I had the pleasure of being interviewed by La Shanda Sugg on her podcast The Labors of Love Podcast. Shanda and I talked about individualism, shame and feelings.

Listen to the podcast or scroll down for the transcript.

Transcript

Shanda:  Hey everyone, it's La Shanda from Labors of Love, and you are listening to The Labors of Love Podcast. Very excited to have a conversation with my guest today. She is a therapist turned Feelings Translator. I have with me today, Joanne Kim. Hi Joanne.

Joanne: Hi, good to be here.

Shanda: So glad to have you. I'm going to start with you, like I do all of my guests, and ask, “What is your Labor of Love?”

My Labor of Love

Joanne: My biggest passion on a grand 30,000 feet view is as a dream activator. I love getting to know people according to the unique individual they are and to draw out the big dreams that they have and actually turn it into reality.

One way that I do that is by helping people tap into their full range of emotions and also their emotional habits that really reveal what matters the most to them.

You know how when people go to watch a movie with other people, they're watching the exact same movie, but they have different feelings being stirred up, even though they're watching the same movie. Each of their own personal reactions reflects who they are, their individuality, their values, their life experiences. Some parts of the movie will be really heartwarming and exciting for someone and then for another person that's going to trigger them. It's not to say that one person's experience is inherently good or bad, all of them matter. There's enough room for everyone's experiences. Instead of judging ourselves for having certain experiences or certain reactions, can we actually use that as a springboard to really get to know ourselves and also get to know one another.

You go to the movie theater together and you watch the same movie, and my favorite part usually is the conversations that happen afterwards as we're debriefing.

“What did you think about that scene and about that scene?”

“About that character?”

“That person was really annoying, etc”

Unpacking that afterwards makes even the first event of watching the movie all the richer.

I love helping people do that with their own life experiences.

Shanda: I appreciate that. And I love so much of what you said.

A few things came up for me while you were speaking. One, a dream activator. That's intriguing to me. And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about it. I think what was the most interesting about it is I am a person who is learning how to dream. Some people were big dreamers as children. And then life happens, right? So, there is a reclamation of imagination and dreaming that they experience. Some people have maintained that their whole lives, and then there are some people, and this is not an exclusive three category, but I fall on the end of the spectrum of a person who dreaming was just not part of the experience I had growing up. That doesn't mean that that capacity is not in me. So, I love that idea of dream activation.

Second, the full spectrum of emotions. Love that. So much of the work I do is helping people recognize that their body can handle it and helping them create the room inside of themselves to hold it.

I love this idea about going to the movies. What struck me most is how non-accommodating our culture is to what you described. From the sheer existence of critics that say, “This movie is good.”  “This movie is bad.” So much weight goes into one person's very subjective determination about a film.

How I see that play out, particularly on social media, my insights churn a little bit when this happens. It happens all the time that someone is like, “That movie was trash.” I'm like, “Well, first of all, there is a difference between that movie is trash and I didn't like it.” I think we should just start there.

You have a right not to like it. You don't even have to explain why. But to declare something as trash because one person in their limited experiences of life did not have a good experience watching or couldn't relate.

Someone else says, “Oh my God, it's the best thing ever.”

It's almost as if those are the only two camps: It was amazing or it sucks. Then they go at each other.

Nuance, individuation, all these things are just not generally supported in our generalized culture.

When you have people that you are supporting and you get to be with and journey with, who live in the same culture that we do, talk us through a little bit of what the path and arc way of how you help someone move from what we internalize in our culture to being able to say, “I am an individual who has a lot of different feelings, sometimes simultaneously at the same time.” What's that like?

Joanne: There was something that you said earlier when you were talking about dream activation and your own experiences and finding out later in life that it wasn't a regular part of your early life experience, a more recent thing.

The vast majority of the people I work with are Highly Sensitive Persons, empaths, people who have big feelings, in environments or families who didn't do feelings. Lots of people who are in marginalized groups where it's not safe to have or express their own feelings. A lot of people who tend to absorb other people's stuff, like women, people of color, like all that, right?

If I were interacting with someone who happens to be in the dominant category or culture, frankly, they're assumed to have big dreams and to be able to do something about it. So, they don't even think twice, they just do the thing.

I love working with people whose dream capacity has been so dampened because it wasn't safe. Because they were rejected or criticized or judged or they've learned how to shapeshift and accommodate whatever other people's opinions or expectations were. It's usually after a major crisis, like a breakup, or getting fired from a job, or a kid's leaving for college and being an empty nester, or all of a sudden there's all this space that opens up where the individual is like, “What do I do now? I've oriented myself around other people's needs and expectations my whole life, and now I have no idea what to do next.” Midlife crisis, core life crisis, end of life crisis, all those things.

