World Leading Psychologist: How to Master Your Emotions & Deal With Negative People

Dr. Susan David (00:00:06):

Absolutely. The world has been changing so quickly and we as human beings, we are not taught in school the science of how to navigate emotions effectively. And so we come to a changing world that feels out of control and we then are more likely to feel out of control as well. There is a huge increase in people's experiences of depression, anxiety, burnout, lashing out at others like this is a real phenomenon. What

Mel Robbins (00:00:37):

Are the specific things that you can say to somebody who is having trouble with their life or their emotions? The

Dr. Susan David (00:00:44):

Purpose of our emotions is not to get us all hooked or get us all frazzled or the purpose of our emotions is to,

Mel Robbins (00:00:57):

I am so excited to talk to you today because today I got a topic that I've been thinking about for a while. Have you noticed that people seem way more emotional right now, like fragile and even in some cases unhinged. And by the way, I would include myself in that description. I mean, just the other day I was standing in line at the grocery store and I just started feeling so impatient with how long it was taking. It's not like I had to be somewhere. I went from feeling perfectly fine to all of a sudden I'm rocking back and forth, I'm looking at my phone, and then I'm looking at my phone again, then I'm looking around and then I'm staring at the person in front of me and shooting them that kind of like, come on, come on. Look. As she's taking one potato and putting it on the conveyor belt and then reaching in, grabbing another potato and putting it on the conveyor.

(00:01:51):

And look, I'm normally a really chill person, but sometimes I wonder have the last four years and the pandemic has, it created so many unexpected detours and changes in your life that there's just all of this emotional baggage that's built up for each and every one of us, and now all of a sudden you're getting derailed by them as you're standing in line at the grocery store. I mean, it's one thing to wear your emotions on your sleeve, but there are some days that I'm like, am I feeling more emotional? I wish I could be better at responding to my emotions. I'm sure you do too. Especially you want to know the situations where I really wish I had more control over how I'm feeling. It's in those situations where somebody else is making me feel overwhelmed. Like when somebody erupts at you because they're frustrated, or do you have somebody in your life that the second that they're mad or upset about something, they give you the silent treatment or make you feel guilty?

(00:02:48):

Or maybe they apologize all the time. I'm really sorry. I was tired, I was frustrated. I didn't mean to act like that. But it doesn't change how controlling or stubborn or volatile they act, and it doesn't change the very real emotions that you now deal with. And it's easy when it's your sister because you can turn to your sister and be like, will you stop playing the victim? But you can't turn to the supervisor of the floor in your nursing department or the principal of the school that you work in and say those things. So today I'm so excited for both of us because you and I are getting a master coaching session on how to understand your emotions and deal with people who cannot tolerate their own. So without further ado, please, let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Susan David.

Dr. Susan David (00:03:34):

Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here today.

Mel Robbins (00:03:36):

I'm so excited to talk to you. Let's

Dr. Susan David (00:03:38):

Do it.

Dr. Susan David (00:03:47):

Absolutely. Someone described this as the word untethered, and to me that's often what it feels like, that there feels like there is an untethering, and it's not an untethering that's a general untethering. It's I think often an untethering from the self. And really what I mean by this is the world has been changing so quickly, there's a pandemic. You mentioned earlier, there's been a war. There's so much that's going on

(00:04:15):

And we as human beings, we are not taught in school the science of how to navigate emotions effectively. We are not taught this in the workplace. And so we come to a changing world that feels out of control and we then are more likely to feel out of control as well. And so just from the basic research, we know that there is a huge increase in people's experiences of depression, anxiety, burnout, lashing out at others. This is real. This is not just you and your grocery store. This is a real phenomenon and I think it's a tragedy that we don't speak to these inner skills more.

Mel Robbins (00:04:56):

I love that you use the word untethered because I know for me personally, when I all of a sudden have an emotional outburst, like even standing in line at the grocery store and I feel this wave of I'm frustrated, I'm impatient, I'm judgy, and then I start to feel judgy of myself and mad at myself for being that way. Whenever I snap at my kids because I've had a stressful day at work, which is not an excuse to snap at somebody else, I feel bad. And I really resonate with this idea that when you cannot navigate the inner world, your emotions, your feelings, you do feel disconnected from yourself.

