--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I know you showed up to spend some time with your friend Mel, but boy, are you in for a treat today because there is somebody really special joining us. And we have a really important and very juicy and cool topic. You're going to love this.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The story about this episode goes back, I don't know, four or five months. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, the Huberman Lab. And he was doing a four part series with a renowned psychiatrist that trained at Stanford and Harvard. The guy's name is Dr. Paul Conte.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, I fell in love with Dr. Paul Conte during this four part series, but it was the fourth part of the series about the unconscious mind, the little voice in your head that had me go, ding, ding, ding. We have to get an appointment with him. Like that man needs to be on this show, sharing his heart, sharing his wisdom. We got to unpack. And so I reached out to him. He said, yes, he is here. He is about to join us and wait to hear what we're going to dig into.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Dr. Conti says, your unconscious mind, it's the key to everything. All those things that are eluding you that you think about, whether it's getting a dream job or improving and strengthening in your relationships, or maybe you beat yourself up because you have these health goals, but why can't you seem to do it? All of this points to your unconscious mind. The answers are there.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And he is going to connect the dots between your unconscious mind, the little voice that's chirping away at you, and how to change the narrative, how to change how you talk to yourself, because it's the key to being a happier, more present and loving you. And you're going to need that if you want to enjoy your life. And I want that for you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, a little bit about Dr. Conti. You already know he's at Stanford and Harvard. He's been in clinical practice for over two decades, and he is a renowned expert on trauma, which is connected to the unconscious mind. He's the author of the bestselling book, *Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic, How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It*. You want to know who wrote the forward of that book? Lady Gaga.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, why would Lady Gaga write the forward on a book that a Stanford and Harvard trained psychiatrist would write? Well, I'll tell you why, because she's worked with them and she credits Dr. Conte with, quote, single-handedly changing her life. And today there is no doubt in my mind that what he is going to share with you and me, it's going to change your life too.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So if you're tired of that negative voice dragging you down, or if you feel like sometimes being in your own head is like being behind enemy lines, I want you to know you're not alone. And my mission today is to inspire you to stop ignoring that little voice and trying to tune it out because guess what? It's not working. And Dr. Conti is going to tell you why. He is here to teach you how to turn toward that little voice and go into your subconscious because the answers that you need are in your unconscious mind. So please help me welcome the amazing Dr. Paul Conte.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Hello. Pleasure to meet you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, thank you for being here. And I just want to jump right in and just start with, I guess, some definitions. When you talk about the little voice in the back of your head, what does that even mean?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: The inner voice in us may be the part of us that is telling us something that we really, really need to know and need to look at, but that we're afraid of or that we're ashamed of, and that our reflex is to look away from when we actually should be curious about it and come right at what is that voice? What is it saying? What does it mean?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And there's often a sort of running dialogue or set of opinions inside of us that are in the background to our experience of life in the present. And this can make a huge difference to how we respond to life in the present, how we think about ourselves and how we think about the world around us. So there's a lot more going on inside of us than what we're taking in at the moment.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'll be honest, Dr. Conti, that little voice started to already come up. Am I ever going to get rid of the negativity? But you can take steps to have some control over this. So there is good news here. We're not just like at the whim of this, right?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: No, if we pay attention to it, then we can have control over it. Like so many things in life, if we don't pay attention, we're not able to exert control. And here's the place for curiosity about what do I think of myself when I'm sitting quietly? What's running along in my mind? What's my self-talk like? Do I have conclusions about myself that may be in some cases or in many cases unfair?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So things that haven't gone well in the past. If the last three relationships didn't go well, there's a person running forward that, oh, they'll never go well. Or I'm not a person who's ever going to have that. Right. These are the things that we can get into our minds that start impacting us very, very deeply that we can change if we go and look at it.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So if a person says, wow, there's such negativity running in my head that I'm never going to find someone. And here I am trying to find someone and to date and to find a good partner. And I'm doing this. But all the time, what's running along in me is, oh, this will never work. And maybe that links to a really bad experience a couple of years ago that is emotionally very powerful. And maybe I can acknowledge that and say it's emotionally powerful, but it's not determining anything. In fact, I don't want that running along in my head. How about I can be a good partner to someone or I can find a better job? How about things that more accurately reflect me as opposed to things that can automatically be going on in our minds that are quite negative that we're unaware of?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So the key here is paying attention, is curiosity and interest in ourselves and how we think of ourselves and our place in the world around us and our ability to navigate in the world around us. And looking at perhaps some of what may be negative because negative things are stronger. They're more what's called salient. We have a salience bias, which means our brains pay more attention to the negative, which is part of a survival instinct that we want to remember negative things because those memories may help us survive in the future. But then we start to weigh more heavily negative things across the board. And we can go and look at that and decide what is really my opinion? What do I really think as opposed to something that is a reflex inside of me that may have a great deal of influence on my decisions and the outcomes of my strivings in the world?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, what was interesting about what you just said is you said this kind of question, what do I really think? And what that little voice is saying to you is that I think some of us are so used to hearing that negative voice that we don't realize that we could get to a point where we could think something different.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Right, right. It's a way people talk about learned helplessness and this has been a topic for a long, long time. And a lot of learned helplessness is often really that we're not paying attention to something. The number of times that in the role of a therapist I've been talking to someone, even in my own therapy I've been on the other side of it, where either I'm inquisitive about the person or in this case my own therapist would be inquisitive about me and what's going on inside of me and asking questions and then realizing, oh, like I have this conception that is going over and over again in my head. And I'm not even aware of it. I've never actually put words to it, right? This going on inside of my mind, that's very, very different than putting words to that.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So after a number of traumas, which I write about to some degree in the book, I started to have a feeling that I'm just cursed and things won't really go well. Or if they go well in one way, they won't go well in another. That somehow there is like a force watching over me and making sure that things don't all go well. And that if something goes well, then negative things will happen too. Because I started to have a very, very different view of myself and how I was able to or not able to, or I was at the mercy of maybe the world around me. Because when some negative things happen, especially in sequence, or even just one big thing or sometimes a bunch of small things that we might not even be aware of, it can change how we feel inside.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And then this stream of negativity was making me, for example, my mood was lower. I felt much less hopeful. I felt more beleaguered. There was more anger and frustration in me. And by putting words to that and then challenging that, do I really think that's true? Do I think that people are cursed? I don't think that anyone else is. I don't think anyone else is cursed, right? But I am. You're the one person. Maybe now I should go revisit that, right? And this is the curiosity. If we start thinking about ourselves, we can change. Really, we can change everything because we can have so much greater control over what's going on inside of us. And it can match up with what we really and truly believe instead of running along inside of us in a negative way. And we haven't even put words to it or decided if we actually believe it or not.