“Unearthed: The Lies We Carry & The Truths They Bury” ~ Chanchal G.

(upbeat music) Hi, it's your host, Dr. DeKees. Welcome to We Speed Podcast where we cover everything, women's empowerment. Check it out. (upbeat music) Jean-Charl Garg is a speaker, author, executive coach, and conscious leadership facilitator. She transforms lives by helping clients break through limiting beliefs and create authentic connections. Drawing from her MBA and personal experiences, she addresses difficult truths directly while fostering environments of openness and collaboration. She's also the author of Unearth, the lives we carry and the truths they bury. Welcome to The We Speed Podcast and ladies today, we are talking, shifting the narrative on emotion. Let's talk anger I have with me, Jean-Charl, welcome to the studio. How are you? Thank you so much for having me, DeKees. It's great to be here and I'm doing wonderful and just really excited to have this conversation with you. I am too, I am too, and I'm very intrigued about what you're going to talk about with this topic, the emotion anger. I feel like I'm gonna hear a spin on it. I'm excited. So let's do this, Jean-Charl, if you will just start, which is kind of telling, the lady's a little bit about you and then I'll kind of get into the rest of what we're talking about today. Happy to, so I am an executive coach and a facilitator. I work with women at the intersection of identity, power and influence. And my background is, I've been working in leadership development for, gosh, I wanna say over 15 years, I had in between there, I had a yoga studio for six years. When I first had my kids, I felt like, oh, it would be easier to have, you know, a brick and mortar business and run that with, as I'm having my children. So I learned quickly that that was not the case. (laughs) I did that for a little while. And I also facilitate at Stanford for their interpersonal dynamics program. And then I run my own groups as well. And so that's sort of me professionally, beyond that, I have a 13 year old daughter, a 16 year old son. I love being a mom of teenagers. They've got their full personalities and I'm able to have really great conversations with them. And we all live out here in California and it's the three of us in my husband. - Yeah, beautiful, love it, love it. Absolutely love the side of academia because I feel like I get to really share certain conversations with all my friends and the academy. So we'll chat later, but let's get into the rest and let's get into the rest of the show. Okay, so in the work that you're doing today, it looks like you're focusing on this emotion called anger. And I want to know what is interesting to you about this topic. - Yeah, so I would say more than even interest, it's been just my life experience and even my professional experience. So working in interpersonal dynamics, there's a lot of emotional intelligence involved in that. And so I've been teaching about emotional intelligence for years. And whenever the topic of anger comes up, the usual narrative that I hear around it that sort of, I think a lot of academia holds around it is anger in the interpersonal world at least. Because that anger is a distancing emotion, right? It causes people to want to distance themselves from you. And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I think what ends up happening is that the wisdom or intelligence that anger can hold gets buried underneath that. So it's like, oh yeah, you need to process it and move on and in the name of processing and we're actually ignoring it. - Mm-hmm. - And in my own lived experience, what I have found is that when I've ignored anger, I lose my own ability to activate, to create change. You know, usually I think in the interpersonal world, we're always asking like, what's the emotion underneath anger, which is usually sadness or fear, right? And when you think about sadness, the sort of somatic or the body sensation that you have when you're sad is to sort of collapse. And when you have fear, you wanna run away. - Mm-hmm. - When you feel anger, you're activated to make a change, right? So from that perspective, and I found that in my own life, too, is that when I was willing to allow anger in, was when I was able to make the changes in my own life that I needed. And I also wanna just differentiate like, when I talk about anger, I'm talking about the emotion of anger, not the behavior of violence, 'cause the behavior of violence is not the emotion of anger, the behavior of violence is how people who are not able to handle their own anger or gather the intelligence from it behave. And that's not the emotion itself. And I think oftentimes those two get conflated. - Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm excited to talk about this from a personal space, from a professional space. I speak a lot on the healing journey in We Sweet. I focus very heavily on emotions and healing your inner wounds, if you will. A lot of times, cared from childhood and how that impacts how we as women lead today when we don't acknowledge that space. And acknowledge not just sit in it and claim it as your forever story, but really sit with the things that happen in your life or the things you felt in life. And how does that empower you today, not how you take up residence and live there, but how does it. (laughs) - So move forward. - Yeah, so. - Yeah, some of the