Dr. Mary DeRaedt: Emotional health, the pains of closeness, Uganda, and more

[Jim] Hello, everyone. Did the video start?

Oh, my gosh, my computer is struggling.

So hello, everyone. Welcome to an episode of the Jim Kleiber show. I'm obviously Jim Kleiber. We have today a guest named Mary DeRaedt, right? Is that how I pronounce it? Yes. I still remember. member.

And today we're going to talk about a lot of different things. But what I've realized is that in these conversations, I want to have a little structure to them, almost like running a facilitation or workshop. And so we're going to start with just simple intros.

I'm going to answer a little bit about me and share how I met Mary. And then Mary's going to share a little bit about her. And then I will say what I hope to happen in the conversation. Mary will share a little bit bit about that as well, and then we'll get started. And at the end of it, we will stop, and then we'll do a reflection on what we learned, what surprised us, and things like that. So for those of you who have never heard about me, or those who have known me for a long time, but have no idea what I do, which is probably many people in my life, I am Jim Kleiber. I have done a wide variety of things in a wide variety of places. I studied electrical engineering, and then switched to intercultural communication when I was in undergrad. And then I lived in Tanzania for about a year and a half doing economic development work. I came back to the U.S., did innovation consulting work for two different firms, quit those, started a company to journal about how I was feeling. So I built an app on Android and then had it on iOS called iFeelio. Tried that for a while moved out to california because I fell in love and wanted to be in silicon valley and realized I didn't want to do an app so I started emotional self-defense for learning how to deal with the breakup that I had in my life how to not hate people how to respond to any situation with love and then have often run workshops in germany and around the world with emotional self-defense and other things like that and have been involved with emotions Emotions, formally, since 2012.

But informally, probably a long time before that. And I met Mary through my friend Pavel, who runs and we started an organization in northern Uganda that does peer to peer counseling, helping people with mental health, emotional health and just frankly dealing with life. And I went out there in October and Mary joined us as well. So me and Mary were the two guests. and so we went up to northern rural Uganda and visited with the counselors and we visited with the team that was running the program and some of the patients and Mary also taught some trauma based trauma-based counseling I believe she can speak more to that and also something called sand tray therapy and Mary and I just had some really good conversations and it surprised me me how well we gelled and agreed on some of these things. So I am happy to pass it over to Mary to share a little bit about her.

[Mary] Mary DeRaedt, So I am Mary DeRaedt. I am a PhD in counseling at George Washington University. I am the director of the school counseling program, but I started my career many years ago as an elementary educator.

And worked with children, first and second graders, really, and what I realized along the lines of that was that the kids I was working with were having a lot of emotional issues. They were challenged. They couldn't manage the academic work that we were doing, and I didn't understand why at the time, and so I decided to go back and get my degree in mental health counseling and got a a master's degree in that and then I spent about 12 years, 10 to 12 years, working as a licensed professional counselor in a couple of different places, one in Indiana, then in Michigan, and now in Virginia. And along the way, I decided that it was important to get a doctorate, so I went to George Washington University and while I was there it really sparked my desire to know and understand even more deeply what happens when people experience trauma and where that comes from what it actually is and how to better not only treat it but prevent it to the extent that we can and so this took me down a very different road which led me to be in Uganda with Jim and Pavel where I started kind of looking at communities internationally that were dealing with trauma and looking more at like the apart from just the United States the international understanding of mental health and came to believe deeply that mental health and physical health are not two different things and that we need to really help to help people understand, reconnect with and engage.

And not just kind of compartmentalizing off. But this led me to start doing some work with refugees in Lebanon, and then teachers who were working with refugee children in Lebanon, and eventually to working with Pavel and peer counseling in Uganda. So that's a little bit about me, just to begin with here.

[Jim] Yeah, and I hope, I mean, obviously, So we're going to get more into a lot of this stuff. So what I hope to happen on this call is that the Internet doesn't die on me because I'm getting a message that says trying to reconnect. Make sure you have a stable Internet connection.

