The People We Carry

How Relationships Shape What We Notice

The People We Carry: How Relationships Shape What We Notice

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

He told me he was alone at a small table in the back of the deli. A sandwich in front of him and no phone in his hand.

He takes a bite, chews slowly, and then sets the sandwich back down. Around him, the place is very full.

A couple’s quietly negotiating where to sit. A kid’s trying to convince someone that he needs a second cookie. And someone nearby is laughing way too loudly into their phone.

He’s not a part of any of it, but he’s paying attention to it all. He’s sitting there as if he has nowhere else to be. As if the sandwich, the noise, and the strangers are the whole afternoon.

And the whole afternoon is completely enough for him.

Hey everyone, it’s Evet.

After doing hair for decades and now working as a coach, I’ve learned that people

rarely leave us with only memories. Sometimes they leave us with a sentence that we might repeat to ourselves or sometimes they change what we actually pay attention to.

Sometimes their way of moving through the world becomes part of the way we move through ours. We carry people.

Their voices become part of our inner conversations, their questions interrupt our certainty, and their way of living shows us that there just might be another way to live.

Today, I want to explore how that happens through one person I’ve known and knew for many years. His name was Loren

And he taught me something about attention, time, and what it means to be fully inside your own life.

So I just want to start with two questions.

Who taught you how to notice your own life?

And what part of the way they lived has quietly become part of the way you live?

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So the man in the deli was Loren. I cut his hair every six weeks for 16 years. And every time he came to the salon, he said the same thing to me.

“I can’t believe it’s already been six weeks.”

He wasn’t saying it to make conversation. He was genuinely surprised that time had escaped him.

I believe Loren was 6 ‘5”. He was gentle. Curious, funny, and one of the least hurried people I had ever known.

He wasn’t slow in the sense that he couldn’t get things done. He had gone to law school, built a career, raised a family. He had a full life.

He simply didn’t seem to stand outside his life with a stopwatch, or constantly judging whether the next thing should have already happened.

He was inside of his life. Nothing dramatic happening.

No stranger revealing the meaning of life over that pastrami sandwich. He just ate lunch. He watched the room. He enjoyed being there.

As he was telling me about this deli experience, I was picturing the deli, the sound, the people that were there. What stayed with me, though, was not the sandwich, which apparently he thoroughly enjoyed, but the fact that he had been present enough to even remember the sandwich and the experience.

This sounds so simple. But it raises a larger psychological question. Why do some people seem to inhabit an ordinary experience while the rest of us are already mentally halfway into the next one?

There are two psychologists, Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert. They studied that question by contacting people at random moments during their day and asking three things:

What were they doing?

What they were thinking about

How they felt in that moment.

They found 47 % of the time people’s minds were somewhere other than what they were doing.

Think about that. Nearly half of the sampled people sampled moments were being lived in one place and mentally occupied in another. They found that the mind wandered during pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral tasks.

And on average, people reported being less happy when their minds were wandering than when their attention was in with what they were doing.

That doesn’t mean that thinking about the past or planning the future is bad, right?

Those abilities are part of what makes us human. We completely need memory and imagination. Who wants to live without those two factors? I don’t.

But the problem begins when the mind is rarely where the body is.

For example, we’re having dinner, but rehearsing tomorrow’s conversation. We’re

on vacation, but planning how we’ll post about the vacation. Someone we care about is talking, but we’re composing our answer before they’ve finished.

I know this pattern very well. I can turn almost anything into a project. I can take a perfectly good day and begin organizing it or improving it and then evaluating it. I can be inside the experience, while still managing it from the control room in my head, basically.

Maybe you do it too.

Attention scans ahead, solves, anticipates, notices what’s missing. It keeps moving so we feel productive, even when there’s nowhere we need to go.

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Loren seemed to have trained his attention differently. It wasn’t just the deli. It was how he interacted with most experiences in his life.

Loren’s attention training in positive psychology is called savoring.

It’s the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and regulate the positive feelings available in each experience.

It’s related to mindfulness, but they’re not identical.

Mindfulness asks us to notice what’s happening with openness and whether the experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Savoring focuses specifically on positive experience. It’s what we do when we allow something good to reach us. Without it, something good can happen without us ever fully receiving it.

Think about when someone compliments you. You immediately

explain why the compliment is not true. I do this often instead of just saying, “hey, thanks so much.”

Or we finish something difficult and instead of taking in the accomplishment that

we’ve done, we move the standard or bar, whatever, and begin criticizing how we could have done it better.

Even worse, what about when we’re laughing with someone that we’re super interested in and then that brain of yours that chatter, says, “this won’t last,” as if preparing for a loss will make it safer.

That’s the positive event happening while savoring is absent.

Positive psychologist Fred Bryant describes three ways we can relate

to positive experiences across time.

• We can anticipate something good before it happens.

• We can savor it while it’s happening.

• We can reminisce after it’s over.

Loren seemed capable of all three.

Music was one way he did this. He seemed to know every song from every decade, but he especially loved The Grateful Dead. He loved that band so much that he and his best friends took the year off between college and law school to follow them around the world. I personally do not share this love of the band at all, yet he kept trying to convert me anyway.

Anyone who knows me knows I live for music and make it a daily part of my life. So our connection was strong on that front, just not what the Grateful did.

At one of our appointments, I was telling him about this harmony group that I was in and how when someone suggested we do a song by CSN, I didn’t know who that was. I had to look it up.

He was completely shocked that I didn’t know music by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. He started rattling off songs, and I knew maybe one of them. The look on his face was total bewilderment that I did not know this. And of course it totally made me laugh, right? He just couldn’t believe it.

The next day after our appointment, Loren showed up to my studio with a CD that he personally burned of the greatest hits from CSN. Because he felt life was too short for me not to know their great music.

That wasn’t the first time he made me a CD. And those small gestures encapsulate him. He would notice something that had pleased him, anticipate that it might please someone else, and then extend the experience by sharing it.

Loren was also a nature photographer. I mean, for real, no joking. His images were awesome in the true sense of the word. But what made his images even more powerful was that he paired the image with song lyrics when he would post it on social media.

The image didn’t need explanation. It was... I think he did it because it was a way that one beautiful experience reminded him of another. And he captured it. You’d read the lyrics and just know. Not only that’s what he felt, but it just made sense. It was as if he was gathering moments and then let them speak to each other.

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His love for his family, it was limitless, even in the hardest of times. He didn’t

shy away from the vulnerability or difficulty ever.

Savoring is not about making life sentimental.

Loren could be completely opinionated. We both argued and championed the Golden State Warriors and whether Draymond Green’s antics that week were justified or not, right?

We discussed politics ad nauseum, and once we spent an entire hour-long

haircut discussing why we didn’t understand Taylor Swift’s music or her fame or the hysteria.

We just eventually succumbed to the fact that millions of teenage girls recognized something in her that didn’t belong to us. That’s how we rectified it and moved on.

We still didn’t like her music, but you know, growth has its limits.

The point is he could remain in a conversation long enough to become less certain of his opinion. He didn’t rush to win a point or prove that he was right. He seemed more interested in what might become visible if we just kept talking.

That’s another form of attention. Sometimes being present means noticing a sandwich or letting a question interrupt an easy answer.

During the pandemic, when the salons were closed and nobody knew when life would return to normal. I drove to Loren’s house and cut his hair in his carport. The haircut took, I don’t know, no longer than 20, 30 minutes. But it was funny because Loren found the lowest chair he could find because, you know, I couldn’t lower him down 12 inches. That’s, you know, necessary for me to reach the top of his head.

And he wanted to cut his hair in the garden, because it was so beautiful. But I don’t know, the ground was uneven, or there were stairs. I don’t remember. But I was still recovering from a hip replacement. So we stayed in the car park.

Afterward, we stayed for almost another hour just talking. And the practical purpose of the visit was over. But neither of us treated the remaining time as just disposable.

I think we sometimes think of savoring as it requires a meditation retreat, a sunset, or a perfectly quiet nervous system. It doesn’t.

It can happen in a carport with hair on the ground and the conversation that continues after its original purpose is finished. The experience doesn’t have to be extraordinary. We simply have to stop abandoning it before it’s over.

The other side of savoring is what I mentioned before: dampening a positive feeling.

Dampening is minimizing or disqualifying, basically mentally stepping away from something good. It can sound like modesty.

“It was no big deal”, or “Anybody could have done it.” “I just got lucky.”

Sometimes it could sound like protection. “Don’t get too excited. Something

will probably go wrong.” We’ve all said those things.

It can also look like constant movement.

If we leave quickly enough, we never have to feel how much it matters. I fully understand that impulse. Receiving joy completely can make us feel vulnerable because once we admit that something matters, we also admit that it can change or possibly end.

Staying slightly detached can feel like emotional insurance.

But refusing to enjoy something won’t prevent that loss, right?

It only means we experience a loss twice.

Once by not fully living in the moment, and then again, when the moment’s gone.

So we might as well take a chance, right?

The reframe of these thoughts and actions is not to slow down and appreciate every

second. That’s a completely impossible standard, and it creates judgment in many ways.

I think the reframe is much smaller.

Can I stay for one more beat? Can I let something good reach me before I explain it away? Or can I notice this ordinary moment is a part of my life and not an obstacle between me and my life?

I think that’s really important to recognize.

Loren died in his sleep two weeks after his birthday. He had seemingly been in good health, and there were no warning signs.

His wife called me herself to tell me.

She was speaking very quickly as though if she slowed down or paused for even a second, she wouldn’t be able to finish her sentence. I could barely speak from how shocked I was at the news, but I finally managed to tell her how sorry I was for her and the kids.

And then she said something that I so wasn’t prepared for.

She said, “I know you were his hairstylist, but he also considered you his friend. And I

think it’s so important for men to have female friends. Thank you for being his friend.”

That sentence broke me a few days later.

I was listening to another CD he had made me. It was the band Monsters of Folk and their song Ahead of the Curve.

I was listening to the chorus that said, I wrote this down,

I’m staying above the flat line.

I’m ahead of the curve.

Take a piece of the sunshine with me

On an all-night drive to another world.

It’s a perfect description of the wonderful human I knew and how I witnessed

he lived his life.

The psychology term savoring is often discussed as a way to deepen happiness.

But it also explains why certain ordinary details become so emotionally powerful after someone passes away.

Reminiscing is not simply replaying the past. It’s really allowing an experience

to produce meaning in the present. The handwritten label on a CD, it becomes more than just handwriting. His phrase, “I can’t believe it’s already been six weeks,” becomes more than a salon conversation.

And a story about a sandwich becomes evidence of how someone has lived their life.

For a while after he passed, I thought I saw Loren out of the corner of my eye, driving, walking down the street. And that sadness would overtake me again.

And it didn’t lift until after I went to the gathering of his celebration of life. I sat in

a room with about a hundred people, maybe a little less. I’m not sure. It was many, many people.

People who loved him. And I was lucky enough to hear about the man I had known every six weeks appear in story after story.

His warmth, his curiosity, humor, and generosity, all of which I experienced behind the chair, had reached everyone in that room in entirely different parts of his life.

His fellow deadheads got up and told funny stories of youthful debauchery on the road. Others shared song lyrics that captured his essence. His coworkers spoke about his generosity. One of his friends even threw Loren under the bus because he gifted him hundreds of cassettes from his music collection, none of which were labeled. It drew a lot of laughter in that room.

That day I realized I had thought of myself as the one providing the space in my salon. I was the hairstylist, listening to the stories, asking questions, right? Giving him a place to show up every six weeks.

What I didn’t understand until that day was that Loren was making space for me too. In that room, I realized he had done it for all of us.

He asked better questions than me and challenged my lazy opinions without humiliating me or anyone else. He brought music to me. He brought kindness. And appointment after appointment, he showed me that an ordinary life becomes way

more vivid when we’re willing to show up for it.

So even though I don’t have another six -week appointment with him, I do have his way of noticing.

Maybe that’s how people remain with us. Not only what we remember about them, but in what they taught us to see.

When I catch myself mentally halfway into tomorrow, I think of Loren sitting in the back of that deli, the sandwich in front of him and the noise of strangers around him. And I reflect on the lesson that he taught me, that an ordinary moment is not what we pass through while we’re waiting for life. It is our life.

That’s one of the ways we carry people.

I’m Evet DeCota. If this story resonated with you and

you’d like to reach out to me, you’ll find all my information in the episode’s notes.

Thank you for listening. Have a great day.

“Don’t I Look Cute?”

What Validation-Seeking Does to Relationships

"Don't I Look Cute?"

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

00:00:00 Speaker 1:

I have a foil in one hand and a bleach brush in the other, and she’s turning her head towards her phone. Don’t I look cute? I glance at the picture on her phone.

Meanwhile, the foil is still open. The bleach is sitting right next to the part of the hair that I don’t want it on, and I need to close up this foil before disaster strikes, and it forms a tiger spot.

So I do what I always do: a quick glance, and say “adorable.”

I go back to painting and closing up the foil, but she’s not done.

Another photo. A different angle. “Oh wait, look at this one.” I glance again. Two more seconds lost that I don’t have.

By photo number four through infinity. I truly start to like, think about my compensation if I were America’s Next Top Model judge.

Then I realized, no, that’s not on anymore. I wonder if Instagram would pay me.

All photos after the fourth one elicit responses such as “Gorgeous!” “Wow!” Always directed towards the vicinity of her phone because I’m not taking my eyes off of what I’m doing any longer.

She never notices that I stopped looking.

00:01:23 Speaker 2: Music - The Original Self podcast.

00:01:27 Speaker 1:

Hey, it’s Evet DeCota.

I’ve been standing behind a stylist chair for almost forty years now.

One of the very first rules a stylist learns in this business is that the appointment isn’t about you. It’s always about the client, their day, their story, their hair.

Of course, that’s the job. And honestly, it’s one of the things I love most about it because I’ve learned lots of things from people.

They tell me information, and I learn about their life. I love the whole thing when someone sits in my chair. I truly try to give them my full attention. But every once in a while I’ll have a client break social rules.

She might ask me about my weekend or what I’ve been up to, and the second I start to answer her, her attention is already somewhere else. Her phone, her reflection, her watch, whatever.

It’s like it wasn’t that she wanted my attention. It was that she wanted to be seen as giving me hers. Once I noticed this years ago, I couldn’t stop seeing it. It’s not just in the salon. I see it in a lot of places.

During every single appointment, before I even have the cape around her neck, this client will say the same thing to me. “Will you make me pretty today?” Every time. Like it’s brand new. Like I didn’t make her pretty the last thirty times I did her hair.

She is pretty, by the way.

I honestly don’t know whether she’s actually needing reassurance or whether she’s asking because it’s just part of our ritual. That is very possible.

Kind of like, “How are you?” “Fine.” Right?

When she says, “Will you make me look pretty today?” I usually retort with something sarcastic, but, you know, with a smile.

“No, I only do that on Tuesdays.”

She’ll laugh like it’s the first time she’s ever heard it. But that’s our relationship. And honestly, at this point, I think it’s as much my ritual as it is hers.

What most people who are not hairstylists, what they don’t realize is that a lot is going on in the salon that we have to pay attention to, as well as block out, in order to be as present as possible to the client in our chairs.

There is constant noise from nearby conversations. Uh, the high-pitched whine of a full-blast blow dryer while the stylist screams over it to, you know, have the client hear her.

And then meanwhile, people are speaking on, they have their phones on speakerphone. Someone else might be watching a YouTube video without earbuds, and then another client across the salon may be scrolling reels at full volume.

And over all of it, the salon playlist is pumping electronic music that somehow gets more irritating the longer the day goes on.

At the same time, you’re formulating color, carrying on a conversation, and cutting the most precise line of a haircut as if your life depended on it. It does.

And every few seconds, repositioning a client’s head because she keeps turning toward the mirror or her phone, or to look at you.

I know it sounds like I have a lot of grievances. I do.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything; I swear I would not. It’s just that that’s a fraction of what’s going on in our heads while a client wants me to look at her phone mid-foil.

Eventually, the pictures stopped. At least I think they have. I’ve moved on to the next foil. I’m in my rhythm when I will hear one more time. “Wait, don’t I look cute in this one?” I look. “You look great.” And just when I think that now it’s finally done, she’ll say to me, “You’re such a great stylist.”

At first I used to think that she was complimenting me. Maybe she was. But then I started wondering if the compliment was really just the last sentence in a conversation that had been about her the whole time.

Was she really even asking about the pictures at all?

Psychology calls that external validation seeking. She’s proving that by all the photos, the different angles, and then repeating “Don’t I look cute?” It’s not really a question. All of that. The photos, everything.

They are bids for reassurance.

She’s not asking because she doesn’t know the answer. I think she’s asking because the reassurance fades almost as quickly as she receives it.

Psychologists call this self-objectification. And sometimes I wonder if part of her isn’t really sitting in the chair at all. Like maybe she stepped outside of the moment instead of simply enjoying getting her hair done. She’s actually watching herself have the experience.

That makes me a little sad, because I wonder how often she actually gets to enjoy feeling beautiful before she starts questioning it again.

Here’s the question I still don’t know the answer to.

Can reassurance become a substitute for self-trust? You guys answer that. Help me.

So another scenario that happens is she’ll ask, how’s your family doing? And because I think she’s actually interested, maybe I’ll start to tell her what’s going on with my nephew or something like that.

I’m maybe one sentence in, and I notice her eyes drift. Then comes the phone. Then she unlocks it, holds it up above her head for me to see, and asks, “How much more time should I add to the meter?”

Every time, decades of appointments, and every single time she does it after asking the question. And every time I stop talking.

Not because she asked me to, but because somehow the phone makes me feel like I’m interrupting. Isn’t that weird?

She asked the question, and somehow I end up feeling like the interruption.

That’s where my mind goes, I think. “Why’d you ask?” And then immediately, I’m making it about me.

Maybe she doesn’t really care.

Maybe I’m boring. Oh my God.

My brain can quickly fill in the blanks. I don’t even realize it. I interpreted her behavior through my own lens.

Researchers have a word for that. It’s called phubbing, which is phone and snubbing, using your phone in a way that makes the person you’re with feel less important than the screen.

But now, stepping away from that situation, I start to think about what shapes a real conversation.

Healthy conversations have a rhythm.

I ask, you answer.

I listen and stay with your answer.

And then it’s my turn. That’s conversational reciprocity, right?

It’s basically the backbone of every relationship we have.

Okay, maybe not with our pets. Unless you’re me and you answer for the dog in a voice I only reserve for animals. Did you like that? I know you did. That’s right. Tell me more.

Crazy.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s not about phones, but about how uncomfortable most of us are with direct conversations.

The other day I was with a friend, and she told me that when she was in her early twenties, she worked as a hostess and later on as a server. She said that whenever a conflict arose- maybe a customer complained, a coworker upset her, anything, any scenario where she had to confront someone- she wouldn’t deal with it.

She would just leave. Like walk out, never come back. She never officially quit. She just disappeared.

We laughed about it, you know, at first, like she was laughing as she was telling me. But then I found myself later on that night being fascinated by that behavior. And then when I think about this story, I realize that some people would rather hold up a parking meter, pay app, than say, “Can we move a little faster today?”

But then there’s my other clients, the ones who sit down in the chair and say, do whatever you think. “Do the same thing you did last time; I loved it.”

They don’t spend their appointment wondering how they look or how they will eventually look. They spend their appointments telling me about their lives, what they’ve learned, what they’ve experienced. They tell me about their trips. A great book that they’re reading, or some documentary that they watch that they just know I’ll love.

Many times they ask how my family is and stay for the answer. They’re fully there. They’re fully present. And it’s not like they think they’re perfect or that they never need reassurance. Of course they do. We all do. They’re just not spending the majority of their appointment monitoring themselves.

The clients that are most comfortable in themselves rarely ask me, “Do I look okay?”

And as I said before, even though we’re taught from the very beginning that the appointment isn’t about us, hairstylists are still human. Most of us are.

There are unspoken rules that help conversations feel balanced, and relationships feel mutual. When those rules are broken, even in a small way. It can leave us feeling a little thrown. And I believe that’s usually why my reaction is like that.

Looking back, though, I don’t think she was ever asking me whether she looked cute for real. I think she was asking a much older question. “Am I okay?”

For a long time, that question exhausted me. It felt like being asked to hand over reassurance. I didn’t have an endless supply of it, but the more years that go by of me being a hairstylist, the more I start to think about what’s actually underneath all of this.

And I thought, a lot of people don’t get real one-on-one attention any longer. Not the sustained kind. Like someone fully facing you, not checking their screen, not halfway somewhere else.

There are a lot of places that you used to run into familiar faces: the gym, the coffee shop, especially the office. They have fewer people showing up consistently now. People are alone more, and even when they do connect, it can feel rushed or transactional.

So for many, sitting in my chair may be one of the only places left in their week where someone is entirely there with them; they’re present for them.

My quick judgment about this client at the time was probably, you know, she’s self-absorbed, but it may be that she’s just starved for connection. And my judgy little self has to think about that.

There may be even a part of her that doesn’t quite trust that anyone would look at her for free. So she has to keep asking for proof. When I consider that possibility, that judgment turns to tenderness; it turns to understanding, because I don’t know exactly where reassurance ends and Self-trust begins.

I’m not sure anyone does, but I know this much.

She leaves my chair every time, still asking the question, and I keep answering it. That’s my job. I’m not there to solve it. I’m just one person willing to say yes again and again for as long as it takes.

If this episode brought someone to mind for you, or maybe even brought something up in yourself, I hope you’ll stay curious about it.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, you’ll find all of my contact information in this episode’s notes.

I’m Evet DeCota. Thank you for listening, and I’ll talk with you next time.

00:16:14 Speaker 2: Music- The Original Self podcast.

You Cry, I Cry

What Women Facing Cancer Taught Me About Presence

You Cry, I Cry

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

My sister-in-law is sitting in my chair. Her kids- my niece, who’s 16, and my nephew, who’s 11 at the time- are standing behind her just watching.

She’s joking around, but I can tell that she’s very nervous because her shoulders are up, her eyes look a little too wide, and 

It’s because she doesn’t want to lose her beautiful long thick

curly hair. I ask her Do you want me to do it? Do you want to do this yourself? Or do you want the kids to help? 

She says no, she doesn’t want to shave her head herself, but looks over at the

kids and says Do you want to participate? 

My niece says okay, and my nephew just shook his

head no. 

When I have to shave someone’s head, I never shave it bald in one pass. It’s too shocking. It’s shocking for the client and for whoever else is in the room. 

So we start very slowly.

I turn the clippers on; they’re buzzing in my hand, and I put the clippers to the back of her neck. I ask her if she’s ready. 

She nods, and that’s where we started. 

Hey everyone, it’s Evet.

Today I would like to discuss the benefit of presence. 

How we show up for each other really matters. 

I’ve worked with a lot of cancer patients over the years. It started when I was 18. My

mom and I volunteered for the American Cancer Society’s Look Good, Feel Better 

program. 

This was a program that women... could come to at no cost, no charge, and they could 

get their wig styled or shown how to put on a wig. And if they didn’t want to wear a 

wig, we showed different ways we would show them different ways on how

to tie a scarf. And then they could also get their makeup done. 

And at 18. watching these women with no eyebrows, no eyelashes, let alone

completely bald, they would divulge that they completely miss their hair and miss

putting on mascara and makeup, and their eyes were tearing all the time, and they 

were so exhausted, yet they would look in the mirror and see someone that didn’t look

like themselves. 

And so our job was to make them feel just a tiny bit more like themselves

but also just listen. Be present. Camaraderie between women. It was very difficult for 

me, I’m not gonna lie. It was a real education because I was watching what this 

chemotherapy treatment did to their bodies, and it was like they were being taken 

apart and had no control over it.

And so the first couple sessions I walked out because I was crying. And I kept 

thinking, well, it’s not about you. Like, don’t cry. You know, don’t show that emotion.

And I realized after volunteering a few more times - what’s wrong with that? 

As long as I could get it together and say, “hey, let’s try something, let’s try to make 

you feel a little bit more like yourself. Let’s see what we can do.” 

So as I volunteered a little bit more, it became not easier, but it became about being present.

There’s something psychologically real that goes on in the room when this is happening. 

I think naming it is worth doing because it explains why that moment hits as hard as it does. 

It’s called anticipatory grief. It’s like grieving a loss before it’s fully happened. 

My sister-in-law wasn’t just losing her hair in that chair. 

She was rehearsing a much bigger loss. A loss of normalcy, of control, maybe of certainty of what’s to come next. 

Shaving the head as a ritual on her terms, let some of that grief happen in a way that 

she could actually be present for, instead of ambushing her later in the shower or alone watching it all fall out by herself. 

And the way we did it- the crop, then the sides, then the mohawk, then the final

shave, wasn’t just me being gentle. 

It’s actually an anthropological structure called the rite of passage. 

It’s a separation, threshold, and return. 

Every culture that’s figured out how to help people through hard transitions uses some

version of a three -part structure. 

Because going through a threshold in stages is genuinely easier for the human mind to process. than just being shoved into it all at once. 

That Mohawk stage, where we all laughed, that was the threshold.

That’s where the room could basically exhale for a second before the final part. 

So the second part to that is the return. 

And in this scenario, it’s when the hair returns. 

Hair almost always grows back after treatment. 

That’s the part people really expect. 

What they don’t expect is how much joy there is when it starts to come back

in. 

And right alongside that joy is how much impatience that goes along with it. 

It never grows back fast enough. It never fills in the way people remember their hair previously looked.

And a lot of times, it doesn’t come back the

same. 

People that had straight hair now have curly hair. People that had dark hair all of

a sudden now have very gray hair. 

I’ve sat with a lot of clients while they looked in the mirror

and tried to recognize themselves in hair that wasn’t quite theirs anymore. 

One of my clients who had to go through treatment had naturally

red hair her entire life. When her hair grew back after treatment, it came in brown- just plain old brown. That’s what she would call it.

We waited almost a year just to see if it would return to its former color. It didn’t. 

So we colored it back to red. It was her natural red, just a little bit enhanced. 

When we finished that first color appointment, she just started

crying in the chair. 

Remember, you cry, I cry.

She said that she finally felt like herself again.

That’s the return. 

My sassy redhead client experienced something different than my sister-in-law.

She experienced disenfranchised grief, which is grief that isn’t socially recognized as real grief. 

Like, no one sends a card because your hair grew back the wrong color. Like, oh, we’re

so sorry. 

Nobody tells you that it’s really allowed to feel like a loss. 

But imagine, it’s very real to her. Her identity, she knew herself as a redhead.

It took her almost a year to even let herself name something worth grieving. Before she could decide to do anything about it. It wasn’t just me saying to wait. She was like, well, let’s wait. Maybe, you know, maybe it’ll grow in red.

Underneath all of that is something that I just mentioned is identity. 

It’s called identity continuity.

It’s the need to feel like I’m still me across any changes you come upon. 

The mirror is one of the main ways we confirm that to ourselves, right? Look in the mirror, there’s me. 

It wasn’t vanity when her reflection stopped matching who she’d always known herself to be. 

It was a real disruption of the sense of self. 

Coloring her hair back, it wasn’t so much about looking pretty.

It was about closing that gap in how she looked and who she knew herself to be. 

Looking back on both of these experiences, the shave and the redhead’s year of waiting,

I didn’t actually fix anything for either woman, obviously. 

I didn’t stop my sister-in-law’s hair from falling out, and I didn’t restore my other client’s natural color biologically. 

What I did in both cases was to help two women stay connected to who they were through something neither of them could control. 

That’s different from what I thought this job was when I was 18. 

Back then, I think I was fear-based. 

Not only did I want to make people feel better, but some of me wanted to fix it, or at least perform to fix it. 

I don’t do that anymore. 

I’m not the person who tells someone, you’re going to beat this. 

I don’t give false hope because I have no idea. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know. 

What I can do is cry with them. I can hold their hands. I can hug them. I can tell them I’m here to listen. 

And that doesn’t stop when they leave my chair. It means texting and phone check-ins before, during, and after treatment. 

Mostly I listen and gently ask what they’re thinking. What’s actually going on in your mind?

Sometimes they can tell me, sometimes they can’t. 

When time has passed, after they finish their treatments, I always ask the

same question. 

How are you thinking about your life differently now that you’re on the other

side of it?

I always get very interesting answers, but they usually contain the word presence. 

They talk about the presence of people that were there with them, that showed up for them in various ways. 

I think that’s the real thread between shaving my sister-in-law’s hair and my redhead

story. 

Neither one of them needed me to have an answer, or anyone else for that matter. 

They needed someone to stay present while they found their own way through. 

My client said it better than I ever could. She said, I feel like myself

again. 

Unfortunately, not every story ends that way. 

My sister -in -law’s hair grew back more than once. and fell out many more times. 

She never got the chance to find her way back to the image of herself before any of it started, that return. 

That day in the chair, the mohawk, the laughing, my niece doing one side, me doing

the other, and all the tears at the end; that wasn’t the moment she made peace with any of it. 

What came after was four years of a road with real hope, real denial, and real disappointment all tangled together. 

So I’m not trying to say that presence fixes that timeline. It doesn’t guarantee that things get better or that they improve when you want them to. 

On the rare occasion, they don’t get better. That’s the reality of the big C. 

My sister-in-law didn’t move through that threshold in that afternoon. She lived there

for years. 

There were moments where we’ve all thought that things were turning around and moments when they weren’t. 

I used to think that day in the salon was the hardest part. It definitely

wasn’t. 

I think it was just the day that we simply realized that everything and what she knew of life, what we knew of her life, and in it, was the change. 

Sometimes the middle part, the threshold, is the whole thing- you know, someone can live in that in -between place, no longer who they were, but not yet at peace with who they’ve become for years. 

Her sense of I’m still me didn’t return because life returned to normal. 

It returned because she slowly learned to recognize herself in a very different life. 

Hair was never really the lesson. 

Hair was simply the place where grief first became visible. 

What people needed wasn’t someone to make it okay. They need someone willing

to stay with them while it isn’t. 

Looking back after nearly 40 years behind this chair, I think

that’s what presence really is. 

It’s not fixing.

It’s not rescuing. 

It’s just refusing to leave someone alone in the middle of being someone

they’ve never expected to have to be. 

My wish is to never shave another head because of cancer ever again. 

We all know that that’s not going to happen. 

And so instead of being angry about it, I feel grateful that I’m chosen to be a part

of it. 

And I will do my best to make it as comfortable as possible, and as real and loving as I possibly can. 

I’m Evet DeCota, and my hope for today is that you walk away from this episode with

a deeper understanding of your own identity and the quiet strength that presence, 

place can offer both to yourself and to the people you love. 

If you’d like to continue this conversation or have a different topic that resonates with

you, you can find all my contact information in this episode’s notes. 

Thank you for listening, and I hope you have a great day.

The Version of Us Stress Reveals

The Version of Us Stress Reveals

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

The Chair Was My First Classroom

After almost forty years behind the chair, I’ve come to believe that a salon is one of the best places in the world to study human behavior. You see people at their happiest, their most vulnerable, and sometimes under an incredible amount of pressure. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stress has a way of revealing the strategies we use to protect ourselves.

Which brings me to the time I mentally renamed an entire wedding party “Jurassic Park” by the time they left the salon.

Now, before anyone thinks that I’ve been secretly nicknaming clients for forty years…I haven’t. Well, not for forty.

Expectations

I started my career specializing in wedding makeup before eventually adding bridal hair, and for years weddings became one of my favorite parts of the job. There was always a different kind of energy in the salon. Music playing. Coffee brewing. Bridesmaids laughing while someone inevitably forgot their earring or spilled a mimosa. The bride would be smiling one minute and tearing up the next, surrounded by the people she loved most. It felt hopeful. Exciting. Like everyone was getting ready for something much bigger than just looking beautiful.

Most wedding mornings were exactly like that. This one was different. When I think back, it started the day of the bridal consultation.

The soon-to-be bride came to my salon about two weeks before her wedding for her hair and makeup consultation. She had a name I’d never seen before, and I remember practicing it over and over in my head before she arrived because I was determined not to mispronounce it.

Foreshadowing…I absolutely mispronounced it and forgot what her name was.

She had this natural, crunchy, earthy kind of energy. No fuss. No drama. She seemed genuinely relaxed and easy to be around. Everything she described came back to one word:

Natural-it was the entire concept of what she wanted.

She wanted her hair down in soft, flowing curls. She wanted makeup that looked like she wasn’t wearing any. More than anything, she wanted to look like herself—just a little more polished.

I explained that wedding makeup is always a balancing act. The camera has a way of washing people out, so the makeup almost always has to be a little more than what you would wear every day. I’m pretty sure she never wore makeup, so I had to be careful because any amount could feel like too much. The goal isn’t to make someone look completely different, unless that’s what they want. Usually, the goal is to enhance their natural beauty in photographs they’ll hopefully treasure for the rest of their lives.

No pressure at all.

We spent the morning doing a full trial. I created hairstyles and makeup exactly as she wanted, while taking notes and photographs along the way. Every curl, every product, every detail was documented so I could recreate it exactly on her wedding day.

I knew there would be five bridesmaids. Three were in my chair, two were with another stylist, and none of them were having makeup—just hair. It was a schedule we’d carefully planned during the consultation, and on paper it should have run like clockwork. I gave the bride one very important instruction for her bridesmaids: they needed to arrive with clean, dry hair, with a little styling product already in it. I explained why those three things mattered, and I remember emphasizing each one of them more than once.

So, two weeks later the wedding day arrived. I got to the salon an hour early, just like I always did. I set up a little goodie bar with bagels, croissants, orange juice, champagne, coffee, and water. I laid out my hair and makeup supplies, checked my notes and photos from the trial one last time, and made sure everything was in place.

The other stylist and I were organized and on schedule.

About thirty minutes after their scheduled arrival time— and two phone calls later— they walked in.

Somewhere in my head, David Attenborough quietly began narrating the scene.

At the time, I thought I was about to style a wedding party. I had no idea I was about to watch four completely different stress responses unfold in front of me— including my own.

Stress Doesn’t Look the Same on Everyone

The first bridesmaid sat down in my chair with soaking wet hair.

I blinked

I’d been very clear with the bride about how the bridesmaids needed to arrive, but there she was… and then I heard the narration:

Emerging from the moist undergrowth, the Damp Raptor appears. Seeking assistance in transforming her saturated curls into a smooth chignon.

Now let me be clear, my first thought was straight up judgment.

How do you show up to a wedding with soaking wet hair after being told exactly what to do? She had just put me 30 minutes behind before I finished blow-drying her hair, but I got it done and figured I could catch up on the next bridesmaid.

Looking back now, coaching has taught me something I didn’t understand then. When someone violates one of our expectations, our brains almost instantly start explaining who they are instead of wondering what happened.

While she might be operating from a completely different set of expectations, we tell ourselves a story that:

She’s irresponsible.

She doesn’t care.

She’s inconsiderate.

Maybe those things are true. Maybe they weren’t.

What I know now is that judgment closes the conversation, but curiosity opens it.

And as it turned out, the Damp Raptor was only the first reminder that people carry stress in very different ways.

____________________________________________________________________________________

When the second bridesmaid, the maid of honor, sat down, everything looked fine at first. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and I could see it had a natural curl to it.

Then I removed the elastic.  Her hair exploded into a tangled, oily knot.

Imagine Bob Marley on a humid day. Maybe a little less. Maybe not.

I took a slow, shallow breath, picked up my comb, and started detangling as gently as I could. I’d made exactly one pass through one lock of hair when she suddenly bent forward, put her face in her hands, and stopped moving.

I couldn’t reach her hair any longer, so I waited a few seconds.

“Are you okay?”

Nothing.

I asked again.

Nothing.

I reached over and gently touched her shoulder.

Silence.

At this point, I couldn’t waste any more time, so I yelled out, “Bride!” because I obviously couldn’t remember her name anymore and couldn’t stop to look it up.

The bride knelt at face level to the maid of honor and asked softly, “What’s wrong?”

She slowly lifted her face from her hands.

With her eyes completely dry, she murmured with a straight face, “Nothing, she pulled my hair.”

Somewhere in the distance, Attenborough cleared his throat. “The Tear-a-dactyl has entered the ecosystem. What’s fascinating about this dino is that they have developed a survival strategy for emotional display with surprisingly little moisture”

The bride looked at me with reproach and asked me to be more gentle.

Once again, my first reaction wasn’t curiosity. It was total annoyance. Are you kidding me?

I gently gathered all of her gnarled hair, pinned it up on her head in what could generously be described as a hairstyle, and never used a comb on her again.

Now I was only 15 minutes behind schedule.

Thinking about her now, I realize there was something I sensed even then, although I didn’t have the language for it yet.

After years of doing bridal hair and makeup, I’d noticed a pattern. There always seemed to be one person in the wedding party whose behavior, intentionally or not, pulled attention away from the bride. At the time, I probably would have called it jealousy.

But maybe it’s more complicated than that.

Major life transitions don’t just change the person getting married. They reorganize relationships. Weddings shift roles, expectations, and a person’s sense of where they belong. Someone who has always been the closest friend, the sister everyone depended on, or the person who felt most important in the bride’s life may suddenly find themselves in a different place. That shift can stir up emotions they don’t fully understand themselves.

Was that what was happening to her? I honestly don’t know.

But years later, I realized that the maid of honor never answered me. She only answered the bride.

Under stress, we often turn toward the people our nervous system experiences as safest. Whether that’s what was happening in the moment, I can’t say for certain. But it reminded me that the person someone responds to isn’t always the person speaking.  Sometimes it’s the person who represents familiarity, comfort, or connection.

I don’t think her moment was really about the comb-I swear I didn’t pull her hair- I think she needed something I couldn’t give her.

At the time, I thought I’d solved the problem. Now I realize I only solved the hairstyle.

____________________________________________________________________________________

The last bridesmaid’s hair was clean, dry, and smooth. Hallelujah!  For a brief moment, I thought maybe the universe was throwing me a lifeline.

I smiled and asked, “So how would you like to wear your hair for the day?”

Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear a single word. So I leaned in a little closer.

She answered again. Still nothing.

Somewhere in the distance, the narration returned.

The Whisper-saurus moves cautiously along the perimeter of the park. Communication is attempted, though rarely detected by the human ear.

She was like the boomboxing girl in the movie Pitch Perfect who ate her twin in the womb.

Eventually, through a combination of lip reading, pantomiming, and what I can only describe as hairstylist intuition, we managed to agree on a hairstyle.

In retrospect, it’s easy to notice the loud people in a room. The people who cry or argue.

The ones that demand attention. But stress has a quieter side too.

Some people shrink. Some stop speaking. And some become almost invisible

The Whisper-saurus reminded me that withdrawal is just as much a stress response as anger or tears.

But thankfully she wasn’t difficult, just very hard to hear.

Bridezilla and the Stories We Tell About Ourselves

Surviving the Damp Raptor, the Tear-a-dactyl, the Whisper-saurus, and only being 15 minutes behind schedule felt like a miracle.

I quickly set up my makeup and recreated what we did at the trial. The bride was pleased by it, but I could tell she was beginning to feel stressed as she kept looking at the time.

 I then began to curl her hair, and she whipped her head around and asked me, “Why are you using that curling iron? You didn’t use it at the trial.”

I explained that it was the second iron I used because the first one was too big and her curls would fall out, halfway through her day.

Her calm, laid-back demeanor completely changed, and she started questioning me and complaining that nothing was the same as it was in her trial. I showed her the pictures but assured her that I could change whatever she wanted.

She was on the phone a lot; I get it—it’s a big day and a lot of people are vying for her attention—she kept getting up and getting something out of her bag on the couch. Asked me several times for more champagne while continuously moving her head while there’s a hot iron attached to her hair.

The third time she asked for more champagne, I just got the bottle and set it in front of her after refilling her glass.

I used a larger curling iron as she requested, no longer worrying about the curls not holding, while catching up to our original time frame.

Her demeanor changed. She became rude and started questioning everything I was doing, even though it looked even better than the trial. After almost spending three hours with this group, my stress response was increasing into anger.

I felt myself becoming more annoyed and knew I needed to walk away for a few minutes. So I excused myself, went into the backroom, and shut the door.

I stood there for about a minute and then began taking in slow breaths and releasing them even slower. I need to calm myself down. As I was breathing, I focused on objects in the room, became very present in my surroundings, body, and in my mind, which regulated my nervous system. 

I went back out there, finished everything to her liking, and they finally left.

For weeks afterward, I kept thinking about how different she had seemed during the trial. I found myself wondering if the easygoing, laid-back woman I had met two weeks earlier had simply been pretending.

I don’t think that anymore.

Psychology has taught me that we all carry an identity- a story about who we believe ourselves to be.

My story was simple. I was prepared, organized; I paid attention to details. I knew what I was doing.

So when she questioned the curling iron, my nervous system didn’t hear a question about a tool. It heard a question about my competence.

That’s identity threat in plain English.

Our identities often feel stable—until they're threatened.

We all carry stories about who we are. "I'm easygoing." "I'm patient." "I'm not controlling." Most days, those stories fit. But stress has a way of testing whether they're descriptions...or aspirations.

The bride wasn’t the only one protecting her identity that morning. She was most likely trying to protect the image of the perfect wedding she’d spent months imagining, and I was protecting this image of myself that I was known for.

And that’s how our reactions often become bigger than the moment itself. 

Closing

One of the biggest lessons I've learned, both behind the chair and through coaching, is that people usually make sense once you understand what they're trying to protect.

Sometimes it's their role.

Sometimes it's their relationships.

Sometimes it's their competence.

Sometimes it's simply their sense of belonging.

We may never know exactly what's happening inside another person.

But we can choose to become a little less certain...and a little more curious.

And maybe that's where our Original Self begins to show up—not when everything goes according to plan, but when the plan falls apart.

I hope something in this episode resonated with you. If you are interested in working with me, you can find all of my information in this episode’s notes.

Thanks so much for listening.

I'll see you next time, and have a great day.

Coming Home: Learning to Trust Yourself Again

The Series Finale on Comfort, Hunger, and Rebuilding Self-Trust | The Original Self Podcast Ep. 22

Coming Home: Learning to Trust Yourself Again

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Chapter 1— Open

Nobody reaches for celery after a breakup. Emotional hunger always knows exactly what it wants, and it’s never celery. But telling the difference between wanting comfort and needing food isn’t always that obvious.

[MUSIC STING]

Welcome back. This is the last episode in the series of Before the Rules: A Psychology of Food, and today we’re finally answering the question that we asked from the beginning: who were you before you were taught how to be around food? We’ll get there by talking about how to actually tell hunger from comfort, and about trusting yourself enough to stop keeping score.

What We Mean by Trust

Today isn’t about finding another answer or another set of rules, but It’s about finding our way back to ourselves. It’s about learning the difference between comfort and hunger and rebuilding trust in our own bodies. I’d love it if our first thought were to remember that beneath every rule we’ve ever followed, there’s always been a person worth listening to.

Trusting ourselves isn’t something we can simply decide to have. It’s built over time, and from listening to this series, it’s a lot about knowing the possible why we instilled or succumbed to the rules our entire lives, and trusting that we can live differently.

So let’s define it plainly. Self-trust, in the context of eating, isn’t believing every craving is right. It’s believing your body’s signals are worth noticing before you dismiss them. It means listening instead of overriding on reflex, and staying curious about what you discover instead of judging yourself afterward.

Throughout this series, we’ve seen how that trust gets worn down. Food engineered to override natural stopping points. Systems with little interest in whether your appetite made sense. Patterns inherited before you ever had a say. Over time, it’s easy to believe the scale knows more than you do. The meal plan knows more than you do. That almost anything outside yourself is a more reliable narrator of your hunger than you are.

Here’s what I want to offer instead.

There’s a name for the part of you that can tell the difference when it’s given the chance. It’s called interoceptive awareness: it’s a bit of a mouthful, but it’s your ability to notice what’s happening inside your own body. It could be the feeling of a full bladder, a tight chest, a hollow stomach, or a wave of sadness disguised as a craving for something specific.

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the founders of intuitive eating, describe interoceptive awareness as something close to a superpower because it underlies so much of how we understand ourselves. Like hearing or balance, it’s a sense and can become sharper the more we pay attention to it.

Picture a moment that probably feels familiar. You’re standing in front of your pantry with no particular plan, just looking.

In that moment, two things are happening. One is your body’s signal if you give it a chance to finish the sentence. The other is decades of noise layered over it, telling you the pantry is either the enemy or the answer, when it’s neither.

Interoceptive awareness is simply the practice of waiting one extra beat—the pause— before deciding which voice you just heard.

That’s the real subject of today’s episode. Not a technique. Not a seven-step plan. It’s a relationship you get to rebuild, one honest check-in at a time.

Here’s a question I’d like you to consider. It doesn’t have to pertain to food or eating. Maybe it was a decision you made at work, a read/judgment on a person that turned out to be correct, or a moment you knew something before you could explain how or why.

REFLECTION QUESTION:

Where in your life have you already learned to trust yourself, even in some small way?

Follow-up question:

What would it take to extend that same trust to how you eat?

Comfort or Hunger

Let’s get practical, because trust doesn’t mean much if you can’t use it standing in front of the pantry at nine o’clock at night.

Physical hunger and emotional hunger are often talked about as though they’re easy to tell apart. In theory, they are. Physical hunger builds gradually. It’s tied to how long it’s been since you last ate, and it can usually be satisfied by almost anything— a sandwich, a bowl of soup, whatever happens to be on hand.

Emotional hunger is different. It arrives suddenly, wants something specific, and rarely resolves the way physical hunger does because it was never really about food. That’s why you find yourself back in the kitchen looking for something that finally feels satisfying

There’s also a difference in where each one seems to live in the body. Physical hunger tends to register low and quiet: a rumbling stomach, a dip in energy, trouble focusing. Emotional hunger often registers higher and louder: tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, a pull toward one very specific food that no substitute will satisfy.

It’s the reason a breakup so reliably gets paired with a pint of ice cream in every rom-com movie you’ve ever seen. Nobody reaches for celery in those scenes because emotional hunger knows what it wants, and it’s rarely celery.

I want to add an important caveat: if you haven’t eaten enough throughout the day, by the evening your body can produce something that feels a lot like emotional hunger: urgency, cravings for something calorie-dense and specific, and even a shift in mood. It isn’t evidence that you’re an emotional eater. It may simply be your body getting loud enough to be heard after being ignored since breakfast. However, please don’t mistake an underfed body for an emotional one.

Along the same lines, I have spent a lot of time in this series talking about how the system profits from our appetite, but I don’t want our conversation to misinterpret comfort food as the enemy of all enemies. It isn’t.

Food is one of the most available forms of comfort we have. It’s fast, reliable, and it doesn’t require anyone else’s permission. Reaching for something soothing after a hard day isn’t evidence that something is broken. The concern is that when it’s used as the only tool in the box, it becomes the default response for every uncomfortable feeling, with nothing else within reach.

Instead of another rule, here’s a question to think about. It’s not a test to pass or fail. Just information, the same way checking the weather is information rather than a moral judgment on whether you brought an umbrella with you.

When you notice yourself reaching for food, ask yourself: Would a full meal satisfy this, or does only one very specific thing sound right?

REFLECTION QUESTION:

The next time you reach for food, what do you imagine it would feel like to pause for one breath and ask that question? Not to change your choice. Just to notice what you learn.

The Practice of Listening

If interoceptive awareness is a sense that can be dulled and sharpened, the obvious question is: How do I sharpen it?

The answer is the same way you get better at anything: repetition, not insight. Not one breakthrough afternoon when everything suddenly clicks into place. One accurate read of your body today doesn’t undo years of ignoring its signals, and I personally find that reassuring. It means you don’t have to get it right every time for it to be working.

There’s one more piece of psychology that belongs here: self-compassion. Kristin Neff’s research identifies three parts of self-compassion that can change the way we relate to ourselves, including around food.

The first is self-kindness instead of self-judgment- treating yourself the way you treat someone you love.

