Christine Hassler

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf m HM. Christine Hassler left her successful job as a Hollywood agent at twenty five years old to pursue a life she could be passionate about, but it did not come easily. After being inspired by her own unexpected challenges and experiences, she realized her journey was indeed her destination. In two thousand five, she wrote the first guide book written exclusively for young women, entitled twenty Something

twenty Everything. Her newest book is Expectation, Hangover, Overcoming Disappointment and Work, Love and Life. It's a guide book for how to treat disappointment on the emotional, mental, behavioral, and spiritual levels. Today we discussed her challenges with divorce, depression, and disappointment and how to carry on and thrive in the face of challenges. Oh and before we start the interview.

On October, Eric will be sending out the first lesson in a four part series based on Stephen Cuvey's classic book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Cuvey's book is widely considered a masterpiece of wisdom, and Eric will be touching on the main points and how to incorporate them into your life. It's free, but you do have to be subscribed to the mailing list. Go to one new feed dot net slash email and sign up in the box to the right. Here's the interview. Hi Christine, welcome

to the show. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Eric, thank you for coming on. So we're going to talk about your new book, um Expectation, Hangover, which I sent you an email earlier where I said I was just sort of getting through the book. I was, I was delayed in getting to it, so I've been reading a lot of it, and this morning I was just like, this sounds so like your way of thinking about things, sounds so much like the way I approached

the world. So I was really, there are a lot of things in it that were pretty striking to me. So I'm looking forward to to talking about those cool me too. So our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of Two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. First, I love that parable. It's one of my my very favorites. And I love that we're starting there because I think it gives us

a great context. And what comes to me first is, you know, I think control is one of the master illusions that we have as human beings. And we never have complete control over what happens or doesn't happen in our life, but we do have choice and how we respond to it, and to me, that parable is really illustrating how we have choice. You know, we don't have control, but we have choice, and whatever we choose to think about, whatever we choose to give our energy, it tends to

grow inside of us. So if we want to feed thoughts about how grateful for we are, how appreciative we are, how accepting we are, that tends to grow. And if we want to entertain thoughts about lack or fear or worry, then that tends to grow in our life. But I think it all comes back to choice, you know. I love um Man Searched for Meeting Victor Frankel's books. It's one of my favorite books. And I don't know, I don't think I'm quoting exactly what he says in the book.

But he says, in between stimulus and response is a window, and in that window lies our freedom, and that window, to me is choice. That's one of my favorite quotes too. So I got to ask you, then, what are some of the books that have been most inspiring to you over the years, because I think Man Search for Meaning was certainly one for me. What else is in there

for you? I'm sitting next to my bookshelf. Um, I my first the books that got me on the path and really turned me onto all this and just blew my mind. I read at the same time. So my first two were The Celestian Prophecy and The Alchemist. So those were two books that was just like, was like WHOA, just kind of opened my mind to what was possible, you know, And I think that I know, I was

very much raised in a traditional family. UM, grew up Catholic, and so my belief system was was kind of limited, and I didn't really have a very expanse of mindset, and so those books just completely blew my mind. Um, and kind of think of other you know, I'm a big fan of Rain Williamson. All her books have really touched my heart in my life. And then you know. I don't know if you've read the Science of Getting

Rich by Wallace Water Wattles. It was written in nine and it talks about wealth consciousness and that really shifted things for me in terms of wealth and money and my relationship with money. Um. And then speaking of relationships, I have all different boxes. Um. I love David Data's books The Way of the Superior Man, I think is a must read for any man and woman to really

understand men. And then his other book, Intimate Communion, is about the different kinds of relationships that we have in the different stages we evolved through as men and women. So I really love books on spirituality, thoughts of conscious creation, relationships. Those are all the books that I dive into. I would say most of my books are nonfiction. Yeah, yeah, I read a lot of nonfiction to all though I grew up loving fiction and I occasionally go back to it.

