Why Smart Women Podcast
Welcome to the Why Smart Women Podcast, hosted by Annie McCubbin. We explore why women sometimes make the wrong choices and offer insightful guidance for better, informed decisions. Through engaging discussions, interviews, and real-life stories, we empower women to harness their intelligence, question their instincts, and navigate life's complexities with confidence. Join us each week to uncover the secrets of smarter decision-making and celebrate the brilliance of women everywhere.
Why Smart Women Podcast
Is it Trauma or Tuesday?
Have we gone too far in labelling everyday emotional reactions as trauma? This thought-provoking episode tackles the complex territory between genuine traumatic experiences and normal human discomfort, offering a refreshing perspective on emotional resilience without dismissing real suffering.
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And then I walked into the second bedroom and not only was the milk sitting in there with the glass next to it, but the air conditioner had been left on, so the room was warm.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, and right now I can feel myself being triggered.
Speaker 1:You are listening to the why Smart Women podcast, the podcast that helps smart women work out why we repeatedly make the wrong decisions and how to make better ones. From relationships, career choices, finances, to faux fur jackets and kale smoothies. Every moment of every day, we're making decisions. Let's make them good ones.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, annie McCubbin, and, as a woman of a certain age, I've made my own share of really bad decisions. Not my husband, I don't mean him, though I did go through some shockers to find him, and I wish this podcast had been around to save me from myself. This podcast will give you insights into the working of your own brain, which will blow your mind. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which I'm recording and you are listening on this day. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Well, hello smart women, and welcome to this week's bonus episode of the why Smart Women podcast. This week, I'm going to be talking about the topic of. So this week's episode I'm going to be discussing the idea around is there too much relabeling of normal emotional reactions as trauma? And I'm going to be discussing that with David.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you picked another dangerous topic there.
Speaker 1:Hello, David, Hello.
Speaker 2:Annie, good morning.
Speaker 1:So we are broadcasting this morning from Sydney, Australia. It's nearly well, it's early winter here and it is cold. It's 11 degrees and it's 11 o'clock in the morning and it's 11 degrees, and that is cold.
Speaker 2:Well centigrade. So your Canadian friends would say that's nothing at all.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, you'd be laughing. Canadians would be laughing at us, but for us, we become hysterical if it drops below sort of 18 degrees. We've all got puffers and we're running around with hats on it's. All we can talk about is how cold it is.
Speaker 2:That's right. It's traumatic how cold it is. It's traumatic. I'm suffering the trauma of cold wind and not enough sun.
Speaker 1:So I did write a little article called Is there Too Much Playing in the Trauma Cub, which I'll read and then we can discuss.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Is that cool?
Speaker 2:It got some interesting responses. This article didn't it.
Speaker 1:A little bit of pushback, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what did you write?
Speaker 1:As we totter through life, we will find people difficult, unpredictable, unhinged, annoying, undermining, nasty and controlling. And depending on our genetics, the cultural environment we grew up in, how we were socialized and the stability of our families, we'll have different inherent capabilities to deal with them. So when one of these people exhibiting disappointing characteristics crosses our path, we have a choice. We can report to Michelle in HR or write a complaining email to someone, or we can deal with our response and the person's behavior ourselves. Now how to know which way to jump? I guess that depends on the severity of the power imbalance and the degree to which you're equipped to deal with it, which brings me to the notion of trauma.
