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

00:00:13

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

00:00:30

growth, identity, relationships, and all the

00:00:34

messy moments in between that shape who we become.

00:00:38

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

00:00:51

the inside. Today, we're talking about the most

00:00:54

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

00:01:06

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?

00:10:23

I feel like it's a pretty auto response kind

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of like robotic at this point. It's like and

00:10:28

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

00:10:39

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

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I would say it is the truth you know a lot of

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time At the end of the day or something like

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I am just fine like it's been a lot of ups and

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downs throughout the day So it's like it's never

00:11:19

really one emotion But like sometimes there has

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been some low points that I don't speak about

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but normally if there's like a high point I bring

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it up in conversation somehow later in the night

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or during that so you feel comfortable with some

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people Yeah, I mean it really depends on on who

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like for example my last relationship like if

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she would ask me how I was doing I would be more

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honest, you know, there was Some i'm fine some

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i'm okay thrown in there but you know It was

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more if I had a rough day I tell her I had a

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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.

When the “I” Is Everything: The Cost of Only Seeing Yourself

When the “I” Is Everything: The Cost of Only Seeing Yourself

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

A friend mentioned she’d seen a music show about an hour away. What stayed with her wasn’t the performance but how friendly everyone was, staff and patrons alike. That struck me as unusual, but shouldn’t it be the norm?

The more I sat with it, the more I noticed: over the past five to ten years, patience, tolerance, and presence have, somewhere along the way, become the exception, not the rule. But why? Is it the “I” phone? Social media? A lack of in-person socializing? Is it othering, hyper-individualism, or empathy erosion? Maybe it’s all of the above, and if it is, what is it costing us?

There’s a reason this shift didn’t happen gradually over generations; it happened very fast. The iPhone launched in 2007, and people changed somewhere in the years that followed.

We stopped noticing what was around us and became little versions of Spielberg, documenting everything instead. Selfies, photos of food, filtered versions of real life, and then, everyone felt they needed to post their opinions about everything. Stated with the confidence of a New York Times editor, whether the facts backed them up or not.

Today, with each opinion liked or hearted, the “I” obsession grows, and so does disconnection. It sounds counterintuitive: more connection, more disconnection. But the more praise we receive through algorithms, the more real connections fade.

The psychological term for what happens when a culture tips so far toward the self is hyper-individualism, and it isn’t just a theory. In their book The Narcissism Epidemic, psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell identify online attention seeking as one of the key drivers of rising narcissism in American culture, and it’s not hard to see why.

Research points to three specific costs: loneliness, polarization, and a slow erosion of empathy. Not because people become bad, but because the lens narrows. When we filter everything through “I” – my experience, my opinion, my image – ­there’s simply less room for anyone else.

You can see all three playing out across the last three generations, just in different ways.

Gen Z is the first generation to grow up entirely inside the “I” era, and connection, in every form, has paid the price. They date less and are significantly less sexually active than the previous generation was at their age.  They are slower to get their driver’s license, less likely to spend time together in person, and more likely to consider gaming or scrolling through social media as hanging out.

AI enters the room. Teachers and professors across the country are frustrated and failing students who submit papers written entirely by artificial intelligence. Often, nothing is their own voice or reflects their own thinking. But the deeper loss is the disappearance of something that used to happen naturally: sitting with a question long enough to form an opinion, debating ideas with friends, being curious out loud, writing something, and discovering what you actually think in the process of writing it. AI doesn’t just do the work for them; it removes the struggle that builds a mind. It is the ultimate “I’ tool. Instant, frictionless, and entirely without the discomfort of genuine thought or human exchange

 Millennials came of age in the era of participation trophies and unconditional praise, also known as the self-esteem movement. They were raised to believe that showing up was enough, but research by leading self-esteem social psychologist Roy Baumeister shows that this didn’t build confidence so much as it built fragility that follows them into adulthood. Combined with the rise of the “I” era during their formative years, hyper-individualism took on a particular shape in this generation: my feelings, my boundaries, my truth became the primary framework for navigating the world, sometimes at the expense of discomfort that real growth and real relationships require. Many are still living at home, working remotely, their most social interaction a Slack message. There’s comfort in the arrangement, and without the friction of real workplace dynamics or in-person relationships, they may have less urgency to develop the resilience that comes from navigating them. It’s not laziness, it’s what happens when an entire generation was never quite asked to be uncomfortable, and then handed a phone that confirmed their worldview with every scroll.

Gen X, my own generation, stays home, streams, and, if we’re being honest, doesn’t put much effort into maintaining friendships the way we once did. I feel like the pandemic pushed us toward aloneness quickly, and we settled into it like a warm bath. Soothing for a bit, but stay in too long, and the pruning bleeds into the oncoming wrinkles of old age.

Gen X’s version of hyper-individualism looks different from the generations that followed us. It doesn’t look like fragility; it looks like detachment. We are the ‘suck it up, buttercup’ generation. We don’t particularly care what people think; we handle our business, and we have very little patience for what we perceive as coddling. I watched it up close when I went back to school and was significantly older than my classmates. I worked full-time while carrying a full course load. I was accountable to myself because that’s what I knew how to be. Sitting next to students who couldn’t turn in assignments on time, who were overwhelmed to the point of not being able to attend class, was jarring. There was even a woman in my class who told me and then the professor that she was going to be late turning in her midterm essay because she had a date and had to get her nails done. The gap between us felt enormous.

Here’s the thing about judgment, and I say this from a lot of experience: it is its own form of the “I.” When we decide that our way of handling hardship is the right way, that our threshold for discomfort is the standard everyone else should meet, we stop being able to see people across that divide. We separate and separation, whatever generation it comes from, leads to the same place; less connection, less empathy, more alone.

Three generations with three different expressions of the same withdrawal

Yet by every measure, we are more connected than any generation in human history. That’s the paradox. The more we curate and perform our lives for an audience, the less we actually let anyone in. In 2023, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy described loneliness as an epidemic on par with tobacco use and obesity- not a personal failing or a phase, but a public health crisis serious enough that the World Health Organization created an entire commission to address it. Loneliness, in his diagnosis, doesn’t just make us sad, but underpins violence, addiction, and extremism. Murthy states that human connection is the antidote, and that is the very thing the “I” generations have replaced with a screen.

Loneliness doesn’t stay private for long. When people stop truly connecting, they start dividing, and nowhere is that more visible right now than in our politics.

Us and them is where we are. I live in one of the most liberal parts of the country, and I won’t pretend I’m above it; my blood runs blue. I watch what is happening to this country under this administration, and I feel the heat of it. I have many friends, clients, and coworkers who won’t give the time of day to people who voted red, nor are they able to have a productive debate about their thoughts and opinions; they won’t even sit long enough with an opposing point to actually consider it. Where I live, supporting MAGA isn’t just a political difference of opinions in its purest form; it’s a moral failing, a conscious stripping of civil rights. And on the other side of the country, people feel the same way about us. That’s what is known as polarization. Two groups, both certain they’re right, both increasingly unable to see the humanity in the other. The “I” doesn’t just isolate us from individuals; it isolates us from entire groups of people who don’t reflect our tribal worldview to us.

A lot of this is by design because we are no longer consuming the same reality. The digital algorithm doesn’t show you the world; it shows you a mirror. It feeds you more of what you already believe until your feed becomes a closed loop, and everyone outside of it starts to look like the enemy. Fox News and One America News Network versus CNN and MS NOW viewers aren’t just disagreeing; they’re living in entirely different versions of what’s true. Those living in small towns versus living in cities might as well be living in different countries at this point, not just in politics but in daily reality, in access, in values, and in what they’re afraid might be the real truth.