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The stories in your book were so helpful because it allows, or at least it allowed me to see myself in your experience and then extrapolate similar things. Could you explain, for example, just one story and how it relates to what that little voice in your head started to say, I'm cursed. Bad things are always going to happen to me. It works out for everybody else, but not me.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: I think one of the most powerful stories, at least in the way that it impacted me, was the I wrote about a person who had what is called Cotard's syndrome. It's a feeling that one has already died when one is still alive. So this isn't a metaphor. They're going through, they go to the grocery store, they do all sorts of things in a normal way, but they believe that they are dead, that they have perished, but their body is still moving along in the world around them. And it's quite rare.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And the gentleman that I took care of was sure that he was dead. They thought it was funny that I would put the stethoscope up and listen to the heart of a dead man. Or that I would come and spend time with him. And that it was just the same as if he were in the morgue, but that part of it hadn't happened yet. And when you look at the history of a person like that, this was a person who was very affable. He had a good sense of humor and it was kind of fun to be around, but he had been around no people for so, so long. He had lived in loneliness and isolation without any real human connection.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And the dialogue in his mind had gone from, say, bad to worse to almost unimaginable to, well, I'll be okay even though I don't have anyone in my life. I don't have any friends. I don't have a partner, but I'll find one to I won't find one to that's not for you to you don't get to have any people in your life. And this was running along over and over for many, many years of loneliness and isolation that got to the point of feeling so little human connection that the man was sure that he'd actually died already.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: It's a strong, strong example, but it shows where the dialogue that we're having with ourselves or what we're telling ourselves can do to us over time. So if it can make us believe that we're dead, what impact can it have on a person who says, I'll never get a better job? I'll never find a partner. I'll never have a better relationship with my kids. If we can make ourselves believe that we're dead from the distress that's going on, then we can do almost anything to ourselves that limits our horizons, limits our health and our happiness.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What I'm processing right now is the connection between the little voice and the kind of story that you keep telling to yourself and how that then becomes the actions that you take or not. And so as you started to tell that story about a person who was lonely and there's a lot of loneliness in the world right now and the story if you were paying attention started to shift from I'm lonely to I'm not going to to I'm always going to be like this and if you are telling yourself that you're never going to find friends you're not going to feel motivated to leave the house You're truly convincing yourself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And in a more pedestrian kind of example that we can all relate to is if you've ever fallen off the wagon with your own health and you start to feel like I'm never going to get back in shape again or I don't have the willpower to eat healthy. All of that little voice is instrumental in you not taking the actions that would change that situation. Is that why this is so imperative?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes. Yes. I believe in 25 years of doing what I do for a living, just taking care of people and being a psychiatrist, being a therapist, I have seen over and over and over again that what we're telling ourselves in here is far more deterministic than any external factor.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So someone who wants to go back to the gym and wants to be in better shape, wants to lose weight again, or whatever it is that that person's trying to achieve, we could say well they should carve out the time for it or they should what what gyms are close and they should make that a priority and how can they change your scheduling and we can look at that in so many ways but if what's running over and over inside is oh you'll never succeed or you'll you'll get in shape but then you'll lose it again and you'll just feel worse about yourself it's so much more deterministic than the external factors often without us being aware of the tremendous impact of what is going on inside of us.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And this is where, you know, we often carry along. I'll imagine sometimes a person who could be living life so much better. They have everything inside of them. They have everything they need for life to be so much better. But I'll imagine it's almost as if they're dragging around the weights of the past. And they're taking them from the past and projecting them into the future. And we can all do this. And one might argue to some extent, all of us, or at least the vast majority of us, do this to some extent. But we often do this to an extent that is actually deterministic about what happens next in our lives.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And this is where repetition makes such a difference that often if something doesn't go right, you know, we try again, but we try again in the same way. So people will come in just to take the relationship example. This happens a lot and would happen a lot when I saw, I was seeing a lot of new patients all the time for many, many years. And people would come in and say, oh, you can't, I know you can't help me. I know I'm only here because someone thought I should go or because I'm just desperate, but I know you can't help me. And then they would tell me about repetition. There's no way I'm going to have a good job. My last four jobs, and then they'll tell me about the last four jobs or I'll never have a good relationship. Let me tell you about my last five relationships, right? And they're not, the jobs, the relationships are not different. And they're the same. It's the same thing that has happened multiple times.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And I found myself saying to someone who'll tell me they'll never have a good relationship and I cannot help them because the last seven have been so bad. And then sometimes I'll say, if you can tell me how they've been bad in seven different ways, then I might have to agree with you. But that's not what you're going to tell me. You're going to tell me something that's seven variations of the same thing, of the same story. And that can provide us with so much help. If you realize I haven't done something that's failed seven times, I've done one thing that hasn't gone the way I wanted it to. Now, the fact that I've done it multiple times just tells me, hey, I need to look at that. How can I do that differently? And now we can open up a world of change because we can learn from the past. The past is good information, right? But it no longer seems as if it's fate that's projecting into our future.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And this is the benefit of exploration, whether it's in therapy or it's reflecting about ourselves. It's much better done if we're writing or we're talking with someone of, hey, what's going on inside of me? And how do I understand that? But understand it so I can use it to my advantage, right? So that it's not then controlling me and making foregone conclusions to my next 15 decisions.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, Dr. Conti, you are incredible. And there's so much more for us to dig into, but let's take a quick pause and hear a word from our sponsors because they helped me bring this to everybody at zero cost. And Dr. Conti and I will be waiting for you right after this break. Stay with us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm so glad you're here with me and Dr. Paul Conti and we are digging into the unconscious mind and how you need to turn toward it to be a happier you. So Dr. Conti, I am so happy you're here because I feel a level of hope and let me explain why. We can see this in other people. Like I'm thinking about a bazillion examples, Like, for example, when one of our daughters was in her, she was 21, 22, and she would constantly lament to me. Oh, every time I go out to the bar, everybody's all over my roommates. Nobody even talks to me. And it was this repetition of this story that I'm never going to find somebody that loves me. I'm not good enough. I'm not pretty enough. I'm not thin enough. And it just over and over and over again.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And, you know, as I would hear her as her mother and I would look at her objectively and go, what are you talking about? Like, this is complete fiction. And seeing it in somebody else is so easy, but it's so hard for us to gain that objectivity with ourselves. And so maybe a place to start in terms of the person listening is could you share some of the most common things that you have heard in terms of that little voice rising up in someone's head that somebody just repeats to you, but they might not even hear themselves saying it?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Mm hmm. Very often it paints with a broad brush or if it not painting with a broad brush it come at the thing that is most distressing to us. So the broad brush part could be just saying oh I a loser right Or even sometimes we see ourselves in the third person. You're a loser. You'll never make it. You're just not good enough. Or no one's going to want me. No one's going to want you. We're talking to ourselves and it's painting with a very, very broad brush that is really kind of striking to the core, right? I mean, it's hard to argue with something like that because it's so pervasive, right?