Speaker 1:Are we triggered or just annoyed? We all had a childhood. What we did not have across the board is a traumatized childhood, so the idea that we must avoid being triggered is misplaced. Are we assisting our children and, by extension, our employees by reinforcing the idea that, to function, the environment they assume around in must be empathetic, gentle, compassionate and safe, that their mental health is so fragile that anything less than this and they will dissolve? Can we ever control the environment adequately? No. Can we ever fully legislate against rudeness, hostility and personal stupidity? No, not ever. What we can do is manage our responses and learn when to access the sass, when to back away and how not to let John, the gaslighting narcissist, to get the better of us, because, like the Russian dolls, there's always another Josh doll waiting to emerge from the nest. Don't get me wrong, I'm not coming down on the side of poor men, can't say anything anymore. We need to shut down that dangerous sexist rubbish ASAP because, as we know, it's the ground being laid for coercion and control. So, no, no, no, not that, but it's complicated out there. Are we losing the capacity to discern between the dangerous, toxic and unconscionable and the clumsy, irritating, rude and self-centered? Because if we reflexively narrow our eyes at anything that we find personally triggering and this has immediately escalated then, overworked Michelle from HR will have to devote precious time trying to differentiate between the genuine and the frivolous, which leaves the voices of the truly undermined, gaslit, assaulted and intimidated, drowned out in the backwash of the mildly aggrieved. If everyone is offended, then we're in the impossible realm of trying to create an environment which will adjust itself to suit our every sensibility. Perhaps we are simply relabeling normal emotions. And who is benefiting? Expensive retreats, online supplement vendors, healers and, of course, the wellness juggernaut, which excels at creating a problem so they can market the hell out of their unproven pseudoscientific solutions.
Speaker 1:Helping those of us who are fundamentally okay, came from stable upbringings and who have the occasional wobble to robustly deal with the awful people is more helpful than climbing aboard the triggered bus and raising the alert level to code red. No childhood is perfect. No parent is perfect. Once you have children, you can look back on your own childhood and see, with freshly minted parent eyes, what a total pain in the arse you were to your own parents. And yet we are fed the notion that we must be helped, fixed, reparented. We must attend workshops, retreats, have our childhoods taken apart, examined and put back together again and sent back out into the world with the salve applied to our childhood wounds.
Speaker 1:Of course, we all emerge from our childhoods with unhelpful attitudes, unconscious beliefs and skewed biases that guide our behavior. So deal with it. Have a look under the bonnet, see what's working and what's not. Get some therapy, do some coaching, learn some skills. Then maybe let it go. We are not all mortally wounded by our childhoods. Only some of us are. Some of our childhoods are littered with disappointments, irritations and unresolved childhood furies when our sibling repeatedly received the academic achievement award and we were left with an unframed participation award and a tepid parental tap on the back.
Speaker 1:I'm not advocating return to the suck it up and get on with it days of yours. Actually, for those of us who are fundamentally equipped to do that, I sort of am. There are people in the world right now suffering the most egregious affronts to their existence, who are suffering horrendous assaults on their physical safety. They don't need to look for offence. Their entire world is an offence to them, whether they're in an active war zone or the war zone is their own home. They need our undivided attention.
Speaker 1:If your childhood was average, then maybe don't hop on the. I'm wounded and you're triggering the bus. That bus has allocated limited seating for the truly traumatized. Maybe hold their hand and help them up on the bus. Show them that they are not alone, that the seats around them are taken up with their fellow sufferers. Whisper in their ear that they are worthy of love and help is on the way. Then step down, walk back down the street, watch the bus drive away and be glad you escaped with minimal damage.
Speaker 1:Go back to work and if Josh makes an annoying but ambiguous aside, take a breath before you decide to report him. Give him some of your best sass, or take a leaf out of the good old bible and turn the other cheek. And if you live in a secure home without the enemy entering through your front door with their own key, if you can drink a cup of tea in the relative peace under a quiet sky, unburdened by the threat of an incoming missile, then maybe your troubles are not calamitous. Calamity can, of course, crook its finger at any of us at any time. If you want to reserve the right to smite your enemies, then maybe keep some fight in reserve, with apologies to Josh.
Speaker 2:What a lovely piece of writing. Oh, thanks, David. No, you pose a very important question there.
Speaker 1:Can you give me more praise before you go on?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I was just going to say, I mean, this is praise the important question that you posit. You know why are praise the important question that you posit? Why are there so many?
Speaker 1:women in HR called Michelle. Why are there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess they're lucky. What motivated you to take that line? Because I could forecast that some people aren't going to like it very, very much. You know taking away their trauma card if you like. You know even calling it a trauma card. I mean, you don't understand how I feel. You know you're probably inviting a bit of resistance, a bit of hostility. Why?