Dr. Susan David (00:05:36):

You feeling disconnected because you disconnected from your values. And also, we often talk about this word hustle, and we talk about hustle in relation to work in relation to the external world, but a lot of what we do is we hustle with ourselves, should I feel this? Am I allowed to feel it? Is this okay if I'm accepting of myself? Does this mean I'm not allowed to think or want bigger things? We have this hustle with ourselves, and the more we hustle with ourselves, the less we are able to be connected with our values, who we want to be grounded. And I often think of this metaphor, Mel of a gymnast. So if we think of a gymnast, a gymnast is agile, a gymnast is able to respond to what's going on in the external world to the crowd that's clapping or the loud music that doesn't play exactly as she wants. But what keeps the gymnast grounded is the strong inner core. It's this core that allows us to be able to respond to the world effectively. And so much of my work is focused on how to develop this inner core so that we can navigate what's going on in the outer world with a greater level of being centered and connected and breathing in ourselves.

Mel Robbins (00:06:55):

That sounds amazing.

Dr. Susan David (00:07:10):

A couple of years ago, I was writing a book, not Emotional Agility, another book, and I had worked long and hard on this book,

(00:07:23):

And I went to a conference where a professor, far more powerful, famous than I will ever be, asked me what I was working on. And I told him, okay, and I'm not going to say who he was, but essentially this professor betrayed my trust and six months later I was working in Starbucks and I got a text from this professor or a voice message actually saying, I hope you don't mind if we use your concept as the title for my book. Okay, so okay. I was like, mind, of course I mind. Okay, of course I mind, and I'm giving you this example. I think it's a real life example of how not to do it.

(00:08:08):

So I was outraged and the trap door to my heart opened when I realized that this professor's question was not a question. The book was available that day for pre-sale on Amazon. So I did what many of us would do in the situation. I called my husband to bitch and my husband was, he's a physician and he had a patient lying on the table waiting for an emergency procedure and he answered the call like this, Susie can't speak now, got a patient on the table waiting for an emergency procedure clock. Okay, so now what do we do? We are like the one time, the one time I needed him, he's unavailable. The one time when his callback comes in three days, I'm not going to take it now I'm going to be, this is reactive, this is emotional immaturity.

Mel Robbins (00:09:00):

I want to highlight that absolutely everything that you felt, I felt as you were telling that story, I felt a deep sense of injustice. And I'm the kind of person that when I get triggered like that, I don't call my husband, I send texts and text and texts. I text vomit at him. And as you're listening, I know you're nodding. You're like, oh, I do that too. I do that too. But the problem with that is that while the texting or the frantic phone call may help you relieve the pressure of the emotion of the moment, it didn't actually help you solve the problem. And I can see how when your emotion starts swirling or life starts swirling around you, you lose that centering and that's why you become super reactive. And so it's super helpful to think about the fact that you could actually teach yourself this skill of a solid emotional core that allows you to stay grounded and in control. I love that. And I think you are highlighting something really important, which is the superpower that you're talking about is being able to experience the wave of anger, hatred, injustice, sadness, feeling defeated, feeling powerless, feeling small, feeling like you're robbed in one instance to validate it, to notice it. And then where the opportunity is, is to then strengthen your connection to yourself and to the emotions that you feel so that no matter who is freaking out around you or what you are going through in your life, that you are able to find a sense of calm to navigate it.

(00:11:10):

So when we are rushing around, often what we've done is we've lost a sense of our own connectedness. We are tactile human beings, and over the past couple of years, we've become more and more disconnected. We are much more on our phones, we have social distancing. There was all of this that went on that disconnected us, and there is something so powerful and so grounding in just putting your hands on your heart and saying, it's hard to human right now. It's hard to be worrying about the lunchbox and getting my kids to school and it's hard to human right now. So that is a skill in compassion and obviously the work goes much deeper and much broader, but this is a powerful way of being with ourselves, which is completely distinct from am I allowed to feel that? Well, I should be grateful, the stuff that we are often taught to do or what social media would tell us to do. So when we've got doctors who are going into patients' rooms to give bad news, we remind them of their feet on the ground and we will often ask them, and if you watching on YouTube or if you even just listening to this, I've got my hands over my chest. So yeah, these skills are powerful and they are, they're absolutely skills that we can develop.

