Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Welcome to this week’s Coaching Hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word. Or text your email to 1-347-997-1784. And when you get prompted for the code word, it’s CoachingHotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.

So, the first question. I think I recently really internalized that I don’t cause somebody else’s thoughts and feelings. However, does this also mean I have nothing to do with the love my fiancé feels for me? If nothing I say or do causes his love, am I not replaceable by any other human being? I find these thoughts really depressing and would love your insights on this question.

So, I think this is such an interesting question, but what I want to ask you first is, why is it depressing? Why is it depressing that your fiancé could love someone else? Right now, he loves you, and that’s awesome and amazing. And right now, you think, oh, it would be depressing to think that he could love someone else. But imagine a time when that wouldn’t be true. What if in 20 years, you’ve had an amazing relationship and you decide that it’s come to an end and you want to be with someone else? You would really hope that he could love someone else instead of you at that point. There’s no inherent depressingness to the idea that someone who loves us could also love someone else. It’s what you’re making it mean.

So, the thought isn’t depressing on its own. It’s what you’re making that mean. You also have jumped from, I don’t cause his love to, I’m replaceable by any other human being, as if that’s a problem or as if we could swap someone else in and he wouldn’t notice. It’s such an interesting way of thinking about love. Your fiancé, presumably, loves you because of his thoughts about you.

Now, yes, he could love somebody else if he had thoughts about them that led to love. And he’s probably met many people in his life he could have had thoughts about that led to love, but he has thoughts about you that lead to love for you. But you make that mean that you’re replaceable. But even if he loved someone else, it would be different thoughts he would have about them. It’s like something in your brain is making you want to see yourself as replaceable and the same as anyone else. That’s directly where your brain goes to. As opposed to that you’re unique to your loved ones, right? They love you because of their thoughts about you. He doesn’t have thoughts about the other people that he has about you.

So there’s something going on here where you already obviously have some pre-existing concerns that you’re replaceable or not unique. And so this is what your brain came up with. Because this is a thought that my brain has never come up with. Because not being unique or being easily replaceable isn’t something that I personally worry about. Again, obviously, I have all my own brain crazy that I deal with. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that this is your version, but I’m just trying to point out to you that there isn’t a logical correlation between these two thoughts. It’s like you put them in one sentence and you put a comma between it. That makes them logically connected, but they’re not.

What you do or say does not cause his love. And no, you’re not replaceable by any other. Like those things aren’t even related, those two ideas. So this is really just, that’s not what the problem is. The problem is what’s going on in your brain that you worry about being replaceable or not being unique or not being special, and why is that important to you? That’s an invitation for you to dig into some thought work there.

Why do you want to cause his love? This is what’s so interesting, right? Even if you did cause his love, then somebody else could still cause his love also. Right? That’s what I’m trying to show you is that no matter what angle you look at it from, these two things aren’t connected. Either you don’t cause his love, and yeah, he could also love someone else, and he could love you. But if you did cause his love, someone else could cause his love too, right? That has nothing to do with this teaching. That’s not what’s depressing you. It’s whatever you’re making it mean.

And you obviously have some work to do on kind of thoughts about being unique or being replaceable or being different from other people or being special. And the fact that you’re finding that thought depressing is really just an invitation for you to dig into what’s going on in your brain there. Like, why does your brain jump to that? Am I not replaceable by any other human being? It’s like an extreme conclusion that isn’t warranted. And like, why is that where your brain jumped to? And also, it would be kind of interesting to be like, even if that were true, so what? What if we are all replaceable by other people?

So what? Why are you making that mean something? Like, what are you making that mean? Why does it mean there’s anything less special happening in your current experience? So that’s just all a good invitation for you to dig in deeper.

Alright, y’all. I know you’re as tired as I am of having the top podcasts in wellness or health and fitness categories be a bunch of dudes who don’t know anything about socialization and who are not taking women’s lived experiences into account. So if you are looking for ways to support the show and, more importantly, make sure the show gets to more people, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And bonus points if you include a few lines about the way you use thought work and self-coaching or anything you’ve learned from the podcast in your daily life. Those reviews are what teach the algorithms to show us to more new people. It helps us get new listeners all over the world, and I’ll be reading one story from a recent review in each of these question and answer episodes.

Today’s review comes from Claire Zab, who says, “Life-changing. This podcast has positively impacted me so much. I think about these teachings on a daily basis. I’m grateful for the ways in which it’s encouraged me to show up more fully in my life, both for myself and for the change I want to see in the world. Thank you.”

I love this review because this work really is about fully empowering yourself so that you can help empower other people and help make the world a better place for everyone.