And there's there's something about um ex varience in the world and emotions through somebody else's eyes that can be very it's I think it's very good for empathy. Oh. Absolutely. I was such a nerd growing up and I would build these furniture tents, like furniture forts. Did you ever do those? Like you move your furniture together and get like blankets and things. Chris is doing one right now. I love it. I love that. I want a picture

of that. But I would climb in my furniture Fords with my flashlight, be reading, you know, my my novels and books and all that I love to read. Love it. So we talked about, um, this idea of we don't You said, we don't have control, but we do have choice, which is a really uh great little great little quote there. So let's talk about your new book, which is called uh Expectation Hangover um, and that I think a lot of that book gets to the fact of we don't

have control. Right, we have these ideas of the way we want things to turn out, but we don't have control. And this the book is about how do we deal with those things? So can you maybe tell us what is an expectation hangover? Sure? It's a term I made up, and it's a right. It can be different things. It can be when a desired result or an expected result

does not occur, things don't go as planned. Life throws us an unexpected curveball that just is senses reeling or we reach a desired results, things doo gole according to plan, but we don't have the expected feeling or experience that we really counted on, and we're left with hangover like symptoms. And I'm sure everybody out there has had a hangover. If you if you haven't, that that's awesome that you've avoided that. Um, but I don't think anyone has a hangover,

and it's like, it's awesome. I just want to feel this way forever. And the symptoms of an expectation hangover are similar. You have a headache, not necessarily physical that that can be the case, but your head is aching from all the thinking and obsessing and analyzing and wondering about you know, what did or didn't happen. You're spinning in the room. Isn't spinning, but you're spinning in confusion.

There's often a sense of regret, there's a lack of motivation, there's kind of being down on yourself, and then there's just you know, really wanting to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your eyes. Um. So that's the definition of an expectation hangover. So you mentioned a couple of different types of expectation hangovers. One was when we expect that something's going to happen, it doesn't and and

we're disappointed by that. The other you said was when we do get something we want and it doesn't give us the feeling we like, which I think is a fascinating one. I'm really interested in that one, having experienced it a bunch of times. What was the third one? Did you say the curveball and life throws us a curveball? Is that the third one? Okay? All right? And so that is, Um, it's not that I had an expectation

that I was going to get a certain thing. It said, I had an expectation that my life was going along a certain path and then a curveball comes. Whether like that. Maybe that's something like illness or divorce sheets on you all of a sudden, like your business goes bankrupt, your

house burns down. I mean, it's just kind of you know, or could just be like all of a sudden, you like, you know, we're on your way to to the grocery store and got an offender under It's just it's little things, um, And I think that the two there's there's three kinds of expectation hangovers there's inner personal meaning, someone has disappointed us, someone has let us down. Um, there's personal meaning, the kind of the self imposed. Um, we don't meet our

own expectations. And then they're situational, you know, when things just happen or don't happen. Yeah, exactly. So you talk about in the book that we all tend to cope with these things, Uh, several different ways. Uh, and these

are the ways that don't work. Could you tell us what the ways that coping with these I won't go through them all, but so a favorite of most people is overing, over drinking, over eating, over working, over shopping, over being on the internet, just doing anything to like avoid the feelings, anything to distract ourselves, anything to numb ourselves. Um, even like getting super involved in someone else's life overcaretaking

that as an example. Um. Another kind of coping mechanism that I see a lot, and this is sort of become more prevalent with the personal growth industry, is just trying to get to the positive right away, like giving yourself a pep talk or trying to do a spiritual bypass where you try to get to the silver lining and tell yourself it's all okay. And life is great

and da da da da da. And and why that doesn't work is because you know, we're humans, and even though part of us knows or has the awareness that, you know, everything does happen for reason and there's a blessing in every lesson, there's still the human feelings of sadness, anger, shock, regret, shame, guilt, the things that are normal to experience during an expectation hangover. So so trying to just get to the positive right

away doesn't really work. So any kind of distraction, avoiding, numbing, um, any of those techniques are are common. You know, I know so many people, for example, who in the midst of an expectation hangover start drinking more. And with all of these coping strategies, they work in the short term. Like if I'm really sad because I just had a breakup and I go drink, I have a bottle of wine with my girlfriends, I'm going to have a moment of relief and that's gonna feel good. But it's not authentic,

it's not real. It's it's something that I've contrived through the alcohol, and then the next day I feel even worse because alcohol is a depressant, and you already feel bad.

So when you put any of these kind of depressants anything, alcohol, drugs, TV, Internet, those kind of things that lower your brain chemistry, it's like you're already climbing a mountain of disappointment and you add those things and it's like putting a fifty pound backpack on your back, and you're just making the climb harder, right, which is why I would just drink again the next morning and keep that, keep that, keep that rolling, which is why I don't drink anymore. So I'm fully familiar

with that, that that phenomenon I do. I say one more thing about that, important for people to get is the thing about when using those coping mechanisms like you just said, is you have to keep upping the anti, right, and oftentimes an expectation hangover left untreated does lead to an addiction problem the alcohol, drugs, sex, whatever it is, because in order to keep numbing the pain, you have