[Mary] Oh, no.

[Jim] So Mary and I are experimenting with video recording. I've mostly preferred to do audio only. So we're going to try to do video on this. And if it doesn't work, we'll just do audio only and hope that the audio also works.

Um also I hope to yeah talk more about the idea of mental and physical health being connected I like to call it emotional health but to explore and to dive into that in terms of her understanding of it but also what the general field believes on that or what her experience has been with people in her field with that um I also love to talk more about sand tray therapy specifically just her experience in Northern Uganda and how sand tray therapy can really help, especially kids, but I would adults as well, just communicate when we don't necessarily have the words. Um, yeah. And to have fun and to learn something because I enjoy conversations with Mary and I'm grateful that she joined and yeah. Anything that you are hoping specifically?

[Mary] Well, I would echo what you've already said, but I think I would love to talk even more about emotional self-defense. I think the conversations we had about that, it was really interesting to me and kind of learning more about it as you and I talk. And really what I hope this to be is just an echoing of the conversations you and I have already had in the past and really just to kind of dig into the ideas about emotions emotions and try to unpack how they impact, how they impact our physical body, how they are completely entwined with our physical body. And I don't know, just have fun and engage and think deeply and complexly about a lot of different things.

[Jim] Yeah, that sounds good. So yeah, let's get started. Mary and I had many, many conversations in Uganda. We did not expect to meet each other. We expected to meet each other, but I don't think we expected to have so many conversations conversations and really go so deep on a lot of different things. Um, it was such a pleasant surprise for me. I was just happy to be in Uganda with Pavel and some of his friends and the organization. And it's just one surprise after another that just warmed my heart. Um, and yeah, Yeah, we had some fun over food as well.

[Mary] We did.

[Jim] So curious. So you wrote an article talking about how physical health and mental health are actually connected. And one thing that I've struggled with in this space over the last 12 years or so is that people love the phrase mental health. People seem to use the phrase mental health over and over again, and they say, you know, there's a stigma around mental health, but, you know, we just need to destigmatize it. And the thing that frustrates me is, why don't you just change the branding? Why don't you change the phrase? Why don't you talk about it differently in a way that might resonate more with people instead of trying to force people to resonate with that phrase? And so I'm curious, what has your experience been like? What led you to thinking that mental health and physical health are connected? And what would you kind of call that? Or how does that differ from people in the space? What has your experience been.

[Mary] So I think, you know, when I first started in this field, the idea of mental health, I was on board with this idea that, oh, we got to destigmatize mental health. We got to destigmatize mental health.

But then I really started diving into neuroscience and learning more about what where emotions actually come from, what's actually happening in our body when we're having an emotion. Ocean and realizing that there are literally times when our body state creates a thought.

So we wouldn't have had that thought otherwise, but the fact that our body is in a specific situation, it creates the thought, which means that this idea that mental health implies that it's something wrong with our thinking, right? Our brain is messed up somehow. And yet our brain is completely, in some ways, at the mercy of our body and vice versa. They are entwined. I think I've mentioned to you before the idea of the Mobius strip or Mobius loop that is, it's a mathematical concept, but it has no beginning and no end. You can't figure out where one part of it starts and where the other part of it ends. And so our conscious awareness Awareness and our thinking are just a byproduct in many ways of our biological experience. Byproduct is a bad word to use for it. But they are a part of our biological experience. And so, and the reason I started looking into this is because I was realizing more and more that, like, what we eat and, you know, pain and things that are happening within our body are impacting our ways, like, addressing those things are ways of healing emotional difficulty, right? Right? If we eat better, if we get physical exercise, if we move, like literally you could be in a bad mood. And if you stand up and just start walking around, it could improve your mood just by walking around.

And so I think the power of that for me, the fact that we have the ability to harness the physical to impact our emotional state because it's all one thing, feels really resilient to me. It feels really powerful and really useful. And yet I keep hearing people get stuck in this idea of you have mental health and you have physical health. And if it's physical if you have this if you have physical pain then we need to address it and we need to get take a pill for it if you have emotional pain then that's all in your head and we need to talk about it and that's going to fix it and I don't I think we have to do both at once we have to do it all together I don't know if that's making sense or if it's answering your question but it.

