way more intense because they'd be like, "No, really, I'm okay. "You know, it doesn't matter that I wasted that money "or that time, or I did get enough done," or whatever it is, right? The antidote, and this is the piece I got from Brunei, the antidote to shame. Do you remember? - I don't. - With a lot of her, right? - I don't. - Yeah, the antidote is empathy. - Empathy to whom? - Well, see that's just exactly the point. Brunei talks a lot about kind of bringing out your shame into the light talking about it and getting empathy from friends. But would I figure it out for me at least? And what works really well with clients is teaching people how to do empathy for themselves. And here's what's really interesting about this. The vast majority of people I work with maybe 'cause they're drawn to me, 'cause I am one such empath, highly sensitive person, that I think most people were inclined towards so madisizing their symptoms, tend this way anyway. They get too empathy all day long for other people. They really can. And I can tell just by listening to you, you can. But the vast majority of them, I really honestly can't think of anybody on my case load ever that when I started talking to them about this, they knew immediately how to do empathy for themselves, even though they can do really high quality empathy for other people. And I find that fascinating, but it was true for me so much so that I would say I resented having to do it. It felt awkward. - To do it for yourself. - Yeah, yeah. It felt like reaching to the moon honestly. Like it felt, well, 'cause here's the thing. Shame itself, the energy of it is like anti-u energy. It's like gross, I don't like it, right? And to do empathy for yourself is exactly counter for that, to that, right? So what most people do, and by the way, I would say, I think therapists early in my career, I was like an empathy machine. And my experience is that people only get, people do need to be seen and heard. So they come to therapy because they haven't been, right? And they really need someone to reflect back, hold them in positive regard, all that. It's important and essential. But at a certain point, they keep coming and the therapist is just like an empathy vending machine. - Yeah. - And the problem is, unless therapists understand this, they never teach the client this tool of doing it for themselves. So then they're forever dependent on you. So when I start doing this with clients who once feel safe in the relationship and all that, once I ask them to do the self-empiracy, it usually sounds like this. You'll be okay, you're fine. We'll get through this. Some variation on that. I call that cheerleading and reassurance, but it's not empathy. - Yeah. - So empathy would sound like this in your Nicole Sacks example. It's so hard to be a parent. And holy cow, you're so worn out that, like you feel hatred towards your kids right now. You are so worn out. And wow, it is scary to have feelings of hatred towards your kids, your own kids. Look, it's really hard to admit that. See how that's empathy? It's not cheerleading. - Is that the example you just gave, that's you talking to a client, not a client talking to themselves. Is that right? - No, in that case, that's me talking as if I were Nicole Sacks and just landed in my journal on. - Oh, okay. Oh, okay, okay, you're doing the writing. This is you as the person doing the right, got it. Okay. - So I, this is a little bit, are you familiar with internal family systems theory, IFS? - We've had a couple, there's been a couple people that have come on to talk about it, yeah. - I think IFS is a really powerful model because in essence, if you're gonna do IFS for yourself, you sort of, you play the role of self-energy, which is the highest best part of you that can do empathy, right? And you talk to these other parts of yourself to suit them. And so in a lot of ways, what I'm teaching, it's, I'm not sort of teaching a full blown IFS model, although I do do IFS with people. But what I mean is, is this talking to yourself as if there's another one of you, and doing it in this empathic, curious, I wonder why you hate your kids right now. Huh, let's figure that out together, non-judgment. There must be a reason, you know. Now that's not empathy, that's getting curious, which is also valuable. But the goal is to hold yourself in compassion. See, I make a distinction between self-emity and self-compassion because, although I think they're related, and it's always better to respond to yourself for compassion way better than like hating on yourself or, you know, repeating all the mistakes you made or how you didn't meet the XYZ goal, whatever. I really do think there's still something different from trying to be kind to yourself. I'll let myself take a bath tonight instead of do email, right? Self-compassion. So that's same as empathy. You could sit in that bath and still be stewing on all the ways that you failed that day, right? I think this makes me think of two things, and I think about these things a lot. There was an episode I did like six, seven years ago that was about the overly positivity movement was really hot on social media at