The second is common humanity instead of isolation- remembering that struggling with this isn’t evidence you’re uniquely broken; it’s evidence you’re human, living in a body and a culture that made this difficult for almost everyone.

The third part is mindful awareness instead of over-identification- being able to notice a craving without becoming it, without letting one moment turn into a story about your character.

I bring this up because self-compassion is what makes trust possible. You can’t accurately hear a signal you’re already preparing to judge. If every craving is met with an internal courtroom, eventually you’ll stop reporting them honestly, just as anyone stops telling the truth when they know they’ll be punished for it.

In practice, it looks much smaller than most people imagine. Notice what’s happening in your body before you explain it, fix it, or judge it. Just notice.

Think about how trust is rebuilt between two people. It’s rarely one grand gesture. It’s small, consistent moments that slowly become a pattern. You don’t have to train for the Olympic Gold Medal in interoceptive awareness. Just try once. Pause. Listen. Maybe once this week. Then try again.

REFLECTION QUESTION:

What is one small, repeatable way you could check in with your body today?

Coming Home

Eight episodes ago, we opened this series with one question: What happened to us around food? I think we've found a lot of those answers. But they've led us to a different question.

Who were you before you were taught how to be around food?

I’m not asking you to remember some mythical version of yourself with a perfect relationship to food or some golden age before diet culture where everything was simple and easy. I don’t even believe anyone really lived there.

What I’m asking about is something smaller and I think more honest.

Before the rules. Before the shame. Before the noise. There was a version of you that was simply in conversation with your own body. Hungry, then not hungry. Wanting something, then satisfied.

That capacity for conversation is the Original Self this entire series has been circling. It was never a specific diet or a perfect set of behaviors. It was a relationship, and relationships that have been damaged can also be repaired.

Coming home, then, isn’t returning to some flawless way of eating that never really existed. It’s returning to a willingness to listen—and just as importantly, a willingness to be wrong sometimes without believing that says something about who you are.

We’ll all misread a signal occasionally. We’ll reach for food when what we really need is rest, connection, or five minutes of alone time. That’s what being in an ongoing relationship with your body looks like.

I’m closing this series with something true in my own life.

Today, what’s different is that I don’t feel at war with food anymore.

I don’t need to eat it all at once. I don’t feel trapped by cravings, food noise, or the belief that one choice determines my character. I don’t spend my energy counting calories or trying to earn the right to eat.

That doesn’t mean I eat perfectly. I don’t.

Most of the time, I choose foods that nourish me. Sometimes I choose a snickerdoodle or a piece of pie. The difference is that I no longer carry the guilt, shame, and hopelessness that came with those choices.

I’ve shared throughout this series that I take a GLP-1 medication, and I don’t want to pretend it had nothing to do with this story. It did. The medication didn’t do the work for me, but it quieted the food noise enough for me to pause.

That pause changed everything.

For the first time, I had the space to ask why I was eating instead of simply reacting. That space allowed me to become curious, to understand the psychology, to notice the patterns, and to begin changing them one small step at a time.

I never want to vilify food again.

What I trust now is that my body has something worth telling me, and if I slow down long enough to listen, I can hear it. As I’ve aged, caring for my health has become one of the deepest priorities in my life.

Understanding the why of my struggle with food has given me something I never had before: compassion for the person I used to be and hope for the person I’m still becoming.

Before we close this series, I want to leave you with the same questions I’ve asked myself for years.

REFLECTION QUESTION:

Who were you before you were taught how to be around food?

And

What does coming home look like for you today?

Close

So here we are. The end of Before the Rules: A Psychology of Food.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.

I hope you leave this series a little more curious, a little more compassionate, and a little more trusting of yourself than when you began.

If that's happened—even just a little—then I think we've done something worthwhile.

Thank you for listening, for reflecting, and for allowing me to be part of your journey.

If you are interested in working with me, you can find all of my contact information in the episode notes.

Until next time, take good care of yourself.

Food Addiction, Food Shame, & the Cheat Day Lie

Food Addiction, Food Shame, and the Cheat Day Lie

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Open

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

Last time, in Episode 20, we talked about what your body is doing during menopause, the shifting hormones, the changing hunger signals, the cravings that seem to arrive right on schedule every evening. We closed with a question worth sitting with. What if the story isn't about what's wrong with your body, but about what your body is renegotiating? Today, we carry that same question to a place that's harder to reach. We've spent five episodes looking at the system around us and the body underneath us. Now we turn toward the self, and toward the words we've been using about what we eat. Welcome to Episode 21: Food Addiction, Food Shame, and the Cheat Day Lie.

Is It Addiction?

Let’s start with the question many of you have probably asked yourselves at some point, usually somewhere between the third and fourth slice.

Am I addicted to food?

It’s not a small question, and for a long time, the scientific community couldn’t agree on how to answer it. But that’s starting to change.

Late in 2025, an international group of researchers and clinicians who study this area completed the Delphi process, which was essentially a structured way of getting experts to work toward agreement on a contested question. They proposed the name Ultra-Processed Food Use Disorder and concluded that this pattern behaves primarily like a substance use disorder rather than just a behavioral habit. One researcher suggested that this disorder should be included in future editions of the psychiatric diagnostic manual.

The tool most often used to study this disorder is called the Yale Food Addiction Scale. It takes the eleven criteria used to diagnose substance use disorders, things like loss of control, cravings, withdrawal, and continuing to use something despite real consequences, and applies those same criteria to eating.

Using this measure, researchers estimate that around 14% of adults meet criteria that would qualify as a substance use disorder if we were talking about alcohol instead of food.

Not all researchers agree with this assessment, stating that more evidence is needed before formalizing a diagnosis. Other questions concern whether what we’re measuring is truly addiction or whether it’s a predictable response to an environment engineered for overconsumption, which is exactly what we spent Episodes 16 and 17 unpacking.

From that perspective, the issue isn’t addiction in the traditional sense. It’s a rational response to an irrational food supply.

One area getting more attention is withdrawal, which has traditionally been considered a core marker of addiction. Some early studies report withdrawal-like symptoms when people significantly reduce highly processed foods. Symptoms of irritability, fatigue, and mood changes presented during the first several days of reduction.

That evidence is still developing, and researchers are careful not to overstate it, but it’s part of why the substance use conversation has gained traction rather than disappeared.

This is how I think about it. Food isn’t alcohol, and it’s not cigarettes. You can quit drinking, and you can quit smoking, but you can’t quit eating.

For every model of addiction researchers have built, it assumes recovery involves some version of abstinence, putting the substance down for good. Food doesn’t allow for that, though; you have to sit back down at the table tomorrow and the day after that, for the rest of your life. That single fact is what makes this question so complicated.

I have said before that I quit smoking after smoking a pack or more per day for 13 years and have never looked back. It was very hard to quit, and I always say I will never smoke again because I’m never quitting again. With that said, the sugar and hyper-palatable food pull is a constant for me. For my entire life. I barely drink alcohol, don’t smoke, and try to eat foods that are nourishing, but I’m always thinking about that sugar.

I’ve gone to nutritionists, thinking that yet another plan mapped out for me will solve the problem. I have seen a food therapist in hopes that something deep inside me needs nourishing and would solve my cravings. I have gone to food retreats where I have meditated and participated in exercises that tried to make me realize that it’s not hunger; it’s the soul crying out for more. None of it worked

And that’s what fascinates me. Some of the strongest, most resilient people I know have rebuilt entire lives after unimaginable loss, but still describe feeling powerless around certain foods.

It’s not a lack of discipline. It’s trying to rebuild a relationship with something we have to interact with all the time. That’s a completely different challenge, and that is why this research matters beyond the label itself.

Researchers are now developing screening tools clinicians can use in ordinary medical visits, the kind of questionnaire a doctor might hand you alongside the usual intake paperwork.

Early findings suggest a meaningful overlap between this pattern and conditions like type two diabetes, where the two may make each other harder to manage.

So this isn’t just an abstract academic argument. It’s shaping how treatment gets built, even before diagnostic manuals catch up.

But whatever label eventually sticks, a diagnosis is not a life sentence but a way to understand and move forward with the information you have. Recognizing yourself in these patterns is information about the mechanisms, not anything to do with your worth.

The name we give that experience may continue to evolve. Researchers may keep debating whether addiction is the right framework. Whether another explanation fits better, or where this belongs in the future of treatment.

But while the science works through the language, millions of people are living with the experience. And whatever we eventually call it, turning that experience into a judgment about ourselves creates shame and helps no one.

Because the purpose of understanding the mechanism was never to assign ourselves another label to carry. It was to finally have enough information to put one down.

The Binge-Restrict Cycle

There’s a pattern so many of us know intimately, even if we never had a name for it. Many people experience it as a personal struggle they can’t quite understand, but research shows it follows a predictable cycle. It’s called the binge-restrict cycle, and it moves through four stages.

The first stage is restriction. It may be skipping meals, cutting out entire food groups, counting every calorie, or building a long list of rules about what you’re allowed to eat and when.

From the outside, and often from the inside too, this phase feels like discipline and like it’s working. That’s part of what makes this cycle so difficult to recognize. Restriction usually doesn’t feel like the beginning of the problem. It feels like the moment you finally decided to solve one.

It comes with a sense of control, a plan, and that familiar thought: this is the thing that is finally going to work.

I can say honestly, I have tried every one of these restrictions countless times throughout my life.

The second stage is craving. Restriction can send messages to your brain and body that something important is unavailable. And your body responds to scarcity by turning up the volume on hunger and repeatedly pulling your attention toward food.

But craving is different from hunger, because hunger is the body asking for energy. Craving is targeted and specific. It’s the food you decided was off-limits that suddenly seems to be everywhere.

You notice it more, you think about it more, and you start negotiating with yourself around it.

Maybe I’ll just have one. Maybe I’ll wait until the weekend. Maybe I’ll get it out of the house so I don’t have to think about it anymore. The more attention the brain gives something, the more important that thing starts to feel. The food hasn’t changed, but your relationship with the food has.

This is an ancient survival system responding the way it was designed to respond. For most of human history, directing attention to something scarce helped keep us alive. The problem is that today, that same system is responding in an environment where restriction and abundance can coexist at the same time.

The third stage is the binge itself. This is the point where the tension that has been building finally breaks. It often looks like eating past fullness, eating quickly, or eating the very foods that were restricted in the first place.

And for many people, this stage feels confusing because it doesn’t always feel like a conscious decision. It can feel like something switches from thinking about the food to needing the food.

The same food that was avoided for days or weeks suddenly becomes the thing your brain is pushing you toward. And once the rule is broken, another thought enters the conversation: “Well, I already messed up today, so I might as well eat more or whatever I want.”

That thought alone can turn a moment of eating into something much bigger.

The fourth stage is guilt. The problem with guilt is that it doesn’t usually end the cycle. It often becomes the reason for the next round of restrictions, reinforcing the very pattern you were trying to escape.

There’s also a physical layer beyond the psychological pull. Research suggests that long-standing binge-restrict patterns can affect things like hunger hormone regulation and insulin sensitivity. That cycle can leave a physiological imprint, where the body adapts to an unpredictable food supply, the same way it would if scarcity of all food were real instead of self-imposed.

The cycle doesn’t stay contained to appetite either. Restriction and the anxiety it produces can disrupt sleep, whether that’s from being too hungry to settle at night or from the physical discomfort that follows a binge.

Poor sleep then feeds back into the whole system, since we already know from Episode 18 that a tired prefrontal cortex is a weaker brake.

Mood follows a similar pattern. Research on this cycle consistently links it with higher rates of anxiety and low mood, not as a completely separate issue running alongside eating, but as part of the same interconnected system.

Nutrition itself plays a role in the brain’s emotional centers, so when intake becomes uncertain, mood often becomes unpredictable right along with it.

The pull toward the very thing you tried to avoid is something researchers have studied. It’s sometimes called the forbidden fruit effect, and it describes how foods can become more appealing and take up more mental space simply because they’ve been restricted, independent of how the food actually tastes.

That restriction changes the food relationship. I’m sure that many of our experiences involve putting a food on the “nope, I can’t eat that food” list, and then your brain begins to find every reason to think about it. Or even better, every commercial or cooking show you watch shows that specific food that you sent to the no-fly zone.

Picture the food or an entire group of food that makes this scenario sound familiar.

In this scenario, I’ll decide Monday morning that carbs like pasta are officially off the table for the week or completely off the table forever, and I’m sure that will totally work out for me. By Wednesday evening, I’d thought about the Orecchiette Il Davide from my favorite restaurant around the corner more times than you can count, despite not having thought about it once the week before, when it was allowed in my mind.

That’s the forbidden fruit effect showing up in everyday life. I once read an article by author Geneen Roth called Kindness and Calories. She told the story of a mother whose daughter always snuck sweets and was gaining weight. The mother was very concerned, having been an overweight child herself, and to prevent the same results for her child, took the sweets away from her and admonished her about her weight. Roth suggested something that probably felt completely counterintuitive: fill a pillowcase with M&M’s, and whenever it got even a quarter empty, fill it back up again. She also suggested that the mother stop making ill remarks about her daughter’s body. At first, the young girl carried the pillowcase everywhere. Then, slowly, something changed. When the candy stopped being scarce, it stopped holding the same power.

If you’ve lived this cycle, and I’d guess many of you have, I just want to say diet culture markets restriction as the solution to exactly the problem restriction helps create. The advice is almost always to restrict harder, follow more rules, and eliminate more categories.

And because restriction can produce short-term results- weight loss in the first few weeks, a sense of control in the moment- it looks like it’s working right up until the body’s response catches up with it.

Most people never connect their own binge back to the restriction that came before it; I know I didn’t. We just experience the binge as more evidence for the belief that we can’t be trusted around food, and then we reach for more restriction to correct it. That’s the loop closing on itself.

Can we start to question the rules we were handed and the ones we eventually placed on ourselves? Because maybe the way out of the cycle was never another rule. Maybe it starts with understanding why the rules had so much power in the first place.  

The Cheat Day Lie

If the binge-restrict cycle is the mechanism, the cheat day is the mechanism with a calendar attached to it.

Plan the restriction for six days, plan the loss of restraint for the seventh, and call it balance.

Words like cheat, clean, good, and bad don’t just describe food. Over time, they can start describing how we see ourselves. A cheat day implies that eating a food you enjoy is something you get away with, something that requires an exception to be granted.

Many dieticians and eating disorder clinicians point out that moralizing food this way can increase guilt, shame, and how much mental space food takes up. This is the opposite of what anyone wants from a system that’s supposed to make eating easier.

But notice what this language does to the rest of our week.

If Saturday is the “cheat” day when you are allowed to enjoy food, then Monday through Friday become the days you’re supposed to earn it.

That’s a lot of days spent turning an ordinary food choice into something loaded with rules, negotiation, and meaning. And as we just learned, restriction sets up the next binge; the cheat day doesn’t always prove to be the release valve it’s marketed as.

It can become another version of the same cycle, except this time the rules are organized around a calendar.

I’ve done this for decades. I can remember ending a day and mentally reviewing everything I ate. If it were on paper, I would have needed to use a red pen to mark every lapse in judgment I thought I had made.

Red marks if I didn’t stay on track, if I messed up and forgot to count the Wint-O-Green mint I shoved in my mouth after drinking coffee. I would assess whether today’s food intake made for a good day or a bad day. It was exhausting, and it took me a long time to notice that the scorecard itself, not the dessert, was the thing that was causing the stress, judgment, and ultimately, the damage to me.

There’s another side to this conversation. Some researchers have found that including enjoyable foods intentionally can help people feel more satisfied and maintain a way of eating that works for them in the long term.

But I don’t think that finding cancels out everything we just covered. I think it points to something more specific.

The difference isn’t whether you planned the food; it’s the meaning attached to it. A cheat day is planned, but there’s a big difference between deciding you’d like pasta on Friday because you enjoy pasta and declaring Friday the only day you’re allowed to have pasta because every other day it represents failure. It’s the moral language wrapped around allowed and not allowed.

Looking at cultures where food is approached with more flexibility offers a different way to think about our relationship with eating. Pasta isn’t saved for Saturday. Dessert isn’t treated like contraband. Food is woven through life rather than rationed out on a schedule, and cravings tend to soften, not disappear entirely, once a food stops being treated as a rare treat you have to earn.

Letting go of the moral scorecard entirely reduces the weight of forbidden foods, and that means there is less for the binge-restrict cycle to hold on to. It means the structure stops being built around morality and starts being built on what actually helps you feel good in your mind and body.

From Blame to Curiosity

Let’s bring these three threads together.

The biologically driven addiction process is still being studied: the way the body responds to scarcity, whether that scarcity comes from the outside world or from the rules we’ve created for ourselves, and the moral weight we assign to foods that eventually gets turned inward.

Not one of those three issues changes by adding another layer of judgment.

That’s the piece I want us to really focus on.

The shift happens when we trade shame for curiosity. When we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me? and start asking different questions.  

What pattern keeps repeating?

What rules did I inherit that I never stopped to question?

And then maybe we finally reach that discovery moment of “No wonder it has all felt so confusing.”

Because understanding the pieces is what starts to calm the chaos.

What’s easy to miss in all of this is that curiosity isn’t the same as permissiveness, and it’s not the same as giving up on caring for yourself.

It means we stop using shame as a strategy.

Asking “what is happening here?” is still an act of care, often a more reflective one, because it gives you something you can actually work with.

Where blame keeps you stuck repeating the same conversation with yourself, curiosity helps you understand the conversation you’ve been trying to have.

And that understanding is where we can finally start asking the next question: what is the behavior trying to do for us?

Close

There was a version of you, long before you learned which foods were supposed to be good or bad, who had a different relationship with eating.

No scorecard, no cheat days, no chapters of rules to memorize.

That version of you hasn’t disappeared. It just got layered over the same way we’ve talked about in every episode of this series. By systems, by biology trying to protect you, and now by a vocabulary that turned eating into a moral report card.

If there’s one thing I hope you carry out of this episode, it’s permission to retire a few words.

Cheat. Clean. Good. Bad. They were never accurate food descriptions to begin with, nor were they accurate descriptions of you. Changing the way we talk about food is also an opportunity to change the way we talk about ourselves.

In the next and final episode of this series, we’re going to talk about what happens after we understand the rules. How do we tell the difference between a body asking for food and an emotion asking for comfort? How do we rebuild trust with ourselves after years of second-guessing?

Episode 22 is Coming Home: Learning to Trust Yourself Again

Thank you for spending this time with me. If you'd like to learn more about working with me, my contact information is in the episode's notes.

I'll see you next time. Have a great day.

Menopause, Metabolism, & the 8 PM Problem

Menopause, Metabolism, & the 8PM Problem

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Open

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

Last time, in Episode 19, we discussed how biology and generational patterns shaped our relationship with food. Now, we will look ahead to later in life and how the rules are rewritten all over again. This is Episode 20, Menopause, Metabolism, and the 8 PM Problem.

The Body’s New Chapter

Hello, and welcome back.

Over the years, I have listened to so many women describe a similar experience: a moment when their bodies and minds started to feel unfamiliar.

They talk about how the same things that used to work no longer do. The way they eat, exercise, manage stress, lose weight, build strength, push through exhaustion, or handle everything on their plate— it suddenly feels completely different.

And maybe the most frustrating part is that many women are left asking the same questions: What changed? Why does my body feel like it stopped responding to me?

If you have gone through perimenopause or menopause, you probably already know the cultural story we are often handed the moment our bodies begin to change.

Somewhere around midlife, women hear a version of “You let yourself go.” or “You stopped trying.”  “You just need more discipline.”

And because that message is everywhere, many women assume the answer must be going back to what worked before. The workouts. The eating patterns. The strategies from our 20s and 30s.

What’s so incredibly frustrating about those messages is that the same input no longer creates the same output. And instead of asking “What changed inside the body?” we often ask ourselves “What am I doing wrong?”

That is one of the more damaging pieces of conditioning women carry into this stage of life. It treats a hormonal transition as a discipline problem. It asks a woman to solve a biological shift with grit and mind control, which is a little like using your old house key over and over again without realizing the locks have been changed.

But what’s actually happening is much closer to a second puberty.

 It’s a system-wide renegotiation of hormones, brain chemistry, metabolism, muscle, sleep and energy regulation. And it arrives on its own timeline regardless of how disciplined, healthy, or consistent someone has been for the previous twenty years.

The body is operating with a different set of instructions.

The problem is that most women are never told the rules have changed. Instead, they are often handed the same old advice:  eat less, move more, count every calorie, and if it isn’t working, try harder.”

Except the body is not asking for more punishment; it’s simply asking to be understood.

Because once you understand what is actually changing, the whole experience starts to make a different kind of sense.

I think this entire episode might create a series of “no wonder” moments.

No wonder this feels different.

No wonder what worked before stopped working.

No wonder my body feels like it changed the rules.

Let’s figure out what’s happening together.

The Hormonal Shift Behind the Weight

So, what is actually happening inside the body that can make weight, appetite, and metabolism feel so different?

A major part of the story starts with estrogen.

Estrogen does far more than regulate reproduction. It communicates with systems throughout the entire body, including the brain, metabolism, and the pathways involved in hunger and fullness.

As estrogen declines through perimenopause and menopause, some of those signals begin to change. For instance, the systems that help regulate appetite and satisfaction may not communicate in the same way they did before.

Hormones like leptin, which helps signal fullness, and ghrelin, which helps signal hunger, are part of this complicated conversation. As the hormonal environment changes, many women notice that the volume gets turned up on hunger and cravings, while satisfaction feels harder to reach.

The result is not a failure of character or effort, but a body responding to its new hormonal landscape.

This same shift helps explain why fat often redistributes toward the abdomen during and after menopause.

The increase in visceral fat, which is different from the fat just beneath the skin, is well documented and connected to declining estrogen. This type of fat sits deeper inside the abdomen, surrounding organs like the liver, pancreas, and intestines, where it can have a greater impact on metabolic health.

Again, this is biology. It’s the body adapting to a different set of hormonal signals.

And those changes don’t stop once menopause is over.

Research following postmenopausal women found that hormones involved in hunger, fullness, and metabolism— including ghrelin, leptin, and adiponectin— continue to change alongside body weight for as long as 18 to 30 months after the menopausal transition.

In other words, the body doesn’t adjust once and suddenly settle into a new normal.  It continues recalibrating.

That means a woman can be years into this stage of life and still feel like her body is changing. Not because she’s doing something wrong, but because her biology is still adjusting.

The 8 PM Problem

Now we get to the part of this episode that I think so many of you will recognize. I call it the 8 pm problem.

So many nights, right about 8 pm, I feel the need to eat something, even though I finished dinner less than an hour before. I need something sweet or salty, or both.

And throughout this series, we’ve already talked about some of the reasons this can happen.

We talked about hyper-palatable foods, intentionally made with a combination of sugar, salt, fat, and enhanced flavors, that activate dopamine pathways connected to reward, motivation, and wanting. These pathways can create a pull toward food even when you are not physically hungry

We discussed food noise and the difference between physical hunger and the constant mental chatter around food. The planning, negotiating, craving, and thinking about food can happen because the brain has learned to connect certain foods, emotions, routines, and memories with comfort, pleasure, reward, or relief.

And we talked about the gut-brain connection, the constant two-way communication happening between our digestive system and our brain through hormones, nerves, and chemical signals. The brain receives information about hunger, fullness and energy, but it also interprets those messages alongside memory, emotion, and reward, influencing how strongly we feel pulled toward food.

And now we are adding another piece to that conversation— what happens when that already complicated system enters menopause as the hormonal environment itself begins to change?

Enter cortisol again, our primary stress hormone.

In a well-regulated system, cortisol follows a daily rhythm of increasing in the morning to help us wake up and gradually decreasing throughout the day so our bodies can prepare for rest.  

But you guessed it, perimenopause and menopause can disrupt that rhythm.

Changes in hormones, increased stress sensitivity, eating patterns, and interrupted sleep can all influence the way cortisol behaves. Instead of the body naturally shifting into rest mode at night, the system may stay more activated than it used to.

But cortisol doesn’t work alone; it communicates with the same hunger and fullness signals we talked about earlier. When sleep is disrupted or the body is under stress, ghrelin and leptin can also shift. This can change hunger, cravings, and how satisfied we feel after eating.

This is what makes me feel so frustrated when I want to eat at 8 pm.

I have every intention of not eating for the rest of the evening after dinner, but my brain and body seem to be receiving a different memo.

 And then the cycle continues.

Hot flashes, night sweats, and disrupted sleep can make it all more complicated because poor sleep itself influences appetite regulation the next day.

A rough night of sleep can change how hungry you feel, what foods feel rewarding, and how easy it feels to make decisions around food before the day has even really started.

There’s another one of those “no wonder” moments. Sleep is one of the ways the body regulates this entire system. When sleep is disrupted, hunger signals can become stronger, fullness signals may become less effective, and the brain’s reward system can become more responsive to foods that provide quick energy and comfort.

At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control and decision-making, doesn’t function at its best when we are exhausted. The part of the brain trying to think long-term is competing with a body asking for immediate energy and relief.

So the 8 PM problem is not always about 8 PM.

Sometimes it is the result of hormones, stress, sleep, and biology having a conversation behind the scenes long before you ever opened the refrigerator door.

When PMOS Meets Menopause

I want to spend some time on this next piece because it is something millions of women experience, and many have been told or have assumed that it simply resolves once menopause arrives.

You may know this condition as PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome. In 2026, after years of research and input from patients, clinicians, and researchers around the world, the condition was renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS.

I mention the name change because the reasoning behind it matters.

The old name focused on the ovaries and cysts, but the condition itself is much bigger than that. It involves multiple hormone systems, metabolism, and the way the body regulates energy.

PMOS affects roughly one in ten women of reproductive age, making it one of the most common endocrine conditions. And for many years, the focus was on the reproductive symptoms: irregular cycles, fertility, and androgen-related changes.

For me, the signs started with my first menstrual cycle. I had one and then didn’t have another one for an entire year. After that, they were completely unpredictable. I started losing my hair, and I gained weight that felt almost impossible to lose.

At seventeen, my gynecologist put me on birth control to manage the symptoms and told me I should consider having a hysterectomy

At 17!

I spent years dealing with hormonal fluctuations, mood changes, irritability, and anxiety while taking early versions of the pill. 

Years later, when more research about PCOS became available, I realized how grateful I was that I didn’t have that hysterectomy because it wouldn’t have addressed the underlying syndrome.

Because PMOS doesn’t simply disappear when menstruation stops.

What often changes after menopause is that the reproductive symptoms become less visible, but the metabolic side of PMOS can continue.

One of the biggest pieces of that story is insulin resistance.

Insulin is the hormone that helps move glucose from the bloodstream into our cells for energy. A helpful way to picture it is that insulin acts like a key, and the receptor on each cell acts like a lock.

With insulin resistance, that key does not work as smoothly as it should, so the body compensates by producing more insulin to get the message through.

Higher insulin levels can influence hunger, cravings, and how the body stores energy.

And this is where menopause can add another layer. Estrogen helps support insulin sensitivity, so when estrogen declines, women who were already dealing with insulin resistance may feel that shift even more.

For some women, perimenopause becomes the moment when weight changes, and cravings and metabolic struggles suddenly feel louder, even if they had found a balance that worked for years.

That was my experience.

For years, birth control helped manage some of the symptoms I was experiencing. But when I stopped taking it in my early fifties because my doctor said I had a higher risk of cancer the older I was on birth control, the more my symptoms increased. The message I received was that PCOS improves after menopause because ovulation stops.

I had spent years researching this condition, including writing about PCOS and menopause in college. And the research was showing a more complicated story.

The reproductive symptoms may change, but the metabolic challenges can continue or even become more noticeable.

After stopping birth control, my body changed again. I gained more weight, became prediabetic, lost more hair, and eventually had a conversation with my doctors about HRT, hormone replacement therapy.

This is also why GLP-1 medications, including medications like Zepbound, have become part of this conversation.

Zepbound, which is the brand name for tirzepatide, works a little differently because it activates two hormone pathways. GLP-1 and GIP. These are natural hormones involved in the communication between the gut, brain, and metabolism, helping regulate blood sugar, insulin response, appetite, and fullness.

For some women dealing with PMOS, menopause, and insulin resistance, these medications are not just changing appetite. They are influencing some of the same biological systems that have been part of the struggle all along.

And that has been part of my story too.

For me, it wasn’t only about weight. I noticed changes in food noise, my hunger signals, my metabolic health, and how my body felt overall. My blood pressure improved, my sleep improved, and for the first time in a long time, the signals inside my body quieted.

Many women describe something similar:  less food noise, fewer intense cravings, and a different relationship with hunger.

Of course, medication, whether deciding to take HRT or a GLP-1, is a personal medical decision that belongs between you and your doctor.

But what matters for this conversation is understanding why these changes happen.

Because if symptoms improve when a biological pathway is supported, that tells us that the body was asking for a different kind of support.

The Brain’s Own Menopause

What about your brain and menopause? Because the brain has estrogen receptors too, and when estrogen changes, the brain notices.

Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi and her team at Weill (pronounce- while) Cornell studied how the female brain changes through the menopause transition. By using brain imaging, their study changed how we understand the relationship between menopause and the brain.

For years, the higher number of women diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease was often explained by one simple idea: women live longer.

And while lifespan does play a role, research suggests it does not explain the entire difference.

One area scientists are studying is estrogen’s relationship with the brain.

Estrogen does much more than regulate reproduction. It also plays a role in how brain cells use energy. During the menopause transition, there are changes in brain glucose metabolism, including in areas involved with memory and cognitive function.

This is one of those facts that changes the way you look at the whole transition.

Because the brain itself appears to go through its own adjustment period. And it also helps explain why researchers continue to study the relationship between hormone therapy and brain health.

Some evidence suggests timing may matter and that starting hormone therapy closer to the menopause transition may have different effects than starting much later. But this is a complex decision that depends on each woman’s health history, risks, and goals, and it belongs in a conversation with a medical provider who understands the whole picture.

But whether or not HRT is part of someone’s story, understanding what is happening inside the brain matters

Because some of the things women have described for years, like brain fog, trouble finding words, or feeling like their mind works differently, start to make more sense.

For many women, these cognitive changes are temporary. The brain is adapting to a different hormonal environment and finding new ways to maintain balance.

And this is where food enters the conversation again. Not because we need another list of rules.

But because the brain is an energy-demanding organ. Supporting stable energy through enough nutrients, protein, fiber, and balanced meals can matter during a time when the entire system is adjusting.

Research around brain health often points toward eating patterns like the Mediterranean and MIND diets, which emphasize foods rich in omega-3 fats, vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants.

Not because there is one perfect “brain food” that fixes everything. But because the brain, like every other part of the body, needs support through a major transition.

There is also growing interest in whether alternative fuel sources like ketones may support the brain during times when glucose metabolism changes. Some early research, especially in people experiencing cognitive changes, is exploring this connection.

But for the average woman going through menopause, the evidence is still developing

The goal isn’t to chase the next perfect diet. The goal is support. That’s an important distinction.

We are finally starting to expand the conversation around menopause, and the experiences women have described for decades deserve to be studied, understood, and taken seriously.

Close

Everything in this episode points back to the same reframe.

The real question is not, “What is wrong with my body?”

The question is, “What is my body adjusting to right now?”

Because before we can change the story we tell about ourselves, we have to understand the story our body has been trying to tell us. So much of this transition is happening beneath the surface: hormones shifting, signals changing, and systems adapting long before we fully understand what is happening.

And when we understand the biology, we can stop fighting the body and start learning how to support it.

Next time, we turn from what the body is doing to the stories we have attached to what the body does.

Episode 21 is Food Addiction, Food Shame, and the Cheat Day Lie, and it picks up exactly where this conversation leaves off.

Thank you for spending this time with me. If you would like to learn more about working with me, you can find my contact info in the episode notes.

I'll see you next time. Have a great day.

Born into It: Where Your Relationship with Food Really Began

Born into It: Where Your Relationshipwith Food Really Began

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

In the last episode, we explored what happens inside the brain and body when we eat. The more we looked beneath the surface, the more clearly we saw that eating is influenced by far more than hunger or willpower. Today, we’re going even deeper by exploring how our relationship with food began long before we ever thought about calories, carbohydrates, or healthy eating–before we had language, before we formed memories, and perhaps even before we were born.  This is Episode 19: Born into It: Where Your Relationship with Food Really Began.

A Word Before We Begin

Hello, and welcome back.

Before I get into the science today, I want to note that this episode touches on pregnancy, breastfeeding, and early childhood feeding, but I am in no way suggesting blame. Not toward the mothers listening, and not toward the mothers who raised us.

Every mother in this episode’s story was living inside the same systems this series has described. The stress, the food environment, conflicting information, and often a lack of support. Nobody was choosing difficulty for their child, and the influences this episode explores were, in most cases, invisible to everyone involved.

That includes breastfeeding because everyone is different. Some mothers are unable to produce enough milk, and some can’t breastfeed at all, while others choose only to use formula. I will share remarkable research on breast milk. With that said, baby formula has fed healthy children for generations, and no one should ever feel upset about using formula over breast milk.

The goal of this episode isn’t guilt. It’s understanding. Because once we understand the full picture, we stop carrying around the feeling that this was somehow our fault.

Before You Were Born

Most of us can point to a moment we consider the beginning of our complicated relationship with food. Maybe it was the first diet that didn’t work or a comment someone made about our bodies. Or the first time we ate past fullness and then felt shame about it.

But what if none of those were the beginning of our complicated relationship with food?

Current research suggests that our first food preferences begin in the womb— not at the family table, in front of the television, or even in a high chair.

As early as the second trimester, the fetus can detect flavors from the mother’s diet through the amniotic fluid. Garlic, carrots, and vanilla— flavors from the mother’s diet pass into the fluid, which the fetus swallows, and those early exposures shape food preferences after birth. Studies found that infants whose mothers drank carrot juice regularly during pregnancy were more accepting of carrot-flavored foods than those with no prenatal exposure to that flavor.

That’s so fascinating. The fetus isn’t deciding that carrots taste good, but is fundamentally learning that these flavors belong in its world. This is one of the brain’s earliest acts of categorization. It’s not about preference— it’s about what feels familiar and safe.

It’s not only flavor that shapes the meaning but something far older.

When we think of inheritance, we usually think of eye color, height, curly or straight hair, etc. But biology also makes the body carry information about environments. Safe environments. Environments where there is scarcity. Or living in environments of chronic stress. We don’t carry that information as memories in the way we traditionally think of them; we carry it as biological adaptations that can influence how the next generation responds to the world.

Scientists call this epigenetics. It explores how life experiences can leave biological fingerprints that extend beyond a single generation. For example, during the final months of World War II, food rations in the Netherlands dropped to dangerously low levels. Researchers later discovered that children born to mothers who experienced this famine showed lasting metabolic changes that persisted for decades. They had higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in adulthood because their developing bodies adapted to an environment of scarcity long before they ever chose their own.

Research on intergenerational trauma is similar. Stress and trauma can alter gene expression in ways that affect the next generation’s stress response, anxiety levels, and metabolic function. In practical terms, this means a child may inherit a nervous system that responds more intensely to stress, develops stronger cravings for calorie-dense foods during difficult times, or has a cortisol system that reacts more quickly. These aren’t certainties, but they are tendencies that can echo across generations.

When I first learned about this research, I couldn’t help but think of my own family and how things that had always felt separate began to feel connected. My mom struggled with anxiety during her difficult pregnancies and also battled bulimia at different points in her life. My grandmother grew up in extreme poverty, where food insecurity was a constant reality. Throughout her life, she cycled between bingeing and severe food restriction. Those weren’t simply individual experiences. They were part of a much longer story that stretched across generations.

I didn’t choose any of that, and I certainly didn’t cause it. Understanding that doesn’t erase my responsibility for the choices I make today, but it does replace shame with compassion. It reminds me that the story I inherited shaped me before I was ever old enough to understand it.

The First Year

In Episode 18, we talked about the gut microbiome— the trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that constantly communicate with the brain, influence cravings, and help regulate the hormones that stimulate hunger and fullness. I want to go back one step further and ask: How does the microbiome develop in the first place?

One of the most fascinating discoveries in recent decades is that the microbiome begins to develop during our earliest days of life. During a vaginal birth, babies encounter their mother’s microbial community, while babies born by cesarean section first encounter microbes from the skin and surrounding environment. Researchers have shown that these different beginnings can shape the infant microbiome, influencing immune development, metabolism, and the ongoing conversation between the gut and the brain.

That doesn’t mean one child is destined for better health than another, or that birth alone determines the future. The microbiome continues to change throughout infancy and well into adulthood.

Another thing that affects the infant microbiome is early antibiotic use. While often medically necessary and lifesaving, it can reduce bacterial diversity. Research has linked these changes to a higher risk of obesity, allergies, and metabolic dysfunction later in life. The good news is that the microbiome remains adaptable throughout life, and our environment and lifestyle strengthen it. These early influences matter, but they don’t determine the rest of our story.

Scientific findings that breast milk is not a fixed formula are extraordinary. The milk changes or adjusts when an infant is fighting an infection. The milk will contain increased immune factors, white blood cells, and antibodies targeted to what the infant’s body needs at that specific moment. The mother’s body appears to be reading the infant’s biology and responding to it in real time, producing something closer to personalized medicine than to food.

Breast milk also contains complex sugars that the infant can’t digest but that feed specific beneficial bacteria in the infant’s gut. In other words, breast milk is feeding the microbiome as much as it’s feeding the infant. It’s building the ecosystem that will spend decades communicating with the brain.

And the flavors from the mother’s diet are present in the milk as well— continuing the flavor education that began in the womb, further shaping which tastes feel familiar, which feel safe, which feel like home.

Taken together, these findings reveal something remarkable about the body’s original intelligence. Long before we followed and broke diet rules, calorie-counted, or lived in a chaotic food environment, it adapted and responded with extraordinary precision. That intelligence hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there, waiting beneath years of conditioning, habits, and noise.  

The Rituals

By the time we were old enough to sit at a family table, the conditioning was already well underway. Childhood added another layer, built through experience, repetition, and emotional learning.

Picture this.

It’s Saturday morning, and you’re in your pajamas. There’s no school today; your parents are still asleep, and you don’t have any chores yet. The house is quiet in the way it only is on weekend mornings. You turn on the TV just as your favorite cartoons begin.

Breakfast was a ritual, but Saturdays felt different. I’d pour myself a bowl of brightly colored Fruity Pebbles or Cap’n Crunch, usually the one with the peanut butter balls that reduced the roof of your mouth to raw pulp. We considered that a reasonable trade for the sugar rush, and it never stopped us from pouring another bowl next time. The cereal was usually accompanied by a piece of toasted Wonder Bread slathered in butter and jam, and a big glass of Tang, because somehow, we all believed that counted as orange juice.

While I was eating, I’d stare at the cereal pictures on the back of the box. There were mazes, word searches, and puzzles to solve, and if you were lucky, a prize hidden inside that somehow made the cereal taste better. Meanwhile, the cartoon characters on the television were entertaining, and the commercials between the cartoons all promised the same thing: this was fun, this was happiness. This was Saturday.

Looking back now, I don’t remember thinking about sugar. I remember excitement. Comfort. Safety. Belonging. My brain wasn’t just learning to like cereal; it was learning what joy tasted like.

Psychologists call that learning classical conditioning— the same learning process that allows a song to transport you back to high school or the smell of sunscreen to remember summers at the pool. When the brain repeatedly pairs an experience with a feeling, it begins to treat one as inseparable from the other. Cereal wasn’t just cereal; it was Saturday. It was freedom. It was safety, excitement, and belonging, all brightly colored in my bowl.

The cereal box itself was part of the conditioning. Research from Cornell University found that companies intentionally angled the gaze of cereal mascots such as Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, and the Trix Rabbit slightly downward to create direct eye contact with children standing in the grocery aisle. They weren’t just brand logos. They invited children to see them as familiar, trustworthy friends. Kids, whose brains were still developing the ability to recognize persuasion, often accepted them exactly that way.

But those childhood messages extended far beyond the cereal box.

Tang became synonymous with astronauts and vitamin C, making it seem healthy to millions of families in the seventies, even though it was essentially sugar with added vitamins. Flintstone vitamins, shaped like Fred and Barney, looked and tasted like candy, handed to us every morning as an act of loving parental care. Even cereal commercials reassured us that what we were eating was “part of a complete breakfast,” reinforcing the idea that these foods belonged in a healthy diet.

Nobody was trying to mislead their children. Parents bought Tang, Flintstones vitamins, and sugary cereals because they believed the advertising, health messaging, and culture of the time presented them as good choices.

The funny, not-so-funny thing is, years later, when I found myself super stressed, I reached for some of those same cereals. It wasn’t because I lacked willpower. My brain had spent years rehearsing that association between sugar and security since I was five years old.

Other food rituals from our childhood included birthday cake, ice cream after sports games, and buttered popcorn during family movie night. Pizza on Friday nights because the weekend had finally arrived, or fast food as a reward for good grades, or to soften a difficult day. Long before we understood nutrition, food had already become woven into celebrations, comfort, and belonging. Those rituals became emotional maps that many of us still follow today.

Research consistently shows that parents strongly shape their children’s relationship with food. What they eat, how they talk about food, and whether they use it as a reward or punishment all become lessons children carry into adulthood. Food in families is never just food.

The phrase “clean your plate; there are starving people in Africa” was not just our parents trying to make us eat what was in front of us; it was often from families living through food scarcity, and food waste had once been unthinkable. That survival logic became a family tradition. Treats given as comfort and food withheld as discipline were patterns that didn’t begin with our parents. They came from the generations before them, each passing along the emotional language of food to the next.

What You Inherited and What You Can Do with It

By now you may be thinking, if all of this begins before we’re even aware of it, then what hope is there?

The answer is: more than you might think.

Everything we’ve explored in this episode explains how your relationship with food began. It doesn’t write the rest of the story.

That intelligence hasn’t disappeared. The body continues to change. The same neuroplasticity that shaped the brain in the womb and throughout childhood remains active for the rest of our lives. The brain never loses its ability to form new associations, new patterns, and new responses. Neural pathways strengthen with repeated use, while those we no longer reinforce gradually grow quieter. That’s the biology of habit change we explored in Episode 18. Awareness creates new pathways, and with repetition, those pathways become easier to follow.

The microbiome also continues to evolve. It responds to diet, sleep, physical activity, and chronic stress. As it adapts, it can regain diversity over time, meaning the gut you inherited doesn’t have to be the gut you keep.  great deal.

Our environment continues to influence epigenetic expression throughout life. The same mechanism that allowed stress and scarcity to alter gene expression can also respond to safety, nourishment, and reduced chronic stress. The inheritance is real, but it doesn’t determine the rest of your life.

Before we ever made choices about food, food was already shaping us. That isn't a reason for despair, but for compassion—toward yourself, the people who raised you, and the child who was absorbing the world exactly as a developing brain is designed to do.

Beneath all of that conditioning is the version of you who simply knew hunger and satisfaction, who ate because the body asked for food and stopped because the body had enough. That self hasn’t disappeared. It has simply become harder to hear.

You are responsible for the choices you make today, but not for the conditions under which those choices first developed. Understanding where those patterns came from is how we begin to find our way back to our original self.

Closing

In the next episode, we’re moving into new territory.

Episode 20 is Menopause, Metabolism, and the 8 PM Problem. We’ll explore what happens as the body changes through midlife, including hormones, circadian rhythms, evening hunger, and why so many people feel like the rules suddenly changed without anyone sending the memo.

Thank you for spending this time with me. If you'd like to learn more about working with me, you'll find my contact information in the episode notes.

Until next time, take care, and have a great day.

The Neuroscience of Why You Eat: Stress, Dopamine & Why Willpower Is Often the Wrong Explanation

Final Episode 18-The Neuroscience of Why You Eat - 6:25:26, 7.43 PM

The Original Self Podcast/ Evet DeCota

Opening

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

Last time, in Episode 17, we talked about food noise and ended with the question: if the system was built to hijack your appetite, what does that look like inside the brain? Three episodes in, we looked outward; now we turn inward to Episode 18: The Neuroscience of Why You Eat.

The Wrong Explanation

Hello, and welcome back

Have you ever noticed that your decision to eat often feels like it happens after the fact? You reach for something. You open it. You take a bite. And only then does awareness catch up and say, "Wait, wasn't I trying to eat differently today?"

It's as though there was a conversation happening somewhere below conscious awareness, and by the time you joined it, the vote had already been taken. The story isn’t that we made a bad decision; it’s that the decision was surprisingly late.

The explanation of not having enough willpower is a familiar one that most of us reach for. We ran out of something, or we failed to hold the line. And that explanation carries real moral weight, because it’s an implication about who we are as people.

I want to pull that explanation apart today. Not to let us off the hook for everything, but because the story we’ve been telling ourselves about what happened is incomplete.

What looks like brain failure is often the brain doing exactly what it’s built to do under specific conditions. Understanding those conditions shifts the conversation from blame to biology. And biology is something we can actually work with.

What Dopamine Is Actually Doing

Dopamine is constantly mentioned in conversation about food and cravings, and almost always in a way that undersells what it actually does.

In Episode 16, The Engineered Plate, I described it as anticipation —the wanting— and that’s accurate as far as it goes. But there’s a distinction in the research that changes the picture considerably.

Neuroscientist Kent Berridge spent years mapping what he called the Wanting System and the Liking System. Although they work together, they’re actually two different systems. The Wanting System— the craving, the pull, the urgency to pursue— is driven primarily by dopamine, while the Liking System— the actual pleasure experienced in the moment of eating— is driven by a separate opioid system. What’s fascinating is that these two systems can come completely apart.

The gap between wanting and liking is why you can crave something with genuine intensity, eat it, and still feel underwhelmed. It’s why you can keep eating past the point of enjoyment, searching for satisfaction that the food isn’t delivering. The Wanting System doesn’t consult the Liking System, and it doesn’t wait for a signal that the experience matched the anticipation before it fires again. It keeps reaching forward, and the food environment we live in—built around the bliss point and designed to hit multiple sensory systems at once—is highly effective at keeping the Wanting System activated long after the Liking System has moved on.

For me, this system goes crazy with pretzels, which is one of the reasons I rarely eat them anymore. The first few are genuinely good— the salt, the crunch, everything I wanted them to be— but then something shifts. The enjoyment fades, yet I keep reaching for the next one, almost as if my brain is trying to recreate the satisfaction of those first few bites.

By the time I stop, my mouth feels swollen from the salt, and I begin to feel physically ill. My body had to get that loud before the craving finally stands down. That’s not a pretzel problem or what I’ve heard called a “red flag food.” It’s my Wanting System continuing to search for something my Liking System had already moved on from.

What this means practically is that the question ‘why can’t I stop?’ often has a neurochemical answer that has nothing to do with desire, intention, or character. These systems weren’t designed to stop wanting the moment pleasure faded.

In a world of engineered hyper-palatability, that same persistence creates a gap that feels, from the inside, like weakness, but biologically, it’s something else entirely.

Stress, Cortisol, and The Gut

So let’s talk about stress, cortisol, and the other mechanisms that drive us toward food, whether we need it or not.

Most of us know that stress and eating are connected, but what we tend to miss is how targeted that connection really is. Stress doesn’t simply make us hungrier. It shifts our appetites toward foods that provide quick, concentrated energy.

When our brains experience stress, cortisol is released. Its job is to prepare us to respond to a threat, and one consequence of that response is a predictable preference for calorie-dense foods. It’s an ancient survival strategy, not a random lapse in judgment.

Most of us aren’t facing immediate physical threats. We’re dealing with deadlines, financial pressure, caregiving responsibilities, health concerns, and the constant demands of everyday life. Yet there’s a feedback loop embedded in that mechanism that makes it difficult to interrupt.