--:-- Mel Robbins: So instead of arguing with it, the idea is to recognize it and reject it, right? How do you do that?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: If it's more, if it's not so broad brush, then often it'll come at the thing that we most want. You'll never have a better job or your relationship will never be better. You'll never find anyone. You'll never reconcile with a certain family member. Whatever it may be, you'll never be healthier. You'll never lose weight. You'll never be in better shape. Whatever it may be that thus comes at us. And if you imagine, I mean, imagine that someone shadowed a person all day and just whispered in their ear the worst possible thing. You know, we would be distraught. I mean, it's someone to follow someone around and just tell them that all day. But we can do that to ourselves. And that's not an exaggeration of like what would it be like to have someone following behind doing that all day it's not an exaggeration what we can do to ourselves is far worse than that.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And I think of the example of of a young man who liked music was really interested in music a true story who was who had a job that was farther away than it needed to be and it wasn't paying well and there were probably better jobs closer and and you know and I thought at one point that the duration of the drive was about music because this person loved music so much until I learned that there's never music on in the car, right? That there was a, it was a longer drive. So this could run over and over in the person's head because they were ashamed of the job that they were doing. They knew that they could do better. They knew that they could earn more and, and be a stronger support to their family. So the job was chosen through the lens of self-punishment. Don't choose one that's just 10 minutes away. Choose one that's 50 minutes away. So you can tell yourself the whole way there and back just what a loser you are.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: It's so awful. But this was not looking, as you said about your daughter, you look from the outside. This person was intelligent and personable and diligent. And none of those things were true. But we had to identify, it was the shock of it. It was like, wow. Oh, you're not even listening to music. And then my shock and his shock and what's going on there, right? And that is a person whose life is vastly different now. That person has a fantastic job. And this is really true compared to what they were doing then. They sought more education as they knew that they could do, but couldn't quite step up to that plate, came through it well. Everything is so much better. But that was the turning point of the realization of, oh, right, nothing can possibly go well if this is what's going on inside of me. And do I believe that? Is that really true? Where did that come from?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: A lot of it came from prior trauma. This is someone who suffered abuse when they were younger. So this was going on in this person's mind since that period of time. And we had to go back to the roots of it, of what it felt like to be abused and to feel like he couldn't tell anyone. And no one would help and felt so bad about himself and responsible for it, even though, of course, he was not. And the genesis of it all was then and going through and exploring some of that, including the shame, because, you know, traumatic events generate shame in us, that there was absolutely shame to feel. But the shame was to feel on the part of the people who are hurting him not him right. And to be able to right like this is not my shame i reject this and it doesn't determine who i am where i can go now his life starts changing and that is a true story and it's not a it's not a rare one either like this happens when we can reflect on get a handle on wait what is going on inside of me. And it starts with curiosity.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, when you were talking about going back, I kept thinking to myself, we weren't born trashing ourselves. Like I think a lot about like a baby, you know, that's learning to walk and they fall over and over and over again and keep getting up and keep getting up. And if we put in an adult situation, I'd have about three falls and be like, I think I'll just lay here on the floor. Like my voice would kick in. Can you explain why this happens? Like, why do we do this to ourselves? Because it seems on some level extremely maladaptive. And yet I would imagine that most adults are trapped in this negativity in their minds until they wake up and start doing something about it. So how did we get here?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: I think that's a great question. And it allows me to highlight what I think is an extremely important point, which is that I do not believe that we mean ourselves harm. It is not true that, oh, there's a part of our brains that can't stand us, that's against us, that we're split inside. There's a part of us that wants to take care of ourselves and a part of us that does not. This is not true of people. I believe with all my heart and mind, 25 years of doing this and studying the psychology and the neuroscience behind it, that this is not how we are built to be. And we don't know for sure, but likely what is happening is the hijacking of survival mechanisms.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So if you think about this salience bias towards the negative, this links back to survival. The example I often give is imagine, say, in a hunter-gatherer society, you know, a person is hungry and a person forages and, say, finds a new berry and tries some of it. And let's just say that it tastes good and it's nourishing and you feel better afterwards. It's good to remember that, right? Maybe a person remembers, goes and looks for it the next day, shows other people. It's good to remember that. But if you try that new berry and you get very, very sick, then you better remember that. Same thing with interpersonal interactions. If something goes well with a person, then okay, maybe that's a person one can collaborate with and we want to note that inside. But if something goes very poorly, someone is threatening or violent, we better remember that. So we have these survival mechanisms inside of us that highlight the negative, so to speak, in the service of our survival. But they can get utilized to highlight things that are negative but are not true about us, which is why trauma in childhood and child abuse is so tremendously impactful. And it can be addressed. It can be treated.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: But the most powerful negative lessons are sent to us in childhood because if we learn those lessons, we don't test them again. So someone who learns I'm not good enough. No one will love me. I can't control what happens to me. Imagine a child in a household where sometimes a parent or parents are in a good place. Let's say they're not using drugs. They're not using alcohol. They're not incredibly stressed out. And then if the child does something good, the child gets rewarded or gets a positive word. And if something negative happens, the parents remonstrate. Okay, that's okay. But when things aren't going well, it doesn't matter then what the child does. So the child does something good, brings on something good from school and may get yelled at or insulted or hit. And then the child learns, I can't control any of this. And then the child ultimately takes in, I am bad or I am not good enough. These are lessons that we can get in adulthood and they can be very impactful. But they are so powerful when we learn them in childhood. And we don't go back and look at that.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: The one thing the computers have on our brains, our brains are far more powerful than any computer, but the one thing the computers have on our brains that they'll reboot and we'll say oh is there new information is there new software let's integrate this let's integrate that but we don't do this we don't say hey here i am a competent adult and i've been able to support myself and i've been able to to live a decent life and to get myself by and be an upstanding person in the world and maybe I can do better for myself. Maybe that lesson that I learned that said, I am not good enough and I will never have whatever, maybe that's wrong, right? We don't automatically do that. I mean, it's not that we never do it, but on balance, it stays with us as a given, right?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: And here's where I talk about my math minor that learning math was so helpful because you get these problems and they have givens, right? X is three, right? And if you can't solve the problem, maybe you want to go back, right? I learned if I can't solve the problem, oh, no, X was five. I wrote down three. That's why I can't solve the problem. But in general, we don't do that. We don't automatically go back and look at the givens. But we can do that if we learn, oh, they're really important. What did I learn about myself in childhood? Did I learn negative things that I'm carrying forward to the future? It's just one example. But these are examples that can change our lives.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I have two things I'd love to dig into. But we got to take a quick break. Let's hear a word from our sponsors. And don't go anywhere because Dr. Conti and I are going to be waiting for you when we return from a short break. Stay with us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here with us. We are talking to the remarkable Dr. Paul Conti. So, Dr. Conti, I have two things I'd love to dig into. And the first one is this observation that I have that, you know, it's just absolutely mesmerizing how complex and intelligent and incredible the human design is. And it's always struck me as just so sad that part of our design when we were little is that when something happens that is traumatic or dysregulates your nervous system or sends you into a state of an alarm as a kid, that our default isn't, wow, these adults are kind of screwed up. It's there's something wrong with me. And that we aim it back at ourselves.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes, children are trying to understand, right? Especially at the stage of life where there's so many connections forming and the child is growing and learning about the world around them that the child is trying to understand, but without the benefit of abstract thought and of life experience. So if you or I enters a room of new people, and let's just say there's five or six new people, and they're treating us poorly, right? Or there seems to be a randomness to emotion, right? Then we can look at that through the lens of abstract thought of like, whoa, I just came in and didn't say or do anything. And why are people being so negative? Or why are they all over the map with their emotions?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here with us. We are talking to the remarkable Dr. Paul Conti. So, Dr. Conti, I have two things I'd love to dig into. And the first one is this observation that I have that it's just absolutely mesmerizing how complex and intelligent and incredible the human design is. And it's always struck me as just so sad that part of our design when we were little is that when something happens that is traumatic or dysregulates your nervous system or sends you into a state of alarm as a kid, that our default isn't, "Wow, these adults are kind of screwed up." It's "There's something wrong with me." And that we aim it back at ourselves.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes, children are trying to understand, right? Especially at the stage of life where there are so many connections forming and the child is growing and learning about the world around them. The child is trying to understand, but without the benefit of abstract thought and of life experience. So if you or I enter a room of new people, and let's just say there are five or six new people, and they're treating us poorly, or there seems to be a randomness to emotion, then we can look at that through the lens of abstract thought: "Whoa, I just came in and didn't say or do anything. Why are people being so negative? Or why are they all over the map with their emotions?"