to keep upping the anti. Yep. Absolutely, I love that phrase spiritual bypass because I think that is such a common thing, and I think you're right, particularly as it's sort of a dark side of personal development. Um because there is a real tendency to immediately think I should never feel bad, and if I do feel bad, then I need to do something about it. And I even

think that sometimes the positive actions that we take. Um, you know, I was in a recovery program and there was a real tendency or am in a recovery program, a real tendency that like, if you ever have a negative emotion, there is something you should should go do that that will make it go away. And the reality, like you say, is that those emotions need some degree of processing. M hm. Absolutely, absolutely, because we all feel things, and men too, not women are not the only ones

who feel. And when we don't process our feelings, it's like trying to keep a beach ball underwater. You know, you struggle with it for a while, and sooner or later it's going to pop up and slap you in the nose. And we, I think, we're so uncomfortable with emotions. Were not taught how to process emotions, were not taught how to deal them. We're told to be strong. That's another coping mechanism that doesn't work. Just being strong and

fighting our way through it. That's a common one for overachievers, you know, just just be strong and just plow right through it. But when we suppress our emotions that are natural part of the human experience, not only does it lead to not dealing with an expectation hangover, but it can actually create illness in our body. Because emotion is energy in motion. So if we don't have healthy ways to get that emotion out, it's going to sneak up on us. It's going to come out in some other form. Yeah,

And I think that is that is so true. And I think if there's one one area that I tend to go wrong with that these days, it would be with that spiritual bypass be by simply finding a way. And I think that's we we talk on this show.

One of my one of the guests we had on wrote a great book and it was examined in the American self help industry, and she had a quote in there because she grew up with a father who was a UM, a therapist and a and a self help author himself, and and she asked the question that I really thought was a great question, and I think it speaks right to this, which is when is it positive thinking and when is it sort of outright denial? And

that is such a tricky line. Yeah, yeah, well, I think when you're trying to talk yourself into something, um, then it's you know, an affirmation that I just say

because I'm trying to make myself feel better. Is different than when I'm saying something authentically because I believe it, you know, and the unconscious mind can tell when we're b ssing ourselves, which is why I call a pendulum thinking in the book, you know, to go from let's say that like you just you're an entrepreneur and your business just failed most likely or naturally going to have thoughts like I failed or I'm a loser or something that's like that, to then shift to I'm learning from

this and I am an amazing person and what I will thrive from this. It's like it's this huge pendulum and your unconscious mind is like no, no, like I don't believe you. So it's better to kind of get to the middle and go, you know, something like I except where I am, I did the best I could. You know, those kind of like I am enough, all is okay? You know, those things that calm us down a little bit and don't perpetuate the negative. I'm not

saying perpetuate negative thinking. But I think you and I are both don't try to get to the silver lining when you haven't gone through the breakthrough that's right in front of you. Yeah, And I think the other thing that's interesting about everything that you just said and your book, your your book sort of talks about this in different ways, is everything that you just described your thoughts and and it's it's the it's the emotion that we're talking about.

How we and I always think that's a that's an interesting distinction, is because I do think it's important, at least for myself to control to some degree, to work with the thoughts I'm having. Because thoughts largely I think our stories do a great degree. But emotion is something different. There's no an emotion is an emotion. Now, there's an interaction between those two things. But I think that what you just described is being in touch with what the

emotion is. Absolutely, people tend to think their emotions rather than feel their emotions, and um in the book, I talked about the difference between releasing and recycling emotions and why the emotional section is the first part of the treatment plan is because everybody just wants to think their way through something rather than really feel their way through something, and we we end up recycling so many of our feelings and our emotions because let's say, let's say I

have a good cry and I don't really feel better after the cry, you know, and I have so many clients that come to see me and I'm like, well, we really need to process your sadness, and they're like, well, I've cried and cried and cried and cried, and I said, yeah, but you're just recycling. And how we recycle is while we're crying or having the feeling or whatever it may be, there's a part of us that's judging and analyzing. There's this commentary going, when is this going to stop? I

hate this? I shouldn't be so sad that the like go on and on and on. And what that does is it just recycles the emotion. And why therapy or coaching or or even twelve step groups to some extent really work is because someone's given permission to be vulnerable and share their feelings and other people are just holding a space of compassion. They're not offering advice, they're not judging,

they're not analyzing. Like a good support group of good coach, a good therapist will just really cold a space for someone to be able to just emote and know that that's not who they are and say things like you're doing okay, it's okay, keep going, And we need to learn how to do that for ourselves to be able to have the feeling at the same time discover this part of us it's like, it's okay, it's okay, you're okay, rather than having this judger analyzer trying to get out