For myself, I am an Enneagram Type Four. One of the terms used for Fours is called The Individualist. There is a built in assumption within my Type Autopilot in that everyone is an individual and we are all different. Actually, Fours gets stuck in thinking, “I am more different than everyone else.” But there's a lot of room for our own respective, subjective experiences compared to some other folks who think their opinion is the opinion, the capital “T” truth. Those folks need to learn how to soften up and account that there may be many subjective truths that can also coexist.

I tend to lean on the spectrum in assuming that everyone's truth is their own truth and it's all different. In the way that I work with people is encouraging them to consider, yes, there are the louder truths that are spoken like on the pulpit, over the radio, in movies, social media and all that stuff, but that doesn't negate your own personal, subjective experience. It's just that that's the very message that a lot of my people need to heal from because their whole lives they've been told that their experiences don't matter. Their feelings are immature or irrational, and there's a lot of repair work that people need to do. A lot of healing they need to do. Even in reconciling with their own emotions with their own subjective experiences. Giving themselves permission to be a self, be their own individual. To have their own experiences, instead of being defined as an extension of someone else, either someone who aligns with someone else or someone who's against someone else.

You mentioned the word individuation, and that's a lot of experience, actually.

Shanda: As you were talking again, I'm coming back to the cultural implications, and by culture I'm really just talking American at this point. I'm sure it could branch out Western but talking about American culture, by and large, the dominant narratives and cultures and identities that get to make the rules and get to change them when it is convenient for them. As you were talking I thought, let me think about my own experience when was Shanda explicitly told, shown, or demonstrated that she was an individual.

Then I thought about school. I went to a Catholic school from kindergarten to 12th grade. Kindergarten to 8th grade, there was a uniform. So, I think about the fact that to this day one of the hardest parts of my day is picking clothes. I don't do well with that. I have a partner who I'm like, “What should I wear today?” Who at least steer me in the right direction. Or at least ask him the right questions, or he might make a suggestion. And even if I don't want that, that goes, nope, I don't want that. But I'll do that because a very basic thing that I think some people take for granted is I spent most of my life in the formative years of my life, not having to think about what to wear, fashion. So, I have an underdeveloped muscle when it comes to thinking about that. I knew what I was going to wear. The choices were, do I want the jumper or the skirt today? White shirt or blue shirt. That was it. I didn't learn it in that regard.

Then primary education looks like: I'm going to give you information and your worth is determined by how well you give that information back to me, the way I gave it to you. That sums up our education system. I learned really well how to give it back to people and I even got bonus points for being very articulate and eloquent and passionate in all the things in which I could return information. But I was never encouraged through the education system to ask myself,

“What do you think?”

“How do you feel?”

“Does this match your lived experience?”

Nah, that wasn't it.

So, a lot of experience art, music, recreation, were all kind of structured in a way that didn't go, “What would you like?”

There were no African drums in my music class. But we have the recorder and classical music, so it's like all this indoctrination.

Then I thought, did I learn it in church? Nope. Church was actually just like school. I'm going to give you information and your worth is directly connected to your ability to give me back the information that I gave you. If you can do it on the Easter Sunday with a microphone and a pretty dress, you get bonus points. So I did it. Nowhere through my Christian upbringing, did anyone say, “What is your individual relationship?” How are you experiencing this as Shanda, who's different than every other person who’s here?”

Then within my family, no, they were drinking the same Kool Aid. I was drinking the same Kool Aid that they were. They were giving it to me.

I can genuinely appreciate this idea of sometimes the working starting with, I am a self. There are so many times where we're actually taught we're not a self. I was taught I was a black woman. I was taught I was a woman. I was told I was black. I was told about the intersection of those. I grew up in a fat body. So I understood myself as that. But a self, no. That's a discovery I had to make way down the line kind of by myself as an adult. So, I really appreciate that.

What do you find when people come into selfhood? And they enter into this new thing of like, “Whoa, I'm actually an individual who has at least the capacity for all of these different things.” What are some of the reactions that you often see from people when they get to that point?

Coming Into Selfhood

Joanne:  I think a lot of it mimics the Stages of Grief. At first, it’s like, “What do you mean I have a self?” It doesn't even register to them. It’s just in one ear and out the other,

There's a lot of envy and a lot of shame that those individuals feel on the inside, that when they look to other people, it's like, “I really wish I could be like them.”