Class is another big, yet rarely spoken about, polarizing divide that is fueling hyper-individualism. It is crushingly expensive to exist here because there are the ultra-wealthy and lower-income residents receiving tax or government program assistance, and then there’s the middle class, quietly failing, hanging on by their nails, too much to qualify for help and not enough to actually breathe. I am always very close to that edge, and I can tell you it creates its own kind of isolation. The unhoused crisis here is overwhelming and heartbreaking, and even that has become a polarizing issue; compassion on one side, frustration on the other, and very little willingness to sit in the complexity of both being true at the same time.

This is what hyper-individualism produces at scale. When my experience is the only lens, my truth becomes the only truth. When my truth is the only truth, there is no shared ground left. Not politically, economically, nor humanly. We stop asking what someone else is living through and start deciding what they deserve.

The culmination of loneliness and polarization leads to a spectrum of empathy erosion. We stop imagining how someone feels, and we stop caring about what’s happening to others. Psychologically, it grows out of living in the “I” reality, layered with stress, fear, and the dehumanization of others, so we can emotionally detach and ignore them, whether temporarily or over long stretches of time.

A comedian friend of mine posts funny stories and observations on social media. In many of her posts, she performs this exaggerated outrage at human behavior, but it’s clearly sarcastic and playful. Hundreds of people get the joke and love her content. But there’s always a small, stinging group that shows up with personal attacks that are shocking, ugly, and brutal.

She’s a beautiful woman, and yet people attack her appearance and, most relentlessly, the fact that she’s a female. It appalls me that people don’t pause to consider how those comments would feel if someone directed them back at the hate slingers, or at their own children and loved ones. Somehow, sitting alone behind a laptop permits us to say things we would never say face-to-face, to people we don’t know and will likely never meet, who will probably never affect our lives at all.

 

When did the person on the other side of the screen stop being a person?

 

The scholar, john a. powell, a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, has built his life’s work around a similar question. He asks: What happens when we stop seeing people as fully human? When interviewed on For the Wild Podcast, powell defined “othering” as any practice that denies someone their full humanity and dignity. That very denial is rooted in the belief that certain people are beneath us or simply irrelevant. Powell stated before this current administration that, at its extreme, it casts the other as a threat, warning that violence often follows. Hear that again, and tell me that doesn’t feel like a current headline.

The discussion and treatment of immigrants in this country is not a policy debate; it is othering in its most institutionalized form. When we accept othering as a justification for violence, belonging becomes conditional, and no one is truly safe.

In his 2024 book Belonging Without Othering, powell argues that we can build community without requiring an enemy to define ourselves against. We can belong without pushing someone else out. It sounds so simple, yet it is anything but.

Empathy erosion doesn’t stop at rudeness or political division. Follow it far enough, and you arrive at addiction and mental illness left unaddressed, and at children being trafficked and abused; the most vulnerable among us are rendered invisible by a society that has turned so far inward it can no longer see them.

That is the full cost of a myopic view, so the question becomes, is there another way?

Thinking back to my friend’s experience at the music show makes me realize that we have to try a little harder.  

It starts with something as simple as being present. What would it be like to actually put the phone down at dinner, to look around at the people seated with us, or to notice what we are eating and recognize the work that went into making it? Presence is not a grand gesture; it’s a decision made in small moments, over and over again.

And when we’re present, we start to notice what we’ve been missing. Ask yourself, what gets lost when we’re half present? Maybe it’s your life when you use a crosswalk, staring down at your phone the entire time as traffic whirls nearby. Or maybe it’s something quieter, the unhoused person sitting on the same corner you pass every week. What would be the harm in smiling, saying hello, or even stopping to ask how they’re doing? Extending our circle of concern doesn’t require a grand gesture; it only requires looking up and seeing what’s in front of you.

Looking up also means being willing to see people we’d rather avoid. What if we actually sought out the discomfort, such as I don’t know, spending time with the other team? Open, honest conversations with people who see the world differently than we do. I know many people would say that’s not an issue for them, yet when it comes to political differences, I have a gut feeling the percentage who wouldn’t do it is significantly high, but can you imagine seeking it out rather than avoiding it? I will say this: I do it almost every time I work in the salon with MAGA-aligned clients. It may be uncomfortable, but it’s also the only way I know how to keep the circle from closing entirely.

Discomfort requires accountability, and accountability is simply owning what you do and say, and sitting with the consequences without looking for someone else to blame. It’s not being a passive participant in your life or in the lives of the people around you. Psychologists call this your internal locus of control, the belief that your choices, not your circumstances, determine your outcomes. It’s also one of the greatest builders of resilience. What you say lands somewhere, and what you do affects someone. Therefore, accountability is the decision to care about that, and caring builds trust, empathy, and respect. It slowly dismantles the ‘us and them,’ opens communication, and makes real resolution possible.

For me personally, accountability in how I show up in relationships starts with truly listening, not waiting for my turn to speak or forming my response before the other person has finished, but actually hearing what someone is saying to me. It means walking the talk and talking the walk; the values I speak about on this podcast, in my coaching, and in my life have to show up in the room when it’s inconvenient, when I’m tired, or when the person in front of me is difficult. That’s when it matters most, and although I wish I could say my accountability is absolute, it’s a trait I’m willing to continue to work on.

And sometimes accountability looks like something even smaller than that. Years ago, on vacation, I met a couple from the Netherlands who were baffled by something Americans do constantly. People passing by would say, “Hello, how are you?” and keep walking without waiting for an answer. I laughed and told them it was just part of the greeting. They paused, then said: “So you don’t really care about how we are, it’s just words?” My amusement faded quickly. They had just described an entire cultural habit in one sentence: self-absorption.

I realize that I can’t fix the country or the world, but I can attempt to make my small circle a little nicer. I start with small acts of kindness: a smile, eye contact, a compliment, a thank you, or asking someone how they really are, and then sticking around to hear the answer.

Which is exactly what my friend experienced at that music show, and it moved her enough to tell me about it. The world changes one circle at a time.

 

Whose circle could you step into this week, and what might you find there?

 

 Baumeister, R. F., & Tice, D. M. (2022, February 16). Ego depletion is the best replicated finding in all of ... Ego Depletion is the Best Replicated Finding in All of Social Psychology. https://lupinepublishers.com/psychology-behavioral-science-journal/pdf/SJPBS.MS.ID.000234.pdf 
Jabbour, R. (2025, January 18). Empathy is dying and so are we. The SMU Journal. https://www.thesmujournal.ca/editor/empathy-is-dying-and-so-are-we 
Kennedy, D. (2024, April 8). The role of personal accountability in Changing your life. Kevon Owen, Christian Counseling Clinical Psychotherapist. https://kevonowen.com/clinical-psychotherpy/the-role-of-personal-accountability-in-changing-your-life/ 
Othering & Belonging Institute (Ed.). (2025). American Press Institute: Designing gatherings where everyone belongs. Home | Othering & Belonging Institute. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/ 
Othering & Belonging Institute. (2026). John A. Powell. john a. powell. https://www.johnapowell.org/ 
Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Atria Books. 

The Hidden Pattern Behind Procrastination: How Your Brain Turns Discomfort into Delay

The Hidden Pattern Behind Procrastination: How Your Brain Turns Discomfort into Delay

The Original Self Podcast/Evet DeCota

I have, on more than one occasion, cleaned my entire kitchen, reorganized a drawer I have already organized three times, and once, very proudly, alphabetized a shelf of CDs I have not touched in years, all to avoid sitting down to write something I told myself I was going to write. If you are smiling, it is because you have your version of that story too. Maybe yours looks like scrolling instead of starting, answering every email except the one that actually matters, or starting a four-season show instead of the one task that has been sitting at the top of your list for weeks.

We call all of this procrastination, and most of us believe it’s a discipline problem, a time-management issue, or a character flaw. That understanding is incomplete, and what I want to offer here is something more accurate and more useful than shame.

