Listen to me go from playing varsity to little league as I tackle an emotion I'm not at all skilled at: disgust. Never fear, if you've got a weak stomach, you're totally fine cause in this case, my disgust is prompted by hypocrisy. I am incredibly ineffective at unpacking my disgust and realize I totally forgot to actually OBSERVE how I got there. So I add some of that in at the end. Let's be disgusted together!

Helpful resources from this episode:

DBT references

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets – online pdf version

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets – buy the manual from a Black-owned book store!

DBT handouts used in this episode

Emotion Regulation Handout 6 – Ways to Describe Emotions

• Disgust

Emotion Regulation Handout 5 – Model for Describing Emotions (alternate version: E Wheel)

Mindfulness Handout 1 – Goals of Mindfulness Practice

Mindfulness Handout 4 – Taking Hold of Your Mind: “What” Skills

• Observe

Mindfulness Handout 5 – Taking Hold of Your Mind: “How” Skills

Other handouts/graphics used in this episode

Misery with vs without mindfulness

---------

More resources are available at https://therapize.joygerhard.com/

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Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

You've got shit. I've got shit. We've all got shit. So let's therapize that shit, with your host, me, Joy Gerhard.

Please note: I am not a therapist. I cannot and do not diagnose anyone, or prescribe anything. This is just me – someone who struggles with my emotions and with intrusive thoughts – sharing what skills I've used and how I've used them. Also, a trigger warning: in this podcast, I talk about sensitive topics including: mental illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, rape, childhood sexual assault, trauma, and more. I also swear here and there, so listener discretion is advised.

Welcome, welcome. Today we are going to be talking about disgust, or rather me – two months ago into the past – will be talking about disgust. I am recording this intro on December 17th, 2021 and what you were about to hear was recorded on October 28th, 2021, so a little under two months ago.

I don't have a lot of practice in identifying disgust when it's happening. I know how anger feels, I know how fear or anxiety feels, I know how sadness feels. But disgust is not an emotion I've spent a lot of time being aware of when I'm having it, practicing how to regulate when it's happening doing opposite action or just observing it, even.

I know that I feel it. I know that there are many times that I feel disgust. And I don't know that if somebody asked me, in the middle of feeling disgust, that I would be able to say, “oh, I'm feeling disgust right now.”

If somebody said, “what emotion are you feeling right now?” I would mislabel it as something else, probably anger. Cause I think disgust triggers a lot of judgment and then the judgment will trigger anger.

And I will get quagmired in the anger rather than sitting with the disgust, or even being aware of the disgust. So that's what we're going to talk about today, or that's what I talked about two months ago and you're about to hear it.

Now, I talk about this way more at the end, but I want to mention it now. In what you're about to hear, there are skills I use and there are also places where I am spectacularly ineffective.

Namely, you'll notice that when I try to describe the prompting event for the emotion of disgust, I'm super vague, which is a big reason why I'm not able to address the disgust.

So if you're listening to this and wondering, “what the fuck is she on about? This ‘event’ – what event?!” That's totally justified. I'm really not being specific. And once we're done with this flashback, I'll get into what the skills gap is in much more detail. So let's dive in, shall we?

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

So I've been doing some recordings that are me basically talking about being skillful and accomplishing things and getting shit done. Today I thought I would actually hop on while I am not in a great place so there would be some balance.

I just literally 30 seconds ago finished an appointment with my therapist, and I think I cried for 45 minutes of the 60-minute session. A lot of conversation around frustration with my folks and their faith and the way that they interact with me around their faith and living in the house with them and hearing them talk about their faith with other people.

It's a lot, and a lot of anger came up and a lot of disgust, so I thought we could take a second and actually talk about one of the emotions that I don't do a great job of identifying. And so this is Emotion Regulation Handout 6 in the DBT handbook. You can find a link to the PDF on my website https://therapize.joygerhard.com. There's a link in the description and you can also buy a copy. There's a link for that on the website, too.

So, Emotion Regulation – that's one of the modules in the DBT handbook. Handout 6 is super long because it's a single handout, but each page is its own emotion. So, we've got anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, jealousy, love, sadness, shame, guilt. And then, at the very, very end, underneath at the end of guilt, there's other important emotion words that don't really fit into those categories.

So, for each emotion it talks about, so if the emotion is discussed – which is what we're going to talk about right now – there's a bunch of synonyms, so you can get the exact flavor of your given emotion.

And then it talks about the prompting events for feeling disgust. So these are things that happen that will elicit the experience, the emotion of disgust. And then it talks about the interpretation of events that prompt feelings of disgust. So, these are things that happen that, they themselves, don't trigger disgust.

How we think about those things, the interpretations of that event, that triggers disgust. An example of an interpretation rather than the fact: if your partner is late coming home from work. Someone coming home late may not trigger anger necessarily.