things that you're saying, Shansha, is as it relates to emotional intelligence and you distinguishing the emotion of anger and the behavior, a lot of that is emotional regulation. And I find too that there are so many adults, my children that have not learned to regulate emotion. And so when they feel anger, they can't channel that in a productive way to make the changes that they need to make in their lives that you're speaking of. Instead, to the point of collapsing, that happens to the point of just running away and ignoring it altogether and not facing hard, difficult decisions and conversations that must happen, or you live in a perpetual state of bondage, quite frankly. And so I think being able to process those emotions in a healthy way and not process getting stuck there, or making it your excuse and continuing to live that as forever poster story, but process it in a way that you realize you're allowed to have needs, you're allowed to have feelings, you're allowed to be angry. But what do I do with that next? And what does it look like to, to the behavior to be a productive action next? So can you speak to, you know, those, feeling the emotion, but then having the productive behavior next? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think even to backtrack for a moment, I think especially for women, oftentimes what happens is we don't even recognize that we're angry because there's been such a narrative around you can't be angry. Like that is anger is wrong. And so I wanna name that like oftentimes, I find that so many women have so much suppressed anger because of that. And so that's a roadblock, right? I think it's important to name. In terms of how to process anger, to make it productive, to turn it into that change agent, for me what tends to work, what tends to work for my clients is almost imagining that rage is kind of like a board member. Like if you were to imagine like all of your emotions as board members, right? - Yeah. - If anger was a board member, if you could ask it like, what is it that you want me to know? Right? And usually with anger, there's a couple things, right? Like a boundary was crossed. An important value was not considered. Somebody like a violation of some sort is usually when anger shows up. And so to know that and then get even more curious to say, okay, a boundary was crossed. How did that boundary get crossed? There are times where our boundaries are crossed and they were forcefully crossed. And that's one side of it. But there are other times where our boundaries are crossed because we allowed them to be crossed. - Yeah. - And I think that's an important distinction as well, right? Like oftentimes we are the ones crossing our own boundaries by allowing other people to do that. Because the only person responsible for upholding your boundaries is you. - Mm-hmm. - You know, people are gonna do, people are gonna people. They, that's what they do. - All right. - Okay. - And so, so I think it's important to recognize that because when you do again. and you're allowing yourself to feel the activation power of the anger, then you can make a choice to say, "No." And it doesn't need to be violent. It doesn't need to be, you know, forceful, even in any way. It's a statement. And what I find oftentimes happens with women when they're faced with their anger is they don't know what to do with it. And so like we said, they either collapse or they shrink or they run away or sometimes, you know, I see women, they start to over-explain themselves, right? In these ways. And they lose contact with themselves. Right? I mean, I can say that I've been in that situation so I know what that feels like myself. And I think when we can pause and ground, get back into our bodies and then check in to say, "What's really going on with me right now?" And just to state just that much. And it might just be, "No." It might just be, "I disagree." It might be, "I don't have an answer for you right now." Yeah, yeah, it might be that. But just to state that much gives you so much of your own power back because you're not trying to please, you're not trying to make the other person comfortable, you're not trying to do any of that. You're staying with your own emotion. And you're allowing yourself to be where you are. Yeah, you know, and so I think, and that's it. That right there just gives you so much of your own authority back. Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited. You get a lot of good stuff, a lot of good stuff that shows up in women's lives everywhere. So this is their romantic lives. This is their friendships. This is their relationships with their children and their parents. And it's their, how they show up in their jobs and this idea of shrinking this idea of people pleasing this idea of don't create discomfort and others. And it goes back to the narrative or belief systems that were most often taught to women that they are to be peaceful, being unique and mild, not, you know, the authoritative voice, not the, you know, person who. I don't really want to say the aggressor in the room, but for lack of better wording. Don't power forward, you know, make, make everyone else around you comfortable. Create a welcoming space, create a welcoming home. You see and not heard. That's what I was trying to say earlier. And, and, and I would even go as far as to kind of pulling my faith in this because even though