Here’s where the loop begins: Eating calorie-dense food under stress can temporarily lower cortisol because the brain interprets that incoming energy as a sign that resources are available and the immediate problem has been addressed. The relief is real. It’s not imagined, and it’s not an excuse.  The next time stress appears, the brain is a little quicker to suggest the same solution that worked last time.

But I also need to point out what some of you may be thinking right now. You may know someone, or maybe it’s you, who loses their appetite when stressed. I have several friends who can barely eat anything when they are experiencing a very difficult event. If cortisol drives hunger toward calorie-dense food, why would stress produce the opposite response in some?

The first part of the answer is the type of stress you experience. Is it acute or chronic? In the immediate moment of acute stress, like a lion chasing you, the body’s first responder isn’t cortisol but adrenaline, also called epinephrine. Adrenaline’s primary purpose is to increase alertness and temporarily put other systems on hold, like suppressing your appetite almost completely. If something is really alarming, stopping to eat something is not usually a priority. Cortisol follows adrenaline and, in short bursts, can also dampen hunger. The shift toward appetite and calorie-dense cravings happens under chronic stress— the kind that doesn’t resolve or that hums in the background for weeks or months, keeping cortisol persistently elevated.

The second part of the answer is that people respond to stress differently. Some people’s stress systems remain more adrenaline-driven, even over time, keeping their appetites suppressed regardless of how long the stress lasts. There’s also a gut dimension to this. Anxiety creates genuine physical distress in the digestive system— nausea, tightness, and discomfort— which can quiet hunger signals before they ever reach conscious awareness.

The person who can’t eat when they’re anxious isn’t more disciplined than the person who reaches for food. Their nervous system is running a different program that neither of them chose.

The third system at play is the gut. We often think of the gut as where food is digested, but it’s also in constant communication with the brain through what is known as the gut-brain axis.  About ninety percent of the body’s serotonin, a chemical messenger involved in regulating mood, appetite, and digestion, is produced there. The gut is also home to the microbiome, the trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that are constantly communicating with the brain.

Research from the University of Pittsburgh suggests that gut microbes not only respond to what we eat but also influence what we want to eat next. Certain bacterial strains appear to promote cravings for the foods they need to thrive while also influencing ghrelin and leptin, the hormones that regulate hunger and fullness. When those signals become less reliable, the conversation between the gut and the brain becomes less accurate.

By now, you can probably see that a craving doesn’t come from just one place. Dopamine anticipates a reward, cortisol directs our appetite toward calorie-dense foods, and the gut sends its own signals about what it wants next.

The part of you that made a plan that morning isn’t the same system generating every craving later in the day. Yet from the inside, they can feel like the same voice. A craving emerges from a conversation between the brain, body, and the gut, and understanding that complexity changes the question entirely. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” we can begin asking, “What is my brain and body responding to right now?”

What strikes me about all of this is how quickly we turn a behavior into an identity. We don’t just say, “I eat when I’m stressed.” We say, “I’m the kind of person who has no self-control.” We take one moment of behavior and let it become a story about who we are. Science doesn’t erase that behavior, but it does change the story.

The Brakes, and What Happens to Them

So if all of these systems are influencing behavior, where does conscious choice enter the picture?

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for planning, weighing consequences, and putting the brakes on impulse. When it’s working well, it creates a pause between a craving and an action, giving us a chance to choose a different response.

The catch is that it’s also one of the first parts of the brain to struggle when we’re under pressure. Stress, poor sleep, and emotional exhaustion all make it less effective. At the same time, stress drives our brains toward calorie-dense foods. Those aren’t two separate problems. It’s a stress response that presses down on the accelerator while also weakening the brakes.

Under enough stress, the brain prioritizes immediate needs over long-term goals. The voice looking for relief gets louder, while the voice thinking about consequences gets quieter. 

We actually understand this principle better than we realize. Think about your younger self. Most of us can look back at our teens and early twenties and immediately recognize decisions we wouldn’t make today. Some of us have lower back tattoos to remind us.

We accept that brain state influences behavior. Stress works similarly. The conditions change, and behavior changes with them.

The encouraging part is that the prefrontal cortex can be engaged deliberately, even if only for a moment. UCLA researcher Matthew Lieberman found that when people apply words to what they’re experiencing, the brain responds. Simply naming the feeling— “I’m having a craving right now”— quiets some of the brain’s more reactive systems while bringing the prefrontal cortex more fully online.

Imagine this: you’re sitting on the couch, watching TV, and as soon as the commercial comes on, you get up, walk into the kitchen, and open the refrigerator or pantry. You weren’t hungry a minute ago; you’re not even hungry now. Yet you are still standing in front of food.

Now imagine if you paused right before reaching for a pint of ice cream and said to yourself, “Interesting, I think I’m tired, bored, or stressed right now.” You may still grab the ice cream. You may not. The point is that for a brief moment, you saw the pattern instead of becoming the pattern.

The goal isn’t to win every craving battle; it’s to stop letting the same pathway win automatically. Every moment of awareness gives the brain another route to practice. Over time, that new route becomes easier to travel, while the old one slowly loses its grip. That’s the biology of habit change.

There was a version of you, before any of this became so complicated, who had a much simpler relationship with hunger and satisfaction. The same brain that learned those patterns can also learn different ones. It just needs different conditions and a little more understanding of what it’s actually responding to.

Closing

In the next episode, we’re going to move further back— before the stress patterns were established, before the neural pathways were carved, and before years of eating shaped the gut microbiome.

Episode 19 is: Born into It, and will examine what was already in place before you were old enough to make any choices about it. It’s about the epigenetics, the family food patterns, the inherited biology, and the psychological conditioning that arrived before you had any framework to question it.

If this episode answered the question of what the system does inside the brain, Episode 19 questions when it started.

Thank you for spending your time with me. If you’d like to learn more about working with me, you can find my contact information in the episode’s notes.

I’ll see you next time. Have a great day

Food Noise: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Food

Food Noise: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Food

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

Today’s episode begins with a simple question: How much time do you spend thinking about food? Most of us have never stopped to consider the answer. Today, I want to explore why that question matters and what it can reveal about the way food has come to occupy our attention.

This is Episode 17- Food Noise: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Food                     

When the Noise Got Quiet

Hello and welcome back.

In the last episode, we explored how hyper-palatable foods are engineered to capture our attention and keep us coming back for more. We discussed how the combination of sugar, fat, salt, flavor enhancers, and food technology can override the body’s natural systems of hunger and fullness. More importantly, we discussed the possibility that many of the struggles people experience around food are not evidence of weakness, but predictable responses to an environment designed to encourage consumption.

At the end of that episode, I mentioned the term food noise. 

Over the last few years, that term has become increasingly common in conversations surrounding GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound. People have described an unexpected experience when first starting these medications. While the headlines focus on weight loss, many users describe a quieting of the constant mental chatter around food.

What fascinated me was not the medication itself, but the language people used. Again and again, people who had never met one another described the same experiences. They talked about food taking up less space in their minds. They described feeling relief. Some realized, for the first time, that not everyone spends as much time thinking about food as they do. Others described it as though a radio that had been playing in the background for years had suddenly had the volume turned down. I describe it as finally being able to stop thinking about the four pieces of pizza left in the box simply because I’m no longer hungry.

Listening to those stories and feeling exactly the same way is what made me think: How much time do we actually spend thinking about food? Most of us have never stopped to measure it. We simply assume it’s normal.

That raises an interesting psychological question. If millions of people are suddenly discovering that food can occupy less mental space than they thought possible, what exactly was occupying the space in the first place? What is food noise? Where does it come from? Why do some people experience it more intensely than others? 

And perhaps most importantly, what if this constant preoccupation with food is not simply an individual problem to solve, but a predictable response to the world we live in?

What Is Food Noise?

Before we talk about where food noise comes from, we need to understand what it actually is. Because food noise is not the same thing as hunger, and understanding that distinction may be one of the most important parts of this conversation.

Hunger is a biological signal. It’s your body’s way of communicating that it needs energy. Hunger can build gradually over time, and for most of human history, it served a practical purpose. It motivated us to seek food, eat enough to survive, and then move on with our lives.

Food noise is something different. It’s a mental preoccupation with food that can exist whether you’re physically hungry or not. It is the running commentary in the background of your day. It is the constant awareness of food, the planning, the bargaining, the anticipation, the cravings, and sometimes, and most of the time, if you live inside my head, it’s the guilt that accompanies it.

For some, food noise shows up as thinking about lunch while they are still eating breakfast. For others, it appears as the promise that tomorrow will be different. It can look like scrolling through recipes despite having no intention of cooking, or like when I watched the Food Network on most days, thinking that I was absorbing chef skills, but really I was only indulging my food noise. 

It can also look like wandering into the kitchen when you’re not hungry or feeling distracted by thoughts of food when your attention is needed elsewhere.  The experience varies from person to person, but the common thread is that food occupies more mental space than seems reasonable.

What’s interesting is that many people who experience food noise don’t necessarily expect it to disappear. It becomes part of the background of daily life. That is why so many people were surprised when the noise became quieter. For the first time, they experienced a different relationship with food and realized that the noise wasn’t as inevitable as they once believed. 

Psychologists have long understood that our attention is influenced by more than biological need, because humans are highly responsive to the cues in their environment. We notice things that have been associated with reward, pleasure, comfort, and survival. Many people walking past a bakery may suddenly think about an almond croissant, despite having eaten an hour ago. Some watching television may find themselves craving a product they had no interest in before the commercial appeared. Think about the millions of dollars advertisers spend on Super Bowl commercials— McDonald’s, Domino’s, Snickers— and how DoorDash can deliver it to your door in under thirty minutes. The industry knows the power of how attention, memory, emotion, and reward interact.

Food is uniquely powerful because it sits at the intersection of biology and psychology. We need it to survive, but we also attach meaning to it. Over time, our brains become very efficient at linking food to emotional experiences. The result is that food begins to occupy mental territory extending far beyond simple nourishment.

Researchers have increasingly recognized that food noise appears to operate primarily within our hedonic hunger system. It’s often less about the body’s need for calories and nutrition and more about the brain’s anticipation of a rewarding experience. That distinction matters because it shifts the conversation away from the idea that people only eat because they’re hungry.

The more we learn about eating behavior, the more difficult it becomes to reduce it to a simple matter of choice. Food noise doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It develops within a culture where food is always available, relentlessly advertised, and constantly competing for our attention. Every day we’re surrounded by cues designed to keep food on our minds, whether we’re hungry or not.

Yet despite all of that complexity, many people still treat food noise as a personal failing. They assume that their preoccupation with food means they’re flawed.

But perhaps the better question is: If so many people experience food noise, why are we treating it as an individual problem? What if it isn’t a reflection of personal weakness or poor choices? What if it is a predictable response to the environment we've created around food? 

To answer those questions, we need to look at how food became more than food and how an entire industry learned to compete for one of the most valuable resources we have: our attention.

The Food Industry Didn’t Sell Food

If food noise is partly a product of the environment around us, then it's worth asking how that environment came to be. 

Most of us think of food as something simple. We think of food as nourishment, fuel, or pleasure. We assume that food companies are primarily in the business of selling products people want to eat. 

But over the last several decades, something changed.

Beginning in the 1980s, tobacco companies began purchasing food companies. Philip Morris acquired General Foods, and later Kraft, while R.J. Reynolds acquired Nabisco. These were not random acquisitions. 

The goal was not only to sell food but to sell products people would continue to buy. The tobacco industry had already invested enormous resources in understanding what captured attention, created desire, and encouraged repeat behavior. Those same principles proved incredibly valuable in the food industry.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we touched on it in the last episode when we discussed hyper-palatable foods and how they can override many of the body’s natural signals of hunger and fullness. 

What these companies understood was that attention drives behavior. The longer a product occupies space in your mind, the more likely you are to buy it. The more often you buy it, the more profitable their product becomes. Food companies weren’t just competing for shelf space in grocery stores. They were competing for space in your mind.

For most of human history, obtaining food required effort. Growing it, hunting it, gathering it, preserving it, preparing it— food demanded time and energy. The flip side of that thought is that resisting food often requires effort today. That’s a remarkable shift.

Think about how food appears in modern life. It’s on television, social media, billboards, podcasts, streaming services, sporting events, and even the apps on our phones. A few taps on the app, and the food can be delivered to our doorsteps in less time than it takes to watch an episode of a TV show.

That helps explain why food noise is not simply an individual experience. It exists within an environment specifically designed to keep food visible, accessible, and competing for our attention.

There is a predictable outcome when an entire system becomes exceptionally skilled at driving consumption. Rising rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic illness did not emerge by accident. And as those conditions became more common, another industry was preparing to profit from the consequences.

The Business of Appetite

As food became increasingly profitable, so did many of the health conditions associated with overconsumption. Obesity rates climbed, Type 2 diabetes became more common, and metabolic dysfunction became increasingly widespread. 

Of course, no single food company caused these outcomes, and no single factor explains them. Human health is always more complicated than that— genetics, stress, sleep, socioeconomic factors, and lifestyle matter. When I look at my own family, I see all of those influences at work. Heart disease and Type 2 diabetes affected generation after generation, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to create this series in the first place. 

But it would also be difficult to ignore the role of an environment that encourages people to think about purchasing and consuming more food than at any other point in human history.

The pharmaceutical industry did not create food noise or hyper-palatable foods, but it found itself in a position to treat many of the consequences associated with them. Medications for high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, and weight loss, plus an ever-growing list of treatments, became part of the modern healthcare landscape.

Then came GLP-1 medications.

While these drugs were originally developed for Type 2 diabetes, they quickly became part of a much larger conversation about weight, appetite, and food. What made them particularly interesting was not simply their effect on body weight but their effect on attention.

Again and again, people described a quieting of food noise. They talked about feeling less preoccupied with food. Less distracted by cravings. Less consumed by the constant mental negotiation around eating. 

If you have food noise and you have never tried a GLP-1 medication, I would like to tell you about my experience. 

For nearly four decades, I was a sheep, blindly following diet culture’s herd mentality. I counted points, logged calories in apps, and readied my restaurant menu order, even before walking through the doors. I clung to the hope that the next diet would finally unlock lasting health and happiness, and I tried to control my body by controlling food.

Over time, points, calories, and “good” and “bad” foods became a constant tug-of-war between control and chaos. I told myself it was discipline, but really it was just mental noise. I’ve been overweight for a long time. The weight didn’t come on from a hard year or a loss; it accumulated through seasons of stress, boredom, and the relentless background chatter in my brain. Thinking about food, planning it, avoiding it, and negotiating with it built into a cacophony that never seemed to quiet. For years, that was simply my normal.

That cycle defined me. But then I learned everything I have been telling you in the last two episodes. I had to look honestly at the ultra-processed foods I was eating, the poor sleep I was normalizing, and the chronic inflammation I was living with. The real epiphany came when I understood that stress elevates cortisol, increasing cravings and fat storage, and I finally realized that my body wasn’t broken but adaptive.

Then a prescription for a GLP-1 entered my world, and the background chatter of food noise stopped. It felt like winning the lottery or discovering a cure. If that sounds hyperbolic, trust me: when you’ve lived with constant food noise for decades, its silence feels miraculous, spacious, and calm. I felt “normal,” whatever that means.

And for many people, it was the first time they experienced the kind of freedom they had hoped for most of their lives. The constant mental chatter around food became quiet. Cravings no longer demanded the same attention. The negotiating, the planning, and the guilt began to loosen their grip. For me, it felt as though a chokehold I had lived with for decades had finally been released. I could breathe easily. It was life-changing.

GLP-1s have improved health markers, reduced disease risk, and, in some cases, even reduced interest in behaviors such as smoking, alcohol use, and gambling. Researchers are still learning exactly why this happens, but it appears these medications influence some of the same reward pathways involved in craving and anticipation. For many people, the result is a quieter relationship not only with food, but with reward itself. 

The popularity of these medications has revealed that the conversation about obesity has never been only about weight. It’s also about appetite, attention, reward, environment, and the stories we tell ourselves about self-control.

Perhaps the most interesting thing GLP-1 medications have done is force us to recognize the nature of the problem itself.

If millions of people have suddenly discovered that the noise has quieted, then maybe the question we should ask is: why was the noise so loud to begin with?

The Question Nobody Is Asking

For decades, the conversation about weight has revolved around a single question: How do I lose it? 

Entire industries have been built around answering that question. Diet books, fitness programs, apps, influencers, and even healthcare providers have focused on helping people reduce a number on a scale. 

Success is often measured in pounds lost, calories counted, clothing sizes, and before-and-after photos. Yet after everything we've discussed in this series, I can't help but wonder if we've been asking the wrong question all along.

What if the most important question isn't how much weight you want to lose? What if the more meaningful question is what kind of relationship you want to have with food? Those are not the same things. One focuses on an outcome, while the other focuses on an experience. One is concerned with changing a body, while the other is concerned with changing the way we live inside that body every day.

When we talk about food noise, we rarely describe a desire to become obsessed with nutrition, calories, or weight loss. What we describe is the feeling of carrying an extra mental burden. It’s the realization that an extraordinary amount of attention has been devoted to food, weight, dieting, and body image for years, sometimes decades. 

That’s what makes food noise such an important concept. It shifts the conversation away from weight and toward attention. The real cost of food noise is not simply what it may do to our waistline or our health markers, but to the amount of mental space it occupies. Over time, that mental occupation becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it, even as it crowds out other things that matter just as much, if not more.

One of the most interesting things people describe when food noise becomes quieter is not simply eating less, but they realize they have more room. More room to focus on work, relationships, hobbies, goals, and experiences that have nothing to do with food. Many describe feeling present in a way they haven't felt for years. 

Perhaps that is why this conversation matters. Food noise isn't only about food. It's about attention, and wherever our attention goes, a piece of our life goes with it. We become what we repeatedly attend to.

Before the Rules

I've learned that awareness rarely changes our lives in a single dramatic moment. More often, it changes the questions we ask.

For years, many of us have approached food as a problem to solve. We searched for the right diet, the right plan, the right amount of willpower, believing that if we could just find the missing piece, everything would finally fall into place. But food noise invites a different conversation.

Instead of asking how to control food, we might begin by asking what role we want food to play in our lives. Instead of viewing every craving as a failure and every indulgence as a setback, we can become curious about the forces that influence our choices. Curiosity often takes us farther than criticism ever will.

Once we recognize the systems, environments, habits, and patterns shaping our relationship with food, we are no longer operating entirely on autopilot. We may not control every influence around us, but we can begin making decisions with a clearer understanding of what we're responding to and why.

We stop asking, "What's wrong with me?" and start asking better questions. Questions rooted in understanding rather than shame.

And that shift in questioning brings me back to where this series began.

Before the points, the calories, the apps, the diets, and the endless advice about what we should and shouldn't eat, eating was much simpler. There was hunger. There was fullness. There was pleasure. There was nourishment.

Over time, many of us stopped trusting those signals. Food became tangled up with stress, comfort, identity, reward, expectations, and rules. Somewhere along the way, eating became far more complicated, and we became disconnected from ourselves.

What I hope you take from this episode, and from this series so far, is not a new set of rules. The world has plenty of rules about food. What it often lacks is understanding. Understanding that many of the struggles we carry around food are not signs of weakness, but human responses to complex influences that most of us rarely stop to examine.

Awareness doesn't solve every problem. It doesn't magically remove cravings, erase habits, or make healthy choices effortless. What it does provide is perspective. And perspective has a way of changing the conversation we have with ourselves.

There was a version of you — before the noise, before the rules, before food became something to negotiate with every single day — who knew how to eat. Who trusted hunger and recognized fullness and didn't spend cognitive energy bargaining with oneself over dinner.

That person isn't gone. They’ve just had a lot of noise layered over them.

And understanding — real understanding, not another rule — is how we begin to find our way back.

Close

In the next episode, we're going to move from the outside in. If the system was built to hijack your appetite, what does that actually look like inside your brain? Episode 18 looks at the neuroscience of why you eat. We will take a deeper dive into dopamine, stress chemistry, and the real emotional grip that willpower has on us.

That’s next on The Original Self Podcast. 

Thank you for spending this time with me. If you’d like to learn more about working with me, you’ll find information in the episode notes.

Until next time, take good care of yourself.

The Engineered Plate: How Hyper-Palatable Foods Are Designed to Defeat You

The Engineered Plate: How Hyper-Palatable Foods Are Designed to Defeat You

The Original Self Podcas/Evet DeCota

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

Today’s episode is about something I hear constantly from clients and honestly from myself. Most of us have been told the same story about food. If you can’t stop eating it, you lack discipline. If you gain weight, you don’t have enough willpower. If you keep reaching for the same foods over and over again, the problem must be you. Today I want to challenge that story. This is Episode 16- The Engineered Plate: How Hyper-Palatable Foods Are Designed to Defeat You.

The Myth of Weak Willpower

Welcome back. Last time, I introduced you to a series I’ve been building for a while, one that uses the lens of psychology to examine something we all do every single day, and yet rarely understand as deeply as we think we do. I told you in the introduction to Before The Rules, A Psychology of Food Series, Episode 15, that this series isn’t really about food. It’s about how we lose ourselves around it and how we find our way back.

And I promised we’d start there, with the self-blame that follows so many of us into the kitchen every single day. So, let’s start with the collective you.

Think about the last time you told yourself you’d have just a few Doritos, one brown butter chocolate chip cookie with sea salt. Or that you’d stop eating the popcorn you made after this TV show episode and not eat anything else tonight. But you didn’t stop. And somewhere in the aftermath, maybe in that moment of sitting with an empty bag, or on the drive home from a drive-through you hadn’t planned to stop at, there was a feeling. Not just fullness. Something more uncomfortable than that. A specific kind of self-blame that so many of us know intimately. Even if we’ve never quite named it aloud.

Most people interpret that feeling as evidence of a personal failing. I’m weak. I have no discipline. Other people seem to manage this just fine, so what’s wrong with me? That story is so familiar, so deeply embedded in the way we talk about our bodies, eating, and self-control, that it rarely gets questioned. We just accept it as truth and carry the weight, shame, and defeat of it everywhere we go.

But here is the question I asked myself six years ago that changed the entire direction of my motivation, goals, and, honestly, the way I understand myself. What if the problem isn’t that you’re broken? What if the environment is working exactly as intended, and you were never supposed to be able to easily resist it?

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand through years of psychology study, through my own research, and through watching clients, friends, and myself navigate this: willpower is real, but not infinite. It was never designed to compete alone, against a system built with billions of dollars and decades of neuroscience specifically designed to override it.

When Food Became a Product

To understand where we are today, it helps to understand how we got here.

There was a moment in American history —from astronauts in space eating and drinking powdered foods, through the 60s and 70s explosion of TV dinners and canned everything, to the 80s invention of the microwave, and when the relationship between humans and what they ate began to shift fundamentally. Before that, most people ate what grew, what was prepared, and what was available to them. The food was simple, the flavors were straightforward, and your body’s natural signals of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction largely guided the experience.

Then food became an industry. And we all know that industries compete. They compete for shelf space, for market share, for your attention and your loyalty, and the industry that wins the competition is the one that receives the most of your repeated purchases. Those winners didn’t win by accident; they won by science.

A psychophysicist, Howard Moskowitz, discovered it first by testing something deceptively simple. At what point does sweetness stop being pleasurable? How much sugar is too much before enjoyment starts to fall away? He called that peak— where something is enjoyed the most— the Bliss Point, and his findings changed the food industry forever. He found that pleasure follows a curve. As sugar increases, enjoyment rises, but only up to a point. Then it drops.

And once the food industry understood that a bliss point could be engineered, not just for sugar, but for the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat simultaneously, everything changed.

Brands like Prego, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper used multivariate analysis to maximize their product’s appeal to consumers, turning them into dominant forces on supermarket shelves. That R & D, that scientific experiment, is what birthed the hyper-palatable or ultra-processed food industry as we know it today.

What followed was an arms race of palatability. Companies began spending enormous resources not just to make food taste good, but to make it taste in a way that the brain couldn’t easily walk away from. Understanding the why requires a brief detour into neuroscience, so I can show you how any willpower fight we think we can muster completely falls apart.

The Psychology of Hyper-Palatability

The brain regulates eating in two ways — the homeostatic pathway, which determines the body's energy needs, and when we run low, a hunger signal is sent out. It’s also the system that tells us when we are full. It is practical and functional when it’s not been messed with.

The other system is the hedonic pathway or the reward system. It operates on pleasure and motivation, not nutritional need. It has no concern for whether your body needs more fuel; its only focus is on what feels good.

Usually, these two systems exist in harmony. But hyper-palatable foods- engineered to hit that bliss point— activate the hedonic pathways so strongly that they override the homeostatic ones over and over.

So even when your body knows it’s had enough, your reward system has yet to reach satisfaction, and so you keep eating those chips, that cookie. The biology of the brain was built for a world that we no longer live in.

Then there’s dopamine. It’s often called the feel-good chemical, but I believe that phrase undersells what it actually does. Dopamine is less about pleasure and more about anticipation—the wanting.

Research from Harvard’s nutrition department has shown that the expectation of a reward stimulates more dopamine activity than the reward itself. And the crazy part is that if the reward exceeds the dopamine response, if it’s even larger than expected, our motivation for the reward drives us to seek the experience again. Think about the smell of something cooking in your favorite restaurant as you walk past, the crinkle of a bag of your favorite snack in someone else’s hands, or even the image of a particular food—they all trigger dopamine before you take a single bite. That is ancient neurology responding to signals that it’s never resisted.

One of the most elegant biological mechanisms we have is called sensory-specific satiety, and it’s very easily exploited by industries selling the drug of hyper-palatable foods. The way it works is that as you eat a particular food, the pleasure you get from that specific flavor gradually declines. Your brain gets bored with it, satisfaction drops, and the drive to continue fades until you stop eating.

But when a product is engineered to contain multiple distinct flavor compounds— fat hitting one receptor, salt another, sugar hitting more receptors, and then layered artificial enhancers throughout, the sensory-specific satiety can not perform. Before one element reaches its satisfaction point, the next one is pulling you forward.

The finish line keeps moving, and companies like McDonald’s know it. McDonald’s puts added sugar in far more products than most people realize including buns, sauces, and even their salads. A Quarter Pounder with cheese isn’t an accident. It’s a scientifically calibrated combination of fat, salt, and sugar designed to light up the hedonic pathway, bypass the signals that would normally tell you to stop eating, and flood the brain with enough dopamine that the craving reactivates the next time you see those golden arches—or even a commercial. You’re not weak; you’ve just been studied by companies that will stop at nothing to make that almighty dollar.

About six years ago, I found myself in a pattern I couldn’t quite explain. After work, on weekends, sometimes when I wasn’t even particularly hungry— I was pulling into McDonald’s. Not because I’d decided to. Not because I was craving something specific. I would come back to awareness already in the drive-through line, wondering how I’d gotten there, like some part of my brain had decided before I was even consulted, like I was in a mind-control experiment. Once I learned how those foods are engineered, the more I understood how powerless I was against them.

Why Smart People Get Hooked Too

One of the questions that launched my academic research was: Why do intelligent, disciplined, accomplished people struggle so much around food? Not people who are uninformed or careless, but people who have built careers, raised families, navigated genuine complexity in their lives—and still find themselves feeling completely powerless in front of a bag of something they didn’t intend to eat.

Some of it comes down to awareness. Many of us move through the day on autopilot, eating without ever stopping to ask what’s actually driving it. But even for the people who are paying attention, the struggle is still real, and that’s where Roy Baumeister’s research on self-control becomes so important.

Baumeister found that self-regulation functions like a muscle— it can be used, and it can be depleted. Every act of self-control draws from the same limited pool of mental energy, whether you’re managing an emotion, pushing through a difficult task, or resisting the cookies someone left in the break room— those cookies are a daily occurrence in the salon break room, and I have a love/hate relationship with them.

Baumeister ran an experiment where participants who had spent energy resisting chocolate chip cookies gave up on a difficult puzzle eight minutes sooner compared to the nineteen minutes people who didn’t encounter resisting cookies. They weren’t more capable; they just hadn’t used up their self-regulatory resources yet.

The reason I’m telling you about this research is that if you think about yourself by ten o’clock at night, after a full day of decisions, demands, and emotional management, you are not the same person who set an intention that morning. The prefrontal cortex, which plans, exercises self-control, and engages in long-term thinking, is running on less. And that’s precisely why you find yourself tiredly standing in the middle of your kitchen or pressing buy on the food app, grabbing the engineered food without a second thought.

As part of my psychology research at Dominican University of California, I studied the relationship between stress, impulsivity, and hyper-palatable food consumption. What I expected to find, and what I did find, was that stress increases HPF consumption. But the finding that surprised me most was that consumption rates in stressful scenarios and non-stressful scenarios were nearly identical. People weren’t just reaching for these foods because they were stressed. They were reaching for them because of fatigue, boredom, habit, and many times at night. The foods themselves had become the path of least resistance regardless of emotional state. And impulsivity, not stress, turned out to be the stronger independent predictor of how much someone consumed.

When I was growing up, we had what we called the junk drawer. It was filled with cookies, candy, chips, and all the foods we now know are hyper-palatable. We weren’t allowed to eat from it whenever we wanted, but it was always there. Sometimes we’d ask. Sometimes we’d sneak.

Looking back, what’s interesting isn’t that the food was there. It’s that nobody thought twice about it. It was normal. Nobody was trying to harm us. Nobody was having conversations about food manipulation, dopamine, or ultra-processed foods. It was just food, at least as far as we understood.

I think that’s important because so many of us inherited our relationship with eating before we were old enough to understand what we were inheriting. The food was normal. The habits were normal. The constant presence of highly rewarding snacks was normal. We didn’t choose that environment. We grew up inside it. And when something has always been normal, it’s incredibly difficult to recognize how much influence it’s still having on you decades later.

This matters enormously for how we think about self-blame. Intelligence doesn’t protect you from the hedonic pathway. Success doesn’t exempt you from decision fatigue. Discipline is a resource, and resources run out. When your capacity for resistance is low and your environment is deliberately constructed to exploit that exact moment, the outcome isn’t a character flaw; it’s math.

The Real Cost

We tend to talk about the consequences of HPFs almost exclusively in terms of weight. And the physical health implications are real and documented. The research connecting ultra-processed food consumption to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic disorders like high blood pressure is substantial.

But another cost is the mental overhead. It’s the constant low-level negotiation that happens around eating when you’ve lost trust in your own responses— am I actually hungry or am I just bored, am I eating because I want this or because I can’t stop, why can I be disciplined in every other area of my life and not here? I have had these thoughts so many times in my life that I’ve lost count. I smoked cigarettes for over 13 years, at least a pack a day, and I was able to quit smoking and have never had another cigarette again for over twenty-five years. Not once have I taken a drag or even thought about smoking again.

Why was I able to conquer that compulsion, yet have struggled with food cravings and noise almost my entire life? I think the answer is simpler than I wanted it to be. I don’t need cigarettes to stay alive. I can walk away from them completely and never look back. But I can’t abstain from eating. Nobody can. And when the very thing you’re trying to navigate is also the thing your body requires to survive, willpower becomes an almost impossible standard to hold yourself to.

I’ve done it, at times for a few weeks to even a few years, but I always revert. Add to that a lifetime of processed foods that rewired the signals my natural biology was supposed to rely on, and a very likely addiction to sugar that started before I was old enough to question what I was eating, and the deck was never stacked in my favor.

And that internal tug of war never really goes away. It shows up as intrusive thoughts about food that occupy real cognitive space. The shame that accumulates quietly and then surfaces in the least expected moments— in a dressing room, looking at a photo of yourself, or in a conversation you weren’t expecting to have knocks us off balance.

The fundamental disconnection from your own body is the real injury lying underneath these questions. When your body overrides signals enough times because the food you eat is specifically designed to do so, you are unable to hear those signals clearly. It makes you stop trusting hunger or fullness. You begin to experience your own biology as the enemy rather than as information. The difficulty of spending years at war with your body makes the idea of listening to feel truly unnerving.

It creates a distrust of self because you can change what you eat in a week, but rebuilding a relationship with your own body takes considerably longer. I believe it starts with understanding what happened to create the distance in the first place.

Returning Awareness

If you are feeling angry, annoyed, or disappointed at the companies that sell HPFs, I completely understand the feeling, but that’s not my intent for this episode.  It will not end with me speaking about a new plan that will be a miracle, or a list of foods to avoid, or a protocol to follow.

I’m interested in the meaningful difference between making a choice and having a choice made for us. Most of us move through our relationship with food without ever clearly seeing which of those is happening. We experience a craving and interpret it as desire, without knowing that the craving was activated by dopamine responding to engineered anticipation. We eat past fullness and call it weakness, without knowing that sensory-specific satiety was circumvented by design. We resist all day and collapse at night and decide we have no willpower, without knowing that willpower is a finite resource that was steadily drawn down by everything else the day asked of us.

It’s also worth noting that this conversation is beginning to move beyond individual responsibility and into public policy. Researchers, physicians, and policymakers are increasingly asking whether it makes sense to place the entire burden on consumers when so much of the modern food environment has been deliberately engineered to drive consumption.

Questions are being raised about food labeling, advertising directed at children, the availability of ultra-processed foods in schools, and whether consumers are receiving enough information to make informed decisions about what they’re eating. Some countries have already introduced warning labels and restrictions on certain forms of marketing. Others are debating whether highly processed foods should be regulated more like products that carry known health risks, like tobacco and alcohol.

Regardless of where those conversations ultimately lead, the fact that they are happening at all represents a huge shift. For decades, the dominant message was simple: if you’re struggling, the problem is you. But when governments, researchers, and public health organizations begin asking questions about the environment itself, it suggests we’re starting to recognize that human behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The choices we make are always influenced by the systems we live inside.

Understanding the system doesn’t excuse us from participating in our lives. It doesn’t remove agency. But it does give us the ability to see clearly. When we see clearly, we finally begin to ask the right questions. It’s not “what’s wrong with me,” but “what is actually happening here?” Not “why can’t I control myself,” but “what am I really responding to in this moment?”

That shift, from self-blame to curiosity, is where the awareness work begins. It may be uncomfortable, but curiosity requires slowing down in moments when the pull to just eat on autopilot is very strong. But it’s honest, and it’s the beginning of coming back to yourself.

What I’d like to leave you with today is simple. Before you make your next food decision, just this once, pause long enough to notice what’s happening. Not to judge it or to override it through sheer force of will. Just notice: Are you hungry? Are you tired? Is the pull to eat HPFs coming from inside you or from something in the environment? There is no perfect answer; you just have to become curious enough to look.

There was a version of you, before all of this, who knew how to eat. Who trusted hunger and recognized fullness and didn’t spend cognitive energy negotiating with that box of See’s Candy, that pint of Cherry Garcia, or that cold slice of pepperoni in the middle of the night.

The work of this series isn’t to turn you into someone new; it’s to help you remember who that person was, and to slowly start, without judgment, to find your way back.

Closing

In the next episode, we’re going deeper into one of the most misunderstood experiences in our relationship with eating— food noise. It’s that constant mental chatter about what you should eat, what you shouldn’t have eaten, what you’re going to eat later, and whether any of it makes you a good or bad person.

We’ll talk about where it comes from, why some people experience it far more intensely than others, and what it actually means when the noise gets loud. Look for Episode 17- Food Noise: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Food’

That’s next time on The Original Self Podcast. Until then, thank you for being here. If today’s conversation resonated with you and you feel ready to explore your own growth, you can learn more about working with me in the episode notes.

I’ll see you next time.

Before The Rules: An Introduction to A Psychology of Food Series

Episode 15- Before The Rules: An Introduction to A Psychology of Food Series

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Opening

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

Today’s episode is the beginning of something a little different. Over the next several weeks, I’m going to talk about food in many different ways. The more I study the psychology behind eating, the more I realize this isn’t really a story about food. It’s a story about how we lose ourselves around food and how we find our way back.

This is Episode 15- Before the Rules: An Introduction to a Psychology of Food Series.

The Lens

Welcome back. As I said in the introduction, this is the beginning of a series on the psychology of food. We will talk about food, but not in the way that you usually hear about it or perhaps how you might expect.

This series is not about dieting, weight loss, meal plans, macros, supplements, or the latest nutrition trend. It’s about identity.

It’s about the stories we’ve been told, the systems we’ve been raised inside, the biology we’ve inherited, and the relationships many of us have spent decades trying to fix without ever fully understanding where they came from.

And at the center of every conversation in this series is one question:

 Who were you before you were told how to be around food?

 Who were you before you were introduced to diet culture?

Before food marketing?

Before food shame?

Before the rules?

 Because I don’t believe most people have a food problem.

 I believe most people have been living inside a food environment that’s shaped their thoughts, beliefs, cravings, fears, and behaviors for so long that they’ve forgotten where those influences end and where they begin.

 And as a side note, that includes me.

At 56 years old, I’ve spent a lifetime being tossed around in a tornado of food rules, food fears, food trends, and all the unconscious messages that come with them. I’m not standing outside this conversation looking in. I’ve lived inside it my entire life, and, like many of you, I’m still sorting through it.

Which brings me to the question that started this entire series.

Why I’m Doing This

So, why is this series important?

Food has always fascinated me, not because I’ve had all the answers, but because I’ve watched so many people struggle with it. For nearly four decades, I’ve spent my days behind a salon chair listening to people talk about their lives.

I’ve listened to conversations about marriages, careers, children, grief, aging, health, confidence, and self-worth. And woven through almost all of those conversations, in one form or another, has been food.

Women promising themselves they’ll be “good” this week. People talking about foods they aren’t allowed to eat, and calling it a “cheat day” when they do. Mothers worrying about what their daughters think of their bodies. Daughters absorbing messages they never consciously agreed to carry. Successful, intelligent, accomplished people feeling completely defeated by something as ordinary as lunch.

Over the years, I noticed that people who struggled most with food were rarely lacking information. Most knew what carbohydrates were. They knew vegetables were healthy, that exercise mattered, and most of the nutritional facts about the food they ate.

Yet many of them still felt trapped, and that observation followed me into my psychology studies.

When I returned to college and eventually completed my psychology degree, I became increasingly interested in why we eat the way we eat.

Not just nutritionally, but psychologically, emotionally, socially, and culturally.

The deeper I looked, the more I realized that food is never just food. Food is belonging, comfort, identity, memory, reward, grief, stress, celebration, and love.

And when we reduce all of that complexity down to calories and willpower, we miss the story entirely. That realization eventually became part of my academic work, my coaching work, and now this series.

The more I learned, the less interested I became in asking, “Why can’t we control ourselves?”

I became more interested in “What exactly are people trying to control themselves against?”

The Question That Changed Everything

The question that changed everything for me was surprisingly simple. Why do intelligent and educated people struggle so much around food?

 Not uninformed people or careless ones, but intelligent, thoughtful, and disciplined people.

People who have successfully built careers, raised families, earned degrees, managed businesses, and overcome extraordinary challenges. Why do so many of them still feel powerless around food?

If information solved the problem, we would have solved it by now. We live in the most informed generation in human history. We have podcasts, books, documentaries, apps, nutrition labels, health influencers, wearable devices, and endless access to information.

Disordered eating, body dissatisfaction, and food confusion continue to grow. At some point, we have to ask whether information was ever the real problem.

What if the struggle isn’t happening because people don’t know enough? What if the struggle exists because we’ve been taught to understand food through the wrong lens entirely? What if the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with me?” but “What happened to me?”

That question changes everything. Because it shifts us from blame to curiosity. And curiosity is where healing begins.

What This Series Is Really About

This series is organized into three parts. The first is called The System.

These episodes look outward, exploring how the modern food environment was built, how food companies learned to shape behavior, how children became marketing targets, and how convenience, consumption, and profit became deeply woven into everyday eating.

These are the episodes that answer the question: What happened around us?

The second part is called The Body.

These episodes look inward, exploring the gut-brain connection and reward pathways. We explore hormones and menopause, and the many biological systems that influence our relationship with food. We’ll talk about cravings, appetite, alcohol, metabolism, and why our bodies often respond in ways that have far more to do with biology than willpower.

These episodes answer the question: What is happening inside us?

And then the final part is called The Self.

This is where everything comes together. We’ll discuss body image, self-worth, and intuitive eating. We’ll move on to why we experience food guilt and perfectionism and explore the rare topic of masculinity and food. Lastly, we will explore food as self-care and the complicated ways food becomes tied to identity.

These episodes answer the question: Who am I underneath all of this?

The System. The Body. The Self. Three layers leading to a journey back toward understanding ourselves.

The Original Self

Every episode in this series returns to the same place: the authentic self that existed before all the noise.

Before food became a moral issue. Before eating became a performance. Before every meal carried anxiety, judgment, guilt, or negotiation. Before food became something to fear.

Children are born knowing how to eat. They know hunger, fullness, curiosity, and satisfaction.

Then the world begins talking. At a young age, we are bombarded with advertisements, diets, family messages, the newest health trends — what’s dangerous and what’s healthy- until that science is disproved.

We are alarmed by the rules, the fears and the shame that follow a diagnosis or a weight gain, and in some cases a weight loss when we can’t afford to lose anymore.

We are exhausted by the constant expectations that society — and often we ourselves — place on food. Rather than increasing awareness, those expectations make it harder to recognize and trust our own signals.

We become disconnected from trust, our bodies, and from ourselves.

This series is not about becoming perfect, disciplined, smaller, or becoming someone new.

It’s about uncovering the person who existed before all of that conditioning arrived. It’s about returning to the question:

Who were you before you were told how to be around food?

Before the rules. Before the shame. Before all the noise.

There was a version of you that knew how to eat. Your original self.

Closing

In our next episode, we’re starting with the food itself.

We’ll explore how hyper-palatable foods were engineered, why they affect the brain the way they do, and why the struggle so many people experience with food has nothing to do with willpower like they’ve been led to believe.

That’s next time in Episode 16:

The Engineered Plate: How Hyper-Palatable Foods Are Designed to Defeat You.

But until then, I’d like to leave you with a thought.

Before the food industry. Before the diets. Before the shame. Before the rules dictated to us.

There was a version of you that knew how to eat, how to trust your body, and how to respond to hunger without fear.

The goal isn’t to become someone new.

It’s to remember who you were before all of this told you who to be.

Thank you for being here at the beginning of this journey, and thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated with you and you feel ready to explore your own growth, you can learn more about working with me in the episode notes of this podcast.

I’ll see you next time.

The Fullest Empty Life:Why You’re Always Busy but Never Fulfilled

The Fullest Empty Life: Why You're Always Busy But Never Fulfilled

DeCota Life Coaching/Evet DeCota

Chapter One-Opening

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.

 Today we're talking about time. Not how to manage or optimize it. But how busyness became an identity, stillness became uncomfortable, and somewhere in between, we stopped actually living our days and just hoped to get through them. This is Episode 13: The Fullest Empty Life |Why You’re Always Busy but Never Fulfilled.

Chapter Two- Personal Reflection

Let’s start with what I’ve witnessed from behind the chair.

 Busyness is something I know personally. I work full time in the salon, and on most nights and days off, I’m building my coaching business. I was thinking about this as I watched a salon client who was unable to be fully present during her appointment.

 She booked a full appointment for highlights, color, haircut, and blow-dry- typically a 2+ hour appointment. From the moment she sat in my chair, her laptop was open, and her phone was face up on the station. Every few minutes, it would light up, and she’d lean forward to grab it —mid color, mid cut — and I’d have to readjust the cape or move my tray and body around the chair to get to where I needed to be. Each time she was on the phone, she would look up at me and mouth ‘sorry, one more minute.’

 The minute never ended until the appointment was over.

 When I finished, I had to ask her if she liked her hair. That’s how I knew she hadn’t looked in the mirror once. She finally glanced up, laughed this tired laugh, and said, ‘Yes, of course.’   I smiled and booked her next appointment, but I couldn’t shake it. She hadn’t relaxed for a single minute. A service she’d scheduled, paid for, and shown up for had become just another box checked off.

 The silence she didn’t receive, I got. Not talking gave me something I didn’t expect. My mind went somewhere quieter. It was a break from being on all the time.

 She came in for the rest, and I’m the one who walked away with it.

 And it left me wondering how many of us are showing up for our own lives without ever really arriving.

Chapter Three- The Paradox — Busy as Armor

Those questions don’t have simple answers because the problem isn’t just personal. It’s cultural, and it runs a lot deeper than one busy client in a salon chair.

Cultural Diagnosis

We live in a culture that has conflated activity with meaning. The calendar is full; therefore, life is full. There’s a psychological concept worth naming here: Action Bias, the deeply human tendency to prefer doing something over doing nothing, even when doing nothing is the smarter choice. Studies on soccer goalkeepers show they dive left or right on penalty kicks almost every time, even though statistically, staying in the center saves more goals.

 We struggle with stillness. Not because we’re lazy or undisciplined, but because we’ve absorbed a cultural message that equates motion with worth. If you’re not moving, you’re not contributing. If you’re not contributing, what exactly are you? Stillness doesn’t just feel uncomfortable.  It can feel like failure.

I received that message loud and clear as a young girl. My parents were always moving. From morning until evening, they did what needed to be done before they even considered relaxing. If there was time left over, we went to the beach, the carnival, or played games together. They would even judge my brother’s and my latest Dance Fever routines. The message wasn’t spoken outright, but it was clear:  don’t sit around. Move. Keep going.

The Status Angle

And here’s the thing: culture doesn’t just allow this. It rewards it.

Researcher Silvia Bellezza at Columbia found that Americans often view busyness as a status symbol. In parts of Italy, leisure can signal success — dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing. My family came from Italy, but whatever sweetness existed was quickly soured by the hustle.

I’ve noticed this belief across cultures. Many immigrant families arrive in America carrying a powerful work ethic born from sacrifice. Once here, that sacrifice often merges with a uniquely American idea: that busyness equals worth. Before long, productivity becomes a measure not just of success, but of value.

Exhaustion becomes a flex. “I’m so busy” is worn almost like a badge of honor. We’ve made a virtue out of depletion. But beneath all of that cultural conditioning lies something much more personal. The psychological reality behind many overscheduled lives is avoidance.

Busyness As Anxiety Management

It’s experiential avoidance, to be exact — the way we fill every hour specifically to avoid contact with uncomfortable internal experiences. Grief. Loneliness. Uncertainty. The silent dread that you might not be living the life you want. A packed schedule keeps those feelings just far enough away that you never have to face them directly. For many people, busyness isn’t ambition; it’s a coping mechanism.

 I experienced this firsthand when California mandated the closure of salons and spas for nearly six months during the pandemic. I went from constant human contact and days scheduled to the minute to what felt like solitary confinement, layered on top of grief from my mom’s passing just months before.

 After three weeks, everything I had pushed down came rushing to the surface. The busyness was gone. There was nothing left to distract me.

 And once the distraction disappeared, I could finally see what it was doing for me. It wasn’t just managing the grief. It was managing uncertainty, loneliness, and the need for control.

 There’s another reason we stay busy that doesn’t get talked about enough: control.

 In a world that feels increasingly unpredictable, crossing things off a list gives us a temporary sense of order. I did this. I finished that. I am on top of things. It doesn’t matter that the list never ends. The act of doing makes us feel like we have some say in how life unfolds.

 And when life becomes genuinely uncertain — a diagnosis, a loss, a relationship falling apart — our lists often get longer. As long as we’re doing, we don’t have to sit with what we can’t control.

 One of my friends always needs plans for the weekend. She’s told me that without something to look forward to, she feels down. Maybe she simply loves connection and fun. But it also might be avoidance. The unscheduled weekend isn’t just empty time. For some of us, it’s an invitation to feel things we’ve been outrunning all week.

 And maybe that’s why I’ve always kept so many balls in the air. I built a salon from a four-wall dump into a beautiful, thriving business. Years later, I dismantled it and created a studio salon. I went to school full-time while working full-time.

 I wanted everything those pursuits represented, and I earned every reward they gave me. But I also know that some of the motion served another purpose. There were feelings I didn’t fully know how to process, so I just kept moving instead.

