The Neuroscience of Emotions with Reneau Peurifoy

Jennifer Norman:

Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to the Human Beauty movement podcast, life lessons from beautiful humans. My name is Jennifer Norman, founder of The Human Beauty Movement and your host. I'm so glad that you're joining me for today's show. Part of the human experience is having wide range of emotions. But if you're like me, it's not always easy to figure out your emotions and talk about your feelings. Sometimes they're just confusing and hard to put into words. Have you ever been in a situation where you just wonder, why the heck do I feel the way that I do? Well, my guest today is an expert on the neuroscience of emotions.

Jennifer Norman:

Reneau Peurifoy is an internationally known therapist, educator, and author of four books. His most recent book is called why you feel the way you do, and he's here to tell you all about it. Welcome, Reneau. I'm so happy to have you here.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jennifer Norman:

Let's get down to it. This book is incredible in why you feel the way you do. You say that there are seven core emotions identified by neuroscience. Can you talk about that and tell us what they are?

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, there's the ones that we're all familiar with, anger and fear and lust. But then some of the other ones, one of the more interesting ones, is something that they call seeking. And if you look at any child, you see them wanting to explore the environment. Babies out there crawling, they're chewing on things and they're looking at things. The same thing with any mammal baby.

Jennifer Norman:

Is seeking the same thing as curiosity?

Reneau Peurifoy:

It's what underlies curiosity. Right? And it's that drive to want to know what's out in the environment. Is it safe? Is it not safe? And that's why when somebody enters the room, everybody looks. It's not because they're judging anything. It's just that impulse to want to know what's coming in. Or when you go to a doctor's office or you're sitting in a new stadium or someplace, first thing you do is you kind of glance around, just kind of checking things out. There's an actual emotional drive. Effects are some kind of circuitry in your brain that gives you the drive or the desire to do something.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And the most basic ones are sensory effects, which would be like heat, cold, pressure. If I sit too long in one position, I need to shift. If I'm cold, the colder I get, the more I have the desire to get warm. Right? And the next set are what they call the homeostatic effects. And homeostasis is just a fancy word for balance. They keep the balance in your body. So hunger and thirst are the two big ones. The thirstier I am, the more I want to get something to drink, and the hungrier I am, the more I want to get something to eat.

Reneau Peurifoy:

So emotions are kind of a higher level affect, and they get tied in, of course, to our thinking part of our brain. They get affected by our beliefs, our expectations, and our early childhood experiences. They get either amplified or dampened by all those things. So seeking was one of the interesting ones. Another one is play. In fact, that's one of the ones that Jaak Panksepp, one of the researchers that started identifying some of these things, worked within rats. He was known as the rat tickler, and he found he could shut off the whole, all the thinking part of the brain.

Reneau Peurifoy:

The rats still wanted to play, and it's how mammals learn to interact. If you have little children, you know, they learn what the limits are by doing too much. Right? They're playing and you say, wait a minute, that's too much. Don't go there, right? And even as adults, we like to play. And it's one of those things that connects us socially because we're social animals. There's actually two fear circuits. The one that we're familiar with is danger. The other one we see in babies.

Reneau Peurifoy:

We call it separation anxiety. And it's why we miss people that we're bonded to when they're away from us. And there's a corresponding caring circuit in mammals will get triggered when the baby, for example, has the distress. And so those two work together. And that's part of the emotional circuitry that binds us together as people. So we actually have four circuits that are all involved with the relationship, right? The fear circuit, or the panic, they call it. But the separation anxiety, the caring circuit, the place circuit, and of course, the lust circuit, which we all know about once puberty hits.

Jennifer Norman:

Right. And so can you describe what you mean by circuit? Because certainly these are impulses that we like to do or to have. We innately have them. We like to think about playing. We like to think about exploring our curiosity and caring. And it's just innate in us.

Reneau Peurifoy:

It's more than thinking, it's an actual drive inside of it. So just like when you're hungry again, there's circulatory in your brain that causes you to become really aware of that hunger and give you the motivation and energy. In fact, you can think of emotions as motivation and energy. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the motivation to take action. And then it activates your body through that old fight or flight mechanism to give you the energy to take the action. And unfortunately, really strong emotions will tend to shut down the thinking part of the brain. So you just start acting kind of on automatic impulse based upon however you grew up. So, yes, by circus, we're actually talking about some biological circuits that generate this drive to do stuff.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And again, they are controlled and kind of oversought by the thinking part of the brain, but they can overwhelm it if they get too strong.

Jennifer Norman:

So would you say that those are instincts?