Speaker 1:did you want to say that? I know I thought long and hard before I. I thought long and hard before I wrote it because I don't want to sound like you're a snowflake.
Speaker 1:Toughen up, princess, toughen up, princess, right wing commentator and I'm not. I'm not. I sit very firmly to the left. I'm not. I sit very firmly to the left and I am very, very aware of the power imbalance, where people really are abused and really are triggered and really do feel powerless and really do feel voiceless. And what I'm seeing is a dilution of the attention that we need to be giving to people who are genuinely traumatized, who are genuinely abused, who are genuinely powerless. I'm seeing a dilution because it's being hijacked by people that just have an uncomfortable experience and then say they were traumatized. Just have an uncomfortable experience and then say they were traumatized. There was somebody in my circle recently talking to another person not to me directly, which is lucky and they were saying how they were really triggered because they were ghosted online by someone. Well, I mean, is that actually traumatising or is that just a very uncomfortable, awful feeling that will pass?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're just pausing for a minute to hear a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2:The why Smart Women podcast is brought to you by Koo, a boutique training, coaching and media production company. A Koo spelt C-O-U-P, is a decisive act of leadership, and decisive leadership requires critical thinking. So well done you for investing time to think about your thinking, If your leadership or relationships would benefit from some grounded and creative support. If you want team training or a conference presentation, reach out for a confidential one-on-one conversation using the link in the description or go to coupcom cove I mean I, I think, what is trauma?
Speaker 1:what do we say? What is it?
Speaker 2:as I understand it, in clinical terms, trauma typically involves being exposed to actual or threatened death, you know, to serious injury or to sexual violence. I think that's the criteria in the dsm-5. Yeah, um, it can be direct, so it could be happening to you, it can be witnessed, or it can be vicarious. So if you've got first responders, you know, turning up on, a've got first responders turning up to a place where children have been injured or hurt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Terrible shock to the system.
Speaker 2:And again, the clinical definition says that it can result then in clinical PTSD or complex.
Speaker 1:PTSD.
Speaker 2:So that's post-traumatic stress disorder, that's right and then dissociative disorders. So it's exposure to an event that seriously impacts on your capacity to be able to deal with life on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 1:So your functionality drops. You can't cope anymore. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Which is terrible. You literally can't cope.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now it's not being ghosted by somebody that you can't see you know it's.
Speaker 1:It's not being given critical feedback at work you see that okay, and that's, that's a really good point. Um, so I, I, you know, I I do have people that work in business and and they now have to be so careful as to the language that is used in a feedback session, in a review, in case the person is offended. And I see I sound right wing, I sound and I'm not. I'm not, but we have to have some resilience around the environment. Not being perfect, nobody is going to think you're doing a great job all the time. You're not. You need to be able to get feedback and we don't want to go back to the days of yore, when you know anybody, when it was abusive and people could do what they liked and they could scream down the house and they could be sexually inappropriate with employees. We don't, i'm'm not. That's terrible and we do need to to move past that. But we're in some strange sort of place now where everything's amortized into this generalized notion. If I don't like it, I'm triggered yes, I mean it's.
Speaker 2:It's a um, it's a. It's a dynamic that's been parodied by a few online videos that I've seen. You know, with the millennials, who now have the language and the concepts and the encouragement to shut down, you know their teachers at school. You know teachers who are just trying to apply you know normal disciplines to the classroom and they're going. No, you're triggering me and you know you're not looking after my emotions. I can see why you. Publishing this article would actually get up people's nose, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too, you know.
Speaker 2:I can feel you saying look, I'm terribly sorry, I'm not right wing, I'm not telling you. You know, toughen up, princess, but something is compelling you to still make this point. You know, if you don't mind me disclosing a little bit of your history, you actually did have exposure to life-threatening illness when you were a child.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, that's right. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So I mean, there were many times because of your asthma and you know the strange treatments. How did they used to? Didn't they burn paper in the room, or something like that?