I'm not doing this on men, I feel like this comes into play to just. When you grow up in certain homes that teach certain values and certain faith based values where you are expected to be of service to your community, you're expected to help others and lift others up in the community. And so you learn that I have to always show up in this way that is acceptable with being polite and being kind, but we've allowed being polite and being kind and being service focus to mean that we can, we have to deny ourself of real human emotion. And that doesn't always look like I'm not going to be angry. I'm not going to be sad. Like those are real human emotions. And it's not right for us to deny that that's a real thing. I think that when we do that, we become almost robotic. We're performing this person that is realistic in our everyday lives because you're going to have a rough day at home. You're going to have a rough day on the job. You're going to have a rough day sometimes in the community or you might even get frustrated in your church home. I don't know. But the reality is we real feelings and we show up self abandoning and people pleasing. And I think it comes from that learned mentality that I have to show up the acceptable calm rational, don't rock the ball, keep the piece with your duty to be this way, regardless of how others are. Then we continue to teach that on down through the kids and everything else. And what we teach people is to stop self advocating to stop owning their needs to stop saying, hey, despite it me. And then I want to get into you talk to that first half of what I had to say. The other thing that I want is processing. And this is something that's very, very big for me because I was definitely. And sometimes I still struggle with being the person that certainly doesn't want to create any type of drama chaos. And there is that I quickly removed myself from from those I've been environment, but I had to learn how to, you know, stop self abandoning with my own emotion stop negating my own needs and, you know, claim my own voice and a sense. And I always when you know, I want to say this and I'm Lord help me do this. I think that when women have shown up in the dynamic that we're talking about and not focusing on their real emotions, whether that's anger or any other emotion really when you just kind of collapse or you have fear and you run. And that sense probably childhood. But it's not just the self abandoning that's the issue here. It's that when you start learning not to do that right and you start learning, okay, how do I say how I really feel in this moment. You won't know how you don't know. And someone says, okay, what's wrong or how are you feeling you've spent a lifetime. And if you're 20, you spent, you know, maybe not your formative years from ages one to, I don't know, two, but beyond that, because you start to, well, you start to develop those emotions. You were very early, so I'll say maybe you do. So, but 20 years old, give or take 18 years, you taught yourself, you know, regulating system, right. And then if you're 30, if you're 40, if you're 50, okay, you have spent your lifetime not doing that. So now when you're in situations where you need to speak and you need to say this is I feel or this is the emotion I'm feeling, there's like a glitch in there. And you're like, like, I don't know, because you haven't focused on that. You haven't learned anything. And then you have a sense of response. Yeah, you have all those emotions, but at this point, to the point of speaking of specifically to anger, when you haven't allowed yourself to process what your feelings are, well, you don't know if you said you angry, you can't even figure out which one is happening. Well, you know, I think it's important to cause and do the reflection. What is the need? But now, what do I do with that feeling? What is the action on a behavior? I want to take and be responsible for from here. And so it takes, it takes time to retrain your in and system to do that. So let's talk about training the nervous system. Yeah. So I, I mean, I love this, right? Like the nervous system, like, I think, I mean, there's so many things to say about this, but I think the first thing to know is like for there's this thing called a social nervous system. And for women in particular, because of everything you just mentioned, it keeps right like our, our, I almost want to call it grooming from childhood. And we need to show up and what constitutes a good girl or a good woman, right? Because of all of that, our nervous system has been trained to respond by either being small or backing up or being invisible or running away. And so, and, and the social nervous system, the way that because of that training, what it does is it equates not being liked with death. Like literally. And so when you get that feeling when you're sweating and you're not sure what to do and, and you know, and then later on you look back on that situation, you're like, why was I, why did I react like that? I felt like such an overreaction. It's because your social nervous system is equating that situation with death, like you might not be liked here. And so to override that, like you said, takes a lot of work. It takes reflection. It takes the pause. And the thing that I really try to work with people on is it takes getting out of your head and into your body. Because your mind and only