But if you have the thought, “they don't care about me,” or, “they don't value my time,” or, “their work is more important than I am,” or, “they don't value communication. Our relationship is doomed,” like those interpretations, those thoughts can elicit all of these emotions.

So again prompting events, then we have interpretation of events. Then it'll talk about the biological changes and experiences – so, basically what it feels like inside your body.

Then it talks about expressions and actions of disgust – like somebody standing in the corner of the room watching you, what they would see. And this also includes urges. And then finally, the echoes and aftereffects. So, kind of how it lingers even after the event is finished. Yeah, let's talk about disgust. So, some...

“disgust words: abhorrence, antipathy, aversion, condescension, contempt, dislike, derision, disdain, distaste.”

And these are alphabetical in case you couldn't tell.

“Hate, loathing, repugnance, repelled, repulsion, resentment, revolted, scorn, sickened, spite, and vile.”

And those are all different parts of speech, and that annoys the crap out of me. What's interesting here is, some of these I had kind of assumed were anger.

Like, “hate” feels like an anger word, and it turns out it's a disgusted word. I mean, it makes sense because, if disgust is just extreme dislike, then extreme dislike is hate.

“Some prompting events for feeling disgust: seeing or smelling animal waste products; having a person or an animal that is dirty, slimy, or unclean come near you; tasting something or being forced to swallow something you really don't want.”

Oh my god, the disgust I feel about Robitussin. Robitussin cough syrup. I think I would rather die of a cough than take that shit. I used to have to psych myself up, and my mom would give me a stack of saltine crackers to just shovel into my mouth immediately after. Whole body, just like eugch, just repulsion. So, I feel that one strongly

“Seeing or being near a dead body; touching items worn or owned by a stranger, dead person or disliked person; observing or hearing about a person who grovels or who strips another person of dignity; seeing blood or getting blood drawn; observing or hearing about a person acting with extreme hypocrisy or fawning;

“Observing or hearing about betrayal, child abuse, racism or other types of cruelty; being forced to watch something that deeply violates your own wise mind values; being confronted with someone who is deeply violating your own wise mind values; being forced to engage in or watch unwanted sexual contact. And then there's a space for ‘other.’”

There's as many different ways to be disgusted as there are people in the world. So, those are prompting events for feeling disgust. So, this is an event that happens and you don't have any interpretation, any thought about it. This is a thing that happens and this thing itself triggers disgust.

I wrote the date on here of when I first did this page in my original DBT group. It was September 21st, 2016, which was over five years ago. And the only thing I circled on there, because clearly this is where I was at the moment, was the word “hypocrisy.”

“Observing or hearing about a person acting with extreme hypocrisy fawning.”

I have been dealing with that a lot lately. But we'll get into that later. Now the next section is interpretation of events that prompt feelings of disgust. The event itself is not the thing; it's the thought we have. Here's some beliefs that will trigger feelings of disgust:

“A belief that you are swallowing something toxic...”

You don't actually have to be swallowing something toxic. If somebody tells you, or you believe that you are, that can trigger disgust.

“The belief that your skin or your mind is being contaminated; the belief that your own body or body parts are ugly.”

So, I'm thinking of body dysmorphia there.

“The belief that others are evil, or that they disrespect authority, or the group; disapproving of or feeling morally superior to someone else; an extreme disapproval of yourself or your own feelings, thoughts, or behaviors; judging that a person is deeply immoral or has sinned, or violated the natural order of things; judging somebody else's body as extremely ugly.”

These are all thoughts that we have that trigger disgust. I put an asterisk next to the “extreme disapproval of yourself or your own feelings, thoughts, or behaviors.” Yeah, I think disgust based on that can trigger shame. So it starts with disgust – that's the first thing that happens – and then shame follows. And, here's what disgust feels like in your body. So, these are...

“The biological changes and experiences of disgust: feelings of nausea, so feeling sick to your stomach; an urge to vomit, gag or choke.”

Or actually doing any of those things.

“Having a lump in your throat; an aversion to drinking or eating.”

I've noticed that there are things that, when I feel disgust around something I'm watching. I don't want to eat during that.

“An intense urge to destroy or get rid of something.”

For me, this oftentimes feels like I want to claw out of my clothes, or crawl out of my own skin. Like I just need to get out.

“The urge to take a shower; the urge to run away or push away; feeling contaminated, dirty or unclean; feeling mentally polluted; fainting.”

So those are all body sensations that can happen when you experience disgust.

“Expressions and actions of disgust.”

So, these are urges. Basically, what it looks like if somebody is in the room watching you when you're experiencing disgust, they may see you:

“Vomit or spit something out; close your eyes and look away; wash, scrub or take a bath; change your clothes or cleaning your space; avoiding eating or drinking; pushing or kicking something away; running away; treating somebody or something with disdain or disrespect;

“Stepping over or crowding another person out; physically attacking the cause of your disgust; using obscenities or cursing; clenching your hands or fists; frowning or not smiling; being mean or unpleasant – I'm sorry – having a mean or unpleasant facial expression; speaking with a sarcastic tone of voice; the nose and top lip tightening up or smirking.”