So, there's a lot of mimicry that happens, which for kids growing up is a totally normal part of the developmental process. They look to others like, “Wow, that person looks so and so” or “Look at what they can do”, “look at the attention that they get from other people around them.” It's like, let me see if I can try to do just like that and then see what happens. If it goes well, then great keep going. If it doesn't go well then there's extra shame. “Why does it work for them, but not for me? It must mean that there must be something extra bad about me.” Even in the process of considering oneself as an individual that doesn't even come anywhere within the purview until the person experiences shame.

Shame is inherently an emotion that highlights one's individual essence, individual personhood. Shame, like with all the emotions, no emotion is inherently good or bad. They're very informational. A lot of people think shame is a bad emotion. Well, it's uncomfortable, but it's not necessarily bad. The themes behind it is: I better fit in because I don't already fit in.

There are some individuals where you see them like talking on camera or whatever. It's like, that is so shameless. I wish they had a little bit more shame. That they could be more conscientious and considerate of other people, more respectful, et cetera.

When we look at a lot of the collectivistic shame driven countries in the world, you will not see any trash on the streets outside, super clean and immaculate. The subway systems work really well. Everything is flowing very smoothly. Then we come to the United States, I live in the Bay Area, and our public transportation system is trash. That's not even my subjective opinion. There's literally trash on the floor and all around. Shame, even that is not a bad emotion, but it does say I am distinct from the group. Our introduction to our own individualism, unfortunately, is through the feeling of shame. I am different. I am disconnected. I am other than whatever is the dominant culture. Not a bad thing, but it's a very painful experience.

Even within shame, there's a lot of lessons we can glean from it. Shame is a very, very common experience for post puberty, middle school, high school. We become super self conscious. Up until fifth grade, and it's like kids might feel shame, but that's not the predominant experience, it's more, “Can I do it?” More achievement focused. I see the thing, can I mimic the thing? Can I get rewarded? And if not, can I change something about how I show off so that I can be more aligned with the collective? There's not a whole lot of individualism. That's the emphasis there.

It's usually like middle school when, my friend calls it the Barnyard Years: you start looking funny, sounding funny, smelling funny. Everything changes. Our world completely obliterates. We become so fixated on ourselves that people enter into the emo teenage years where there’s so many feelings, partially because we're extra focused on self.  We might actually mirror that experience too.

Shanda: Yes. And so many emotions when there's, generally speaking, nothing set up around you to encourage you to feel them, encourage you to understand them, encourage you to name them, to normalize them.

I’ve had children and how the oxytocin and all these chemicals get released to kind of help you forget that your body just went through a terrible trauma and almost ripped you in half so you actually do that again, right? I feel like that's part of the process.

What happens going into adulthood around adolescents, people forget. I'm constantly sitting in a place trying to remind adults, let me help you remember because all the judgment you have for that adolescent right there, it was you. I'm not saying it looked exactly like that, but you went through this experience.

I  really appreciate you talking about mimicry. I don't know if mimicry is a word, but it feels real good when I say mimicry. I also feel like we have, I'm still talking about our generalized culture, has been misinformed about so many things. One of them is that chronological age and developmental age are synonymous and simultaneous, and they're not.

Someone like myself, who said dreaming wasn't part of my growing up experience, to expect that I now recognize that and just because I have that awareness all of a sudden I'm going to have the capacity and capability as if I've been developing this for 40 years. It's completely unrealistic.

People are coming into these new awarenesses is about themselves but there is sometimes, and often, an expectation that they're going to have a mastery of it just because they recognize it's not there. Instead, no, you're going to go through the stages of development that you would have had this been something that was part of your life since birth or since childhood. But there are so little tolerance. Personal, individual tolerance, societal tolerance. So little tolerance for people to go through the stages. There's so much judgment and shame heaped onto other people because they're still trying to figure it out.

The example you use, particularly with mimicry, you look at another person and you go, “Wait, so I'm an individual. Look at that person. Look how she does that thing. I like that. I like the results that she's getting. I'm going to try it.” Then you'll have people be like, “You need to be yourself. Don't go around doing what everybody else is doing.”

It's like time out people!

One, I do have a theory. I'm working on this theory in practice. Sometimes we just need to mind our own damn business. That's a working theory that I want to share with people. You just need to mind your own business, right?

But there's this idea that if you can't mind your own business the only other alternative that I see as suitable is to love well. So, love well or mind your own business.

I made an observation over Facebook that got me to thinking. There was a person who was talking about relationships. Now, I want to tell you this has got a whole lot of culture dripping on it. It has some Christian culture dripping on it. It has some, what I would say, some pretty traditional black, African American churches. It was Sierra and Russell Wilson. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Football player, artist. They are a married couple. Sierra was married or dating, has a child by a rapper. Now she's with this football player who there is all this non-mind your own business commentary, critics, very little in between of, “Oh my god, he's an amazing guy” and on the other side, “he is so lame”.