[Jim] Makes it makes sense to me I don't know.

[Mary] About people listening but it makes Well.

[Jim] It's so many thoughts came out of my mind. One is, so why do you think maybe your field in academia, or not even in academia, maybe just the mental health field, doesn't see the connection so strongly? What do you well.

[Mary] I think we have we have a long history hundreds of years right we have hundreds of years of believing and living in a reality a kind of created reality that we have that our thoughts are somehow our conscious mind is somehow separate I wonder sometimes if there's like a religious like root to that you know like I don't have no evidence of this but that maybe this idea that like we have a soul I'm not saying we do or don't have a soul but I'm saying like the idea that there's a part of us that isn't our body and then we ascribe that to our consciousness so our consciousness is now somehow the separate from from our physical body, then that means that there's health to our conscious mind, and then there's health to our physical body.

That it somehow separates it out and says, okay, here, this is how we address our brain. This is how we think about our brain as not really part. And so if it's not really part of physical health, then it has to be its own separate thing. And then we say, okay, then it's mental health.

[Jim] Wow, I never thought about it that way. yeah because a lot of religions will talk about you know the body has died but the soul continues to live and so there is that separation between soul and body um.

And so thinking that there are, yeah, I mean, I think even in Buddhism, they talk about things like this. It's about trying to have better karma. And so that when you have reincarnation, that you are slowly releasing, which talks about a separation from the body. Huh. Right. There's a book. I can't remember the title. I think it's called Why Do Religions Exist or something. Why We Need Religion, I think it's called. By Stephen. Oh, that sounds familiar. Stephen Assmer. Oh, man, I feel bad. Professor from, I think, University of Chicago. And one of his main arguments is that religions help us process emotions.

And he says it helps us process emotions with regards to the stories, but also with regards to physical practices. So it approaches both. So it's not just, if you go to church, it's not just what's happening in the written word, but it's also the songs people are singing, and standing up and kneeling, and then kneeling and standing up and moving the body, and dancing. These things change the way that the body feels, which changes the thoughts, and the thoughts change the body, and there's this interaction between the two.

Um but I really appreciate what you said that like we've had hundreds of years maybe even thousands of years of culture almost telling us that they're separate right the belief that they're separate.

[Mary] I love I don't want to interrupt you but i.

[Jim] Love what you're.

[Mary] Saying about the movement because it's it's something really important and I didn't intend to talk about religion today, but I think that my experience as someone who grew up in a religious tradition, Christianity, you're right. Something that I have noticed about it is that there are, in almost every religion, there are these postures, there is the actual practice, encourages the combination of physical and emotional engagement, right? You kneel to pray, You have postures that put you in a position where you are able to focus. All of the practices really fit with what we know now about kind of harnessing the physical, and yet it doesn't really talk about it as...

It doesn't really talk about it in terms, it talks more about, like, how do you manage your mind? The scriptures, right, the texts are like, how do you manage your thinking? How do you change how you approach this? How do you do this? How do you do that? And it doesn't really explain, I don't think I ever got a good explanation of, well, guess what? When you, for example, something I learned is that when you use the words, the kind of, like, amen and shalom, Om, the spiritual words for some religions, Om, the M and the O sound and the A, they resonate in the head and calm the brain. And all of these religious words, Shalom, Amen, Om, they all have the same sound. And so there is a physical, right?

[Jim] The sound is similar to, sorry.

[Mary] Exactly.

[Jim] Exactly.

[Mary] I was like.

It's interesting though right that for centuries these things have already been happening where that it is it is harnessing the physical to impact the the emotional but it, no one ever talks about that right no one ever talks about how this is why the reason why that works is because your emotional health is completely entwined in your physical health.