So those are some ways. If you're looking at someone, you might be able to tell that they're experiencing disgust. Or, if you're experiencing disgust, those are some things other people might see you do. And the...

“Echoes or aftereffects of disgust include: narrowing of attention; ruminating about the situation that's making you feel disgusted; becoming hypersensitive to dirt.”

I think narrowing of attention is actually – I'm flipping through Handout 6 and looking at every single one of them. Almost all of them have narrowing of attention as an aftereffect. Because one of the things about experiencing strong emotions is that it narrows our attention.

So, feelings of disgust. What I'm noticing and the thing that's prompting this is a disconnect between what my parents say and what they do; things that they say are important and then behaving in a different way. A lack of self-awareness around that. Saying something to me, and saying something different to other people on the phone.

This is a conundrum for me because I don't want to eavesdrop, and my parents are both losing their hearing, so they are extremely loud when they're on the phone or on zoom or whatever. And our doors are hollow core doors, which means that they're basically glorified cardboard.

So, talking to my therapist today about how to basically tolerate the distress that comes up. Which is not to say that I like the behavior. I don't think there's anything I can do that's going to change their behavior, which merely means I need to address how I feel, or tolerate the distress that comes from it.

I should probably get into the biological model of how emotions work. What's in the DBT handbook is... it's shit. It's Emotion Regulation Handout 5. It's very confusing. I will put up a diagram that I actually like way better. That's the emotion wheel. Basically, it's Handout 5 but just drawn differently in a way that I think is a little bit more intuitive.

Imagine your emotions – the experience of having emotion – like a wheel. And if you don't have any emotions in a given moment, your wheel is just sitting there. And then you push it.

And it'll start spinning. There are things that can happen that can slow down the spinning and things that can perpetuate the spinning. There are two things that will get the wheel spinning.

One is an event – what you thought, what you saw, what you heard, what you felt, what you tasted, smelled, dreamed, remembered. Any of those things can elicit an emotion.

And the other thing that can elicit an emotion is: the story or the interpretation we have about an event. So again, like your partner coming home late.

That thing, the thought that you have, “Oh, they don't care about me. They don't love me. They value their job more than they value me. They're just like my parent, who always came home late. Oh, my God, my parents got divorced. I never felt loved.”

Those are all kind of thoughts that can have that experience blow up. So your wheel starts spinning faster and faster. Oftentimes, the interpretation happens so quickly behind the event that we lump them together.

I once had a meltdown... I don't know if I've talked about this on this podcast. I once had a meltdown because I couldn't find my sunglasses. That's actually not the reason I had the meltdown. I had the meltdown because I couldn't find my sunglasses, and then I had the thought: I can't control anything.

So. not finding my sunglasses is not a thing. There's no emotion behind there, except for maybe annoyance and frustrations, like, “well, this is inconvenient.” The meltdown is of course: I can't control anything.

That's a thought that, if you have it and it starts spinning, that wheel just starts going. It would be hard not to have a meltdown from that thought. There's some thoughts we have that are so volatilizing that you have the thought and, well, yeah, you're going to have a very strong emotional response.

Both events and interpretations can get the wheel spinning. Then once the wheel starts spinning, you have your experience in your body: body sensations, the physical way your body changes, your urges to act. And then you have your expression, which is how you communicate this emotion to other people, or what other people would see if they were watching you.

So, what you said or did, facial expressions, body language. And then the echoes. Echoes are how your emotion influences your attention, mood, thinking, and actions as the day goes on. So, everybody has had an experience of a friend or family member who gets upset about something, and then there's a black cloud around for the rest of the day.

Like there's this kind of lingering anger, resentment, just something that's unspoken. That's an example of an echo. I've had things where I woke up one morning and I'm super excited to eat my leftovers for breakfast, and then somebody else ate them. It kind of throws off my entire day.

I get upset, and then that resentment lingers for the rest of the day. Echoes are protective in intention; they are trying to protect you from having that emotion again. There's a lot of avoidance and a lot of battening down the hatches.

Kind of to summarize: an event happens and gets the wheel starting, or an event happens, and then our interpretation of that event happens, and gets the wheel started. The wheel is the experience of how it feels in your body, the expression of how it looks to other people, and the echoes, the aftereffects of how it lingers overtime.

And that wheel can keep spinning because you have an experience in your body. If you experience something, like you experience anxiety, well now you may have anxious thoughts, and the thought can keep the wheel spinning.

The thought is the interpretation that just keeps adding fuel to the fire. Now I'm mixing all my metaphors here. The likelihood of the emotion wheel starting to spin is impacted by your emotion vulnerability.