--:-- Like we can attribute that outside of us because we have the ability to do that. There's a brain function involved in abstract thought that's a complicated one. And there's life experience, too, to understand people can act like this. We combine our life experience and our capacity for abstract thought. But in children, they're trying to make sense of things without those capabilities. So then the idea is, "It must be me," because there's not the thought, "Oh, people can have issues of their own that can impact how they're responding." So in one sense, they're responding to me, but they're not really responding to me. They're responding to what's inside of their head.
--:-- So if I say, "Mom or Dad, can I have something to drink?" and the person says, "Just go in the other room" or just yells at me, I didn't really do anything wrong. My mom or my dad was in a bad place. So the attribution is to self, which is why the lessons that we learn in childhood can be so, so difficult into the future, because we don't have the capacity for abstract thought. We don't have the life experience. So we attribute the negative things around us to ourselves.
--:-- This is where there was an English physician named Winnicott who wrote about the idea of raising children so that the child can feel "good enough." This wasn't an idea of limping over the line. That's not what "good enough" meant. "Good enough" means solidly good enough that I'm good enough to face what there is for me to face. If that's something negative, I can get myself through negative things. And also I can get myself to better places. I can find better for myself. If I get knocked down, I can get back up again. These are the lessons that we want.
--:-- And if we can get through childhood feeling good enough—and there are aspects of "not good enough" we carry along in all of us—then we can go back and look at that and we can change that later in life. But that would be the ultimate idea: that when we're raising children, they come through childhood feeling, "Look, I'm good enough. I can bring myself to bear regarding whatever it is in front of me to face or to strive for."
--:-- Mel Robbins: And of course, every single parent listening, including myself, just leaned in to go, "Dr. Conti, how the hell do we do that?" Because I feel like every other day I am doing something that I didn't mean to do that is going to screw them up and send them to therapy. And not that therapy is a bad thing. Love therapy. Kids love therapy. But it just seems like a minefield to navigate. And I was curious, as you were talking, is there an age range when that skill of being able to have abstract thought or processing starts to develop in someone?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: It comes along across time in childhood development, so there's no one stage where that comes online. But it starts off in very kind of minor ways and then grows with the ability for sort of full abstract thinking. And if I could say something to what you had said about parents leaning in—because we want to be the best parents that we can be—the first step there starts with ourselves. And that's often what people don't want to look at. They want to look at, "Oh, how can I talk to my child differently?" Instead of really zooming out to start with and say, "Look, am I taking care of myself?" Because if I'm too stressed, if I'm tired, if I'm hungry, if I'm just stretched thin, then we don't have the time and attention to nurture those around us.
--:-- It really starts with our self-care and whether we can bring our best selves to our parenting, and then the choice of how we're interacting with the child. And also to be honest. If we make a mistake, to say it. Or if we say something that we wish we hadn't, or we snapped a little bit—again, I'm not talking about bad parenting. These are things good parents do, to acknowledge that. To say, "I'm sorry, I was tired, and I'm trying to get more rest so I can be the best parent I can be. And I'm sorry that I..." It's good for us to know that we're human. To acknowledge that humanness and what it requires of us in order to be the best people we can in the world around us. And then also to think about our communication choices and how honest we're being, as opposed to feeling ashamed that we snapped at our kid and then we look the other way instead of acknowledging it and saying, "I'm sorry." If that makes sense.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It makes perfect sense. And it also applies to every relationship you have.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Your friendships, your romantic partnerships, your family, all of it. Because if you can't regulate your own emotions or you're not aware of how your subconscious mind and this repetition that you're talking about—this story you keep telling yourself at yourself—if you're not aware of that and what's trying to come to the surface, you're going to bring all that into every single interaction you have with any other human being. And so you're right, it does start with you.
--:-- I wanted to share with you because we asked our global audience, knowing that you were coming on, about the little voice in your head. And 95% of people said, "Yep, I know what you're talking about." And I want to read to you some of the responses of what the little voice was saying, because I noticed they fell into kind of positive, coaching, nudging type voices, and then the person with the sledgehammer in their mind bullying them.
--:-- So the positive nudges kind of sounded like: "Take care of yourself." "Hey, if you start doing that one thing, you might just live your best life." "Leave your husband." "You can start another business, even though the first one failed." "It's time to get over your ex." "You'd feel a lot better if you'd work out."
--:-- And then there was this other category. And this one, there were a lot more responses in: "You can't do that." "You're not going to make it." "It's all bullshit." "You're never going to be an Olympic athlete." "Shouldn't even move to Canada." "I am wrong." "My anxiety is right. My fear is right." "I can't do this." "Am I enough? Am I ever going to be enough?" "I am not living to my full potential and I never will."
--:-- Can you talk a little bit about that sort of tenor and the content of the nudge versus beating yourself down?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Well, the positive voices just need an ally, because the negative voices have so much of an advantage. And it is that human evolution, anthropological bias towards the negative. So the negative tends to get louder over time. It tends to feed and foster itself more than the positive. So the positive requires nurturing. Just in the way I think people who are very, very good at gardening recognize that the weeds grow faster than the flowers.