the time, and it was almost like the, narrative was you can combat negative thinking with positive thinking. When to me, that's a lot like, and I use this example the other day with a friend of mine. We weren't talking about this thing specifically, but I talked about, I don't know if you remember, I don't know if there's still a thing. I think they were called Chinese finger traps. You like put your fingers in and then you try, like the harder you try to pull away, the more trapped you get. And so I think about that, but then also the fitness side of the mind of fitness podcast. I think about like, I can have the best training plan on earth. And if my diet sucks, it doesn't really matter. None of it really matters. So I can train, train, train, train, train, train, but if I'm not kind of paying better attention to my diet or making the right choices or whatever my performance will suffer, I know they're completely different worlds. But to me, I think that there are some parallels between trying to combat one thing by trying to do another. And it still continues to just be busy work. Because almost like you're over complicating a problem that doesn't really need it. 100%. And honestly, what you just described is my experience in recovery because I came by like the really solid, good information, pain science and stuff quite late in my process, which lasted close to three decades. But early on, I had my, I had a holistic perspective. I totally believe stress creates or magnifies illness. And even I have this memory as I was thinking about talking with you. I think just a few years in once I had exhausted conventional medicine and I was just so frustrated that like just the bottom had dropped out of my energy level and my vitality, everything. Body aches, you know, I could go on. It's a very long list of symptoms. But I was just at my with end and I was talking to some friends and they took about five minutes to get this question out because I think they were so uncomfortable asking it, but they were like, you think maybe, you know, and eventually they came up with a word psychosomatic. And I was like, well, yeah. Duh. Yeah. But I didn't figure out how to fix it anyway. They thought they were going to insult me. I'm like, I'm pretty, it must be like I never really got hooked into any of the diagnoses. But honestly, that's part of the problem because I didn't find my way to the right books and the right, you know, thought leaders and such. Although that said, this was three decades ago. There wasn't find, right? Anyway, my point is that because of that, I had been doing, you know, I started yoga. I went down to part time. I meditated. I, you know, I was journaling the whole time. I was practicing trust and surrender because of my spiritual life, but I didn't understand this piece about shame. And so like my internal diet was like, like you said, you know, like you could be lifting great, but like you're, you're feeding yourself with crap. Yeah. So I, this shame piece was so central to me, it's like an entire module. And my program, because I, because in here's the other piece about shame, I think that it's so noxious as an emotion. Like I really do think it, it is part of our human equipment, but it is literally the one emotion that we want to train out of. I mean, sadness, we want to allow sadness, but we don't want to get stuck in sadness. That's depression, right? Or we want to allow anger, but we can't get really stuck in it. So we're angry and bitter and seething all the time, right? So we understand that idea, but just in general, I think shame, this, this experience of feeling like I'm defective and it really matters because if people know they're not going to like me or more to the point, you adjust your behavior because of it. That's the thing we have to train out of. Because so many of the personality traits that we talk about that feed neuroplastic symptoms, they're all shame. They're all shame based perfectionism. It's just, it's trying to manage for the feeling I feel when I'm not perfect. People pleasing, this is the biggest one, honestly. I think people get hung up in there. Like once people know the science, the reason why symptoms keep coming back is because they're dodging that feeling of, and I'm going to call it shame, but they don't recognize it as shame, that they feel when they do the thing that's right for them. They're dodging that. If I do this thing, if I say no, if I don't do this thing that this other person wants me to do, I don't like how I feel about me. When you really drill data ends up there, and they don't know what to do with that feeling, and therefore they're forever perpetually doing the behaviors that will keep it in place. Like what I described in the OCD thing, the more you try to solve your obsessions with compulsions, the more the obsessions will come. So I think the secret to solving for shame is actually yes recognizing it, but learning how to tolerate it. Believe it or not, like it's so noxious, we don't actually want to feel it. And I know that sounds sort of like, well, duh, but we have to learn how to feel it and tolerate it. And for example, people hang