Think of this. Think of the difference between pushing a toddler on a little tricycle verses pushing a car. When you're not feeling emotionally vulnerable, it takes a huge amount of something to get your wheels spinning, so you're more like the car. You're super stable, super grounded.

Versus if you have a lot of vulnerability factors running, it takes very little for somebody to push you, and suddenly it's like now my wheel’s running.

There's all sorts of things that will increase your vulnerability, increase the likelihood that your wheel will start spinning out of control. Things like: your health, stress, self-esteem, preparation for what's going on that day, doing things each day that give you a sense of joy or satisfaction

If I've been able to complete something, I am oftentimes un-fuck-with-able. If something is uncomplete, like I've been thwarted in being able to complete something, I can get super irritable.

And that's for me personally, because completion is a huge source of joy for me, and being thwarted in that will make me more likely to be emotional. So, getting back to disgust here. Let me find it again. Here we are.

So, prompting events for me feeling disgust is observing or hearing somebody act with extreme hypocrisy. So, watching my parents say one thing to me and then saying something else to somebody else, there's a disjoint there that is really bothersome to me.

And then what ends up happening: my emotion wheel will start spinning. So, I'll overhear that. And then the interpretation that I have is: that's extremely hypocritical. That's the thought that I'll have. I'm having cognitive dissonance. It doesn't match up.

And then I have the... I feel crazy. Like I can't trust my own reality. I start judging myself. I start judging them. And I want to either run really, really fast. So that would be the biological changes, the urge that I have is to go run really fast, or get in the car and drive really fast.

Like there's this, “I have to get out of here.” Kind of like all this pressure has built up and I need to have a pressure release valve or something.

Again, talking with my therapist, we're trying to figure out... I wanted to put in problem solving because the event is I'm hearing my parents say things to other people that differ from what they've told me. And so, I want to do some problem solving there around like wearing headphones all the time.

At which point my therapist is like, “yes, but given that there are times when you actually have to talk to your parents, how then do we basically beef up your ability to emotionally regulate your disgust?” So, acting on the level of the experience and that's where we get to emotional regulation of disgust. And that's tricky for me.

I'm just... God, I just lost my spot, actually. You know what? I'm going to take a break because I'm so adle-minded right now, I am not thinking clearly. So, I'll come back to this.

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

Well, that was interesting. I had actually forgotten that I recorded this episode. Which is why, on the last episode I published, I said, “this is going to be the last one where I used the shitty microphone.” Then I forgot that this episode existed. So, in listening back to this, I noticed something was missing.

I was speaking with a lot of vagaries and generalities and hypotheticals, rather than being able to identify, “here is an event that happened.”

What I noticed was missing was the observe skill. I wasn't observing, and I hadn't been observing something. I think that's part of the reason why that emotion discussed lingered. It kind of felt like this just pervasive, diffuse black cloud.

We’ve talked about the motion wheel before, and in fact we talked about it just now in what you just hear. I become conscious of disgust kind of in the middle of the wheel spinning rather than paying attention to what started it spinning.

And when that happens, it's really challenging for me to answer the question of: what's wrong, what happened? I don't know. I just suddenly became conscious, like coming out of a blackout right in the middle of the motion wheel spinning.

When that happens, it really is very disorienting. My mom tells a story of driving in a car with some friends when she was like in college or whatever. She fell asleep at the wheel and she woke up because her friend was like, “hey, wake up,” really gently because she was driving into oncoming traffic.

The disorientation of suddenly becoming awake while driving down the road at full speed, that's intense. That's kind of how I feel a lot of the times with my emotions. In situations where I'm not practicing the observed skill, I will just basically become aware that I'm having a feeling in the middle of having the feeling.

And I can't tell you what started it or how I got here. And that's uncomfortable and scary. It makes it hard to have conversations about how I'm feeling. I'm like, “I don't know how I got here.”

So, typically I get defensive if somebody asks me how I'm feeling. They can tell that I'm upset about something or I'm having a strong emotion, and they're like, “what are you feeling like?” I don't know. And I get defensive. I want to deflect. I want to blame other people.

Because I think I'm experiencing embarrassment. Like I should know how I feel, so I'm judging myself. Instead of just being like, “I don't actually know right now how I'm feeling,” I get defensive and I get mad at the person for asking me how I'm feeling. Which is not effective.

In listening back to what we just listened to, I hear a lot of anger at my parents. I remember feeling a lot of anger during the therapy session that immediately preceded that recording. Because my therapist kept asking for specifics, and I couldn't think of a thing.

I just had this kind of dark cloud of disgust hanging over me, and I was really struggling to come up with a specific event that triggered that disgust. I kept waiting. As I was re-listening to this recording, I kept waiting for me to bring up an example. I'm like, “Joy, you're not actually saying anything.”