--:-- So we need to be very, very attentive to nurturing the good things and to what are the negative things and where do they come from. So I'm very, very curious: where did those negative voices come from? And then we look at those and explore them. And it's this concept that if we're taking care of ourselves, then people just feel a sense of humility. This comes with feeling good, with recognizing, "Well, there's a lot out there in the world that is difficult and it can be scary and that I cannot control. But I am taking care of myself. I did that hard thing of leaving that relationship. I'm shifting that job to feel proud of myself."
--:-- And humility, I think, is more a feeling state. And then when a person is in that feeling state, we approach the world through the lens of gratitude, and gratitude being very, very active. Where I can feel a sense that I am grateful for myself, that I strived to get myself to a certain place. And if something doesn't go well, I don't want to beat myself up for that. How do I make myself the best that I can be instead of beating up on myself?
--:-- The sense of humility and then active gratitude, where we start to become unshackled from the past. "I'm grateful that I'm here and doing the best I can." So if it starts at home and I'm fair with myself, am I more likely to be fair with you? And that's how what you said about our relationships with our kids goes to all relationships and settings and people in our lives, including ourselves.
--:-- Good mental health is consistent with simplicity. It's just hard to get there. So we see that people get to the same places, like people who get happier as they grow older. It's an interesting demographic of people. Why would anyone get happier? We accumulate aches and pains and we worry about our mortality. But people do get happier when they're taking good care of themselves. And we see these common factors: a sense of humility, approaching the world through the lens of gratitude, a sense of being self-aware and being at one's best and prioritizing self-care. This is how people grow old healthily. And because those things are so common, we can learn from them and we can strive towards them amidst all the complexity in our own minds and in our own lives.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I absolutely want to jump to how do we do this, but I want to first address something, which is for so many people, the idea of turning inward and going toward those thoughts, particularly the ones that are scary or negative or intrusive, or that are tied to very traumatic experiences that we'd rather try to forget or ignore. It's like staring at a dark tunnel. And I'd love to have you speak to the why. Like, what is in it for somebody who—I think about my mom, for example, and she literally just says, "I'm sure I have trauma. I'm sure I have anxiety. Why the hell would I want to go talk to a therapist? What am I going to do? Find out I don't like my life? It's okay." And there is so much resistance to looking inside and going, quote, "there."
--:-- So Dr. Conti, what if you're scared about opening up a can of worms or revisiting the things that you tried to forget?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Well, this is very, very natural. In fact, this is sort of the default: to become ashamed of what it is that we don't want to look at, to become afraid of what it is that we don't want to look at. So then we hide from it and it grows.
--:-- I could link it so strongly to my own life. After losing my youngest brother to suicide, I felt ashamed. I felt that there was something wrong with me, us, him, that we were marked in ways that made everything so, so, so much harder. And it was that that really moved forward this thought process inside of me that maybe I wasn't good enough or was cursed, that I was destined for really bad things. And all of that festered out of the initial reflex of shame.
--:-- Later on, as I went to medical school and became a psychiatrist and started doing this and learning about it, I realized how shocking it is that when something happens to us, we can, in that rapid, reflexive way, feel such a sense of shame that we immediately start being fearful of the future. And we start hiding from exploring what has happened to us. And we start stepping away from what we need to do to get our arms around it.
--:-- I find it remarkable that it's often the case that the answers to our problems are there in front of us. But it's as if the answers are inside of a room, but outside the room there are scary goblins and ghosts. There are a bunch of things that make us think, "Oh, wait, maybe I'm too afraid to go in." But it's not anything that's going to hurt us. It's just fear-inducing decoration around what it is that can change our lives for the better.
--:-- Because things that are traumatic to us—including dramatic things, or just feeling inadequate or not feeling so good about myself because of my health or my job or my relationship status or whatever it may be—that creates, "Oh, no, I can't go and look at that." And then it gets some special status where we're not looking at it. It's off over here where it gets to grow and fester. Which is why what's called for is exactly the opposite.
--:-- People will say, "I can't go talk about that because I'll start crying and I'll never stop." We hear that. Nobody starts crying and then never stops. Or, "I'll just curl up in a fetal position. I'll never get up." That never happens either. It's fear of that that keeps us from shining the light around in our own minds and shining the light in the places that we need to go.
--:-- It's actually quite remarkable. Trauma isn't a thing. It doesn't have a mind. It's not plotting against us. So why would I go look at the thing that scares me, that makes me feel bad? So it doesn't scare you anymore. So you don't feel bad about it anymore. But it's the reflexive shame and the reflexive fear that lead us to say, "I'll look anywhere, but not there." But "not there" is the only place that we need to look. It's always that way.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So are you saying that we can't just not think about something or forget about something or shove it down? "I'm not going to go there. It's not going to affect me." That just doesn't work is what you're saying.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Right. Absolutely not. No more so than—imagine that a toilet is overflowing in a house or in a building. And you say, "I don't like that. That doesn't sound good. That's stressful. Oh my gosh, you know what? I'm just going to pretend that's not happening. I'm going to go do something else." That doesn't work. That problem, which may at the beginning be mild, even though it's daunting—there's some water on the floor—if that problem keeps going and going, that problem can turn into a disaster.
--:-- So yes, the examples of what's inside of us are far, far more powerful. I think that's an obvious example, so it's a good one to attach to. But the same is true, and the stakes are much, much higher when it's about what's going on inside of us. So we do need to look at our past.
--:-- Another example that can be used: if we're not looking at our past, we're carrying the weights of the past around with us. So if I'm moving forward and I don't want to look back, well, maybe I'm carrying 20 pounds of weight from this thing that happened. There's another 30 attached to me from that. There's a five-pound weight from three or four other things that happened. Now I'm trudging forward and I'm carrying all of that with me. It's not that if I don't look back, it's not there. Just like the toilet's still overflowing, even if I want to pretend it isn't and just go out of the house and do something else. It's all there.
--:-- It's by looking at it that we can gain control over it and say, "I am not going to drag around that 30-pound weight from that terrible thing that happened when I was younger. I'm not going to drag that weight around just because people bullied me or people told me that I wasn't worthwhile, or because this really bad thing happened, or because I was hurt or I was assaulted or whatever the thing may be. I don't want to lug that around and drag it around for the rest of my life." And by going back and looking at it, I can cut the rope to it so that I leave it behind me.
--:-- And it is also so that we do not drag around with us the weights of the past and say, "Why am I not going anywhere?" Well, look at what you're dragging behind you. And if you don't go and look at that, then you will continue to not feel like you're moving into the future as you wish to be, and continue to be baffled about it. So if I don't know I'm dragging the weights, but I'm frustrated, I'm not moving into the future—well, what's going to come of that? Then I decide, "Well, what's wrong with me? I really can't do it. I'm a loser." You see how it fosters more of the negative self-talk.