Mel Robbins (00:12:29):

Well, I can see in the scenario that you just gave because you do do so much consulting and teaching and advising in the corporate space, in the healthcare space, and I can see how if you're somebody working in the healthcare field and you're about to walk into a treatment room and you know that you've got bad news to deliver, that the fact that you're a human being means you're going to feel something about what's about to happen. And you are saying that simply reminding a nurse, a doctor, a healthcare professor or professional to take a breath feet on the floor, arms across the body, it's hard to be human right now that even just that grounding moment is something that helps you really tolerate the emotion. Or maybe you should just talk a little bit about what are emotions and what purpose do they serve so that as everybody's listening, they kind of understand what you're talking about. When you say feeling an emotion,

Dr. Susan David (00:13:40):

The purpose of our emotions is not to get us all hooked or get us all frazzled. The purpose of our emotions is to help us to adapt to the world around us. That is the purpose of our emotions. So our emotions have evolved to help us to adapt and survive. So what does this mean from the perspective of how we connect with ourselves? What this means is that a lot of the language that we have around emotions has actually not been from this functional perspective. It hasn't been from the perspective that actually emotions are human and healthy and normal and beautiful. Instead, what we have is this idea that emotions are weak, emotions are feminine, emotions are bad. That's the history that we come with when we think about emotions. And so when we see emotions in that way, we start this hustle. Well, if I'm feeling anything other than a so-called positive emotion, then it's bad. We have every day thoughts. A thought might be, I'm not good enough. I'm a fraud. We have emotions, we have emotions of anger, fear, grief, all of these experiences that we have, we have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old, when we were this high stories about whether we good enough, whether we deserved to be loved. And the pop psychology way of viewing these is that they're good or bad, positive or negative. In other words, if you have a thought that's negative, put it aside, it doesn't belong. Think about something positive.

(00:15:41):

What my work does is it actually says these thoughts, emotions and stories are normal. They are helping you to understand the world, to see what you need to pay attention to adapt to the world. So these are normal. We don't need to get into a hustle with ourselves as to whether we should or shouldn't be allowed to think or feel a particular thing. These are normal, these are beautiful, these are human. If we turn against that and say, I shouldn't think this or I shouldn't be allowed to feel that we unsee ourselves. Now, emotions are data.

(00:16:22):

Emotions are data. They're not directives. In other words, it doesn't mean because I feel something now I need to act out. And now I've got to tell everyone how I feel because there is a difference between feeling our emotions with compassion, with curiosity and being able to be grounded in them. And then that allows us the space, the distance from the emotion because now we're not hustling to be able to think about who do I want to be? Who do I want to be in this relationship? How do I want to come to the circumstance so that we coming to the world not in a way that's reactive, but rather coming to the world in a way that is clear sighted and centered within the self.

Mel Robbins (00:17:15):

That was really interesting. So let's talk about how you do this in real life. And I've got a ton of questions from our global audience when they heard that you were coming on. Dr. David, we've got a ton of questions about how you manage your own emotions, particularly in situations where other people are triggering you. 

Dr. Susan David (00:18:06):

Well, I mean anyone who's parented, anyone who's looked after elderly parents, anyone who's been in relationship with anyone recognizes some of the truth that is said, which is as a parent for example, you only tend to be as happy as your most unhappy child because of course when we see people in pain, it evokes pain in us. We are social creatures. We of course are going to experience pain, grief, agony when we see someone else in pain. So at the same time, what happens when we get stuck in my experience of what that other person is experiencing, we become both unable to manage our own health and wellbeing, but also we can't really be functional, effective parents

(00:19:10):