And the reason I wanted to share this recording with you is because it kind of feels authentic to how emotions – at least for me – can feel when I'm not observing. It's just this diffuse misery. And I can't tell you why. I don't know why. I don't know what's going on. I'm aware that I'm pissed off or annoyed or something. I'm disgruntled.

And I could probably even tell you who it's aimed at. I know that my disgust was aimed at my parents. And I couldn't think of examples as to why. So, I wanted to share an example of me really not being skillful. And then talk about what skill I want to add into that.

Because I really wish I'd used observe during that whole exchange, and that I had been using observe previous to that so when I went into my therapy appointment, I could actually be articulate. I could actually describe. Because observation is a prerequisite to describing. If I don't know, if I'm not observing how I'm feeling, I can't then describe to you how I'm feeling.

So, this kind of diffuse black cloud of disgust. I think part of that is a function of overhearing things, because our house is small, my parents are loud, and our doors are thin.

So, I overhear things that I'm not all that aware that I'm hearing them. It's kind of like subliminal messaging or studying by sleeping with an audio book under your pillow.

I just find myself sitting in my room reading or listening to music and then feeling angry. Nothing happened or I wasn't aware that anything just happened. But clearly something happened. As we've discussed before, all behavior is caused. All emotions are caused. Emotions don't bring up out of nothing. They come from somewhere.

So, I wanted to talk a bit about how to observe. Observation is a Mindfulness skill. I haven't really talked all that much about Mindfulness. I think I talked a bit about Wise Mind because I was talking about Emotion Mind in a previous episode. I want to say episode 4 about anger, but I'm not sure. Don't take that to the bank.

Just to kind of give you a little bit of an overview, we're not going to get super deep on what Mindfulness is or all of the skills that are included in Mindfulness.

I just want to give a bit of orientation so that you kind of know where you are. Mindfulness is one of the four major sections of the DBT – Dialectic Behavioral Therapy – created by Marsha Linehan. The link to that, there's a PDF, the entire thing is a PDF online you can look at, or you can buy a copy of the book.

Both of those are linked on the website and in the description of this podcast, now that I think about it. Because I thought things through. Go me.

So, mindfulness is one of the four modules. There's Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Interpersonal Effectiveness, and Emotion Regulation. The way DBT skills group is structured is that you go through all four modules in six months, and then you do it again. So, it's a year commitment: 4 modules and then, back-to-back, four modules again.

Mindfulness isn't treated like a separate module. It kind of is treated like the ads at the beginning of a movie for each module. Because mindfulness is necessary for all of those other modules, for all of those other skills.

It's really hard to tolerate distress if I'm not mindful. It's really hard to be effective interpersonally, if I'm not being mindful. And it's really hard to regulate emotions if I'm not being mindful. So, mindfulness is kind of a foundational skill, or rather a collection of skills.

And the goals of mindfulness – and this is from Mindfulness Handout 1 – are to:

“Reduce suffering and increase happiness; increased control of your mind; and experience reality as it is.

Oh, and I really struggled with this. This would have been 2016. And I was dissociating like it was my job. I was dealing with... I wouldn't say the worst PTSD symptoms. They were still ramping up. The worst would be yet to come, but it was getting worse. And I was also dealing with chronic pain from my pelvic floor spasm.

So, I really didn't want to be mindful. I didn't want to be aware of how I was feeling. I didn't want to be aware of my emotions, or my body sensations. I dissociated to avoid that. And then, of course, dissociation is a skill and it's not an effective... I mean, it can be effective. It typically gets in the way of long-term goals. I'll put it that way.

And like any skill, the more you use it, the better you get at it. So, I was becoming very, very good at dissociating, and it became kind of my default coping mechanism, and got in the way of a lot of things. Because I just wasn't paying attention. I wasn't present. I wasn't aware of other people. I wasn't aware of myself. I was just checked out mentally.

So mindfulness felt really threatening. And I didn't want to... I really didn't want to engage in it. And one of the things that my then DBT instructor (Bob Gettle from Maple Leaf DBT), one of the things that he mentioned about mindfulness is that typically, if your misery level when you're not mindful is high but consistent...

So, I'm dissociated and I'm checked out, but my misery level is like 80 out of 100 just kind of consistently. That's one way to live. Mindfulness typically will have your misery level spike up, but then drop down to a much lower equilibrium.

So being mindful, my misery would increase initially. So instead of being at an 80, I'd be up at 100, maxed out. And then drop down to like 40 or 30 out of 100 in terms of misery.

I think I was avoiding. Like, I would much rather be at 80 all the time than briefly be at 100. That was the thought I was having then because I didn't have a lot of stamina – emotional stamina – for actually sitting with really challenging emotions, really strong emotions.

And so, mindfulness felt really, really scary, because I kind of figured that mindfulness would peg my odometer at 100 in terms of misery. So max-out misery.

And what my DBT instructor pointed out was: it will briefly, and then you will drop down to a much lower equilibrium. And that was hope-giving, I guess. It hadn't occurred to me that that would happen eventually.