--:-- So we need to look at the weights that we're dragging around with us. We need to look at the traumas and the distress that's inside. It's exactly what we need to do. And the thought of "Why would I need to do that? I need to avoid that"—that's the hijacking of those survival mechanisms. And if we let that win the day, we can stay fixed and rooted forever. But it absolutely does not have to be that way. And many people change. It's not pie in the sky where I'm picking out three or four examples where people change. No, awful things come of the trauma we carry with us—like the man who was alive and pleasant and funny, who was sure that he was clinically, medically dead.
--:-- But wonderful things can come of looking at ourselves and making changes. There are countless stories of change where people look at what's going on inside of them. And guess what? The eighth relationship did go well, because the eighth was different than the prior seven. That person did get a better job. They have a better relationship with their parents or their children or their friends. We do change, but we have to understand how to do it. And then we have to actually do it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I have so much I want to say to you. First of all, I just think you're amazing. So thank you.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Thank you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And you have a real gift in your ability to go so deep and yet be very visual so that for those of us who do not have a degree in neuroscience, but have a lot of weight that we're carrying around—I just had this huge wake-up moment where visually I could connect the dots between the weight that you are carrying around from the things in your past that you have not processed or you carry shame around, which is why you won't face it. Like if you won't face it, that right there is evidence that it's weighing you down.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And that little voice that is following you around saying, "You're not good enough. It's never going to work out. You're not important. See, see, I'm right." And pointing out that that is tied to the weight. And it's a way in which the weight creeps from your subconscious at the bottom of that all the way up and is chirping to your conscious mind. Like that's the thread that connects to that weight.
--:-- And I can give an example, Dr. Conti, from my own life. And I offer it only in the hopes that maybe one more story about the different layers of this would help somebody access a breakthrough as they listen.
--:-- So I remember a couple years ago, there was this very kind of normal moment where I woke up. I was on vacation, and I was in this amazing place that I love to rent in the summer by the beach. And I had slept in, and I woke up and I rolled over and my husband, Chris, was gone. And I looked at the clock and it was 8:30 in the morning. And I immediately thought, "Oh God, I did something wrong. Someone's going to be mad at me. Uh-oh." I rolled out of bed. I ran downstairs and he wasn't there. The kids weren't there. The dogs were gone. And now that voice is going, "You're in trouble. It's your fault. You didn't get up early. You didn't help with the dogs. Chris is going to be mad at you." Just this beat down in the most normal circumstance in my life.
--:-- And I noticed it. And that's what you're talking about going in. Like, "Oh, well, that's kind of weird. Why would I be trashing myself for sleeping in on a vacation? Why would I be making up a story that someone's mad at me?" And so thankfully, I had a conversation with my therapist, Ann, a week later. And here's where we connected this. She started asking, "Well, when else have you had an experience where you thought someone's mad at me, that you're in trouble?" Like the first thing. And we were doing EMDR, which is a specialized modality related to trauma. And I could trace it all the way back to being in the fourth grade.
--:-- And a very traumatic moment that I've shared about in my work, where I had woken up in the middle of the night at a big family gathering and there was an older kid on top of me. And in the range of sexual abuse experiences that people could have, this would be down at like the one on a scale of zero to ten in terms of how scary and awful, but still traumatizing. And the next morning when I woke up, I hid under the covers until all the kids left. And in my body had this experience that I had done something wrong and someone was going to be mad at me.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And even though I had processed that trauma in therapy, I didn't realize that that singular experience—and then probably a million other experiences of waking up and telling myself that somebody's mad at you, you've done something wrong—led to me, Dr. Conti, from that morning in fourth grade, all the way up to being a grown-ass 50-year-old woman with Ivy League degrees and tons of research under my belt and therapy and EMDR and MDMA—got it like all of this stuff had not connected the little voice in my head that has beaten me up for decades saying "someone's mad at you" to that singular moment.
--:-- And I will tell you, going backward and digging into that again, even though I thought I had it all figured out, it was one of those massive weights that I was dragging around in my life that was tied to that voice, "someone's mad at you." And it wasn't until I saw that thread that I was able to do what you're talking about, which is I had a choice in that moment because I could see, "Wow, I don't have to do this to myself because Chris wasn't mad at me. He didn't give a shit that I slept in and he was happy that I did. He was happily walking the dogs. He didn't even want me."
--:-- As you have been so eloquently explaining to all of us, that little voice is tied to something deeper, and figuring it out is the access to a level of freedom in your life and agency to create a different way of living that is hard to describe in terms of how liberating it is.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: It's an extremely powerful example, and thank you for sharing it. And I'm sorry, of course, that you went through that, but relieved that you were able to identify it and take the power out of it by bringing yourself to bear. I think there are so many aspects of that story that really capture this concept.
--:-- So if you think about it, from the beginning, you were young. You're in fourth grade. You woke up with something happening to you. So clearly it's hard, but the brain can do it anyway to make you responsible for it. And you weren't even awake. Yet somehow—this is how humans work—your brain takes in a sense of shame and a sense of being at fault. And in part, shame is a reflex to trauma. It generates shame in us. So unless we look at that and say, "Wait a second, is this shame appropriate?" Because sometimes we can do things we might feel a little ashamed of, and then we feel the shame, and it can alter our behavior. So we need to assess: does this make any sense? But of course, you don't get to do that as a child.
--:-- So the next morning, you feel ashamed as if you'd really done something wrong, whereas actually the opposite. Something has happened to you around which you deserve some support and some processing and some care and concern. So it stays in you. You learn a lesson then. And the lessons of trauma that we learn as children, they may be false, but they're lessons nonetheless. And you learn that you may do things wrong. You're not even aware that they're wrong until you've done something wrong, and that you should feel ashamed about those things. This is the lesson. And unless we unlearn it, unless we look at it and make ourselves unlearn it, we don't automatically unlearn it.
--:-- So all of the life experience since then, all of the achievements and education, personal and professional achievements—all of that that's been the case in your life—didn't make that lesson go away.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Your brain didn't reboot and go back and look at it and say, "Does that make sense?" Because probably because it's tied to survival, the reflex of shame tells you, "Hey, you better remember that." It doesn't know that, "Wait, this is one that's not your fault. You didn't do anything to be ashamed about." But it just links it in like the high negative salience. It makes us remember things so that it stays with you until you have that sort of aha moment and you realize, "Wait, this is still in me. And it predisposes me to have this reflexive shame. And what did I do wrong all these years later?"
--:-- I think it's extremely powerful because of the genesis of it, how long it stays with you, impervious to all the other things that happen in your life. But what is it not impervious to? You going and looking at it and really shining a light on it and deciding, "What is this? What does it mean? And what does it not mean?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: Thank you. And what I can see now is, your word "repetition"—because of the nature of the way that this little voice stays tied to these traumatic, dramatic experiences, the way that that little voice stays tied to these things. That's powerful. What's interesting is the more you repeat it, the more it becomes not "Did I do something wrong?" or "I must have," but "I have." Like, it becomes the presumption. And I can see how this affected me, Dr. Conti, in social settings, always kind of feeling like on the outside looking in. It's everywhere in my life.