Not All Delay Is Procrastination

Collapsing every form of delay into procrastination is part of why we end up punishing ourselves for situations that were never in our control, so it is worth getting precise about it.  Procrastination has a specific definition: the voluntary delay of an intended action, even when you know that delay will make things worse. That word voluntary matters because it means you could act and choose, consciously or not, to avoid it.

Three other types of delay are not procrastination and deserve their own category.

Purposeful delay is intentional, the act of scheduling something for a time that genuinely fits your life based on practical reasoning.

Inevitable delay is when life intervenes in ways you cannot control, whether that is illness, an emergency, a canceled flight, or the internet going down in the middle of a deadline.

Emotional delay is avoiding something to escape a feeling, such as anxiety, grief, insecurity, or fear of failure. Emotional delay brings short-term relief but tends to carry a long-term cost in stress, guilt, and reduced performance.

Before you label yourself a procrastinator, it is worth asking honestly whether this is voluntary avoidance or whether something is genuinely in the way.

The Four Types of Procrastination

When something is actually procrastination, understanding which type you are dealing with changes how you respond.

Hedonistic delay is the most familiar: choosing immediate pleasure or gratification over a long-term goal, the show over the project, or the donut over the workout planned for later.

Arousal delay is waiting until the last minute for the thrill that urgency creates, and it is worth asking honestly whether you genuinely work better under pressure or whether it has simply become the only gear you use.

Irrational procrastination is putting something off even when you know clearly that the delay will make the outcome worse, with no pleasure or thrill involved, just avoidance despite knowing better.

Psychological distress delay is perhaps the most compassion-worthy of the four: the inability to begin, not because you are undisciplined, but because grief, overwhelm, or burnout has used up the emotional capacity that starting requires.

Why the Brain Chooses Avoidance

The psychologist, Dr. Timothy Pychyl, who has spent a significant part of his career researching procrastination, arrives at a conclusion that is deceptively simple: procrastination has nothing to do with time and everything to do with emotion. More specifically, it is what happens when the brain prioritizes feeling better right now over doing what we actually intended. In other words, we are not avoiding the task, but we are avoiding whatever the task makes us feel.

The reason this pattern is so hard to break is that avoidance works. The moment you set something aside, there is genuine relief, your body relaxes, and the discomfort lifts. Your brain logs that result and now has evidence that avoidance resolves the problem, so the next time that same feeling surfaces, it offers you the same solution. Eventually, the choice disappears entirely, then avoidance simply becomes your default.

The neuroscience behind this is worth understanding. When a task feels threatening, the amygdala, which is the part of the brain responsible for detecting danger, can effectively take the wheel from the prefrontal cortex, which handles rational thinking and decision-making. Once that happens, willpower is largely beside the point because you are no longer dealing with a logic problem. You are dealing with a nervous system that has categorized this particular task as something to be escaped.

That is what Pychyl means when he calls procrastination a negative reinforcer. It removes something unpleasant, in this case, the emotion, and that removal becomes the reward. This is not irrational behavior because, in the short term, it is actually quite effective, but the problem is accumulation. Every time we let avoidance handle the feeling, we make it slightly harder to face that task the next time around.

What Actually Gets Us Unstuck

David Allen, the author behind the Getting Things Done methodology, builds his entire framework around one central insight: overwhelm and uncertainty are not problems of willpower; they are problems of clarity. The way through is not motivation but identifying the very next physical action. Not the project or the goal or the full picture, just the first immediate and concrete step. Not 'work on the presentation' but 'open the document.' The brain can act on something specific and freeze in the face of something formless.

James Clear argues that action comes before motivation, not the other way around, and we sit and wait to feel ready or inspired or like the time is right while waiting for something that can only be created by beginning. Newton's First Law explains exactly why: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. Procrastination is inertia. The task does not get harder the longer we wait, but starting does, and once we are in motion, even slightly, the next step becomes easier than it looked from the outside.

Self-Compassion and Procrastination

The connection between self-knowledge and the psychology of procrastination is a layer, I think, that often gets overlooked, and it may be the most important one.

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed Self-Determination Theory to explain what genuinely drives human wellbeing and motivation from the inside out, and at the heart of their work are three basic psychological needs. The first is autonomy, the need to feel like your choices are genuinely yours and freely made. The second is competence, the sense that you are capable of handling what is in front of you and that you can grow within it. The third is relatedness, the feeling of belonging and connection, and that what you do and who you are actually matters to someone else.

When all three of those needs are present, people tend to function well, and when any one of them is missing or under threat, motivation quietly erodes. So, when you find yourself stalling on something, it is worth asking which of these feels most compromised, because the avoidance is rarely random and tends to point directly at something specific.

Dr. Kristin Neff, whose research on self-compassion draws from both Western psychology and Buddhist practice, offers what I believe is the most underused tool in this conversation, and it is not a more disciplined or stricter system. It is the act of treating yourself the way you would treat someone you love who was struggling with the same thing. The research is consistent on this: self-judgment does not reduce procrastination, it deepens it. When we avoid something and then criticize ourselves for avoiding it, we layer shame on top of the original discomfort, and shame is one of the hardest emotions to sit with, so we avoid that too. The task now carries two layers of feeling we are running from instead of one, and the self-criticism that was meant to push us forward actually digs the hole deeper. Brene Brown speaks to this as well, describing procrastination as often less about laziness and more about self-protection, a way of shielding ourselves from the vulnerability of judgment, of trying and falling short, instead of truly being seen for our efforts.

A Personal Story

Many years ago, I had a bad accident which resulted in many broken bones, six months off of work, followed by another twelve months of physical therapy and part-time work. In those eighteen months of physical healing, I lost control of my hair salon. When I say control, I mean the vibe, structure, and peace I wanted everyone to feel while spending time and money there. I worked very hard to create an environment that was beautiful and welcoming, where anyone could come regardless of status or appearance. I hired talented stylists, installed systems to help the salon flow effortlessly, and was ever-present to keep that vision alive.

When I could no longer work or worked far less, that feeling disappeared. When I would walk in, I could sense the stylists not caring about anything but themselves, not coming to meetings, and disrespecting everything I had built. I no longer wanted to be at the salon I had built from the ground up, and still, I kept procrastinating on speaking about how I was feeling because I knew it would not be received with understanding or compassion.

It was not until I recognized that feeling angry and undermined had taken away my initial reason for building the salon environment in the first place that something began to shift. I slowly realized that my sense of competence and relatedness was not gone. I had just buried it in the shame of self-judgment and avoidance. Once I recognized what was actually happening, everything changed. I had thrown my hat in the ring and put everything on the line, taken every risk and absorbed every cost financially, emotionally, and personally, and shown a level of vulnerability they had never dared to come close to. The shame I was carrying did not belong to me because I had confused their resistance with my failure, and once I stopped doing that, the clarity came back. The procrastination loosened its grip, the vision for the salon resurfaced, and I finally made the changes I had been resisting.

The Identity Connection

Procrastination, at its most stubborn, is often an identity problem as much as an emotional one. When we repeatedly avoid something, we build a story around the avoidance: I am someone who cannot finish things, I never follow through, I am not the kind of person who does this. And when a story about ourselves gets repeated long enough and goes unchallenged long enough, it stops feeling like a story and starts feeling like a fact.

In psychology, this dynamic is captured in two effects that sit on opposite ends of the same spectrum.

The Pygmalion Effect is what happens when someone genuinely believes in us and communicates a real expectation that we are capable, and studies show that belief alone can shift performance. When someone holds a high bar for us and makes that visible, something in us tends to reach for it.