Reneau Peurifoy:

It's not exactly an instinct, but it's similar to it. Yeah, it's wiring that gets shaped by, again, your experience. And because we're thinking people, our beliefs and expectations, what we think is as positive and negative and dangerous or safe can vary from culture to culture. And depending upon your upbringing, one of the interesting things about the brain is how unconscious we are for much of what's going on there. We're busy driving your car or you're walking down the street. And at an unconscious level, your body is not only or your brain is not only coordinating all of those actions, but also all of the associations that it's made throughout your life about what's safe. And what's dangerous is keeping an eye out on those. And so if it sees something that might be a danger or a benefit, it immediately brings that to your attention.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And so then you start to focus on that. Otherwise, I'm busy thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch or some tv program I'm going to watch at night or a conversation I had or something like that, while all that other stuff is going on at an unconscious level. So 90% of that activity, you're not even aware of, but it's going on. And that's where we get into trouble, is sometimes things that are safe because of past experiences have been labeled or associated with danger. And so now when they come into your environment, your brain picks up on that and it will signal that there's danger. In fact, I think to understand how that works is one of the functions of emotions, because they serve many functions, but one of them is to sort information. They're sort of an indexing system for the brain. So as you have experiences, if it's really important or really bad, your brain puts an emotional tag, if you will, on it.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And so that's kind of how your brain sorts what's important and unimportant in terms of these associations, which is why experiential learning is more valuable than book learning. I can read everything there is to know about driving a car, but until I get behind the wheel and start driving. Oh, my gosh, that didn't work. Oh, this feels good. Brain is now able to make these emotional tags on the different movements and the different things we're going to see. So now I can drive without even thinking about it, because now my brain has sorted that information into what's a meaningful set of associations for it.

Jennifer Norman:

So you said that some things that were safe, all of a sudden we get into trouble because we have a tag associating danger with it. Can you give us an example?

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, post traumatic stress disorder is probably the most vivid example. People have been in an accident or they've been in a war zone, and now person comes back from a war zone, a car backfires, and now they're covering up in the ditch. Right? Because that's been associated with incoming fire, or a person's been in a car accident, or they've had other kind of abusive relationships. And now things associated with that, when they encounter them again, it triggers that alert response. I had one lady who was in a bad car accident, and she went through, she was fine. Then one day she was going through this car wash, and as soon as the brushes hit the front of the top of the car, she freaked out, because, again, that felt like the crunching of a metal to her. And again, it's a very automatic and conscious thing that happens with people. And you can desensitize so that those triggers will quiet down over time.

Reneau Peurifoy:

They can be very powerful.

Jennifer Norman:

Interesting. Let's recap what those seven emotions are.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, there's the seeking, again, that's seeking curiosity. Right. You want to know what's out there. There's a play, and then there's, of course, lust. And then two, fear emotions. Fear of danger, and then separation anxiety when we're away from those people. Separation and then carrying circuit. And of course, anger didn't mention that.

Reneau Peurifoy:

But anger and fear are really kind of this flip sides of the coin, and they both have to do with threat. So if a threat is manageable, I'll tend to get angry and take it out. If it's unmanageable, I want to get away from it. And when I use those words, I'm using them in a very broad term. So fear can range from just apprehension to panic. Anger can range from irritation to rage. And so that anger, positive side of it that a lot of people don't understand is that it's really the basis of all your assertiveness actions. Whenever you assert yourself, there's some irritation underneath there.

Reneau Peurifoy:

I don't like this. I'm going to speak up, right? That's really low level anger. That's driving, giving you the energy and motivation to speak up and do something. Of course, if it's way high up, then it causes problems. In fact, that's one of the keys to anger management, is being able to tune into it at an early level and then taking action then and not letting it build up.

Jennifer Norman:

In terms of those seven underlying emotions, I would have thought love would have been on there.

Reneau Peurifoy:

That's caring, though, right? That's the caring and separation anxiety or the panic circus.

Jennifer Norman:

Right? But when people say, oh, I love, that is often a misunderstood term. Perhaps it's a very broad term, which can mean so much.

Reneau Peurifoy:

We use it in a lot of different ways, which is why the Greeks had different words for it, right? They had eros and all the different things. The brotherly love, we used it in a lot of different ways. But certainly that bonding, deep affection we have for another person arises out of some of that circuitry in our brain, and it's a good thing. So it binds us together.

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah. And conversely, some people will say, well, the opposite of love is hate, but some people will say the opposite of love is fear.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, yeah, and it depends on how you're defining emotions, because when I'm looking at from a biological perspective, it's a little bit different from the way it's used in everyday language a lot of times.