So, this conversation was happening and someone came out with a song called “Sierra's Prayer”. The general gist is the encouragement for women, particularly women within the Christian church, to specifically and exclusively value themselves based on their partnership with a man. But, that's an asterisk on the side, but with that, knowing if you can pray for the right kind of man, like, what was Sierra's prayer? Let's pray for this kind of thing. So that's kind of the gist.

Someone was commenting, “I don't need Sierra's Prayer. I know what I want.”

It was intriguing because on one hand, it was like, I hear you. At the same time, you don't know what you want unless you see some representation of it. It's not a thing until at least you've seen something that can help you guide, “I don't like that. I like that.”

So, they used an example of a SUV. “I don't need that. I just, I know what I want.” I'm like, you ain't make it up in your head. You ain't going to go get some aluminum and some plastic. No, somebody advertised it, or you saw somebody driving it, or you know someone who owns it and you go, “Ooh, I kind of like that. Now I'm going to customize it.”

All that to say, it's okay sometimes to see something in someone else and say, “That's intriguing to me.” We don't have to want to possess it all. But sometimes that is the stepping stone. Just like as we're growing up as children, right? I've always said, why do children walk because the other adults walk? They want to get from one place to another and they see how everyone else is doing it. People aren't walking on their hands, generally speaking. If they were, the kids would try it. Because we're generally using our legs and they see how we're mobile they go, “I want to try that.” So, they start pulling up.

It's this idea that because they've seen it it's like, I can replicate that and then put my own spin to it. So often people are discouraging people from the natural path of development.

That felt a little soap boxy. I'm not going to put it up, but I will put it over to the side and step down for a second.

Joanne: Ironically, there's conflicting messages we hear. One is, don't go out of line, stay in your lane, follow the rules, know your place. Another place of, be authentic, be yourself. Both of these are polarized. Kind of flip sides of the same coin because ironically, even those who say be your own authentic self, they have a certain idea in mind of what authenticity means. It's an arbitrary standard. It only sets people up for further judgment. It doesn't matter which camp you're getting the judgment from.

The healing truth is probably somewhere in between. Not like halfway down the line where it's like 50% this 50% that. It's probably more integrated into our own particular blend, also based on the immediate context that we're in.

If you take one individual who has positive, negative, the rough and tumble experiences in this country and you pick them up and you drop them in a different country, they're going to have wildly different experience, even though the individual didn't change.

The ability to shift according to one's immediate environment is a very necessary skill. It doesn't mean that they're being inauthentic. They're just summoning an authentic part of them that happens to align with the immediate environment that they're in.

I think we need to have a lot of permission to recognize that when we shift in our different environments, it's not us being dishonest. It's just that we're accounting that there are actual risks. Real risk and real costs that we incur being in particular environments because the environments themselves may not be safe and welcoming. If the individual gets judged for shifting because the culture isn't welcoming then there's way too much blame placed on that one person.

Shanda: Exactly. And the fact that the person can inherently trust themselves to know when they're in an unsafe environment, I think is huge.

I think part of the healing journey, this has been my experience and I've seen it with a lot of folks as I call it, The Pendulum Swing. The pendulum swings to extremes before it finds this kind of balanced rest.

As a person who has said many times, I've spent the vast majority of my life shapeshifting and people pleasing. When my pendulum swung to the other extreme it's like I ain't shifting for nobody. That wasn't a very long-lasting endeavor. I can recount so many instances throughout life where I would feel some kind of shame for how much I talked, how much space I took up, how much I was Shanda. And the pain of that would lead me to declare, “I'm not talking no more.” Man, I was so unsuccessful at that because this is who I am, but how much I would try.

I have some people in my life who are extremely private. I joke with this friend, some things that I should have known, like when we were in high school she got a beeper, she didn't tell me. Like how are you not going to tell me you got a beeper? Or one day I happen to be walking out in the parking lot with her at the same time and she had gotten a car. Girl! Why didn’t you tell me you got a car? Then when she was salutatorian, like no one knew. So, we joke about these things and I would always go like, “There's part of me that wishes there was mystery about me. I wish that there were some parts that were like that.” But that just wasn't authentic to who I was.

So, this pendulum swings. I see people, sometimes, when they're moving into this healing space and they're finding their authentic self, whatever things kept them from authenticity or were barriers to authenticity at one point, there's a declaration that that won't happen again.

Part of it is like, we get to live in this in between space. Again, something that our culture does not encourage that we don't see. We live in a culture of extremes. You know, the top 1% and poverty. Even hearing the middle class is disappearing. This is to say, even just in hearing that concept, the middle, this space where life is lived, love is loved. This place where all of the magic happens is being discouraged, which just feels wild, but it is. It is what it is.

