Dr. Caroline Fleck
speaker
364 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Caroline Fleck’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But if you divorce yourself from the narrative and you just feel it, it can.
It just gets bigger. It just gets hungrier. It's like a child trying to get your attention, isn't it, right?
That's right. I think what you'll find, you know, if you struggle with being alone, I think that's a real tell for the degree to which you are facing and at peace with your emotions.
Because when there's no one else around and your phone is dead and you're the only person you're with, if that is painful and uncomfortable and you can kind of feel things trying to like crawl out, that suggests that you're not quite at peace with yourself.
practice a lot of self-validation.
That, I mean, this is, I go through these steps almost every single night in bed. I go through these steps of like... What's this process look like?
I had a breast cancer about a year ago, and I had to go through all of the nastiness, the chemo, the radiation, the mastectomy, the surgeries, all this. Wow. And it profoundly affected my daughter. And she felt like after I lost my hair, I was a different person. She's 11, but she has felt this really acutely. And I've had to really work on rebuilding that relationship. Wow.
And so we're here in L.A. doing all this great stuff. And I had an article that I needed to get out by 9 a.m. this morning. And so she's wanting to watch Friends in the Hot Tub. Like, come on, what's better than that, right? Like, we're staying at this fun place. And I just didn't have time.
Like I was able, you know, we did a little bit of time in the hot tub, but she's like, can we watch it in your bed? And I'm like, I got to write this, you know, and I'm texting my husband. Can you like read to her tonight? And so I got in bed and I just felt so bad about myself. Like I felt so I had to sit there and be like, all right, what am I feeling? All right. This is this is shame.
Okay. Now that I've, the first step is just to acknowledge it, give it an adjective.
Yeah, sure. Guilt, shame, devastation, disappointment. And then I repeat whatever that emotion, I copy it. I keep repeating it. This is shame. This is shame. And as I'm repeating it, I'm trying to feel it in my body. Where is it? Is it in my chest? Is it behind my eyes? Try and feel it as intensely as you can without reliving it.
the evening or replaying it in my head or all the reasons why i'm a failure as a mom or i've screwed up my kid i'm never going to be able to repair this relationship here i am now prioritizing my career all these things that want to like fight their way in to feed and stoke that shame i'm just putting them over here and i'm just my mantra is this is shame this is shame feel it this is shame feel it
And it goes up and it does come down. And once it comes down, I need to look for the kernel of truth in that shame. Where is it coming from? Why am I feeling this way? Well, of course I'm feeling shame. I'm not being the type of parent I want to be. That makes sense. There's a lot of societal expectations around being a mother and a working mother, what that's supposed to look like.
And I don't feel like I'm measuring up. That shame makes sense. Okay. I get where that's coming from. If I were to look at this from the outside and see a friend in this position, I wouldn't think they were a bad person. I would have empathy for them. So I do this kind of understanding, kind of looking for the validity in the emotion if it's there.
At the same time, maybe challenging it if it's not serving me. And then the most important things I do are kind of the last two steps. The first is to take action in some way to self-soothe.
hmm okay so i'm usually lying in bed when i do this well do like um soft touch so rubbing your shoulder hand on the tummy whatever it may be um and then you got to pay that forward you got to do something with that negative energy so if i'm if it's during the day i would go and i've done all sorts of wild things to like you know Everything from working out to fostering kittens, right?
Trying to just do something I wouldn't have done that day were it not for this suffering.
And last night it was just a loving kindness meditation. So I thought about all the mothers out there who had had cancer and who were also struggling and just like, you know, imagined like, let me take that on. And like, let me just imagine them being more at peace.
And that's it. But so that's like, that's a, it sounds really, yeah, it sounds kind of exhaustive, but like, it's, oh, it's so soothing.
Yeah.
Showing 141–160 of 364 · page 8 of 19
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