Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody. This is part two of my conversation with the one and only Jennie Allen, who is back here with a marvelous new book, Untangle Your Emotions. In this episode, we are going to go deep and rapidly to what you can do about it so that if you have emotional responses in your life that surprise you, things that disproportionately affect you, you can start the work to untangle them, figure out what’s really going on underneath the surface, give it language so that you can not exactly rise above those emotions but be able to turn those emotions into something useful, the building blocks with which to build a better life.
Welcome back to the show, Jennie.
Jennie Allen:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Greg.
Greg McKeown:
So in the very first pages of this book, you talk about this idea of a disproportionate emotional reaction. Can you unpack that for us?
Jennie Allen:
Sure, I’ll start with the story. So my daughter got married this past year, and it was a great day and this is a great guy, and we are celebrating it. We love this guy. He feels like part of our family, this daughter of mine truly, both my daughters are just two of my best friends. It’s the joy of having adult kids.
Greg McKeown:
Everything is good about this.
Jennie Allen:
Yes, it’s good. We’re happy. And not long after they get married, we’re at dinner together and she starts hypothesizing, not even making plans, but just in theory, talking about moving away. And at this moment, they live in Dallas together, and they still do. And so they start talking about it and I remember it causing a feeling in me that was so dramatic, like my skin hurt, right, like I just felt like my heart was going to come out of my chest. I was so bothered, and I am wise enough to know if I display a reaction like that, that is not going to go well. So I keep it together, but I’m sure my eyes look glazed over, and I’m trying not to cry.
And so this happens more than once. They’re dreaming about moving. Of course, they are. I moved 10 times in my 20s, come on. So there’s a reasonable, practical side of me that is very mature, that is, that knows exactly that I have sent my daughter into marriage to build her own family and to accomplish her own dreams and she does not exist for my happiness. All that I know. Some of you are already judging me, and you’re like, now, don’t you know that…I understand all that pragmatically, intellectually,
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, level one, you get it.
Jennie Allen:
Yeah, got it. Why is my body freaking out? Why am I? Why am I so scared?
Greg McKeown:
You’re having a psychosomatic reaction.
Jennie Allen:
And I don’t want to because I want to support and be there for her, and I also don’t want to live in fear. I don’t want to live in fear that my kids are going to move away because the chances of that are completely high, right? Like it’s a very transient world we live in, so I don’t need to live in fear.
So I take all of that emotion, and I bring that, of course, to my dear friend who is a counselor, and I say, where is this coming from? And I let out my tears, and I weep over it. And he asked me a very profound question that I’d love to turn around on you, Greg if you’ll let me, which is when was the first time you remember feeling that way?
Now I told a story in the last episode about my great-grandmother, and that certainly was one of the first times I felt afraid of being alone, where I would have to die alone, where I realized at this funeral that death was a thing I hadn’t ever faced it. And at seven years old, I remember feeling afraid of being alone.
Fast forward about a year and a half ago, two years ago. My husband can’t speak, and this is post-COVID, and he had a really hard bout with COVID, and he can’t speak, and he can’t form words, and so I take him to the hospital, and he’s having a TIA, a small stroke, and it turns out his blood pressure is like 210 over 180. I mean not human, just like the doctors. There are eight people in the room, and they’re frantically trying to get his blood pressure down and figure out why it’s so high. And so it was traumatic. And I remember we were in and out of the hospital that week and over the next few weeks, and I just remember at that moment standing in the hallway as the nurse looked at me and said you know, this isn’t good, and this isn’t human, like what your husband’s going through. And I remember thinking he’s going to die.
And so I look back at moments where in my brain, what my brain is doing is it saying you don’t want to be alone. And when Kate’s talking to me that seven-year-old is coming up that has to die alone, that you know, 40-something is coming up where I almost lost my husband and I would be alone in my home, and I am going to be alone, like there is a message that is so deep, deep, deep, deep down. It’s not on the surface, or I would speak to it and correct it, and I would reason with it’s deeper. It’s seven year old, deep, right, it’s back from when I could barely form memories or thoughts deep.