out in relationships that really don't feel very good to them. That was a very big thing for me. And there were all kinds of ways that I was abandoning myself because I would invalidate myself. My own felt experience about an interaction or a whole dynamic and a relationship. And that has, I mean, we could talk all day long and I'd be happy to how that gets crafted in early life by our parenting. Because you get to work on emotionally immature parents is I think huge for that. But the point is is that we learn to abandon ourselves to please the other person because it's a survival strategy. It's an attachment strategy, an adaptive strategy to maintain attachment when we're young. But then that persists in adulthood. So because I can't tolerate it if I displeased this other person disapproves of me, I feel bad about me. And so then what we do is we just try to please them and keep their approval. But that is like a gerbil wheel that never stops. So the idea of so much of my work is teaching people how to tolerate pissing other people off basically. Is it, so I could see that being problematic though, people that aren't, you know, they're not feather rufflers or anything like that. Are you saying that part of the answer is to be okay with pissing people off? Maybe a better way of thinking of that is that it's okay to disappoint people. Is that part of that at all or no? I would go so far as the pissing off part. Yeah, I think I'd say this often that you won't heal from people, nor plastic symptoms entirely permanently until you are very comfortable pissing other people off. And I don't add in a sense of you get to be like obnoxious and mean and all that. I mean that the most people who have psychophysiologic symptoms are conscientious and goodists and all that. And really recovery from goodism is to get comfortable with people not approving for you. Maybe you're maybe you're 70, you may be part of your personal anecdote is that you're 75% good and you're 75% people pleasing and you're 75% perfection versus before it was 100% maybe that slight 25% can take some of the like a large portion of the edge off. Do you think that's fair to say? Not sure which, what is the percentage applied to? Can you frame that in a different way? I'm not sure what you mean. Yeah, so here I'll give you a real world example. I don't think maybe I'm wrong. I don't think that any of the I coach girl soccer, right? I set a really high standard for myself and the organization and planning part of it. And part of that in the past has been I'm planning out every practice, every focus, every lesson that I want to teach the kids and writing those things out long form and presenting them to the families of every player. This season and this wasn't fully intentional, but this season I have done dramatically less in the sense of real long forming it, presenting it out. All the planning is still there and everything for the kids, but it hasn't been that further extra mile of communicating these things to everybody on the outside. And as I as the weeks have rolled on and I've kind of done less in that regard, the perfectionist in me really doesn't like that. However, it sure feels a little better to not feel like at once I once I didn't do it 100 percent the first time that it was kind of okay to not do it 100 percent the second time. And then the third time and I don't know if that example is helpful or makes sense or anything like that. But that's what's coming to mind as you're talking about. Back of us. One, those kids are lucky. I really like it. Have you second? Do you have like way more hours in your days? No. No, I think it's the obsession around the planning and the everything is very meticulous. We actually we just bought a family skylight scheduler where our calendars are all broadcasted. That's the only way that any of this works is that there's not a lot of that like Saturday I got done coaching a game about an hour away and I was busting out of there and one of the moms had made a comment. Now we lost the game, which is fine. lose way more than we win and I'm fine with that of course these kids from forever. She had said, like I was really hustling to get out of there. I said, I, you know, thank the kids for being there, but in a lot of times I'll socialize with the families after the game. This time I was flying out of there. And one of the moms had said, Oh, like it really looks like you're getting out of here quick. And I had thought to myself, I'm like, should I have told everybody why I was leaving so quickly? No, it was to, because I had to hustle an hour away to get to my other daughter's game and see her in the second half of her other game, you know, her, my youngest one. But as I drove away, as I drove away and I've wrestled with that since that interaction happened, you know, the perfectionist in me says, should have sent a note so that people knew that I wasn't just flying out of there. So I don't know. Anyway, it's, it's a, there's a razor thin margin. If it feels like there's a lot that I can get. So in your anecdote, and I love your authenticity, by the way, just do like openness about sharing your life and things