Joanne: If people don't have room within themselves to hold multiple realities at the same time. There ain't no fucking way they're going to be able to do it with other people.

If within oneself there's only room for one or the other. One feeling or the other, then there's no way that a person can actually engage in true empathy. Which acknowledges that the other is another, for one. I am also a distinct person. We all have our distinct unique experiences and they can coexist at the same time. It's like that does not register for people. Because that is how honestly, that's how elementary schoolers operate. We don't have room for nuance. It's too much work. So, people are like, “You know what, I don't want to spend the effort trying to find somewhere, something in between. I'm just going to go with what's easy.” That's the default.

Discerning Other’s Capacity

Shanda: A recent discovery for myself is I realized that there are people in my life who don't know certain things are a thing. There are certain people in my life who have never genuinely experienced love without conditions. It's not a thing. Love is conditioned. It's conditional. So, they can't even fathom that I have the capacity to hold them unconditionally.

Before this acknowledgement, this recognition for me, I took their responses as personal attacks on me, my character, their perception of my intent. And I started to realize, no, actually, they don't even know. They do not understand that one person can feel multiple things at one time. Not just two, like either or. No, multiple things at one time. And because that's not even a thing for them, the indictments or the judgments are, you're being fake or you're being disingenuous. Because you just said this, but now you're saying this, well, you told this person this about this. And it's like, “Oh, I get it.” I spent all this time trying to defend myself and my position. Now I realize it's not about me at all. It's about the fact that I have been working diligently, painstakingly to clear out the things I need to clear out so that my body can hold expansiveness and tension at one time. That I can experience joy and fear at the same time. That I can both want to move towards something and want to move away from it simultaneously and it doesn't crack my body in half that I'm able to just sit with that and go, “Oh, ooh.”

“How you feeling?” You know, we get asked that question, but I always look at people like, I don't even know if you have the capacity to understand. You want me to say one word, don't you? And you want it to be a word that's not even a feeling word. You want me to say good. I can't even really do that anymore if we're going to have any kind of depth. Because let me tell you, you know that feelings wheel that you sometimes see with all the colors and all the section and all the words I got about 20 of those right now, just about this one thing. Do you really want to know how I feel? And when I know that capacity is not there, I'm not going to lie, I default to the answer, “I'm cool. I'm good.” Because that was your way of actually saying, “hello”.

“Yup, good! Hey, how you doing?”

But then cultivating relationships that when they say, “how you feeling”, they're saying, and now I have the capacity and time to go, “Let's go through all the nuances of all of that.”

But when I started to realize that that is so foreign to so many people, and you can share if this is a similar experience for you, when I'm working with folks and journeying with them, helping them expand their capacity to hold all of that they're coming and they're feeling that they're getting healing. Then there's more distress that's happening as well because they're still in relationships with other people who don't even know that it's a thing.

So, it's this personal stuff that's great, right? They're great when they're in office with us. They're great when they're talking with us. Then there is that grief and frustration because now they're going back into all these other relationships with people that have no clue.

Joanne: It is an important skill, a discernment skill, for people to recognize the other person's capacity.

I'm going to put a disclaimer in. Sometimes we can make a judgment call in assuming that the other person can't handle it. My encouragement for folks is to test it out. Test it out with some lower risk things and if the other person drops those balls, okay. No judgment. That person doesn’t yet have the capacity to hold bigger things. That's all right. We all have been there. It's not a problem.

But those aren't your people right now. It's like throwing pearls before swine. We don't open ourselves up in our most vulnerable tender places to people who just don't even have a category in their brain, let alone the language for it. Again, no judgment on those folks. But it is discernment in recognizing this is neither the time or place or person for me to open up regarding this part of myself yet. So, we look for people who actually have that capacity.

I think this is where a lot of Highly Sensitive Persons, empaths, a lot of compassionate, conscientious folks get stuck. They know they have the capacity to hold other people's feelings and be present for them they assume that other people also operate the same way. It's understandable but technically it's projection. Then there's disillusionment because the other person isn't actually a reflection of you.

There's a term that I love, it's called ruinous empathy. We think of love as automatically a good emotion, hate as automatically a bad emotion. But again, like with shame, they're all neutral because it's not about the emotion itself. It's about the subject of that emotion, where it gets directed.