 The continual moving has a cost that goes deeper than exhaustion. It reaches all the way into who we think we are.

The Identity Piece

Think about when someone at a party asks, ‘So what do you do?’

 Notice that we don’t ask ‘who are you?’ or ‘what do you love?’ We go straight to function.

 Psychologists call this Role Identity Fusion — the merging of self-concept with productive function. When busyness becomes identity, stillness becomes an existential threat. It’s not just that you’re bored when you stop. It’s that you’re no longer sure who you are.

 A few years ago, I started asking new clients, ‘What do you do when you’re not getting your hair done?’

You’d be surprised how many people pause, really pause. Some laugh nervously. Some say, ‘I don’t know’ with a kind of sad honesty. A few look confused.

 That pause tells me everything. Somewhere along the way, many of us handed our identity over to what we produce.

 Sit still long enough in this culture, and someone will read it as laziness. Or worse, as evidence that something is wrong with you. At its most insidious, doing nothing becomes unworthiness.

 I know this one from the inside.

 I don’t struggle with laziness. What I struggle with is stopping.

 Most nights after work and on my days off, I’m building something — my coaching business, this podcast, the next project on the list. I’m almost always moving toward the next thing.

 Sometimes I stop long enough to binge a series instead of starting any of it. I used to judge myself for that, but now I see it differently. It’s not laziness; it’s my nervous system finally waving a white flag. It’s avoidance showing up in a different costume. For people like me, stillness often has to sneak in through the back door.

 I think about someone who figured this out long before I did.

I have a friend who is both an accomplished artist and musician. Years ago, another friend asked her why she only taught music lessons two days a week when she could easily teach more.

Her answer stopped the table.

She said she needed to set aside time to walk in nature, be with her family, and daydream. Just that. Daydream.

It was so honest and so confident that it made me realize something sad about myself.  I had stopped doing all of those things. Looking up at clouds. Sitting still.  Watching what I can only describe as Squirrel du Soleil —squirrels launching themselves through walnut trees as if they were performing for an audience.

My musician friend understood something intuitively that neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel later put into words.

 In IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We), Siegel argues that we’re taught to see ourselves as isolated individuals defined by what we produce, achieve, and accomplish. But humans are more than a separate Me. We are also part of a larger We —connected to other people, our communities, and the world around us.

 Why does that matter?

Because when every hour is devoted to productivity, we end up living only the ‘Me’ side of ourselves. The pauses, the daydreams, the walks, the moments that look unproductive on paper — that's where the ‘We’ side lives. It’s where we connect, reflect, and actually make meaning of our lives.

Busyness doesn't just exhaust us. It cuts us off from the fullest version of who we are.

And most of us don't even realize what we've given up.

So what exactly have we given up?

Let’s get specific.

Chapter 4- What Got Stolen —The Mind’s Hidden Work

The Default Mode Network

This is where neuroscience gets genuinely interesting.

 When your brain isn’t focused on a task, it doesn’t shut down. It activates what’s called the Default Mode Network. This is where the brain processes emotions, consolidates memories, makes connections between ideas, and builds a coherent sense of self over time.

 In other words, some of the most important work your brain does happens when it appears to be doing nothing.

 When I was fifteen, I woke up one night and looked out the window at a full moon. I sat there long enough for my brain to quiet and begin moving in a different direction. Within ten minutes, I had written a sonnet. Not because I was trying to. Because I had stopped doing everything else, and my mind finally had room to go somewhere beautiful.

 I don’t think I could do that today. Not because I’ve lost the ability, but because I’ve lost the conditions.

 The fifteen-year-old who wrote the poem had something I’ve slowly given away: unstructured time with no agenda and no device telling her where to look next. That’s not nostalgia.  It’s neuroscience. The Default Mode Network needs stillness to activate, and we’ve engineered stillness almost completely out of our lives.

 It happened gradually, and we called every step of it progress.

What the Gaps Used to Give Us

Think about where you’ve had your best ideas. Most people don’t say ‘at my desk.’ They say the shower, a walk, a long drive, or just before sleep.

 Those are Default Mode Network moments.

 The architecture of daily life used to create these moments automatically. Waiting rooms with nothing to read. Commutes with no signal. Slow Sunday afternoons with nowhere to be. No one called those moments valuable, but they were doing something essential.  They helped us process our experiences, tie loose ends, and let our minds wander far enough to come back with something worth keeping.

 We gradually replaced those spaces with things that felt like upgrades. Waiting rooms now have Wi-Fi. Commutes stream podcasts and music. Sunday afternoons have endless entertainment.

 Every gap filled, every pause covered.

 And the brain that depended on those gaps stopped getting what it needed.

What Phones Actually Did

The smartphone didn’t just fill the remaining gaps. It made having gaps feel uncomfortable.

 Apple’s Screen Time data found that Americans pick up their phones about 96 times a day. That’s once every ten minutes. Pew Research found most people check their phones within minutes of waking.

 I’m guilty of it myself.

 Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, reach for my phone, and immediately start listening to political podcasts. As you can imagine, that does wonders for relaxation.

 I watch people at restaurants and family dinner tables with their phones sitting beside them, waiting for the next interruption. Eyes drift downward instead of toward each other. Conversations become fragmented, and attention gets divided across the table.

 In my own life, I barely read books anymore. I used to love reading. Somewhere along the way, social media and streaming started occupying the space that books once filled. The same thing happened with music. Music used to be woven into every day of my life.  I’ve made a conscious effort to bring it back, and I notice the difference immediately.

 Reading and listening to music create exactly the kind of wandering mental space that feeds the Default Mode Network.

 But the deeper issue isn’t distraction. It’s interruption.  

 Researcher Gloria Mark found that it can take more than twenty minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption.  Most of us interrupt ourselves constantly. We rarely experience sustained attention.

 In fact, to write and record this podcast, I put my phone on airplane mode. Otherwise, it would never get finished.

 The phone has made restlessness feel normal. We have become uncomfortable with our own inner experience. The phone becomes the relief valve, and every time we reach for it, we reinforce the idea that stillness is something to escape.

The Grief and Joy Piece

There's something even more tender underneath all of this.

 The unscheduled moments aren't just where we have our best ideas. They're where we actually feel our lives.

 Grief needs space to move through us. Joy requires us to slow down enough to register it. Some of the most important emotional experiences of being human — gratitude, wonder, love, mourning — happen in the pauses.

 When we fill every pause, we don't just stay busy.

 We stay slightly numb.

 Brené Brown writes about this in Atlas of the Heart. She describes what she calls foreboding joy — the tendency to brace against good moments because fully feeling them feels vulnerable.

But the most important thing she says is: we cannot selectively numb emotion.

 When we numb grief, loneliness, and fear, we also numb joy, gratitude, and connection. The busyness that protects us from feeling bad also prevents us from fully feeling good.

 This is where Tricia Hersey's work becomes important.

Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, argues that rest is not a luxury or a reward for productivity. It’s a human need.

And what I love most about her definition of rest is that it isn’t limited to sleep.

Rest can be creativity. Laughter. Time with people you love. Seeking out beauty. Learning something simply because it interests you. Watching squirrels launch themselves through walnut trees on a Tuesday afternoon.

All of it counts.

All of it restores.

When I stop — really stop — it doesn't always feel like relief. Sometimes I feel lonely or sad. Sometimes I feel like I have nothing to look forward to.

 I've sat with that long enough now to understand what it means.

 It means the stillness is working.

 Not because it feels good, but because it's finally allowing the feelings that motion was managing to come forward.

 And as uncomfortable as that can be, it's also the only way through.

 Rest isn't the absence of productivity.

 It's the presence of yourself.

Chapter 5- The Reframe, Getting Back into Your Own Life

We need to completely invert the way we talk about wasting time. Because I don’t think most of us actually know what it means anymore.

 Staring out a window is not a waste of time. Sitting outside listening to nature is not a waste of time. Playing with the dogs is not a waste of time. Putting on newly released music on a Friday evening and simply listening — not cooking to it, not cleaning to it, just listening — is not a waste of time.

 These are the moments the Default Mode Network has been waiting for all week. These are the moments Tricia Hersey is talking about when she says rest is a human right. These are the moments Brené Brown means when she reminds us that we have to stop numbing long enough to actually feel our lives.

 Scrolling, on the other hand — mindless, reflexive, filling-the-gap scrolling — is usually the real-time waste.

 And I say usually because I want to be fair.

 Sometimes I find a TED Talk that changes the way I think. Sometimes I fall down the rabbit hole of dog grooming videos that make me laugh. Sometimes I find a hair video that sparks creativity.

 The difference isn’t the platform.

 The difference is intention.

 Did you choose it, or did you simply fall into it?

 Presence, for me, can be as simple as standing in the shower and listening to the sound of the running water. It can be listening to my client — not just to the words, but to the tone underneath them. It can be noticing my mind has finally grown quiet. It can be eating something because it nourishes me, not out of emotion.

 I’m still learning that last one.

 Here’s the reframe: presence is the product.

 Not the thing you produce while you’re present. The presence itself.

 The difference between wasting time and spending it isn’t activity versus inactivity. It’s whether you are actually inside your own experience or running from it.

 One leaves you emptier than you started.

 The other gives you something back.

Being Mode vs. Doing Mode

We’ve been measuring the wrong thing all along.

A framework from Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy helps explain.

 It’s the distinction between two mental modes: Doing mode and Being mode.

 Doing mode is goal-oriented, future-focused, and constantly evaluating the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It’s the mode I’m in when I run my salon, build my business, record podcasts, answer emails, and get everything done on my work to-do list. It’s essential. Without it, nothing gets built, finished, or moved forward.

 The problem isn’t Doing mode itself. The problem is that many of us have forgotten there’s another option.

 The Being mode is different.

 It’s present. Experiential. Not measuring, not evaluating, or planning.

 It’s the shower. The music. My client’s voice. The squirrels launching themselves through the walnut trees while nature does the rest of the talking.

 I notice Doing mode in my body before I notice it in my mind.

 Almost every day I catch myself taking a deep breath — not intentionally, but because I realize I’ve been holding my breath, or breathing so shallowly that my body finally takes over and demands more.

 That breath feels like my nervous system tapping me on the shoulder and saying,

 “Hey, you’ve been gone for a while. Come back.”

 Being mode feels good.

 My mind gets quieter. My body relaxes. I settle.

 And yet, I still default back to Doing mode the moment there’s something on the list.

 Researchers Lyddy and Good describe two related experiences they call Entanglement and Disentanglement.

 Entanglement happens when we become completely absorbed in Doing mode. The inner observer goes offline. We react, execute, and produce without noticing ourselves doing it.

 Sound familiar? That’s most of us, most of the time.

 Disentanglement is different.

 You’re still doing the work. You’re still moving through the day. But a quieter layer of awareness remains present underneath it all. It’s basically two parallel layers of the mind.

 You notice yourself.

 You notice the breath.

 You notice the moment.

 The awareness is available to almost anyone. It’s not a personality type. It’s a practice. The more often you return to Being mode, the easier it becomes to access.

 You don’t need an hour of meditation or a retreat in the mountains.

 You simply need practice in tolerating the pause long enough for awareness to return.

 That’s the whole practice.

Attention As a Resource

The philosopher William James wrote in 1890 that the ability to voluntarily bring back wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.

 Today, we call that attentional control.

 Like any resource, it can be depleted with overuse and replenished with rest.

 When our attention is constantly fragmented by notifications, scrolling, podcasts, and interruptions, we slowly lose the ability to choose where our minds go.

 Eventually, our attention belongs to whoever is competing for it most aggressively.

 So, what do we do?

 We don’t need to delete apps or become monks.

 But we could try a small experiment.

 Once this week, create a block of time with no agenda, no productivity goal, and no self-improvement project attached to it.

 Go for a walk without listening to anything.

 Sit with your coffee and do nothing else.

 Let yourself be bored on purpose.

Then pay attention to what surfaces. 

Coming Back to Yourself

Remember Siegel's MWe — the idea that Me and We were never meant to be separate?

The productive self. The scheduled self. The self whose worth seems tied to performance.

That isn’t the whole self. It’s only the part we’ve been trained to display.

The rest of you lives in the pauses. Siegel calls it integration. You can't integrate a self that never stops performing. The empty moment isn’t a threat; it’s where the rest of you lives.

I know sitting in stillness can feel frightening, but it won’t break you.

When I finally slowed down, the loneliness came forward. The grief came forward. The questions I'd been too busy to ask came forward.

It wasn't comfortable. But it didn't break me.

In fact, it gave me something back. Stillness takes courage. And like any muscle, it grows stronger with use. Eventually, you stop tolerating the stillness and begin to crave what it gives you.

I am worthy of rest. Not after the list is finished —now. Because the list is never finished.

I’m worthy now.

As I am.

And so are you.

You can't get back the time that's already gone. But you can step back into the time you still have.

Not to optimize it. Not to improve it. Simply to live inside it. To become the MWe you already are.

That's The Fullest Empty Life. And it was yours the whole time.

Thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated with you and you feel ready to explore your own growth, you can learn more about working with me in the episode notes of this podcast.

I’ll see you next time.

Part 2-The Witness True Crime Obsession Explained: What Happens When You Stop Watching and Walk into the Room

Part 2-The Witness: True Crime Obsession-What Happens When You Stop Watching and Walk into the Room

Evet DeCota/DeCota Life Coaching

00:00:00 Evet: Welcome to the original Self podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach. Exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape. Who we become. Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I’ve watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside. Today, we’re talking about one of the most fascinating and under-examined patterns of our time, a pattern that most of us share and almost none of us question. This is Episode Twelve-Part 2: True Crime Obsession Explained | What Happens When You Stop Watching and Actually Walk into the Room.

Hello and welcome back. Last week in part one, we went into the deep psychology behind our true crime obsession, uh, the evolutionary science of morbid curiosity. Why women are specifically and rationally drawn to this genre, the dopamine loop that makes these stories impossible to put down. And finally, the costs that accumulate when we consume it without consciousness. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I’d encourage you to start there. Uh. It will make everything you hear today land very differently for you.

Today we are going somewhere. That part one never took us not into that research, but into the actual room. My guest took the relationship with true crime further than most of us ever will. She didn’t watch the Lori Vallow Daybell sentencing on a screen. She got on a plane, booked a hotel, drove to the courthouse in Idaho, and sat in the room where a woman who murdered her own children received her sentence. What she found there, what it did to her, what it could not have prepared her for, is what this episode is about.

My guest today is Rhonda Gaines, a close friend of mine and someone I’ve known for forty-three years. Sharp, honest, and is someone who, like me, has always been drawn to the more complicated corners of the human mind and human behaviors.

My fascination with her going to this case —what compels a person to cross that line from follower to witness? What do you find when the documentary is gone and the music stops? It’s just a room full of people and the unmediated reality of what one human being did to two others who called her mom.

I asked Rhonda to come on today because I think the answer to those questions gets at the heart of everything we’re exploring in this episode. I think what she experienced in that room is something that no podcast, no docuseries, and obviously no Reddit thread could have given her or us without her going.

Evet: Yeah. Hi, Rhonda.

00:04:01 Rhonda: That’s. Hello.

00:04:03 Evet: I’m so excited that you’re here right now.

00:04:05 Rhonda: I’m excited to be here too. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

00:04:10 Evet: Yes, it’s very exciting. All right, so let’s just start at the very beginning. When did you first hear about the Lori Vallow Daybell case, and what exactly was the crime? I’d like you to tell us everything. Like what? Got your what got its hooks in you.

00:04:29 Rhonda: Let’s see. Okay. Well, the very first time I heard about this case was in the Costco parking lot at Vintage Oaks in Novato, California. I ran into a girl from high school randomly. Her name is Sonia Landy. I don’t know if you remember her. She’s a hoot. No, she had a really, like, uncanny ability of just. She. She made her approach. I’ve probably seen her in about. I’d maybe seen her in like twenty-four, twenty-five years. Maybe it was the last time I’d seen her. She approached me as if that had been a few minutes ago. Rhonda. Rhonda and she just saying hi. She wants to know how everybody is. What have I been doing? And I’m just kind of like quickly summarizing twenty-five years for her real quick. And then she wants to know if I’ve heard of the Lori Vallow Daybell case.

00:05:18 Evet: That’s random.

00:05:19 Rhonda: It was pretty random. It was pretty, pretty random. I hadn’t heard of it, and I was in it was such a halfway crazy conversation anyway. Costco parking lot. Sonia Landy. So much time has gone by. Sonia. What the fuck are you talking about? And so she just started to kind of go on about this really nutty case she was following. She was like, It’s all over Facebook. There’s groups, there’s all this, whatever. There’s these missing kids. There’s these missing kids out of Idaho. Everybody’s looking for them. Their mom’s not saying where they are. And I thought, oh, okay, that’s a trip. But I mean, it wasn’t I didn’t I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t pursue it. It was just a weird little interaction that we had. I went on the following November, I think this was over the summer that I ran into her. And then in November twenty-twenty-three, I was at my cousin’s wedding in Mexico, and it was this beautiful wedding. And I so don’t drink alcohol. And the kids were partying so hard and having fun and just whatever. Me and my sober husband just kind of made our way back to our little cabana. And we were, we were just kind of looking at the phones as the old folks do in bed. And I just stumbled upon this funny, like, little Spotify thing by these two sisters out of Idaho, and they called themselves the Psychic Sisters, and they had a podcast, and they were covering this case. This was happening in their town. So all this shit from this case was going down in their little town, and these ladies were so awesome and so down home, and I found them so randomly. They were like in their forties. They were extremely overweight potato people. They were really just like, you’re not gonna believe what blew into Rexburg this week. They just they were beside themselves with the media presence, and just it was insanity.

00:07:19 Evet: So they’re, um, just absolute all in ness made you go, what’s going on here? Like I need to know more.

00:07:26 Rhonda: Really interesting story. They started telling the story in a way that just like two sort of Idaho housewife hens can kind of tell it, right? Like you’re drinking some ice tea, you’re listening up. They’re laying down the facts of this case. So the facts of this case are so tweaked. It’s it involves a cult like religion that is, uh, kind of created by this weird prophet that lives in their town. Uh, he’s an author of kind of doomsday books. He’s a self-published guy. Um, they, they just live in a, and he’s kind of, it’s a filtered, I’d say, uh, not a filtered, but a, um, like the FLDS is a fragment of the Mormon faith. So he starts calling his little, his little part of the Mormon faith, the church of the firstborn. And it has things to do with really old-school Mormonism, like atonement, like blood atonement. Um. What is it called again when you marry like a bunch of people? Sorry, I’m getting a little bit of brain fog at the moment, polygamy and things of that nature. So just kind of weird beliefs. He believes that he was, you know, um, kind of John, John the Baptist, in a past life. And he’s got all these past life things, and he starts telling women, you know, Hey, we were like married before, and you were or this biblical person, and I was that biblical person kind of starts getting this little group together. And it’s mostly these Mormon housewives that are just feeling really moved by the spirit, even though they’re really wanting, they’re wanting to hear more about how sexy they were when they were biblically with Chad Daybell in a previous life. Pretty gross.

00:09:14 Evet: Yeah. So gross is another way to describe it.

00:09:17 Rhonda: So it’s kind of a culty, just religion thing. They form like a group, but what it comes down to is they end up the two of them get together and murder his wife, murder her husband, and then her children.

00:09:33 Evet: I didn’t know that. Yeah, I didn’t know that.

00:09:35 Rhonda: Yeah. No, there’s there’s more than just the kids. They got rid of the spouses, too. They had. Excuse me. Insurance. I don’t talk my throat dry. They had insurance on everybody. She was I mean, it was it was a money thing. They were saying they were putting, you know, pulling all their money together for this church that they were creating. And, and he convinced them that the world was ending. And so, like, nobody was going to be looking for them because, like, all these bad earthquakes were going to be happening, floods, fires, etcetera. End of days. He was this doomsday guy that preppers the whole nine. It’s it’s it’s such a. But here’s the thing, Yvette. At the end of the day, like you can look at all these variables, right? Growing up in a tight culture that is Mormonism. This is what they grew up around. It was very provincial, totally sheltered environment. Yes. Okay. So they’ve they’ve got this set of beliefs. She’s a mom.

00:10:35 Evet: Yeah.

00:10:36 Rhonda: She’s a mom. I, that’s where I couldn’t it never from the beginning when when Sonia Landy in the parking lot told me they can’t find the kids and the mom’s not saying where they are. So right away I went, oh well, the kids are okay. The mom just doesn’t want to say where they are, right?

00:10:57 Evet: Because because you can’t imagine something like that.

00:11:00 Rhonda: And this isn’t like, you know, the kind of case where you’ve got a mom that’s like strung out on drugs, there’s abandonment, there’s negligence, she’s out of her head and the kids end up in foster care there. It wasn’t like, I don’t really know where my kids are at because I’m so out of my head. This was a soccer mom. This was a attractive woman. This was a married woman. She had three children. She grew up with strong family connections, strong community connection. She was big in her church. She was a gospel singer. She had been on Wheel of Fortune. She had been in the Miss Texas.

00:11:40 Evet: Did she win?

00:11:41 Rhonda: She won some money on Wheel of Fortune.

00:11:43 Evet: Did she?

00:11:44 Rhonda: She did not know. She did not. I think she I don’t even know that she was a runner up, but she was in Miss Texas. Strange correlations in the world of killers and Wheel of Fortune. That might be a later episode.

00:11:57 Evet: But I don’t know this. I would have to investigate this. Okay, so.

00:12:04 Rhonda: This was a woman that you see on a normal weekend with her family out at the store, out at the park, out at the ball game. Carton the kids around doing the school drop off. You know, this this nothing made sense. Nothing made sense. And that is what piqued my interest. Now, when November hit and I was at that wedding, started tuning it again. They had just found the kids.

00:12:31 Evet: Oh, okay.

00:12:32 Rhonda: And so now they knew they were dead.

00:12:36 Evet: And those kids, if I remember correctly, were in a grave in the backyard of her husband’s.

00:12:43 Rhonda: Yeah. Her new husband.

00:12:44 Evet: Her new.

00:12:44 Rhonda: Husband. They’d offed their spouses, married each other, right? The kids were buried on his property. Yes. Okay. She the daughter? The, um. Who was? I guess she was fifteen at the time. Yeah. Was, uh, badly burned and dismembered. And they couldn’t tell even how she had died.

00:13:04 Evet: Oh my God.

00:13:05 Rhonda: The the the little boy who seven forever, uh, was in pajamas. He was in a, in a garbage bag that was then wrapped like, um, this duct tape all around it. Mummified with with duct tape all around.

00:13:26 Evet: So crazy.

00:13:27 Rhonda: And they had been there for since September. The year previous.

00:13:32 Evet: Oh.

00:13:33 Rhonda: So they’d been missing for a long time that she had been. They’d they’d asked her to show proof of life of the kids. She did not. That’s when they had to arrest her. At that time, it was for abandonment because she wasn’t saying where they were.

00:13:48 Evet: And she was in Hawaii, right. She was in Hawaii.

00:13:50 Rhonda: That’s where they had planned to move. They just split. They she has another living son. They didn’t tell him where they were going. He’s an adult. Right. Um, and he has five children that are adults. And they split on them and just came to Hawaii.

00:14:03 Evet: The husband, the husband had five children. Okay.

00:14:06 Rhonda: Yeah. So he kills her mom and they all stand by him now it’s.

00:14:10 Evet: Oh, well, that’s another fun topic.

00:14:12 Rhonda: It’s it’s it’s it’s a crazy story. It’s so crazy. And there’s even, even so much more that has to do with they collected money on them when they were missing before people knew they were missing.

00:14:25 Evet: Like they were getting a GoFundMe.

00:14:26 Rhonda: They were getting SSI. I know it was from their father’s death. They were receiving benefits from that. And also the child was the younger son was autistic and receiving state benefits. So she was collecting about four thousand dollars a month on her dead children just to live on. And then they had received insurance money from her husband’s death. Or no, that was the thing. How they started, how it started unraveling is he had actually saw that she’d gone on the computer and tried to fuck around with the insurance. So he actually he put it for his sister to get it.

00:15:02 Evet: The the son did that. Um, her.

00:15:05 Rhonda: Husband.

00:15:05 Evet: Her husband did that. And the husband she killed. Uh huh. Oh.

00:15:09 Rhonda: So he died and the sister got it. And the sister’s like, um. I feel like you killed Charles.

00:15:15 Evet: Oh, wow.

00:15:16 Rhonda: Yeah.

00:15:17 Evet: Oh my God. Okay, so a lot of people follow cases obsessively, right? I mean, I hear my salon clients talk about it. I hear my girlfriends talk about it. At what point did you go from online to deciding, I’m going to this trial? I’m gonna get on a plane, like I said earlier, and I’m going to go to Idaho and go to this trial.

00:15:43 Rhonda: I think there were a lot of parts to that question at the time. I do remember when I booked the flight and the hotel room, I was, uh, I was angry at my family. We were driving home from Oregon and we’d been on a little family trip. That was really fun. And of course, I can’t remember. I was really annoyed and I was like, I’m fucking myself. Another goddamn trip. And I, I’d had that thought that it’d be cool to go see it, you know, and I was, you know, hoping that it was going to be televised and that I’d have the opportunity to do it that way. Well, then it came out that they were going to play audio of the day of that day’s court later in the day. And it was kind of like, oh, well, I was grateful for whatever insight I was going to get, but I also really wanted to see. I wanted to see the testimony. I wanted to see her. I wanted to know. I wanted to know because there was a lot of. She was basically saying, I know nothing, I did nothing. This is crazy. This is a. Whatever I needed to know. I had to know.

00:16:56 Evet: So she she pled not guilty the entire time. And I never did a thing.

00:17:00 Rhonda: She’s got five life sentences, right? She’s. She been to three different trials the last two. She represented herself. Oh, she’s. This woman is a hoot and holler.

00:17:11 Evet: Does she have a law degree? No, no. Okay, okay.

00:17:14 Rhonda: She’s got a very high degree of narcissistic traits.

00:17:20 Evet: Yeah, yeah.

00:17:20 Rhonda: Yeah, that, uh, and very histrionic. Yeah. And also, she was when she was tested, it was like an obsessive degree of religiosity.

00:17:31 Evet: Okay.

00:17:31 Rhonda: Delusional schizoid thinking.

00:17:33 Evet: Sure, sure.

00:17:34 Rhonda: So that was her final, you know, final, final. I didn’t know these words in my mind. I’m just thinking she either really didn’t do anything.

00:17:43 Evet: Okay.

00:17:45 Rhonda: She did something and she cannot face it. And it’s completely.

00:17:51 Evet: Blocked. Yeah.

00:17:52 Rhonda: Or she knows what she’s doing.

00:17:54 Evet: Yeah. I’m going to go with number three.

00:17:55 Rhonda: That’s what it was.

00:17:56 Evet: Yeah.

00:17:57 Rhonda: But you know what? If that was hard that I, I, I kind of wanted to sit in presence with that I did. It was wild to me because I, I had, I just followed cases of, of, uh, domestic violence or, or abandonment, neglect, things like that, trauma based things that happen in families. This was so different. This was something so evil.

00:18:19 Evet: Yeah.

00:18:19 Rhonda: This was evil.

00:18:21 Evet: Totally.

00:18:21 Rhonda: And it was also something that I don’t think. I think it’s awakened. I don’t think that this just pops up one day. I think that that this woman was running with this her whole life. And, and kind of with knowing this about her now and looking back through her history, it’s quite interesting.

00:18:44 Evet: So when you said awakened, you just mean for her. You don’t, do you? Do you mean it came to life?

00:18:50 Rhonda: I think, oh no, God.

00:18:52 Evet: I.

00:18:52 Rhonda: Really don’t. I, and I really I really hope not. But end of the day, I don’t know. I, I don’t know that I, I, I just feel that. Meeting this man and kind of just where she was. So she was fired up on religion. She’s been reading his books, he writes all these doomsday books and, and, and stories and talks about the future. She’s dreaming of some kind of an apocalypse where she’s one of the chosen ones. Because in this story of their religion, there’s one hundred and forty four thousand chosen ones that will remain and they’re going to repopulate the earth, right? So she was feeling pretty big for her britches, you know, pretty sure she was one of these. I know I’m not. I’m not even in the bottom. Whatever it is. Are you serious? Repopulate the earth. Send me back to space. I don’t want no part of it. I want no part of it.

00:19:49 Evet: Beam me up.

00:19:49 Rhonda: Like we’re going to restructure this. No.

00:19:51 Evet: Thank you. Exactly. So maybe she was idolizing Daybell at first, but then, because she was part of the scenario, all of her past lives and he really kissed her up. Yeah.

00:20:05 Rhonda: He asked her up into.

00:20:07 Evet: Yeah.

00:20:07 Rhonda: You’re definitely part of this new earth, right? That is coming. But also together we are stronger. And what we need to do is get obstacles out of the way. And so they, they would call them kind of zombies. They needed to make it like, ooh, they’re, they’re, they’re possessed. Yeah. So the kids were showing signs of being possessed by demons and such. So they, they, that’s what they needed to call it and, and to murder these people. But, you know, Interesting.

00:20:37 Evet: Um. So I think I got what you’re you hoped to get. Like you wanted to look at her. You wanted to just check her out, right? Like, yeah.

00:20:48 Rhonda: I wanted to be there. And I wanted to see her reactions, her responses, her expressions. I like studying like you. I enjoy behavior, I enjoy microexpressions, I enjoy tone, cadence, the whole thing. I want to be there.

00:21:02 Evet: And I think you’re a big empath. I know we both are. And I think sometimes we know things before it ever comes to the to light. Right. And so I, I would think I’m putting words in your mouth that that was another reason why you’d be there just to like just to feel this.

00:21:21 Rhonda: I wanted to know. And it probably, I think I knew that I would feel the certainty. Exactly. And there was a lot hanging there. But when I said before, like, hey, I think there were so many reasons, like I, you know, in the moment of a spontaneous. Well, I’m going to take a little trip by myself. I know that that was in there. Yeah. And then I do have a friend that lives in Idaho. I thought it’d be fun to see her one night. Okay. And we did. We had dinner and talked and stuff. I’ve never gone anywhere by myself like that on a plane to a different, you know, thing for no reason other than to just explore something I find interesting. And I thought that that was pretty fucking liberating, I’ll tell you.

00:21:58 Evet: I think it’s super cool. Yeah.

00:21:59 Rhonda: I had these, like, little Italian shoes. Okay. So I bought clothes for court. That was something else that I felt strongly about. I wanted to dress and I wanted to look like I belonged there. And so a couple of really fun things happened. Um, so I did, I had some, I had some nice slacks, I bought myself some Italian loafers. And I did have a, some pretty blouses, um, hairstyle. Of course I had everything going on the very first day that I got there, I put my little Italian loafers on and I wanted to go out and kind of get the lay of the land and just sort of see where I was, how close I was to the courthouse, all that stuff, where the food was. So I embarked on a walk and I got lost very quickly, um, in a major downtown area, which didn’t seem possible, but they have north, south, east, west type streets. Yes. Uh, need I say more?

00:22:51 Evet: No. So where’s the target? What corner is it on?

00:22:56 Rhonda: Then I have my phone and I’m, like, trying to do that. But then it’s saying like, you know, walk north like it’s doing the same thing. And I’m looking. How do you translate North. South. East, West. Yeah. Front back, left right. You can’t do it. It turns out you need some kind of a focal point. So that’s where I was having trouble locating a focal point.

00:23:20 Evet: Yes.

00:23:21 Rhonda: So I wandered around. Oh my God, Yvette, the blisters from these shoes. So I, I had to take off the loafers. And I had huge blisters all over my feet before I found my way back to the hotel. Rest of the trip. Every cute court outfit worn with cowboy boots. The only other shoes I had. It was horrible.

00:23:42 Evet: You were in Idaho, cowboy?

00:23:44 Rhonda: It’s not with a court outfit. And also the people in Idaho are not like that.

00:23:49 Evet: Oh, really?

00:23:50 Rhonda: Not in Boise. Very, very upstanding. Conservative, very white, but very friendly bunch.

00:23:58 Evet: That’s nice. Yes.

00:23:59 Rhonda: Very friendly bunch. Very warm. They found me very interesting. They liked me.

00:24:03 Evet: And.

00:24:03 Rhonda: I did. They did. They liked me in Idaho. I did make a couple of girlfriends.

00:24:07 Evet: That’s very nice.

00:24:08 Rhonda: I did, I made friends, we sat by each other, and then we would just giggle about what was happening, you know? But it was nice to have somebody next to you to be like, oh, oh my God, did you see what she just did?

00:24:18 Evet: Right. Okay. So so now you’re in the courthouse or in the courtroom is what I’m trying to say. What did it look and feel like when you realize, okay, I’m no longer watching this on television. I’m no longer listening to this. I’m actually in it. There she is. What did that feel like?

00:24:41 Rhonda: It felt like I was supposed to be there and that it was meant to happen. I felt comfortable there. I just I was on time every day. I wasn’t bored, I listened, I enjoyed talking to people on the breaks. And at the lunch I met a lot of my favorite podcasters that I’d been listening to leading up to this point. And I felt that was wonderful because I just love knowing you’ve got like pals and people that think like you, like all over the place, you know, just everywhere. It’s kind of cool.

00:25:14 Evet: We’re the podcasters, mostly women. Yes, yes, yes. That’s interesting.

00:25:18 Rhonda: There were, uh, two that I met that were one that I don’t actually, uh, it’s interesting because she’s kind of fallen off as being, um, kind of a credible podcaster, so I don’t listen to her anymore. But but my other friend Gigi, I listened to religiously. I like Gigi, Gigi.

00:25:38 Evet: Um, okay, so Lori comes in.

00:25:41 Rhonda: Lori comes in.

00:25:44 Evet: Tell me what that was like when you first started. I know you said you’re comfortable and all that stuff, but now she comes in and to me, what she’s been accused of, like you said, is pure evil. Yeah. And so I imagine that I might have been uncomfortable, that I might have felt a little bit nervous. But how did that like when you saw her, like, there she is. What went through your mind?

00:26:11 Rhonda: I think I kind of it kind of slowed down. I think that it kind of was a little bit suspended. Like, ah, but you, I even from the jump, there’s a reptilian quality to her.

00:26:30 Evet: Tell me more about that.

00:26:32 Rhonda: The way she looks around the room is predatory.

00:26:35 Evet: Oh, yeah.

00:26:36 Rhonda: Yeah. There, there. There’s just a way of a gaze. There’s a there’s a way of fixing your gaze. There’s a way of looking around to see who’s there. And then there’s a way of kind of checking yourself against who’s there. I felt that way. I felt her attention go around that way.

00:26:57 Evet: That’s that’s very interesting. Because when you were saying before, like, you know, maybe the schizoid or narcissistic or all of the above. I was thinking about how she was a, you know, infamous on Wheel of Fortune and she was in the Miss Texas pageant. And all of that is a lot of look at me. Look at me. Yeah. And now she was the she was in a situation, the ultimate look at me situation. Right. So then finding how she’s looking at the room, like you said, like who she’s up against? That’s right. That’s a very interesting character.

00:27:38 Rhonda: And it just does feel kind of I mean, it did her her gaze was, I would describe as predatory.

00:27:46 Evet: Oh that’s crazy.

00:27:47 Rhonda: Um, yeah. And and cold.

00:27:49 Evet: Yeah. Okay.

00:27:50 Rhonda: So it was, it was a, a presence. And also, I think what it turned into for me was just a lot of frustration because this person won’t ever tell the truth. And that’s what it, that’s what it, that’s what you come to reckon. Like I, I started to recognize that what I wanted, what you want is you want to know what. Why? Yeah. You want to know what happened to you?

00:28:15 Evet: Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s the whole reason.

00:28:17 Rhonda: Yeah. How did this happen to you? Yeah. What moment did you snap? Was it a thousand cuts? How did you get there? Right. Because I I, I can’t get there like I, I wouldn’t get there. Exactly. Now I feel safe in saying that I don’t understand it, but in a sense, you almost feel like is it maybe I’m safer watching her from over here knowing I’m never going to do this. Like she, in a sense, has taken this on for everybody. I can watch you for way over here. Right. I can see a horror show. I’m not a part of this, but I still have to explore how nuts this is.

00:29:03 Evet: Yeah.

00:29:03 Rhonda: Yeah. So I it’s it’s pretty baffling. I, I don’t know why that and in that case in particular struck me like no other. There’s a few more I’m getting into deep diving. Yeah. And they all are women. They’re all women that kill.

00:29:18 Evet: Right. Which is unusual. And so I think as you know, making up over seventy percent of true crime viewers as women. When we see women that kill. It’s always very interesting to me because I, I, we obviously have that trait in us, but I always think of it more as like self-defense, right? And so when you realize like, you killed your babies, you killed your ex-husband and his ex-wife, like, because of Jesus, like, I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Right. But I mean, the world doesn’t make sense sometimes, right? So. Okay, I have another question. The victim’s family, uh, maybe a mom. You said another son that Lori had. You said he had, uh, Daybell had five kids. Yeah. Were they in the courtroom.

00:30:20 Rhonda: When I know they were not.

00:30:22 Evet: Okay.

00:30:23 Rhonda: Uh, they were not, because they were all going to be testifying. I see. And so they’re not allowed to be present. So after they testified, they could be. I was there for a week, like I watched five days of trial. Okay. So, um, in the days that I was there. No.

00:30:37 Evet: Okay. And you didn’t see them?

00:30:38 Rhonda: Well, actually, the grandma and grandpa were the grandma and the grandpa. Whose grandmother? Um, it was the grandma and grandpa of the kids.

00:30:47 Evet: But whose parent? Lori. Or it was.

00:30:49 Rhonda: Actually, his sister. His her husband’s sister, the one that he had left the money to. This is where the story gets a little bit confusing. Not for somebody like you, but think of it, I.

00:31:02 Evet: Feel.

00:31:02 Rhonda: Just like. Think of it. Well, I’ll put it to you this way. Okay. There was a a young couple that had a baby, but they were addicted to drugs, so they adopted their baby to, uh, the guy’s uncle. Right. So say. Okay, that uncle happened to be. That was Charles, her husband. Okay, so the kids who had the baby that was his sister’s kids.

00:31:27 Evet: His niece and nephew or his niece.

00:31:29 Rhonda: That was that. That was there. Yeah. Okay. So it was like his sister who was like in her sixties. Her son had a kid.

00:31:36 Evet: Oh, that’s the grandparents.

00:31:37 Rhonda: And then so they felt like they couldn’t raise the kid. But Charles had a young family already, so he adopted JJ into their family. So that was actually her grandchild.

00:31:47 Evet: I got it.

00:31:47 Rhonda: Now. And it was Charles’s nephew. Okay. But they adopted him as their son. Got it. So?

00:31:54 Evet: So that’s.

00:31:54 Rhonda: And he was like a little autistic boy.

00:31:56 Evet: Yeah. So when you did you look at them? Did you like see how. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And how were they.

00:32:04 Rhonda: Well they’re. Oh my God. These Larry and um, and Kay are so strong and so close and very tight knit with their family. Yeah. They are like, she’s like a strong Catholic Background. They’re just total salt of the earth they live in, um, like poor Charles, like Louisiana. Um, and they’re just really down to earth. Really, really sweet people. Totally southern. Very gracious. Yeah. Yeah.

00:32:40 Evet: Well all right.

00:32:42 Rhonda: And the press loved them. They spoke with them outside all the time. Okay. The grandpa’s like a total sweetie. Kind of funny.

00:32:49 Evet: Yeah.

00:32:50 Rhonda: Personality. And everybody really liked them a lot.

00:32:54 Evet: So I’ve watched a few court trials. Right. And, um, it always seems, you know, like you watch the reenactment and it’s so dramatic. Right? But what was the atmosphere like in the courtroom? Was it just. Question, answer objection. Like, you know, was it did it ever get dramatic?

00:33:16 Rhonda: Definitely, definitely. I was there on one day. That was very dramatic. But I think for the most part, It’s just it’s fairly dry. Yeah. In this case, the, uh, defense lawyer was pretty salty. Um, and the prosecution was pretty smart, and so there was like some little fun sparks at times, but for the most part, fairly dry. Yeah. Nothing. Nothing exciting. But really the most fascinating was just getting to learn more information, because it had been a few years for this to get to trial. And you don’t, you know, you get to only learn so many things that are in the indictment, but you don’t know a lot of the of the evidence. And so it was learning a lot of evidence, and that kept you very engaged with the testimony. There was one woman one day and she revealed something that hadn’t been revealed, and that the defense lawyer was not prepared for and had never heard before and was totally pissed off that she said. And, um, that had to do with the conversation that she’d had with Laurie that where Lori had described that she was going to hurt her and, you know, she was threatening her, essentially. But that had never been mentioned before. Right. The defense lawyer, he fucking yelled at her. He’s just like, why would you say that? You have never said that before. No, no, no no no, she cried everything. So it’s true. It’s true. But me and my little friend that I made looked at each other. Oh my God.

00:34:44 Evet: So okay. The kids names were JJ and Tylee. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler. Okay. Did you see images of them?

00:34:55 Rhonda: No, I was not there that week.

00:34:57 Evet: It was not.

00:34:57 Rhonda: There. No. And I wouldn’t go on a week where that’s that that would stick with me. And I know myself well enough. I could maybe I can watch, like, scary movies and stuff, but like a real like this is a real photo of a real child. No. No way.

00:35:10 Evet: Okay.

00:35:11 Rhonda: No, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t show up for that. So you can. And I believe that that day, the family also didn’t come. Yeah, you know what I mean. So. No, that that wasn’t happening the week I was there.

00:35:21 Evet: But when you heard about this and then they were, I would assume that they were talking about these children being murdered. They did being in the courtroom, did it make Tylee and JJ more real, even more real? Like these were real children? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

00:35:42 Rhonda: Oh, God. Yeah. They were so real already because so many photos, so many like little video clips of them. Yeah. So many other family members talking about them. The search had gone on for them for almost a year. Yeah. It was, it was like you, you did. And, and a lot of history about them and learning about them, their school, their personalities, what they liked. And so you felt like you already they were real children that you could totally feel like you knew already. And so the, the thoughts of like their last moments or whatever really happened isn’t something I can really contemplate, right?

00:36:21 Evet: Absolutely. It’s it’s it’s too much. I would say.

00:36:24 Rhonda: Just more the that the blessing that it’s over.

00:36:26 Evet: Yeah, absolutely. Um, there’s a moment in a lot of true crime coverage where the perpetrator becomes almost the protagonist. And, you know, obviously the story centers on them, their psychology, their choices. Did that shift at all when you were sitting in the room? Like, did like what came up about her that like, oh, this is for me. This is why I did it or. I guess I’m saying, was there like a defense? Uh, the defense attorney saying like, oh, well, you know, she was beaten her whole life. You know, I’m making something up, but that kind of.

00:37:11 Rhonda: No, really her, her, her defense attorney. And especially when he gave his closing argument as well. He shed tears. His, uh. He really believed that she was someone that loved Jesus and that she really believed everything that Chad Daybell had told her that she was. That it was the right thing to do, that the children were being tormented and that they were dead anyway and taken over. And they they were releasing their spirits by killing them. And, uh, you know, whatever they needed to tell themselves. I think that she got into a loop with it. She has to say she has to. I don’t know if she can actually believe that, but I believe that that’s what she has to keep saying. Yeah. And that’s what she’s not changed her story. Well, actually she did. She changed her where she she said more than she tried to make it sound to her son, her surviving son, on a phone call. She tried to tell him that the daughter had killed the little boy and then killed herself, and that Laurie, to save her daughter’s reputation, took the hit. And, uh.

00:38:30 Evet: And therefore.

00:38:30 Rhonda: They.

00:38:30 Evet: Just got the story centers on her. Exactly. There we go.

00:38:34 Rhonda: Yeah. She she she was the victim and the hero.

00:38:37 Evet: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Wow. Um.

00:38:43 Rhonda: And I’m happy to say at this point now, I mean, what is true about it is it did run its course. I, I mean, I, I was totally intrigued and captivated. I learned all about it until I got to the point where I realized there’s things I’m not going to understand. And that’s fine. Right. There’s things in life I’m not going to. But the awareness that that exists is a little bit challenging because It’s you know, I don’t ever think that about anyone I meet. Right. And I never would have thought that about her. She’s somebody probably would have been, you know, we would have seen her around town. Right. You know what I mean? Maybe not if she was in the whole, like, religious deal or whatever, but she’d get her hair cut from you.

00:39:33 Evet: God, I hope not. Well, she.

00:39:34 Rhonda: She was a hairstylist. Evet. She was. She was. Yeah.

00:39:37 Evet: You know, a different bunch.

00:39:40 Rhonda: She was a hair girl. Yeah.

00:39:42 Evet: Okay. Wait, so you were not there for the sentencing? No. But did you watch? Listen to it. Watch it.

00:39:50 Rhonda: It did show the sentencing on TV.

00:39:51 Evet: Oh, so you did watch it? Yeah. Okay. So what do you remember most vividly about the sentencing? Because I did not.

00:39:58 Rhonda: She seemed unmoved and emotionless.

00:40:01 Evet: She just took it.

00:40:02 Rhonda: No tears. No. No change of facial expression, no nothing.

00:40:09 Evet: What about in the courtroom?

00:40:11 Rhonda: She never cried.

00:40:12 Evet: No. The reactions of others.

00:40:15 Rhonda: There she had a big reaction when that one girl said something that hadn’t been spoken before.

00:40:20 Evet: Right? No, but I mean, when she was being sentenced.

00:40:22 Rhonda: Oh, when she was being sentenced.

00:40:24 Evet: No, it was quite.

00:40:25 Rhonda: No.

00:40:26 Evet: Interesting. Nothing.

00:40:27 Rhonda: She will not. She you you get that feeling. It’s that prideful feeling. She’s not going to give it to you.

00:40:34 Evet: Yeah. Yeah. Well, like you said, predatory. Right. She’s watching the reactions.

00:40:39 Rhonda: Yeah. She’s she’s she’s not. And she went on to do a couple of like little interviews in the jail, one by East Idaho News and another by Arizona family. And in both she’s I mean it it it is a sketch in in probably that I can’t say narcissistic or histrionic. I can’t, but I can say, you’re going to see what I’m talking about if you watch those interviews, it’s pretty nuts, especially if you like body language. Sure. Yeah.

00:41:11 Evet: Yeah. It’s very revealing.

00:41:12 Rhonda: It’s it’s it’s a lot. Wow. It’s a lot.

00:41:16 Evet: So did what? Lori didn’t say anything in the courtroom when she was being sentenced. Not a thing. Did she get.

00:41:24 Rhonda: Well? She did make an allocution, not an allocution. But, like, you know, you can make a statement before he delivers.

00:41:30 Evet: I was just going to ask you that.

00:41:31 Rhonda: And that is. Yes she did.

00:41:32 Evet: Okay.

00:41:33 Rhonda: She did. Again, just claiming innocence. Yes. And kind of making it. She’s like accidental this and that is not you know she tried to everything. She had an answer for everything.

00:41:44 Evet: Yeah.

00:41:45 Rhonda: For eight million zillion things. Here’s a reason why, you know, no matter what anybody else says. See, I just couldn’t. I mean, here’s the thing. I just worst criminal ever. I’d immediately say everything I did because I’d be, like, so ashamed.

00:42:04 Evet: And horrified.