[Jim] There's a woman that I hope to have the courage to email today or tomorrow, because I would love to have her on the podcast. Her name is Anna Wurtzbika, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, a professor based in Australia, but I believe she's originally Polish. And she wrote a book called Emotion Across Cultures. And she's done a lot of work on something called semantic primes. This whole idea of, she's a linguistic anthropologist and how to figure out what are some of the semantic concepts that can't be further reduced, like prime numbers. So it's like I, you, because, things like that. And she said the word emotion doesn't exist in all cultures, but what does is to feel and to think. And she believes that emotion is really, I put me, you know, putting words in her mouth, but that emotion is thought applied to feeling, thinking about feeling. And so when you say that we're doing these things, but we're doing these things with our body, but we're not talking about them, that's, it's not making that for me, that connection. That's why I like the phrase emotional health. It's in my mind, it's stitching together those two. It's the words and the concepts and the thoughts applied to the analog, the physical, that's actually happening.

So when you're prostrating in, I don't know if that's what they call it, but in Islam, when they bend over to do the prayer five times a day, I mean, it's intense exercise. But how does that open up the...

Diaphragm? How does that open up the body? How does that relieve some of the tension and the fear that people are feeling by just going through these practices? In a couple of days, I'm going to have Nancy Leutz on the podcast and her work is called ALBA. And the whole idea is to help a lot of people, but for a while it's been focused on actors to help them induce emotional states without having to think of their trauma, without having to come from a cognitive place. So the idea is to feel anger, to express anger, to really be in it without having to think about betrayal in the past or to feel the sadness without having to think about their dog dying. And so I think you will love a lot of stuff with Nancy's when it talks about this body. body, but I think you two would also have a lot to talk about with regards to this.

I am excited to hear about that. I'm curious as well. Oh, yeah. And I'm curious as well, do you think that there's just, especially in academia, especially in, yeah, especially in academia, that there's a culture of not feeling, being disconnected, like not being in the body? Just I think academia like for example I remember writing papers when I was in school and I was not allowed to use I couldn't use the first person pronoun that it had to be objective in a way and it didn't allow me to be subjective and so it didn't really allow me to say what I was thinking or feeling in my body my intuitions like there's no intuition in science like there's a ton of it but we think there's no intuition in science. Like a lot of great scientists will tell you there's a ton of intuition in science, but the culture of it says, oh, there's no intuition. It's a very rigorous process, very objective.

So how much of it do you think is just, yeah. What do you think about that with the kind of this disembodied is academia kind of disembodied in a way?

You know, I haven't thought about it that way, but as I'm listening to it.

Well, first of all, there is a desire to be very scientific and rigorous, right? The more scientific, whatever that means, and rigorous that you are, the more you kind of get people to agree with what you're selling in terms of your research that you're putting out there.

Hold on, Mary. I hate to interrupt, but I'm getting some weird messages of, hey, your recording is finished. That's great. I'm like, what do you mean? Did it stop recording? Is it still recording? It still says it's recording on my end, but. Hello, everyone. I need a new computer. We'll figure out how this works in the back end. I have to do a little more editing than I'd like to, but hopefully you'll still have some of our conversation with me and Mary. And we're back, I think. I think my computer overheated. Time for a new computer. And yeah, Mary, if you can, please continue with what we were talking about, because I totally forget.

[Mary] That's okay. We were talking about kind of a disconnect in academia, between, and I'm not, I can't remember exactly what word we were using, but just kind of a...

[Jim] Oh, disembodied. Yeah.

[Mary] Yeah, a disembodied sense. That's what I used it.

[Jim] Yeah.

[Mary] Now that you say disembodied, I think I actually really like that term disembodied for academia, because I think there is a couple of things. My personal experience has been that generally in academia, there is this need to prove yourself, right? You've got to publish or perish, you have to be the expert, you're the professor, you're writing this research. And I think my personal perspective is that when people get so focused on performance and on achieving, beyond being who they are, and I think there's benefits to that, to my original point, but when they're so focused on that, you do become disembodied, right? You're no longer connected. You have to put up a facade of, you know, competence and perfection and achievement.