Folks who lean more in the ruinous empathy category, are folks who tend to overly lean on their capacity to go outside themselves to other people's territories and actually take on other people's pain, other people's feelings, other people's responsibility as if it's their own. They often feel rejected, shamed, criticized because they put too much of their heart out there in the world when the world around them wasn't ready to hold that. Then they come back within themselves and feel like, “They're not seeing me, they're not understanding me. So let me double down and try to explain myself, explain my feelings even further.” There's this vicious cycle that happens. Then the individual is like, “If I'm trying to explain myself and no one's getting me or seeing me that must mean I'm too much.” That kind of reinforces the shame.

It's not necessarily that the individual is bad or the environment is bad, it's just there's a mismatch between the sacredness of one's own experience and their immediate environment's capacity to actually receive that and honor that well.

It takes discernment to identify who around me has an actual track record of holding my truths well. If yes, I may try the next level and if not, no problem. Maybe I'll dial it back and see if that's a good equilibrium point. There's room for all kinds of folks along that spectrum.

Shanda: Absolutely. When you were talking, a thought came to me, I think in analogy and metaphor and stuff. I had this thought of on my way from my home to my office, I pass this doggy daycare. I thought, what if a person went, that's a daycare and they took their infant child to this daycare. And they're like, but it's a daycare. It says it right there. It's a daycare. So, I'm going to entrust my child to them. When they come back, they find that the child's diaper hasn't been changed. The care that that infant received would be like, this is not suitable for my child, and you are so right, but it was a doggy daycare. It is suitable for the doggies. The expectation that the doggy daycare has the accommodations, has the capacity, has the know-how, has the desire to care for a human child, it's just unreasonable.

I feel like that's sometimes what we do. We say, “I'm giving you my feelings. I'm opening up my heart to you” as if that's the infant. It's not that the doggie daycare is bad. The doggie daycare is just not a child daycare. So, we are constantly putting ourselves forth into spaces that aren't inherently bad spaces, like you said, but are not equipped.  They don't have the capacity. They don't know how to handle that.

What I was also thinking is the challenge of when there are certain people in your life that you want, that you have such a desire to be able to hold it. The pain that comes with that. So, I think it's like there might be people out there, but I want my mom to be one of those people. I want my partner to be one of those people. I want my cousin to be one of those people. I want my pastor, rabbi, etc. to be these people. Then sometimes I think we get stuck because we go, okay, I'll show them how to do it. I'll show them how to do it by doing it for them. Then they're going to learn, right? I'm going to do it for them. I'm going to sacrifice a whole, whole lot to do it for them, too. Then they're going to learn to do it and they're going to do it for me. Good plan. High five. No, because I feel like I say it every episode, we don't teach people how to treat us by how we treat them. We teach people how to treat us by how we treat ourselves, that they get to follow our lead.

I feel like I fall in that Enneagram Type Two, you know, Highly Sensitive all the things. I spent so much energy trying to get the people I wanted to be my people to be my people. And there was a more recent revelation within the last couple of years in that some of the people I want to be my people may never be my people in that capacity. Outside of that there are some people who are genuinely my people. If I can be open to that, then I'm going to start finding my people. Once I was able to loosen that up, I realized that when I just let the doggie daycare be a doggie daycare, the doggie daycare is fine. When I just let people be who they are, and I am clear on who they've demonstrated that they are, then they just get put in the right seat on the bus and they're actually fine. The relationship can actually be good because they've been pretty clear about who they are and what they can do and what they can't do. Once I stopped trying to manipulate them into being my people, they actually became my people, just a different kind of people.

Joanne: As you're sharing, I think we touched upon the denial stage of the grief process, and a person not even registering that they're a distinct individual. Then the second stage is anger. It's like them, for the first time, realizing, “Hey, hold on a minute, I'm actually not okay with this.” Usually the first emotion that comes up is resentment. And then once you tap into that resentment, it's like, “Oh my gosh, I'm so livid. How could no one have ever taught me how to actually have my own voice.” That is a very valuable process, but also very uncomfortable.

Then, like you said, the pendulum swings back. It's like, “Well, I know I can't do this much anger because it's a bad emotion. Let me see if I can try to make this work for me.” And as you said, “Let me try to show these other people how to receive me well,” That will be the bargaining stage. By exerting control, trying to manipulate one's own environment so that I don't have to go through the change process. Recognizing that this is just a wall that you cannot break past. “Some people, they don't have the capacity for me yet.” Some people might have the potential to grow and change you just don't know who those people are. Nobody knows. The individuals themselves don't know.