Because we are now reactive within the pain that is created in that world. So there are a couple of things that I would say. Firstly, if we think about how to think about children's emotions, because that's probably a really good place to start, we can then start thinking about our own. So children's emotions. Often as a parent, it becomes really tempting when we see our children in pain to Russian and fix. I remember Mel years ago, me taking my son to the pediatrician. He had just been born and I remember going and my son was Gogo and Gaga and smiling and happy, and I handed him over to the pediatrician for his shots and he started to scream. He started to be outraged and he was crying and I jumped in and I said to him, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And the nurse so kindly, so empathetically said to me, Susie, it's not okay. Your child is in pain, okay? It's not okay. Your child is in pain. It will be okay, but your child is in pain. And I was like, oh, I've got a flipping PhD in this stuff and I did the one thing that you're not allowed to do, which is invalidate. So the point that I make here is one of the first things we often try to do with others is we try to control what emotion we think they should or shouldn't be allowed to feel. And often we do it. I can see it's resonating, I can see it's connecting. Often we do it with good intention,

(00:20:56):

Okay, we do it with good intention. Now, what does that teach our child? What it teaches our child is what we call display rules. Display rules are the implicit rules that we often have of what emotion is it for me to feel in my family or what am I allowed to experience? So how does this impact on the child? What it basically does is a display rule. If every time a child comes home and is upset, you say to the child, oh, you're not allowed to be upset, and you might not be saying that overtly, but you might be signaling that what that's saying to the child is sadness has no place here.

(00:21:40):

I need to turn away from myself because sadness is not allowed in this family, or anger isn't allowed or emotions aren't allowed. So now what is the longer term impact of that? Well, how do we become good at regulating our emotions? We become good at regulating our emotions when we say, Hey, this is what sadness feels like, and you practice feeling sad and you practice the sadness that I felt 24 hours ago I did IB, I did C. Now I no longer feel sad by allowing our children to feel all of their emotions, we are not just allowing them to feel all of their emotions. We are actually doing the core work of parenting, which is helping our children to be with discomfort, helping our children to recognize and be with uncomfortable emotions. And so I think one of the most powerful ways for Tina and for every single person listening is any emotion we experience rather than judging that emotion as that's positive, that's negative, that's wrong, that's right.

(00:22:49):

It's hard to human. And so for Tina, creating a little bit of space where she sees that experience in herself with compassion is very powerful because now it's already moving you into the space of the self where you're not in this vortex of both of you struggling. You now are in with yourself. So that is firstly a very important skill. Secondly is often when people experience tough emotion, we start getting hooked by the emotion and there's no space for anything else. So I'm angry and I'm feeling overwhelmed, and there's all this stuff going on for me, and there's no space in that for the wisdom that I believe every single one of us has. We all have wisdom, we all in the peace of night when we are lying in bed and it's just us. There's this part of ourselves that is just us and it's wise and it's capable, beautiful, centered, and so we need to create the space for that. And when we are being clouded by being hooked by a difficulty, motion is not the space. So some practical strategies is when we are hooked by a difficulty. Motion is to recognize that often we use very big labels to describe what we are feeling. If you just think about something as simple as saying, I'm stressed, a lot of people come home and someone says, how was your day stressful?

(00:24:37):

Now let's deconstruct that a little bit. Your body, your psychology doesn't know what to do with the word stress. There is a world of difference between stress and disappointment.

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Okay, stress and I feel unsupported stress and I feel unseen stress and I'm bored. Okay? There's a world of difference. What we know is that when we label our emotions with greater levels of accuracy, with high levels of granularity, that what it starts to enable us to do is to understand the cause of the emotion. Gee, it's not just stress. It's I'm feeling unsupported. And it also allows us to develop what psychologists call our readiness potential, the readiness potential. When you move away from I'm not stressed, actually I'm bored. What that boredom does is when you're starting to label it in that way, you are also starting to say, gee, what do I need to do to now not be bored? So it starts to move you towards goals. We know that children as young as two and three years old who have greater levels of emotion granularity.

(00:26:01):

In other words, they're not just saying I'm mad or I'm sad, but they're able to say, I feel a bit upset. I feel a bit disappointed. I feel even children as young as two and three years old, obviously within their language capacity, those children who have greater levels of emotional granularity, 10, 20, 30 years later, those children do better. So again, coming back to Tina, we've got this gentle acceptance of emotion that is crucial in my work. I call it gentle acceptance. It's about showing up to all of our emotions with acceptance and curiosity. Not the same as passive resignation, but it's this acceptance. We also want to start creating space because we can't be wise, we can't be intentional when we are just on autopilot or react.