And then if you actually sit in how you're feeling as a human being, if you actually sit in the emotions that go along with that, let yourself experience them and share them with others, then that breaks the facade. And so I think there has to be, there's almost this natural barrier to being in academia that requires you to stay all up in your head.

You've got to be thinking about, you know, the research. You've got to be thinking about the methodology. You have to be, you know, demonstrating to other people that the research you're doing is valid valid and important. And, you know, you have to make sure that your research is new and not already been done and that it's filling a specific niche that no one's ever looked at before. So you have to be trying to prove all the time that what you're doing is the best and most cutting edge thing that's ever been done. And I don't know, even as I say those words, I can feel the sense of you can't be yourself, right? You can't just be yourself.

And it's something that I personally have been working on for the last few years, which is trying to just be myself and be genuine in what I know and what I don't know and acknowledge that I don't have to be right all the time. And I don't have to, the research that I do doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have have to be, you know, the best and most amazing newest thing that ever existed. It can be what I think is going to be valuable to people, what I think is going to help people and no one else has to agree.

But, I mean, I don't know what that brings up for you listening to it, but it makes me think about your statement that, like, it makes me think about your statement that, like, you can't use I, right? In my field, just for the record, you can't use I, but you also, even when you're writing, like, clinical notes and work, like, case conceptualizations and things like that that I teach students how to do, you can't use I. Even though you're literally giving your opinion, you're supposed to officially refer to it as this clinician.

So like when I write something, I would say this clinician believes that this is what's going on for this person.

[Jim] Whoa.

[Mary] Right. So like I can't say I think that so-and-so is experiencing this and that this is what's the root of their problem. You have to write it in a way that is completely disconnected and separate from your own personal identity.

[Jim] So as you were speaking the software is driving me nuts, speaking of like disconnect from your identity it's weird to like look at his face but also when for some reason the camera just zooms in it just doubled on my face so now my face is taking up the whole side I don't know what it's on your side but just with zoom you.

[Mary] Look you look completely the same it didn't change at all on my end.

[Jim] Oh my god I have no idea what's going on with this thing like i'm just watching you and then I just see my face go my face gets huge i'm like what why am I now blurry and zoomed in like digital zoomed so you have to write this you have to write this clinician yeah which is so what the the thought that came into my mind is that you might be helping a patient with, disassociation by disassociating in the right. I'm saying you have to do you're taught to disassociate literally, isn't that disassociation? Like an out of body experience talking about oneself in the third person.

[Mary] Yeah, a little bit. And we could talk all about dissociation as one of my specialties, but yeah, a little bit. You have to kind of, you have to, in many ways you have to have like a counselor or a therapist persona that you are presenting because the and i'm not saying all this because I think it's all pathological i'm just this is the facts as they as they exist which is you know you are supposed to try to manage and navigate your own identity in a way that tries to take it out of the equation as much as possible so that you can lean more heavily on what's, And I think, I don't think you can separate your personal judgment from your clinical judgment.

[Jim] It sounds similar to just remove everything that's going on with your body and just have this pure, rational thought that's going through your mind that, yeah, it seems like there's this purity test almost in a way that, a lot of neuroscience and economists and psychological researchers who talked about how, we're not purely rational beings what did somebody say the other day they said they really understood humans when they switched from thinking we were rational beings to, rationalizing beings I was like oh that's good yeah but this so for you to put they're basically saying ignore your intuition like you just have to I don't know just go with what is by the book I don't it just and like you said certain thoughts can arise based on different bodily states so I think the one I wanted to say earlier that most people are probably familiar with at least in the u.s is this concept called hangry right people are hungry sometimes we get angry and when we get angry sometimes we think people are idiots and it's because we're hungry We want food. The thought of this guy is an idiot might actually be that I'm tired or I'm grumpy or I'm hungry. Right.