remember past experiences and it's constantly, I mean, our bodies are too, but it's constantly scanning for threat. And in our minds, it's constantly scanning for threat and it's looking for previous situations that might even a little bit match the situation you're in. And then it's going to replay that again. So you can never really move forward into possibility when it's only operating on the past. And then our bodies are present. Our bodies are also scanning for threat, but they're present. And if if you allow your body to scan, it can actually see that, wait a minute, I'm safe. I'm okay right now. really true for me right now. What's not a reaction from the past? What's my truth right now in this moment? Yeah. And you don't have to give that answer right away. So I tell people, you know, when you're in those situations, if you stop and you ground and what I mean by ground is get your awareness out of your brain and maybe even into your feet on the floor. And then check and then be like, where am I right now? And you don't have to go beyond that in that moment. And then you can continue to process. You can continue to ask yourself, like the questions you were saying, you know, what do I need right now? What do I want to take responsibility for? What is not my responsibility? What is this anger really trying to tell me? What does it want me to know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I could not agree more that that pause and that reflection and that scan is so important. Yeah. I want to say this too because I think just reflecting on my own history and how I ended up in times in people pleasing mode or kind of self abandoning as we're talking about, you know, fear and sadness. There's also the little children in the family who just learned very early to be the dutiful responsible one and carry weight. So you sort of fell away to what you need, what's important for you and sitting with your own emotion because you learned your job was to take care of everything else on the outside. So you stop learning to process was going on in the inside. So you auto palette your way through life. You learn how to be busy. You learn how to work very hard. You learn how to distract yourself because you learned that doing and showing up and making sure this person is okay and that person is okay. Like that became way more important than what I was going on in a year. And so I want to say that for those group of women, I don't know if this will resonate for others, that when you start to learn how to process your emotions in a more healthy space, you start learning to name the emotion, you start learning to say, okay, what do I need in this moment? You start learning, okay, what about this? upset me. What about this? Like is it this present moment? Or is it something from my past that's triggering memory? Like what specifically is feeding into the here and now? And the other piece of that and I think this is very important for women to do because you know, people love to say women are the nurturers, the emotional beings, the weird emotional all these things is very important for women to say what about this situation, this environment, whatever it is that you're facing is my responsibility emotionally and what is or isn't someone else's responsibility in this because sometimes when people self abandon in that way and they learn to do that growing up and they don't quite yet know how to self regulate, they outsource someone else to handle all of their emotions for them. Yes. And that can be very that can be very taxing on the people around you who love and care about you. And so I think it's just important to ask yourself when you are struggling or not even struggling if you're facing a challenge, whatever it is decision making and you're feeling all the things that you haven't quite named, how do you identify what is my responsibility to carry in this moment and what is not my responsibility to carry in this moment and that's just for the folks who learn to carry very early. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's true for a lot of us, right? Like I I often will tell people I know I did this for the longest time as I engaged my safety based on how other people in the room were feeling. I'm like if you're good and you're good and you're good and you're good, you know, yeah, codependent and meshed all the things, right? And we're often trained to be that way. Learning and what you just said, learning that peace was dependent upon you, how unfair is that? How unfair is it that the only way for peace to exist around me is if I make sure that there's peace in everyone else, not just in me, but I need to make sure it exists. Yeah, exactly. Everyone else. Like carrying it, but you know, that goes back to that carrying piece, you know, carrying whether someone else is feeling okay, but how much of that is really my responsibility? Yeah. And then focusing so much on things like that that we completely become dismissive or forget about who we want to become in this life. That's right. Because it's always been about, you know, everybody else. Yeah. And I just also want to name like sometimes we don't even realize we've learned these things because it's not like our parents told us directly you need to make sure everybody else in the room is okay. Oftentimes we just watched our mothers do it. Yeah. And we watched our grandmothers do it. And so then we assumed this is our place, right? And so some of this stuff is ancestral. Some of the stuff comes down from our lineage, right? And and I think when that is the case, it's even more important, you know, as you just said to ask the question, what part of this is really mine? And what part of it isn't? It's so freeing. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's so free. It's hard to get to because it feels wrong. It feels like you're looking some unspoken rule or for some people are spoken rule, but it feels inherently wrong or like morally wrong. And and we really just have to allow ourselves that freedom to really own the emotion we have, the motion we feel. And you talked about modeling after, you know, ancestors and just previous generations. And there's also when people just complimented you or praised you for doing something. So you learn, oh good girl because and is it mean that your parent intended to lighten still this weight or or thought process in you, but as such a young kid, when you get pat on the back or praise for, you know, doing something to make sure someone else was peaceful or making sure someone else who was sick, you when and rub them on their back like I have a niece who is the most little empathetic being ever. And um, so who was, I mean, since she was really little like age two or three, like if you didn't feel good, she goes and pulls your blanket up and she rounds around to get like a cool cloth and put it on you. And, you know, we do come from that. We come from very nurturing family, but she was just like that was just on overload for her. And, you know, at a young age, I can see, I don't know how she'll be as she becomes teenager like ear cues and stuff, but we can see at such a young age that she's just going to be that very just heartfelt compassionate little being in the world where her heart is literally in the world. And she does years to comfort and help others heal. But that's also going to be where we have to remember as her family to teach her that that's nice and that's kind. But you've got to make sure that you take care of you to your feelings matter, your heart matters, your needs matter. Don't don't outsource that so much that you shrink. And, and, and that's something that these conversations right here today help do for yeah people at her space that are growing women, you know. Absolutely. And, and, you know, a thousand percent yes for our children, for our daughters. And I just want to say I see this in the sea suite, right? I see it in the sweet where a woman is like, you know, she's getting complimented like, oh, you have it so together, you've got everything under control. And she's like one request away from losing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like screaming on the hand side and reveling in these compliments of how she's got it so together. And it's like that, I mean that that internal external incongruence is just it's not serving you, you know. It's more pressure. Is more pressure to keep on carrying that. So, you know, I don't know. So I could keep on going with this. But I do want to have another question for you. But before I do, I really want you to talk about just a little bit more maybe some examples of coming into the body. So that when we are struggling like, okay, I hear you, Shensha, I hear you, the keys, but I just stuck in my mind a lot. I overthink a lot. My fears, you know, hit me heavy and it's very hard for me to come out of past things. And my present, how do I really come into my body? Yeah. That rumination is real. So if you were to imagine, you know, your body is like a vessel for our being, right? you're imagining you as the being inside this vessel when you're ruminating you as the being are up here. Yeah, and it's almost like you're circling, right? So if you were to drop down into your body, I always tell people like imagine yourself moving from your brain down into your jaw, into your neck down, if you're really struggling with it down into your chest into your belly, you can put your hands on your belly for a minute, right? And then just be able to feel, can you feel that contact between your hands and your belly? And if you're in a situation where you can't do that, you know, like if you're in a leadership position and you're going to look a little weird, if you sit there, let me put my hands on my belly, it's a little weird. So just feel your feet on the floor, sometimes even press your feet into the floor. Basically, all you're doing is trying to get your awareness out of your head into your physicality, into some sort of physical sensation. So that you're remembering that there's also wisdom here within your body, right? And as soon as you do that, it's almost like you're getting out of the reality that your brain wants you to be in and you're coming into the reality of the present moment. Yeah, yeah. And also, I think it's important to remember that in those moments, oftentimes we feel a sense of urgency that is an illusion. Right? We're like grasping for answers in our brain. And we think we need to respond right away when it's actually okay to say, I need a minute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we learned a piece in that too, you know, the piece that, because when you are the person that wants to keep the piece and you people please all the time, even saying that I need a minute feels