Secret #82: Why We're So Mean to Ourselves with Holly Yates & Shawn Costello Woolley
episode
Life's Dirty Little Secrets Podcast | Breaking Silence Around the Secrets We All Carry
49 min
1 speaker
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Why do we compare ourselves to others and feel inadequate?
We are all very human and fallible, and yet we live in a society that rewards pretending we're not fallible, or the range of acceptable fallibility is narrow. We are constantly comparing our insides to other people's outsides and feeling inadequate and guilty, even ashamed. Trying to blend in means parts of ourselves will disappear, and we must then live in fear that we will be found out. Here, together, we will create a space where we can laugh, cry, and carry our suffering and hurts lightly. In the service of being deeply human. This is Life's Dirty Little Secrets.
Welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Emma Waddington.
And I'm Chris McCurry. And today we are delighted to have two guests. One of them is Sean Costello-Wooley. Sean Costello-Wooley is an acceptance and commitment therapy peer review trainer and staff psychologist on the PTSD clinic team at the VA hospital in the Maryland healthcare system. She also maintains a private practice outside of Baltimore, Maryland, and is the owner and founder of Stillpoint Journeys, a coaching and trainee practice. Through Stillpoint, Dr. Costello-Willey takes clients and trainees out of the office and into life by using extended hiking trips and other adventures to experience the change processes of acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT in real time. In addition to her clinical work, she provides ACT training internationally, supporting ACT skill development for clinicians and helping outdoor facilitators and educators integrate ACT processes into their programs.
Alongside Four Remarkable Women, Sean co-leads Women's Summit, a community grounded in ACT and behavioral science that creates spaces and immersive retreats where women can reconnect, with themselves, deepen relationships with other women, and intentionally move toward lives of greater vitality and purpose. Dr. Stella Woolley is the author of the Inner Critic Workbook, a self-compassion and mindfulness skills book to reduce feelings of shame, build self-worth, and improve your life and relationships. So Sean, welcome to Life's Dirty Level Secrets.
Thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here.
Fabulous. And we also have today, I'm very pleased to welcome Holly Yates. Holly is a clinical mental health counselor based in North Carolina, where she's been in private practice since 2004. She's trained in functional analytic psychotherapy, which I think our roads may have crossed slightly in that many moons ago with our lovely made a sigh in ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. in dbt dialectical behavior therapy and is a certified fap trainer through the university of washington she's also a founding facilitator of the online act peer intervention group called through acbs and was a plenary speaker at the acbs brazil conference her work brings a deeply relational lens to how we understand shame and self-criticism looking not just at what happens inside us but at what these voices are doing in our closest relationships
together with Sean. She's the co-author of the Inner Critic Workbook, which is what brings us all here today. Holly, it's so good to have you here with us.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here. It's exciting.
Very, very exciting. So I thought we would start with this inner critic. I think we all have an inner critic. I know that in a previous conversation that I heard that you had, apparently there's a small cohort that doesn't have an inner critic. But my experience is that most of us have this sort of inner voice that can really make us feel small and less than. And I thought we could start there, introducing this inner critic, this voice that we all have. And maybe one of you can tell us a bit about this and how to identify it, because I don't think it's that obvious to many of us that we do have a voice inside our heads or very critical thoughts.
So I love Emma that you said that we don't know that it's there because you're just there all the time, like radio and background that we don't really pay attention to. And it's not helpful.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why do we compare ourselves to others and feel inadequate?
0:02–4:44
2
How do Holly and Sean define the inner critic and its purpose?
4:44–16:23
3
What metaphors do the hosts use to describe the inner critic?
16:23–36:31
4
How can we transform the critic into a helpful coach?
36:31–37:42
5
Why is the inner critic so harsh and how did it evolve?
37:42–49:52
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Life's Dirty Little Secrets Podcast | Breaking Silence Around the Secrets We All Carry
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