of the feeling as quickly as possible. One of the books that I loved a lot. Speaking of books, I read UM when my son was too I we were talking about him earlier and and my wife and I split and it was a really difficult time for me. And there was an author, Pema Children, who had a book called When Things Fall Apart, and she talks very much about that, don't indulge or repress those things um and and drop the storyline of what's happening. I think

that's so important. We talk on the show a lot about feeling bad, about feeling bad, or the second arrow, which in Buddhist terminology, which is this exactly what you described now, I've got a feeling, and now I'm telling myself what that feeling means. It means that I'm not good enough for it means that I shouldn't have this feeling was so if I feel this way, then I'm weak and all these things that we layer on top of and if we can get back to that, what

that original pain was, what what's this actually about? It? It tends to um allow us to do that. And I love that phrase where you said that you know it's by analyzing these things that we go into recycling. Yeah, yeah, and I love I love that you brought up when things fall apart. When my fiance dumped me in my twenties, six months before our wedding, that was my go to book and yeah, and I remember during that breakup that

was like such an important emotional release for me. And I remember having to like do kind of use the temper tantrum technique that I described in the book like every day for like days, because the thing about an expectation hangover is that you're not only dealing with that particular event, We're also dealing with everything in our past that it triggers. And so let's say you're dealing with like a loss, a breakup, a divorce, like whatever it

may be. When when that happens, you're also dealing with a lot of the other breakups you haven't dealt with yet. And I saw this really when I so I got my fiance broke up with me in my twenties, and then I got married to someone else, and then in my early thirties, it was clear my husband and I were going on different paths, and it was a marriage that I completed and and got divorced. And I have to say, and I don't think whether you're the one who is broken up with or you're the one who leaves.

I think of breakups just suck, like they're just awful, Like no matter how you slice it, they're just awful. But I have to say that because I had done so much clean up work when my fiance broke up with me and really dealt with so much of the grief that I had never dealt with in my life, the divorce was actually a lot easier because there wasn't so much unprocessed, uncovered material. And that's what I've really learned with disappointment. I don't know if this is true

for you, Eric too. It's like As you kind of go through each one and you learn more tools and you process each one deeper, the length of time between disappointment gets longer, and the time you spend really suffering and the disappointment gets shorter. Oh, I think absolutely, And I think that's the one thing. So I I told you this, you know, I mentioned that with my with my ex and my son's mother and he was two years old, and she came home one day and said, oh,

i'm I want you to leave the house. I'm in love with someone else. And I was just like, holy shit, And I mean my world really did fall apart um. And a lot of it was, you know, I wasn't going to be living with my son, and but I what I got to in that place was I had no choice but to process those emotions. I had nowhere to go. I think, partially being in recovery, I was like, well, I can't go do this and I can't go do that.

And I did a lot of the things that are in your you know that you talk about in the book, the the writing of I mean angry letter after angry letter after angry letter that just got thrown away. But the interesting thing was I felt like I for the first time ever, I really worked all the way through that. And it's interesting now because I have a pretty good relationship with my ex and there is no hint of any bad feeling or anything there. It's like it, it's

it's over. And that that's an interesting experience to have something be so totally transformed. And it was. It was I will not say in any way, shape or form, that was enjoyable going through it. And I think if I could have thought of a way to avoid it,

I probably would have, but I couldn't. I couldn't and so um And when I read your book, it brought a lot of that back me thinking about how that was an example of me really processing emotion versus doing these different things and maybe what I've done more recently, which is more of the spiritual bypass route. Yeah. Well, and and see, I love what you're saying because what it reminds me of is that, you know, the agenda of our ego and the desire of our soul are

often in direct conflict. Um and our ego wants things like marriage, job, it wants to form, it wants outcome, it wants to check things off a checklist. But all our soul kind of cares about is our evolution and our growth and coming back to the parable for a moment, about the one you feed. You know, I think that most people in the personal transformation spiritual world would all agree that, you know, we all start out as love.