wrong. And feeling like there's going to be some drastic loss of connection, this drastic, you know, inevitable doom that's going to happen if I choose me in this moment. And when really it's just reshaping a new boundary that you've got to adjust to. It's really, it's a new boundary and it's uncomfortable, but it's going to be uncomfortable until you learn how to, you know, it's like new shoes, especially hard shoes, you know, they're uncomfortable, but once you learn how to wash, you know, and break them in a little bit, you're fine. So yeah, and I'm glad you said that too, because it can be an identity thing, like that's not the type of person I am. It's like that's not your identity. That's learned to behavior. And you can learn differently. And your identity, I mean, at least from my perspective, ideally, your identity is evolving as well. Right? Yeah. So I think it's okay to grow to change, to do all of those things and don't feel like you're losing yourself by setting your boundaries, because chances are you're gaining more of yourself. Yes, you spoke to. Yeah, you spoke to identity and that made me want to say on your own narrative, because sometimes people get stuck because then they get projected on to. You know, oh, you just don't want to have this conversation. Oh, you just or whatever, whatever they say about you. And you have to be okay with whatever projection has been thrown your way. And you have to own your own narrative. I am not. I need a minute. This is healthy for me. This is what I need. And those those type of statements help too. And I'm saying things I've done personally. This is what I need. This is what's important for me at this time. This is what's healthy for me. This is my boundary. And you have to reframe it in what's healthy and what your needs are, because one of the biggest things is that that's the thing that we stopped doing. That's the thing that we we evaded. So I think sometimes that fear of disappointing others from the whole people please ask because they'll project a narrative that we don't agree with about our character, the point of the identity. Yeah. Yeah. And people will project a way. I mean, there's a whole narrative around how women are supposed to show up. And just because you've grown doesn't mean your next door neighbor has. So yeah. Trust me. Yeah. Okay. Sean Shaw. Well, I have, you know, this this last one for you. You have this book. Okay. Unurth, the live carry and the troops we bury. First of all, amazing title. The title along is that. But can you tell us what the word un-earth means to you now after writing this book? Yeah. So my book Unurth, The Lies We Carry and The Truths They Bury. It's my memoir that's based on my story of sort of reclaiming myself from after experiencing spiritual and sexual abuse over many, many years. And a lot of my work centers on sort of my process as I went through that that healing. And so when I think about un-earth, it's a lot of what we're talking about, right? For me, un-earth means un-earthing these narratives that I was given or that I learned over time that are not necessarily mine. Un-earthing them and saying, what's a lie? And what's mine? What's not mine? And what is mine? And letting go of what doesn't serve me of what is not mine to carry. Both for myself and as a woman and as a mother so that I can pass down a little bit more of a filtered version of my narrative than what my mother gave me. And then also expect that my daughter is going to do her own un-earthing. And she's going to pass down different narratives, right? So to allow sort of this lineage to continue to evolve, you know, it's it's it's leadership work, it's personal development work. And for me, it's also very sacred work when I think about just my familial line. Yeah, love it, love it, love it, love it. Well, I can't wait to make sure I read it. It sounds like a lot of beautiful healing points in there and things that we can carry as far as just new beliefs that we carry on entire leadership about who we are as women today. So you guys go get the book, Shenzha, where can they get the book? So it's everywhere where books are sold. You can get them at your local indie bookshop. It's available on Amazon, all the places. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. Well, Shenzha has been absolutely amazing to chat with you. This is gotta be hands down one of my favorite topics when we start talking emotional. I lose track of time. So I love this and I want to direct women to you to connect with you all things, you know, leadership coaching, all the things. How can women connect with you and learn more? Yes, so my website is chunchallgarg.com. You're welcome to reach out to me there. I am pretty active on LinkedIn and on March 25th, I have an upcoming workshop called Ground Your Power in which we really start to sit with our own anger and how we reframe our anger into actual intelligence and wisdom. And so that's sort of a nice entry way into my work if you are looking to do that. Nice, nice. Well, I am so grateful that you came to the studio, Shenzha, thank you so much and let me be one of the first to welcome you to the We Sweet community. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. It's thank you so much. Okay. Thank you for listening to The We Sweet Podcast. Don't forget to follow me on [email protected] is in the podcast bio and I'll see you later soon.