Okay, second question. I had an elective rhinoplasty, so a nose job for those who don’t know what that means, three years ago, which was ultimately the decision that led me to this work. At the time, I really didn’t realize the range of complications that could occur from undergoing such a treatment. The results I was after were very subtle, and it’s my belief that the doctor altered my nose beyond what we had discussed.

I’ve done a lot of work since 2017 to examine my thoughts and learn to love myself just as I am. I even wrote a letter to the clinic to help them better identify folks who may not be ideal candidates to undergo this kind of procedure. Fast forward three years, I’m now consulting with a high-level revision rhinoplasty surgeon to help me reconstruct my nose to be closer to my original appearance. I know the perfect nose is unattainable and that I can love myself either way. Regardless, I’m still terrified to go through the whole process a second time.

Okay, so my love, I don’t think that you do know that you can love yourself either way. I think that you still think that what your nose looks like causes your feelings and causes what you think about it. I’m not saying that it’s not possible that you wouldn’t choose to do this if you’d learned to love yourself the way you were, but you wouldn’t be terrified about doing it. We might still make a choice to alter our appearance maybe, if we really have truly learned to love it anyway, but there’d be nothing to be scared of. What you’re scared of is that you still won’t like your nose, I think. You don’t say exactly what you’re scared of. The question ends here, but I think that’s what you’re scared of. You’re scared that you still won’t like your nose.

Which means that you haven’t truly learned to love the nose you have, clearly. Or yourself, regardless of what your nose looks like. I think you still think that what your nose looks like determines how you think and feel about it. I think you maybe have tried to learn to love yourself despite not having the nose you want. Right? Or like, learn to love having this not really good nose.

But that’s not what loving yourself is. Right? Full acceptance and loving yourself would be not thinking there’s anything wrong with your nose and not thinking that you need a different nose or that it’s a problem that you have the nose you have. Not thinking that another surgery is required for you to get the correct nose or the nose you were supposed to have, and that is what’s going to make things better for you.

So I think you’re terrified in some way for a good reason, in the sense that you’re right that changing your nose is not going to solve your emotional problem. I don’t mean you should be terrified, but what I mean is like, I think you’re scared because you’re accurately predicting that as things are right now in your brain, it’s very likely that you will have negative thoughts and feelings about the results of the surgery.

Because it’s not the surgery that causes our thoughts and feelings. It’s our brain. It’s our own thoughts and feelings. And so, I think I would just suggest that I’m not sure that you really do believe that you can love yourself either way, or maybe you believe you can love yourself, but you don’t believe you can love your nose. But loving yourself includes your nose. You can love your nose without changing it. And I think that if you loved your nose, truly this nose you have, if you loved it, you wouldn’t be terrified to try to go through the process because you would know I can love myself no matter what my nose looked like. I learned how to love this nose. I know I can love another nose.

Right? The fact especially that you use the word terrified suggests to me that you haven’t really resolved this yet. And if you haven’t resolved your thoughts and feelings about your nose, like you started out not liking your nose and then you got surgery and now you still don’t like your nose, and now you think that it’s the surgeon’s fault and they should have done it differently. So now you’re going to get another surgery so you can like your nose better. And like this letter to the clinic you wrote, right? It’s sort of like, “Oh, okay, I shouldn’t have gotten this.” It’s like you’re still very in the story that like the surgery went wrong. So interesting.

It’s like you’ve kind of shifted what was wrong with it. It’s like, first it was wrong because it didn’t give me the nose that I wanted. And then it was like, “Oh, it’s wrong because I wasn’t in the right mental place. And so they should be, they should be able to tell who is in the right mental place to get the surgery.” But it’s like there’s still this underlying kind of, “Something went wrong, it shouldn’t have happened the way it did. I’m trying to take action to change that. I’m going to try to teach the clinic who they shouldn’t do rhinoplasty on. I’m going to try to get my nose redone so that then I can feel better.” It’s like there’s still this sort of sense from it that you think a mistake happened and something went wrong and you need to try to fix it. And you’re trying to take action to fix it.

Whether by preventing other people from getting a surgery, telling the clinic where they went wrong, getting a new surgery yourself. And no amount of action is going to change an emotion. And so if you’re terrified to go through the process, what you’re terrified of is the way you’re going to feel, which is caused by your thoughts. And so I think that feeling is a signal to you. Like, I don’t think the solution to this is, do thought work to not be scared of the operation by telling myself, “I’m sure I’ll love my new nose and it’s going to go great and the surgeon is amazing.” The whole point is that it’s not your nose that causes how you feel about it. That terror is an indication to you that you have more work to do on loving the nose, the original nose you had, the nose you have now, whatever nose you might have in the future.

And that trying to change the shape of your nose in order to feel better about what happened in the past or to feel better about your nose or whatever it is, is never going to work. Taking an action to change a circumstance never changes our feelings.

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