We all start out totally connected to source energy called God, Divi, nature, call it whatever you want, but we're all kind of connected to this oneness is love. We know our whole, we're know, we know we're complete. And then things happen and we move into fear and judgment and shame and all that kind of stuff. And so I think we have the constant choice again coming back to choice is are we going to feed love or are we going

to feed fear? And oftentimes we have to go through these difficult, challenging times to get us back to love. And sometimes it takes a catalyst like a divorce or an addiction or an illness or something like that to bring us to our knees enough to surrender, to stop clinging for safety, security, control, and to eventually move out

of that fear and back into love. Because I think that like our true purpose here is to come back to how we started you know, to come back to that place of wholeness, completeness, knowing that we're nothing's wrong with us, knowing that we're loved, knowing that we're lovable, knowing we're not broken, knowing we're enough independent of anything we create. Yeah, that's uh, that's a wonderful place to

to get to. So in the book you talk about you have a treatment plan that you talked about for going through these expectation hangovers and it's a fourth step plan. You say, there's a and I think it's in order right, emotional, than mental, than behavioral, and then spiritual. So could we spend a minute and kind of walk through each of those and then I have a question about the order? Yeah. Yeah, so my um, when I one of my first spiritual teachers and coaches, I met her when I was twenty two.

Her name was Mona Miller, and she was she she really called me out. Um, she saw me with love, but but also could see through all my bullshit. Oh sorry, I hope I can say that. I think I've sworn several times already, so I think we're good. So, um, oh sorry about that. I just turn this off. Um. So that's when I really first kind of learned as myself as a multidimensional being. You know, I think that for all of us, thinking is easy, but thinking and

and and feeling are very different, as you said. And then thinking is great in terms of awareness, but awareness without action, without changing our behavior, means nothing. And then if we're just sort of these thinking, feeling, acting beings with no higher connection than we never feel totally fulfilled. So that's why the you know, there's those four levels, um,

so I'll just walk through a little bit of each one. So, like I said, we start on the emotional level of an expectation hangover because that's the one we don't want to deal with. That's what we want to avoid. And the treatment plan is really about learning how to release emotions rather than recycle them. So there's things you learn like release writing like um, which is a way of writing that isn't like journaling that you go back and reread.

But it's really about an emotional release, mind dumping, burning and ripping it up when you're done, just away to us get emotion out. And the temper tantrum technique is is definitely unique, UM, but it's a way to actually let yourself have an adult version of a temper tantrum.

And the reason why this is important is because you know, if you if you imagine a little kid and you see a kid have a temper tantrum, if you don't interrupt them, what ends up happening is first they get really something happens and they get upset, and then first the anger revs up and they may yell and scream and kick, and then they start crying really loud, and then the crying kind of turns to a whimper, and then the whimpering kind of turns to like, you know,

shortness of breath and just kind of going, you know, and then eventually they start to rock themselves and they start to self soothe, and then they're totally out of it and they're fine and they want ice cream. And what what they've done is they've learned how to ride the wave of emotion. And on every level emotional, mental, behavioral, and spiritual, I have is something called role playing our X where you kind of embody a role to help

you understand these tools. So on the emotional level, it's that of the surfer, and you really learn how to ride your emotions all the way to the beach without trying to dive off the board and control the waves or whatever. UM. So that's that's you know, each each section is pretty deep and rich. So I'm just kind of skimming this for me. On the beach. Yes, whatever your favorite flavor is, it's there, waffle cone or in a cup, whatever you like, it's there. Um. And then

moving on to the mental level. The role planar acts on this level is out of the horseback rider. And you know, we can't control every thought that comes in our mind is like a galloping horse, but we have dominion over the reins. We hold the reins. We can stop it, we can redirect it, we can slow it down, we can speed it up. So on the mental level, you're learning how to basically rewire your brain by watching normal thought patterns and and changing the neural nets in

your brains by creating new ones. There's also a lot of UM exercises to help you realize what your story is because we all have there's what's happened to us in our life, and then is what we've made it mean. And we all have these stories that we carry around like backpacks and collect evidence that support our story. Even if our story sucks. Like you could have a story about always getting rejected. Well, that's a really sucky story, but if you keep believing it and replaying it, and

then you're really gonna start collect evidence. Collecting evidence in your life is going to be about continual rejections. So it's really about you know, what is the story you want to tell. And on the mental level, we also work with time travel, so past hacking in the future tripping, we tend to go back in our past and do things like regret things and use information we have now to go back and analyze and beat ourselves up for things we didn't know in the past, which is not fair.

And then we tend a future trip and come up with taste scenario thinking. So there's a lot about really using your mind as your servant, not your master um. And if you're going to go back to the past, go back from the perspective of what can you learn, And if you're going to go in the future, at least make it good. You know, we're making up the future anyway, so like, at least make it something and

you want um. And then we get to the behavioral level, which is you know, awareness with that action is nothing it's just sort of like entertainment. And you start to look at what has driven behavior in the past, and you learn about things like what's been your compensatory strategy? You know, what's been the thing that you've gotten really

good at that isn't necessarily good for you. Um most compensatory strategies come from a wounded place, like, for example, I was bullied and teased a lot growing up as a kid. I formed the belief that I was not likable, something was wrong with me. To compensate for that, to make up or I felt less. Then I became a severer overachiever, which made me successful in life, but since it was driven by massive insecurity, it was never fulfilling.