Speaker 1:Darling, I wasn't born in 1922. You're thinking about Patrick White.
Speaker 2:Oh am I.
Speaker 1:Patrick White, the author. He's a fantastic author.
Speaker 2:He had asthma, and then they just burnt newspapers or something.
Speaker 1:They could do nothing about asthma, so they used to burn these terrible, these sort of papers in the room to try and fix it. No look, I was very fortunately born into a period where there was good treatments for asthma, but didn't mean I stopped getting it. And I was very, very ill for a number of years.
Speaker 2:What age were you when it was at the worst?
Speaker 1:See, it's interesting, isn't it? I can feel I don't particularly like talking about it yeah, yeah. So it still sits in there somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It just doesn't dominate my life. I guess I was at my worst between maybe seven and ten or eleven.
Speaker 1:I couldn't go to school, I had to be homeschooled and, um, I was deaf, I was definitely very, very ill, and they said to my um parents you'd better give her steroids or she will, she won't, she won't, she won't live. Because it was so, it was so serious and they were in the days. Well, still now steroids are a very two-edged sword, but they cause a lot of physical malformations and my father said she's going to be all right, don't give them to her. And of course I am. I started swimming. I started swimming, I think, at 12. And that really improved things, but it was very, very frightening and very frightening for my parents. It's awful for me, and I spent years and years and years just in ambulances and hospitals.
Speaker 2:But if you were to lay your experience of, say, the DSM definition?
Speaker 1:I have a yeah, I have a generalized anxiety disorder, but it's very well managed and that's because my neural pathways were changed by being constantly exposed to a life-threatening situation. So I probably do have some PTSD, I don't know, but it does not in any way. It gives me health anxiety, as you know, and I'm a bit weird around that, but I don't. I am capable, very capable of just until it rears its head. I just compartmentalize it, it's over there, I don't think about it. It doesn't ruin my life. It hasn't ruined my life life. It hasn't ruined my life, um, and I would say to you that in some ways it has.
Speaker 1:I am very, a very optimistic person yeah and capable of looking at um how lucky I am to be alive and what a great life I have, probably because it is that is the background of my life is that I? Nearly didn't have it, so in a lot of ways it's actually worked for me.
Speaker 2:It is so sweet, are the uses of adversity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's kind of a nice positive statement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:But I think it sometimes goes wrong when we say that which does not kill you makes you stronger.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that's just bullshit.
Speaker 2:Because that's not Sometimes. That which does not kill you can actually.
Speaker 1:Just maim you for life. Yeah, that notion of everybody needs to be resilient and just celebrating their disabilities is really frigging annoying yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but if you are able to, you know, return to a baseline, if you are able to, you know, function and recover, then yes, it's probably not trauma, it's just normal human distress. Why is it? Do you think that some people are inclined to gravitate towards describing a challenging situation?
Speaker 1:or a developmental challenge as trauma Like what? Okay, give me an example.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you've been quite happy to talk about my ADHD in the past.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, okay, yes, david.
Speaker 2:My history with ADHD. I wasn't diagnosed until my very late 40s, and so I kind of grew up with a whole lot of challenges that had no explanation. Sure, which is awful, which is awful, and I think it has actually shaped my psychology. There's that defensiveness that comes with it, that overdeveloped look I'm just doing the best that I can kind of emotional thing, and, yes, sometimes I will be triggered into that thought process.
Speaker 1:Do you mean like when I got up the other morning to make a cup of tea?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I had remembered that you had gone downstairs to Woolies bought some milk, and I couldn't find it. It's not like I had to look in the West Wing, because this apartment is only as big as a freaking postage stamp.
Speaker 2:You had to talk about this, didn't?
Speaker 1:you. That's so funny. So then I'm like, where's the? And then I began to go. Did he not buy milk? But then I remember you coming in the door with the milk, and so I'm looking and I thought maybe he absentmindedly stuck it in the pantry. And it wasn't in the pantry. And then I had to have a cup of tea before I went to the gym and so I said you were still asleep. I said, David, do you know where the milk is? And you went, hang on, I think it's in the lounge room. It wasn't, Anyway?