--:-- And I love that you're also saying to us, we are doing everything but turning in. For me, I tried to outwork it, achieve it. As long as I was running and busy and doing and this and that, then I didn't have to look at it. Other people numb. We shove it down. And so I want to talk about the how. How can we turn inward and start to hear this little voice and then do the deeper work to follow that thread to what the weight may be that you can process from your past to free yourself?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: I think the starting place is always just a curiosity about ourselves. And a lot of times, just as a person doesn't want to go look at the trauma—"Why do I want to go look at that thing that makes me nervous?"—that works very strongly against our curiosity about ourselves. And if we are sort of free to be curious about ourselves, it's not dangerous or threatening to be curious about ourselves. There's so much that we can learn.
--:-- So just an example can be: What does my self-talk sound like? What do I say to myself in quiet moments? What do I say to myself if I do something wrong? What do I say to myself if I drop something? What do I say to myself if I approach a new social situation or a new challenge?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: So we become curious about what is going on inside of us, and now we start to put words to things. We can do it sometimes just by thinking, but when we put it outside of us, it's different. That's why if we're talking to someone, that can make a difference—a trusted other. About, "Hey, I was thinking about... I'm saying this to myself over and over. I realize it's been going on for years." Can we say that to someone else? Or can we write it? Writing it down, journaling, can make a big difference in that way.
--:-- And talking to another person can involve a therapist. I think if someone is having thoughts that they don't want to be alive anymore, or thoughts that start to be quite severe, then that person should get help, because we want to understand and make sure that we're maintaining safety. So there is a place where professional help is important and is needed.
--:-- In many situations, if it's not to that level of severity where it's needed for safety, it can still dramatically help us inquire with ourselves. There's another person who's trained to help us introspect, to help us inquire about ourselves. That's why I go to therapy. I don't miss therapy unless there's no choice about it—I'm out of town. I simply have no two ways about it. Because even though I can help other people do this as a trained therapist, I can't do it for myself. I can do some of it for myself. I can introspect. I can think about myself, talk. I can write. But I can't do for myself what someone outside of me can do, because I'm impacted by what's going on inside of me as I'm trying to think about what's going on inside of me.
--:-- So thinking, writing, or the therapy process can help us understand ourselves so much better. And the change rides on the back of understanding. We're trying to polish the hood instead of looking underneath at the engine. I believe that we are capable of understanding ourselves so much better than we do. The world kind of collaborates with the shame in us and the fear that says, "Oh, just look the other way." And it's really the opposite of what leads us to health, which is part of why you and I are talking about it today, a part of why it's so important.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, and it's also why I want to take a highlighter and make sure that as you were listening to Dr. Conti, you had two, maybe three super important takeaways from what he just said.
--:-- Number one, that just thinking about this can sometimes lead to you spinning in circles. And so there's an enormous benefit to you getting those thoughts out of your mind and onto paper or speaking them out into the world.
--:-- The second thing that you said is, if you can have access to therapy, that's a fantastic thing. Just like the example that I gave earlier when I was saying our daughter was telling herself, "I'm never going to find anybody and I'm not good looking and I'm not that and I'm not the other thing." When you're outside and you're objective, you have this perspective that the person living with this little voice doesn't have. So there's something beautiful about speaking it out of your mouth so that you can now analyze with somebody else.
--:-- But you also said something, and you wrote about this in your book, and I think it's super important: that just talking about it with a friend or a loved one, having somebody that you feel safe with that you can share your experiences with, normalizes it. It makes you feel that sense of relief. And that can be helpful to somebody if you can't afford to go to a therapist. So don't do this on your own, because talking to a friend or a loved one about the little voice in your head and how you see the dots starting to connect can provide you the insight and self-awareness that you really deserve.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yes, absolutely.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is there anything else that you would add to that?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Well, I think we can get perspectives from outside of us. Imagine in the example where you're citing your daughter saying, "I don't know how to talk to me" or "I'm not good enough or attractive enough." When a person feels that way, we can very rapidly start making self-fulfilling prophecies without being aware of it. Someone who feels that way is often diffident, their head is down, they're behaving in ways that may make them much, much less approachable. Then no one does approach them. And then they find confirmatory evidence that they're not good enough. And then they're looking down more next time. They're more avoidant next time. This can get people into places that can at times be hard to get out of or to understand, because we're often not aware of how what's going on inside affects how we present ourselves in the world around us.
--:-- That person who keeps having a negative experience with a boss over and over and over again may not realize that they're inadvertently behaving in certain ways that are diffident, that are avoidant. And then there's a repetition. So we can look across life situations. But we're not necessarily the best at observing ourselves—how am I in the world?
--:-- How many times have I heard a person say, "Oh, no one wants to talk to me" or "I'm not good enough, I'm not attractive enough for this or that." And then when you get a little bit more information, oh, since that breakup two months ago, every time they go out, they're kind of like this. And their friends see that. But maybe people haven't talked about it. A lot of times that's the case—people around someone haven't talked to someone about something that's very clearly evident. If we start being more curious about ourselves, talking to trusted people around us, it's remarkable how much we can learn about ourselves.
--:-- Someone will tell me that they feel very ashamed of themselves. They've done something terrible, but they have been assaulted. They're kind of like the example that you gave, which happened throughout life. And you would say, "Well, what might you say to another person?" If another person came in who was sleeping when they were assaulted, would you stay around and tell them just how awful they are? It's a way of getting out of ourselves, because we make ourselves special in ways that are not good for us. Don't make yourself special in ways that are not good. If it were anyone else, we would have sympathy and compassion. We want to bolster that person. So why am I the exception?
--:-- We can look at ourselves through a fair and equitable lens if we come at it that way. That's part of the premise of inquiry in therapy. And what it would be like if we're just talking to someone trusted around us—they don't want to go tell someone, "Here's my story of why I'm so bad." But like, "Oh, here's a story of how I can really think that. And that can go over and over again in my head." If I'm curious about it, that conversation is likely to go well because I'll learn from me while I'm talking. And if I'm talking to you, I'll probably learn from you too. And I'll open up also for you to talk to me. Maybe then you talk to me about yourself, and that's good for you.
--:-- There are ways that we can, through trusted communication and communication in the service of understanding and helping, be so much help to one another in ways that we just often aren't. Often not because we don't want to be, but because the opportunities aren't there for it. Nobody raises something. It's just not talked about. It doesn't have to be like that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When you start to identify that little voice and the weight that it's tied to, how do you train your mind to default to something else?
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Well, there are a lot of potential answers, depending upon the person, their underlying mental health, what that thing is, how pervasive it may or may not be in their lives. Is it reflection? Is it writing? Is it a therapy process? There are a lot of answers to that, and they also include behavioral change.