So we’ve got something in us that is going into our conversations as adults that came from when we were 10 or 12 or five, right, but because those parts of us have never healed. Then, yes, we have a disproportionate reaction, and right now, somebody listening is like, “I’m turning this off because this is too deep, I don’t want to go. If you’re telling me to not have a disproportionate reaction, I have to go back to my seven-year-old self. I’m not doing that work.”
And I would just say let me start with the joy of doing this work. There is an ability to actually like. For instance, right now, in the last few weeks, my daughter has dreamed again about a fun adventure with her husband, away from me, even, dare I say it, out of the country, and I was fine, my heart did not race, my body did not react, I was not passive, aggressive. I was able to be present with her and encourage those dreams and hear those dreams. It is possible to heal.
So I have to start with, like the end, that if you want to have healthy relationships, if you want to be present in your own pain and other people’s pain, you have to do a little work, you have to do a little digging and as you do that and as you begin to heal those parts of you that are so afraid and fearful today, those parts of me as I’m going and more are being revealed, are beginning to heal, and it’s just making me more at peace, and it gives me the energy to do the things I want to do to help people and to create and to build things that are good in the world because I’m not spending all this energy trying to not feel my seven-year-old fear or to not feel the fear of my husband dying, or to not feel the fear of my kids abandoning me, like if I spend all that energy, that’s energy you’re burning that you don’t have available for other things. And that comes from my friend, Dr. Kurt Thompson, who is so wise and taught me such and helped convince me that this work was worth it.
Greg McKeown:
Well, this is a thin slice element of the story that you shared just now is that it wasn’t just that you were feeling these emotions, and it wasn’t just that they were disproportionate to the circumstance. It was that you were trying not to feel them, and anybody who has ever tried not to feel what they’re feeling is on a fool’s errand. And maybe we go to, I mean, maybe we go to really extreme strategies sometimes in our lives to avoid that right. Like the whole idea of numbing our emotions, whether it’s through drugs or through any kind of addiction, including social media, which is certainly as addictive as many or maybe all of the traditional drugs that we have. The moment we feel emotional discomfort, we just go okay, yes, I’m gonna go to YouTube. Okay, yes, I’ll just go to Instagram. Okay, yes, I’ll just go to whatever the social media advice is to avoid the experience we’re having right now.
I think it is something to do with not recognizing that emotions are these other raw materials needed to be able to make progress. Like they’re there to teach us something, and as long as we’re trying to avoid it and not go there and not sort of, as we might say, have conversations with those emotions and go, okay, where are you coming from and what do you have to teach me? And as long as we’re not doing that, they sort of stay with us, trying to get our attention still. No, there’s still something here. So, anyway, I wanted not to miss that particular element of the experience.
Jennie Allen:
Absolutely. I think they are the greatest gift that we are missing because we’ve demonized them, we’ve judged them, we’ve pushed them down. We can’t see their benefit. There’s a million reasons we don’t feel our emotions. We think we shouldn’t, because our parents told us we shouldn’t feel that. So there’s a real barrier to entry here. And then, not to mention, you’ve got people that just let their emotions run their entire life, and it causes destruction. So there’s that wisdom that some people are feeling right now, like, oh no, I have seen this, and it results in a terrible, terrible place, and I would say that’s less about their emotion and more about their emotional health.
So what I’m proposing is not just emotions for emotion’s sake. My thing is exactly what you’re saying. You’re going to feel them, you are a feeler. Even those of you that are listening are like I’m not. I am not a feeler, I don’t feel anything.
I would say you are built by a God who is a feeler, and he made you a feeler. This is the facts. You are an emotional being, and so when you are an emotional being, you can begin to go, okay, well, what do we do with this? Just like, what do we do with money? What do we do with sex? What do we do with these things? That are good things, but we all know can cause damage and destruction. So that’s really where I approached the book.
I did all this research. Of course, in my own life I’m walking through counseling for the last two years and growing tremendously through that, but then I started all the research, and I was like, “Gosh, nobody’s just holding my hand and saying this is what you do when you have a strong feeling.”
And so that’s what I tried to do in the book was just hold people’s hand and say, follow me, I’m gonna give you the simplest way to walk through this. That will lead to emotional health if you let it.