You can see this play out in sports as clearly as anywhere. This season, the Golden State Warriors, my all-time favorite NBA team, have won 21 home games compared to 15 away. That means they have a 40% higher win rate at home than on the road. While Steph Curry’s extraordinary skill and the thousands of hours he has put into his craft are undeniable, I believe the crowd at Chase Center is part of that equation, too. I have taken part in thousands of people on their feet, believing in the players, expressing that belief loudly and without reservation, which fuels the team’s fire. Confidence has an audience, and the Pygmalion Effect suggests that the belief others hold for us doesn’t just feel good; it actually changes what we are capable of.

The Golem Effect runs in the opposite direction: when doubt is the message, spoken or unspoken, direct or delivered through a telling silence, we tend to shrink to fit it. Low expectations have a way of becoming self-fulfilling, not because we are weak, but because the nervous system is extraordinarily sensitive to what the people around us believe we are worth.

The free-throw line in an NBA away game is one of the clearest illustrations of the Golem Effect in action. The shooter stands alone, and the pressure comes from every direction at once: their coaches and team are counting on them to make the extra points, while their own mind runs commentary on their success or failure. However, the loudest pressure often comes from the crowd that doesn’t want them to succeed. Fans seated behind the basket swirl rally towels, clash noisemakers together, and boo with the kind of sustained intensity designed to make the shooter doubt themselves in that single unguarded moment. In some cities, the crowd is even incentivized with free chicken tenders if the away player misses both free throws, which gives thousands of people a very personal reason to make as much noise as possible. The message being sent is clear and collective: we don’t believe you can do this, and the research on the Golem Effect suggests that message, delivered loudly enough and by enough people, can actually work.

The question worth sitting with is not only what others have expected of you, but which of those expectations you have quietly made your own, and whether the voice driving your avoidance is actually yours or belongs to someone who decided a long time ago what you were and were not capable of.

Where to Begin

The next time you catch yourself avoiding something that matters, try getting curious before getting critical. Ask yourself what feeling this task is asking you to sit with that you have not yet given yourself permission to feel, which of your three psychological needs feels most at risk, and what the smallest possible physical action is that you could take right now before the feeling resolves. You do not need to feel ready or have the whole picture. You just need one concrete next step taken before the amygdala gets the final word, because patterns, once seen clearly, lose some of their grip, and some is always a starting place.

What is the one thing you have been putting off that, if you are being honest with yourself, matters to you more than almost anything else on your list? And what is the very first physical step, not the whole thing but just the first movement, that you could take toward it this week?

Helping you reflect deeper, grow stronger, and walk confidently back to yourself, through coaching, podcasts, and blogs.: decotalifecoaching.com

What Loss Leaves Behind:

Grief, Identity, and Who You Become When Someone or Something Is Gone

What Loss Leaves Behind - Grief, Identity and Who You Become When Someone or Something Is Gone

DeCota Life Coaching/Evet DeCota

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching. I’m 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. Whatever brought you here today, you’re in the right place.

I’ve noticed over the years that, standing behind a salon chair and coaching individuals, people rarely come in for just a hair service or a single topic. They come to me carrying doubts, fears, dreams, and questions about who they are becoming.

Over time, I’ve realized that beneath all the noise of expectations, criticism, and life’s pressures, there is still a version of ourselves. Let’s explore What Loss Leaves Behind: Grief, Identity, and Who You Become When Someone or Something Is Gone.

Every loss changes the shape of the life around it. Some losses are announced with funerals and flowers. Others happen quietly, without ceremony, and nobody thinks to ask how you are doing.

Loss is not just about death. It’s about the absence of something or someone that once helped define who you were. Today I want to talk about all of it — the losses we name and the ones we never do. And I have brought someone with me who has lived through many of the same ones I have.

Stefan DeCota is my older brother by almost three years. We were very close as small children, drifted apart in our late teen years the way siblings sometimes do when they are busy becoming themselves, and found each other again in our mid-twenties in a way that has never wavered since. Our mother taught us to value one another and to be each other’s best friends. An argument has never lasted more than a few hours — it simply wasn’t allowed.

Stefan is a strategic business advisor with 25 years of experience at large startups and data-driven companies across marketing, finance, and fashion. But his real talents are not seen; they are felt. They are felt by everyone who knows him and everyone he takes an interest in. He celebrates people, he loves deeply, and because he loves so deeply, loss has hit him hard and often. He has carried a great deal, and yet he still stands. He doesn’t break, and that is exactly why his voice matters today.

When we lose a friend, through a huge rupture, a ghosting, a slow drift, or a death where circumstances kept us from being present, we are left holding a grief the world doesn’t have a name for.

Dr. Pauline Boss, a family therapist and researcher, developed the Theory of Ambiguous Loss. Ambiguous Loss describes grief that has no clear ending and no social recognition — the grief is real, but receives no permission to exist. Losing a friendship fits this perfectly. There’s no formal goodbye, and the world does not stop to acknowledge it. But the pain is real, and a shift in identity often follows. People often blame themselves or minimize it because there is no script for how to grieve someone who is still alive.

The Grief Nobody Names: Losing a Friendship -Ambiguous Loss

Questions:

• Have you ever lost a friendship that mattered to you — not through a fight or a clear ending, but just a slow disappearance? What was that like?

• Did losing that friendship change how you saw yourself at all?

I recently read research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that confirmed unacknowledged grief registers in the brain as genuine pain. The same neural regions activated by physical injury are also activated by social disconnection and loss. The fact that no one brought flowers does not mean the wound was not real.

Research presented by Duke and Yale Universities showed that friendships are biological. The bonds we form are governed by the same neural and biochemical systems woven into our health and survival. Stronger social bonds make us live longer and carry lower levels of cortisol, our stress hormone. This means losing a friendship is not just an emotional loss but one that the body registers and carries long after the conscious mind has moved on.

• Do you think men grieve the loss of friendships differently from women? Is it something men even talk about?

• Is there a loss in your life that did not fit neatly into any category — not a spouse, not a parent, not a traditional friendship — but hit you just as hard? How did you make sense of that grief when the world did not have a name for it?

• Is there anything harder than watching someone you love grieve, especially when you are grieving the same loss, and there is nothing you can do to take it away from them?

Romantic Relationships and Who You Were in Them: Identity Enmeshment and the Loss of the Relational Self

Psychologists who study relationships argue that our sense of self is partially constructed through our closest bonds. When a significant relationship ends, we do not just lose the person; we lose the version of ourselves that existed inside that relationship. The habits, the routines, the way we saw ourselves reflected in their eyes. This is sometimes called loss of the relational self, and it is why breakups and divorces can trigger a full identity crisis even when the relationship was not a healthy one.

Questions:

• When a significant relationship ends, do you think people lose more than just the person — do they lose a version of themselves too?

• How did you find your footing again after a significant relationship ended?

• Is there a version of yourself from a past relationship that you miss, or one you are glad is gone?

Losing Parents: Stages of Grief vs. Continuing Bonds Theory

For a long time, grief was understood as a process of letting go — moving through stages until you reached acceptance and release. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross gave us the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They were never meant to be a linear checklist but are often treated as one.

More recent research, particularly Continuing Bonds Theory developed by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, challenges the idea that healthy grieving means detaching from the person you lost. Instead, it suggests that we can and do maintain an ongoing relationship with those we have lost — carrying them forward in how we think, how we make decisions, and who we are becoming.

Losing a parent also removes the people who have known you the longest, the witnesses to your own story, and that particular absence reshapes identity in ways that take years to understand fully.

Questions:

• When we lost Mom and Dad, how did it change you — not just emotionally, but in terms of who you are?

• Did losing them make you question anything about your own identity or the direction of your life?

• Was there a moment after losing them where you felt completely untethered — like the people who knew you best were gone?

• How do you carry them now? What does that look like for you day to day?

The Unexpected Grief of Outgrowing People: Ambiguous Loss

Outgrowing someone you love falls into that same territory. There is no big fight, no funeral, no moment you can point to and say that is where it ended. You look up one day and realize the distance between you has become too wide to cross, and nobody permitted you to grieve that either.