00:42:05 Rhonda: We’re bad liars, and I want the whole thing to just be over with. And I’d be like, blah. Yeah. And then just like, whatever, like, help me put the cuffs on, make this change. Turn me into something else. I hate this. Yeah. I, I’d be so horrified. I just would. Yeah. Every time I try to lie about something, like, like, even if it’s small, I always have somebody go, are you lying? They can tell. They know you. They can just tell because it’s not worth it. Wrong. Yeah. And it’s just, you know it and it’s not worth it. It’s not who gives a shit? No, but I, I have not killed somebody, so it doesn’t matter. Okay. But I’m telling you, if I did, I’d be the first. You’d still say so. I’d be like, hey, man, I just I cannot unburden me, right? I’ve gotta unburden myself right now. Oh. All right. So flying back from the Idaho. What did it feel like? Like, not what you were thinking. What did it feel like? Like, like just a, like a really cool, interesting experience that I would love to do again. Okay, yeah, I’ll definitely do it again when I feel, you know, really connected to something. And it was also I had to do with like, I kind of, and I’ve run this past Alan also, and he likes the idea of like, because we were thinking of going to Arizona because for her last trial and just make a little, how do the five days of trial and like, if you wanted to come in the day, you could, or if you wanted to go do something else and then we could just play at night or whatever, have fun with it, you know? So there’s some place like Florida is a great place to see, uh, to see court cases. They’re there, they’re plentiful, they are very plentiful and they’re interesting. And they’re many, many, many women involved in the crime community in Florida. Yes. I feel like, um, of, of the true crime that I’ve watched, I don’t know, I can’t give you a full percentage, a real percentage, but I’m going to go with like ninety percent or so. Usually in Florida, but they’ve got their sunshine laws, so they show everything they show. That’s why. So we get to see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening in other places. Sure. We’re just not. But we do. We also feel like it’s true. There is more there, though. Come on. All right. Is there anything you wish you had known before going there? I mean, it sounds like it was an overall good experience for you, but just probably walking shoes, back up shoes. I would say that that was the major kink that the very first day my outfits were going to look bad for the week. I could have cried. I, I, everyone, everyone chosen with care. And now and then just with the boots and then. Okay. I told my aunts, hey, I got all the, you know, cute outfits. She’s like, I want to see a picture of you on your way to court every morning. And I said, all right. So every morning and not take a picture in that mirror, full length mirror in the room and with the boots and everything. And then finally, by Friday, she’s on. Did you bring any other shoes?

00:45:23 Evet: Those shoes and those blisters. I like that, that’s what we’re taking away. All right. Um, last question for you.

00:45:32 Rhonda: Where have I heard that before?

00:45:34 Evet: I know it’s usually a lie. We’re spending this whole episode asking why we’re drawn to these stories. Right?

00:45:43 Rhonda: Right.

00:45:44 Evet: Especially why women are. Right. And after everything you have been through, seen and heard in this case. What do you think it’s really about? Why? Why did we go there?

00:46:01 Rhonda: I do believe that it is exploring a darker side of ourselves through another person. I think that we recognize human frailties and faults and conditions and and we can watch them play out and we can judge it from far away or break it apart. And it’s just easier because it’s not personal. But it doesn’t mean that you’re not learning like, wow, you know, this stuff exists. But I don’t know. That I fear these things in myself. I honestly, I just don’t think that I see them. Right. You know, and I, I haven’t had an opportunity to be like, let’s see now, I’ve never explored, um, welfare fraud using my children. I mean, this is a thought that’s never occurred to me. Where did that come from? Like what happened? What? It’s just it’s very it’s. She. They also her husband made good money and a lot of the things that she did were. So she was. Yeah. It didn’t it didn’t seem to make sense.

00:47:15 Evet: Yeah. Do you think that we are attracted to true crime? As you know, I was saying on part one of this, the cautionary you know, women are taught to walk with their keys in between their fingers and don’t go running at night. And, you know, when you get the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, move, get out, get out of the elevator, like whatever it is, if somebody comes in and you feel that way, do you think that we are so interested in this, besides the fact that we like the human psyche and human behavior, is it a cautionary? Warning? I don’t pay attention, ladies.

00:47:55 Rhonda: I mean, I guess it could be I, I don’t know because I don’t really think that way. It just I don’t think it’s really changed me like that because like I said, I feel like if I met her in some out of context way, I would not think anything too much of it. And I can do consider myself an empath, but I’m only picking up things that are on my radar. I only pick up what I kind of am attuned to. Sure. And I don’t think I’m attuned to that way of thinking.

00:48:23 Evet: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I do think that you are. Keen enough to see something’s different, right? You may not know what it is, but.

00:48:36 Rhonda: I think I think you would over a longer period. I think that you’d need a little bit more interaction and a little bit more context. But, um, you know, I’d probably get there with her. I’d be like, something’s going on. Okay.

00:48:50 Evet: Yeah, something’s going on there.

00:48:51 Rhonda: But I’d love to hear about the Wheel of Fortune. I’d love to hear about it. Oh, yeah. Tell me your stories, you know.

00:48:56 Evet: Yeah, I’d like to.

00:48:58 Evet: I’m going to explore that more after this. Um, thank you so much for being here today.

00:49:03 Rhonda: Wow.

00:49:03 Evet: It was, uh, I don’t know. I really you’re the only person I know that’s ever done that. And I know there’s more. You just told me how you made friends there, but I did find it very interesting. And now it’s definitely more clear as to why you went there. And I hope that it helps.

00:49:20 Rhonda: Anybody has an opportunity. If you’ve felt a little interested in something, it’s also a really cool way to learn more about like, just the justice system and what a regular court looks like. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Yeah. But I’m kind of a nerd in that sense.

00:49:33 Evet: You’re not a nerd. You’re very cool, very pretty, very cool. Okay. Thank you so much.

00:49:37 Rhonda: Radio pretty. You’re very welcome.

00:49:41 Evet: Well, thanks to Rhonda for going, for coming back and for being willing to tell us what she found out.

What strikes me most, just sitting here and thinking about what she shared is how different it is, the room versus the screen. The research we talked about in part one describes what true crime does to our brains in the abstract.

But Rhonda just showed us what it looks like when the abstraction falls away and you’re sitting ten feet from the reality of it, the empathy that we build watching these stories, or the hatred from a distance is, is very real.

But what Rhonda experienced in that courtroom in the same air as the perpetrator, it’s a different order of things entirely. It’s a reminder that maybe behind every case we consume, there are real people still living inside of it long after we’ve moved on to another episode.

If this two part episode has done anything, I hope it’s made you a little more conscious of that. Not guilty. Just aware there’s a difference because of that, I think more than any specific habit, is the work of the original self. Choosing what you let in, knowing why, and staying honest about what it costs you.

If something in these two episodes stirred anything in you- a recognition, a question, something you want to look at more honestly- I’d love to speak with you. That’s the work I do.

You can find me at decotalifecoaching.com, but until next time, keep coming back to yourself. Thank you for listening.

Part 1: True Crime Obsession Explained |The Psychology Behind Why You Can’t Stop Watching

Episode 12-Part 1:True Crime Obsession Explained The Psychology Behind Why You Can’t Stop Watching

DeCota Life Coaching

Welcome to the Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach. I explore resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside. Today, we're talking about one of the most fascinating and under-examined patterns of our time. A pattern that most of us share and almost none of us question.

This is Episode 12, Part 1, True Crime Obsession Explained, the psychology behind why we can't stop watching this. Hi, and welcome back. I'm really glad you're here today because I think this topic is one that almost everyone has a relationship with even if that relationship is one that you haven't

fully examined yet let me paint a picture for you it's 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night you told yourself you're going to bed early you're very tired and yet here you are one episode deep into a four-part docuseries about a murder that happened in 1987 You're fully invested in a case you've never heard of three hours ago.

The laundry's still in the dryer. The book on your nightstand has not moved in a week. But you're absolutely unshakably committed to finding out who did it. Maybe yours looks different. Maybe it's a podcast on your commute to work that you can't stop thinking about all day long.

Maybe it's a live court hearing you have streaming in the background. Because you need to know the verdict in real time. Maybe it's a YouTube channel that reconstructs cold cases or even a Reddit thread where thousands of strangers are collectively solving something that police have not been able to in years. Whatever the form it takes for you,

I want you to know something important before we go any further. You're not alone. You're not strange or a weirdo. True Crime is the number one most listened to podcast genre in the world. It generates billions of streaming hours annually. And women are the vast majority of its listeners.

So the question I want to sit with today is not whether we are fascinated. We already know that. The question is, why are we fascinated? The question beneath that is what's the fascination doing to us? In both ways, helping us in ways that may cost us something we haven't even named yet. That's what we're exploring today.

Before we go any further, I would love for you to sit with just one question. You don't have to answer it out loud, but just notice what comes up. How do you feel after you're watching a true crime or listening to a true crime episode? Not during it, but afterward.

When you close the app or you turn off the screen, are you left with whatever emotion is sitting in your body for some time? Hold on to that answer because we're going to come back to it. When I was thinking about this podcast, I started to think about

When true crime fascination started for me And I realized it was long before I knew what true crime was Maybe even before the entire genre was possible I was nine years old It was Thanksgiving break in 1978 And I was watching the soap opera The

Young and the Restless with my mom When the program was interrupted by the news for a news bulletin The reporter said that the San Francisco mayor George Moscone and the city supervisor Harvey Milk had been assassinated inside of City Hall Apparently shot by a colleague who at his trial became infamous for his Twinkie defense which was a

diminished capacity argument that earned him a dramatically reduced sentence It was just nuts When the news reporter said that the two were assassinated, I remember my mom gasping, and it kind of startled me. The news stayed on in our house for, I don't know, maybe two days, nonstop. I didn't fully understand the politics, but I understood enough,

including how the media tried to minimize Harvey Milk, just focusing the coverage of the assassination on Moscone And then using Milk's sexuality to push him to the margins. I also understood what I saw in my mom's face. The world just revealed something about itself that I hadn't known before.

That regular people in regular buildings at regular jobs could be erased simply for who they were. At that age I didn't have the words for what I was feeling. But I now know it was the first time my nervous system registered that the world contained a category of danger that had nothing to do with me personally and

everything to do with what humans were capable to doing to one another. I don't think that feeling has ever fully left me. I just think it's grown a little more sophisticated over time. Then came OJ. If you were alive and paying attention between 1994 and 1995, you already know. There's nothing I can tell you about the O.J.

Simpson trial that will be new information. I can tell you what it was like to live inside it as a hairstylist in a busy salon because that experience taught me something about true crime and about people that I've never forgotten. The case The trial It was everywhere It was on every television Every radio station

You could not get away from it At home At work In the break room We were all consuming it All the time Without calling it consumption of course It was just life The white bronco chase on the 405 was one of those moments where I couldn't believe what I was watching A man, a famous,

famous man who was beloved, might have killed two people and was moving at a crawl down an LA freeway with the whole country watching live on the news. I've never seen anything like it. None of us have. On the day of the verdict, I actually went into work late.

I needed to watch the announcement of his innocence or guilt live on my own television before I walked into a salon full of people and full of all of their opinions they had very strong opinions opposite ones of myself depending on who was

sitting in my chair this is what I know Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were dead and I believed OJ put them there I felt that there was overwhelming evidence that made it hard to think otherwise but I also thought of how horrible it was for their families who were sitting in

that circus of a courtroom cameras like zooming in on every facial expression they made while the rest of the world including myself debated over OJ's innocence or guilt The verdict of not guilty was read and my gut knew that the entire spectacle was wrong. I still feel for those families today. That particular grief,

losing someone you love to violence and then watching the world argue about whether it counts. It's something I think about whenever true crime asks someone of the people it leaves behind. And then last week I watched a documentary on Netflix called The Crash It's about a

17 year old girl named Mackenzie Cirilla who drove her car into a brick wall at 100 miles per hour killing her boyfriend and his friend who were also in the car but she didn't die There were no skid marks no attempt to break

And a phone full of messages and videos that told a story that the defense didn't want the judge to hear. As I watched this documentary, I was disgusted not only by Mackenzie's malignant narcissism, but also by her parents' behavior. Their certainty that their daughter could do no wrong,

despite so much proof of how spoiled and disturbed she was, made me increasingly annoyed as I watched. They joked about her drug use and their own and spent most of the time defending how they raised her to be so incredibly gross and ultimately sociopathic, in my opinion. Everyone in that documentary filmed everything, every minute of their lives,

from doing drugs to throwing tantrums when they didn't get their way, especially Mackenzie. And to performing grief in front of the camera. It felt like a portrait of what happens when no one is ever required to answer for the consequences of their choices. It was horrifying in a way that went beyond the crime itself.

What connects all of it isn't the violence or the mystery. It's actually the people left behind. And no case has stayed with me on that question I'm going to tell you more about that case and about someone who was in the room when justice was handed down in part two of this episode. But first,

let's talk about the psychology because I think understanding why we're drawn to these stories is just as important as the stories themselves. Let's start with the landscape because the scale of this thing is genuinely staggering. True crime is not a niche interest. It is a cultural institution.

Serial is the podcast that many credit with igniting the modern true crime boom. It became the fastest podcast in history to reach 5 million downloads when it launched in 2014. It has since been downloaded more than 340 million times. Staggering. Today though, there are thousands of true crime podcasts. Netflix, HBO,

Hulu and Prime have built entire content strategies around true crime documentaries. YouTube channels that are dedicated to cold cases have millions of subscribers. And then there's live court coverage. Think Menendez Brothers retrial or the Alex Murdoch case or even the Karen Reed trial drives live viewership numbers that rival major sporting events like the Super Bowl.

The best part is women are at the center of it all. Research from Edison Research found that women between 18 and 49 are the most consistent true crime consumers across every platform. YouTube, Netflix, you get it. A 2010 study by psychologist Amanda Vicarry, which we'll come back to,

found that women not only consume more true crime than men, So something is happening here that is specifically resonant for women. I don't think it's an accident. I think it's deeply and profoundly human. I'll explain what I mean by that. The first thing to understand is that there's a name for this pull toward dark or disturbing content.

It's not pathological. It's called morbid curiosity, which I'm sure many of you have heard of. In case you haven't, it's one of the oldest and most well documented features of the human mind. The psychologist Colton Scrivner defined morbid curiosity as the desire to learn about threatening, dangerous, or disturbing aspects of the world,

but specifically in the service of understanding and preparing for danger. Morbid curiosity is not the same as enjoying suffering. In this, the brain attempts to gather intelligence about threats that it could possibly face one day. Think about evolutionary history. For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in environments where the ability to recognize danger, such as predators,

aggression, violence, members of a tribe, it was literally the difference between life and death. The brain that paid attention to the threat that lingered on it that steadied it survived. The brains that looked away they didn't survive they died. We are the descendants of the ones who looked who paid attention.

This means that the same mechanism that makes you slow down to look at an accident on the freeway even though you feel guilty about it sometimes It's the same ancient circuitry that draws you toward a true crime documentary. It's not weakness. It's not a character flaw even. It's an evolutionary inheritance firing exactly as designed.

Scribner's research also found that people who score higher in trait morbid curiosity tend to be better at regulating fear They're not more anxious They're often less anxious Because they've pre-processed threat information Before ever encountering a real version of it True crime on some

level is the brain doing threat training That's a way to look at it My friend Shawn is a perfect example of what this looks like in real life She's been listening to My Favorite Murder for years. She even drove to Oakland to see the host perform live. But here's the thing that tells you everything.

When she hears a case on that podcast, she immediately searches for the documentary so she can see exactly what they're talking about visually. She's not consuming passively. She's investigating. And what she finds most compelling isn't the violence itself. It's the behavior that sits completely outside her own experience. Going beyond anger, acting on your darkest thoughts.

Most of us will never go there. Shawn, like all of us, can't stop looking at the people who do or who did. Professor Gina Stahlhaven, a very good friend of mine, teaches communications at Santa Rosa Junior College, has built an entire course around true crime and told me that she traces her

obsession with true crime to one single afternoon. She was in her graduate program at San Francisco State when she toured San Quentin Prison. She walked in and something shifted She became obsessed, she says, with everything she didn't know about our criminal justice system The gap between

what she assumed and what she saw in that building was so vast that she spent her career trying to close it One class, one student, one case at a time That pull you feel toward what you don't know, toward what you're not supposed to see, that's morbid curiosity operating exactly as designed.

We were built for this and for women that training serves a very specific purpose. So why women specifically? I think this is a part of the conversation that most true crime commentary skips over or handles superficially. Amanda Vicarry's research found something striking. Women are more drawn to true crime that features female victims or cases involving

domestic violence or intimate partner violence and stories where the perpetrator was known to the victim. In other words, women are most interested in the crimes that are statistically most likely to happen to them. This is a totally rational mindset. It's not coincidental. Let's think about this.

Women are taught from childhood to be aware of their physical vulnerability in a way that men, genuinely speaking, are not. We are told to walk to our cars with our keys between our fingers, not to go running after dark, or to share our location with a friend when meeting someone new.

To trust the uneasy feeling in our stomach even when we can't articulate why. We absorb a constant low frequency awareness of danger that most men are not socialized to carry. True Crime feeds directly into that awareness. It's not to frighten us further, but to educate us, I think.

When we listen to a story about how a predator selected his victim, what tactics he used to isolate them, or what the warning signs the people around him dismissed, we're not wallowing, we're studying. We are gathering information that our nervous system has spent our entire lives telling us we need. Psychologists call this safety information hypothesis.

The research supports it. It means women who consume true crime report higher awareness of Personal Safety Strategies They're more likely to recognize warning signs of coercive control in relationships and they feel a greater sense of agency around their own protection. My friend Shawn simply stated that it feels like she's researching while watching

these shows and listening to the podcasts. She sees it as protection because women are usually the victims in most scenarios. Gina said women are probably taking notes to figure out how to avoid getting murdered. It was a funny comment, dark, but it is completely true. The safety information hypothesis describes in clinical language, but never quite captures emotionally.

The vigilance women carry is not paranoia. It's a reasonable response to a world that has given us every reason to carry it And then there's my friend Angie Angie's been consuming true crime since she was a young adult At first it was books on true crime, then documentaries,

then nightly videos and reels She grew up in a community along with myself Where the crimes weren't exactly abstract. Polly Klaas was murdered in the next town over. A girl from our town was murdered and her body was dumped near a local lake right up the street from me.

For Angie, this genre was never entertainment at a safe distance. It was close. When Angie was in her 20s, she walked into a liquor store. Her friends were outside. And the attendant locked the door behind her and started pushing her toward the back of the store Thankfully she picked up a bottle,

looked him square in the eye and told him she would break every bottle in the place and use the glass on him if he didn't open that door immediately He did and she got out I asked her where she thought her response came from

She said it was a fight response that she had always had that never froze but also didn't consider it came from her knowledge of true crime conception for at least a decade but here's what the research tells us her brain didn't file a footnote when

it learns something it just learns it right and Angie has been learning every night for years I then asked her whether before that night she had ever thought about what she would do if something like that happened. Her answer was no, not before the liquor store. But afterward, she started questioning herself,

wondering if she misread the situation or whether she made too much of it. Basically, whether she was wrong. She survived a real threat using exactly the right response, but she still asked herself if she overreacted. I then asked her what she thought a man in the same situation would ever,

if he would ever question himself the way she did. She immediately said no and then added, violence simply doesn't happen to men at a rate it happens to women. So that makes me think that self-doubt isn't irrational. It's the tax women pay for having accurate instincts in a world that has spent a

lifetime telling them that their instincts are wrong. I remember I saw this Oprah episode where there was a homicide detective on it and he was talking about how when let's say you're as a woman you're in the elevator And a man gets in and the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up And

everything in you tells you caution, caution, caution But because we've been told to be polite and kind We try to ignore that Don't ignore it There's also something else happening for women in this genre that I think is equally as important But it has nothing to do with self-protection It has to do with justice

Women are disproportionately the victims in true crime stories, right? Historically, they have also been disproportionately disbelieved, dismissed, and failed by the system meant to protect them. The true crime community, largely composed of women, has become one of the most powerful forces in the modern justice landscape. The Golden State Killer

was identified in 2018 partly because of the relentless work of citizen investigation. Many of them true crime podcast listeners. Countless cold cases have been reopened because of the online communities that refuse to let victims be forgotten. For women who have spent their lives being told their fear is irrational, their instincts are wrong,

And their experiences are exaggerated True crime offers something rare Validation, community, and the belief that what happened matters And that someone is paying So now I want to talk about the dopamine suspense loop Brain chemistry There's a mechanism at work here that explains why true crime isn't just interesting,

it's compelling in a way that's hard to interrupt once it starts. When we engage in a true crime story, the brain enters what researchers call a suspense resolution cycle. Suspense triggers a release of cortisol, stress hormone, which heightens your attention and focus. The body is activated. Every detail feels significant.

You can't look away because the brain has registered an unresolved threat and it will not fully relax until that threat is resolved. When the resolution comes, maybe the arrest, the conviction, the ID, dopamine is released. This gives you relief and satisfaction. A small but real neurochemical reward is given to you for staying with the

discomfort long enough to reach the end. This cycle of tension engagement resolution finally reward is the same loop that makes narrative fiction impossible to put down. It makes gambling compelling. It makes any story with a strong narrative arc feel so satisfying to complete. True crime uses it exceptionally well because the stakes are real.

These are not fictional characters. They're real people. And that reality raises the emotional stakes in a way no drama can fully replicate. This is also why true crime that ends in unsolved cases is particularly disturbing to many listeners. That dopamine reward never arrives. The cortisol has nowhere to go.

So you're left holding that tension of the cortisol with no release. So the thread is always there, but it's never ending. Which is one reason why cold cases generate such intense audience engagement. The brain wants to finish what it started. Let's give this genre its due before we examine the cost to us.

I've already mentioned safety awareness and justice advocacy, which those are great. Phenomenal. But let's talk about empathy at scale. True crime at its best is an exercise in radical empathy. It asks us to enter the experience of a victim, maybe to imagine their fear, their confusion,

Their Trust That Was Betrayed But To Also Hold That Reality Long Enough To Actually Care About It In A Culture That Often Moves Way Too Fast And Values The Abstract Over The Personal True Crime Shows Slow Us Down They Force Us To Sit With The Weight Of A Single Human Life

Research from the University of Illinois found that people who engage regularly with narrative nonfiction, including true crime, show increased scores on measures of empathy and perspective taking. The immersion in another person's experience, even a dark one, appears to build the emotional muscle that allows us to connect more deeply with people in our real lives.

So that's a few points towards the pro column of watching True Crime True Crime has also been one of the most powerful popular forces driving criminal justice awareness in the last decade Documentaries like Making a Murderer The Jinx The Central Park Five have forced national conversations about wrongful convictions prosecutorial misconduct

And racial bias in policing Conversations that academic papers and advocacy organizations have been trying to start for years without traction True Crime gave those conversations an audience of millions My friend Gina has built an entire college course around exactly this idea Her class guides students to do a deep dive into specific cases that examine how a

victim's identity, race, class, gender, sexual identity, how it shapes what happens to their case. The students look at what gets investigated and what doesn't, who gets justice and who doesn't And at the end of her course, each student advocates for a specific policy change rooted in something they discovered.

One student for this semester in her class found that in one state, I believe it was Idaho, you can't request a change of cause of death on a death certificate unless you do it within two weeks of the original filing. That means that if someone realizes a year later that a death was actually a homicide,

they can't legally correct the record. That student is now advocating for a policy change. That's true crime doing exactly what it should do, turning fascination into action. I like that. So what about processing fear in a safe container? There is a therapeutic function to true crime.

Because it allows us to experience fear or threat and a moral complexity in a control bounded container. The danger is real, but it's not happening to us right now. We have the safety of the screen or the earbuds between ourselves and the content. This creates what psychologists call safety threat experience or a way of

metabolizing fear and building emotional resilience without real world risk. It's very hard to say. For survivors of trauma in particular, true crime can serve as a form of narrative processing, maybe as a way of approaching experiences that feel too close to examine directly. You could examine them through a story that's familiar but not exactly identical

Full disclosure this is not universally true and should not replace actual therapeutic support But the research is real for some people engagement with true crime is part of how they make sense of a world that feels unsafe My last item in the pro column of true crime watching is community Shawn sitting at

a live performance of My Favorite Murder was also surrounded by people who felt exactly the same way about it Think about that for a moment A podcast about murder became a shared experience in a room full of strangers bonded by the same fascination That's community The true crime community is one of the most active, engaged,

and connected online spaces that exist Maybe people who would have never met otherwise are bonded by shared investment in justice, truth, and the belief that victims deserve to be remembered For many people, especially those who feel isolated That community offers something real and sustaining. That gets my vote.

But now here's the part that we don't really like to talk about. The hidden cost of what true crime can actually take from us. Because the same genre that builds empathy, raises safety awareness, and creates community can also If we're not paying close attention Quietly erode things We can't afford to lose

That leads me to Anxiety and hypervigilance As many of you know I was born with a genetic bone disease That has meant a lifetime Of physical vulnerability My nervous system Has always carried A certain level of baseline Alertness It had to So I understand viscerally the difference between useful vigilance and the kind of

chronic low level fear that simply exhausts people. If you recognize that low level chronic fear, that feeling that true crime feeds anxiety more than it calms it, that's worth paying attention to. The safety information hypothesis cuts both ways. Yes, true crime increases safety awareness, but for a significant portion of the audience,

especially women who are already carrying a baseline level of threat vigilance, it can tip safety awareness into hypervigilance, a chronic state of nervous system activation that makes the world fundamentally dangerous. Research has found that heavy true crime consumers show elevated anxiety scores, increased distrust of strangers, and a distorted perception of the prevalence of violent crimes.

Those are the people that are in a chronic state of nervous system activation. But here's a fact worth sitting with. Violent crime rates in the United States have fallen significantly since the 1990s. The average true crime listener perception of personal risk has not followed that trend. Maybe it's because the content never stops.

The stories keep coming and the brain which cannot distinguish between a threat it is watching and a threat it is living can stay activated. There's also a concept in psychology called habituation. or meaning the process by which repeated exposure to a stimulus causes a decreasing response to it.

The first time you hear a story of extreme violence, it usually shocks you. The fifth time, slightly less so. The 50th time, you may find yourself eating dinner with a, I don't know, forensic pathologist describing a The specific gory details of a homicide and feel nothing at all. I hope that's never me.

My friend Angie watches true crime every single night. Fully relaxed. No sleep disruption. And by her own description, completely desensitized to the violence. As she, and she functions well. She feels no chronic anxiety from it. She's a real counterpoint to the research pattern Not every person experiences the

genre the same way How it lands in your body depends in part, I guess, of what you bring to it But here's the distinction worth making There's a difference between desensitization to the production of true crime content Such as the music, the narration, the pacing and desensitization to the reality underneath it.

I want to be careful about the second kind, the kind that makes it possible to treat a real human tragedy as background noise. The next con of watching true crime, listening to true crime is, and it kind of seems obvious, is sleep disruption. And I think we underestimate how important this is.

Study after study has found that consuming distressing content, including true crime, in the hour before we sleep, it elevates cortisol, it delays sleep onset, And increases the frequency of disturbing dreams Because true crime is specifically engineered to be bingeable The one more episode pattern that we watch with is

particularly seductive at exactly the wrong time of day I know this and yet I also know my I know this from me But I also know my friend Gina who has completely studied the psychology of this genre professionally watches these shows before bed specifically to relax and she

means it there is a real individual variation here but sleep deprivation doesn't just make you tired it impairs emotional regulation increases reactivity it reduces empathy and It increases anxiety. So in my opinion, the genre you turn to partly as a way of managing fear can, when consumed in excess at the wrong time,

I think make the fear harder to manage. For those who engage deeply and frequently with true crime content, there's also a real risk of what clinicians call secondary traumatic stress. That's the accumulation of trauma responses from repeated exposure to other people's trauma. It's the same phenomenon experienced by emergency room or emergency responders,

journalists who cover disasters and therapists who work with survivors. Symptoms can include intrusive thoughts, emotional numbing, difficulty sleeping, Increase startle responses and a pervasive sense of real dread that doesn't quite have a specific target. If you've ever found yourself unable to stop thinking about a case or feeling

fearful in situations that would not normally frighten you or maybe even carrying a sadness you can't quite trace or Secondary traumatic stress is worth considering if you are a avid true crime viewer. So let's consider for just one moment an ethical question concerning victim as content.

The people at the center of the true crimes are not characters, right? They are or were real human beings. They have families, habits, favorite foods, inside jokes, and fears of their own. Most of them did not choose to become the subject of a podcast, a docuseries, or even a Reddit thread. Their families almost certainly did not either.

There's a growing movement among crime journalists, victim advocates, and even some within the true crime community that asks a question that the genre has largely avoided. At what point does our engagement with these stories stop serving justice and start serving our entertainment at the expense of people who are still living inside the

worst thing that has ever happened to them? Gina's students wrestle with this directly. They examine how victims are framed by race, class, gender, and sexual identity. Not just in the crime themselves, but in the coverage. Which cases get told by the media? How are the victims described? Were their lives tragedy or a plot line?

That critical lens is exactly what this genre needs more of And it's striking that it's being taught in a public speaking class to students who just love true crime podcasts So win-win, they got more than they signed up for Back to Angie, who consumes more true crime than almost anyone I know Well,

maybe she and Shawn are tied She said something that surprised me After everything she's watched, she said what stays with her isn't rage at the perpetrator. It's the sorrow that she feels for the families. The people who love someone who turned out to be capable of the worst thing imaginable.

That kind of empathy extended even to the people we're not supposed to feel for. is what this genre can produce at its best, I think. Which makes the ethical question that follows all the more important. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't engage. I am arguing that engagement without reflection is a form of carelessness that this

genre or the victims and the victims' families do not deserve. So ask yourself with honesty. Am I engaging with this story because I truly care about justice or because I find the horror compelling? Both can be true simultaneously. That's the complicated reality of being human. But it's worth knowing which part is driving you.

So where does all this leave us? I'm not here to tell you to stop watching I'm not here to make you feel guilty for something that provides genuine comfort community intellectual engagement even what I'm here to do is what I always try to

do in this space I want to help you to be a little more conscious of your patterns so your patterns are working for you instead of the other way around here are questions I would encourage you to bring to your true crime habits one

Does this content leave me feeling more empowered and informed or more afraid and helpless? Both answers are valid data. Two, am I watching at times of day that support my sleep, my mood and my nervous system or am I using it as a way to avoid something I should be feeling? Three,

Do I find myself consuming this content even when I don't want to? When the pull feels more compulsive than chosen? Last one. How do I treat the victim in this story in my own mind? As a human being whose life mattered or as a narrative device in a story about someone else? Those are not gotcha questions.

They are the questions of someone who cares about both the genre and about herself. I asked you at the very beginning of this episode how you feel after the viewing or listening, not during, of a true crime episode. I hope by now you have a clearer sense of what that feeling is telling you.

And I hope you'll decide with intention what to do with it. Because that, more than any specific habit, is the work of the original self. Choosing what you let in, knowing why, and staying honest about what it costs you. I'll also offer this. If you notice that your true crime consumption is feeding anxiety rather than calming it,

consider time limiting it. Choosing content that ends in resolution rather than a cold case. Or pairing it with something that actively restores your nervous system afterward. A walk, a conversation, something that reminds your body that the immediate world around you right now is safe.

And if you find yourself carrying something from a case that you just can't put down, I don't know, a heaviness, a grief, a rage that won't resolve, honor that. That is your empathy speaking. You don't have to perform detachment to be a thoughtful consumer You just have to

know what you're holding and then decide intentionally what to do with it Next week on the Original Self Podcast I'm bringing in someone to this conversation who didn't just follow a case from her couch She got on a plane, booked a hotel, and walked into a courthouse in Idaho to sit in the room where Lori Vallow Daybell

was sentenced for murdering her own children. My friend Rhonda is going to tell us what she found when the documentary was gone and the music stopped and then it was just a room full of people and the unmediated reality of what one human did to two others who called her mom. That's part two. The Witness.

True Crime Obsession Explained. What happens when you stop watching and walk into the room? I'll see you next week. Like always, if you need to speak to me or you want to check out my website, please go to decotalifecoaching.com. Until next time stay curious stay honest and keep coming back to yourself.

Why We Say “I’m Fine” When We Are Not: The Psychology of Hiding Your True Feelings

Why We Say “I’m Fine” When We Are Not: The Psychology of Hiding Your True Feelings

Evet DeCota

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Welcome to the original self podcast. I'm Evet

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DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology

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informed life coach. I explore resilience, mindset,

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and the courage to become your authentic self.

00:00:27

This is a space for honest conversations about

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growth, identity, relationships, and all the

00:00:34

messy moments in between that shape who we become.

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Between the salon chair and coaching sessions,

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I've watched people move through life in patterns

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they never notice. Patterns that are subtle or

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familiar and often incredibly hard to see from

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the inside. Today, we're talking about the most

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automatic answer most of us give when someone

00:00:57

asks how we're doing. I'm fine, and how it rarely

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tells the truth. This episode 11, why we say

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I'm fine when we're not, the psychology of hiding

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our true feelings is coming up. In America, We

00:01:22

greet each other with, hello, how are you? And

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the expected response is supposed to be, I'm

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fine, how are you? Either way, the answer rarely

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reflects what you're truly feeling underneath

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the surface. And it's not really supposed to,

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it's just a greeting. If I had a dollar for every

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time I said I was fine when I felt angry or overwhelmed

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or possibly having a panic attack, I'd be very

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wealthy right now. But why do we do that? Of

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course most of us don't want to unload our problems

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on the cashier or a co -worker and we learn really

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quickly that people are not usually expecting

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a real answer. So the problem isn't fine in casual

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moments. It's when we go home and talk to people

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who we genuinely love or genuinely love us and

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say we're fine or we sit across from someone

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who truly cares about how we feel and the answer

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is still fine. So why do many of us walk around

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saying we're fine when we're actually anything

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but? It's not weakness. It's not dishonesty.

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I think it's something far more human than that.

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I believe I started doing it at a young age.

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Maybe starting with my bone disease. I was born

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into a body that broke easily. Sometimes from

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things other kids would have totally walked away

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from. And every time the message at home was

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exactly the same. You're fine. You'll live. Walk

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it off. Provided it wasn't my leg. So I did it.

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I did it every time. And there's something powerful

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about being told you're fine when your bones

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are literally breaking. It makes you learn at

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a very young age that your pain is not the point.

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What matters is getting up and moving on and

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not making too much of it, right? And if you

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think about it, it wasn't such a bad way of coping

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with it and not letting it define me. Because

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of this though, I learned to minimize my feelings

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at school as well. I didn't want pity. I didn't

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want to be seen as fragile or different. So I

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acted like it was no big deal and people followed

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my lead most of the time. If I didn't make a

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fuss about it, they didn't do it either. What

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I didn't realize was that I was practicing something.

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Every time I minimized my bones breaking, I was

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reinforcing the idea that my pain mattered less

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than how other people perceived me. That's heavy

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for a little kid, and so I didn't get it, right?

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Then came the teasing about brittle bones, my

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weight, about being different. And it was the

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kind of casual cruelty kids can deliver without

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anyone noticing how deeply it lands inside of

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you. I became very good at crying in private,

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pulling myself together, and walking back out

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as if nothing had happened. Eventually, it kind

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of became my template for everything. I'm fine.

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I'll live. Move on. All of this performing prepared

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me for the very big things in my life. My best

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friend dying in our twenties. It severely shut

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down my emotions because I wasn't practiced at

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grieving openly. So I carried it inside alone

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quietly. Or the man that I loved deeply who didn't

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love me enough to choose me. And I chose to deal

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with that in silence because what do you do with

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pain that big when you never learned how to say

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it out loud? The real truth is I just let the

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love go because it terrified me to be that vulnerable

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and needy. The armor that I had constructed had

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protected me for years and it also made me invisible.

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I think even to myself. And here's the hardest

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part to explain. For me, after a while, I wasn't

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performing fine any longer. I genuinely couldn't

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locate the pain. I had buried it so deeply that

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I would have told you honestly that I was okay,

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that there was nothing to talk about. That's

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what long -term fine does to someone, to someone's

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emotions and expressions. expressing their emotions.

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It doesn't just hide your feelings from other

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people, it eventually hides it from yourself.

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Before I bring my guest in for this podcast today,

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I want to say one thing briefly because I think

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it explains what you're about to hear. A sociologist

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named Irving Goffman believed that everyday life

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was kind of a performance. He called it impression

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management. He said that we all have a front

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stage the version of ourselves that we present

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to the world and Then there's a backstage who

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we actually are when no one is watching I'm fine

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is one of the most rehearsed front stage lines

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So knowing that we'll come back to the psychology

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behind that during the interview But first I

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want you to meet someone who is choosing, maybe

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for the first time in his life, to stop performing

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fine. My nephew calls me Annie because when he

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was little he missed the T in Auntie and it stuck.

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He's 17 now, an athlete, a good student, he's

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funny, he's charming, he's super good looking,

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and by most standards the kind of kid who seems

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completely fine. He's also one of the most guarded

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people I know. And I say that lovingly because

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I recognize it completely. I'm not only his Annie,

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I'm also his friend. And I know where he learned

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to perform that fine. He learned it from us.

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Two years ago my nephew lost his mom to colon

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cancer. She was my sister -in -law, my sissy.

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And in the aftermath of her death, the family

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fractured in ways that we're all still trying

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to understand. At 15 years old, my nephew was

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left carrying enormous grief inside a life that

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no longer felt stable. He saw a therapist for

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a while, but through his own admission, he spent

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most of this session avoiding what he actually

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really felt. He hated going. He called it pointless.

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He joked to me that the therapist was a forced

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friend so we started calling her FF. It was our

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own private laugh but underneath those jokes

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his emotions were far too raw to let anyone in.

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Then his first real relationship ended and something

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inside him just cracked open. For the first time

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in his life I watched my nephew Begin letting

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go of the persona that he had built up around

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all the emotions that he couldn't show anybody

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a Few weeks ago during a conversation between

00:09:32

the two of us. He asked me if he could come on

00:09:35

this podcast I said yes before he even finished

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the sentence What you're about to hear is a 17

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year old young man choosing Maybe for the first

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time in his life to stop performing fine I'm

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not here to polish it or steer it too much it's

00:09:54

just going to be his Annie and some questions

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and We're gonna let him be exactly who he is

00:10:04

So hello my little nephew Jackson when um, how's

00:10:09

it going? Hi, are you excited to do this? Yeah,

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I am pretty stoked. All right, cool so I'm gonna

00:10:15

ask you a question and When people ask you how

00:10:20

you're doing, what do you tell them typically?

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I feel like it's a pretty auto response kind

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of like robotic at this point. It's like and

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I'm fine or and I'm okay or you know if the day

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was better than it normally is it's a you know

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my day was good but it's never like I never go

00:10:36

deep into like what I actually feel because I

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feel like number one like a lot of people even

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though they say they want to listen to that I

00:10:43

feel like coming from me it's like I don't know

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I wouldn't when I ask someone that I'm not trying

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to sit there for 30 minutes and like kind of

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full listen sure sure sure sure yeah I mean you

00:10:56

don't want to like you know tell a perfect stranger

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well I've had a really bad day today right like

00:11:00

you don't really go into it right um is it ever

00:11:04

the truth when somebody says like hey how you

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doing is it ever the truth some most of the time

00:11:10

I would say it is the truth you know a lot of

00:11:12

time At the end of the day or something like

00:11:15

I am just fine like it's been a lot of ups and

00:11:17

downs throughout the day So it's like it's never

00:11:19

really one emotion But like sometimes there has

00:11:22

been some low points that I don't speak about

00:11:25

but normally if there's like a high point I bring

00:11:27

it up in conversation somehow later in the night

00:11:29

or during that so you feel comfortable with some

00:11:32

people Yeah, I mean it really depends on on who

00:11:37

like for example my last relationship like if

00:11:40

she would ask me how I was doing I would be more

00:11:44

honest, you know, there was Some i'm fine some

00:11:47

i'm okay thrown in there but you know It was

00:11:50

more if I had a rough day I tell her I had a

00:11:53

rough day, but I feel like with the parents and

00:11:56

friends It's more easy in a way to just be like,

00:12:00

you know, i'm fine and leave it at that Yeah,

00:12:02

that makes sense It is easier What you just described

00:12:06

has a name and I talked about it earlier in the

00:12:09

podcast. It's called impression management, meaning

00:12:12

it's we all have this performance version of

00:12:16

ourselves for anybody watching. So most of us

00:12:20

learn which emotions are maybe feel the safest

00:12:24

or like OK to put forward, right? We're not people

00:12:27

are not going to just judge us. So when we say

00:12:29

I'm fine, that's like one of the most rehearsed

00:12:32

lines. It's the easiest one to say. The thing

00:12:37

is, is the more we rehearse it of saying, I'm

00:12:40

fine all the time, the more it becomes automatic,

00:12:45

right? And we don't talk about our true feelings.

00:12:48

Does that make sense? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All

00:12:51

right, so before this relationship, Had you ever

00:12:55

let anyone a friend your family whatever? Had

00:12:59

you ever let anyone get very close to you? Yeah,

00:13:03

I have a you know, I kind of see him as a brother

00:13:05

at this point Like I say his name obviously,

00:13:09

but he's very close to me and he transferred

00:13:12

schools This year so that was kind of hard. But

00:13:16

you know, we still talk like he's one of my mainest

00:13:19

friends like I've had him since like honestly

00:13:23

I didn't know him at the time. It was like that

00:13:26

there's like a Kind of a like a superstition

00:13:30

is the word where it's like It's like the meeting

00:13:33

someone twice there. You meet him once They don't

00:13:35

really mean anything to you. You don't really

00:13:37

understand it You don't know them and the second

00:13:40

time you meet him you like connect and you click

00:13:43

instantaneously and that's kind of what happened

00:13:44

with us He was on my flag football team As a

00:13:48

kid and you know, I never thought I would see

00:13:50

him again then he came to our school and we kind

00:13:52

of butted heads for the first little bit while

00:13:54

he was at school and then you know, we just clicked

00:13:57

and everything went from there and you know,

00:13:59

he's been my one of my best friends ever since

00:14:01

and You know, I do think of him as like someone

00:14:05

I could tell kind of anything I want because

00:14:08

it's like without him their school would have

00:14:12

been a lot more rough sophomore freshman year

00:14:15

and You know that's kind of where The relationship

00:14:19

kind of like hurt the most is because when he

00:14:21

left She kind of filled that void in a way like

00:14:26

she made it seem like What I even made it seem

00:14:30

like she was my best friend, you know anyone

00:14:32

I could talk to at school If I was feeling okay,

00:14:36

like, you know, I could always go talk to her

00:14:38

See her on break. So it's kind of like the same

00:14:40

thing like because me and him would always walk

00:14:43

to class together And even if we didn't have

00:14:44

the same class, you know just chat the whole

00:14:46

time and you know That's kind of what we did

00:14:48

this year. So that's what it makes this one sting

00:14:50

a lot more Yeah, absolutely Well, I mean not

00:14:56

that your buddy was your first love But I mean

00:14:59

when you have a first love or like a first really

00:15:02

deep relationship it changes you like it allows

00:15:06

you to be who you really really are and Dr. Brené

00:15:12

Brown. She's like my favorite scientist. She

00:15:14

does work on vulnerability and shame she talks

00:15:19

about how We carry this quiet fear of of showing

00:15:26

people who we really are right like we just talked

00:15:28

about so we perform strength instead right and

00:15:32

there's a distinction where the strength shows

00:15:35

up as armor not resilience does that make sense

00:15:39

yeah right so like you know think about like

00:15:41

in the in the dark ages, the chain mail that

00:15:44

people wore, right? Like it totally protects

00:15:46

you. But then that chain mail becomes like a

00:15:50

skin, like an additional skin. And we just have

00:15:52

this like what you were saying to me a while

00:15:55

ago, like this persona that we keep putting out.

00:15:57

So when you are friends or you still are friends

00:16:00

with this guy, right? That kind of allows you

00:16:05

to be the person that you are. And when you were

00:16:08

with your girlfriend, it allows you To be as

00:16:13

as as truthful and who you are as as you want

00:16:16

to be. Yeah Yeah, yeah, so You've told me before

00:16:21

but you just kind of mentioned that you were

00:16:24

completely open with your ex -girlfriend You

00:16:28

know most most of the time I think Transparent

00:16:34

in a way that maybe you weren't with everybody

00:16:36

else except for your your buddy What made that

00:16:40

possible? Um, you know, it wasn't a an all -the

00:16:43

-time thing, you know, I wasn't always Transparent

00:16:46

there was a lot of times that actually I wasn't

00:16:49

Transparent just about you know life in general

00:16:51

like it'd be over the littlest things. It'd be

00:16:54

like, you know, like I Don't know how much money

00:16:58

I had or something It was just it was stuff to

00:17:00

make me seem like quote -unquote cooler and quote

00:17:02

-unquote like, you know I had this like unlimited

00:17:05

like income even though like Obviously that's

00:17:08

not true, especially as a 17 year old, but it's

00:17:10

like When I was truthful it was because it was

00:17:14

so happy that I didn't need to be that way and

00:17:19

it was like for example, like, you know, we would

00:17:22

be hanging out and it would just be me and her

00:17:24

and let's say we're going on like a an ice cream

00:17:26

run at night and it's like it's just us like

00:17:29

those are the moments where I am the most transparent

00:17:32

because it's like that's who I am like Those

00:17:36

car rides that we would have together like we're

00:17:38

just like laughing having fun singing the music

00:17:41

together like that's kind of like who I am as

00:17:43

a person like, you know and when it wasn't me

00:17:47

it was because I There's like this term that

00:17:51

younger kids use it's like nonchalant and or

00:17:54

full and I have a reputation at school that you

00:17:58

know, I'm kind of nonchalant kind of or full

00:18:00

and it's like I didn't want to ruin that perception

00:18:03

of me because I liked quote -unquote like who

00:18:05

that was and like looking back like you know

00:18:08

all I wish I did was like not be nonchalant because

00:18:11

it's like Nonchalant means that you show that

00:18:14

you don't care about anything and not caring

00:18:16

about anything is what makes people cool but

00:18:20

honestly like Not caring about stuff just makes

00:18:23

you like lame in a way because it's like you

00:18:25

don't show any passions You don't you don't show

00:18:28

any love or interest for others and people because

00:18:31

it's like you're too busy trying to put up this

00:18:34

facade that you don't care when really like you

00:18:37

probably do care. Yeah. What did you say? Or

00:18:40

oracle? Yeah, oracle. I never heard that oracle.

00:18:44

It's like, you know, you have like an aura about

00:18:45

you. Oh, oracle. OK. Yeah. I'm not quite sure

00:18:50

that's a word, but I like it. I like the phrase.

00:18:53

So when you said that you were. Like that's who

00:18:58

you are, like easy. Like that's what I got out

00:19:00

of that. You didn't say easy, but like you were

00:19:03

having fun and singing songs and things like

00:19:05

that. When you decided to put on the cool persona

00:19:11

or the auraful, I'm gonna keep using it, what

00:19:15

do you think changed? Like why did you go to

00:19:18

that? Honestly, it's kind of like, it's like

00:19:21

a lot of the, like a thing at school, like kind

00:19:24

of an escape, I would say. Because it's like

00:19:27

at school. I don't know I really don't know why

00:19:31

I would go to it and that's something i'm still

00:19:33

kind of working through and You know i'm doing

00:19:35

it a lot less like the other day. I you know

00:19:38

me my boy We're just like sitting there And I

00:19:41

realize like I don't really participate in many

00:19:43

school assemblies or the school games and i'm

00:19:45

like, you know like why is that like why am I

00:19:48

afraid to Like go down there and have fun. So

00:19:51

we just kind of like we just went down there

00:19:53

We had fun and we won it and like, you know that

00:19:56

was like way more fun than just like sitting

00:19:58

in the crowd and kind of like Making fun of the

00:20:01

people that do go up there because it's like

00:20:03

it's like yeah It's way easier to sit back and

00:20:06

like call them weird because they are going up

00:20:08

there and they're showing who they are But to

00:20:11

actually do it it's a lot more fun than you would

00:20:13

think like yeah, maybe maybe some people You

00:20:16

know like sat there and made fun of us for going

00:20:18

up there and having a good time But it's like,

00:20:20

you know who cares like I went up there and I

00:20:22

had a good time So why do I care about what they

00:20:25

think and it's like to go back to the question

00:20:28

about like Why did I put up that facade? It's

00:20:31

cuz I don't know. I just I wanted to seem Cooler

00:20:34

I wanted to seem like, you know Nothing affects

00:20:37

me. Nothing. Nothing hurts me Life's perfect,

00:20:41

you know, just that that whole that whole facade

00:20:44

I feel like a lot of people put up to this day

00:20:46

and I feel like if you can break down You know

00:20:51

your true actions and what you actually care

00:20:53

about and do those things then you'll be so much

00:20:57

happier than Putting up that facade because even

00:21:00

if I continue to put up that facade and continue

00:21:03

to act that way, you know Like yeah, I would

00:21:05

seem cool. Yeah, I would you know have these

00:21:09

friends and stuff, but it's like um I don't know.