It's like, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting, hoping for them to change. I'm going to just recognize that this is not a situation I have any control over. And then that's kind of why we swing into the depression stage of the grief process. Like, I recognize that I'm helpless. I have zero control over the situation. I am floating out in the abyss. Not knowing which side is up, and that's kind of where a lot of the crystallization happens in defining oneself. I'm recognizing that I've lived most of my life as if I'm God trying to change my environment, trying to change other people so that it would suit me so that I don't have to change. I recognize that I'm a finite, limited human being in a very imperfect, broken world full of other people who also have no idea what the fuck they're doing. Let me come to reckon with that. Put myself in my rightful seat, an honorable seat as a human being, not as God or the Devil.

That's kind of when we can switch into that, it's called the acceptance phase, I don't know if I quite like that word, but it'll do for now. It's like coming to acknowledge and coming to terms with reality for what it is versus what I thought it was from the very beginning.

Shanda: Yes, there was this moment I had. Life became so much less disappointing for me when I realized I wasn't the center of the universe. It was a huge shift. It was literally when I went, “Oh my goodness, I am not the center of everyone's world.” So, when I'm wearing this outfit that really I'm not feeling that comfortable in, everyone's not looking at me. Everyone is literally not stopping what they're doing to look at me. But I spent 30 some years of my life believing that was true. Every insecurity I have, everyone has not pulled out a magnifying glass to examine it. Really? You mean to tell me they are actually people who don't even notice? The audacity, right?

When I de-centered myself from everyone else's universe, I felt so much less disappointed because imagine how disappointing it is when you're the center of the universe and people still let you down. People still don't show up for you the way you need them to. People still don't acknowledge that you have needs.

Joanne: Oh, you must be a terrible God.

Shanda: I was a terrible God. Terrible. It was just like, wait a minute. I don't want this job no more. I resign. I actually don't want to be God no more. I don't want to be the center of the universe. Like I didn't even give a proper two week notice. I just quit on the spot.

I have felt so much less disappointed.

When you were talking I had this thought that came up and I wrote it down because I want to sit with this for myself. I've spent so much time putting people in their right seats, kind of trying to observe and evaluate people's capacity to hold all of me that I never once until this moment considered how many relationships was I the person that didn't have the capacity.

Joanne: We don’t want to talk about that.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

Shanda: That's what I'm saying. Y'all this was Shanda. Cover your ears, la la la la. You don't have to listen to this part if you don't want. I sat for the first time in my life and went, wait a minute I know there were times that I was misassigned on somebody's bus.

I know there were times, particularly a 12-year period of my life, I know I wasn't available to anybody else. I was in such a dissociative trauma, I wasn't in a great place though I looked like I was. I didn't have the capacity to be there for anybody. I was doggy pedaling all out.

Now I just want to sit with myself and think. I bet there were people who were handing their hearts over to me and I didn't have the capacity. And how when it's that I want to come up with all the rationale, right? Well, this is what was going on in my life. And then I have all the reasons why I couldn't. What that does though, is that goes, everybody had their reason too. So, when we're saying some people don't have the capacity, they don't know how, I love how you keep emphasizing “yet”. Maybe it hasn't come yet, maybe it won't, but there's something going on in their life too.

When we are centralizing ourselves in everyone's story then we wonder why are they disappointing me? But it's people out here living whole lives in some fashion or form. So, that hit me and I'm eager actually to kind of sit with that.

There are parts of me, my internal experience, my littles that have needed me and I didn't have capacity. Can I sit and recognize that I've disappointed myself by not even being available to myself in ways?

I have disappointed the emotions that said, I'm just trying to send you a message. Can you just take the letter? It's like putting up an invisible fence, not letting the mail carrier get to your mailbox. You know, zapping them, having rifles, like threatening the mail carrier who's just trying to deliver the mail. Mail person's like, look, I'm not responsible for what's in the content of these envelopes. It is just my job to put them in your mailbox, what you do with them is none of my business. That's emotion’s job. That's feeling’s job. They are mail delivery people. And all they're saying is can I just give you the envelope?

It ain't a bad envelope. It ain't a good envelope. It's just an envelope that contains information. That information is being sent to you to do something with it, to aid your survival, your ease, your life. But we sit up here spending all our time mad at the mail delivery people for sending us the message.

Joanne: I’m so glad someone received that memo who's not me. That's one of the main metaphors that I used to describe feelings. This is not something that I'm inventing here. There's nothing new under the sun. It's not copyrighted. I don't really care how people receive that message that feelings are messages. It's extra validating to hear that from another person that we didn't like feed this side of the script.

Shanda: No, no. It’s the metaphor I use all the time.

The reality is some people really do get mad at the mail delivery person. Like in real life. It's also the equivalent of getting mad at the server who brings the food that was made incorrectly. You ordered your steak medium rare, it came medium, and who gets the all the gunk of that, it's the person who delivered it to the table. That person didn't cook it. And who's tip is impacted? Who's review? It's the person delivering. Feelings just delivered it to the table.