Questions:

• Have you ever grown in a direction that took you away from people you once felt close to? How did you handle that?

• Is there guilt that comes with outgrowing someone, even when the growth is healthy?

• What would you say to someone in the middle of that right now — outgrowing people they love but unsure how to move forward without them?

Loss and the Original Self

Questions:

• Looking back at all of it — the people we have lost, the relationships that ended, the versions of ourselves that changed — who are you now that you might not have become without those losses?

• Do you think loss ever brings people closer to their original selves?

• What is the one thing about grief that you wish more people understood?

Personal Reflection:

Well, there you have it. One man’s perspective on loss and grief, and how we walk through it, carry it with us, and can become more from experiencing it.

For me personally, loss shows up in many ways and scenarios. I’ve had close friendships end, causing my confidence to diminish.

I feel that deep grief, that’s always just right under the surface, over my mother’s sickness and ultimate passing. When I lost my mother and father, I realized that I was an orphan, but after time had passed, I realized a type of power in having to count on myself rather than following a familial and cultural construct.

I know that loss left behind part of my innocent original self, but merged most of her with a stronger and more able self.

Mindset Shift:

What Stefan and I shared today is the kind of insight that doesn’t come from a textbook. It comes from living, and I hope that somewhere in our words, you heard something that sounded like your own story. Loss and grief are some of the most isolating experiences a human can have, and yet they are also the most universal. You are not alone in what you are carrying.

Reflection Question:

As I prepared for this episode, a quote by C.S. Lewis has stayed with me: Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. That is loss. That is life, so with that, ask yourself:

What loss are you still carrying that you have never given yourself full permission to grieve?

Thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If these reflections resonate with you and you’d like to explore your own growth, you can learn more about my coaching at DeCota Life Coaching.

The Authentic Algorithm: Can AI Enhance or Hinder Who You Really Are?

Episode 3: The Authentic Algorithm-Can AI Enhance or Hinder Who You Really Are?

The Original Self-DeCota Life Coaching

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching. I’m 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. Whatever brought you here today, you’re in the right place

 I’ve noticed over the years that, standing behind a salon chair and coaching individuals, people rarely come in for just a hair service or a single topic. They come to me carrying doubts, fears, dreams, and questions about who they are becoming.

Over time, I’ve realized that beneath all the noise of expectations, criticism, and life’s pressures, there is a version of ourselves that still exists. Let’s explore The Authentic Algorithm: Can AI enhance or hinder who you really are?

Over the last month or so, I have been speaking to clients and listening to podcasts and news about how AI is taking over just about everything. Advertising and marketing to news, songs, and audiobooks, and to the obvious AI-generated content flooding social media reels and stories. It’s fun to watch media reels of dogs dancing in synch or barking out a sentence, yet no one is fooled by it. But watching celebrities, athletes, or politicians say something they never said, voices and mouths perfectly matched, is where I start to feel unsettled. People fall for these falsities, and as misinformation has shown us over the last decade, when we start to believe a false narrative, a small divide becomes a chasm between people, viewpoints, and feelings.

I have a heightened concern about businesses increasingly pressured by wealth and power to abandon any guardrails that companies may want to install on the use of AI. I worry about American jobs becoming extinct in a mere decade or less. What would we do for money? What would we do with our time? How will we learn new things that make our minds and bodies stronger? How will we connect, either empathetically or in real life? Will we all become like the characters in the Apple TV series Plur1bus, where AI merges all of humanity into a single collective consciousness, peaceful on the surface, but stripped of every individual thought and impulse that makes us who we are?

And then a thought turned me inward. Hadn’t I used AI for prompts, spelling, and grammar checks? Didn’t I rely heavily on AI to build the first rendition of my website because the whole field was new to me, and I felt very unsure about my ability to communicate who I was and what I wanted to present to the world? I wondered whether using AI would quietly erode everyone’s creativity and critical thinking abilities, and whether leaning on it the way some people lean on an emotional support dog for comfort, rather than capability, might do more harm than good.

In case you have been living under a rock in the last few years, AI, at its core, is a technology trained from an enormous amount of human-generated information, designed to learn from it, reason with it, and communicate in ways that can feel surprisingly human. It doesn’t feel, intuit, or originate. That distinction matters enormously when we are talking about authenticity.

The first time I used AI, it seemed similar to a Google search, but now it feels like it’s a totally different beast. The more it starts to reason and communicate, the more my psychology-informed, curious brain hears the faint beep of a dying smoke alarm.

I’ve had many conversations with friends, family, and clients about how they use AI in their personal lives. A few have told me that they use AI as a makeshift therapist in times of need, and believe that it is better than actually speaking to a licensed professional therapist. As a coach, that kind of thinking made me do a deep dive to find out how empathetic can AI truly be? I found a study by researcher Victor Frimpong called Empathy and the Human-Moment Gaps of AI Chatbots: Insights from Empathy Displacement Theory

The study speaks to how psychologists describe empathy as having three dimensions. The first, Affective empathy, is the ability to emotionally connect with what another person is feeling, including unconscious automatic mimicry. The second, Cognitive empathy, is the capacity to understand someone else’s perspective. And the third is Compassionate empathy, which moves us to actually do something about another person’s suffering rather than simply observe it.

The thing about empathy, though, is that it develops through trust, timing, tone, and the kind of presence that tells another person they are truly being seen, which is exactly why it’s so difficult for technology to replicate. Empathy assumes that both people in the exchange have actually felt something.

Frimpong identifies three ways the absence of genuine AI empathy does not just leave a gap, but actively changes how humans experience empathy over time. The first absence of empathy in AI is called Affective Surfaceism, meaning that people begin to prefer the predictable comfort of a chatbot over the messier reality of human connection. The second absence is Memory Fragmentation, which shows that a lack of any relational history distorts how we value empathy in our human relationships. The third part is Moral Framing Mismatch, which showcases how organizations begin to prioritize efficiency over genuine care.

Together, these three gaps form the foundation of what Frimpong calls Empathy Displacement Theory. AI-simulated empathy doesn’t just fill the space where real empathy used to be. It gradually retrains us to accept the imitation as the real thing, until the most pressing question is no longer whether AI can care about us, but what happens to us when we become used to the version of care it offers.

So even though many feel truly heard, supported, and seen by the AI therapist, it’s not programmed, YET, to know how the person feels through their own similar experiences, and it can’t mimic facial expressions, gestures, or tone to allow the human on the other side of the screen to feel really connected.

Reflection Question:

Take a moment to consider this: Think about a time you felt genuinely heard by another person. Not just agreed with, but truly heard. Could that moment have happened with a chatbot? If your answer is no, what does that tell you about what you actually need from the people in your life?

On my quest to find out if AI enhances or hinders our real selves, I reached out to two people who live and breathe the world of AI. The first works for a major AI company whose mission centers on safety and honesty. The second is my brother Stefan, a strategic business advisor with 25 years of experience inside large startups and vast data companies, AI included in all of it.

My contact at the major AI company and I have talked many times about it, specifically around the eventual programming and processing of emotions by chatbots, which is his main job. I know, frightening images straight out of the film iRobot, of thousands of enraged anarchist robots standing on shipping containers ready to strike while plotting the ultimate takeover of the human population, come to my mind.

He told me that AI will get closer to replicating human emotion, but it will never be a one-to-one match, and oversimplifying that distinction is part of the problem. If some form of independent intelligence does emerge, it will have developed from an entirely different set of parameters than humans, with no microexpressions, no physiological cues, and no instinctive sensitivity to the subtle signals we read in one another constantly. He said that AI may actually surpass us in objective decision-making because of how efficiently it processes information, but it can’t gather emotional data the way a human does. As he put it, ‘I might say one thing, and my body language will tell a therapist something completely different. There is no way for AI to know that piece.”