Mel Robbins (00:26:56):

I want to lean into the word, how do I separate my emotions? And whenever I use that in my own life,

(00:27:06):

I want to separate my emotions from a child that feels anxious or a husband that is struggling with depression or going through something really difficult. When you feel that sense to separate, is that a signal that you are getting kind of sucked into and triggered by someone else's emotions and you need to now take a breath and come back into your own body? If I listen closely to what you're saying, you're basically saying that of course, if there's somebody in your life that is struggling, it's going to make you sad and make you feel grief and make you feel all these complicated things, which is absolutely normal. And that hustling with our emotions and being in conflict with what is coming up for you is part of the problem. Like resisting the actual feelings that you have. Yes. How do you separate though what your son or daughter or significant other is dealing with and needs to deal with and feel for themselves and what you need to deal with for yourself? Because for me, I'll just explain in case it's helpful to you listening. When one of our kids is struggling with anxiety, which all three of them have in various levels throughout their life

(00:28:31):

Or my husband struggling with depression, the emotions that come up for me are so uncomfortable that the way that I would normally deal with them, Susan, is first try to swoop in and remove all the discomfort from my kids. I'll take care of it. I'll get you the therapist. We're going to talk about this. You're going to be okay because I can't do with my own emotions. And then as soon as I have just barfed all that out at somebody because I'm going to fix it, fix it, fix it. I don't want to feel what I'm feeling. It scares me to death that you're anxious, I love you, and I don't want you to be in pain, and now I'm upset about it. Then I go pour a drink. I don't want to feel those things.

Dr. Susan David (00:29:10):

Yes, I love that question. And by separation we don't mean disengagement. By separation we don't mean I don't care about you. By separation, what we mean is healthy levels of boundaries. Boundaries don't mean that I remove my compassion boundaries with my child that basically say, I am safe as a, and you my beautiful child are safe as a person because I'm not going to let your anxiety derail me and make us both unsafe, in other words, because it's a really important thing. So what are we doing when we are setting a boundary? You are wanting to see your child's need to recognize that need and to state that need. I can see that you need me right now while I'm cooking dinner. So we want to state the need.

(00:30:17):

We want to, number two, empathize. I love you. I care about you, I empathize with you, and I can see that what you're going through is really tough right now. So we are doing all of this need empathy. And third is we are stating what we can and cannot do. I can't deal with this now. I'm cooking dinner. Can we have this conversation in an hour? Now, in that way, you're not being in inhuman, you're not walking away from your compassion. What you're doing is you're coupling your compassion with a strong sense of groundedness in yourself and your ability to set boundaries. So separation is not about distance or I don't care, but it is the most important skillset. 

(00:31:35):

The first is what I call bottling difficulty, emotions, bottling difficulty. Emotions is when we experience these emotions, but we start engaging in emotional suppression. We can do it with ourselves, we can do it with others, ignoring and going and watching Netflix. So I don't need to deal with it is an example of bottling. Doing that once is fine, but when it becomes a default coping strategy, you aren't going to be effective in the world at all. So bottling is this idea of suppressing difficult emotions and pushing it aside in myself, pushing it aside in others, forced positivity, trying to fix, trying to say to someone, don't worry, it'll be okay. Sometimes leaders will say, when people are going through difficult situations at work, leaders will say something like, it doesn't matter. Everything will be okay, everything will be fine. And I'm like, that is not leadership. That is what we call denial. Forced positivity is not leadership. Forced positivity is denial. It's denial that's wrapped up in rainbows and sparkles. So what do you do? But it's denial. If

Mel Robbins (00:32:47):

You're worried though, you've

Dr. Susan David (00:32:48):

Got somebody that, you know what I mean? That's really struggling. And then the opposite is brooding. And brooding is where we, this feels terrible. This feels so difficult. We get stuck in our difficulty motion. So what we want to do with our difficult emotions to create that distance is firstly this gentle acceptance that I spoke about. Secondly is when we start getting granular with our emotions, we are now not in the space of like, oh, everything's stressful and my whole family life is up the creek. Instead, what we are doing is we are saying, I'm feeling disappointed because this is hard. And just that starts to create a sense of liberation in ourselves and a sense of separation. Another thing, and this I think is one of the most powerful things that we need to recognize. I own my emotions. My emotions don't own me.