--:-- So if I think I'm a loser because I'm not healthy enough, some aspect of that is behavioral change. It's realizing, "I can get myself out of bed 20 minutes earlier and go for a walk around the block. I can do that." And then getting myself to do that, which then bolsters me. So there's behavioral change and there's what goes on inside.
--:-- But I think an extremely important thing to say about the question you asked is that when something has been with us for a long time, it doesn't change overnight because we are also creatures of habit. I give this example a lot: if you and I just chose a word and we decided to say it a thousand times, then you'll be thinking about it this evening. I'll be thinking about it this evening too. If we say it 5,000 times, it'll be on our minds in two days. So we have to understand that these negative pathways can and will atrophy over time, but they don't go away all at once.
--:-- Because we live in a world that often wants rapid gratification and a medical system that is like, "No matter what's going on with you, you get 10 sessions of a certain kind of therapy and everyone's supposed to be better afterwards." This drive towards rapid gratification and these expectations that we're just supposed to be able to change things—I think also come from how the mental health systems that allegedly are treating us, and often don't do a good job of it, create a sense of disappointment. "Why am I still thinking that after I've already been through three weeks of therapy about it?" Well, the answer might be because you've been thinking about it for seven months or seven years. Or in some cases, seven decades.
--:-- So we have to have a framing that's realistic. It may be that a 20% change in the frequency of saying that negative thing to oneself over a couple months might be an amazing achievement. And that achievement is leading towards that thing going away. But we get so impatient, and we don't have a framing of what should this require of me? How long should this take? What are these neuronal mechanisms that are forces of habit that guide so much of what goes on inside of us that can be changed but not rapidly?
--:-- So I think, again, understanding is of such importance, and having rational expectations. I very often will want people to understand: we can change this. But it's going to take us—I might say, "It's probably going to be in the four to six month range. We can really get our arms around this." And I hope that things can start improving a couple of weeks down the road. But it's a several month process. Let the person know that. Because so often there's just a reflex that says, "Hey, somebody threw a medicine at you, and that medicine is supposed to make you better." Let alone if it's a couple of therapy sessions and that's supposed to make a person better. We need a rational framing for what's going on inside of us and to plot out how do we actually get to change.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I think that's good news. Because if you have a level of patience that you bring to this process, you're giving it room to work. And I will share personally that even just identifying the fact that this was a reflexive habit of mine to tell myself someone's mad at me—even just identifying it like, "Oh, there it is again. Oh, interesting. Oh, wow. There it is again. Oh, how could the person in front of me in the line at the coffee shop be mad at me? I haven't said anything." Just, "Oh, there it is again." The process alone of starting to see this is rewarding in and of itself.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: I think I want to highlight, when we talk about having the courage to look at ourselves and how hard it is, you think about the example that you gave. You could have felt bad about feeling bad. "Why am I feeling this way? I wake up and no one's here, I feel this way." Or, "Am I saying feeling bad things about them, that my husband would feel that way about me?" Think about how many ways you could just feel bad about that and have shut it down. So it takes courage and curiosity to not do that. I just think that part is so important to emphasize.
--:-- We can start doing that. We can start feeling better, doing better, emboldening ourselves just by doing small, nice things for ourselves and for other people. And it may sound trite, but it is not. If you're in that line of the coffee shop and somebody drops something, pick it up for them or give them a smile. Or do something nicer for ourselves, because we often self-punish. If I don't feel bad about myself, I'll just walk that distance in the rain instead of putting an umbrella up. We do a lot of these things to ourselves where we could just, in the moment, be nicer to ourselves, more considerate to ourselves and to others.
--:-- That starts empowering and emboldening us to see there's enough good in me that I can give somebody a smile, I can give somebody a helping hand, or I can even be a little nicer to myself. It may sound small or trite, but I promise that it is not. And it's often that that gets the ball rolling towards something maybe more difficult, like looking at something that I know is on my mind a lot but I've been scared to look at. I think we can start in simple ways—simple goodness to self and others.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. That example of putting an umbrella up was so poignant because I think of how many times I've had an umbrella and I've just been like, "No, it's okay. I carry the umbrella. I walk a couple blocks. I pop my collar. I start to hunch down and I take the drops." And that moment where you stop and put up the umbrella—it is important. And I keep thinking about this visual of the raindrops being like the negative beat down, and the act of popping up the umbrella as a way to just have yourself not have to.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yeah, I really do love that. Sometimes we'll say, "To hell with it." But the idea, I get the umbrella out, but "to hell with it." No, that's actually "to hell with me." So we want to stop and think: if I'm thinking "to hell with it," what am I really thinking? "To hell with me. I'm not worth getting the umbrella out." And it's awareness. I know I'm going to stop and I'm going to do that. I'm not going to say "to hell with it, to hell with me." I'm going to make some protection, make a little bit more pleasantness or anything positive for myself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I love that way of then the umbrella is shielding us from the negativity because we've had the wherewithal inside of ourselves to do something small but meaningful for ourselves.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: Yeah, I think that's a powerful way to move that example forward. I like that. It's beautiful.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Dr. Conti, you are a gift. Thank you so much for being here with us, for sharing so much, for giving us so many tools. I am so happy to know you. Thank you.
--:-- Dr. Paul Conti: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You're welcome. I don't think I'll ever forget that umbrella example because I do that to myself all the time. And so do you. And what I hope you took away from this conversation is that you don't have to. Just because you're used to letting that little voice pummel you day in and day out like I used to, doesn't mean that you have to do that for the rest of your life.
--:-- You now have the tools, you have the perspective, you have the context, you have the wisdom, and you have the support of Dr. Conti, and you know you've got the support of me. So please, whatever it is that inspired something in you, whatever that voice is saying, and getting curious—please do it. Because I really believe more than ever that the rest of your life and your happiness depends on you finding the courage to do exactly that.
--:-- And just know, your friend Mel Robbins is going to be here twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. I'll have my hand on your back and we'll do this together. And in case nobody else tells you, I want to be sure to tell you that I love you. I believe in you and I believe in your ability to tell yourself a different story, to tell yourself what you want to hear and what you deserve to hear. Because when you start doing that, according to Dr. Conti, that's how you're going to create a better life.
--:-- All right. I'll see you in a few days.
--:-- [Sound of Mel struggling to speak]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Guess I shouldn't wear this as a necklace. I've invited somebody very special to spend some time with you and me. No, okay. Now, I discovered Dr. Conti a couple months ago. I need to start up. Why can't I talk today? Whew! Yes, this is so... I don't know what is wrong with me today, you guys. What is wrong with me today? Okay. Whew! Something's wrong with my unconscious mind. It needs to stop interrupting the string of sentences here. Okay. To. OK, hold on a second. I can't talk. What is going on? It's like my lips are swollen. And that's why I'm not going anywhere. So my dog is now doing his thing and I don't think he can hear. Can you hear it? Yes, it's like I'm like kind of like. Exactly.
--:-- Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