Jennifer Norman:

And that's the trick of it, I think, because biologically, a lot of people don't speak biologically, and maybe that's why they get confused with the words. Or think about the way that they're talking about their emotions in a way that is hard or maybe subjective to understand and what they're feeling and what they're saying might be different than what somebody else is interpreting that as.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Yes, you can break it down to fairly simple language. Again, you take a word or you take an emotion like anger. If you start looking at all the different words we have to describe anger. I had a list of about 30 words at one time, and I just got started on it again, everything from I'm peeved, I'm irritated up to I'm enraged, you go out and go out. Same thing with fear again. And it's the same basic emotion. It's just how high the dial is turned up. So if it's turned down, I'm irritated.

Reneau Peurifoy:

If it's turned up. I'm enraged. Same thing with fear. If the dial is down, I'm apprehensive over that interview or if it's turned up, I'm terrified of that bear coming at me. Right? Same emotion.

Jennifer Norman:

And so the conditioning or the response that people will have to any of those particular emotions is learned over time. So some people may learn to be really motivated, if you will, energized by a small irritation. And others, they'll have to get all the way up to enraged to actually get up and move and do something.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, our response is a learned response. And again, that comes from your society and the family that you're raised in. And I should also mention that these are not the same for exactly the same level for every person. Some people are better musically than others. Some people are better at math. Some people are better throwing a baseball. So these circuits, just like any other human aspect, is changed, and they can be exaggerated or dampened by human experience. Probably the saddest example would be infants that used to come out of eastern Europe that were raised in orphanages where they were never touched.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Bottles were propped up for them. They were changed. But when they would cry, nobody would ever come to them. So they would learn not to cry. And unfortunately, they would have difficulty when adopted, attaching to the parent. And one of the interesting experiments that was done to kind of show this is they would measure the level of oxytocin, which is sometimes called the love hormone. It's tied in with that caring circuit. And if you take a baby and their natural mother toddler, and they're playing the game, the oxytocin levels of both will go way up.

Reneau Peurifoy:

If you take one of these babies when they're playing the game, the oxytocin level stays flat, which means that circuit is not activating the way it's supposed to because of that early childhood experience and hence the difficulty in attachment. And, of course, that can be changed with proper treatment. Stuff can be revived. Again, it's not totally dormant, but these are affected by your early childhood experiences. And, of course, how you react is certainly a learned behavior, too. And they become automatic, just like everything else. The way you react when you're afraid or when you're angry is very much a learned behavior pattern. And you can change those behavior patterns and learn new ones that are more effective, even though most people don't.

Jennifer Norman:

Right. You also talk about positive emotions versus negative emotions. Can you describe which would be which? And are they always positive, and are they always negative?

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, actually, emotions in one sense are kind of neutral. It has to do with the context. We tend to think of anger and fear as negative emotions. But again, anger, like I said, is the basis of your assertive actions. And fear gives you caution, right?

Jennifer Norman:

Keeps you alive in certain cases.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Yeah. If I worked with dynamite or something, a healthy respect or some fear of that dynamite is going to make me more careful with it. So all emotions can be positive or negative. But again, dealing with the anger and the fear, like we talked about earlier, they're basically a response to threat. And once you understand that trick is identifying what is the threat and then how do I deal with it? And a lot of times, that's what you're dealing with in therapy. Somebody comes in and they have anxieties, they have anger or some other issues like that. And a lot of it's getting down to what's underneath it, what is the ultimate threat? And that might be an actual threat relationship, somebody leaving me, or it may be more of an existential threat in terms of my self esteem, my status, who I am, how people perceive me. I mean, there are a lot of ways because we have these rich belief systems that we can feel threatened by people or situations.

Jennifer Norman:

The lesson here is that it's not that we're trying to get rid of the emotions. You need to have a healthy dose of fear. You need to have a healthy dose of anger. And so it's not to not feel those, what we might consider the negative emotions, because they're not necessarily negative, because that depends on the context and what your motivation is afterwards. It's to have a healthy relationship, potentially with those emotions.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Yeah. And of course, the only way you can get rid of your emotions is be totally numbed out, which is, of course, part of substance abuse, right?

Jennifer Norman:

Yes.