Stefan sees AI as a force that gradually erodes self-creativity and breeds reliance, making people increasingly dependent on it across nearly every area of life. He also points to mounting evidence of how quickly it is eliminating jobs, and while he believes a bounce back will eventually come for those who learn to master it creatively, he warns that AI will largely wipe out what remains of the middle class and drive poverty rates significantly higher over the next one to three years simply by making entire categories of human work obsolete.

Reflection Question:

Listener, consider this: What is the one thing you do, either in your work or your personal life, that you believe only a human being could do? And how certain are you that it will still be true in five years?

Those are some of the ways AI can work against who we are. But can it also enhance our original selves?

A client recently told me she was struggling with her family and had turned to a chatbot for support. After several conversations, I warned her that AI is the ultimate people-pleaser and may not challenge your thoughts and beliefs the way a therapist or coach would. But what she described was something different. She was using it to journal, to identify her own thinking patterns and ruminations, and to get to the crux of her emotional distress so she could frame it clearly, both to herself and to a professional. She used it as a sounding board for deeper self-reflection and to clarify what her core values actually are. It even suggested a psychological concept that she completely identified with, which led her to a course that she is now working through. The way she uses it offers her a glimpse of her original self, and that, in my book, is a win.

Personally, I use it to get unstuck, whether it’s a word I dropped out because I type too slowly, a jumble of words that are a complete run-on sentence that could use a little help from the concise tab, or amplifying my message without diluting what I meant when I wrote it the first time. In coaching, or heck, all communication, the clearer I project, the quicker and deeper someone can reflect on the subject.

Reflection Question:

So, I ask you: Think about how you currently use AI, or how you might use it. Are you bringing your own thoughts and questions to it and letting it help you go deeper? Or are you handing it a blank page and asking it to fill it in for you? The answer to the last question matters more than you might think.

So where does that leave us?

AI is not going anywhere. It will get more sophisticated, more convincing, and more woven into the fabric of daily life than most of us are prepared for. The question is not whether we will use it, but whether we will use it with enough intention versus abdication to keep ourselves in the equation.

What I have come to believe, through my own experience, research, and through the people I have talked to while preparing this episode, is that AI becomes a problem for the Original Self the moment we ask it to think for us instead of with us. The moment we hand it our voice and call the result our own. The moment we turn to it for the kind of comfort and connection that is only built between two people who actually have lived experiences.

But when we bring our own ideas, our own questions, our own half-formed thoughts, and let AI help us shape them into something clear, that is a tool in service of the original self and not a replacement for it. The ladder, not the climber.

My brother Stefan, along with many scientists and economists, sees the devastating financial consequences coming; they are real, and they are very serious. My contact inside the AI industry sees the empathy gap widening, and the very possible ability to eventually learn emotions on its own terms, and that deserves our utmost attention.

So notice it now. Use the tool, but stay in the room with yourself while you do. Remember, AI can hold the ladder, but you have to do the climbing. The tool doesn’t make the work yours, your intention, your voice, and your willingness to show up and think does.

Reflection Question:

Final reflection question to contemplate: When you use AI, are you bringing yourself to it, or are you slowly letting it replace you?

Thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If these reflections resonate with you and you’d like to explore your own growth, you can learn more about my coaching at decotalifecoaching.com.

Source:

Frimpong , V. (2025). Brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and Neuroscience​. Empathy and the Human-Moment Gaps of AI Chatbots: Insights from Empathy Displacement Theory. https://www.edusoft.ro/brain/index.php/brain/article/download/1934/2417 

The Quiet Power Of Small Steps

The Original Self Podcast

The Power Quiet Of Small Changes

DeCota Life Coaching/Evet DeCota

Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching. I’m 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. Whatever brought you here today, you’re in the right place

I’ve noticed over the years, standing behind a salon chair and coaching individuals, is that people rarely come in for just a hair service or one single topic. They come to me carrying doubts, fears, dreams, and questions about who they are becoming.

Over time, I’ve realized that beneath all the noise of expectations, criticism, and life’s pressures, there is a version of ourselves that still exists. Let’s explore The Quiet Power of Small Changes.

For the last couple of years, I have watched a woman who works in the building next to my salon really struggle as she walks up a small incline in the street. She looks about twenty-five years old, with a very pretty face, and a body that I recognized, because I had once carried that same weight myself.

I previously worked in that building on the floor above her, and we often rode the elevator up together. I would listen to her try to control her breathing as she gently wiped the sweat from her face. I knew instinctively that if she were alone in the lift, she would be breathing very heavily. I feel an abundance of empathy for her, and I use the word empathy intentionally, because I have been extremely overweight, and I know what it feels like to conceal heavy breathing after nothing more than walking up a slight incline, as if I had just run a 10k.

I was so overweight that walking 300 feet made me see black spots and feel dizzy. I sweated constantly even in 40° weather, got easily winded, and lived with many aches and pains all over my body, severe reflux, and a constant stomach ache. I went on like this for a couple of years until one day, in 90°degree heat, I walked home from the salon and almost passed out while only moving at a snail’s pace. I sat down for ten minutes when I got inside and thought about my family history of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and knew all three were coming for me quickly. That was the moment I made the first very small change and texted my doctor for help.

What I didn’t know in that moment was that I had stumbled onto something science has been telling us for quite a while about sustainable change. Sometimes the smallest step, taken at the right moment, can quietly rewire everything. And understanding why that works begins with understanding how the brain responds to change.

Here’s the fascinating part. Our brains are actually designed to resist change, not because we are weak or lacking discipline, but because the brain’s primary job is to keep us safe and to conserve energy. When we attempt a dramatic lifestyle overhaul, the brain can interpret that sudden upheaval as a potential threat. The part of the brain involved in detecting threat, the amygdala, can trigger a stress response that shows up as procrastination, anxiety, or exhaustion. We end up quitting before the new behavior ever has a chance to take hold.

Maybe that’s why every time I decided to lose weight and eat healthier, it would last anywhere from two to four months and then fade out. I would start to feel bored and frustrated, my focus would shift entirely to the end goal, and when the results didn’t come fast enough, I would quietly give up.

Habit Formation:

The problem was never my desire to change; it was that I was trying to change everything at once. Small changes work very differently. They slip past the brain’s resistance almost undetected, and when you repeat a tiny action consistently over time, the part of the brain responsible for habit formation, known as the basal ganglia, begins to automate that behavior. What once required effort starts to feel natural and almost effortless, not because we forced the change, but because we allowed it to take root gradually. And perhaps that is why one of the most powerful things ever said about change has nothing to do with grand gestures at all. As Martin Luther King Jr said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

In other words, lasting change rarely begins with a dramatic overhaul. It begins with a small decision repeated often enough that it quietly becomes part of who you are, so trust in the process. That is not just a philosophical idea; it’s actually backed by research.

The author James Clear wrote something in Atomic Habits that has stayed with me. He describes how a one percent improvement each day, something almost too small to notice, can compound into remarkable growth over a year. When I think about change through that lens, it stops feeling overwhelming and starts feeling completely possible.

I remember the moment I realized something had genuinely shifted. For a long time, my body would crave sweets at night, and I would immediately get up and find something. So, I made one small change. I started waiting five to ten minutes before acting on that craving, just sitting with it instead of immediately feeding it. What I discovered was that most of the time, if I waited for that short window, the craving would quietly pass on its own. Over time, I realized that on many nights, I hadn’t thought about it at all. I had simply waited without reminding myself to wait. It had stopped being a strategy and become something else entirely; a part of who I was.

Before we move forward, I want to offer you this question to reflect on: What is one habit you have tried to build before that faded out, and looking back, was too big to stick with?