00:21:13

I just it's it's a lot more Enjoyable to live

00:21:16

life how you actually want to live it instead

00:21:19

of you know, putting up that false front. Yeah

00:21:22

Do you think that? you put that facade up that

00:21:26

cool facade like where do you think that came

00:21:28

from or Did you also have friends that would

00:21:32

judge people for that like you learned from them?

00:21:36

Saying oh, that's lame or that's not cool. Like

00:21:39

I'm wondering where it came from. Yeah No, I

00:21:41

mean everyone has friends, you know, everyone

00:21:44

does that, you know, you know I love all my boys

00:21:46

like, you know, they're my boys for a reason

00:21:48

so I'm not gonna like diss them but you know

00:21:50

that is that is like Boy culture nowadays and

00:21:53

that happens with people that you know, I wouldn't

00:21:55

even say are in my Direct friend group. It's

00:21:58

like you just put each other down for no reason

00:22:00

I'm like and I realize that you put each other

00:22:03

down because you don't want to seem interested

00:22:07

in a thing so it's like that's where the nonchalant

00:22:09

is comes from and that's where that facade comes

00:22:11

from it's because you want to seem cool you want

00:22:14

to seem like You know, you want you want to attract

00:22:17

others by doing that when rather, you know I

00:22:22

kind of wish I had memorized the quote before

00:22:24

I came in here, but it's like there's a quote

00:22:26

That's like like stand out It's better to stand

00:22:29

alone in something you enjoy than to be a part

00:22:31

of a crowd of something you don't like and it's

00:22:33

like That's kind of exactly how it is, you know

00:22:36

I would never trade my friends for anyone else

00:22:38

because you know there my rider dies, but it's

00:22:40

like You know my friends I became into that group

00:22:44

and became very invested in that group by putting

00:22:46

others down like that's how you kind of built

00:22:48

your way up the The pyramid I would say of the

00:22:51

friend group is by you know How many jokes you

00:22:55

can get off how much you can make others laugh

00:22:57

and I feel like a lot of friend groups are like

00:22:58

that. It's like Normally the yeah the the top

00:23:02

friend like the the friend of everyone is normally

00:23:06

the friend that can make everyone laugh and like

00:23:09

make everyone have a good time and enjoy themselves

00:23:11

so it's like to be able to be like that is like

00:23:14

to be the most nonchalant to be the You know

00:23:17

the quote -unquote meanest one and it's you know,

00:23:20

it's like I did that for a while, you know, I'd

00:23:23

I'd not not Happy to admit it and not proud of

00:23:27

it. But you know definitely put others down and

00:23:30

you know definitely made little digs at people

00:23:33

all the time and it's like that's kind of like

00:23:37

I don't know that that's just it's very normalized

00:23:39

for a teenage boy and maybe I don't know about

00:23:42

anyone else but I do I can speak on teenage boys

00:23:44

and it's like that's kind of the norm is to do

00:23:46

that so you know, I do get called corny nowadays

00:23:50

because you know, I no longer do that and I After

00:23:53

these like, you know past few weeks, you know,

00:23:55

I've kind of fully changed how I act especially

00:23:58

in classes like no longer like trying to make

00:24:01

like jokes about people and kind of trying to

00:24:04

make a joke about like the the atmosphere or

00:24:07

like the situation instead of like insulting

00:24:10

someone's like not character because I would

00:24:13

never go that far, but it's like Insulting someone's

00:24:15

actions because you never know how much that's

00:24:18

gonna impact someone like speaking from example

00:24:20

I was driving one of my uh, my friends one time

00:24:24

and like a kind of older song came on and like,

00:24:28

you know It meant no harm, but I loved the song

00:24:30

and it was like he just called that like yo Like

00:24:32

what are you an unc like obviously it was just

00:24:34

a joke, but it like It made me kind of think

00:24:37

more about like what I would play in those situations,

00:24:41

like what kind of music I would play, like trying

00:24:43

to play like the the newer songs, the more underground

00:24:47

songs, because I'm trying to seem cooler. Got

00:24:49

it. Yeah. And just because he didn't like that

00:24:52

song, then then that means that you were. too

00:24:55

old school or yeah exactly enough okay got it

00:24:58

well it was probably a really good song I was

00:25:01

gonna say something to you like you were saying

00:25:03

like about going up and playing this game you

00:25:06

know at school which hopefully they got pictures

00:25:09

of because I never see pictures of you and it's

00:25:12

too it's too bad anyways Theodore Roosevelt he's

00:25:16

you know, obviously an older ex -president, but

00:25:19

he did this speech called man in the arena and

00:25:23

it's about how okay, you're in the arena, right

00:25:28

the spectators are all around you and You throw

00:25:32

your hat in and you you're like Sweating and

00:25:35

blood and and all this stuff and you're fighting

00:25:38

and you've thrown everything in there you thrown

00:25:40

caution to the wind And there's always the spectators,

00:25:45

always the naysayers that are like, oh, I could

00:25:48

do that better. Like, oh, he looks foolish for

00:25:50

doing that. But they've never had the vulnerability

00:25:55

and the courage to throw their hat in. And so

00:25:59

today, when you went up and you played that game

00:26:01

or this week when you did that, that's like straight

00:26:05

up saying, yeah, this is me. This is what I'm

00:26:08

going to do. Yeah, exactly. Ace is for you. So

00:26:13

you did do that with your ex a lot of times not

00:26:16

all the time I would say it was like a Honestly,

00:26:21

it's kind of bad to look back and admit but it

00:26:23

I feel like it is a majority of a facade and

00:26:27

less of you know kind of who I was Because I

00:26:31

felt like I needed I don't know in a way I needed

00:26:34

the facade to keep her but actually that That

00:26:38

facade and not being able to you know be in touch

00:26:41

With my emotions and being touched like why I

00:26:45

feel certain ways about things in my own opinions

00:26:48

it's like not being able to I Don't know. I don't

00:26:52

I can't remember the word for but like not being

00:26:54

able to put my true self out there is what in

00:26:57

turn, you know lost her in a way because you

00:27:01

know, I I wasn't I wasn't the man that I should

00:27:05

have been to her because she was very like loving

00:27:08

with me and I was loving back but in a way like

00:27:11

You know, I think we can maybe get into it later,

00:27:14

but you know Just there was like little stuff

00:27:17

that you know if I done it would have shown that

00:27:20

I cared a lot more instead of that That facade

00:27:23

that you know, I don't care. I'm too cool for

00:27:25

this. I'm too cool for that. It's like It's just

00:27:29

a lot of that. Yeah It's interesting When we

00:27:34

were talking before you we were talking about

00:27:37

you know you being in love and You know, like

00:27:42

I said a part of you emerges right where another

00:27:45

person sees you but it sounds to me like You

00:27:50

didn't let her see the real you a lot of the

00:27:53

time. Yeah. Yeah What's that feel like now? Oh,

00:27:57

it hurts honestly because it's like You know,

00:28:01

we've talked a few times since then it doesn't

00:28:04

it's not like a lot of people might think like

00:28:07

like high school love doesn't really mean much

00:28:09

but It did mean a lot to me and I can see that

00:28:14

by how much I've reflected and changed myself

00:28:19

over the past few weeks. Sorry, what was the

00:28:24

question again? I got lost. It's okay. I said

00:28:27

that you had the opportunity. You know for a

00:28:33

couple years to show her who you really were

00:28:36

and I'm sure you did show her but you know like

00:28:39

you You needed to put up that front and I'm wondering

00:28:43

why with her you needed to put up that front

00:28:45

I don't know I think it all stems back to the

00:28:49

you know trying to be cool because she had a

00:28:51

little brother and her little brother really

00:28:53

looked up to me So I felt like the cooler I acted

00:28:57

Around them around her and even when it was one

00:28:59

-on -one, you know, I'd still try and act like

00:29:00

that cool. Like I don't care facade Because I

00:29:04

think I was so deep into the act of it that I

00:29:08

couldn't even see that it was an act and that's

00:29:12

the biggest thing I think I'm kind of looking

00:29:15

back on right now is I Couldn't back then like,

00:29:18

you know, I didn't know that was a facade I didn't

00:29:21

know I was just trying to act like that. I just

00:29:23

acted like that and You know, I'm not saying

00:29:26

to go get your heart broken to figure it out

00:29:28

But to figure it out is really nice because you

00:29:31

know I can see Who I truly am now and you know,

00:29:35

I'm not the same guy and that doesn't mean that

00:29:38

You know, I'm gonna she's gonna run back to me

00:29:41

because I'm a changed man But it's like because

00:29:43

it's it's not for her that I changed I just realized

00:29:46

that you know, I didn't like the path that I

00:29:48

was on I didn't like who I was becoming and us

00:29:52

that doesn't have to do with you know, my friends

00:29:55

or anything that just it was kind of had to do

00:29:57

with me like Because my friends, you know, they

00:29:59

don't care that you know I'm changed now like

00:30:01

they still still hang out with me still do all

00:30:04

this You know, I'm just I'm no longer making

00:30:07

those digs anymore so that's That's the lesson,

00:30:12

huh that they still like you no matter what exactly,

00:30:15

you know, like you might think That you need

00:30:19

to put this facade up that you know, nothing

00:30:21

affects you You know, you're too cool or the

00:30:24

exact opposite like, you know Because I don't

00:30:26

know about the other end of the spectrum, but

00:30:28

there might be friend groups where it's like

00:30:30

You know you try and act overly happy about something

00:30:35

that you don't like because everyone else in

00:30:37

your group likes it so you know being your true

00:30:41

self and conflicting with your friends is more

00:30:45

important than Trying to be their they're like

00:30:48

robot because you know, no one no one wants to

00:30:51

hang out with Like it's called a yes, man. No

00:30:54

one wants to hang out with a yes, man because

00:30:56

it's like well some people do but you're never

00:30:58

gonna be close friends with a yes, man because

00:31:01

all they're ever gonna do is agree with you and

00:31:04

agree with your opinions and that's kind of the

00:31:07

thing that Kind of lacked was that I didn't like

00:31:13

when others Disagree with my opinions because

00:31:15

I didn't want to disagree with others opinions

00:31:17

and I didn't care about disagreeing with others

00:31:18

opinions It was something I was passionate about

00:31:21

but it's like I would never fully disagree with

00:31:25

like my girlfriend's opinions because I didn't

00:31:27

want to Hurt her in a way, I guess but it's like

00:31:31

when she disagreed with my opinions It was kind

00:31:34

of the same thing, but I would take it a lot

00:31:36

more to heart which is you know something we

00:31:39

can talk about later on about like why I would

00:31:41

do that, but it's It was a lot more personal

00:31:43

than I even realized like why I felt the way

00:31:46

I felt about certain things That I didn't even

00:31:49

know back then so it's like, you know everything

00:31:52

Your true self will find you like that That's

00:31:55

the end of the day thing is like you will find

00:31:58

who you're supposed to be. You know, you might

00:31:59

be 40 when you figure it out and then have a

00:32:02

midlife crisis, which you know isn't the best

00:32:05

but you know, you will Like everything takes

00:32:09

time like not trying to be like preachy but you

00:32:13

know there is a path that you're supposed to

00:32:15

be on and like a destiny and everything happens

00:32:18

for That reason and you know, I could never imagine

00:32:23

losing her Losing her but it's like that helped

00:32:27

me figure out, you know, I didn't like who I

00:32:29

was becoming I didn't like what I was doing with

00:32:32

my time because it was like a lot of my time

00:32:35

during lunch when I should have been you know

00:32:37

doing other things I was you know making fun

00:32:41

of others or you know I'm not trying to be like

00:32:43

the mean kid you know I didn't make fun of that

00:32:44

many people what it was like you know like just

00:32:46

a little insults like if someone did something

00:32:49

dumb or like tripped on the patio like we would

00:32:51

kind of make fun of that a little bit you know

00:32:52

just like as teenage boys do It surprises me

00:32:57

though because I know you as You know pretty

00:33:01

sweet and and you know, yes, we're all sarcastic

00:33:04

in our family, right? But I am surprised by that.

00:33:08

But like you said teenage boys, right and I I

00:33:11

get that I was never like never like makes it

00:33:14

worse actually it was never to their face like

00:33:16

we wouldn't it's like we would like go up and

00:33:18

point and laugh at them, but it'd be like the

00:33:20

the little snarky comments You didn't really

00:33:24

answer it, you said we'd get to it later, but

00:33:26

I am interested if you know, you may not, why

00:33:31

you felt the need to put up such a facade. I

00:33:37

mean, obviously we can kind of Freud it out a

00:33:41

second, you know, like you had a lot of stuff

00:33:43

happen in your family, right? But do you think

00:33:47

that that's a part of it? Do you think that...

00:33:50

You were doing it beforehand. Like maybe when

00:33:53

your mom got sick, like what do you think? I

00:33:56

felt like I always wanted to be Like that kid

00:34:00

I didn't want I didn't want to be you know, like

00:34:03

the the sad kid or the yeah the sad kid So I

00:34:07

felt like I always put up this this front that

00:34:10

I was, you know And I never wanted to be the

00:34:12

dumb kid either and I'm not dumb, but and I didn't

00:34:15

try Lot in my first few years of high school.

00:34:18

I just had a lot going on so you know I didn't

00:34:21

get the grades that my friends were getting even

00:34:24

though I Looking back like especially from this

00:34:27

junior year how I've been doing you know I definitely

00:34:29

could have I could have gotten amazing grades,

00:34:31

but I didn't For some reason I didn't care about

00:34:36

that and I think that had a lot to do with you

00:34:38

know my dad didn't finish college and he's one

00:34:43

of the most successful people I know, you know,

00:34:46

he does all this this like Just has a lot and

00:34:51

you know, I I look at that and i'm like I looked

00:34:53

at that and i'm like, you know, I don't need

00:34:54

to finish college either I don't you know, I

00:34:56

would I always wanted to finish college but I

00:34:58

was like, you know If he didn't need to try I

00:35:00

don't need to try and I could be just as successful

00:35:01

but it's like That's not how it works. You know,

00:35:04

i'm not trying to say that he got lucky but because

00:35:07

he worked his ass off for it, but you know It

00:35:10

does take that it does actually working for and

00:35:13

I didn't Didn't work for it and I didn't try

00:35:16

so, you know, that's kind of where that came

00:35:19

from but back to the main point it's like I Put

00:35:22

that wall up because I still wanted to seem as

00:35:26

smart as I actually was I still wanted to seem

00:35:28

like I was in par in line with everyone else

00:35:32

and So I lied a lot about you know, my grades

00:35:37

to my friends. I lied about You know how things

00:35:41

were at home just cuz you know Never wanted to

00:35:44

be the main thing when my mom got sick I didn't

00:35:48

want to be the the cancer kid and I didn't want

00:35:51

people to look at me and be like Oh his mom has

00:35:53

cancer like feel bad for him, you know feel feel

00:35:57

the certain way for him I wanted people to like

00:35:59

me For you know, not even who I was because I

00:36:02

kind of put up like a fake about who I was but

00:36:05

One of you would like see me and be like, oh

00:36:08

he's doing perfect. You know, he's He never had

00:36:12

anything wrong happen to him and you know, a

00:36:15

lot of people did think that so it it worked

00:36:18

because you know a lot of people when You know

00:36:22

just over these past few years of high school

00:36:24

and I kind of stopped putting up that front,

00:36:26

you know and like I started to know a lot more

00:36:29

people and I started become friends with people

00:36:32

that I didn't know before, you know They looked

00:36:35

at me when I would you know break down in front

00:36:37

of them not even break down But like just get

00:36:39

emotional about certain things and you know,

00:36:41

they'd be like, you know Why are you so emotional

00:36:43

about this? Like you've never had to deal with

00:36:44

that like I remember one of my one of my not

00:36:47

even their friends now but you know that we weren't

00:36:50

that close back then he was talking about you

00:36:53

know, it was a jersey number and soccer and you

00:36:57

know, I just lost my mom and she had always worn

00:37:00

number five and He took number five because he

00:37:04

was a senior and I was like I need to wear that

00:37:07

number for soccer season this year and he was

00:37:10

like You know like why like you can have it next

00:37:12

year and I was like, yeah But I kind of want

00:37:14

to wear it like it means a lot to me and he was

00:37:17

like Like what did you like get your first phone

00:37:20

when you were five or something, you know Just

00:37:21

kind of making fun of like oh my life's been

00:37:24

perfect. You know, nothing is nothing has happened

00:37:26

to me because that's that's who I Wanted to be

00:37:29

I wanted to be the kid that you know That's who

00:37:32

you projected. Yeah, I wanted to be the kid that,

00:37:34

you know, went to private schools all life. And

00:37:36

I don't even know why. I just wanted to I wanted

00:37:37

to be like the like the rich kid, I guess, like

00:37:40

the one that's never had like the nepo baby.

00:37:43

And I don't know why, but it's like and I definitely

00:37:47

am, you know, a rich kid. I'm never going to

00:37:49

say that I'm not. I'm definitely spoiled as well.

00:37:52

But I wanted to. This is true. I wanted to be

00:37:56

that kid. And it's like. You know, I had to tell

00:37:58

him I had to be like, you know, my mom wore that

00:38:00

number and he was like Like okay, like you can

00:38:04

wear it for her next year. I was like, they know

00:38:06

barely my mom passed away like I need to wear

00:38:08

that number and he was like Yo, bro, I'm so sorry.

00:38:10

Like I wouldn't I would have never guessed that

00:38:12

and it's like those are the things that you know,

00:38:15

like really just told me that you know, the facade

00:38:17

is working like keep this up keep this acting

00:38:20

because it's like Nobody knows who you truly

00:38:23

are and it's it's it's way easier that way. Okay,

00:38:26

but wait It's working you say but then when you

00:38:30

told the guy that had the number five that you

00:38:33

needed it and why? Did that feel okay? It actually

00:38:40

felt really uncomfortable, you know, I I felt

00:38:43

like There's a lot of there's like a thing called

00:38:46

trauma dumping and I feel like whenever I open

00:38:49

up That's what I feel like happens, you know,

00:38:51

even when I'm speaking to friends about you know,

00:38:53

just like You know my girlfriend or something

00:38:56

like that Like I just felt like I was trauma

00:38:59

dumping or like when I would speak about how

00:39:01

sad I was like that my family kind of drifted

00:39:04

apart and everything like that like I just felt

00:39:07

instead of Easier instead of it kind of relieving

00:39:11

some of it. I felt like I was putting a weight

00:39:15

onto them in a way that it's like Felt bad because

00:39:20

all I was doing was Yeah trauma dumping I was

00:39:24

like making them sad and making them kind of

00:39:27

quote -unquote Uncomfortable in a way because

00:39:29

you know a lot of people don't know what to say

00:39:31

back to that not not trying to like diss them

00:39:34

but it's like a lot of people wouldn't know if

00:39:36

I just went up to my boys now like obviously

00:39:39

they would know what to say but if I just went

00:39:40

up to like one of my friends and just started

00:39:43

like telling them everything, you know, they're

00:39:45

probably just gonna be like I'm so sorry and

00:39:47

I'm here for you. I feel you, you know, I'm here

00:39:50

if you need to talk which is like the most That's

00:39:52

another auto response people have is like when

00:39:54

someone is going through something It's always

00:39:58

the same three like I'm sorry I'm here for you.

00:40:02

And if you ever need anything like talk to me

00:40:05

Do you think that it made you feel worse because

00:40:08

it was such an un it was such a foreign way of

00:40:12

being to you because you had this you know that

00:40:14

chainmail right like you had been wearing it

00:40:16

for so long do you think that was part of it

00:40:20

and also when your ex was your girlfriend you

00:40:26

didn't think that you could talk to her about

00:40:29

that like let's just say that specific story

00:40:31

about the number five um you know i always talked

00:40:34

to her about it but not in a way that actually

00:40:39

helped me you know it'd be like I'd be mad or

00:40:42

when I'd be You know upset about something, you

00:40:46

know, I'd bring that up. I'd be like, you know

00:40:49

Or if I was just down, you know, I'd be like,

00:40:52

you know, my life kind of sucks right now And

00:40:54

it's like she's like, oh don't say that and then

00:40:57

I would just rattle everything off And that was

00:41:00

never was never healthy because it's like that

00:41:02

didn't help me do anything and actually made

00:41:04

it more Unhealthy in a way because it's like

00:41:08

All I would do is was try and use that to prove

00:41:11

a point instead of to like actually Get it off

00:41:15

my chest and to start healing about it. It was

00:41:17

it was to to kind of help me win that argument

00:41:22

in a way it was never an argument, but like It

00:41:25

was like the I love you more game. It's like

00:41:27

I was I was winning that in a way Between you

00:41:31

and her between me and her And it was never you

00:41:35

know, she was she was actually amazing about

00:41:38

it all like, you know She was like she didn't

00:41:40

do the auto response like, you know, I'm here

00:41:42

for you. I'm sorry It was like she would let

00:41:45

me speak about it. She'd be like like Jackson

00:41:47

like you your family is so amazing and how they

00:41:52

and how they You know kind of still kind of stick

00:41:55

together for you Even if it's not in the same

00:41:58

way it was before, you know they're still together

00:42:01

for you and it's like I never kind of realized

00:42:04

when she would say that and I would because I'd

00:42:08

be I'd be so mad I'd be so mad at them I'd be

00:42:10

so mad at everything and it's like I Should have

00:42:12

just well, there's a lot of I coulda woulda shoulda

00:42:15

so I'm not even gonna go down that path But you

00:42:18

know if I did listen to her more and if I did

00:42:22

You know kind of be more in touch with my feelings,

00:42:25

you know Most likely we'd still be together,

00:42:28

but then most likely, you know, I might not have

00:42:31

realized I didn't like the nonchalantness, so.

00:42:35

Well, yeah, I mean, coulda, shoulda, right? Like

00:42:38

I said, we don't know. It seems to me that, I

00:42:42

don't know if this is a family trait, but it's

00:42:46

easier to be in touch with an anger emotion than

00:42:50

it is, or happy, right? Than it is for sadness,

00:42:55

fear, like we don't seem to. Like those emotions

00:43:00

so much we're not so comfortable with yeah, yeah

00:43:03

No, not blaming anyone because you know, it is

00:43:07

my fault but you know for the first I don't know

00:43:12

14 years of my life the only emotion I kind of

00:43:17

really ever saw from anyone was Anger in a way

00:43:22

because you know besides when My grandma passed

00:43:28

away when people were sad. It's like That that's

00:43:33

kind of the only time I ever saw My dad be sad

00:43:39

and you know, that's It's not his fault. That's

00:43:43

not it's not my fault either. It's it's no one's

00:43:45

fault that it was like that, but it's like You

00:43:48

know, I didn't I didn't grow up and a lot of

00:43:51

boys. I feel like don't grow up learning To be

00:43:54

sad to be in touch with your emotions like that's

00:43:58

not really who I guess quote -unquote men are

00:44:01

is like to be sad, but it's like You know if

00:44:05

that had happened it, you know, I don't know

00:44:08

who I would have been today, but it's like You

00:44:12

would be a lot more in touch with sadness if

00:44:15

you're shown sadness from a young age because

00:44:17

you pick up a lot of traits From your parents

00:44:20

and you know my parents Love all of them, but

00:44:23

you know they didn't have the most healthy relationships

00:44:26

at time. There's a lot of Arguing a lot of yelling

00:44:30

a lot of bickering and a lot of digs at each

00:44:32

other and that that's kind of what I picked up

00:44:35

on instead of you know when they would Rekindle

00:44:38

and when they would be sad together and try and

00:44:41

fix things I wouldn't see that I wouldn't be

00:44:43

there for that because they would they wouldn't

00:44:44

want their kids to see that but it's like all

00:44:47

I would see is that bickering so I'm like Okay,

00:44:49

that's how I display my emotions. That's how

00:44:51

I That's how I do everything is I need to show

00:44:56

no emotion unless it's anger unless it's trying

00:44:59

to put a dig at someone else and winning that

00:45:01

argument winning that fight when it's really

00:45:03

you know, you're You know, it's just like a common

00:45:07

quote, but it's like you're never in a fight

00:45:09

With or against your partner. You're always in

00:45:13

a fight with your partner Because you got to

00:45:15

work it out together. You got to be there together.

00:45:17

You got to fix it together instead of it takes

00:45:20

two. Exactly. You know, it takes the two. Yeah,

00:45:23

because like you could you could put 100 percent

00:45:26

into a relationship, but if they're putting zero

00:45:28

percent, it's always going to be zero percent

00:45:30

no matter what you put in. If they're putting

00:45:33

in zero, then it's never going to equate to anything.

00:45:37

That's right. Do you think that you put in? Less

00:45:42

than your ex -girlfriend because you weren't

00:45:46

being the real you Did you know you weren't being

00:45:50

the real you like sometimes? I think you vacillate

00:45:53

like maybe maybe that the the real you got lost

00:45:56

under the performance you at all times Yeah,

00:45:59

honestly, I would say You know, I definitely

00:46:02

feel like she put More effort in than me a lot

00:46:07

of the time, you know No matter what it was,

00:46:10

you know if I was Upset or emotional, you know,

00:46:12

I would always be there for her. I'd always let

00:46:14

her talk. I'd always let her have her time, but

00:46:16

it's like When I would know when I would be upset

00:46:20

it would be a lot more of her trying to help

00:46:24

me But when she was upset, you know, it would

00:46:27

be a lot more of you know, why do you feel this

00:46:29

way? Like do you think never it was never like

00:46:33

a I don't know. I feel like I'm losing it but

00:46:35

it's like She just put more time and effort into

00:46:39

it than I would and I just think that was kind

00:46:41

of like our personalities You know, she would

00:46:43

always want maybe she explored of the reasons

00:46:46

why you were more upset like trying to help you

00:46:49

Solve it or figure it out where you were like,

00:46:52

well, um kind of in a way I mean, you know neither

00:46:56

of us knew and that's kind of the hardest part

00:46:59

is neither of us knew Why I would get because

00:47:02

I got upset a bunch of little things, you know,

00:47:04

it was never There was never a big argument between

00:47:07

us. It was little petty ones that would turn

00:47:09

into big arguments that would turn into little

00:47:12

stuff like kind of just like let's say one night

00:47:15

she would want to go out with her friends or

00:47:18

something like that and I would want to spend

00:47:20

time in and I felt like if she went out she was

00:47:24

choosing them over me and I felt that way because

00:47:28

you know, I didn't want to be abandoned and I

00:47:30

didn't want to be chosen over because you know,

00:47:33

no offense to my dad, but he chose Other things

00:47:40

over my sister in a way that you know kind of

00:47:43

kind of wrecked me because no matter what I did

00:47:46

no matter what I tried to do for them, you know,

00:47:49

I never brought them back together and What I

00:47:52

realized is they just needed time and they have

00:47:54

come back together. They've rekindled and that's

00:47:56

great, but it's like I kind of never never realized

00:48:01

that and never realized that you know this time

00:48:04

is actually good that we're spending apart because

00:48:07

I'm learning so much about myself and like why

00:48:11

I don't like those petty arguments and why I

00:48:14

felt like I was getting abandoned because you

00:48:16

know my mom passed away and I felt like she abandoned

00:48:19

us and you know just kind of the whole family

00:48:22

split I feel like it was abandoning you know

00:48:25

my childhood in a way so by her doing that You

00:48:29

know the most normal thing, you know Just wanting

00:48:31

to hang out with friends because when I would

00:48:33

want to hang out with friends, you know It would

00:48:34

be a oh my god have so much fun and that's always

00:48:37

what I said to her i'd be like, okay Have so

00:48:39

much fun and then i'd replay it over and over

00:48:42

and over and over again in my head To the point

00:48:45

where it became toxic and to the point where

00:48:47

I became Angry because I would come to the abandonment

00:48:51

conclusion instead of the You know jackson. She

00:48:54

needs to have space. She needs to have fun. You

00:48:57

know, we're not 70 years old married like we're

00:49:00

not doing every single thing together like she

00:49:02

needs to still find out who she is and By me

00:49:07

doing that, you know, it pushed her further and

00:49:09

further and further away every single time That

00:49:12

I would get mad because you know, it wouldn't

00:49:14

even be like just getting mad. It would be like

00:49:17

Just being an asshole in general, you know I'd

00:49:20

I'd bring up past things that you know, I didn't

00:49:23

like when when the thing would happen, you know

00:49:26

It was just it was it was honestly like to be

00:49:29

completely honest. It was when I would get like

00:49:32

that a very very toxic relationship because it

00:49:36

was it was a lot of bickering instead of trying

00:49:39

to help it and You know the worst part about

00:49:42

it is for the longest time. I just thought Jackson,

00:49:47

why are you so angry? Why are you why are you

00:49:50

why can't you control your anger? Like do you

00:49:52

need to go to anger management and? When we did

00:49:55

break up that was one of the things I said that

00:49:57

you know I might try and do is go to anger management

00:50:00

because I didn't understand why I got mad and

00:50:04

why I got So mad to the point where I couldn't

00:50:08

even see it like that's that's the worst part

00:50:11

And you know that that hurt me every time She

00:50:14

said it was like it was like I was two different

00:50:17

people, you know that that's also how I saw it

00:50:19

is There was you know, normal Jackson how I am

00:50:22

right now and then there was like this angry

00:50:25

prideful Jackson that wouldn't let go until I

00:50:30

don't know it was never even an answer that I

00:50:32

was looking for wasn't an I'm sorry because an

00:50:34

I'm sorry wouldn't do anything with it like He

00:50:37

would like poke the bear for some reason. I was

00:50:39

like I would actually get like more and more

00:50:42

defensive and 30 minutes after the argument,

00:50:45

you know, I'd completely forget about it or I'd

00:50:48

have a good time at lunch with my friends or

00:50:50

something like that and You know, I would act

00:50:53

like nothing happened and and then I would I

00:50:55

would apologize I'd be like, you know, I'm so

00:50:57

sorry for how I just acted like, you know And

00:50:59

I hated myself for it and I never let her know

00:51:02

how much I hated myself for but you know, it

00:51:05

was It was one of the things that if I could

00:51:07

cut out about myself, and you know I wouldn't

00:51:09

cut it out now because I've learned to Kind of

00:51:12

control it and be better about it, but you know

00:51:15

I would have cut that out in a heartbeat and

00:51:17

not anything else that I didn't like about myself,

00:51:20

but it's like That just made me you know in a

00:51:23

way kind of a horrible boyfriend because it was

00:51:26

it was just non -stop And it was over the littlest

00:51:30

thing so you know Jackson There's a saying that

00:51:34

hurt people hurt people, you know, and I think

00:51:38

Everything that you just said about how your

00:51:42

parents communicated how You know the bickering

00:51:46

the sarcasm the fracture of your family That

00:51:49

and and then of course the ultimate the loss

00:51:52

of your mother You're hurt, you know, and I think

00:51:57

You know, I'm not a psychologist, but I do think

00:52:01

that You acted out and unfortunately you act

00:52:06

out on the wrong person, you know Yeah, I thought

00:52:08

it was I thought it was the easiest to because

00:52:11

I felt like she would always been there So, you

00:52:13

know, well you probably trusted her in the most

00:52:15

too Yeah, you hurt you hurt the people you love

00:52:17

the most because you love them the most and it's

00:52:19

like you feel the closest to them so you feel

00:52:22

like you can take it out on them which is never

00:52:24

the right thing to do but it's like because I

00:52:28

Loved her so much. I felt like I could Take out

00:52:33

my anger in a way on on her and you know never

00:52:35

physical because I would never do that but you

00:52:38

know Let's talk about your therapist for a second

00:52:43

your FF you said you made things that you act

00:52:47

like everything was fine I think you said to

00:52:49

me like oh you just sat there and brag about

00:52:50

yourself because you know everything was fine

00:52:53

and It was interesting to me that you didn't

00:52:57

have anything to talk to her about when everything

00:53:00

was fine But was it fine um You know speaking

00:53:07

directly about therapy right now. I if I'm gonna

00:53:11

be honest I used to think therapy was a joke.

00:53:14

I thought therapy was You know something that

00:53:17

they made up You know never it never helped me

00:53:20

because I was never me inside of therapy and

00:53:23

not that was the problem is instead of you know

00:53:28

buying in to therapy All I did was push it further

00:53:32

away and I did like an ego thing in therapy where

00:53:35

I just kind of stroked my own ego and made up

00:53:38

things about myself that were completely untrue

00:53:40

and You know looking back now. That's the reason

00:53:43

therapy never worked for me is because I made

00:53:46

up things To feel better about myself to look

00:53:49

better about myself Told her I was fine told

00:53:53

her I was okay told her you know, I'm happy and

00:53:56

I'm I'm fine. I'm doing well when You know honestly

00:54:01

looking back I probably did feel fine when I

00:54:05

would say that I probably did feel okay because

00:54:08

I never It's kind of hard to say I never mourned

00:54:12

My mom in a way. I never I never sat, you know

00:54:17

There was a few nights where I feel a very strong

00:54:20

connection and miss her greatly But I never on

00:54:23

the day that she passed. I didn't cry One time,

00:54:27

you know that the time that I did cry is when

00:54:30

she sat me down and told me that she was going

00:54:34

on hospice and would no longer be here in a few

00:54:38

months and That that night I you know, I walked

00:54:42

outside and I just I just sat outside on our

00:54:45

stairs crying for an hour so Until they came

00:54:50

and got me outside because of how long I had

00:54:53

been out there they thought I had like walked

00:54:55

away because they wanted to give me my space

00:54:57

and They came outside and I just I came back

00:55:02

in and every single time I Looked at my mom.

00:55:07

It was tears. I cried profusely because I knew

00:55:11

that I Was losing my best friend. So You know

00:55:17

That was the hardest night for me and after that

00:55:20

I kind of Dug myself into anything but her because

00:55:25

I couldn't accept the fact that you know, she

00:55:28

was passing and That was kind of the hardest

00:55:31

thing to look back on is I spent a lot of time

00:55:35

with a girl that I didn't really you know, I

00:55:39

cared about her, you know, and you know, it was

00:55:42

I didn't see a long future like how I saw with

00:55:46

my Previous girlfriend. I or my like the most

00:55:50

recent girlfriend. Yeah. Yeah and I saw a long

00:55:53

future there, but I didn't see a long future

00:55:55

with my last one you know, I told myself a few

00:55:57

times like are you just doing this as a coping

00:56:00

thing and Turns out I was because looking back

00:56:04

on it all I wish I did and I think she also knew

00:56:08

it but didn't didn't know how to tell me because

00:56:12

there was a few times that she was like She was

00:56:15

like Jackson like are you sure you want to hang

00:56:18

out today? Are you sure you don't want to spend

00:56:20

time with your mom and looking back like I told

00:56:23

her no I'm fine No, she'll show because I think

00:56:25

I was in denial in a way I was like I didn't

00:56:29

want to accept that that might have been the

00:56:31

last day that might have been the last week that

00:56:33

might have been the last month I wanted to Continue

00:56:37

on like everything was fine because you know

00:56:39

she was this one of the strongest woman or strongest

00:56:42

people I've ever known She fought so hard all

00:56:47

the time and it's um, but yeah, no, I feel like

00:56:50

this was a therapy question I'm just saying like

00:56:59

why you thought you know, you could I don't even

00:57:02

remember my question It was just something about

00:57:04

oh why couldn't why couldn't I like tell what

00:57:07

was really going on? Yeah. Yes. I don't know.

00:57:09

I just feel like it was easier to To fake it

00:57:13

like fake it to your make it it was easier to

00:57:16

act like everything was fine because that would

00:57:20

mean I could stop going to therapy if I acted

00:57:25

like everything was fine it meant no more therapy

00:57:28

and I hated therapy for some reason because I

00:57:32

found it like a pointless point of time and So

00:57:36

there was there was this big thing that I always

00:57:38

bring up when I speak about how I was in old

00:57:40

therapy where I told my therapist I You know

00:57:43

played basketball every day, and I was like most

00:57:46

dedicated I was like the greatest player of all

00:57:48

time basically because you know like everyone

00:57:50

does that everyone does you know? Hypes himself

00:57:53

up, but it went to a point where you know I told

00:57:56

her I would go to the gym Six times a week when

00:57:59

you know clearly by just looking at me you could

00:58:03

tell I didn't Go to the gym six times a week

00:58:06

and that was one of the biggest things I've changed

00:58:09

over the past year now i've i've gone to the

00:58:11

gym very consistently um five to six times a

00:58:16

week for a year straight now and it's it's been

00:58:19

the most dramatic increase of happiness in my

00:58:22

life because I look forward to the gym, you know

00:58:25

a lot of people say that Takes a lot for them

00:58:28

to go to the gym for me if I don't go to the

00:58:32

gym I don't have a good day and that's it's well

00:58:34

not it not even that I still have a good day,

00:58:36

but it's like a Gym is a very happy place for

00:58:40

me. Well, I mean chemically it gets your endorphins

00:58:44

going, right? It's good for your brain, right

00:58:48

to work off stress and and any emotion that you

00:58:54

might be feeling. And then also physically you

00:58:58

feel much better, right? So I could see why that

00:59:01

happens. And what you told the therapist that

00:59:05

wasn't exactly true, you actually made it come

00:59:08

true. So I mean, yeah, maybe it was just something

00:59:11

that you really wanted to be like. Yeah, I mean,

00:59:14

I told her that's a great point is I told her

00:59:17

everything I wanted to be like. I wanted to be,

00:59:21

you know, this Perfect student. I she thought

00:59:23

I was a genius, you know, I told her I went home

00:59:27

and I studied every night and I never I never

00:59:30

said that I played video games and back then

00:59:32

that's all I did it's all I did I would go home

00:59:35

from school and You know looking back it was

00:59:39

kind of bomb activities. I'd get home from school

00:59:42

After you know a practice or something. I would

00:59:45

door -dash fast food I would play video games

00:59:50

until I could barely keep my eyes open and then

00:59:53

wake up super tired in the morning and be late

00:59:56

to school every single day for basically my whole

01:00:00

freshman year and So that was a that was a big

01:00:03

problem is I would never study I would never

01:00:06

do anything because I just thought you know middle

01:00:07

school and lower school came very easy to me

01:00:11

because I'm not trying to brag but and I do have

01:00:15

a base level of intelligence that is Quite high.

01:00:18

So it's it was way easier to You know not do

01:00:23

anything in middle school in middle school My

01:00:25

grades were almost perfect and I never studied

01:00:28

for a single test. I never had to because You

01:00:32

know, I just I picked everything up so much quicker,

01:00:34

you know I was I was one of those kids in lower

01:00:37

school that just knew how to do like everything

01:00:40

while still being good at sports while still

01:00:42

Having a good friend group. So it was like I

01:00:45

never thought I would lose that and I lost that

01:00:47

because In middle school, I didn't prepare myself

01:00:51

for high school and then when I got to high school

01:00:53

And I actually did need to study. I didn't know

01:00:55

how to study. I didn't want to study All I wanted

01:00:57

to do is keep playing my video games. So I I

01:01:01

told my therapist that you know that I would

01:01:03

study every single night and I'd cook home cooked

01:01:06

meals and I was like a Pro chef and you know,

01:01:09

i'm still not even a good chef. I know how to

01:01:10

cook like maybe ground beef and everyone knows

01:01:13

how to cook your own beef, so. Not everybody,

01:01:16

not everybody. There's a researcher named, his

01:01:20

last name is Pennebaker, and he talks about the

01:01:24

long -term emotional toll on performing fine,

01:01:31

right? The suppressed emotions cause stress.

01:01:35

They cause your health to be compromised. The

01:01:42

worst part is your sense of self over time starts

01:01:46

to fade, right? And that's kind of like what

01:01:48

we've been talking about the entire time, right?

01:01:52

So I just think it stops you. And I think it's

01:01:55

very interesting that from this breakup, it's

01:02:00

what opened the door for you to say, I don't

01:02:05

want to be like this anymore. Yeah, it showed

01:02:07

me who I actually wanted to be. You know, it

01:02:10

came in the worst way, but you know, still grateful

01:02:13

for her. You know, I actually told her thank

01:02:14

you the other day when we had a little in -person

01:02:17

convo about maybe I think two weeks now ago.

01:02:22

And I just said like, you know, I never wanted

01:02:25

to lose you, but losing you showed me who I actually

01:02:29

wanted to be. So like, thank you for that. I

01:02:33

have two questions. With you just saying that

01:02:38

when your relationship ended I'm interested to

01:02:41

know how you physically felt in your body and

01:02:45

How you feel now? Um, you know that night was

01:02:49

um, you know opening up about this it isn't easy

01:02:54

especially because you know she might see it

01:02:57

later on or like a friend might see it, but I'm

01:03:00

not trying to be corny or anything. It's like

01:03:03

that night was harder Than losing, um my mom

01:03:08

in a way because it was I lost more than Just

01:03:12

like my girlfriend and I lost my best friend.

01:03:16

I lost my companion. I lost This person that

01:03:19

you know, we built our whole Lives together for

01:03:23

all a lot of our high school life together because

01:03:25

we started very start of sophomore year and To

01:03:30

lose her at the very end of junior year, you

01:03:32

know Everyone called us like the married couple

01:03:35

of our school, you know, like the mom and dad

01:03:38

and it was like, you know I kind of saw us as

01:03:40

that too. So that night Not being able to you

01:03:45

know and the days that followed not being able

01:03:48

to text her not being able to tell her everything

01:03:50

I was doing not being able to like get an update

01:03:53

not being able to Say hi not being able to hang

01:03:56

out. You know, it was it was extremely extremely

01:04:00

hard it felt like Well, I did I felt like I lost

01:04:05

a part of myself because You know you always

01:04:08

eat when you when you're with someone because

01:04:10

we were together for almost two years when you're

01:04:12

with someone for that long You're no longer just

01:04:16

You know, you're so you're yourself. You're you're

01:04:19

together You're a lot of your identity is built

01:04:21

with them, especially when you're in your formative

01:04:24

years So, you know going to any spot listening

01:04:27

to any music that we might have listened to I

01:04:29

couldn't there was a lot of movies that we had

01:04:32

watched together and you know I started this

01:04:35

thing with um my mom and my sister where we watch

01:04:39

a movie every night now because you know I just

01:04:42

just want to have fun wanna because I felt like

01:04:44

you know that was a big thing that I also realized

01:04:47

by the relationship ending was I didn't spend

01:04:49

enough time with the people that I loved including

01:04:52

you I feel like we don't spend enough time together

01:04:55

and You know, it's just like that's something

01:04:57

I'm very regretful about because I felt like

01:05:00

me and her didn't spend that much or as much

01:05:02

time as I wanted doing things that we should

01:05:04

have done like She what we wanted to do this

01:05:07

over summer. We were gonna start where it was

01:05:09

alphabet dating So we were gonna like go to the

01:05:12

aquarium and then a bowling alley until we got

01:05:15

all the way down to Z and You know just doing

01:05:19

all that and So I was looking forward to that.

01:05:22

So just, you know, when it ended, I kind of just

01:05:25

felt like my future collapsed as well because

01:05:29

my future, everything had her in it. So it was

01:05:33

harder to let that go in a way. So that night

01:05:38

and I felt horrible sat in my room for four hours

01:05:44

almost because we stopped talking at seven and

01:05:48

I didn't stop. You know sitting in my room until

01:05:51

almost 11 o 'clock just Just crying, you know,

01:05:56

that was the longest I've ever By the end, you

01:05:59

know didn't have tears left. It was just You

01:06:03

know everything and it was it was so sad and

01:06:06

then you know that weekend Was super hard going

01:06:10

to school the next day seeing her first thing

01:06:12

one of the hardest things I've ever had to do

01:06:15

But you know, it's it's gotten better It's got

01:06:18

a lot better still hurts to see her and not be

01:06:21

able to talk to her and I'll be able to do anything

01:06:23

but it's like you know, I am moving on slowly,

01:06:27

but surely and What's that moving on feel like

01:06:32

physically in your body? What's that feel? Oh,

01:06:34

it stings Honestly, that's that's the main thing

01:06:37

is it it stings because it's you know, no matter

01:06:40

how far I've moved on it. I always get a reminder

01:06:46

of her and like um last week whenever we would

01:06:50

even have a class together i'd get weak in the

01:06:52

knees from anxiety of just seeing her just you

01:06:57

know maybe the the hope of maybe you know she'll

01:07:00

realize that night like the night before or the

01:07:03

class before that she misses me so much and then

01:07:05

you know she talked to me all class and we'd

01:07:07

rekindle but you know that that's never going

01:07:10

to happen especially not now to give that a lot

01:07:13

of time and space but it's You know that that's

01:07:16

always what it was. It was the the anxiety and

01:07:19

the hope of everything so it that that's kind

01:07:22

of gone away not fully away, but you know I'm

01:07:26

a lot less hopeful of our relationship and that's

01:07:31

actually helped me a lot more because not not

01:07:35

continuing to like Continuing to have my brain

01:07:40

think about you know, oh You're gonna get her

01:07:45

back. You're gonna get her back. It's it's now

01:07:47

moved on to the You know, how are you gonna be

01:07:50

happy? How are how are you gonna make yourself

01:07:52

happy and it's still a lot harder there's an

01:07:55

artist that we that she actually like put me

01:07:58

on to called Olivia Dean and um III every time

01:08:04

I put on Olivia Dean song. It's kind of funny.

01:08:07

I start to get teary so I haven't been able to

01:08:10

actually listen to an Olivia Dean song but the

01:08:13

other night I was at my gym lifetime and and

01:08:18

Um, they were playing an Olivia Dean song I just

01:08:20

kind of sat there because you know we had been

01:08:22

to that gym a lot, you know She loved that gym.