So you start to look at behavior that has maybe has made you successful or made you well liked, or made you feel safe, but isn't necessarily creating the results in terms of the feelings that you want experience. And you also look at your avoidance trap in terms of you know what you spend a lot of time and energy invested in avoiding, Like do you avoid rejection? Do you avoid judgment? Do you avoid upsetting people? Do you avoid feeling out of control? And how does that stop

you from taking action in your life. Um. And then finally on the spiritual level, you start to look at your life. Oh and on the behavioral level, you take on the role as a scientist, so you start observing yourself rather than judging yourself. And then finally on the spiritual level, you become the seeker and you start to look at your life lessons and you start to move into things like prayer and deep performance of meditation and

surrender and forgiveness. I would say forgiveness is probably the most powerful tool on the spiritual level, because forgiveness doesn't mean condoning anything. It doesn't mean making things okay, it doesn't mean agreement, but it does mean letting go of the judgments that we're carrying around inside. And that truly is what sets us free, and I think what opens us up to our dhrama, to our purpose, to really truly being guided. So that was it. That's a brief tour. Yeah,

that was a brief tour um. And I can say from having been through the book, there is a lot of detail on each of those things, and you've got a lot of exercises in there, and uh, different meditations and different things to use to work through that. I'm interested, and I said, I had a question about the the order. What I always find interesting is I think obviously for a plan, you have to have an order of things

to go through. What I always find so interesting is the dynamic between those four areas and how um how in some ways the the interplay, like what I'm thinking can affect how I'm feeling, how I'm behaving, can act how I'm thinking, and all those Because of a quote that I use often as you you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into into right thinking in some cases, um which is

which is just a slightly different take. But I really like where you start with the emotional piece because I I agree. I think that is the part a that we try and avoid and be that's the part that sets off the emotional hangover. It's an emotional yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's there's not a lot out there in terms of how to teach us how to deal with our feelings. There's so much out there about manifesting

and manipulating our mind. I think we're so mentally stimulated and mentally obsessed that we we've really got to get back into ourselves as feeling people, you know, and and that's part of the human experience, and even even you know, kind of with the movement to spirituality, which I love, I consider myself a spiritual person. We can't go to spiritual bypass either. You can't just chant mantras the rest of your life and expect to deal with the deep

anger and shame from your childhood. You've got to do a little investing on the emotional level in order to really clear that. You know, That's just been my experience personally and working with thousands of people at this point is eventually you've got to feel your feelings. I've more and more been thinking we end up talking on this show about about depression a fair amount. It's something I've

wrestled with on and off in the past. I know a lot of our listeners have, and I've more and more become convinced that it's a you really have to have a holistic approach to it. That really and these four areas that you laid out pretty much cover that.

What that means. There's it's not enough to just take care of um the mental aspect of it, Although it's critical to have the mental aspect of it, because and you talk about it in your book, this idea of ruminating about you know, thinking about the same things over and over again can drive us into a really negative emotional spaces. So there's there's that interaction there. But I more and more become convinced that it's you need all

of this working in concert together. Yeah. I mean I Eric got put on prozac when I was ten years old, and I was on antidepressants until about thirty, so twenty years of my life. I was kind of numb. And part of my mission, you know, my my big mission is to help be suffering on the planet and whatever way I can. And you know, a sub part of that mission is really bringing light to depression because I think depression is often a result of suppression and repression.

And most people that are depressed are and medicated. A lot of them don't even need it um, but they need their emotion, they need their creativity unlocked, they need to be given away to feel again. And so much of my own journey coming off the antidepressants and really healing depression inside myself because it's not something that I suffer from anymore. And I and PS I was told my whole life, you will always need medication. Um, this is just the way you're wired, and this is just

how it is. So I had all of that kind of belief system seeded inside of me, and a huge part of finally being able to to get through it and get to the other side of it was being willing to go into those really scary feelings and finally feel all of those things that I was so terrified to feel. And it was dark and it was hard, but I will tell you that once I went into that and got through it, it's like something released, you know.