Speaker 2:then I think I worked it out. It was the second bedroom.
Speaker 1:And then you said it's in the second bedroom. And it was in the second bedroom, next to the bed, on the night table, the whole two litres of milk with a glass next to it. And as I was going towards the second bedroom, you called out but it's okay, because it's cold overnight, because I'm super fussy about food and temperature. And then I walked into the second bedroom and not only was the milk sitting in there with the glass next to it, but the air conditioner had been left on, so the room was warm.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, and right now I can feel myself being triggered. Oh, can you? Yeah, yeah, I can feel the trigger because I wanted to say listen, the reason I was in the second bedroom is because I wanted to be nice and quiet so that I didn't disturb you. Which?
Speaker 1:is reasonable.
Speaker 2:Because you get cranky with me if I make any noise that is true, that's right. So I was in the second bedroom and I was going to have a glass of milk.
Speaker 1:Just let me ask you why couldn't you have poured the glass of milk like near where the glass was and near the fridge?
Speaker 2:Why would?
Speaker 1:you take the two litres and the glass.
Speaker 2:Because there's an explanation for that Go go, go, but it's complex and embarrassing.
Speaker 1:Go on.
Speaker 2:Because there was water in the glass and I was going to sit down and I was going to drink the water and then I was going to add the milk on top, but then I got distracted by something that was on the television and then I fell asleep. Where?
Speaker 1:In the second bedroom. Yeah, I fell asleep in the second bedroom. Why didn't you get another glass?
Speaker 2:Well, because the dishwasher's broken.
Speaker 1:The dishwasher's in fact broken.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so yes, my psychology, when faced with the terrible realization that I've done something ridiculous and stupid again, my mind absolutely goes towards you know the defensive explanation. You know to try and preserve my sense of identity, etc. Etc. Etc. So definitely that is a trigger.
Speaker 1:Definitely it was an uncomfortable experience when I was young and didn't know why it was that I couldn't sure I couldn't keep breathing, I couldn't keep up, you know, with the thank god, for now we understand, you know, we understand your neurodiversity and you will be supported, and so people should be.
Speaker 2:That's right. But I can't say that that persistent, uncomfortable and alienating experience as a child was actually trauma, because I do have some perspective on it. It doesn't overwhelm my capacity to, you know, find my centre. It isn't persistent all the time. You know I can observe my thinking and go oh look, you know, just let it go through to the keeper, apologise for leaving the milk out and try and do better next time. So I guess I wouldn't call that trauma either. And so then I do get a little bit irritated by, you know, other people who have disappointments in their life and then they, you know, they call on the cavalry because, you know they, they now have the language to describe it as something you know, deep and wide and intractable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then somebody has to be wrong. In that you know they have to make somebody else wrong. I mean, we cannot.
Speaker 2:That's right, you're doing this to me.
Speaker 1:You're doing this to me and it's as I said in the piece, it's complex, it is really complex and, of course, none of us did have a perfect childhood, of course. And we've all got patterns of behavior, we've got unconscious biases, we've got, you know, unconscious belief systems that drive behavior, and I'm firmly believe, firmly, that we should be at some point talking to somebody, to a psychologist or a coach, and going can we take this apart?
Speaker 1:have a look at it to see if that because all of us are making decisions based off flawed data all of us, yes um, but that doesn't mean that just because all of us had flawed childhoods, that all of us had traumatic childhoods, it doesn't mean that and I don't think it helps. I just don't think it helps the individual for them to exist in a world where we're going to adjust everything because they're not comfortable, because it's not life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay. So there's a again. I come back to the. You know the danger of the topic. It's like you're taking away someone's license to demand attention. You know, taking away people's license to demand that they're treated, you know, more kindly. So that's, you know. That's the downside. What's the upside of being able to discern that was just a challenging experience. From that was trauma and I'm now traumatized. What's the upside?
Speaker 1:Of being able to discern that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's the good news?