I was more concerned about avoiding the initial spike in misery, and not even considering that in the long-term, my misery would actually go down quite a bit.

So, let's talk about mindfulness. There's 2 main groups of skills in the Mindfulness module. There's the “what you do” and then “how you do it.” So, on Mindfulness Handout 4, it lists the “what” – the “what you do” to be mindful, and that's:

“Observe, describe, and participate.”

And all of these are going to feel incredibly self-evident, and I promise you they're not. So, we'll get into them shortly. And as far as the “how” skills, that is on Mindfulness Handout 5. The “how” skills are:

“Non-judgmentally, one-mindfully, and effectively.”

So, you'll notice all of those are adverbs describing how you do a thing, and then all the “what” skills (observe, describe and participate) are verbs. The how describes the what. So, let's talk about observe, because that was the skill that I noticed was missing from the recording you just heard.

A couple of things to note: I can only observe the present moment. I can't observe the past. I can't observe the future. Because the past is no longer happening, and the future hasn't happened yet. So, I can only observe the present moment. Now, if somebody said, “hey, joy, you observed a car I was driving a week ago. What color is it?”

I would be able to say it's red, but it's not because I'm observing it right this second. It’s because I am having a memory, I'm observing the memory – it was red – and then describing that.

We can't observe the past and we can't observe the future. And as my first DBT instructor would say, “observation is a skill that happens in the nanosecond before we start talking to ourselves about what just happened.”

I've talked about this before – I think actually maybe on this recording, the recording you just heard – that one or two things will happen that will start an emotion wheel spinning: an event, or an interpretation.

And for a lot of folks, including myself, the interpretation happens so immediately after the event that it's almost indistinguishable. We relate to the interpretation as the event.

An example that I've given is: I have plans with a friend and they're late, so obviously they don't care about me.

Now, them not caring about me isn't what happened, isn't the event – that's a thought. The event is what happened. Our interpretation is our thoughts about it, and they get smooshed together.

It's like a head-on car collision of two cars going 90 miles an hour at each other, and in order to separate those cars, you have to get in there with a pry bar and wedge them apart. The Observe skill is one of the ways we can wedge those things apart.

Again, the Observe skill happens in the nanoseconds before we start talking to ourselves about what just happened. So, let's talk about what actually is included in observation. I'm just going to read all of these and then go back through and talk about them more in detail.

“How to observe? Notice your body sensations coming through your eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue. Pay attention on purpose to the present moment. Control your attention, but not what you see. Push away nothing. Cling to nothing.

“Practice wordless,” (that's a hard word), “wordless watching. Practice wordless watching. Watch thoughts come into your mind, and let them slip right by like clouds in the sky. Notice each feeling rising and falling like waves in the ocean.” And finally, “observe both inside and outside yourself.”

So, let's start with the first one:

“Notice your body sensations. “

So those are things we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. I've talked about one of my favorite exercises to get into noticing my body sensation. I call it 5-4-3-2-1. I'm sure there's a more appropriate or more accurate name for it. That this is the name that I use to reference it to myself.

It's five things that I see, five things that I hear, five things that I feel; and then four of those and then three of those; two; one. It's a skill that I use when I'm having a lot of distress, or I'm having a panic attack, to get myself into what is happening right this second.

For example, right now, five things that I see: I see my map hung up on the wall; I see a curtain; I see a puzzle; I see a coat; and I see my foot.

Five things that I hear: I hear my own voice; I hear my mom lowering the blinds out in the living room; I hear a door opening – it’s very squeaky; I hear the white noise behind my own voice because my headset is plugged in; and I hear my laptop motor.

And then five things I feel: I feel sheet protectors – how I love the feeling of sheet protectors, all my DBT manual is in sheet protectors, so turning the pages is just a sensory delight; I feel my foot on my bedspread; I feel my headphones in my ear; I feel my lips touching each other; I feel my tongue touching my teeth.

Those are things that are happening right this second. So, the next item here is:

“Pay attention on purpose to the present moment.”

What's happening right this second, here. And what's happening right this second is I'm sitting on my bed and I'm talking. What's not happening is that I'm not fighting with my parents. I'm not getting broken up with again. I'm not leaving a business that I founded. I'm sitting on my bed, talking into a microphone.

That doesn't mean that I can't have thoughts about all of those things I just mentioned. I can be sitting here and having the thought, and that thought is a present thing. I'm having the thought that I'm still broken up with.

I'm having the thought that my parents really need to go get their hearing checked. That's a thought that I'm having. I'm having the thought that nobody will listen to this and I'm wasting my time.

So, all of these are thoughts that are happening. But none of those things are actually happening right this second. So, thoughts are also things I can observe. Not with my senses, though, but I can pay attention to my thoughts. The next item is:

“Control your attention, but not what you see. Push away nothing. Cling to nothing.”

