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.

Here’s the first question. “Dear Kara, I just started listening to your podcast this week and I already love it. I’ve been struggling with a fucked brain for a long time, despite being aware that my thought patterns are what actually cause my struggle. This brings me to a question that I hope you’ll be able to answer for me. I have seen a good number of therapists who use different methodologies to work on the actual source of my anxiety, stress, and depression. My brain. And yet, none have been able to help me in a significant way.

“Have you heard stories like this before? If yes, do you have a sense of what therapy might be lacking? Or if there are therapists who do work similar to what you do that I have just been unable to find so far? I guess I feel some frustration towards therapy, myself, the world, that I have been unable to gain the help I need for so long despite actively looking. Anyway, I really, really appreciate the work you’re doing. I’m hoping I can start moving my brain in the right direction using your resources.”

So, not knowing anything about this listener’s therapist or what they’ve been doing, of course, it’s very hard for me to say. I think that one of the reasons that sometimes therapy does not help people, of course, sometimes therapy does. Just like sometimes coaching, there’s lots of kinds of coaching and some of them are good and some of them are not so good. There’s lots of kinds of therapy. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. In my experience and what my personal experience was, was that talk therapy was not really that helpful for me because I already had a fair amount of insight in a narrative sense. I could tell you what my childhood family life was like and how that might have shaped the way that I think. But that didn’t solve anything. It didn’t change my thoughts. And so, for me, any therapy that wasn’t teaching me how to concretely change my thoughts wasn’t helpful.

And that’s what coaching provided. So, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if you went to a Freudian and a Jungian and a traditional talk therapist and none of that actually worked, I would not be surprised by that, right? Of course, it all depends on your therapist and it depends on the type of therapy and on the therapist, of course, right? Just like there are some life coaches who are amazing and some who are not so great. And there’s some therapists who are amazing and some who are not so great. It’s not that all coaching is one thing and all therapy is another thing.

So that’s what I would say about that. So yes, I have heard stories like this before. I think the other thing that you have to deal with, this listener, is this frustration that you haven’t gotten the help you need, right? Despite actively looking. There’s a little bit of a kind of victim thought here that, well, I’ve been trying and the world isn’t cooperating.

We’re all on our own journey, right? And you get to decide whether to believe that something’s gone wrong that you haven’t got that help yet, or to be grateful that you live in a time where there’s so many options and you can still keep trying and looking for new things. This happens a lot with my clients where they learn thought work and then immediately they start beating themselves up or feeling bad that they didn’t have it before, or feeling sad that they went through so many years of their lives without thought work. But that’s just the same thought pattern that causes all the problems, right? I choose to be so grateful for every experience I’ve had that led me to this work because without those experiences, I might not have known that I needed the work.

And I am grateful to be someone who had to learn to manage my mind. There are people who are naturally even keeled. It’s true. But one of the things I see is that if something really big happens to them, they don’t have any tools because they’ve just naturally handled day-to-day life. Whereas I feel like because I was not naturally able to handle day-to-day life very well, and I had to find this work, now I feel so rooted and secure that I can handle anything. And I can teach it to others, right? If you do something instinctively, you can’t really teach it to somebody else often. But because I had to learn how to do this, I can teach it to other people. So I could choose to think, “Oh, it’s so unfair that I’m not just naturally chill and that I had to suffer for 33 years or whatever it was before I found this work.” But I don’t choose to think about it that way.

I choose to think I’m so glad that I had all those experiences that when I found this work, I was prepared and I saw its power. I’m so grateful that I had to learn it because now I know nothing can shake it and because now I know I can teach it to other people. So no matter what the circumstance is, you always get to decide what to think about it.

All right 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 Podcast 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.

Okay, this review is short and sweet, but I just love the username. So this comes from 192739cats, which I hope is the number of cats that this person has. The title of the review is Favorite Mindset Podcast.

Says, “I followed Kara for five years and still come back for her podcast. She’s a way of translating complex topics in such an easy to digest way. Thanks for all that you do, Kara.” I just love that so many of you have been listening to this podcast for so long. It’s like we’re in a long-term relationship with each other.

All right, second question. “Dear Kara, I want you to know how grateful I am for the work that you do. I’ve been struggling with managing my thoughts for years now. Of course, I did not know that I wasn’t managing my thoughts until I started listening to your teachings. And I finally found some teachings that resonate with me in your podcasts. I just listened to your Clean versus Dirty Pain podcast and there’s one thing which I keep struggling to manage my thoughts about. I struggle the most with managing my thoughts when it comes to dating.” You are not alone, sister.

“I went through a very hard breakup a couple of years ago, which made me realize how much self-doubt I had about myself and how much I’m always trying to manipulate my relationships to obtain a certain outcome that will provide me with the external validation I need. After two years of not dating anyone after that breakup, I finally decided to put myself out there again and started going out with a guy I met through a dating app. Not surprisingly, I started trying to manipulate him and our very brief relationship into something that would make me feel good about myself. Of course, that didn’t work and the relationship ended with me finding out that he’s just not that into me.

“Although this made me feel really bad about myself, I was able to do some thought work to try to think more neutral and positive thoughts about myself. However, I still find myself going against reality. I understand there’s nothing wrong with me and that him not liking me does not mean I am not worthy. However, I keep thinking if there’s nothing wrong with me, then why is it that he doesn’t like me? I know I’m fighting a battle I can’t win, but I wonder if there’s a way to think more positively about this issue.”

So here’s the thing. You don’t really know that there’s nothing wrong with you and that him not liking you doesn’t mean you’re not worthy. And that’s okay. Most humans don’t know that. And even when they learn that they don’t know it, like you, it takes a while to get there. But it’s a lie to tell yourself that you understand that and know that already because you don’t.

Here’s how we know you don’t. Because you’re still fixated on why this guy doesn’t like you and you think that if there’s nothing wrong with you, everyone would like you, right? So that’s how we know that you don’t really like yourself and you don’t really believe you’re worthy. If there’s nothing wrong with me, then why is it he doesn’t like me? We could just as easily ask, why should he like you? Do you like everyone you’ve met? Of course not, right? Much less everyone you’ve gone on a date with. My teacher always says, you can be the most delicious peach in the world and someone still is not going to like peaches. I think Dita Von Teese said that originally, actually. My teacher says it too.

So your brain is so committed to the idea that there’s something wrong with you and that how you are causes what other people think about you, that it’s basically telling you that if it’s true, there’s nothing wrong with you, that would mean everyone should like you. And so if anyone doesn’t, it means there is something wrong with you. But those premises are totally wrong. What other people think about you has to do with their thoughts, right? Maybe you reminded him of his third grade teacher. Maybe he’s not really ready to be dating. Maybe you just weren’t a good fit, right? It could be a million things that doesn’t have anything to do with something being wrong with you. If it was true that if nothing’s wrong with you, everyone should like you, then everyone could just marry everyone in the 10th grade, right? There would be no dating and breakups and divorces, all the things that happen in relationships, right? And we could all just marry whoever, it wouldn’t matter.

So that premise is what’s wrong here. If there’s nothing wrong with me, then why is it he doesn’t like me? Those things are totally unrelated. What someone thinks about you has nothing to do with you. It’s their brain. And your problem here is your brain and what it’s telling you. And the real problem is you not liking yourself. That’s what you need to work on. So it’s not about him. He’s just a green screen that you are projecting your insecurity on. You have to work on liking yourself. When you do that, you will know that him not liking you has nothing to do with you.