Reneau Peurifoy:

I think the healthiest thing is to look at emotions as messages. They're messages about needs that you need to deal with. In fact, I worked a lot with anxiety disorders, and they, as a group, tended to have very reactive bodies. And one of the things that they needed to learn is to go through their checklist when things were coming up, when they were starting to get anxious. Okay, how's my primary relationship? How's my kids doing? How's work going? My life goals, my friendships, anything important happened recently. And usually they would say, well, this happened, but it wasn't that big a deal. Well, wait a minute. Your reaction is telling me it was a big a deal.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Deal with it. And keeping short accounts is really part of the key to successful living is as things come up, come up with a plan for what you're going to do with it. How am I going to manage it? If it's a threat, if it's something I need to attain, how am I going to work towards getting that? People oftentimes are very fuzzy about that because they haven't really thought clearly about their needs and wants and how they're responding to them.

Jennifer Norman:

Exactly. And I also believe that nowadays it seems like anxiety is running rampant. It seems like there's so much that people worry about between politics, climate, relationships, health, finances, all sorts of things that people are worried about. Some people are just, I cannot control the anxiety, I cannot control the anxiousness. I don't know what to do. And their bodies are just filled with cortisol at all times because of stress response. You're such an expert on anxiety. Can you give us a rundown of specific tips that people can go through in order to help to manage their anxiety?

Reneau Peurifoy:

There's a lot of things, and you can work at it from two different perspectives. First of all, I would tell people, turn off the news, quit watching the news.

Jennifer Norman:

Which I have done. I have no idea what's going on in the world {laugh}.

Reneau Peurifoy:

You're much healthier if you just get your head out of all that stuff, because it's all geared to wind you up. Right. In the morning, I'll spend 15 minutes, I'll go to a news collection site, I'll look at the headlines, I'll click on those things I want to know more about. And actually, I'm better informed than people who just watch the evening news anyway because you get more depth out of it. And then I turn it off and I move on to other things. And so I stay informed. But I don't wallow on it, if you will, which some people do with 24 hours coverage. I mean, if you watch any cable network 24 hours, you're going to be a nervous wreck at the end of it because of all the stuff that's coming up.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Let's talk just for a brief moment about how you deal with worry, because a lot of times people would have worries that they deal with. And there's basically four steps. One of the things that makes it bad is something called emotional reasoning, and that's where you use your emotions to judge whether something is true or false rather than the logical side of your brain.

Jennifer Norman:

Can you give an example of that?

Reneau Peurifoy:

Extreme example would be people with panic disorder, where they'd have panic attacks. And one of the fears that they often had was fear of passing out because they would hyperventilate. And so I'd say, okay, so what are the odds of you passing out when you go to the grocery store? Well, I guess 50%. So I'd say, so how often have you passed out in your life? Oh, I've never passed out. So, based on their emotion, it was very likely based on reality? It was not. Then I would say, how bad would it be if you were to pass out? Oh, my gosh, it'd be the worst thing in the world. Okay, so if you were to pass out, you'd probably not hurt yourself. You'd come to after a few minutes as your carbon dioxide and two balance readjusted.

Reneau Peurifoy:

So let's compare that with getting your arm cut off, having your kid die, having a wasting disease. How bad would that really be? And of course, on a scale of one to ten, that comes way down. So people who do a lot of emotional reasoning, they overestimate how likely something is to occur, and they overestimate how terrible it would be. And, of course, once you get past those two things, then what do I do to prevent it? What are some reasonable steps? And then what are some reasonable steps I could take if it were to happen? And that's what we would do with all the fears that people would come up with, is we would just go through that process of making a realistic estimation of how likely it was to occur, how bad it would be. What could I do to prevent it? What would I do if it were to occur? And then when that fear or come up, then you just run through your little thinking that you've done, you compose it down into, like, two or three sentences that you can just say to yourself. And they would actually put them on cards. And all their fears, we would do that with. And after a while, they got in the habit of doing that automatically.

Reneau Peurifoy:

When you look at people who deal with fear, well, they just sort of automatically do that. And if you grew up in a family where that was kind of your approach to uncertainty, then you just learn to do that. But a lot of people don't. They learn this emotional reasoning. Things come up, and they get very histrionic about it. In fact, news loves that stuff, right? There's a disaster, and they go find the person who's freaking out, and they stick their microphone in front of their face and say, so how do you feel about that? And of course, that makes good copy for the evening news, but it's certainly exciting.