So for anyone out there, I'm not here to say medication is good, bad, right, wrong, whatever, Like everybody has to trust their own intuition and the people that care for them. But for anyone who may be suffering from you know, either diagnosed depression or you just kind of feel depressed and sad, there there is another there is another side to that, and so just keep going, keep going. Yeah, the medication topic is a really interesting one because it certainly has been a huge help to me and a

lot of people that I know. Um, And yet the question does become is that is it something that you how long do you need to continue. And is that medicine causing a numbing effect to some degree? I think that's something that people who are on depression medication, myself included, I wonder often about is there a is there a numbing element to that and how significant is that? And and that's why I get back to sort of this idea of a holistic plan. And I didn't actually start

taking medicine for myself until I had really done. I was doing all that stuff, all the emotional stuff, really working deeply with what was happening. UM. When I was a kid, I was taking finally taking good physical care of myself. I was, I was meditating. I was like, and I still feel awful and so and then you know, the medicine sort of changed that. But but things evolve over time. I just think it's a very interesting concept.

But I think that UM. We had a guest on last tweek, John Rodderman, who's a he's a professor in Florida, and he talks a lot about depression, and he talks about depression being an evolutionary adaptation, UM, and that it's it's and he's in general his general sense is, look, it's not it's not enough to just give people medicine and send them home. And that's what I'm pretty much, very much amazed by these days is how often that

is the only answer that people are given. Yeah. Yeah, and and I think that again, like the personal thing, and I will say, the thing that was my girl, I guess you'd say, our lifeline through it. And what finally got me off is that, um, a spiritual connection like that, that kind of nurturing, that relationship with a higher power, um, and faith is what got me kind

of was that final step. You know, I've done the herbs and diet and all that kind of stuff, um, but that having a relationship with higher power and experiencing myself as a spiritual being, UM, I would say, was the missing link for me personally. Interesting. So you say you don't you don't suffer from it anymore? Do you find that you you cycle through emotion or mood or you are you fairly steady at this point. I'm a woman.

I'm not steady, all right, that I was going to leave that aside, but um, and I'm a human, you know, so I here's the thing I really good at using my tools. I definitely have moods I definitely have downtimes. I definitely have my own expectation of hangovers. Um, But I am much better at using my tools and I'm much better at asking for help to you know, realizing I have a support system around me. Realize I have friends and teachers and mentors and communities that I can

lean on in those moments. And then I have my my spiritual foundation as well. Um So, I would say that absolutely, I still have my moments, but I never feel depressed. Um I, if I ever kind of start to feel depressed, I know I'm suppressing something. I know I need a good like yell. You know, I know I need to go box, or I know I need a good cry, or I know I need to just go dance and move my body or do something creative. Um So, depressed. Anytime I start to feel that remnants

of depression, it means something needs to move. Yeah. That's a really interesting way to think about it. Because the thing that is so tricky about depression, I think, is that it's a lack of feeling. By in large right, it's not a sadness. Is is as a whole different animal. Um Depression is that sort of deadness, and that emptiness, and it's it's very difficult to say, oh, it's because of x um, because that doesn't feel like it's because

of ice. And I think your point is that stuff just builds up over time and over time, and in a lot of cases that that suppression or that repression happened at a complete it's very it happened so long ago or in such different circumstances, it's very difficult to

tie those things together. I think that's what makes can make depression such a challenge, because being angry or being sad, it's easy to find those Oh I'm angry because I'm sad, because largely whereas depression is like I don't there's no emotional now, a lot of times there's an event that kicks it off, right you go, oh, I'm I start to become depressed because you know, I lost my job, and then we can sort of see how it it flows. But I think for people who've been in it a

long time, it's so nebulous. Yes, totally totally, it's it's and I think that that's um, that's when the self judgment kicks in big time of why am I feeling this way? What's wrong with me, I'm pathetic, which just makes it worse. Um. So I think another huge lesson I would say that that people that suffer from depression are often high achievers and are often people that are really hard on themselves and think being hard on themselves is an effective way to kind of motivate themselves. Um,

which is so not true. And another huge lesson that came from my depression with self compassion. I'm really learning how to be with myself in a gentle, loving way and not be so freaking hard on myself. That makes a huge difference. The other thing you talked about that I thought was really important was talking about asking for help and having friends and a support group and various things like that, because I heard somebody say recently. It was in the interview that we just put out today

where the quote I think was loneliness masquerading is depression. Um, that it's that that can be such a catalyst that it's very those those two things, um show up symptomatically, so similarly, Yeah, they really do. Loneliness is is brutal, and it's even like being that a group of people and feeling a lonely worst the worst. So um, I think we're nearing the end of our time. But I did want to talk with you about one other part