Greg McKeown:
Now you said you were gonna turn the tables on me, and if I weren’t mentioning that right now, we might just I might have just avoided my. I probably should have just let that go.
Jennie Allen:
Will you go there with me?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, of course.
Jennie Allen:
Okay then, you’ve asked me so many hard questions, let’s go. What is a disproportionate reaction you’ve had in the last week or two?
Greg McKeown:
In the last week or two. Oh, I was thinking. I was thinking the question might be slightly different to that. So I already sort of have now in my mind a disproportionate. Oh no, I don’t know if it’s disproportionate, I don’t know, I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. I think I’ll just stay with this because this is wrong.
Jennie Allen:
Well, what’s a strong feeling you felt recently?
Greg McKeown:
Well, the experience that was in my mind, okay. So the emotion was serious, fear, and so let’s say that perhaps the two worst days in my life right, one was a few years ago when my best friend growing up was again diagnosed with cancer, and this is, it is now terminal and see, the thing is like a lot of people have friends and I have a lot of friends, but that’s not really what this relationship is. He’s a rare kind of person, and our friendship is a rare kind of friendship. So we’re like each other’s earliest friend. We have spent, you know, I don’t know what the number is, hundreds of hours, maybe thousands of hours just listening, talking, laughing, sharing dreams, especially growing up, the safest conversations about every possible conceivable subject, and that friendship has gone on all through our lives.
Okay, so the day that he knows and is calling to share that bad news is, you know, I count the worst day of my life. And the second worst day, the one that surprised me most, was when I was messaging, we message or call each other, you know, very regularly, and he was on a medication that meant that he was experiencing paranoia, and it’s not unusual for his medication, even though they hadn’t warned him, strangely enough, that this would be a likely symptom, and so he expressed to me words something like, “Look, I just can’t talk now.”
Which, first of all, that’s like that’s not, that’s not normal communication. But it wasn’t like, hey, I’m just busy, it’s like I just can’t talk now. No, he didn’t say now, it’s like I just can’t talk because our lives don’t like we have nothing in common. We have nothing in common anymore, and in that moment, we’ve talked about it a lot since, but in that moment, it was like, okay, man, but like what, if that’s forever? Because that’s what it felt like at that moment, and it wasn’t obvious to him that he was experiencing paranoia. It wasn’t obvious to me, of course, therefore, that that’s what was going on, and so it wasn’t like personal, it wasn’t didn’t feel attacked, but there was a pure fear in that moment that was totally something like totally suffocating because what it felt like was oh, it’s already the end. It’s right here, you know, because it isn’t-.
Jennie Allen:
But it was worse than death because he was abandoning you, like he was choosing versus death would take him from you.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I mean, sure, look, not sure. I shouldn’t say it in that way. That sounded dismissive, like so let’s say that what safe attachment is practically is I can say anything to you, and you won’t run away, right? Like when somebody says okay, for example, okay, I’m going to, we’re going to, I’m going to marry you. The astonishing and outrageous commitment that we’re making, this lifelong commitment, this extraordinary thing, this amazing thing, there’s nothing you can say that makes me run away. And, of course, the thing that makes that astonishing or shocking or outrageous is like there’s so much inside of us, right? Like there’s so many reptiles inside there. There’s so many challenges, right, not at level one, you know, not at level two or three or four, but by the time you get to level 10, everybody is full of all of these complex, unresolved emotions, challenges, thoughts, fears, and so, as the closer you get to somebody, the more likely you are to come into that, and the longer you live with people, the less able they are to be able to hide at higher levels.
And so that deep commitment, that that’s what makes it so astonishing. And so if you can feel that kind of depth of commitment in a friendship which I think is truly rare and, in my life, has been rare. This is one of them. So, then, for there to be something that fractures that the threat of that was was totally piercing.
Jennie Allen:
So let’s go back to that day that you felt that, that he said that to you, and I don’t want you to bring your thoughts today about it like what you know about the medicine, because you probably didn’t know that that day. So that day, what did you feel?
Greg McKeown:
You know, piercing fear.
Jennie Allen:
What were you afraid of?