you struggle with. In that anecdote is perfect examples of what I'm talking about. And probably why, because my note to you, I like your, your episode on F off, you know, telling your foot to F off. It's exactly this kind of thing. You recognize it as shame. Most people probably wouldn't, but because you've listened to so much, Prune Brown, I think you probably do have your eye on that. And so you heard yourself or you, you felt it or noticed it in those interactions about the soccer. So one about I'm not doing as much as I used to and what do people think about that? And, or maybe it might be, it might show up in your thinking as, you know, do they think I'm, you know, slacking or whatever? Or it's just you like there, you should, the best way to do it is this way. And you're not doing it that way anymore. So there's some, I would argue that that's the emotion of shame. You're not in a bad of it. It's not, you know, you're not self-hating, right? But it is the emotion of shame. And I think when you recognize it, you didn't know what to do with the emotion, right? You were aware of it and you were like, should I have? And you went into this sort of a little bit of obsessive, you know, might don't mind me. Like I'm not judging or criticizing. I lived there for years or years. But you started kind of questioning yourself and thinking I should have sort of prepped them for that, et cetera, because what are they thinking? And really, if you try the Ellen Ronka method, it would sound like this year in the car. It's really hard to not be able to do everything as well as you really want to. You know you could. And it's hard to know that people might be wondering, why isn't he doing it as well as he used to? And it's hard to worry that other people are judging you for racing out of there. When really the truth is you're just doing your darnedest to be a good parent to both kids and coach and blah, blah, blah, and Holy Cow. Now, see, once you do the empathy, then reassurance is great. Yeah, you're doing the best you can. Holy cow, look at how much you're getting done. And you're really following your values. And I'm so proud of you. That's the reassurance part. And that is loving. I don't call that empathy per se, but I'm off for it. It's just that most people will go straight to the, you're fine. You're good enough. And you're doing the best you can. All that is true, but it's not empathy. And I can tell you every time I do this with clients, when they're having a shame moment, I ask them to, you know, I teach, I say, can you do empathy like you would for your friend? Almost always they do cheerleaning or reassurance or, you know, basically what I call lying to themselves, which is like, you're okay, you're fine. Yeah. Which doesn't feel right now. So it's not empathic. It's, it's, it doesn't resonate. It actually feels invalidating. But they're like, I feel good. And I'm like, I'm not convinced. You don't really, and they're like, you're right. I don't feel good. And I say, here's what I would say to you. And when I say real empathy, like I just did with you, like, you're, man, like, it's, it's really hard to feel like you're disappointing these parents when you're really doing your darn is to be a good coach, right? When I do that with clients, they're like, soften, they breathe. And then I say, how did that feel compared to what you did initially to this all time? At least a couple times a week. Yeah. Way better, they'll say. Way better. You know, my, my wife does something really good related to this that is bringing this to mind. Maybe you'll think this is in the, the meta universe of what you're describing. She, she is a master at this, especially with my daughter, but she does with me too is say, I come in and I'm angry about something going on with work. Like, you know, it could be, could be really anything. I'm telling her this wrong story and all that. And she's gotten really masterful over the years of, I guess the term that I could call it is listening with, listening without a solution. So if I'm telling her this long-winded story about something instead of her saying, why don't you try this or you could do this or you could do that? Even if it's like the most well-intentioned thing, a lot of times I think that people don't want a solution. They just literally just want you to at a minimum say, I hear you or I understand or I'm listening and maybe at a maximum just restating whatever it would not even, sorry, not restating because that can also be suggestive. Literally just saying back to them what they said to you. And I feel like that is sort of, in, it's like very much intrinsic empathy because it shows that you're listening. There's a non-judgment away. You're not giving a suggestion. You're not giving a solution. A lot of times some of the, some of what she'll say back will be, do you want a suggestion? And a lot of times I go, no, I just want to be angry about this, right? Just, you know, that's kind of it. So she does that with our sixth great daughter. And I think it drives the daughter nuts because she's a preteen and that's what, you know, I don't want to listen, I don't want to listen