[Mary] Absolutely. So there is this understanding of feelings. I love that you were bringing up earlier the feelings versus emotion word. And um in her book how emotions are made lisa feldman barrett does a really great job of like compiling all the research that's been done about emotions and feelings really and I make the distinction of a feeling is something that happens in your body and hunger is one of in my field you often say to people um tell me how you feel but hunger is not a feeling I don't it absolutely is is just as much, that is like the fundamental misunderstanding of what a feeling is.

[Jim] Right?

[Mary] Because there are only four feeling states, and that is arousal, sedation, so arousal at one end, sedation at the other, and then pleasant or unpleasant.

And what's interesting about it is that those are all feelings, create kind of, if you imagine like a grid and like an X and Y axis and numbers going up and down in each direction, right? And you think like, if I were to say to you, chart on this grid where mild anger falls for you in terms of how unpleasant or pleasant and then sedation or or um arousal almost every person on earth would put put it in a slightly different place.

[Jim] Ah okay yes I agree I was like oh no don't tell me they're gonna be in the same spot because i'm gonna disagree real quick.

[Mary] No no no no in a totally different place yeah i've talked to people I I I did this lesson with a couple different classes and people are like well yeah but our anger is always going to be arousal and I said actually no I have met and discussed with multiple people I know that anger is a state of sedation. It's like a quiet, calm, simmering that for them, they experience as almost pleasant sedation or unpleasant sedation. Whereas, and if you think about it, that's because when we were little, our parents looked at whatever was happening to us and told us what we were feeling, right? They told us the feeling word for what we were experience they look at kids and we look at kids and go you're angry right now because you didn't get to have that cookie and that's how we teach them feeling words but in essence we're labeling something we have no clue what this kid's actually feeling inside we're just looking at external, experiences and we're telling them what they feel and so now they create us we all create create this map in our head that goes, oh, when I felt this, my parents told me that was this.

And how they interpret us is based on their own interpretation of their own feelings.

Wow.

[Jim] And the signals that they get from maybe our face or whatever, but they don't know what's going on in our stomach or what's going on. I mean, how do we recognize what we're feeling as we pay attention to our body? Like, hey, how do, like, am I angry? Oh, my heart's beating really fast a little bit. Okay, maybe I'm stressed. Maybe I'm afraid, actually. Maybe I'm not angry. Maybe I'm nervous. Maybe, what's, you know, what's my stomach doing? What are my fists doing? This is something that Nancy talks a lot about. um it's just that what is the body doing and how does that contribute to the emotional state.

And yeah and to receive the label from somebody else who doesn't have access to everything that's going on in the body like I can probably tell if you're uh like right now maybe you're curious you look kind of curious because I can see your face I can hear it in the voice a little bit but with with the face more um and that hmm like some of the intonation some of those frequencies are giving me that impression but that doesn't mean that's what you're feeling or the thing that I like to say it doesn't mean that you're feeling that attached to the same context that I think you're feeling it so i'm like she's curious and me and it's like maybe she's curious about something happening on the screen maybe she's curious you know maybe she's curious about the The way her hair is falling, you know, who knows, right?

That's interesting. Look like I should flip my hair like this more often. Who knows? But I think you're right. I think a lot of times we look to parents and authority figures, whether it's a parent or a boss at a workplace, or if we don't call them bosses anymore, I don't know, manager, whatever people call them, or to a president, or to an older sibling, or to a romantic partner that we look up to or something. And we trust their judgment on how we are feeling.

You say I'm angry so I must be angry it's like no how are you feeling if you disagree with me tell me and that's actually some of the thing I say with emotional self-defense step two was tell the other person how you imagine they might be feeling don't tell them you know how they are feeling because that can often change the feeling to anger very quickly anger right because it's You're misunderstood.

[Mary] Right?

[Jim] Yeah.

[Mary] And then you get angry. Yeah, I think it's so fascinating to me because, you know, you were saying like you're reading my context clues in terms of my facial expression, and yet, depending on the country you're in, all of those cues for interest, all of those cues for, you know, they're totally different. They're very different. I fall back on a moment when Pavel was explaining to me that in Uganda, sometimes they indicate agreement with you, not by nodding their head, but by raising their eyebrows. And he's like, so if someone's doing this to you, it just means they agree.