I have this tendency that if I have a thought, I need to engage with it. I need to pay attention to it. I need to honor it. I need to treat it like it is factually accurate and has a seal of approval on it.

My current DBT instructor... I love this. She says, “thoughts are kind of like a toddler trying to get your attention. It's like ‘mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.” You're like, “what?” And the kid is like, “I wanna snack.”

You’re like, “OK, well, you just had dinner” or “dinner is about to happen. You're not going to get a snack.” Just because the toddler voices that desire doesn't mean you have to give it to them. And in fact, a lot of cases, it would be unwise or ineffective or problematic to give your toddler everything that they ask for.

So, thoughts are kind of like that. My thoughts have specific routes that they like to follow. There’s major thoroughfares of thought. And then there's random shortcuts and side streets that are less frequented, I would say.

But I have kind of my pattern, in the same way that, if you're driving to work, there's a route you probably take almost automatically. I have done this multiple times: I have left my house to go visit somebody or go to the store, and on autopilot, I will end up at the gym.

Because that's the route I take most frequently. So, if I'm not paying attention and I'm listening to a podcast or just daydreaming, I will end up at the gym, whether I intended to get there or not. I think thoughts are a lot like that.

There are thoughts that my brain will just have automatically. It's the path of least resistance. It's like, “this is a path that's well traveled. We're familiar with this route. Let's go down this route.”

Going down that route doesn't make those thoughts more accurate than other thoughts. It doesn't make those thoughts more true. It just means that those are the thoughts I am more used to having. And that is all it means.

Observing my thoughts as just a thing my brain will do, rather than things I have to do something with was kind of a game changer.

Because I would have a thought, and I'm like, “oh, my God, I need to address that. I need to think about that more. I need to figure that out.” Whatever the thought might have been. And, it has taken a lot of practice to not interact with my thoughts that way, and to just kind of treat them like, you know, like I'm sitting next to a river and watching leaves float down.

It's like, “Oh, there's a leaf. There's another leaf. Oh look, two leaves.” And just letting them flow by. And the way I had been relating to my thoughts was like, “Oh my God, there's a leaf I need to dive in and go get it and bring it out and stare at it for 10 hours.”

It didn't occur to me that I could have thoughts and just let them go, let them pass. “Oh, look, a thought. Hi, thought!” That brings us into the next step here:

“Practice wordless watching. Watch thoughts come into your mind and let them slip right by, like clouds in the sky. Notice each feeling rising and falling like waves in the ocean.”

This is a skill, folks. This is such a skill. There was nothing about this that came naturally to me. I interacted with my thoughts as though there were things I needed to change, things I needed to fix, problems.

And, if you're like me and you have intrusive thoughts that just show up and you're like, “oh, I should drive into oncoming traffic,” having that thought and then being like, “Oh my God, I need to fix it,” is exhausting.

So, I had to learn how to observe the thought, acknowledge it, and go, “yeah, that's a thought I had.” And sometimes I even have the energy to validate it and be like, “oh, yeah, it makes sense that I would have that thought because that's the route I used to take all the time, and of course on autopilot, that's the thought I would have.”

And that doesn't make the thought true. It doesn't mean the thought is anything I have to do something with. So, just observing. II don't like the word “just” there, because typically “just” can be a way of, I guess, minimizing.

And in this case, I think it's necessary. This is the only thing I'm doing during observe. I'm not doing anything else. I'm not grabbing a hold of things or clinging to something or latching onto it and trying to fix. It's just like, “oh, that's a thought I'm going to have.” And then the final item here under the Observe skill is:

“Observe both inside and outside yourself.

So, outside yourself are your five senses: touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell. I listed taste twice. That’s not right. And then the inside of yourself, there’s an acronym. It's STUF, with just the one F.

Things that you can observe inside yourself are: Sensations. I've observed having a tightness in my chest, or a lump in my throat, or butterflies in my stomach. So that's the S. I can observe Thoughts. There's the T.

And we just talked about that, observing, “oh, there's a thought now.” I'm having the thought that I'm being repetitive. Now I'm having the thought that you guys are going to be super bored by this. I'm having the thought that you'll think I think you're an idiot because I keep repeating myself. Those are thoughts I'm having.

And then the last letter here in STUF is the F, which are our feelings or emotions. So you can observe feeling angry, feeling anxious, feeling disgusted, as is the topic of this episode. So those are ways to Observe.

And if I don't Observe first, I can't do the next step, which is Describe. And that was why that whole section of me talking about disgust two months ago was kind of a shit show. Which is a judgment. Judgment, judgment, judgment.

I really struggled in actually being able to articulate anything because I wasn't observing. If I don't observe, I can't describe, and the whole point of a podcast is to describe.

