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 our first question is about social media, but this is actually going to be great advice for anything that you find quote-unquote triggers you. Okay, so the question says, “How can I be on social media without feeling just awful about myself?” I get caught in comparisonitis easily with thoughts like, ‘Oh, that was such a clever post and mine sucked. I should spend more time commenting and posting things of value.’ And I feel so negative when it comes to hearing about how people are crushing it in their coaching businesses. I just want to curl up into a ball and hide. The feeling is shame with all those thoughts. Then I shut down, avoid social media, hate on it and myself. I would love to be able to post myself and appreciate others’ posts from a place of fullness and self-sufficiency, that I’m enough. In fact, this is my dream for all areas of my life.”

Okay, so let’s just pick one area of life at a time to work on. Here’s what I want to suggest that you do. It’s sort of like exposure therapy. So if social media sets all of this off, obviously I don’t think we should just avoid circumstances about which we have thoughts. That’s what we always try to do, is we try to change the C. At the same time, just constantly going on social media, telling yourself you should coach yourself or change your thoughts and then not, is not feeling good either.

So what I would recommend is that you schedule time to do some exposure therapy for yourself, and this is what I would say. Number one, you schedule a time you’re going to do this, however often you’re willing to do it, if it’s going to be a half hour once a day or 20 minutes once a week or whatever it is. Number two, here’s what you do for the exposure therapy time.

Number one, decide what you’re going to think ahead of time. So you do a little thought work before you open up social media and you decide what thought you want to practice thinking. Then number two, you go on social media and just for that period of time, you coach yourself the whole time. But you keep it a manageable amount of time, so you’re not telling yourself, “Oh, I should coach myself every second I’m on social media.” It’s just unrealistic right now. But it’s, “I’m going to spend 20 minutes on Instagram and I’m going to coach the shit out of myself that whole time.” Right? So that I get some experience in looking at and changing these thoughts, but I don’t make it an overwhelming goal.

And then when you’ve done that, you also have a bunch of thoughts for you to then practice until the next time you do it, right? So whatever thoughts you came up with yourself that you wanted to practice while you were doing it, then I would add those into your daily thought practice so that you’re not only practicing it when you’re looking at social media. So do some exposure therapy with yourself for small amounts of time to build up your ability to be on there and managing your mind at the same time.

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.

This week’s podcast review comes from E. W. Parker, and I almost died when I first read the subject line because I thought it said, “Surfing in Paradise No More,” but it actually says, “Suffering in Paradise no more.” So they say, “I had everything on paper, but it was all wrong. I called it suffering in paradise. This podcast and working with Kara in one of her programs gave me objective tools to use in a time of my life I felt stuck. The podcast intro tells you exactly what Kara and her amazing coaching team help with. Suffering is still part of being human, but now I’m curating my own paradise and it’s fucking magical.”

All right, next question. “How do you handle an emotional family member? My mother recently told me I was unwelcome in their home until I was nicer to her and my father. The reality is, while I could be quote-unquote nicer, I find that I’m a direct reflection of her. I think that we are so alike that she doesn’t like what she sees and hears and wants to distance herself from my behavior. I miss my mom. I enjoy talking to her, but through this, I’ve realized that her issues are not mine. I cannot control her feelings and emotions. I feel liberated that I no longer feel obligated to call and chat with her, but I do miss her and I enjoy our time together. How do I heal this or restore a healthier relationship so I can be welcomed again?”

Okay, so this is super interesting because a lot of these thoughts are quite conflicting, but I don’t think that the question-asker sees that, which is normal. But fundamentally, you can’t ensure that you will be welcomed, because that requires someone else’s thoughts and feelings. Your mom has to do the welcoming. This isn’t about her being emotional or not, right? This question isn’t really, “How do you handle an emotional family member?” as opposed to a non-emotional family member. An emotional colleague is no different. It’s all the same, right? Your mother doesn’t want you in her house unless you act, it sounds like, a certain way. It sounds like you know what that is.

So the question for you is really, are you willing to act that way to be in her house? It has nothing to do with whether she’s being reasonable. It has nothing to do with whether maybe she is reacting to a projection of herself. It doesn’t matter. You can’t control her mind or thoughts. If you do have a sense of what she wants you to do because she thinks that causes her thoughts and feelings, the question for you is just, are you willing to do it? Knowing that it doesn’t, and it may or may not work.

Since you don’t cause her thoughts and feelings, it may be that you could do what she wanted and then she’s still going to feel, quote-unquote, that you’re not being nice and not be responsive. Or maybe her manual is just, if she does these things, it counts as nice and it doesn’t even matter whether I feel good about it or not. I just need my daughter to do X, Y, Z and then even if I feel miserable, I’ll still want to have her in the house. Who knows, right? The question for you is just, how willing are you to do what it is she wants in order to spend time with her? Those are her terms.

The second thing for you, though, to think about is, you say you miss her. What if that’s okay? What if it’s okay to miss her? You can actually enjoy her without being around her. So it’s almost we have to bifurcate your question, because you ask, “How do I heal this and restore a healthier relationship so I can be welcomed again?” And those are actually two totally different questions. “How can you be quote-unquote welcomed again?” Well, we can’t guarantee that. And really it comes down to how willing are you to behave the way she wants and see if that works, which it may or may not, in terms of her inviting you over.

None of that has anything to do with your feelings. So how can you heal it or restore it for yourself? How can you have a good relationship with her? That’s got to do with your thoughts, and it only happens in your brain. So you’ve got a whole push-pull thing going here where you say, “Well, I could be nicer, but I think she just is rejecting me because she rejects herself. You’re wrong. She’s wrong.” You’ve got some thought work there to clear up. And if you want to feel connected to her and love her, then you can do that. And that is something you can control. You can enjoy her even when she’s not around. And it’s also okay to miss her, and that can be okay too.

But you got to clean up your own thought work about her and not tell yourself, “This is her problem and she’s projecting, so I don’t have to do my thought work on it.” Those are two separate things. Are you willing to go through the motions of whatever she wants to see if that will get you invited back, which it may or may not, right? Or may for a little while and then you might get kicked out again, who knows? And how do you want to think and feel about it for you in your own brain, which has nothing to do with what she’s doing or why she’s doing it or whether she’s being reasonable or whether she’s projecting or any of that? It’s all just up to you and your thoughts.