01:08:25

She thought I was like the best gym ever and

01:08:27

you know just hearing that song just made so

01:08:31

many memories come back and You know, honestly,

01:08:34

that's kind of what it is now is instead of a

01:08:37

painful sting. It's a happy It's a happy sting,

01:08:40

you know made all those memories together made

01:08:42

everything together and you know, maybe We might

01:08:46

not ever be together again, but it's you know

01:08:50

Everything was happy, you know that when it was

01:08:52

good You know, that was some of the greatest

01:08:55

moments that i've had in life was when When me

01:08:59

and her were extremely happy together, you know

01:09:01

It might have been like for example those late

01:09:04

night runs to get yoga fina or It's called yogurt

01:09:07

park and then like grizzly peak and just watching

01:09:10

the sunset was just like just so much fun. Yeah

01:09:13

absolutely, um the We'll have two questions the

01:09:20

alphabet dating i'm wondering what you would

01:09:22

have done for x But that's you know, you can

01:09:24

tell me that later. But anyways, um I asked you

01:09:29

how you felt because I know in your body physically

01:09:32

because I know that like first love real love

01:09:35

like like young love how about that young love

01:09:38

is almost like an addiction it it actually stimulates

01:09:44

the same reward patterns that drugs do like it

01:09:49

boosts the dopamine and so I think sometimes

01:09:53

that's why it hurts so much. Don't even think

01:09:57

that I know it it's it's actually research. There's

01:10:01

evidence of it that the word heartbreak is a

01:10:05

physical Reaction to breaking up. Yeah, so I'm

01:10:11

glad to hear that It's it's not as Devastating

01:10:15

as it was a month ago, right that it's a little

01:10:18

less. It still stings, right? We get that we

01:10:21

get that so So You know, you and I are close

01:10:29

right? We have a lot of fun together But you've

01:10:33

never spoken to me like this or maybe many people

01:10:37

you've never spoken to like this and What does

01:10:42

it feel like to finally just say all of it out

01:10:46

loud? Um, honestly, it feels a lot better than

01:10:50

it was before and for anyone listening like You

01:10:54

know, you might not have a lot of people that

01:10:55

you feel comfortable opening up with and you

01:10:58

know I didn't either even though how many like

01:11:00

so many people told me, you know Open up to me

01:11:03

whenever it's like you might not feel comfortable

01:11:05

doing that and you might not feel comfortable

01:11:07

doing anything But I'm telling you like when

01:11:10

I first Reached out to Annie and just started

01:11:13

talking about everything and I didn't feel exactly

01:11:16

comfortable opening up like that because I'd

01:11:19

never done that before but You know after the

01:11:21

first time, you know, you just it becomes more

01:11:24

comfortable. It comes, you know easier and then

01:11:27

now I catch myself opening up to like everyone

01:11:29

so I do kind of have to dial it back a little

01:11:33

bit, but it's like You know everyone if you have

01:11:37

a good friend group where you have people that

01:11:39

care and support about you They will listen and

01:11:43

I didn't I used to not think that either But

01:11:46

you know, they will be there for you. They will

01:11:48

listen to you They will hear out your problems,

01:11:50

even if they don't have an answer, you know,

01:11:52

sometimes just just talking will be great because

01:11:56

When we'd first broken up, you know, I think

01:11:58

I told Annie 25 times. How do I kid her back?

01:12:02

What do I do? What do I say? And you know Annie

01:12:04

didn't have a set answer because no one has a

01:12:06

set answer but it's like Just being able to speak

01:12:09

about that made it so much easier because it's

01:12:11

like, you know, Annie would be like I don't know

01:12:13

but you know Try breathing try doing this and

01:12:17

it helped a lot and it's like no one is ever

01:12:20

going to be My ex so they're not gonna know what

01:12:22

she wants what she's gonna say and nothing like

01:12:25

that, but it's it's a lot easier To go through

01:12:29

life with someone else by your side that you

01:12:32

know, you could talk to Then you know having

01:12:35

everything inside of my inside of your head Yeah,

01:12:39

where you can just like you talked about like

01:12:41

ruminating over and over again, you know, it's

01:12:43

that's the worst unhealthy and so Debilitating

01:12:48

I think you know super super debilitating. So

01:12:52

All right, so If you could go back Not to change

01:12:59

things change things but just to be more honest

01:13:02

and vulnerable What do you wish people had actually

01:13:07

seen? About you like that you would kept hidden.

01:13:11

I think the biggest thing that I kept hidden

01:13:14

that I wish I didn't was like my love for certain

01:13:18

things or like the ability I had to have fun

01:13:23

because um, I feel like with the nonchalantness

01:13:26

that I kind of kept it hidden like about my truth

01:13:30

the nonchalantness that made me keep myself hidden

01:13:33

was a lot of like fun like for example the assembly

01:13:37

or You know just her asking to do a lot of things

01:13:42

and me saying no because uh I don't know. I don't

01:13:47

know. I just thought they were like kind of Weird

01:13:49

to do, you know, like I wish we went on a lot

01:13:52

more of the fun dates That that's the thing that

01:13:55

I would go back and change drastically is Saying

01:14:00

yes more, you know, that's that's the biggest

01:14:04

thing think is it's the biggest life lesson I've

01:14:07

learned is to say yes more because You know saying

01:14:10

yes at the assembly made me have a blast saying

01:14:13

yes to The hangouts my friends when I would normally

01:14:16

just sit at home and play on my my video games

01:14:19

because I was like my downtime You know, but

01:14:21

saying yes actually allowed me to have more fun

01:14:25

and have Deeper connections like there was one

01:14:29

of my boys. That's like I didn't used to be as

01:14:31

close with but now i'm a lot closer with happened

01:14:34

because You know, I just started saying yes more

01:14:37

and then I started seeing him more and I started

01:14:39

like hanging out more and Now we're now i'm not

01:14:42

gonna say we're super tight But you know, we

01:14:44

talk a lot like we're we're good friends and

01:14:47

you know, like he's my boy He also just lost

01:14:50

his girlfriend. So we've been speaking through

01:14:53

that but you know, like we're we're tight Yeah,

01:14:56

like that's kind of how it started and then you

01:14:59

know, we just kind of realized that We do have

01:15:01

a lot more in common than you know, we thought

01:15:04

right right It's nice to make a new friend, you

01:15:07

know, especially one that you bond with over.

01:15:10

Yeah, and you know, we had always been Friendly

01:15:14

and you know joked around but you know now I

01:15:16

truly think of him like as a as a good friend

01:15:19

You know, I just thought of him as like, you

01:15:21

know, that's my friend, you know, like I'm boys

01:15:23

with him But like now I'm like, you know, that's

01:15:25

like actually my boy like yeah I think as we

01:15:30

come to a close on this. I think the one thing

01:15:34

that I want to say is that your realization of

01:15:40

that persona that you were putting on, that mask

01:15:45

that you were putting on, I think you're figuring

01:15:48

out why you've done it. I don't think you totally

01:15:50

know. And to be truthful with you, I don't know

01:15:54

if you'll know right now everything. I think

01:15:59

if you keep on the path of the reflection that

01:16:02

you're doing, the work that you're doing with

01:16:04

the FF, and just speaking and not being afraid

01:16:09

to be vulnerable, not being afraid to not be

01:16:12

cool, man, I don't know. I think that some of

01:16:17

your realizations are going to really help you

01:16:21

move forward through life. I'm always here for

01:16:25

you. I Mean that you know, I mean that I hope

01:16:28

you know, I mean, yeah, I hope you do. Yeah,

01:16:31

but is there anything else that you would like

01:16:36

To say about what you've learned or how you feel

01:16:41

about anything I don't know. I feel like I've

01:16:45

said a lot of my key points that I've been thinking

01:16:47

about but it's like it really is the But there's

01:16:53

this quote. It's like it's better to Leave a

01:16:58

flower and watch it bloom than it is to pick

01:17:01

the flower and watch it die and it's like it's

01:17:05

a lot easier to You know stop trying to self

01:17:10

-care and because you think you you've done it

01:17:13

all you think you know, you're that flower that's

01:17:15

super pretty but if you let yourself, you know

01:17:19

stay and Stay in the dirt and continue to work

01:17:22

on yourself It's only going to better you because

01:17:26

it's you know, there's i've never heard of anyone

01:17:29

that said self -improvement Didn't help them.

01:17:32

I've never no one's ever said, you know, I wish

01:17:35

I hadn't self -improved I wish I hadn't spent

01:17:38

more time on myself, you know, I feel like a

01:17:40

lot of people Look back and they say man. I wish

01:17:43

I spent more time with with my own thoughts.

01:17:47

I wish I Spend my time, you know bettering myself

01:17:52

instead of throwing myself into other actions

01:17:54

because it's like All anybody wants to do is

01:18:00

be that perfect person and the only way and no

01:18:03

one's ever gonna be perfect but the only way

01:18:04

that you're going to be a person that you truly

01:18:07

like is to Work on yourself enough to where you

01:18:11

don't have many insecurities and that's a big

01:18:14

thing as well as like insecurities Stop me from

01:18:17

doing a lot of things. You know, I was insecure

01:18:19

about how people thought about me I was insecure

01:18:20

about how I looked how I I always because Growing

01:18:24

up and I was an athlete in lower school and then

01:18:28

covid hit And I put on like 30 40 pounds straight

01:18:33

in my stomach It was not that much Well, I gained

01:18:37

a lot of weight and I became very skinny fat

01:18:39

and very insecure about how I looked and So getting

01:18:44

that back Kind of helped me a lot, but I realized

01:18:49

you know, it didn't help me in the best way because

01:18:52

it made me You know, I never have a huge ego

01:18:57

because I still don't think I actually have a

01:18:59

very small ego when it comes to that because

01:19:01

I still don't think I'm anywhere where I Should

01:19:03

have an ego, you know, but it's it's a lot it's

01:19:08

a lot healthier because I just feel healthier

01:19:10

at all times like a Biggest biggest thing as

01:19:14

well. Just speaking on that is like cutting soda

01:19:16

out with no soda It's been a game changer. I

01:19:19

just feel like I'm A lot happier all the time.

01:19:22

That might just be a placebo, but you know. Oh

01:19:24

no, no, it's sugar. It's addicting. Yeah, yeah,

01:19:28

absolutely. That's the next podcast. We'll talk

01:19:30

about your diet, okay? Well, when you said that

01:19:34

you're the flower in the dirt that keeps staying

01:19:37

there through the rain, through everything and

01:19:40

not getting pulled out, I just thought of a little

01:19:42

sunflower or a large sunflower, because you're

01:19:45

very tall, and just blooming. Over and over.

01:19:50

Yeah, there's there's never been a harvest without

01:19:52

a rain. So exactly. I like it. Well, you're wise.

01:19:57

Seventeen year old young man. Thank you. I really

01:19:59

appreciate you being on this and I love you so

01:20:02

much. And I'm giving him hugs now. And it was

01:20:06

it was a blast being on this and being able to,

01:20:08

you know, speak to this and I'd be so happy to

01:20:11

come back any time. I don't know what what other

01:20:12

podcasts I could do. But, you know, I love speaking

01:20:15

about my feelings now. And it's honestly been

01:20:17

a it's been a great time, you know. Thank you

01:20:20

so much. I want to sit with you for a moment

01:20:25

before we close. I think what we just heard was

01:20:31

a 17 -year -old boy doing something that took

01:20:33

me decades to approach. He told the truth. He

01:20:39

let himself be seen. Not perfectly, not without

01:20:44

hesitation, but he did it. fascinated by that

01:20:50

at just his, I think, confidence, you know, maybe

01:20:55

he doesn't think he has it. But I think that

01:20:58

took a lot to be that honest. I keep thinking

01:21:04

about what finally cracked him open. It wasn't

01:21:07

the devastating loss of his mother, although

01:21:09

I do know that that's underneath everything.

01:21:12

It wasn't even the fracture of his family, which

01:21:15

I know completely changed everything for him,

01:21:20

but I don't know, it was the girl who loved him

01:21:26

enough to tell him the truth about what she needed

01:21:29

from him and wasn't getting. And I think losing

01:21:33

her finally made him stop performing. And I hope

01:21:38

it sticks. I think we don't realize what the

01:21:43

performance cost us until you know, something

01:21:47

we love is gone. Before we recorded, I told my

01:21:52

nephew, don't be like me. Don't spend years building

01:21:56

a persona. Because you think people won't love

01:22:01

who you really are. I'm not sure I have fully

01:22:05

learned that lesson myself, but Every time I

01:22:09

have let someone see the unpolished, you know,

01:22:13

the not always fine version of me, nothing terrible

01:22:16

has happened. Nobody left. And for a moment,

01:22:22

I felt lighter. That's what exists on the other

01:22:27

side of fine. Not weakness, not burden, just

01:22:33

the quiet relief of being known. Your original

01:22:37

self the version of you That version of you that

01:22:41

existed before you learned it was safer to perform

01:22:45

than to actually be seen It's still there It's

01:22:49

just waiting for you to decide if it's worth

01:22:51

the risk worth the risk of letting someone in

01:22:56

I'm starting to believe it is and I believe that

01:23:02

you're worth the risk So I'll leave you with

01:23:05

a reflection question and that is who in your

01:23:09

life would make time for your truth But you still

01:23:14

keep giving them fine instead What would it cost

01:23:19

you to tell them one real thing this week just

01:23:23

one honest feeling Think about that think about

01:23:27

who that would be Thank you for listening to

01:23:31

the original self podcast if today's conversation

01:23:35

Resonated with you and you feel ready to explore

01:23:38

your own growth You can learn more about working

01:23:41

with me at decotalifecoaching.com I'll see

01:23:46

you next time

They Couldn’t Do It Without Us

The Psychology of Normalizing Deviance

They Couldn't Do It Without Us: The Psychology of Normalizing Deviance

The Original Self/Podcast

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in

patterns they never notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see

from the inside. Today, we're going to talk about something that I believe is one of the most

urgent and underexamined forces shaping our culture right now. This is Episode 10: They

Couldn't Do It Without Us: Normalizing Deviance.

CHAPTER 2: Opening

Think of something that would have genuinely shocked you ten years ago. Something you would have said, “No, that could never happen.” “That would never be acceptable.” “People would never allow that.”

Got it?

Now ask yourself, is it still shocking? Or have you just…adjusted, accepted?

We used to have a word for when powerful people did terrible things and faced no consequences. We called it corruption. Then we called it a scandal. Then we called it complicated. Then we stopped calling it anything at all. Somewhere between the scandal and the silence, that’s where normalization lives.

Because here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. You’ve watched the shows. You’ve followed the trials. You clicked on the stories. You shook your head, maybe said something about it to someone, and then you moved on. So did I. So did almost everyone.

And that, not the predators, not the corrupt politicians and billionaires, that is what I want to talk about today. Because they couldn’t do any of it without our willingness to eventually stop being surprised.

That adjustment, quiet, gradual, and almost invisible, is normalizing deviance. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s where we’re going today

REFLECTION

Before we go further, I want you to sit with this. Is there something happening

in the world right now that you have quietly adjusted to? Something that would

have outraged you years ago, and now just feels like background noise? Just

notice. We'll come back to this.

 END REFLECTION

CHAPTER 3: The Anatomy of Deviance

There are two ways to define sexual deviance. The sociological definition is what society

considers abnormal or immoral, and that line moves depending on the era, the culture, and who holds the power. The clinical definition draws a harder line: it refers to sexual behavior, fantasies, or urges that cause real harm to others, often without consent, or a compulsion the person cannot control. The first definition is intentionally vague. The second focuses solely on harm.

And most of what I'm going to talk about today depended on us staying stuck in the first definition long enough that nobody asked the second question: who got hurt?

In psychology, paraphilic disorders, the clinical term from the DSM-5, are only designated

when the behavior causes real harm, involves someone who didn't consent, or creates

significant distress or dysfunction. Not every unusual sexual interest qualifies. But

pedophilia and rape fall squarely in that category.

Now here is the part that connects everything. Economic deviance and sexual deviance

are not as different as we'd like to think. They grow from the same soil. Both are rooted in

power, the need to control others, to assert status, to take what feels entitled. Whether

someone is manipulating financial markets or manipulating people, the underlying

psychology is remarkably consistent: entitlement, a willingness to dehumanize, and the

belief that the rules simply do not apply to them.

Sociologist Robert Merton's Strain Theory explains that when people cannot achieve what

society tells them they should have, wealth, status, and power, some do not abandon the goal. They abandon the rules to get there. And when you layer narcissism on top of that, you get someone who genuinely believes the rules were never meant for them in the first place.

Social and political deviance is the category that makes all the others possible. Tribalism

overrides moral judgment. Motivated reasoning means we arrive at conclusions first based

on who we want to protect, and then work backward to find the evidence. And institutional

deviance, when the organizations designed to enforce accountability become the ones

providing cover, is the most insidious form of all.

I know this personally. This happened in my own childhood parish when I was sixteen. The

brothers I knew were molested by my favorite priest, a man I was in awe of, a man I

genuinely believed was spiritual. When the truth came out, the church moved him. They

didn't report him. They didn't protect those boys. They protected the institution. I watched

the people around me rationalize it because the alternative was too uncomfortable. That

was my first real education in normalization. And it taught me something I have never

forgotten: the silence of good people is just as much a part of the system as the actions of

the predator.

Albert Bandura spent his career asking how people do terrible things and still live with

themselves. His answer was moral disengagement, a set of mental mechanisms that allow

us to switch off our conscience when it becomes inconvenient. Perpetrators justify their

behavior. They diffuse responsibility. They dismiss consequences. They dehumanize

victims. But what makes Bandura's work so uncomfortable is that these mechanisms don't

only operate in perpetrators. They operate in all of us. In institutions that look the other

way. In colleagues who stay silent. In audiences who keep streaming the content, buying

the R. Kelly records, and watching the Woody Allen films even after he married Soon-Yi

Previn, his long-term girlfriend's daughter, was around twelve years old when Allen

entered her mother's life. And in voters who still cannot bring themselves to admit they

were wrong, because any other conclusion would demand they confront the cognitive

dissonance they spent years avoiding.

Moral disengagement is the engine that makes deviance sustainable for the people

committing it and for everyone around them who decides, consciously or not, that it is

easier not to know.

REFLECTION

I want you to sit with one question before we go further. Think of someone you

admire, politically, creatively, or personally. Have you ever looked the other way

at their behavior because of how much you valued what they gave you? What

did that cost the people they harmed?

END REFLECTION

CHAPTER 4: How It Becomes Normal

Diane Vaughan studied the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and found something that

had nothing to do with engineering. The engineers had seen small warning signs so many

times without catastrophe that the signs stopped feeling like warnings. The deviation

became the norm. And then one day, the shuttle exploded. Vaughan named this the

normalization of deviance.

During the incubation period, when things are going wrong, but nothing has blown up yet,

we tell ourselves everything is fine. Jeffrey Epstein operated for decades. Harvey

Weinstein produced films for decades. The banks gambled with the global economy for decades because nothing catastrophic had happened yet. Until it did. And Vaughan's key

distinction is the one that matters most: this is not about bad individuals making bad

choices. It's about systems that slowly redefine what is acceptable, until the unacceptable

becomes policy, becomes culture, becomes just the way things are.

Then there's the research that should have changed everything, and mostly didn't. In the

1980s, psychologists Linz, Donnerstein, and Penrod exposed men to films depicting sexual

violence against women over five consecutive days. With each day, anxiety decreased and

enjoyment increased. And after the five days, those same men showed measurably less

empathy toward a real rape victim in a trial reenactment than men who hadn't been through the exposure. The media they consumed changed how they saw a real woman in a real courtroom.

That is not a theory. That is a documented finding. And it points directly at what we have

been watching.

Entertainment doesn't just reflect culture. It shapes it.

365 Days, a Netflix film where a woman is kidnapped by a crime boss who gives her 365 days to fall in love with him, was one of the most-watched films of 2020. Kidnapping framed as romance. Possession framed as love. No consequences.

Game of Thrones gave us rape as a plot device so routinely that audiences began to accept it as atmosphere, consistently shot from the perpetrator's point of view, framed as his character development, not her trauma.

Or the show

Ozark, which built an entire series around making you root for a money launderer, measuring success not by whether justice is served but by whether he escapes it. That is exactly how we have been conditioned to think about financial criminals in real life.

What all of these shows have in common is that they are brilliantly made, have devoted

audiences, including me, and in every single one of them, the deviance is the draw. We

don't watch despite the darkness. We watch because of it. And that distinction matters

more than we've been willing to admit.

Journalism has a responsibility it frequently abandons. When a powerful person is

exposed, the story follows the same arc: the revelation, the statement, the think pieces,

and then the next story. The monster narrative is journalism's most reliable tool for letting

everyone else off the hook. When we frame Harvey Weinstein as a singular aberration, we

don't have to talk about everyone who knew. The monster contains the damage. The

system walks free. And the language does the rest. Misconduct instead of rape. Indiscretion instead of fraud. Inappropriate relationship instead of abuse of power. When

we reach for the softer word, we are not being careful; we are being complicit.

CHAPTER 5: The Protected Class

These are not aberrations. These are case studies in how deviance gets protected,

celebrated, and absorbed into the culture until it stops feeling like deviance at all.

R. Kelly

R. Kelly wrote Age Ain't Nothing but a Number and we made it a hit. He married Aaliyah

when she was fifteen, and he was twenty-seven, and the music industry shrugged. The

abuse was never a secret. It was hiding in plain sight inside the music, and we sang every

word. It took over a decade, a documentary, and a federal conviction in 2021 before

anyone was willing to call it what it always was: rape, kidnapping, and pedophilia.

Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby was America's Dad for thirty years. I grew up on his recorded comedy routines,

laughing hysterically with my family. I saw him twice in concert and left with sore cheeks

from smiling and laughing so hard. Along with his comedy, he lectured Black America

about pulling up their pants while he was drugging and raping women in hotel rooms. Sixty

women came forward. Sixty. He was convicted in 2018, and then a technicality set him

free. Not because he didn't do it, but because one prosecutor made a promise another

prosecutor broke. He walked out of prison in 2021 while sixty women had nowhere left to

go. That is not justice. That is the system protecting its own comfort.

Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, fled

to France before sentencing, never returned, and in 2003, the Academy gave him the

Oscar for Best Director, while the room gave him a standing ovation. If you want one

moment that captures how completely the industry normalized its own deviants, that is it.

Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein was the hub of everything. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor

and received a deal so lenient it became its own scandal, thirteen months in a county jail with work-release privileges. Then he went right back to his mansions, his private island,

and his black book. The most powerful people in the world kept taking his calls, kept flying

on his plane, kept attending his dinners, because he made himself deliberately

indispensable, financially, socially, and strategically. His network touched politicians,

billionaires, royalty, and celebrities across every party and every industry. Wealth and

access were the mechanisms of his protection. He did not operate despite these people.

He operated because of them.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was the soundtrack to my childhood. The Jackson 5 played in my house

the way air moves through a room: constantly, naturally, without question. When the

Thriller video premiered on MTV. I recorded it on VHS and played it over and over until my

brother, my best friend, and I had learned every single step of that dance. We practiced it

so many times that I heard my dad ask my mom if we were learning it for a school project.

My fourteen-year-old sassy head quickly turned toward him and, in an exasperated voice,

said, oh my god, Dad, we HAVE to learn this.

When he moonwalked during the Motown 25 special, I jumped up from the floor and tried

to do it on the spot. My brother and I practiced until we had it perfected. Michael Jackson's

music and movement were not just entertainment. They were a language. A shared

experience that connected an entire generation to something that felt genuinely magical.

Which is exactly why what came next was so devastating.

When the rumors of abuse surfaced, I did not believe them. Looking back now, I

understand exactly why. I had bought completely into the wealth and hierarchy of protected deviance. The logic was simple and seductive: someone that beloved, that gifted, that important to the culture could not possibly be capable of the abuse of children that he professed to love so dearly. The fame functioned as a character reference. The money functioned as proof of innocence. And I, like millions of others, accepted that without examining it.

It was not until 2020, when I watched Leaving Neverland, that the real horror of his

deviance came into clear view. The testimony of Wade Robson, whom I had admired as a

brilliant modern choreographer, and James Safechuck was specific, detailed, and deeply

credible. I was devastated. My childhood hero had used his fame, his money, and the very

magic that made him untouchable to gain access to children and systematically abuse them.

This particular cruelty weaponizes your love for the perpetrator against your ability to see

clearly. The more you love them, the more the system can count on you to look away. And

the more we collectively look away, the longer the abuse continues.

Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes built Theranos on a costume and a con: the turtleneck, the artificially

deepened voice, the Steve Jobs mythology. She convinced investors, hospital systems,

and Silicon Valley that her company could diagnose hundreds of diseases from a single

drop of blood. This technology didn't exist and never worked. Patients received false

results and made life-altering medical decisions based on fraudulent data. For years, she

was celebrated as the most important female entrepreneur of her generation, not despite

the fraud but because the culture was so hungry for the story she was selling that nobody

looked closely enough to see it was not true.

Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried

Bernie Madoff created the largest Ponzi scheme in history, totaling sixty-five billion dollars,

protected for decades by prestige and the assumption that someone that successful

couldn't possibly be a fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted in 2023, was the deliberately

disheveled grifter who built a crypto empire on the performance of generosity as moral

camouflage. The shield that allowed him to get away with the swindle was this: if you

appear to be giving it all away, nobody asks where it came from.

Donald Trump

And then there is Donald Trump, who did not just normalize deviance but made it a brand.

Found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case. Criminally

convicted on thirty-four counts of business fraud. Caught on tape bragging about grabbing

women without consent and called it locker-room talk, and disturbingly, many believed him.

He vilified the media as the enemy of the people while simultaneously using them as

pawns in his malignant game of narcissistic attention gluttony, understanding before

anyone else that outrage is just another form of ratings. He did not need good press. He

just needed press. And they gave it to him every single time.

Then came the payoffs. Foreign governments funneled money through Trump hotels while

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund propped up his golf courses through LIV Golf. Apple, Meta, and Amazon lined up to genuflect, writing checks, attending summits, posting

congratulations, and calling it business when it was nothing of the sort. It was tribute, the

kind you pay when you have calculated that resistance costs more than surrender. That is

not capitalism. That is a protection racket with a better press release.

He appointed three Supreme Court justices in one term who went on to dismantle fifty

years of established law, and in doing so, he did not just influence the highest court in the

land. He owns it. And the people cheering loudest were the same ones clutching their

rosaries and their Bibles and their Books of Mormon, because somewhere between the

porn star and the pussy grabbing, Donald Trump convinced Catholics, Evangelicals, and

Mormons that God had sent him. A man who has never demonstrated a single authentic

moment of spiritual conviction in his entire public life, selling salvation to people desperate enough to buy it. It is a con disguised as faith. He cynically turned every accusation into a rallying cry, every conviction into a fundraiser, every piece of evidence into a witch hunt. He did not hide it. He ran on it and won. Twice.

REFLECTION

I want to pause here. Of the people and institutions I just named, is there one

you found yourself wanting to defend or qualify? Notice that impulse. Ask

yourself where it comes from. That impulse is exactly how the protection

works.

END REFLECTION

CHAPTER 6: The Cost It Steals from Us

What does normalization of deviance actually cost us? Not abstractly or theoretically, but

the real toll.

It starts with survivors. They share something that doesn't get talked about enough: the

internal erosion that happens before anyone else even knows. There’ question that

normalization plants directly inside the victim: was it really that bad? That question is not

weakness. It is what happens when you have spent your whole life watching the culture minimize, contextualize, and excuse exactly what just happened to you. Psychologist

Jennifer Freyd called this institutional betrayal, the specific, compounding trauma that

occurs not just from the original harm but from being failed by the systems that were

supposed to protect you.

Remember the story I told you about the priest and the brothers at my parish? The church protected the institution and threw the boys to the wolves with a small payoff to their single mother, who didn’t speak English. In the meantime, they moved the predator priest to the Ozarks to probably groom more children

Martin Seligman's learned helplessness research tells us that when people repeatedly

experience that their actions have no effect, that reporting leads nowhere, that speaking up changes nothing, they stop trying. Not because they don't care, but because they have

been taught by experience that caring doesn't matter. Every protected perpetrator sends

that message to every potential survivor: this system is not for you. Stay quiet. It is safer.

The bystander effect, the well-documented phenomenon in which the presence of others

reduces individual responsibility to act, doesn't only occur in emergencies on subway

platforms. It happens at a societal scale. When an entire culture watches deviance remain

unpunished, the diffusion of responsibility becomes total. Someone else will report it.

Someone else will fix it. And no one does. Cynicism does not just make us passive. It

makes us complicit.

Then there are the children watching it all. Research on adolescent media consumption is

unambiguous: what young people consume shapes what they normalize. Children who

grow up watching deviance go unpunished internalize it as instruction for how power

works. They learn that these are the rules, and they are optional if you are the right kind of

person. And that lesson does not stay in one generation. It gets passed down through the

examples we model, the behavior we excuse, the content we consume, and the things we

choose not to name.

Hannah Arendt gave us the concept of the banality of evil: the most dangerous evil is not

dramatic or theatrical. It is bureaucratic and ordinary. It looks like a boardroom, a

courtroom, a studio lot, a church, or a House and Senate chamber. When accountability disappears long enough, people stop expecting it. The vacancy gets filled by someone who points at the wreckage, promises to clean it up, and neglects to mention they helped make the mess. That is how authoritarianism finds its opening, not through force, but through

exhaustion.

And the literal financial cost: sexual violence costs the United States an estimated 3.1

trillion dollars annually through healthcare, lost productivity, legal costs, and mental health treatment. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out an estimated 22 trillion dollars in household wealth. Families lost the homes they spent decades building. Retirements evaporated. And the people who built the machine that collapsed received bonuses. Political corruption is measurable in every school not funded, every hospital not built, every climate bill not passed.

That cost is paid by survivors, bystanders, children, and democracies. And it is not only

paid in dollars but in the eroding belief that any of it could ever change.

REFLECTION

Where in your own life have you felt the cost of looking away? Maybe you saw

something and said nothing. Maybe you stayed loyal to someone who didn't

deserve it. Maybe you consumed something you knew wasn't right and kept

going anyway. You don't have to judge what comes up. Just be honest with

yourself about it.

END REFLECTION

CHAPTER 7: Staying Clear-Eyed

So what do we do with all of this?

If this conversation ends in despair, it has failed. The entire argument is that normalization

happens gradually, quietly, and with our participation. That means we can participate in

making it abnormal again.

The first battleground is language. Words are how normalization travels, through

euphemism, through softening, through the careful selection of the least threatening way to describe something that should disturb us deeply. Misconduct is not rape. Indiscretion is not fraud. A complicated relationship is not abuse of power. Boys will be boys is not an

explanation. It is a permission slip that has been handed out for centuries. Naming things

accurately is not harsh or inflammatory. It is precise. And precision is the first act of

resistance.

The second is refusing the tribal pull. The moment you find yourself defending someone

because of their politics, their talent, or their relationship to you, stop. Ask the question you would ask if it were the other side. Accountability only works when it is applied consistently. The minute it becomes selective, it becomes worthless.

Stop outsourcing your moral judgment to institutions. Courts acquit guilty people. Studios

protect profitable people. Churches protect their brand. The Supreme Court protects its

ideology. These systems arbitrate what they can afford to admit rather than what is right.

Your own assessment of behavior does not require a verdict.

The research supports something most people do not believe: resensitization is possible.

Linz and Donnerstein proved that with sufficient distance from harmful exposure, empathy

returns. We are not permanently altered by what we have consumed. But we must make

deliberate choices about what we continue to put in front of ourselves. Critical media

consumption means asking one question before pressing play: Who is the person served when watching entertainment? If it’s not from the victim’s point of view, then watching differently is the answer.

For those with children, this is the most urgent part. Early education about power, consent,

and accountability is the single most effective intervention available. Not just the

conversation about bodies and safety, though that matters enormously, but the broader

conversation about power: who has it, how it gets abused, and what it looks like when

institutions fail to check it. Children who can identify and name deviance are significantly

less vulnerable to it.

And finally, individual moral clarity is necessary but not sufficient on its own. Accountability needs infrastructure: laws with teeth, courts that are actually independent, journalism that is actually funded and free, HR departments that answer to employees instead of shareholders, and a political culture that collectively determines the protection of power is no longer worth the price we have all been paying.

The history of every social shift tells us that normalization can be reversed. MeToo happened. The Challenger findings changed NASA. Financial regulation followed the 2008 collapse. Society eventually names what it once refused to acknowledge and holds

accountable those who were once untouchable. The incubation period always ends. The

only question that matters is how many people get hurt before it does.

REFLECTION

What is one thing you have been

calling by the wrong name? And what would it cost you to start naming it

accurately? Write these down. Bring them into a conversation you are having.

END REFLECTION

CHAPTER 8: Closing

Let me bring it home.

We started today with a question, not about the predators, not about the politicians, not

about the billionaires, but about us. About the adjustment we make, quiet, gradual, and

almost invisible, every time we decide it is easier not to know, every time we reach for the

softer word, every time we look away and tell ourselves that someone else will handle it.

That adjustment has a cost. We spent this episode accounting for it. 3.1 trillion dollars a

year in sexual violence alone. 22 trillion dollars in household wealth wiped out by

normalized financial fraud. Survivors who learned to doubt their own experience. Children

absorbing instructions about power from content we chose to put in front of them.

Institutions that traded accountability for self-preservation so many times that self-preservation became their only function.

Underneath all of it the same engine runs: entitlement, dehumanization, and the conviction that consequences belong to other people. Moral disengagement is spreading outward from the person committing the harm to everyone around them who decided, consciously or not, that it was easier not to know.

We are in an incubation period right now. The warning signs are not subtle. They are loud,

documented, and sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to look. The question is not

whether we can see them. The question is whether we are willing to stop adjusting.

Because they could not do any of it without our willingness to be entertained by it, to vote

for it, to stream it, to excuse it, to stay quiet about it, and to decide that this particular

person at this particular moment was too important, too complicated, or too powerful to

hold accountable.

That ends when we decide it ends. Not in a courtroom. Not in a headline. In the daily,

ordinary, unglamorous decision to call things what they are. To refuse the softer word. To

apply the same standard regardless of whose side someone is on. To teach our children

that power is not the same as permission.

Leaving the field to the people counting on our silence is a cost none of us can afford.

If this episode stirred something in you, I would love to continue that conversation.

Coaching is where this kind of work gets to go deeper, where you take the awareness and

turn it into something real. You can find me at decotalifecoaching.com. I genuinely love this work, and I would love to work with you.

If you like to read a more detailed version of this podcast, go to either Substack or decotalifecoaching.com for the blog version named The Quiet Permission: How Normalizing Deviance is Costing Us Everything.

Thank you for being here with me today. I'll see you next time.

The Original Self Podcast | Episode 10 | DeCota Life Coaching | decotalifecoaching.com

That's just how the world works.

It sounds like wisdom. It isn't.

It's the moment we cross from bystander to participant. The moment cynicism stops being a reaction and becomes a choice.

And we make that choice more often than we want to admit.

Cynicism doesn't just make us passive. It makes us complicit.

Why You Feel Disconnected from Your Life and How to Come Back to It

Episode 9: Why You Feel Disconnected from Your Life and How to Come Back to It

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I’ve watched people move through life in patterns they never notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside. Today, we’re going to talk about something many people experience but rarely name. This is Episode 9: Why You Feel Disconnected from Your Life and How to Come Back to It.

Hi, and welcome back. I’m really glad you’re here because I think what we are going to talk about today is something a lot of people have been carrying for a long time without quite knowing what to call it.

Let me start off with a feeling. Not a dramatic one, but a subtle one. The feeling that everything in your life looks fine, and still doesn’t feel right. From the outside, and sometimes even from the inside, things are objectively okay. You have a job, or a relationship, or a functional routine. You’re not in crisis. You’re not falling apart, yet something is off. Something is missing. There is this low, steady feeling underneath everything that you can’t quite name, and because you can’t name it, you tend to dismiss it.

You tell yourself you are just tired, or that you are overthinking. Or that other people have real problems, and you should be grateful for what you have. And so, you keep going. You keep showing up. And the feeling stays.

That’s what I want to talk about, that feeling. Because I think it’s one of the most misunderstood and underestimated experiences a person can have. It sneaks in slowly, sometimes over years, and it tends to live right in the gap between the life you are living and the life that actually feels like you.

As I said, you are functioning, but functioning and living are not the same thing, and somewhere inside you, you already know that.

── REFLECTION ──

Before we go any further, sit with this for a moment.

Is there an area of your life right now where things look fine but do not feel right? You do not have to know why yet. Just notice whether that feeling is familiar to you.

── END REFLECTION ──

THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND IT:

So, what is actually happening when we feel this way? Where does this disconnection come from? We know and feel that it doesn’t just appear.

What I’m describing is what psychologists call identity performance, sometimes known as identity work. Sociologist Erving Goffman explored this idea extensively in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, arguing that we are all essentially performers, continuously managing the impression we give others depending on the social situation we encounter. He called it impression management. What he was describing was not manipulation. It was survival. And it starts far earlier than most of us realize.

Let me break down the three drivers of identity performance.

Adaptation is the automatic reshaping of who we are to fit our environment. When a child’s environment doesn’t support authentic expression, the child builds a version of themselves designed to comply with expectations. That compliant version is not who they are. It’s who they learned to be. And the longer it goes unnamed, the more it begins to feel like the real thing.

Approval is the reward that reinforces the adaptation. Psychologist Carl Rogers introduced the concept of conditions of worth, which is the idea that we learn very early that love and acceptance are not unconditional. They come with terms. Every time you adjusted yourself and received warmth, inclusion, or praise in return, your brain logged that. Do more of that. Be more of that. Those doing the approving are often completely unaware they are doing it at all. But the pattern it creates is powerful and lasting.

Safety is the deepest driver of the three. When belonging feels like a survival need, and in childhood, it genuinely is, anything that threatens belonging can feel dangerous. Showing a part of yourself that might be rejected doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. To a young nervous system, it can feel like a genuine threat. John Bowlby’s attachment theory explains why: children are biologically wired to stay close to their caregivers, and anything that risks that bond triggers a fear response. So, you learned to keep certain things hidden, not because they were wrong, but because keeping them hidden felt safe.

Think about what you learned as a child, not from what people told you explicitly, but from what you observed and what you experienced. You most likely learned what earned approval. You learned what made the adults in your life comfortable or uncomfortable. You learned which parts of yourself were welcomed and which were inconvenient, too loud, too sensitive, too much, or not enough. Children are wired for attachment and belonging. It’s a survival need at early stages of development. So you adapted.

What matters most is that the adaptation wasn’t a flaw. It was your nervous system doing what it was designed to do, automatically and below your awareness, to keep you safe and connected to the people you depended on. The performing, the shaping, the adjusting, all of it made sense at the time. It served a real and important purpose.

The problem isn’t that we learned to adapt. It’s that most of us never received the message that it was okay to stop. We adapted so thoroughly, and for so long, that the performed version of ourselves started to feel like the real one. And the original version, the one underneath all of that adaptation, started to feel foreign. Strange. Difficult to access.

I have felt this way a few times in my life. It always came from trying to fit in with people I admired. I overlooked their negative traits, gradually absorbed them, and, without realizing it, drifted away from my core values. I couldn’t fully see how much I had changed. I became less tolerant of others, less kind, and increasingly annoyed and sarcastic, amusing my friends with a quick, toxic wit that was pointed outward at others. 

I have lived my entire life in Marin, a very affluent county known for its money, beauty, and its famous residents. The reason they move here is that the locals don’t care, or at least appear not to care, who you are. Acknowledging a celebrity is considered gauche or beneath us, with many of my transplanted clients commenting on how hard it is to make friends here, and on the distinct aura of indifference we carry.

I once read in our local magazine that the way we speak here is dubbed Marin Speak by outsiders. Marin Speak is a tone conveying that nothing is a big deal, nothing bothers us, and nothing can touch us. It’s sarcastic, slightly dismissive, and I can slip into it in seconds. It is genuinely second nature for me. But because I know I can speak and act this way, I catch myself more quickly now and pull myself out of it.

There is also something important happening at the level of the nervous system; our brains have a very strong preference for the familiar. Not because familiar is good, but because familiar is known, and the nervous system treats the known as safe. So even when the role you are playing is exhausting, even when the identity you are performing no longer fits who you are, your nervous system is still pulling you back toward it. It’s what you know. It’s what has worked. It’s the path your system learned to walk.

This is why change can feel so threatening even when you genuinely want it. It’s not weakness, it’s biology. And understanding that can take a remarkable amount of pressure off yourself.

So, before we move forward, I want to pause here for a moment:

── REFLECTION ──

Think back to the environment you grew up in. What did you learn was acceptable to show? What did you learn was safer to hide? And how much of what you learned then is still shaping how you show up now?

── END REFLECTION ──

WHAT PERFORMING ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE:

Let’s get specific to help us recognize ourselves clearly in our performance.

Performing is built into the ordinary choices of an ordinary day, and once you start to see it, you will see it in many places.

It looks like saying yes when everything inside you is saying no. Not because you want to help, not because it aligns with your values, but because saying no feels dangerous. Saying no might mean disappointing someone, being seen as difficult, or losing approval that you depend on. So, if you say yes and follow through, some part of you resents it because you didn’t tell the truth. A perfect example of this in my life is saying yes to an event I don’t want to attend, because I don’t want to disappoint the person asking. I think I’m annoyed with them for asking, persuading, or trying to guilt me into going, but I’m really just disappointed with myself for not being able to say no.

Performing looks like choosing what makes sense over what feels true. You make the practical decision, the logical one, the one you can defend and explain. You justify yourself to other people, but the thing that actually calls to you gets set aside because it’s too risky or too uncertain, or too hard to explain. And over time, you stop asking what feels true and you only ask what makes sense, and the distance between those two questions becomes the distance between you and yourself.

It also looks like being liked but not known. Having a full calendar and people who genuinely care about you, and still feeling profoundly alone, because the person they like is not quite the whole person. You have shown them the version that is easy to be around, the version that is agreeable and steady. The uncomplicated version, while the parts of you that really are complicated or raw have never quite made it to the surface. People love you, and you know they love you, and it still doesn’t land the way it should, because what they love is a curated version of who you are.

I have seen this so many times in the hair salon. Stylists who say ‘it’s showtime’ before greeting a client are doing exactly this. And maybe that’s not just performance for its own sake. Maybe it’s a protection against emotional drain. Certain clients and coworkers can deplete you.  A persona becomes a safeguard against that.

Performing can also look like living a life that works but doesn’t land. A respectable job, a comfortable home, a stable relationship, a functioning routine, and this persistent, nagging feeling that none of it fully belongs to you. Like you are living someone else’s version of a good life. Like you followed all the right steps and arrived somewhere you didn’t intend to go.

None of these things is a failure. They are patterns. Patterns that made sense once, and that you have never had permission or language to examine.

Before we go any further, I want to invite you to turn this inward:

── REFLECTION ──

Which of those patterns showed up for you just now? Where in your life are you choosing familiar over true? Who are the people who like you for a version of yourself that isn’t the whole truth?

── END REFLECTION ──

THE COST OF DISCONNECTION:

The cost of disconnection is where the stakes become real.

There’s a cost when we perform instead of live, when we spend years and sometimes decades playing a role that doesn’t fully belong to us. That cost doesn’t always look the way you might expect. Rather than feeling dramatic, it feels more like slow erosion or a gradual dimming.

The first thing that tends to go is a kind of low-grade dissatisfaction. Not happiness exactly, though that matters too, but the deeper sense that what you are doing means something to you. That you are in it. That you chose it. Psychologists Deci and Ryan, who developed Self-Determination Theory, identified autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three human psychological needs for well-being.  When we perform and live inauthentically, autonomy is the one most quietly violated. And when autonomy is chronically suppressed, the result is not acute misery but something subtler, and in some ways harder to address: A persistent flatness, a hollowness at the center of a life that otherwise looks fine. It’s the heaviness you can’t explain or the emptiness that settles in at the end of a day that was objectively okay.

I have witnessed this many times in people who don’t feel that enough is enough. They buy something, big or small, something they’ve always thought they wanted, and the thrill fades almost immediately. The flatness returns, sometimes within hours. It becomes so normal to fill their life with things that they barely notice the pattern. It seems like they are filling their lives with anything and everything except themselves. And because it looks like living, because there is always something new to want, or get, or plan for, the cause of the heaviness stays invisible.

The second cost is emotional numbness, or its opposite, a restlessness you can’t quite locate or satisfy. Physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté has spent decades studying what happens when we learn early in life that certain emotions are unsafe to express. Over time, that suppression doesn’t just affect our inner lives. It disconnects us from our bodies, our instincts, and our ability to feel fully present in our own experiences. We can go numb. Joy doesn’t land the way it used to. Things that should matter feel distant. Others feel the exact opposite: a persistent undercurrent of anxiety or agitation, a sense that something is wrong even when they can’t point to what it is. Both responses are the self signaling that something is out of alignment.

Next is what I think is the most honest and least talked-about symptom of a performed life. It’s not rage or bitterness, but a low, steady, barely acknowledged resentment toward your own life. Toward the obligations you agreed to. Toward the expectations you have spent so long working to meet. Toward the choices that seemed right at the time, but have slowly become a kind of cage. Carl Rogers, who founded humanistic psychology and whose work on conditions of worth I touched on earlier, spent years documenting exactly this, and his conclusion was direct: When love and acceptance come with conditions attached, and we spend years meeting those conditions at the expense of our own truth, resentment is not a character flaw. It’s what happens when the self has been overridden for too long without acknowledgment. And because it feels ungrateful or unfair to admit, most people push it down. They don’t examine it; they carry it.

And finally, there is the experience I believe to be the most disorienting of all, the feeling of watching your own life from the outside. Like you are present for it, you show up, go through the right motions, but you are not quite in it. It’s called depersonalization and feels like there’s a glass panel between you and your own experience. It exists on a spectrum, and the mild, chronic version is well-documented in people experiencing identity suppression. No crisis needed, just a long enough time spent being someone other than yourself. And that feeling, more than anything else, is what brings people into my coaching practice. Not the big catastrophes, but this sense of removal from their own story.

I want to stop here and give you a chance to sit with what performing does to your well-being.

── REFLECTION ──

Which of these costs resonates most for you right now: the flatness, the numbness, the restlessness, the subtle resentment, or that feeling of watching from a distance? Just name it. Without judgment. That naming is already something.

── END REFLECTION ──

THE TURNING POINT:

Here is what I want you to know about the moment when people start to wake up to this pattern, because it rarely looks the way we think it will.

We tend to imagine that the realization will come as a breakdown, a crisis, a moment of rock bottom so undeniable that the only way forward is a total reinvention. And for some people, something like that does happen. But for most people, it’s slower. It is more like a persistent whisper that gradually becomes too loud to ignore.

Carl Jung wrote about what he called individuation, the lifelong process of separating the authentic self from the persona, a Latin word meaning mask. It’s the version of ourselves that we construct for the world to see. He believed that the moments that begin this process are rarely thunderclaps of clarity. They are more often small, slightly bewildering instances of noticing that something no longer fits. It might arrive in the middle of a perfectly ordinary day, driving to work, washing dishes, sitting in a meeting, where you catch yourself and think: why doesn't this feel like me? Not with any fanfare. Just a muted recognition that the life you are living feels designed for someone else.

Or it might come through exhaustion. Not physical exhaustion, although that can be part of it, but the deep tiredness of performing. Of maintaining. Of showing up as the version of yourself everyone expects, while the version of yourself that is true stays waiting, unexpressed, in the background.

Sometimes it arrives through envy. You hear about someone's life or someone's choice, and you feel a pull you cannot quite explain. Not because you want their specific life, but because something in their story touched something in yours. Therapist Hillary McBride reframes envy in a way I find genuinely useful: she describes it not as a flaw or something to be ashamed of, but as the self pointing toward something it wants yet hasn’t permitted itself to pursue. In other words, envy is not really about the other person at all. It is self-knowledge in disguise.

These moments are not breakdowns. They are not failures. They’re your original self, asking to be included. They are awareness catching up to something that has been true for a long time.

And the most important thing I want you to hear about that moment is this: it is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something is finally, slowly, going right.

── REFLECTION ──

Have you had one of those moments recently? A brief instance where something inside you said: This does not feel like me? What was happening when it came? And what did you do with that feeling afterward?

── END REFLECTION ──

THE REFRAME:

Here is something I see constantly in my practice: people take this awareness and immediately use it as evidence against themselves.

If you have recognized yourself in any of what I have described today, the performing, the disconnection, the quiet cost of it, there is a very good chance that some part of your mind has already translated that recognition into something like: I have wasted so much time, or I should have known this sooner, or I’ve made so many wrong choices — I want to gently but very directly say: that is not the lesson.

What you were doing wasn’t failure. It was adaptation. As I said earlier, adaptation is intelligence, and it’s what kept you connected, kept you safe, and kept you functional during the years when you did not yet have the language, the distance, or the support to do anything differently. You were not sleepwalking. You were surviving. And that is an important distinction.

What is happening now, this awareness, this noticing, this discomfort that brought you to an episode called why you feel disconnected from your life, that is not a verdict on who you have been. It is an invitation into who you can be. Awareness is not an accusation. It is a beginning.