to that. But I think that she does prefer that over the advice of the elder millennial parents that, that were born in the 80s, which is, you know, that might as well literally like the amount of time between the 80s and now is ironically the same. When we were in the 90s, the difference in time is like the 60s of the 50s, which is really hard to imagine. But yeah, I don't know if that, if that resonates at all, but that's the thought that's coming to mind as you're describing this is, it's listening without a, like listening without an answer, listening without a solution. Yes, you nailed it. It is in the metaverse. It's very, very close. It's not just, you know, it might even be on the same planet. But it's so interesting because even the way you're talking about a little bit diminishes it. Like you're saying it works and it's better than the advice giving blah, blah, blah. But there's almost an element like all you're doing is listening and what I want to tell you is empathy is the currency of love. Empathy is, that's how I think of it. It's the, it's the currency of love. Like if you don't feel seen in an accepting way by the person you're relating with, you're not going to feel loved. And this is what emotionally immature parents do. They want to be helpful. They want to get their kid out of discomfort. Ah, honey, with that bully said, really, doesn't matter. Don't listen to him anyway. Sticks and stones, blah, blah, blah. You know how that kid ends up feeling? Not reassured at all. Yeah. They feel not seen. And I think of being seen as the highest compliment anyone can give me. Right? You're paying attention. You're tuned. You get it. So even very often, I do a lot of couples work and I'm always teaching this skill to couples often. It's the man who really need to learn this more than the women, but it doesn't always line up that way. And they're like, but that doesn't help. I'm like, Oh, no, it does. You don't realize it's not just you want me to just listen or I just want to be mad when someone holds us, contains us. Really hears our emotions and validates them. I get it. And by the way, you don't even have to, in order to do empathy, you don't even have to agree that that's how the person should feel or that even you would feel that way in the same situation. What what needs to happen is, you know, I could see that given your commitment to being a good parent, teaching all the peers of your kids, these values, informing the parent, that matters to you. So given who you are, it's hard for you not to do as much as you could do. Yeah. In other words, it has nothing to do with how I would feel, but I know you well enough to know that would be hard for you. And so I think that people vastly underestimate the power of empathy. Like literally, you know, Renee talks about, you know, if shame, like the image I get is like, it shames a mold and a peach redish. And if you spray bleach on it, poof, you know, light and bleach, it kills it. Empathy kills shame. Because if you know what or what, you know, whatever you're like feeling gross about yourself with, when you hear empathy, you feel better. You can give me a whole bunch of examples of that. But I also think that shame is what drives, you know, like I was saying, you know, if love is what makes the world turn round, shame is what blocks it. Like stops, you know, it's not hate. It's shame. Well, I guess if you think about shame is a little bit like self-hating. But most people don't experience it that way. They think in terms of other people are judging me. So it gets projected onto other people. How, maybe this isn't a, 'cause I imagine like, I don't know how often you work with adolescents or kids. This topic of shame is, I would say this period of time, not anything specific, but like this period of time, let's say in the last nine months, nine months to a year, and foreseeably until Zoe turns 18. My older daughter, feeling shame or believing that she's feeling shame about something, and seemingly it's all the time about something, is one of the biggest parenting challenge period. Like there's nothing even that's close, in my opinion of the 12 years that she's been around. What are some tips maybe for, because I get a lot of emails from listeners that our parents, nobody's asked this specifically, but it's coming to mind as we're talking about this. What is a way for parents who have kids that are that age, whether they're preteens or teens, to be able to help, I don't know if combat is the right word, but help kids work with the shame that they have about anything and everything. - Yeah, it is the work of parenting. And I love the way you frame this question, 'cause really the age of your kids, that is, I mean, it's always true that we are all wired for connection, we all wanna feel like we belong, right, that we're acceptable and all that. But for teens, this is the thing, right? You start separating from your family and you really wanna belong with your peers. So of course, shame would come up, 'cause again, fear of disconnection, right? So what do you teach them? I think the most powerful thing is to actually name it, to teach your kid what shame