I'm describing it because you're not here physically in the room with me, so you can't see what's actually going on. This feels kind of self-evident, that if I'm not observing something, I can't describe it. But it hadn't really occurred to me that that skill gap was what was having me be ineffective in talking about disgust.

So, what I want to do in the future is actually observe when I'm feeling disgusted, and take note of it, and then describe it to you guys. So that I can actually go through this whole process in a more effective way, and do opposite action, and do mindfulness of emotion, and all of this other stuff. Which I can't do if I'm not observing. So observation is key.

One final note – and again I will devote an entire episode just to this – Observe is the “what.” The “how” is (again, Mindfulness Handout 5) is: non-judgmentally (observe non-judgmentally), observe one-mindfully (just one thing at a time), and observe effectively (being mindful of goals, and focusing on what actually works, etc.).

Cause observation that is just steeped in judgment leads to misery, speaking from personal experience. A lot of these skills kind of depend on each other. I was learning the skill of Observe, and I hadn't learned the non-judgment skill yet.

So I was observing things and just miserable, because I was like, “Oh, I feel like shit over here, and I'm experiencing pain here, and it shouldn't be this way, and I shouldn't have a conversation like that, and I shouldn't be having a panic attack at the gym,” and all of this stuff.

And it was increasing my misery – not in an effective way, not in that initial spike that I mentioned earlier that would then taper off and result in a much lower equilibrium. This was just increasing my misery, full stop.

It became apparent that I needed to practice non-judgmentally in concert with practicing my “what” skills: Observe, Participate and Describe. That's backwards. Observe, Describe, and Participate. There we go.

Oh, and one other thing. I've been observing... Ah ha! Here is me observing! OK! I have an example! Oh, that's so exciting! I have noticed, the last couple of times I've gone to my gym, I will go into the main weightlifting area and start feeling anxiety.

I've been going to this gym for, god, I don’t know, 6 years now. This is my neighborhood gym and I'm very familiar with the front desk people, and I'm used seeing the same folks at the same time each day of the week. So, to walk into the gym, to walk into the weightlifting area and feel anxiety is... I don't like it. How about that?

It's not what I want to be experiencing when I go into my happy place – what is typically my happy place. So, I was experiencing anxiety and wanting to at least understand it. I was like, “OK, anxiety, what brought you here today?”

And looking around and realizing there were a lot of men and maybe one woman there. That's not atypical. That's pretty frequent, actually, that I'll go into the weightlifting area and it's mostly men or all men, and I'm the only woman or one of a few women.

I think the difference in what has me feel anxious on some days and not on others is: if there are groups of men – like pairs or groups of three, who are around a machine or a bench working out together, that will be one of the things that has me feel anxious.

And then the other thing is if the men are large. If they're tall, if they're super buff, if they just take up a lot of space, I become very aware of how small and fragile I am when that's the case.

I think the reason that the groups of men adds to my anxiety is because they're talking to each other. If a bunch of individual dudes are just working out, it's very quiet in there. But when there are groups of guys talking, you get laughter, you get encouragement, you get guys shooting the shit.

There's something about it that increases my anxiety. I have, several times, wanted to just turn around and walk back to my car and go home. Long-term, I really want to workout. Also checking the facts, I know that people can be gross at the gym. I mean, TikTok is full of examples of people posting videos of somebody being creepy or getting too much in their personal space, saying weird things, what have you.

And I've never... That's not true, I wouldn't say never. I've rarely experienced that at my gym. There are staff there. There are bystanders there. So, I'm pretty objectively safe. I don't think anybody's going to try to assault me in the gym.

So, I was just observing that, “Oh look, anxiety is coming up. Oh, it makes sense that anxiety would be coming up because there are a large number of men in here. There are very few women. And a lot of the guys are big.”

I have emotion come up around that. I chose not to interact with that anxiety as anything that I needed to fix. It was just, “Oh, OK. We're feeling anxious, all right. Let's go do some bicep curls, shall we?”

So again, like that toddler, he's pulling on my sleeve. “Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy! I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling anxious.” I'm like, “OK, great. I got it. I hear you. And we're going to still workout.”

Anywho, I've been meaning to bring that up on an episode, and today was the day, apparently. I wish I had a more profound way to end this, and I don't. If you have any questions, please e-mail them to me, or DM me on any of the social media. The link is in the bio.

And I'd love to hear if there are topics that you want to hear more about more broadly, or if you have a question specific to your life, I'd love to get some listener questions and hear what you guys are thinking. Feel free to drop me a line in whatever manner you choose to do so.

And again, I really don't know how to end this. So, I'm just going to end it super abr –

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

This has been “Let's Therapist That Shit!!!” with your host, me, Joy Gerhard, if you like what you heard, please rate, review, subscribe and tell your friends about it. I'll see you next time.

Intro and outro music is Swan Lake Opus 20 by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Anatole Fistoulari, released on LP by Richmond High Fidelity / London Records in nineteen fifty-two.