Speaker 1:What's the encouraging element? Well, you won't live such a dysregulated life If you can discern and manage. I mean being able to manage your emotions is a massive predictor of having a more successful life Financially, emotionally, relationships, health, emotional stability and not being dysregulated is absolutely massive. So if you can identify what's going on for you, put it in context, reframe it, understand that um, you know in, understand it contextually and then choose a response instead of you being tossed about by your emotions. There's massive upsides to it. You know they've done lots of studies on um dysregulated, you know, children into teenagers and then they've tracked them. So ones that were, you know, highly reactive, um, highly argumentative, highly oppositional, explosive, combative, all of it, um and the data around there as they have progressed through life, as opposed to ones that could actually moderate, um, control themselves, choose something as opposed to it. Choosing them that, choosing them the, the life outcomes. It's just, it's black and white yeah, okay, okay.
Speaker 2:So so if I'm too quick to call my emotional state trauma, what I'm actually doing is I'm putting the locus of control outside of myself, and so it's an act of of actual disempowerment, while creating the wrong kind of power over other people in the environment a hundred%.
Speaker 1:You know. They now know that trigger warnings outside theatres etc are counterproductive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's a trigger warning outside of a theatre?
Speaker 1:You know, if you go and see a production of Hamlet, it might say there is violence.
Speaker 2:And you know, suicidal.
Speaker 1:Suicidal ideation or whatever in it, and apparently it's really counterproductive because then, people just get set up.
Speaker 1:And you know, apparently somebody made a big complaint recently because they went to Hamlet and hadn't read it outside or didn't know that there was a suicide in it. And I'm like hello, hello, when was Hamlet and hadn't read it outside or didn't know that there was a suicide in it? I'm like hello, hello, when was Hamlet written? You know, educate yourself. Come on, really you were triggered because you sat in Hamlet and Ophelia died. Come on, guys, let's get a grip on ourselves here. It's Shakespeare, stuff's going to happen. There's war, death, suicide. There's everything in there right.
Speaker 1:And then you're rewriting history. Oh, it's a very, very, very complicated area and sometimes I find myself coming down on the side of white comedians, middle-aged white comedians like Ricky Gervais, et cetera, or John Cleese, who are like um, we, we can't. Are we now reordering everything so that we have? We have to be so careful that no one's offended. Um, and it it's. It's difficult. You know, I look out at the moment at what's going on around the world. You know the appalling situation in Gaza, and every time I walk into a supermarket, every time I go to bed at night, every time I turn my tap on, I think to myself there are people in many parts of the world but I'm holding Gaza in my mind at the moment um, who don't have the basics and it does inform the way I think about my life yeah, it does. And they, they are traumatized. You know not, um, having somebody give you a, you know a six out of ten on a performance review is is not, you know, living with the threat of a bomb over your head.
Speaker 2:So you have opened up a can of worms a complex one and a dynamic one, because it's always shifting, and it's certainly impossible for us to be able to describe the line that separates trauma from normal challenging experiences.
Speaker 1:Did you say it's impossible? Yeah, it's impossible for us to Well, people are going to have to do it for themselves.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:So we know this is a real can of worms. We know that Highly, highly complex. We've got to try and land somewhere right so that we can be helpful. Otherwise why are people listening? So what do you reckon?
Speaker 2:I mean, I guess for the people who are listening, that's right. It's up to you to make that judgment yourself. I think the antidote what judgment? Well, the judgment is is this trauma?
Speaker 1:Or am I triggered, or do I just not like it?
Speaker 2:Or is this something else? Certainly, the antidote to the problem isn't to dismiss people's pain.
Speaker 1:No, it's not to dismiss it.
Speaker 2:No, not to dismiss other people's pain or the pain that you're experiencing yourself. But what you can do is name it. Name it accurately.
Speaker 1:Name? What Name the pain?