Greg McKeown:
I mean, I don’t know if I’m primed by the conversation, you know, or whether this is literally what it is, but it is, you know, it’s a loneliness in the universe, you know, and it’s not. It wasn’t. Yeah, I mean, I suppose it probably was that, even though I knew even in the moment well, I’m not alone in the universe, right, I have Anna, and I have my children, and so I’m not alone in the universe. So, of course, there’s lots of people beyond that, but there was definitely, I, definitely had the fear. I am more alone in the universe.
Jennie Allen:
So I want you to think back to the first time you were a member, feeling piercing fear.
Greg McKeown:
In my whole life? Yep, okay, I think I have a candidate for that. Okay, you want me to talk about that, I assume. Well, there’s sort of two options in my mind. One was when my mother was very unwell.
Jennie Allen:
Okay, let’s go with that one. So I want you to start again, and I want you just to go there, and I want you to remember, if you can, a day, a specific moment that that fear struck you.
Greg McKeown:
So the moment that comes to mind is when my mother was really unwell. It was wordless for me. No one was talking about in any detail what was happening. Perhaps I was, I don’t know, 10 years old. I could have been 11 or 12. And I remember being at school. There was no news at school, so there wasn’t like a single moment that was sparked it for me at school or anything. But I just remember being in a home economics class and just feeling all of these feelings. Just feeling this piercing fear. That’s, by definition, what I’m supposed to be finding here for you. But just also, just you know, that sense of unraveling, like okay, well, I don’t know what any of this means, you know, and I have to keep a certain, you know, let’s say professional exterior. I’m here at school, I’m doing this thing. This is normal. It didn’t occur to me to not go to that class or to not go to school so that just had to carry on. Meanwhile, I’ve got this whole thing, that’s just, you know. I don’t know what to make of it. I forget a lack of words for emotions. I don’t have any words at all for what’s going on. Nobody’s talking about that, so that’s the moment.
Jennie Allen:
Do you remember what you were afraid of?
Greg McKeown:
I mean, it’s an interesting question actually, because I suppose that the surface or the answer that would be obvious would be like, oh well, you know, I’m afraid that my mother will die, or I’m afraid that you know that that’s the fear. But actually, I think it had more to do, even in the moment. I think it had more to do with just the unknowing of it all, just the wordlessness of it all, the ambiguity of it. I don’t know what this all is. So I’m dealing with all of the emotions, I’m dealing with all of this feeling, and I can read it, and I can sense it, and it’s all palpable, but no one’s talking about anything. So the difference between the experience and the words, that, to me, I think, was actually what was most disturbing.
Jennie Allen:
First of all, I feel so compassionate to that little boy because he is trying to make sense of the world, like you today are doing a better job of it, but that 11-year-old version of you was doing the best that he could to make sense of the chaos, of what was around him and I feel so kind and compassionate to him because of course, he feels that way. Of course, he feels confused and like there’s chaos and life is out of control, and so, wow, I just feel really privileged that you let me into that, and I also feel incredibly moved by how you are today, and we only know each other through the screen, but it seems like today your 10-year-old or 11-year-old curious boy that is scared of the unknown is doing his best to help people know, like to help people see and to help make sense of the world and to help bring clarity.
I heard a quote one time “We longed to give to the world what we failed to receive growing up.” And I feel really moved and proud of the man you are today and how he is really filling holes for people that he felt when he was 11 years old. But I think the magic of going to these places is that the 11-year-old is still in you, like he’s still there. There’s still a fear of that when you’re 40-something, and you hear that your best friend is dying, and there’s confusion around why he’s talking the way he is and what’s going to happen to him physically and is he going to die or not, or is he going to be well? Is he going to be my friend, for crying out loud? That confusion and chaos, like that part of you that’s 11 is still showing up at your 40-something moment.
And I need to be super clear about something. Everybody listening right now is insanely moved by everything you just shared and so grateful because they relate. I relate.
All of us had a moment in those years when we felt like I can’t put my hands on my life and it’s going out of control, and we felt that terrifying sense that we’re not in control. We all relate. So that’s moving all of us into places of ourselves that we maybe haven’t thought of in a long time. It’s really a gift, and I want to be clear, too, that this is not something to fix, right? I think we tend to think, if I can go back to all these moments and heal that part of myself or work out whatever I have to do, follow the steps, whatever the steps are, that I won’t be afraid anymore. That is insane, guys, we are actually.