Micro Changes:

So how do we make changes without getting frustrated, bored, and eventually giving up? I think many immediately picture a complete lifestyle overhaul that starts on Monday (insert incorrect buzzer sound), wrong! What we can make are micro-changes that are so small the behavior feels almost effortless, but will immediately make you feel like you are actually moving forward.

A micro-change I began in the beginning was drinking one extra glass of water per day and swapping one highly caloric meal out for a more nutrient-dense one three days per week. As I continued throughout the months, those micro-changes became a habit that I increased throughout the whole week and for each meal. Around the same time that I was implementing micro-changes in my diet, I was also micro-changing my mindset by replacing one negative thought with a neutral one, making a list, mental or on paper, of one thing I was grateful for every morning, and pausing before reacting negatively in a difficult moment. I will admit that the reaction change is an ongoing work in progress.

Clear also makes the point that habit formation is not just about doing something differently, but about becoming someone different; a change in identity. For me, exercise looks nothing like what you might see on social media. I have a brittle bone disease that limits what my body can do, so I had to completely redefine what movement meant for me. I used to tell myself that if I could not do a real workout, there was no point in doing anything at all. That story kept me completely still for a long time.

The micro-change was simple. I started stretching for five minutes before I got out of bed. Not at the gym, not in workout clothes, just five minutes of gentle movement before my feet hit the floor. It felt almost too small to count as a change, but I kept doing it, and somewhere along the way, something shifted. I stopped saying I am not someone who exercises and started saying I am someone who moves her body in the way that her body allows. That identity shift changed everything, because it was no longer about what I could not do, but about honoring what I could do.

Changing how I define myself is not so much a “fake it ‘till you make it” attitude, but more of a connection with my inner self, coming back to my original self. The part of me that never doubted my actions and my ability.

Pause here for a moment and consider this: What is one change so small it almost feels too easy that you could begin tomorrow?

Consistency vs Motivation

Understanding micro-changes is one thing, but putting them into practice over time is another. What actually determines whether a small change becomes a lasting habit has very little to do with how inspired or motivated we feel on any given day.

There is a belief that most of us carry around without ever questioning it. We treat motivation as the prerequisite for change, the catalyst that has to arrive before we can move forward. “Once I feel motivated, I will start; Once I feel ready, I will begin; Once I feel inspired, I will take action.” But behavioral psychology tells us something that completely challenges that assumption. Motivation does not create action. Action creates motivation. Let me say that again: Motivation does not create action. Action creates motivation. We have it completely backwards.

This is not just a philosophical idea; it is rooted in how the brain actually works. When we take action, even the smallest and most unglamorous action, the brain’s reward system responds. It registers that we followed through, releases a small amount of dopamine, and suddenly, we feel a little more capable, a little more like someone who follows through. That feeling is what we call motivation, and it was generated by the act of starting, not the other way around. Which means that every time we sit and wait to feel motivated before we begin, we are actually waiting for something that can only be created by beginning. Consistency is not what happens after motivation arrives. Consistency is what summons motivation in the first place.

I know this pattern intimately because I have lived it myself. When I first started promoting my coaching business, I had so many ideas about how to do it that I would become completely overwhelmed before I ever began. I thought that if I wrote a blog, I would need to cite every source like a college essay. I was uncomfortable with the idea of being on camera, and I secretly wanted to do a podcast but had no idea how, plus I convinced myself that nobody would care anyway. So, I ruminated on every idea I had and implemented none of them.

The mindset shift for me was not dramatic or sudden. It did not arrive with a lightning bolt moment of clarity. It arrived quietly, sometime around Christmas, when I simply stopped swirling around which idea was the right one and decided to try them all. I stopped waiting for the perfect plan and started treating every idea as worth attempting. Because the truth is, you can’t know what will resonate, what will feel natural, or what will actually reach people until you begin. The pursuit of perfection can become a very convincing form of avoidance. The shift from thinking to doing, from planning to starting, from waiting to beginning. That is where everything changed for me, and it can change for you, too.

Consistency for me has never looked particularly glamorous. Some days I write at my desk, other days I am typing on my phone, or voicing an idea into a notes app on a break, or talking to myself in the car because a thought arrived that I did not want to lose. Sometimes consistency looks like catching the idea wherever it finds you.

There are days when I sit down and feel like I have nothing new to say. On those days, I have found that the answer is not to push through the resistance but to move toward stillness. A little deep breathing, a moment of rest, and the thoughts begin to find their way back.

I have skipped days of writing, but I can’t remember a day when I did not jot down at least one idea. I have written things that were, to put it plainly, should have never seen the light of day, but I keep coming back. Not because every day feels inspired, but because somewhere along the way, writing and speaking, whether it’s a blog post, a social media caption, or this podcast, became less something I do and more simply a part of who I am.

I still see her sometimes, the young woman at the building next to the salon, making her way up that small incline. I no longer just feel empathy when I see her; I feel something closer to hope. I know that change doesn’t begin with a dramatic overhaul or a perfect plan or even the right amount of motivation. It begins with one small decision, made quietly, on an ordinary day. A text to a doctor, five minutes of stretching before your feet hit the floor, one glass of water, or one idea jotted down in a parking lot.

I don’t know her story, I don’t know what she carries or what she has already tried or what small changes she may already be making in ways I can’t see, but I know this. The most powerful transformations rarely announce themselves; they slip past the brain’s resistance almost undetected. One tiny action at a time, until one day you look up and realize you have become someone you almost did not believe you could be.

The science is clear, the research supports it, and if my own experience has taught me anything, it is that the smallest decisions made consistently over time are far more powerful than the grandest intentions made once and abandoned. That is the quiet power of small changes

The last reflection question I want to ask you is: Where in your life are you still standing at the bottom of the staircase, waiting to see the top, when all you really need to do is take one step?

Thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If these reflections resonate with you and you’d like to explore your own growth, let’s talk.

Who You Were Before The World Told You Who To Be

The Original Self Podcast

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. It’s a space for honest conversations about growth, transition, identity, relationships, and all the messy, meaningful stuff in between that creates the small shifts that help move us forward. Whatever brought you here today, you’re in the right place 

Today, we are talking about how, for many years, standing behind a salon chair and coaching individuals, I’ve noticed people rarely come in for just a hair service or one single topic. They come to me carrying doubts, fears, dreams, and questions about who they are becoming.

Over time, I’ve realized that beneath all the noise of expectations, criticism, and life’s pressures, there is a version of ourselves that still exists. Let’s explore Who You Were Before the World Told You Who to Be.

Earlier today, I was thinking about something people have said to me for most of my life: that I am a chameleon, someone who can adapt my behavior to other people’s personalities very quickly.

When I was younger, I used to think that was a talent that served me well as a hairstylist. Possessing pieces of many different traits allowed me to connect with a wide range of people and to appreciate the differences in personalities, cultures, perspectives, and the unspoken rules that shape how people move through the world, and it certainly can be.  

But about 10 years ago, I noticed something that gave me pause. I realized that the benefits of adaptation did not always outweigh the masking of who I am authentically and what I might be losing in the process. The easier it was for me to shift to meet other people’s expectations, the less certain I felt about who I was underneath all of it. At different moments throughout the day, a quiet voice would interrupt my thoughts with questions I hadn’t seriously asked myself before: “Who are you?” “What actually matters to you?” and “Where are you in this narrative?” and over time, I realized that this experience wasn’t unique to me. And in many ways, it reflects something psychologists have been describing for decades

The psychologist Donald Winnicott had an idea of what he called the True Self, something I think of as the Original Self. Beneath the masks we wear, and the roles we play, remains a version of you that was never lost, only quieted. That is your original self, the part of you that existed before fear, before criticism, and before you learned to shrink yourself to fit into the expectations and boxes that people, culture, and society place around us.