is, that this is just an emotion, it doesn't have to drive your behavior. The biggest thing is, I didn't say this earlier, but the reason why you can sort of downgrade the importance of shame and therefore tolerate it is 'cause it is just an emotion. You don't actually have to believe the message of it. So okay, right now I'm feeling crappy about myself, but it's not a permanent thing and I don't have to actually believe the message. It's just, you know, we love on yourself, right, which is very anti-shame, right? You give yourself, and again, I think the most potent form of love is empathy. So I literally, I think I would just teach the kids exactly this, which is, we don't measure, there's your worth, your deserving of belonging, it's not in question. I don't even entertain that. In fact, the way I talk about it is they say, shame is a terrorist and if we negotiate with it, it has us by the Kauhoneist. You know, like, you have to decide, and for me this works really well 'cause I do have kind of a strong cerebral side, even though I'm like a failure. So when I finally got a hold of this and I realized this shame-based thinking is just a neural network and it's repetitive, and it's gonna keep going until I train out of it. Every single opportunity I bumped into shame, I used it as an opportunity to train out of it. And again, the training is through empathy, but you have to actually recognize it as shame, and you do, right, you see it everywhere. So that means you can teach your kids that. And once they have, I mean, being able to name, recognize a name shame is the first step to resilience, shame resilience, that's the word, again, Brunei's word. And for a lot of people, recognizing how it feels in your body is actually a quicker path to recognizing it than even their thinking. I mean, I would say if you're talking at all, if you're at all worried about someone judging you, you're definitely at least flirting with shame. But very often people have a very specific sensation in their body, like a sinking feeling in their stomach or maybe a tight feeling in their throat, whatever. And if you can recognize that sensation, you're like, and then you go looking for the shame. And I say this to couples too, by the way. If you're in an argument that's just getting worse, even though you're both committed to figuring it out and resolving it and it just keeps getting worse, I guarantee you it's about shame, really. In other words, we started out arguing about the color of the bathroom, what color we're gonna paint it. And then somehow someone's shame got triggered. And now we're trading shame, as I call it, like trading forza nates, like a jazz rate, but we're trading shame instead. Because when one person's shame gets triggered, almost always the next thing out of your mouth is something is going to be shaming to the other person. And now we're just trying to defend our own okness. Instead of, we're not really talking about the bathroom anymore. We're, you know, when people apologize, here's another cue that shame has been triggered. When someone says, hey, you hurt my feelings or I don't like that you blah, blah, blah. It wasn't my intention. You know that the person who's just been told that something they didn't feel good, they're in shame. 'Cause we're defending, they're defending their character, right? Well, it wasn't my intent to hurt you. But that's what I'm gonna do with it. - Yeah. - Ipo, right? That's not the point. I was never actually saying you were trying to hurt me, but you did. - Yeah. - Okay, we talk about it without talking about having your character in question at all. Yeah, we should be able to. But when you can't distinguish between guilt and shame, it's really troubling. So that's what I would do with your kids is teach them a difference between guilt and shame. Cheated on a test, guilt. But most people can't have guilt without also having shame on top of it, right? 'Cause if I get caught cheating, now I feel like a terrible person. Then in that case, I never really think as shame is adaptive, but it makes some sense. But you can have shame all day long without any guilt involved. And most of the time, take your example with having to cut a little bit corners on your very, committed information to parents about the soccer lessons. You have to do anything wrong. You're one person, you only have so much time. You're doing nothing wrong. There's no guilt here, but there is shame, right? So that's, we have to distinguish between the two because sometimes kids are being mean to each other, for example. - Yeah. - Elf is appropriate there. But you don't have to feel like a bad person. - Is your messy emotions journaling, 'cause I haven't read anything about it, but you'd said that it seems comparable to Nicole Sax's journal speak. Is the messy emotions journaling in the same meaning that somebody basically just goes unfiltered as they're writing in this, and then the intent is that it is burned or it's trashed or it's, like is that kind of the idea that you're just, you're going full send on whatever is, kind of comes across the namesake and let it basically burn the whole world to the ground