Fear is a natural response to your best friend, your brother. He’s your brother, your sole brother on earth. To call you and push you away in the midst of him dying potentially. That is too horrible. Of course, you would be a robot if you weren’t insanely fearful, sad, and grieved over that.
So I think we’ve got to couch this in the gift that this all is. I mean, this is our life, this is living. The 11-year-old fear, the 40-something-year-old, potentially broken relationship, this is what makes life so full. I know that sounds weird and harsh even, but take all that out, and we are living the life of a very boring documentary versus a rich, beautiful story that has beauty and darkness and fear and grief and death and life, and something about all of it really is the way we want to live, the fullest picture of how we are meant to live. And so I think when you share all that, I hope everybody hears the beauty in all of it. But when I said those words, if I feel connection, that compassion to that 11-year-old, and how proud I am of the man you are and what you’re doing for the world. What do you feel when I say that?
Greg McKeown:
That’s a good question too. I mean, let me respond to it from the end first, right? So you sort of ended on this idea of something that connected and felt quite safe, which is, yeah, like we came here for the feelings, right, like, when we say we came for experiences, we don’t mean we came for the rational experiences and not for the emotion of it. It’s inherent in the word experience, right? We mean, we felt something. We didn’t just do something, we felt something, we experienced it.
And so the idea that all these emotions that were bigger than our words or that were more advanced than our ability to navigate them, it isn’t something to fix but something to experience, it’s like maybe we’re trying to experience it again now where we have the language, and we have a bit more maturity, so that we can, in a sense, we find a radical gratitude for it, I think is itself interesting, right, like, yeah, we, the idea that if we could just strip our lives, the whole of our lives, so far from all of their emotions, the idea that that would be better is, you know, it’s obvious that that’s nonsense, right? It’s obvious that that’s just, you know, foolish. And yet we’re afraid to feel, and we’re trying to do that lots of times, trying to strip it. Well, yeah, there’s this self-reliance course that, well, that’s not. That language doesn’t do justice to it.
Jennie Allen:
Hold on, hold on. I’m actually going to boss you around on your own podcast. Go back and tell me how you felt. What emotion did you feel, and start with the words I feel. When I told you how I felt, I know this is a funny exercise.
Greg McKeown:
I don’t mind it, and I will, but I still want to say the thing I was going to say, and then I will do that, which is I went, we went through this course, and it was all about emotional resilience, and I just remember that we were in this little group together and the men in the group expressed something that I understand but didn’t really relate to, and that was, “We just I just don’t do emotions, we just don’t. You know, my family didn’t do it, and I don’t do it.” And it was just so new, it felt so new to their vocabulary, and I thought, oh yeah, I’ve been on that journey. I suppose there probably was a time I might have said that I thought that, but I’m further on that journey now. But this idea that they really were, even in their, you know, forties, actually trying to live life, remove from emotions, not talking about them, not giving them language, that’s what I wanted just to connect on.
Okay, now to your question. How did I feel? I felt a little like crying when you said that. I would say, you know, like I, I wouldn’t have interrupted you for the world in that moment. You know, that’s my sensation, and I’ve experienced that before, where, on the other hand, like if you wanna stop someone talking, you just say listen, let me just tell you something amazing about you, or let me just tell you something great about you. It does not matter the situation, with 100% certainty, they will stop talking, they will wait to hear it.
And so there was a feeling of that like, oh, you’re speaking something kind to that to that little boy back there and that there’s a goodness to it and that there was something about that that was like a first, because I don’t really know if I’ve talked about that specific moment before, and so the idea of breathing compassion, you know to, in a sense it reminded me that I was a little boy.
Jennie Allen:
Did you feel proud of him, too, in a way?
Greg McKeown:
I don’t know. That’s a step beyond maybe where I’m at with it. I think I just felt compassion. As you said it, I felt compassion to that little boy. Like I said, it was almost like that was the first moment that I went. Oh yeah, I was just a little boy, you know, it’s just a little boy when that was happening because I think at the time I wasn’t really aware of being a little boy, you know?