For instance, even an infant will begin to change their behavior the moment a parent responds to them, positively or negatively. From the beginning, we are learning what’s expected of us. It’s not just taught by our parents, but by everyone we encounter and nearly every circumstance we move through. With each verbal, physical, or visual correction we absorb, a small piece of our Original Self quietly steps back. I think of it as a folder that’s moved to the back of the filing cabinet, a little further from reach each time.

So, what fills that filing cabinet? What are the forces doing the filing?

There are three that do the most work, and they often operate together so seamlessly that most of us never notice them as separate things. They are family, culture, and fear. And what makes them so powerful is that all three tend to do their deepest work on us before we are old enough to question them. 

Let’s dissect how family affects us. Family is the first world a child ever knows. Before you have any frame of reference for who you are, your family is already communicating, through words, silences, reactions, and expectations, who you are supposed to become. Most families do not do this out of cruelty. They do it out of love, out of habit, and out of the unexamined beliefs they themselves inherited and never thought to question.

I have observed this across cultures and across generations in my work. The messages vary in their specifics but tend to rhyme with one another in their effect. For many women, the message arrived early and without discussion: you marry, you have children, you build your life around the people you love, and that is enough. Going further — going to college, building something of your own, wanting more than what was modeled for you — was either not encouraged or quietly discouraged, not because anyone wished them harm, but because that was the shape of the world they had been handed, and they were simply passing it along.

Religion adds another layer to this, and I want to be careful here because faith is a genuinely meaningful source of strength and purpose for many people. But there is a difference between a faith you have examined and chosen and a set of beliefs that were handed to you as a very small child, absorbed before you had the capacity to evaluate them. Many people spend years carrying a version of their religious upbringing that feels more like judgment than grace, more like a set of rules about who is acceptable and who is not, before they finally pause long enough to ask whether what they were taught actually reflects what they believe. That examination is not a betrayal of where they came from. It is part of the process of becoming who they actually are.

What all of these family messages share is that they arrive when we are too young to weigh them. A child cannot say, I appreciate your perspective, but I would like to form my own. They simply take it in. And what gets taken in early enough becomes the wallpaper of the self — so constant, so familiar, that most people never think to ask whether they chose it or whether it was chosen for them.

The second part that forms identity is culture. Culture operates the same way, only on a larger scale. If family is the first world, culture is the second one, and it moves in almost simultaneously. Culture tells us what is beautiful, what is valuable, what ambitions are reasonable for a person like us, and which ones are considered overreaching. It tells us, with remarkable consistency and very little apology, how much space we are allowed to take up.

For young people, the need to fit in is not vanity. It is closer to survival. At a certain age, belonging feels like a biological necessity, and the self gets shaped around that need in ways that are genuinely difficult to undo later. You learn which parts of yourself are welcome in the rooms you want to be in, and which parts make people uncomfortable. You learn to lead with the version of yourself that is acceptable and keep everything else somewhere quieter. And if you do this long enough, you can lose track of which version is actually you.

Youth is particularly vulnerable to this because the brain is still developing the capacity for the kind of self-reflection that would allow a young person to say, I am changing myself to belong here, and I want to notice that. Most young people do not have that yet. They are simply adapting, the way humans have always adapted, and the original self is filed a little further back with each adaptation.

Finally, there is fear, which I think is the most honest of the three, because at least fear does not pretend to be acting in your best interest, the way family and culture sometimes do. Fear is direct. It says: do not go there. Do not try that. Do not love that person or want that thing or step out of what is familiar, because something bad might happen if you do.

For me, fear arrived in some of its most formative shapes through loss. Losing people I loved deeply did something to the way I moved through the world that I did not fully understand until much later. Grief has a way of quietly tightening the radius of what feels safe. You become more careful. More protective. And sometimes, without realizing it, you start to make yourself smaller in ways that feel like wisdom but are actually just fear wearing a more acceptable coat.

Fear also arrives through the body, through hormones and aging, and the ways our physical experience shifts beneath us in ways we did not ask for and cannot fully control. The body is one of the places the original self lives most honestly, and when the body changes in ways that feel like loss, many of us respond by pulling back rather than leaning in. We quiet parts of ourselves that once felt natural, because they no longer seem to fit the version of ourselves, we think we are supposed to be at this stage of life.

I want to say something about that directly, because it is something I have lived. I have quieted the feminine part of myself over the years in ways I am only now beginning to examine honestly. Not because anyone told me to, at least not in so many words. But because somewhere along the way I absorbed the message that softness was vulnerability, that expressly feminine ways of moving through the world were less serious, less credible, less safe. And so I filed that part away too, the way we often do with parts of ourselves that we’ve been told, either directly or indirectly, don’t belong.

The original self does not disappear under the weight of family, culture, and fear. It waits. It gets quieter, and sometimes it gets very quiet, but it does not leave. And one of the things I have come to believe most deeply, both from my own life and from the work I do with others, is that the hunger to return to it never fully disappears either. It shows up as restlessness, as a feeling that something is missing even when everything looks fine, as a quiet voice asking questions you have been too busy or too afraid to answer.

That voice is not a problem to be solved. It is an invitation.

And one of the clearest ways to understand what I mean by the original self is to look at a young child.

If you watch a very young child, before the corrections have fully accumulated, you are watching someone who is almost entirely their original self. They want what they want without apology, feel what they feel without editing it first, and have not yet learned which parts of themselves need to be managed. And then, slowly, the shaping begins.

Now, I want to be clear, I’m not suggesting we skip the shaping entirely. I’m not trying to promote Jodi Foster as Nell because we know exactly how that turned out. Raise yourself in the woods with no outside influence whatsoever, and you end up saying “tay in da win” in your own language that works beautifully in the forest and absolutely nowhere else. Some correction is necessary, but the goal is not to become feral. It’s simply to notice how much of what shaped us was genuinely useful growth and how much of it was someone else’s fear or expectation wearing the costume of wisdom.

What I find so striking is that if you watch someone who is very old — someone who has truly lived long enough to make peace with most of it — you often see something remarkably similar. The same unguarded quality. The same willingness to say exactly what they think. The same absence of performance. I believe the elderly, at their best, have done something that takes an entire lifetime to accomplish. They have worn out their need for approval, outlasted most of their fears, and in that clarity, the original self has room to resurface.

I also think — and I hold this more as a feeling than a certainty — that something else may be drawing the very old back toward who they truly are. When we are close to the end of a life, things loosen. What felt urgent for so long begins to matter less. I wonder sometimes whether that loosening is the self preparing to return to something it always was, beneath everything it learned to be. I do not think it is a coincidence that the two groups most in touch with the original self are the ones closest to the beginning and the ones closest to the end. What the rest of us are doing, in the middle of our lives, is trying to find our way back without waiting that long.

And that is where so many of us find ourselves as adults, sensing that something essential is still there, even if we have not quite figured out how to return to it. Everything you have been through — the corrections, the expectations, the fear, the loss, the years of adapting yourself to fit into spaces that were not always built for who you actually are — none of it was wasted. All of it taught you something.

One of the most important things it taught you, even if it has taken a long time to see it clearly, is that the version of you that exists underneath all of that shaping is not only still there, but is the most capable, the most honest, and the most resilient version of you there has ever been. You did not survive all of that by accident. You survived it by being exactly who you are, even when you did not fully know it yet.

The original self was never the problem. It was never too much, or too soft, or too ambitious, or too different. It was simply waiting for you to stop apologizing for it and start accepting it instead.

And accepting it does not mean returning to who you were before the world got involved. It means taking everything the world has taught you and bringing it home to the truest version of yourself–the one that was there at the very beginning, the one that will still be there at the end.

So the question may not be who you need to become, but what parts of yourself may be ready to rediscover. And that, my friends, might be the quiet work in front of you.

Thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If these reflections resonate with you and you’d like to explore your own growth, you can learn more about my coaching at decotalifecoaching.com.