[Jim] Oh, man. Yeah. In Uganda, like I think Tanzania as well, but especially Uganda, if people are talking, if you're talking with somebody and they want to agree in the conversation, they'll often raise their eyebrows or also go hmm hmm hmm right and so they're like what the, what's going on and I think it's bulgaria where it's for no they actually nod their head, or I can't remember maybe you shake the head side to side is yes I don't know one of them was opposite from how a lot of people do it and then obviously you have the I forget what they call it but in India, where the head kind of goes side to side in some ways. Lots of different conflicting things based on our culture.

Yeah, like you said, if we take on what our parents tell us, this is how we're feeling. Or if we take on how a thought leader tells us how we're feeling, because there are a lot of people in the field of psychology who say that these are the feelings, the primary feelings that we have. And nobody agrees on what the primary feelings are. they say oh it's these five and somebody says no it's these seven and somebody says oh no it's actually these three plus or minus one or two and you're like what right and and lisa feldman barrett probably has a different perspective on a vert speaker has more of a linguistic approach to it um what you were talking about with the arousal and for me when I heard you say that that's a grid grid but then you you said that's almost a grid to explore how we place the words because people will place the words in different places so you're not saying that these are the four, word feelings that we have no.

[Mary] It's not like you're but but it's but it's a it's a body state right those aren't those are body state feelings.

[Jim] Right reactions so.

[Mary] Arousal is arousal goes along with with the parasympathetic nervous well the sympathetic nervous system right when the sympathetic nervous system is engaged we're in a state of arousal when the parasympathetic nervous system engages we're in a state of sedation it's like it so it's describing the bodily reaction that creates a feeling in our body.

[Jim] And then you having like where do people place it almost it sounds like emotion yeah is the word the label they have for that the thought they have applied to that feeling yeah excuse me and the yeah because some people might like you said think the word anger is high arousal in this one quadrant and some people may associate that word with a different spot or if somebody doesn't speak english as a native language they may not associate it with much right yeah you know I know words in german for emotions or in swahilI I know some but I don't feel them so much I actually wrote a paper on this I tell you about that I wrote a paper on this in college um it's probably the first thing that got me into working on a lot of this stuff is um okay I came back from costa rica I was thinking I don't want to do to engineering anymore. I'm just in a country that.

I sat behind a computer in Costa Rica with a blue screen of death, trying to figure out why my computer was broken. And I just turned to myself, I'm like, I am in Costa Rica. Why am I sitting behind this stupid computer? Let me go look at the birds outside. Like, what am I doing with my life?

And so in the first semester, one of the classes I took was speech communication, intercultural communications. And I did a paper on swear words taboo words and euphemisms I think in first and second languages and so I interviewed my danish friend I interviewed a friend who was first generation mexican-american I interviewed a few different friends maybe from singapore or france or something and fascinating to learn about the different emotional reactions we have to words, in learning a second language okay I can learn spanish but we often teach people the swear words because they don't have the emotional reaction to them so I could say like a swear word in korean and it means nothing to me but to other people they freak out like in swahilI they taught me like a phrase to say mama's boy which you call somebody a mama's boy in english it's kind of and I said this to one of my friends he almost wanted to fight me and I was like huh what I I mean, it doesn't mean anything to me. And so, so a lot of times it's just, so we learn the euphemisms because it means the same thing without punching so hard emotionally. But if we're not that good at the second language, we don't learn the euphemisms. Or the other thing I'd say is that when we feel anger, so I think it was the Mexican American woman who said that when she feels anger, she actually resorts to Spanish because because that's when she was a kid, and the language that she grew up with. I was like, ah. So we have certain words associated with certain emotional experiences in the body.

[Mary] Absolutely. I love that because I have often quoted to people that swear words sometimes are associated with intelligence, but I'm like, I don't know why, but people who have high IQ.