I just had a little conversation with it, with a nephew who’s younger than I was then, but not very much younger, and he wept, he just teared his tears the whole way through this conversation, and I thought, oh my goodness, this little boy just has the whole weight of the whole world on his shoulders. He thinks he’s in charge of all these things that he’s not in charge of. I think I felt that. I think I felt some of that. Like I’m in charge of something here I’m not in charge of. I have to look after people that I don’t. It’s not my job to look after them. So yeah, I think that was a discovery in the conversation.
Jennie Allen:
I just wanna say how awkward this could be, but it’s just not. Like I love, I don’t know. There’s something about it that’s so human and relatable, and the words that keep coming to mind is, of course, you felt that way. Of course, you did, and I think that’s what we’re all craving.
You know, I just think of the person listening right now. That’s like I’m in the middle of that 11-year-old boy moment. Maybe I’m 57, but I’m in the middle of that 11-year-old boy moment, and the world is out of control, and I can’t fix it. And I would just say, “Of course, you feel scared, like, of course, you feel overwhelmed, of course.” And I think that compassion is healing in a way that we can’t even measure or understand, really, because we’re so accustomed to the opposite.
“Pull yourself together. Quit feeling afraid, Don’t think that, don’t feel that.” It’s like, well, it doesn’t help that much, you know.
But getting to why we feel it and understanding where it’s coming from, that begins to help, and it’s that untangling, it’s like it begins to just sort it out and go. Man, yeah, I’ve often thought I’m afraid of being left alone, and I know, pragmatically, I won’t be, but maybe I will be. But that’s not, that’s not a pragmatic question, it’s not a pragma, it’s a 10-year-old question, it’s a seven-year-old question, it’s a human question, and we all have those at our core.
Greg McKeown:
Listen, it’s a beautiful conversation. It’s a lot but in a good way. I wanna end on just one thought about this experience. I mean, of course, what you’re modeling is untangling the emotions. But instead of talking about untangling emotions, we’ve just sort of gone through this experience, and I love it, and I wanna connect it back to something we talked about somewhere previous in the conversation, and it’s to do with why do we need it so badly? And that is a question I have really wrestled with. Like that, it’s a need to not just understand our emotions but have our emotions understood by somebody else, right?
That that is necessary is obvious to me, like the whole of my life teaches me that. The whole of my every interaction, almost with another person, teaches me that that’s true. But why? Why isn’t it just a nice to have? Why is it so desperately? Why do we yearn for it? Why do we act so poorly when we don’t have it, and so on?
And I just want to offer what I think is the best answer. Well, it’s the best answer I have so far, and there may be other, better answers, but let me share this thought. So one could say that humans are born prematurely. You know, if you compare a baby to a gazelle, right? Like gazelles, the day they’re born, they’re running literally with the herd, right? Or an elephant who walks through its first meal. And because you could go through so many animals in this way, right? Like a human, a baby cannot survive. We know that they’re completely helpless. The only thing they can contribute to their survival is that they can cry.
That’s it.
That there’s nothing else. They have no other tool with which to navigate, not just the first days of their life or the first weeks, months, I mean, let’s say, a good 18 months to two years. They have no other skills with which to survive the world, so pre-language, and so I think that it’s reasonable to make the case that the first lesson of life that our brains learn is something like if you’re not heard, you will die, and so I think that it’s a that’s based partially in an article that I read about this same evaluation, but that idea that we carry that with us all through our lives, that we have to be heard. We need to be heard to be able to just even survive in this world. I mean, I think this is right. It’s Jaak Panksepp from Washington University who calls it a primal panic, and I think that that’s a great description.
Jennie Allen:
That’s a great word.
Greg McKeown:
Very deep in us that fears that. Of course, we need to untangle all of that through our lives, and you are the person to help us to do this in this marvelous new book Untangling Your Emotions. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Jennie Allen:
So good to be here, Greg. Thanks and thanks for going to all those places with me. That was truly a gift. I feel grateful.
Greg McKeown:
I feel grateful. Thank you so much.