and then shred the paper and then move on with your day sort of thing. Is that kind of the intent behind what you call messy emotions journaling? - That's the start, yes. I think the way my journaling process has evolved after understanding this mind body model for healing, it's more involved than just that, but that certainly is the foundation. But, you know, and Nicole Sax shall say journal for 20 minutes and then 10 minutes do some sort of self-compassion meditation, whatever. And I think she's getting at the same thing as I am, but I don't know that people can go necessarily from, I hate my boss and he joins me crazy and then you know that, right? Like, I want to like poke his eyeballs out and all the things, right? And it needs to be unrestrained on hindered, no holds barred, all that, yes. But I think it's dangerous to go there and then not do empathy and also. So empathy, so doing self-compassion meditation, sometimes people don't make the real connection. Like, I think we need to hear ourselves say to ourselves, well, of course, no wonder. Rick Hansen, hard-wiring happiness. He talks about the, of course,ness of a situation. You know, well, of course you're mad at your boss. Of course you are. You're trying your hardest. He never seems like able to be pleased. You're frustrated. You know, saying that to yourself really does bring your nervous system down. It's the equivalent of a safety message to someone who's having pain, right? So there's that, but here's the other piece and this is related to what I initially emailed you about. I've done a lot about because for me, you know, my story is very convoluted in terms of how my system, symptoms came on and evolved and everything I did to try to result them. I mean, you'd recognize similar elements in the story to all your other guests, but what was I going to say? Shoot, where was I? Empathy, where was I? Back me up. Where was I? Well, we were talking about journaling. That is like a vessel. Here's the piece. So I've done a lot of thinking because of my own story is that once I like really understood purity and I dealt with a lot of symptoms before I got to that that were probably when I had dribs and drab symptoms or they came and went, I've done a lot of thinking about why is that? And my experience is it's because I'm not learning. the lesson from the emotion. And I feel really strongly about that. I don't think that the journaling can be purely expressive. In other words, if I'm really pissed at my boss and my boss is never be pleased, right? I probably need to do something in that relationship differently. Yeah. And I think a lot of the kind of dribs and draft symptoms or the coming and going is that you're allowing something in your life that's not an alignment with really being your best friend, your own best friend, right? Like you're not standing up for yourself. Something isn't quite right. And you're not addressing it. So you can-- this is my experience, because I have journals. And I have boxes of journals in my basement. I don't throw mine out, but even free understanding this model. There was plenty of anger there. I didn't know what to do with the anger. And in fact, one of my key points-- because I was in therapy the whole time-- I remember saying very explicitly to a therapist, my main one, my longest term one, I don't know what to do with my anger. I just don't know what to do with it. And she gave me the lamest answer that I think-- I want to try to give her some credit that maybe it was the end of the session she didn't have time or something, but she said, I have confidence. You'll figure it out. That's what she said. And from my perspective, no, no, no, no. Anger is-- it's like one of those red, yellow, or green lights at the intersection. It tells you what to do. It's a piece of information, your emotions. So the fact that you're angry about that first of all, you believe yourself. Second, what do you want to do about it? Apparently, your boundaries are being imposed on somehow some way. I don't want to know why I'll sometimes it's just, oh my gosh, my kid is crying nonstop. We can't fix that, right? But probably anger then really might be angry, but there's-- there too. So my point is that we have to do something about a lot of our emotions that make symptoms keep going. Ellen, thank you so much for being here. If people want to learn more about you-- first of all, I'd love to have you back and let's table that. Because we didn't really even get to-- how did you get in this line of work? How did you do all that? We sort of tear and teanote it. So maybe next time we'll start at the beginning, instead of starting at the end or more present. But EllenRanca.com, that's ELLENROMKA.com. And then Chronic to Cured, and that's T-O, not the number two, but ChronicToCured.com. And you can find her on Facebook. Chronic to Cured with EllenRanca, L-C-M-H-C. Let's see if I get this right. Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor. Is that right? Brilliant. Can't believe I did it. OK. Let's keep touch over email. And yeah, we'll talk soon. I'd love that. OK. But this is a super fun conversation. Excellent. Thanks, Ellen. Bye-bye.