Mel Robbins (00:33:49):

I mean, that sounds great. I don't know that I feel that way someday. Let's,

Dr. Susan David (00:33:54):

Let's think about our language. Alright, I am sad. What are we saying when we say I'm sad? We are saying all of me 100% to me,

Mel Robbins (00:34:04):

Oh, versus I

Dr. Susan David (00:34:05):

Feel sad versus I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad

(00:34:09):

When we say I feel sad, when we say I feel angry, what we are literally doing is saying, I am. All of me is defined by the sadness. And Mel, the metaphor that I use sometimes is imagine there's a cloud in the sky When you say, I am sad, I am angry, I'm a bad parent. What we are doing is we are almost being the cloud. I am, all of me is that cloud, but when we instead start noticing our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories for what they are, I'm noticing that I'm feeling grieving about what I'm seeing in my child. I'm noticing my sense of disappointment that I need to go it alone here. That I'm the person that's holding the family together. Okay?

(00:35:11):

I am noticing a story, which is that I needed to be a perfect parent here. So when we move away from, I'm a bad parent into I'm noticing my thoughts, emotions, and stories for what they are, which is their thoughts, their emotions, their stories, they're parts of us, they're not all of us. We've also got our wisdom, we've got our values, we've got our intentions, we've our wants, our dreams. So we need to create that separation. And a really powerful way of doing that is using this linguistic separation. Linguistic separation instead of, I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. What you're doing here is you are not the cloud, you are the whole damn sky. You are powerful enough to experience all of your emotions and then to choose who you want to be in that situation.

Mel Robbins (00:36:08):

I want to really drill down into this example a little bit further because I think what you've just shared is super helpful when you are the one who is getting brought down and overwhelmed by somebody else who's really struggling, and it's super helpful to see the need to literally kind of separate a little bit, have some compassion for yourself, use the linguistic separation of, I'm noticing this in myself, which even just acknowledging it does that readiness in terms of pointing you in the right direction to know what kind of support you need.

Dr. Susan David (00:36:50):

Firstly, we are not trying to sense make with anyone while they're lying on a supermarket floor having a tantrum. What we know from our work is that the simple presence, the simple willingness of one individual to be human with another individual, to not try jostle and fix and distract, but simple presence automatically deescalates those difficult emotions. So we know that, okay, you can't react with intentionality when you are reacting. In other words, when you're being reactive rather than responsive.

(00:37:39):

When we grounded in ourselves, we can respond. We've got our feet on the ground and we are responding. Now, there are a couple of mistakes that people make with us, okay? The first is, I spoke about brooding earlier where we get stuck in our difficult emotions. There is something called co brooding. Co brooding is when someone's had a really bad day and you come home from work and they come home from work and you have a big fat moan about what's been going on in the day. That's co brooding. What we are doing here is we are both now stuck in these difficult emotions. There's fascinating research on co brooding the idea that you got with your best girlfriend, you have a big fat moan about your father-in-law, and what do you do when you leave that restaurant conversation? You love your best friend, you feel better about your best friend, but what is the longer term impact of your behavior on your father-in-law? It actually is worse. So brooding is where you both now get stuck in a little vent. And we know that brooding and brooding is actually predictive of longer term depression, of longer term anxiety, and it is unhelpful. So this is where this labeling comes in. That's very, very important. I would

Mel Robbins (00:39:04):

Love to hear you help us understand what some emotional laced behavior in other people is signaling to us. Because I don't think most adults go up to other adults and they're like, I'm really lonely. Here's an example. If this happened to a friend of mine where she just wanted to have a couple people go out for her birthday, just three or four friends and some other friends found out about it and she gets a passive aggressive text, thanks a lot for inviting me. That is clearly behavior by another adult that is driven by emotions that are uncomfortable for them.