in the book that really struck me. Um And you talk about the difference, you talk about form versus essence. Can you explain what you mean by that. Yeah, this is the kind of the thing that that I learned. UM. So, my first my first job was an agent. I was a Hollywood agent, and um, I was like the youngest ever female agent, and I was I was really, really, really successful at a young age. And I, you know, no matter what promotion I got, or you know, how much more money I made, it was like I still

wasn't getting the feeling that I wanted. I still wasn't feeling fulfilled. I wasn't feeling happy, I wasn't feeling on purpose. And like I shared earlier, I was mostly driven by insecurity, you know, and was looking for something that would finally make me feel good about myself. Um And I kept attached different forms to it, like be a successful agent, make this much money, date this person, have this size figure,

like whatever it may be. I kept looking for the thing to make me feel that way, versus realizing that it was really the feeling I was after not the thing. So form versus essence means we all have certain desires, we all have ways we want to feel, things we want to experience, and because the mind like certainty and the mind likes to know, it attaches a form onto that and then we become obsessed with that form versus really letting the essence lead us. Um. So I'll give

an example. Are most of your listeners women or men? I don't know. I think it's a pretty fair mix. I only I can only go by the people who get in touch with us, and based on that, it's it seems like to be a pretty even split. Well, give an example. That's that's a female example, but I think men will really get it as well as a good form versus essence. So, most women feel the desire

to have a baby. And but really, and I've talked to a lot of women about this, what they're feeling is the desire to create, the desire to give birth to things, the desire to experience unconditional love, to nurture two, take care of to mother, and they attach baby to that. That's the form boom, this, this must be what I want. If I'm feeling this feeling that must be what I want.

But I've challenged women, and I've had pretty honest conversations with women, and what I've seen in my own life is and with other women, is that it's it's not necessarily quote unquote baby, that's just the form. There's lots of ways that essence can be satisfied. Like for me, I don't have children, but I feel like I'm my my mothering essence is satisfied in creating books and nurturing people and coaching people and facilitating and having lots of

creative expression in my life. And so I think that's another lesson that expectation hangovers teach us is that we we definitely can have everything we desire in terms of feeling, in terms of essence, it just might not come in the form or the package that we thought it would. Yeah, I think that is such a profound understand And we

had an interview several weeks back. I think you quote her somewhere in your book, Danielle laporte Um and her book The Desire Map, and the thing that struck me about that was sort of exactly that same thing, which says, look, think about how you want to feel. Start there and and work your way through, and most of us do

exactly the opposite. And I I do it and have done it, you know, my whole life, which is leads to that expectation hangover of oh I got what I wanted and I don't feel any different, and instead of questioning that whole mentality, it's you. My My train of thought has always been, oh, well, it's just not enough of that thing. I thought that if I had a girlfriend that I would be happy. Well, now I've got the girlfriend, and well she just must not be a

good enough girlfriend. Right, It's not it's not the it's not the whole process that I'm thinking. And I really love that idea of starting with how we want to feel and making that the focus, um and then trying to sort of piece together being a lot more open to what that what the form uh is? I just that's such a profound, profoundly different way of looking at the world. And I really like the way you put

that as form versus essence. Yeah, and then we can and then we can realize we can generate that right now, you know, like we we can create experientially the feeling we would like to feel, and the more we live in that feeling, the more we attract. You know, that's how a law of attraction really works. You know, that's how we attract those things that are in alignment with that feeling. You know. So it's sort of like, you know, single people are like, wow, you know, I always find

someone when I wasn't looking. You know, I was dating for years and then I finally just loved my life and stopped looking and stop carrying, and boom, you know, I met my partner. And that's just one example of how, you know, when when we're just in the wholeness and completeness and we're in like nothing's missing, and we're in kind of the feeling that we want to feel, then then we naturally attract those things in align with that.

I agree, And um, I it's like I keep thinking I need a better podcast partner, but the truth is I just want to feel more supported. So right, Chris, al right, it would be this show would have been off the air like by the fourth week. It was a technology helped us out when it didn't allow us to have a second microphone in here. That's hysterical. I see the Chris and Eric show coming. Sam. Yes, well, I think like I said, we are, we are near the end of our time, but thank you so much

for taking the time to talk with us. I really liked the book and I've had a great time talking with you. Oh, I've had a great time with you two. Thank you so much for having me on, for reading the book and just doing the work that you do in the world. All right, well, thanks so much. We'll we'll talk again soon, Okay. Thanks bye. You can learn more about this podcast and Christine Hassler at one you

feed dot net slash Christine. By the way, everybody, don't forget to go to one you feed dot net slash email and sign up for Eric's upcoming four part lesson about the seven habits of highly affective people. Thanks bye,