Joanne: That piece of mail has your name on it. You're the person who's supposed to receive the mail. Maybe instead of you taking it out on the person who delivered it, maybe you direct that energy to focusing on what's in the content of the mail and doing something about it.

Shanda: That's it.

Joanne, is there anything that we didn't get a chance to talk about? Anything I didn't ask or anything you want to say as we start closing up our time that you want to leave with me and my listeners?

Closing Thoughts

Joanne: Honestly, there's so many things I would love to share about. So, let me know if you need another guest to come back.

The takeaway from our time today would be in recognizing that our emotions are inherently both a personal, like an individual experience, as well as a collective experience at the same time. And our own feelings about our feelings are sometimes a byproduct of the environments that we're in. So, before we judge ourselves for the millionth time maybe we'll zoom out a little bit and at least question, is there something in my environment whose stuff I'm absorbing and taking on as if it's a reflection of me? Maybe this ain't my stuff. Maybe I'm actually overly judging myself because other people are underly taking responsibility for their own stuff.

Shanda: Oh, what a word. “Maybe I am overly judging myself because there are other people who are underly taking responsibility.” That right there could let us go a whole nother hour. That's awesome. I needed somebody to hear that. I needed to hear that.

I love when the conversations are so good that we don't actually get to talk about what you actually do. You've named it a little bit, but we just went in, which I love. I would love for folks to know, like, “Mmm, Joanne's saying some stuff over there. How can I work with her. She got some stuff I need. How can I get in touch?” So, can you tell folks a little bit about what are the services that you offer?

How can people find and get in touch with you?

Joanne: On this topic the main way that I am trying to help people around their emotions. As a therapist, by training, I recognized that a lot of it's one on one sessions, with a strict confidentiality, privacy policy. It's understandable. Lots of people need that individualized space. But there are lots of sessions where I really wish my other client early in the week could listen in on this conversation. It’s frustrating because again, there's nothing new under the sun. There’s one person struggling with shame, thinking I'm the only person who struggles with this. And there's this other person who's like, I'm the only person who struggles with this. And who are they going to tell? Me, because I'm a therapist! If only I can break down those walls outside of a therapy arrangement. For example, having a collective group conversation where a person who doesn't feel comfortable, they don't feel safe, they don't have the courage to ask that scary question for themselves, but they'll still  hear another person asking that same question. I think that our own emotional, personal healing process has to be in the context of relationships because that's where we got hurt.

When I share what I usually share about feelings to my clients or just people around me, the number one feedback that I get. “Why didn't anyone teach us this in school?” So, in response to that, I'm trying to build a school. I'm trying to build a school on feelings where we can have the one on one framework, learning the building blocks. Then it's in the classroom setting, it's in like the cafeteria where people are sharing about their own experiences and wrestling with the source material. That's kind of where the magic happens, not just in isolated book study that only builds head knowledge but doesn't actually lead to personal transformation. That's the school that I want to create. At the current moment, my name for it might be the Big Feeler Flow State Academy. I don't know if that's going to stick. We'll see how it goes. That's my big dream for the moment in creating the content that people could take in because we have to learn first through our head and then we need to have a reaction to what we learn through our head. We have a head, we then have the heart, and then the transformation happens to actually lead to action, that's the body. That's my dream.

I am having a hybrid model where people can learn the things on their own time.I work with a lot of people in the Silicon Valley. They don't always have time to carve aside in their week to attend a live thing, but they might just do it on the side. There are some live weekly or monthly calls where people can ask their questions or like someone can join in on the hot seats. Let's work together and other people kind of observe and take away something for themselves personally.

Shanda: That is wonderful. Joanne, I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your passion and your work with me and my listeners. It was so good to have you here.

Joanne: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me here.

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Joanne Kim, Feelings Translator

Hi! I’m a therapist-turned feelings coach who helps Highly Sensitive Persons, Empaths, Enneagram 2s & 4s, etc. turn their BIGGEST feelings into their GREATEST superpower! 

They are often the first (or only) person in their family to intuitively process and express feelings; consequently, they are often judged or criticized so that they learn to people please, placate, or perform until they hit a wall. 

They’re super familiar with anxiety, guilt, and shame, partly because of an allergic reaction to anger (theirs and others').

Often the super responsible, empathic, and ethical person in their environments, they reach out to me after they're already burned out, resentful in their relationships, or sucked into their shame spiral.

The most common feedback I get from people when I share about how feelings work is,

"Why didn't anyone teach me this in school??"

Hence, I am building a school helping people work WITH their feelings so their feelings work FOR them.

Join the waitlist here and you’ll get details fresh off the press!