[Jim] But I wonder if it's actually associated with, also associated with emotional intelligence, if we want to use that phrase. I like the original phrase of emotional intelligence. But the idea of emotional capacity, maybe? Because swear words tend to have stronger, more intense emotional reactions.

Emotional feelings, like stronger feelings. If I say, if I swear, it's because I'm angry or I'm excited or it's not because I'm slightly excited or I'm like, I'm slightly annoyed. I'm not going to cuss, but I'm real pissed off. Hey.

[Mary] Right. It is. It's amazing. So the term I like is emotional granularity, which the more language that you have for the feeling state that you're experiencing. And it's really a combination of three things, right? It's the feeling state that you're having connected to the context in which it's occurring, and then the language to which you apply.

Because different bodily states in different contexts create the different interpretation language that we put on it.

And so being able to recognize that that the context is just as important as the body state because it's what tells our it's what tells us what why what we maybe should be feeling or shouldn't be feeling um but the but the the thing about language that we put to it is really important because language is what allows us to communicate right with other people and human beings are hardwired to emotionally regulate in a social context so we need the language because we need to feel seen and heard, and the negotiation of language is, kind of allows us to connect with other people and I know you and i've talked a lot about connection um but that that like feeling feeling like you are connected to someone else, I I wonder if in some way requires that you be able to explain the feelings connected to the words that you're using in terms of like I mean I mean I don't know if i'm supposed to cuss on this or not i'm allowed I put it as explicit.

[Jim] I I put every episode as explicit even if we don't cuss so please cuss.

[Mary] Talk about.

[Jim] Sex do whatever you want because.

[Mary] I think like for me I I think that you know the ability to when I am with someone and I feel comfortable enough to say like fuck when something bad happens, that word just, it is connected to a feeling so directly inside of me that has nothing to do with its meaning or its, you know, but to your point earlier, it's connected to an experience that I have and a context in which I'm experiencing that in a way that when when I can share that with another human being, that this word fits this feeling for me, I feel like that person knows me more. They know me better.

[Jim] Right?

[Mary] Because I got to use the word that actually applies. And then they may say, oh, why are you using that word? And I can say, because, oh my gosh, this feeling that I'm having is so whatever, right? I can start explaining myself. I can start, but I guess I'm, I don't know if this is making sense, but it's kind of combining all of these things together to say like, we have our own individual experience, but when our individual experience is observed or engaged with by another person, that experience becomes more manageable and it becomes more understandable and it becomes less intense when it's not just something we're having to carry ourselves and we get it outside of ourselves and someone else experiences it too. And then we feel seen and we feel known and that emotion feels like it's had, that feeling feels like it's had a voice. I don't know if that makes sense.

[Jim] Yeah. I mean, there's some research.

I watched an interview with Don Lemon and Elon Musk and Don Lemon said, oh yeah, research shows, studies show. And he got annoyed. And I was like, yeah, I'm doing the same thing.

[Mary] Right, I know.

[Jim] Well, there was some research or some study that was talking about how when we feel very strong emotions, we want to share them. We want to to express them to other people. And I think just intuitively, I think a lot of us understand this. If I feel really excited about something, I jump on my phone. Hey, I can't believe that this happened. Can you believe this happened? Or if I feel really pissed off, hey, can you imagine this happened? Like, what? Why would this person do this? And then I want somebody to share that feeling with me. And it's not just the feeling, though. I think for me, it's communication of information. I am sharing information with you so that we can do collective action together. Other it's if we are in the bush and I see a tiger I go ah and I scream now you know he's afraid why is he afraid ah tiger and oh tiger we run right up a tree or whatever you do to save yourself from a tiger I don't know um and I think a lot of people don't see emotion as communication or as information sharing, for me, it's you didn't just say the word fuck. Fuck.

You not only shared the word, you shared the bodily state and you had the.

You let yourself do that because there's a lot of pressure to not communicate these things with other people. And so that maybe you feel safe to communicate this with somebody else. So there's so much that's happening. You want to share this part with you. They could respond to you and say, stop worrying about it. It's not a big deal. And then you may not share it so much.