There is something I come back to again and again in my coaching work, and it is this: you cannot change what you cannot see. The performance worked precisely because it was invisible, to you as much as to anyone else. It was just the water you were swimming in. It was just life. And the moment you begin to see it, really see it, you gain something you did not have before. You gain a choice. And choice, even a small one, even an imperfect one, is where change begins.

So, if you are sitting with this today and feeling the weight of it, I want you to hold alongside that weight the fact that you are here. You are paying attention. And paying attention to your own life is one of the most courageous and most consequential things you can do.

Pause here, and ask yourself:

── REFLECTION ──

What would it mean for you to interpret this awareness not as evidence of failure but as the very beginning of something? What becomes possible if you choose to start from there?

── END REFLECTION ──

A GENTLE SHIFT TOWARD ALIGNMENT:

So, what do you actually do with all of this? I never want to leave you in a place of awareness without also giving you something real to carry into your week. The steps I’ll offer are not a dramatic overhaul. It is not a list of sweeping changes you need to make immediately. They consist of small, honest steps.

The first step is beginning to notice where you are performing. Not to judge it. Not to fix it immediately. Just to notice. Start to pay attention to the moments when you say yes, and you mean no. The moments when you choose what looks right over what feels true. The moments when you edit yourself before you speak, when you manage the impression rather than offer the reality. You do not need to change all of those moments right away. Just start seeing them, because seeing them is what makes a choice possible where there wasn’t one before.

The second step is to ask yourself a question. It’s a simple one that I have given to many clients, and one that continues to reveal a great deal. The question is this: is this true for me, or is it just familiar? Ask it when you are about to make a decision, when you are about to respond a certain way, when you feel pulled in a direction you cannot fully explain. Ask if this is true for me — does it reflect something I actually value, something I actually want, something that genuinely aligns with who I am? Or is it just familiar — the path I have always taken, the role I have always played, the answer I have always given, not because it’s mine but because it is known.

The difference between those two questions is the difference between a performed life and a lived one. And you will not always be able to answer it clearly right away. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not know yet. And that is a valid and important answer, because I do not know yet is the first truly honest thing you can say.

The third step, and the one I want you to sit with the longest, is to permit yourself to start very small. Alignment starts in the small moments. One honest conversation. One boundary that actually reflects what you need. One moment where you let someone see a slightly more real version of who you are. Those moments accumulate, and over time, they become the path back to your original self.

── REFLECTION ──

What is one small, honest shift you could make this week? Not something enormous. Not a life overhaul. Just one moment where you choose what is true over what is familiar. What would that look like for you?

── END REFLECTION ──

I want to leave you with a mindset shift that hopefully stays with you.

The disconnection you have been feeling is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Nor is it ingratitude, weakness, or confusion. It’s your original self letting you know that it’s been waiting. That it has been patient. Underneath all of the adapting and adjusting and performing, it’s still intact and very much alive.

The performing was never who you were. It’s what you learned. And everything learned can also be unlearned. Not all at once, and not without discomfort, but in the slow, steady, honest way that real change always happens. One true thing at a time.

You do not have to blow up your life to come back to yourself. Sometimes it starts with something you almost miss. Sometimes it starts with noticing where you stopped being in it.

And if today was the day you started to notice, then something significant has already begun.

If anything in this episode stirred something in you, I would love to continue that conversation. Coaching is where this kind of work gets to dig deeper, where you get to take the noticing and turn it into something real and lasting. You can find me at decotalifecoaching.com. I genuinely love what I do, and I would love to work with you.

Thank you for being here. I will see you next week.

Are You Self-Aware or Self-Absorbed?The Truth About Why We See Ourselves the Way We Do

Are You Self-Aware or Self-Absorbed? The Truth About Why We See Ourselves the Way We Do

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

(00:00:00):

Welcome to the Original Self Podcast.

(00:00:02):

I'm Evet DeCota,

(00:00:04):

the owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology informed life coach who explores

(00:00:09):

resilience,

(00:00:10):

mindset,

(00:00:11):

and the courage to become your authentic self.

(00:00:15):

This is a space for honest conversations about growth,

(00:00:19):

identity,

(00:00:20):

relationships,

(00:00:21):

and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

(00:00:26):

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions,

(00:00:30):

I've watched people move through life in patterns they never notice.

(00:00:35):

I've also, for the record, recognized some of those patterns in myself.

(00:00:40):

In this episode,

(00:00:41):

we're going to talk about the difference between two ways of moving through the

(00:00:45):

world.

(00:00:47):

One that keeps you stuck inside yourself and the one that sets you free.

(00:00:52):

Today, we'll discuss

(00:00:54):

Are you self-aware or self-absorbed?

(00:00:57):

The truth about why we see ourselves the way we do.

(00:01:13):

Today's topic gets mistaken for narcissism constantly.

(00:01:19):

So I want to clear that up right now.

(00:01:21):

Narcissism

(00:01:23):

is a diagnosable personality disorder.

(00:01:26):

It is pathological.

(00:01:28):

The narcissist rarely changes even with medication and therapy because real change

(00:01:36):

requires something most narcissists do not have and that is the genuine desire to

(00:01:41):

look inward and do the hard work.

(00:01:45):

So now that we got that clear, what's the difference between self-absorption and self-awareness?

(00:01:52):

I'll tell you but first I want to tell you about a conversation that I eavesdropped

(00:01:56):

on recently.

(00:01:59):

My nephew Jackson loves to play golf and during his spring break I told him that he

(00:02:06):

should play golf in the town that I live in and then I would rent a golf cart and

(00:02:11):

drive him around.

(00:02:13):

That's a win for both of us because he gets to be chauffeured for 18 holes and I

(00:02:18):

get to spend five hours with a teenager

(00:02:21):

That's usually too busy for his auntie.

(00:02:25):

So as he was warming up at the, I don't know, driving range?

(00:02:29):

I don't know the terminology, but something like that.

(00:02:32):

He was practicing.

(00:02:33):

There was a cart parked next to me with four guys maybe in their 40s just standing

(00:02:38):

around talking.

(00:02:40):

They were talking about making money and their stock market investments.

(00:02:45):

One of the men was speaking about his brother and how he had apparently hit it big

(00:02:51):

in the tech industry.

(00:02:53):

Although he made millions,

(00:02:55):

he was an addict and spent all of his money on alcohol and cocaine,

(00:03:00):

which landed him in a rehab in Los Angeles.

(00:03:04):

Apparently after some relapses and additional rehabs,

(00:03:09):

this brother took his sobriety seriously and began working at the rehab.

(00:03:16):

He then with the head counselor opened up their own wellness spa rehab for the mega

(00:03:25):

wealthy and that made his brother millions of dollars again.

(00:03:31):

The other men were like super impressed by this comeback story and one asked a

(00:03:37):

pretty pertinent question about how the addicts behavior affected the rest of the

(00:03:43):

family.

(00:03:45):

The brother answered that it definitely did and that they all had to go to the

(00:03:50):

rehab when he was in rehab a bunch of times and talk about how it affected them,

(00:03:55):

their emotions around it,

(00:03:57):

etc.

(00:03:59):

Another man in the Forsen piped in and said he thought therapy was very good for

(00:04:05):

women but that men didn't need it so much.

(00:04:10):

That's when my superpower hearing became

(00:04:14):

as amplified as Jamie Summer's bionic ear for real.

(00:04:19):

As their conversation continued from there,

(00:04:22):

they all admitted to having had some therapy at some point in their lives and how

(00:04:28):

much they got out of it.

(00:04:31):

As I saw my nephew heading back towards me, I kept thinking, were they self-absorbed?

(00:04:38):

Were they just completely self-unaware or both?

(00:04:42):

And then I wondered, did they even know the difference?

(00:04:46):

So before we can answer my question of are we self-aware or self-absorbed and can

(00:04:52):

we see ourselves as one way or the other,

(00:04:55):

we need to know what we're talking about.

(00:04:57):

So I'd like to define these phrases.

(00:05:02):

Psychology defines self-absorption as an excessive preoccupation with one's own

(00:05:08):

thoughts,

(00:05:09):

feelings,

(00:05:10):

and experiences.

(00:05:12):

It's not classified as a disorder, but as a pattern.

(00:05:18):

Often learned and often protective.

(00:05:22):

The self-absorbed person isn't necessarily selfish.

(00:05:27):

They're just often stuck within themselves without the tools to get out.

(00:05:34):

It could be temporary.

(00:05:37):

Yet stress and anxiety can also trigger self-absorption

(00:05:42):

and even maybe so deeply ingrain that it's a way of moving through the world that

(00:05:49):

they've adapted to.

(00:05:51):

Self-absorption in practice is includes conversations that consistently come back to them.

(00:06:01):

They struggle to ask you about yourself and actually mean it.

(00:06:06):

They might present

(00:06:10):

with difficulty sitting with your emotions or pain without bringing it back to

(00:06:16):

their own experience of emotions and pain.

(00:06:20):

It's a lack of impulse control or they react before they observe what's really

(00:06:26):

going on in front of them.

(00:06:28):

They also have a hard time laughing at themselves because there's no distance from

(00:06:34):

the ego to laugh from.

(00:06:38):

The opposite on the spectrum is self-awareness.

(00:06:42):

Self-awareness is the ability to see yourself clearly and objectively through reflection.

(00:06:50):

It involves knowing your own values or emotions,

(00:06:55):

your strengths,

(00:06:56):

weaknesses and how all of those drive your behavior.

(00:07:02):

Psychologists split self-awareness into two types, internal

(00:07:09):

which is knowing yourself from the inside and external self-awareness which is how

(00:07:15):

others experience you self-awareness in practice looks like catching yourself in a

(00:07:24):

pattern before it takes completely over or admitting when you're wrong and not

(00:07:31):

falling apart when the error is pointed out to you it looks like

(00:07:37):

Taking responsibility without self punishment or really long bouts of rumination.

(00:07:45):

I could have done it this way.

(00:07:46):

Why did I say that?

(00:07:48):

They must think this or that of me.

(00:07:50):

It is awareness of your effect on the room or the ability to laugh at yourself

(00:07:57):

because if you have that,

(00:07:59):

that means it requires distance from the ego.

(00:08:02):

In the short conversation that I heard

(00:08:07):

from the golf guys.

(00:08:09):

I noticed especially when they said that therapy was better for women and not men

(00:08:14):

and then proceeded to talk about their own time spent in therapy and how it helped.

(00:08:19):

I definitely noticed that maybe they didn't practice self-awareness.

(00:08:25):

The paradox between the two is very interesting.

(00:08:30):

Self-absorbed people are constantly looking inward but never actually seeing themselves.

(00:08:37):

they're drowning in self however the self-aware person does observe the self they

(00:08:45):

are stepping outside themselves enough to watch what's happening so looking inward

(00:08:52):

then isn't the same thing as self-awareness if you think about it one acts submerge

(00:09:02):

the other acts as a witness

(00:09:06):

I don't know,

(00:09:07):

maybe that's why self-absorbed people are simultaneously hyper-focused on

(00:09:13):

themselves and unaware of their effects on others.

(00:09:19):

There's no distance or observer position so they can't see themselves in the room.

(00:09:26):

That observation drives me down multiple question street.

(00:09:31):

Are self-awareness and self-absorption

(00:09:37):

Is it caused by nature versus nurture?

(00:09:41):

I think that nature includes narcissistic tendencies or other personality disorders

(00:09:48):

that are present from the beginning of people's lives.

(00:09:52):

But nurture is maybe where behavior at the opposite ends of the spectrum such as

(00:09:58):

neglect and overindulgence can produce the same results.

(00:10:04):

Like the kid that's ignored versus the kid given a trophy for showing up.

(00:10:10):

Both can end up self-absorbed just for different reasons.

(00:10:16):

One operates from I deserve this and the other one from I'm terrified there won't

(00:10:22):

be enough for me.

(00:10:24):

I can often hear someone's origin story and how they speak to me.

(00:10:30):

The ignored often have to prove how great they are

(00:10:34):

At the expense of monopolizing a conversation never pausing long enough to allow a

(00:10:41):

back and forth question and answer session or giving off vibes of anxiety and

(00:10:47):

restlessness.

(00:10:48):

I've seen this many times where the overindulged are only waiting for you to finish

(00:10:54):

a sentence so they can launch into everything about them.

(00:10:59):

They might not even comment on anything you say or just completely ignore your

(00:11:03):

contribution to the conversation Maybe it's a superiority or inferiority complex

(00:11:12):

That's a piece of self-absorption The psychologist Alfred Adler introduced these

(00:11:18):

complexes and he described them as extreme and distorted ways of seeing oneself

(00:11:28):

It's often developed to a response to childhood experiences or social anxiety or

(00:11:36):

even a deep fear of failure.

(00:11:40):

Both are actually the same defense mechanism just pointed in opposite directions.

(00:11:48):

The person who thinks they're better than everyone and the person who thinks

(00:11:52):

they're less than are both obsessed with comparison.

(00:11:57):

Yet neither see others clearly.

(00:12:02):

In an article published in Psychology Today,

(00:12:04):

the UK-based contemplative psychologist Dr.

(00:12:09):

William Van Gordon discussed ontological addiction theory developed with Edo

(00:12:16):

Shonin.

(00:12:19):

This theory argues that even people with inferiority complexes

(00:12:23):

can be as self-absorbed as someone with a superiority complex.

(00:12:30):

The addiction is to your own sense of importance,

(00:12:35):

to the belief that you exist at the center of the world separate from everyone

(00:12:39):

else.

(00:12:41):

The separation is where there's the problem.

(00:12:44):

That's where the problem lives because nothing exists in isolation, right?

(00:12:50):

There is an interconnection between

(00:12:55):

And everything and everyone around us.

(00:12:57):

But the more we lose sight of that, the more distorted and smaller our world becomes.

(00:13:08):

So basically, self-absorption is just ego with nowhere to go but inward.

(00:13:16):

Before we go further, I want to leave you with something to sit with.

(00:13:22):

I ask you,

(00:13:23):

Are you the person who walks away from a conversation thinking about what the other

(00:13:28):

person said?

(00:13:30):

Or are you the person who walks away thinking about what you said?

(00:13:36):

During one of my conversations with my friend Angie,

(00:13:40):

we talked about can you change what you can't see?

(00:13:46):

And for me the question I keep coming back to is can a self-absorbed person

(00:13:52):

actually become self-aware?

(00:13:55):

I believe they can but with one important exception and that's the narcissist.

(00:14:01):

The narcissist cannot do that.

(00:14:04):

Remember that's a disorder and a different conversation but for everyone else I

(00:14:10):

think change is possible.

(00:14:12):

Here's what I've observed both in coaching and in life.

(00:14:17):

The self-absorbed person usually doesn't change gradually.

(00:14:22):

I think it's something that breaks them open.

(00:14:25):

A relationship ends or they lose something or someone significant.

(00:14:32):

It's a crisis of some kind that forces a crack in the wall.

(00:14:38):

But here's what's interesting.

(00:14:40):

Two people can experience

(00:14:43):

The exact same crisis and go in completely opposite directions.

(00:14:48):

One could wake up, the other one doubles down and goes further into themselves.

(00:14:55):

But what makes the difference?

(00:14:58):

Narcissism, depression, unbroken behavior patterns, those will keep the walls up.

(00:15:06):

These are the things that keep self-absorbed people

(00:15:10):

Continually searching for outward excuses rather than inward inside themselves for answers.

(00:15:22):

In a previous episode, I introduced locus of control.

(00:15:28):

It's developed by an American psychologist in the 50s named Julian Rotter.

(00:15:33):

Simply put, do you believe you're in control of your own life?

(00:15:39):

Or do you believe

(00:15:40):

Life Happens To You.

(00:15:42):

There are two types of locus of control, internal and external.

(00:15:49):

An internal locus of control means you take responsibility for your outcome.

(00:15:57):

You believe your actions matter and you work toward change when something doesn't work for you.

(00:16:04):

An external locus of control means you attribute

(00:16:10):

Outcomes to luck or circumstances or other people.

(00:16:14):

Therefore, you're less likely to change.

(00:16:18):

So here's where it connects to our conversation.

(00:16:23):

Self-awareness almost always lives on the internal side.

(00:16:27):

The self-aware person believes they have agency.

(00:16:30):

They can look at their own patterns to take responsibility without falling apart.

(00:16:38):

And

(00:16:39):

Then make different choices.

(00:16:41):

That's internal locus of control in action.

(00:16:46):

Self absorption tends to live on the external side.

(00:16:51):

Not always, but often.

(00:16:54):

Because if everything that happens to you is someone else's fault,

(00:16:58):

or just bad luck,

(00:17:01):

there's no reason to look inward.

(00:17:03):

There's nothing to examine.

(00:17:06):

And you stay stuck in the same pattern because you don't believe you have the power

(00:17:12):

to change it anyway,

(00:17:13):

right?

(00:17:15):

Interestingly,

(00:17:17):

one of the clearest outward signs when someone falls on that continuum is impulse

(00:17:23):

control.

(00:17:24):

The self-absorbed person who reacts without thinking isn't necessarily doing it consciously.

(00:17:32):

They may genuinely not believe they could have done otherwise.

(00:17:38):

They say things like, that's just how I am or you made me do that.

(00:17:43):

I couldn't help it.

(00:17:45):

That's the external locus of control speaking.

(00:17:51):

Because impulse control, it requires a pause.

(00:17:56):

That pause is only possible if you believe your response is a choice.

(00:18:02):

The self aware person isn't necessarily more disciplined by nature.

(00:18:09):

They've just internalized one belief that changes everything.

(00:18:15):

The space between feeling triggered and their response is their own.

(00:18:23):

That's the space where self awareness lives.

(00:18:28):

There's something Rotter himself noted about gender which I find very interesting

(00:18:34):

Some studies suggest men tend toward an internal locus of control and women toward

(00:18:41):

an external one which makes sense because given the conditioning of women to put

(00:18:48):

everyone else first when you spend your whole life considering or responding to

(00:18:54):

what other people's needs are

(00:18:56):

You can lose the belief that your choices drive your life.

(00:19:03):

I witness this many times with clients telling me stories of feeling stuck and

(00:19:08):

unable to leave bad situations or relationships.

(00:19:13):

They name the circumstances that keep them stationary and fail to realize that no

(00:19:19):

matter how difficult the situation is,

(00:19:22):

they are actually the change agent.

(00:19:25):

So with all that said,

(00:19:29):

locus of control might actually be the mechanism underneath all of it,

(00:19:34):

the thing that determines whether self-awareness is even possible.

(00:19:39):

If that's true,

(00:19:41):

then the first step towards self-awareness isn't insight,

(00:19:45):

it's actually ownership.

(00:19:48):

Two researchers named Ferdi Botha and Sarah Dahman conducted

(00:19:54):

A large-scale Australian study where they found that people with an internal locus

(00:20:01):

of control consistently reported greater self-control better physical and mental

(00:20:08):

health and a higher life satisfaction they also found that an internal locus of

(00:20:16):

control doesn't just correlate with better outcomes it amplifies them

(00:20:23):

In other words,

(00:20:24):

believing you have agency over your life makes the work you do on yourself more

(00:20:32):

effective.

(00:20:34):

The belief and the behavior reinforce each other,

(00:20:38):

which means developing self-awareness isn't just a mental exercise.

(00:20:43):

It has a real measurable consequences for your life and

(00:20:50):

It's attainable if the desire to change is truly genuine.

(00:20:57):

Before we move on, here's another question worth thinking about.

(00:21:02):

When something in your life isn't working, where does your mind go first?

(00:21:08):

Is it to what you could do differently or to everything and everyone outside of you

(00:21:13):

that's to blame?

(00:21:16):

One of the places self-awareness is often tested is how we respond to other people

(00:21:22):

specifically whether we can tell the difference between something that's genuinely

(00:21:29):

about us and something that we're just making about us.

(00:21:37):

I think taking things personally is actually its own form of self-absorption.

(00:21:44):

There's research to back it up

(00:21:46):

People with low self-esteem are considerably more likely to take things personally,

(00:21:52):

interpreting neutral or even constructive feedback as a personal attack.

(00:21:59):

So the person who takes everything personally isn't necessarily thin-skinned,

(00:22:06):

they're just operating from a wound that they haven't yet examined.

(00:22:12):

Behavioral health therapist Ken Alexander

(00:22:15):

says that the minute you begin to personalize these types of behaviors, you're in trouble.

(00:22:21):

He says it sets you up to be manipulated in some way, shape or form.

(00:22:28):

He says that self-absorption disguises itself as sensitivity.

(00:22:34):

That's interesting.

(00:22:36):

Also worth noting,

(00:22:38):

research on self-absorption highlighted in Psychology Today magazine by

(00:22:43):

psychologist Leon Seltzer

(00:22:47):

found that self-absorption undermines our capacity for empathy and a true

(00:22:55):

understanding of others.

(00:22:58):

It's extremely difficult to appreciate the world outside ourselves when we direct

(00:23:04):

most of our focus inward.

(00:23:08):

We have to ask ourselves, is this about me or is it about them?

(00:23:14):

And then patiently, key word,

(00:23:17):

Wait for the answer.

(00:23:21):

Every morning my friend Angie and I have what we call our daily therapy sessions.

(00:23:29):

Though it costs a lot less and the laughs are way better than a true therapy session.

(00:23:35):

It usually starts with a well-placed meme or reel that captures our exact views on

(00:23:42):

various subjects.

(00:23:44):

And then we get on the phone before work

(00:23:47):

And unpack whatever's on our mind.

(00:23:50):

We each swap stories or offer a reframe to the mindset we are currently holding.

(00:23:58):

Whatever's bothering us,

(00:24:00):

whatever happened,

(00:24:02):

whatever we're carrying,

(00:24:03):

we name it,

(00:24:04):

we examine it,

(00:24:05):

and then we figure out what's ours to own and what isn't.

(00:24:11):

And then we laugh.

(00:24:15):

We laugh not because everything's funny because we know that ruminating over our

(00:24:23):

problem unnecessarily is destructive to our well-being.

(00:24:28):

When we bring levity to something that's bothering one of us,

(00:24:34):

it creates or feels like there's more room to breathe.

(00:24:40):

There's room to have maybe a different perspective.

(00:24:43):

Like I said, that reframe.

(00:24:46):

Laughter creates distance from the ego.

(00:24:50):

And distance is exactly what self-awareness requires.

(00:24:56):

Seltzer also talks about how all rumination is not the same.

(00:25:01):

The two kinds of rumination are productive,

(00:25:05):

which is where you actually work through a problem and fix it.

(00:25:10):

And there's also maladaptive rumination,

(00:25:14):

Where you just continually cycle through the same thoughts with no resolution.

(00:25:20):

That second kind is where self-absorption lives and also where depression and anxiety grows.

(00:25:26):

Think about this.

(00:25:28):

The depressed person ruminates about the past.

(00:25:32):

Where the anxious person ruminates about the future.

(00:25:36):

The both of them are stuck in the same loop.

(00:25:41):

They compare themselves unfavorably to others,

(00:25:45):

catastrophize,

(00:25:47):

avoid anything that feels risky,

(00:25:50):

and make their problems feel bigger and less solvable than they actually are.

(00:25:58):

I read research from psychologist Edward Watkins at a university in England,

(00:26:05):

and he points to two ways out of this loop.

(00:26:11):

He suggests that first you get concrete and specific about what's bothering you

(00:26:18):

because if it's abstract,

(00:26:20):

evaluative thinking keeps you stuck in that loop.

(00:26:25):

Second,

(00:26:27):

develop self-compassion because the relentless self-criticism underneath the

(00:26:35):

rumination is what keeps it going.

(00:26:38):

So let's take our daily laugh therapy sessions.

(00:26:42):

My friend Angie and I, having those sessions helps us process and move on.

(00:26:50):

It offers concrete, compassionate alternatives to rumination.

(00:26:56):

And that at its core is what self-awareness looks like in practice.

(00:27:02):

So let's bring this home.

(00:27:04):

If you recognize yourself anywhere in what we talked about today,

(00:27:08):

Whether you're the person who's been moving through life unaware of your patterns,

(00:27:14):

or the person who has been quietly absorbing the weight of someone else's,

(00:27:19):

just hear this,

(00:27:20):

awareness is not a verdict.

(00:27:23):

It's a starting point.

(00:27:25):

The thing is, is that self-absorption is not a character flaw you're born with.

(00:27:31):

It's a pattern that you develop for a reason.

(00:27:34):

And patterns, unlike personality disorders,

(00:27:38):

They can change, but only if you can see them.

(00:27:43):

Only if you believe you have the power to do something more about them.

(00:27:50):

That's the work, not the grand gesture, not the dramatic breakthrough.

(00:27:55):

It's the daily practice of asking yourself honest questions and being willing to

(00:28:02):

sit with the answers.

(00:28:04):

It's the pause before the reaction.

(00:28:07):

The Laugh Instead Of The Spiral The Morning Phone Call That Costs Nothing But Has

(00:28:17):

The Ability To Change Everything I Think Self Awareness Is Not A Destination It's A

(00:28:24):

Discipline And The Good News Is You Don't Have To Do It Perfectly You Just Have To

(00:28:30):

Keep Doing It I'll Leave You With One Final Thought To Take Into Your Week

(00:28:38):

I want you to notice one moment where you feel yourself react to criticism,

(00:28:45):

a comment or to disruptive behavior that gets under your skin or to a situation

(00:28:52):

that stings.

(00:28:54):

Before you respond, ask yourself these questions.

(00:29:01):

Is this actually about me?

(00:29:03):

What am I assuming about this situation?

(00:29:07):

That May Not Be True Am I Making This About Me?

(00:29:14):

Just Notice You Don't Have To Fix Anything Just Notice If You Want To Explore What

(00:29:21):

Patterns Have Been Quietly Running In The Background Of Your Life And What Might Be

(00:29:26):

Possible On The Other Side Of Them I Would Love To Talk You Can Find Me At

(00:29:32):

decotalifecoaching.com I Offer Individual Coaching

(00:29:38):

And I genuinely love this work Thank you for being with me today This one took some

(00:29:45):

living to put together I hope what we talked about stays with you It makes you a

(00:29:51):

little more curious about yourself And maybe a little less hard on yourself for

(00:29:57):

what you find Have a great day

Toxic Positivity vs. Real Resilience: Why Hope Without Action Is a Trap

Toxic Positivity vs. Real Resilience: Why Hope Without Action Is a Trap

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

Hi, welcome to the Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching, and I am a psychology-informed life coach who explores resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth or identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've learned a lot about the phrases we reach for when someone else's pain makes us uncomfortable. I have also, for the record, said most of these phrases myself. In this episode, we're going to talk about why they hurt more than they help.

So let's discuss toxic positivity versus real resilience and why hope without action is a trap. I'm going to say a few phrases that I want you to listen to and also pay attention to how your body feels when you hear these phrases. These are phrases that people say to you like when you're expressing difficult

emotions or you're telling a story of something crazy that happened to you. And I will give you a warning. Some of them might make your eye twitch, which I feel is the right response. So, okay, here they are. Here's the first one. That can't be true. Or you're too sensitive. It's never happened to me.

You shouldn't think like that. Side note, who loves a shouldn't? Raise your hand. Look on the bright side. Just be positive. At least you have fill in the blank that invalidates your feelings the most. Or, ha, you think that's bad? My experience was way worse. Or everything happens for a reason. The last one, you're fine.

If you just felt your jaw clench, congratulations, you're totally human. You've heard these. You've probably said them. I know I have. And I think no one's getting out of this episode clean. Today, I'd like to sit with what those phrases actually do to us. Because on the surface, I think they sound kind. They sound like encouragement.

Or they sound like someone's trying to help or support you. But underneath it, I think there's a very clear, specific message. That message is, your feelings are making me feel uncomfortable, and I'd like you to stop having them. At the core of that is what it's called toxic positivity.

What we'll look at today is the difference between the toxic positivity and real resilience. We'll also look at why hope without action becomes one of the most seductive traps we fall into. I'd like to share how I learned the difference the hard way and it involved the people I love the most. This one gets personal.

It needs to be. I don't think you can understand toxic positivity from just a definition. I think you understand it from the moments that cost you and I something. So I'm going to start with defining what toxic positivity is because I think the

word toxic gets thrown around a lot and it can feel like we're labeling every kind word as some kind of emotional assault. But that's not what I'm talking about. Positivity that is toxic is the belief that no matter how difficult or painful a situation is, people should maintain a positive mindset.

It's the reflex to skip over real emotions and jump straight to the feeling of fine. You see it everywhere on the coffee mug that claims good vibes only. Which, by the way, I think is a very bold claim for a coffee mug to make at 7 o'clock in the morning. Just saying.

Or it's the self-help phrases that tell you to choose joy. As if joy is on a menu and you've just been very indecisive. Maybe it's the well-meaning friend who, when you tell her something is breaking your heart, says to you, at least you have your health. You smile and nod because what else are you supposed to do?

But I think something closes down inside of you a little bit. There's a psychologist named Susan David. She's a teacher at Harvard Medical School, and she wrote emotional agility or what she calls the tyranny of positivity. She said that at its core, toxic positivity is an avoidant coping strategy.

She says telling someone to be positive invalidates their experience and suppresses their emotions that they need to feel. So it doesn't make the anger or sadness or grief go away. It actually enhances them and then layers shame on top of it. It's another way of conveying that my comfort is more important than your reality.

Sit with that for a second. My comfort is more important than your reality. What's actually happening in those moments? It's not always with cruelty or on purpose, but I think it can have the same effect. She also gave a TED talk. It was called The Gift and Power of Emotional Change. David shared research.

from a survey that she did with over 70,000 people in it. She states that a third of them reported harshly judging themselves for having bad emotions or they actively tried to banish those emotions because they did not feel that they were socially acceptable. There's also a therapist named Whitney Goodman who wrote the book Toxic Positivity

keeping it real in a world obsessed with being happy. Goodman says that the pressure to stay upbeat, no matter how dire the situations are, she points out that that forced optimism actively harms healing by not allowing the individual to move through the difficult emotions because they aren't allowed to feel them in the first place.

Toxic positivity skips that step entirely. It rushes past the grief and straight into the lesson. It jumps past the anger and straight into gratitude. Or it rushes past the fear and straight into the reassurance that everything is going to work out. The worst part is that the person that feels this and receives it

they are deemed a problem. Their reality is inconvenient. Or if they can't smile through it, then they're doing something wrong. Before we go any further, I would love for you to pause and think about this. When was the last time someone dismissed a real feeling you had with a phrase that sounded kind?

What did you actually feel in that moment? Not what you were supposed to feel or what you pretended to feel, but what actually landed inside of you when they said that phrase or words. The part about the toxicity that nobody names out loud is that it creates shame. Brene Brown, my favorite scientist,

has dedicated her career to studying shame's cause and effect. She defines it as the intensely painful feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging. The installation of shame in people comes from the people whom we trust telling us that our feelings are wrong, that we're too sensitive or too much. We're not accurate or it's not warranted.

I don't think we arrive at shame all at once or in one conversation. I think it's a thousand small moments where we bring something to someone that's very real to us and they hand us back a phrase instead of their presence. Each of those moments teaches us that my feelings are a problem.

I should hide them and not share them. I should figure out how to stop having them. the tyranny of the shits done messing us up. But the wild thing is the person handing you the phrase seldom means to hurt you. I've said that many times. I mean, we all know that one person who truly does intend harm,

but hopefully once we figure that out, we stop hanging out with them. But the ones that have no intention to hurt you are reaching for a sentence that makes the moment easier Not for you, but for them. I think it's important to point out that something that took me a long time to see clearly.

Toxic positivity often comes from people who are themselves drowning. It's not only a personality flaw, but it's a survival reflex. For maybe when we don't have the emotional capacity to sit with someone else's pain, because our pain is already at the brim or past the brim. That reframe matters because if we only understood toxic positivity as something

others did to us, we will never catch ourselves doing it to the people we care about. Here's something to think about. Who in your life taught you over time that your feelings were a problem? The harder question, who have you taught the same thing to without meaning it?

I have been on both sides of the coin in my life many times. I've been told that my feelings were too much, but I have in moments told others that the same thing, that their feelings are too much. This example that I'm going to tell you about

taught me more about toxic positivity than any book or class I've ever taken. So for many years, my mom was the receptionist at my salon. And for over three years at the end, she was on dialysis. She was the person that made everyone feel welcome. But most importantly, she was my person. She was my best friend.

As she became sicker, she came in less and eventually could not come in at all. And suddenly I was running every part of the salon, doing her job and mine alike, and coming home at night and taking care of her. There was a specific evening that I am not proud of,

but it defines how toxic positivity can also come from a place of love and fear. It wasn't from a stranger or some bumper sticker mindset, but from a daughter who was doing everything she could and still reaching for a sentence she wished she could take back.

I had worked a very long day with no breaks and my knees and hips were really hurting me to the point of where I could barely walk. I hadn't eaten and when I came home, my mom told me that she wanted to go to the store.

I didn't want to say no to her because she had been stuck at home all day long. So I got her wheelchair and I helped her into the car and I lifted the heavy wheelchair into the back of the car, drove to the store,

walked around to find what she had wanted and did the reverse when I arrived home. This is all to say that I was even more tired and in pain by doing all of this. I still needed to get her something to eat, help her get into her nightclothes,

and clean up her apartment because I was so terrified of bacteria getting into the open wounds in her legs caused from edema that the dialysis didn't remove that she could get sepsis and... That would be the end. The point of telling you all of this is that while I was wheeling her to the elevator,

she told me she was angry. She said that she couldn't believe that her kidneys didn't work and how unfair it was. She told me she didn't understand why she had to suffer. I didn't have the patience to just listen I firmly said to her that many people suffer but don't have loved ones around to help them.

I told her that many suffering people do not experience living their full lives. The minute I pushed the down button on the elevator, I regretted saying it. My mind was saying, why is she not allowed to vent? Why couldn't I let her feel sorry for herself? Why didn't I show her compassion?

ask her more questions so that she could process what she was feeling. Why did I blurt out that bullshit and shut her down? The truth of my why was that I was too tired and too scared. If I let her be furious, I had to be furious. If I let her be heartbroken that her body was failing,

I had to sit with the fact that I was losing her. I didn't have the room for that on top of the wheelchair, the wounds, the work day, and my own body breaking down trying to carry hers. So I reached for a sentence that made her feeling smaller because making her

feeling smaller was the only way I could keep moving. That's toxic positivity. delivered not with intention and cruelty or intentional cruelty, but delivered with exhaustion, delivered with love even, but still delivered. And then it landed on me as shame. The part that broke me later when I was,

was when I learned my mother confided her feelings to my really good friend. She would often visit my mom when I was working, and my mom was able to express her fear, exhaustion, and grief over her own body to her. She could tell my friend the truth because she wasn't me.

My friend wasn't scared to death of losing her and was able to receive my mom's emotions. My mom protected me from her feelings because she loved me. But if you've ever watched someone you love hold their pain from you to keep you comfortable, you know what that costs. They are sparing you,

but it's your loss of the sacred and honest confessions that they would have shared with you if you only were able to open the door and invite their emotions in. The thing is, is I knew what that felt like. And I turned around and did it to someone who was not only my hero,

but also at a very low point in her life. I learned quickly that she couldn't tell me how she truly felt. Fortunately, I never did it again. I never dismissed her. Not that I got everything right, but I never reached for an easy phrase again. And then one day, closer to the end of her life,

she knew she had to go back to the hospital and she started crying. My mom was not an easy crier. It was a very rare emotion for her. And she didn't have any power at this time. But this time I didn't panic at her emotion. Instead of reaching for a phrase or a sentence,

I just sat on the arm of the chair that she was sitting in and held her as we both cried together. That's the moment I choose to remember, not because it redeems me from my behavior at the elevator or whatever. It's because it's genuine resilience. Not the bounce back version, the Instagram version. It's the real one.

It's letting yourself feel scared enough to cry with the person who's dying. Instead of trying to fix it, fix their fear with a sentence, It's letting the moment be as big as it is while holding space for both of you inside of it. Listener, is there someone in your life right now whose feelings you have been managing

because their reality is too hard for you? What do you think it would look like to stop managing and just be present for them? I was thinking about how my actions turned toxic positivity into real resilience, which made me think how the word resilience has been hijacked. Like the way the world speaks about it,

it sounds like it must have to have a silver lining attached to it, or it's bouncing back, it's turning lemons into lemonade. Or maybe it's a slogan on a pillow that you'd find at that store, HomeGoods. You know that store? It's like a hoarder's dream store filled with unorganized items steeped in chaos.

That's how I feel about that store. It makes me panic. Anyway, that isn't resilience. Resilience to me is acknowledging that things may be bad, really bad, and knowing that I'll get through them. Not because the bad part is not real, but because I'm real. My capacity is real. And my history of getting through things is real.

My resilience came from my life, not a book. When I was a kid, I broke a lot of bones, leading to many timeouts from my daily life. Hospital stays. A cast on some limb. stretches where I couldn't walk, couldn't play, nor could I hang out with my friends at school.

I would watch the other kids learn how to cruise down the street on their bikes and skateboards. But what I learned is how it felt for my body to continually take me out of my own life without warning. But slowly, I also learned that I was still me on the other side of it. The body would heal.

The world would be waiting. And I wasn't the only breakable thing. And I wasn't broken in a way that lasted. I was also a kid who became heavier than other kids my age. At that time in history, kids noticed the weight gain and never hesitated to comment on any difference between me and them.

I spent years being pointed at for looking different. But what I did with that teasing and harassment is what built my resilience. I don't think I could have survived it if I let all the criticism in at one time. So I let in what I could handle in small pieces.

And in between, I reminded myself of what was true about me. I was smart, I was funny, I was a really good friend. But what I didn't realize is that I was actually pattern rewiring at the age of 10. Somehow I was able to take the hurt in in small doses that didn't drown me.

But in between those confidence chipping insults, I was building a version of myself That was big enough to handle it. That's resilience. Not pretending the pointing didn't happen. Not telling yourself the mean kids were just telling the truth, which is what they said to my face a few times. Or not always looking on the bright side.

There's nothing wrong with that. But in order for me to build up my resilience, I had to let the hurt be real. while also letting in what was true and real about me. This pattern has carried me through my whole life. I had a doctor once tell me that my knee hurt because I was obese. Now look,

I know that the more weight someone carries, the more pressure you have on your joints. That's not news to me. But this doctor was very gung-ho about it being my fault and very sure that the fix was going to come from me walking more and watching what I ate.

It's all very good advice, yet I still demanded an MRI. I stayed in his office until he agreed to order one. What were the results, you ask? The results were a bone-on-bone knee joint. no traceable meniscus, no ACL, no MCL, many cysts and bone spurs. He never apologized, said he was wrong.

He never said anything remotely human about how he acted in that appointment. And he didn't have to. By then I had already learned the most important lesson in my adult life. I have to believe myself. when the room won't. Another reason or experience for building my resilience is I have been a woman in a

male-dominated industry my entire career. Yeah, even the beauty industry, the decisions at the top, the distributors, the brands, the business side has been predominantly owned by men for decades. In my career and in my life, I've been told that my experience wasn't real.

I've been told that a man who acted unkindly to me must have been having a bad day because he's always nice to the person saying it. I've heard a thousand versions of the phrase, well, I've never had experience with him. Each of those phrases has asked me to erase myself a little.

And I have chosen over and over not to do that. So when I say that genuine resilience is knowing you will get through, even when it's bad, I mean it. This is the thing that I've been building since I was a kid in a hospital bed.

The reason toxic positivity lands so hard on me is that the exact wound I have spent my whole life healing Every time someone tells me to look on the bright side, they're doing a smaller version of what the school kids did, what the doctor did, what the friends said.

They are telling me that my reality is not real. I don't buy it. I think what saved me every single time was that somewhere deep inside, deep down inside, I kept believing myself anyway. And that's what I want for you. So I ask you, where was your resilience forged? Not the slogan version, the real one.

What did you live through that taught you that you could live through anything? And are you giving yourself enough credit for it? Or are you still explaining it away? So far, we've talked about toxic positivity as something that happens between people. One person says a phrase and the other person receives it as shame, right?

But there's another version that occurs inside of us and it may be more damaging to our well-being. It's when we use hope on ourselves to avoid reality. There are three examples I want to share of Hope's role in avoiding reality. One of them is mine.

I have lost 40 pounds, give or take, more than once in my life. That's not a small thing to say out loud, but it's true. Every single time I have done it, there has been a moment when the old eating habits slowly creep back in. The thing is,

I'm conscious of it, but in order to avoid it, I won't step on the scale. Because the scale would tell me the truth, right? I will negotiate with myself. If I gained, it's probably only one or two pounds. And I can easily lose that. But mostly I hope that I haven't gained any of it back.

I hope I got away with it. I will go for months hoping. not stepping on that scale. And every single time when I finally face it, the weight is back plus more. That is not hope. It's avoidance dressed up very nicely. The second example is we all know someone who always says everything will work out.

They say it over and over. But Self-indulgence, struggling to pay bills, and then panicking about money while never changing your mindset or the circumstances that are actually in your control don't create different results. It's a pattern exhibited by many, and a version of it is in all of us.

It's when we get into a bind, we say the universe will provide. Or we just go back to doing the thing that created the bind in the first place. There's nothing wrong with hope if there's action behind it. Some people call it faith mixed in with gratitude and a positive mindset.

I'm all for that as long as we change the negative behavior. I have seen with my own eyes that when hope becomes the permission slip to not change, It's not hope at all. It's just a cage with a pretty little name on it. My last example is the truth, but it's more dramatic.

I had a friend who avoided opening his bills for months. He avoided paying his taxes for many years. And the weight of all that avoidance built up such stress in his body that it started to take over his vagus nerve. Once that vagus nerve was activated, he would just pass out randomly, hit his head,

like it was very horrible. It seemed that his body was doing the work of what his mind refused to do. The envelope stayed closed, but his nervous system was paying the bills instead. The body always knows what the mind is avoiding. You can keep the envelopes closed. You can skip the scale. You can continue destructive behavior.

But your body keeps a record. And eventually, I guess the record comes due. As I said at the start of this episode, hope without action is a trap. Hope is supposed to be the fuel and the thing that keeps you walking when the path is long or winding or actually unclear.

But I think when you use hope to not walk at all, it stops being hope and starts being like a wall that keeps you stuck. Nelson Mandela, he spent 27 years in prison. 27 years of reality that he couldn't pretend was anything other than what it was. But somehow, He emerged without bitterness, without despair,

and without denial about what had happened to him. Now, obviously, I don't know him, but what I've read of him, about him, that is what everything says. No bitterness, no despair, and didn't deny what had actually happened to him. In his autobiography, he wrote about his own optimism. He said,

part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed towards the sun and one's feet moving forward. That's not one thing, it's two. Your head is pointed toward the sun. Let's call that hope. And your feet are moving forward. Let's call that action. hope and action together in the same sentence, in the same practice.

The Nelson Mandela foundation says it even more plainly. They say his hope was not passive optimism, but it was disciplined and active and strategic. That's the kind of hope that produces resilience, hope that looks at the scale, and still believes you can change your relationship with food.

It's hope that opens the envelope and deals with whatever is inside of it. And it's also hope that acknowledges your mother is dying and still sits on the arm of the chair with her. The other kind, the kind of hope that keeps your feet still, No matter how pretty your view of the sun is, it's not hope.

It's paralysis. Let me give you something to think about. What's the envelope you're not opening? Or what's the scale you're not stepping on? What's the phone call you're not returning? And what's the version of hope you've been using to justify not doing it?

I want to make sure that anyone listening to this doesn't think I'm the evolved one in this conversation and other people are the ones who need to work on themselves. So here's my own piece. Throughout my life and especially my childhood, I heard the phrases that you're fine, you're okay, you're all right. And to be fair,

I was sometimes. Sometimes I was fine. Sometimes I was also bleeding and broken. The Venn diagram definitely has some overlap there. And then, of course, because we become our own influencers, I have caught myself using the same phrases on people I work with.

When a hair color has gone wrong in the salon, a stylist may start to panic. And I have been known to look them dead in the eye and say, you're fine. I use it as a reset, a little electric jolt to their nervous system.

It gets the panicker, not a word, back online so we can solve the problem in front of us. It's not the worst tool, but it's also not the best one. Honestly, a quick you're fine in the middle of a high pressure salon moment is not the same as telling your grieving mother to be grateful she's alive.

There is a difference and the difference matters. But the phrase is still a phrase. It's still doing the thing that phrases do. Telling the person in front of you that their distress is unwarranted. When what I actually mean is we can fix this. Those are two different messages. The first one shrinks the person.

The second one expands the walls in the room, allowing breath. I'm still learning to reach for that second one. I think the work of noticing what we reach for is not pass or fail. But it's not about becoming the perfect person who never says the wrong thing. It's about catching yourself. Each time you catch yourself,

you earn a little bit of space between the reflex and the response. Allowance for the ability to choose something different. That's what I'm trying to practice. So think about what is your go-to phrases or phrase? What's the one that you reach for when someone else's feelings are making you feel uncomfortable? Name it, just name it.

You cannot change what you have not seen. Okay, now let's turn this into something that we can actually use. The following are a few things that you can try this week, just a handful of practices. The first one is to notice the phrases. Notice the ones other people reach for when you bring them something real.

Notice the ones you reach for when someone brings you something real. You don't have to fix them yet, but you just have to see them. Awareness is the open door. The second one, when someone you love brings you something hard, Try saying nothing at all at first.

That sounds really hard, but try something like, I'm so sorry, tell me more. Or try, what do you need right now? Ask a question instead of offering a phrase. A phrase can create shame. A question can create presence. The third one is stress. to let people be furious or heartbroken. Let them be scared.

You don't have to fix them. You don't even have to match their mood. You don't have to talk them out of it, which is something I do very often. You just have to stay because that's the whole gift. Not many know how to stay. The fourth one is to let yourself be furious too.

You're allowed to be angry about the unfair thing. You're allowed to be scared about a hard thing. You're allowed to not be grateful in the moment where gratitude has not earned itself yet. If I had a dime for every time somebody said to me, you have to be grateful, but I couldn't feel it, it annoyed me.

It made me feel less than. If someone tries to talk you out of your own feelings with a bumper sticker phrase, you're allowed to notice that. You don't have to say anything. You just have to recognize it for what it is. The fifth one's the hardest. I will tell you, open the envelope. Step on the scale.

Return the call. Make the appointment. Whatever it is that that hope has been letting you not do, do the smallest version of it this week. Not the whole thing, just the first step. Because that first step is the whole thing. The first step is how you know that hope is real. So here's where this lands.

If you recognized yourself anywhere, in what we talked about today, on either side of it, like the one who has been shut down or the one who does the shutting down, just hear this. Noticing is not the same as being stuck. Noticing is actually the movement. Noticing is the first thing resilience actually asks of you.

Toxic positivity tells you that your reality is a problem to manage. Genuine resilience tells you that your reality is the only honest place to begin. Hope, the real kind, is not something you hold instead of reality. It's something you hold while you're looking right at it. My mom died.

I never got to undo what I said at that elevator. But I did learn what she was trying to teach me. Even when she was angry, Even when she was scared, she was trying to teach me that love is not the same as comfort. That being present for someone is not the same as trying to fix them.

That sitting on the arm of the chair is sometimes the most resilient thing a person can do. I carry her with me in this work. I carry every version of myself who had to learn to believe her own story when the room would not. So here's your final reflection question.

It's just one, and I would love it if you could just sit with it. Where in your life have you been reaching for a phrase when what the moment is actually asking you for is to be present with someone else, with yourself? Name one place, just one. And then this week, try staying instead.

If you'd like to explore what is quietly holding you back or what patterns have been doing their work in silence, or actually what might be waiting on the other side of them, I would love to talk to you. You can find me at decotalifecoaching.com. I offer individual coaching and I truly love this work.

Thank you so much for being here with me today. This episode was not an easy one to put together and I do not take it lightly that you spent this time with me. I hope something we talked about today stays with you.

I hope it helps you be a little gentler with yourself and a little more honest with the people you love. I'll see you next time.