Speaker 2:You know, I'm feeling, I'm feeling.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's just say, let something happen to me this morning. Let's say, imagine someone was really really rude to me when I was just trying to be nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm feeling misunderstood, I'm feeling disrespected.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know I'm feeling and that hurts, that hurts, you know I'm hurt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I was trying to help this woman to back a car in, I said do you want me to? I was sort of trying to guide her, yes. And I said do you want me to? I was sort of trying to guide her, yes. I said you're really close, sort of you know, and she put her head out and she said I have reversed this car for 10 years. Yeah, okay, thank you. I was like oh, have you, yeah, I was trying to help Okay. I sort of hurt my feelings.
Speaker 2:I hurt my feelings and she was also, you know, triggered into snapping back at you. So much triggering, okay, but yeah, to name it accurately, you know, I just feel hurt.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To then just meet it with compassion Meet what Meet the feeling? Yeah, meet the feeling with compassion. You know, yes, it hurts. You know, yes, it's sad, yes, it's uncomfortable, and then just face what you can face. You know to notice the feeling and go. Well, you know, is this actually going to stay with me forever? You know, is this pain going to? No, it's not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been ghosted. Let's say it hurts, I don't like it, I feel betrayed. I've put however many weeks into this and then he's just, you know, for no reason, stopped replying to my texts. Let's just say that's very painful.
Speaker 2:yes, meet it with compassion meet your response with compassion and look in the work that we do with acceptance, commitment, therapy there are little processes that you can do, Just putting your hand on your heart and going yeah, that hurts.
Speaker 1:That hurts, as opposed to just resisting it and pretending it's not happening.
Speaker 2:As opposed to pretending it's not happening.
Speaker 1:But you don't have to swim around in it, and I think that's the difference.
Speaker 2:That's right. You don't have to elevate it, you don't have to turn the pain into your life's work no right, it's just, it's momentary, and it's awful, and that's life for you, though, isn't it?
Speaker 1:life is up and down and not happy all the time.
Speaker 2:It's impossible and your life's work is actually looking after the people that you care about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, looking after yourself I think we will come back and retouch on this. I won't mention the leaving of the milk in the second bedroom.
Speaker 2:You won't do it again I feel, I feel completely unsung, triggered by your mention of the milk the milk. Yeah, the milkings will call it the mi I don't know whether these conversations are psychologically safe for me, and oh yes, safe spaces, that's the other one yes um, so thank you so much for listening and I'm going to pass over to David.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, look when Annie told me that she was writing this article and when I read it, I could see that it was complex. We're in an area which is very personal and, apart from producing these podcasts, annie and I both see clients corporate and therapeutic and we work on issues like these, you know, helping people to get their thoughts straight around what is motivating them to do, or not do, the things that shape their life. If anybody listening to the podcast would like to book some time, you'll find a link in the description that will give you access to our booking calendar, and we'd be delighted to have a one-to-one conversation with you if you feel that that would help. How's that, annie?
Speaker 1:Very good, david. Thanks so much for listening. And, david, don't forget to put the milk back in the fridge.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll do it now. See you later.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. And, David, don't forget to put the milk back in the fridge. Okay, I'll do it now. See you later. Thanks for listening. Bye, Thanks for tuning in to why Smart Women with me, Annie McCubbin.
Speaker 1:I hope today's episode has ignited your curiosity and left you feeling inspired by my anti-motivational style. Join me next time as we continue to unravel the fascinating layers of our brains and develop ways to sort out the fact from the fiction and the over 6,000 thoughts we have in the course of every day. Remember, intelligence isn't enough. You can be as smart as paint, but it's not just about what you know, it's about how you think. And in all this talk of whether or not you can trust your gut, if you ever feel unsafe, whether it's in the street, at work, in a car park, in a bar or in your own home, please, please respect that gut feeling. Staying safe needs to be our primary objective. We can build better lives, but we have to stay safe to do that.
Speaker 1:And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and share it with your fellow smart women and allies. Together, we're hopefully reshaping the narrative around women and making better decisions. So until next time, stay sharp, stay savvy and keep your critical thinking hat shiny. This is Annie McCubbin signing off from why Smart Women? See you later. This episode was produced by Harrison Hess. It was executive produced and written by me, Annie McCubbin.