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah. And it makes people feel that the likelihood of something bad happening is a lot higher than it is. And so in people's minds, they think that crime rate is so high, I have to armor up. I can't trust anyone. My kids can't go outside. A lot of the way that we are living now, which is very isolating, is a result of fear.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And depending upon where you live, that may or may not be true. There are. Things are dicier today than it used to be, but they're not as bad as sometimes it's painted out again, depending upon where you're at. And of course, everything in the news is a crisis, right? That's the cris mentality. But the other side of it, and this is more the long term thing. And it gets into those three things that make people happy. And one of them is your existential, or your sense of meaning, your existential beliefs. Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Is there a God? Is there not a God? Is there life after death? That really shapes a lot of how you deal with the world in general and in our country, where we've become very materialistic.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Most people, their philosophy, while they may not say it this way, the way they live is you get good things, you enjoy them, then you die, and it's all over. And if that's your philosophy and that's the way you look at life, then you have a right to be frightened about a lot of this stuff that's going on around you. One of the things, and I just mentioned it briefly at the end of the book, but I point people to, is some of the near death studies that go on. And in the 70s, Moody did his groundbreaking book on life after life. And since then, there have been a lot of studies. The one I mentioned in the book had a very large group of people, and then they concluded at the end, there's no scientific way of explaining what's going on here. Something is happening, and people who've really delved into this have pretty confidence that there is something after death and there is a spiritual dimension to life and what you do with that, of course, we get in the era of philosophy and religion, and I leave that up to people to figure out. But just acknowledging that there's more to life than just what you see, and then how am I going to make sense out of that? And how does that play into my life in general, especially when bad things happen, that's what helps people have more of a calmness in the face of adversity.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Why some people can be content even though they don't have a lot of stuff. I mean, you look at a lot of the developing countries, people who don't have a lot and have a lot of hardship that they face, and they're much more at peace and content than a lot of people are industrialized country, who have just so much richness in their life and so many things.

Jennifer Norman:

That is so true.

Reneau Peurifoy:

That's an area of life that I try to point people take a look at that, because that's going to have a lot of benefits long term.

Jennifer Norman:

Yes, there are very many people that feel that the world is reflecting upon them what their self worth should be, rather than really feeling it from within and like, oh, this person doesn't respect me, or they don't see me as valuable, or I'm not feeling loved, I'm not feeling wanted. I do have that sense of abandonment or separation. And so they get into this spiral of feeling negative energy, of feeling negativity, and it's hard for them to get out of it and see the other side. And so what are some of the things that they can do in order to get themselves to a place where they can discover meaning and purpose in their lives?

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, let me back up and look at all three of those in context, because the first one, which is by far more important than anything else in your life, is relationships, having deep, meaningful relationships. If you have two, three people in your life that you can be totally transparent with and that you're bonded with, you don't have to worry about your mental health. And when you look at people who have terrible things happen to them, one of the things that usually they have in common is they have some anchor of some person that helps to ground them as they go through that experience. And unfortunately, one of the crises that is going on in our modern day world is lack of relationships. The internet has played a role in that. Not the only role, just certainly the mobility. We used to live around the same people for long periods of time. We used to have the village or the block or the town or whatever, and we had people down, the couple of doors down that we go to and talk to if we needed to.

Reneau Peurifoy:

We had people, we had aunts and uncles and cousins. And nowadays people don't have that. And a lot of their relationships are very empty relationships on the Internet, where everybody presents this wonderful time and there's something called fear of missing out, right?

Jennifer Norman:

It's all for show. It's superficial.

Reneau Peurifoy:

I'm not having as much fun, I'm not living as good as everybody else is from what I see, and it's all fake. But having those real relationships that you talk to face to face and you have interaction with that is very healing. And people can go through their entire life, their entire day, rather, and never have any experience of that. And again, that's part of what makes us anxious and depressed and fearful and all that other stuff.

Jennifer Norman:

There's certainly the fear of getting too close because of trust issues and things like that as well.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Yeah, that's a whole nother ball of wax, but we'll get to that maybe in a bit. And of course, the second one is purpose. Right. Having a purpose. So relationships, purpose, and meaning are the three things that make people...

Jennifer Norman:

Relationships, purpose, and meaning. Okay, we're going to say that again for everybody who's listening. Relationships, purpose, and meaning.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And purpose can be narrow. I want to be the best parent I can be, or I need to sell the most widgets, or I need to have a nice product, or it can be more broader. I want to do something that's going to help people. And of course, you can have more than one reason for getting up.

Jennifer Norman:

Right. Can you discern between purpose and meaning?

Reneau Peurifoy:

Purpose kind of comes out of meaning. Purpose is very goal oriented.

Jennifer Norman:

Goal.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Okay, I want to be the best doctor I can be. That would be a purpose. Or I want to help people, or I want to be the best business person, or I want to invent something that's going to help people, or I want to be a baker that's going to delight people's lives. That's the purpose. Right? Meaning, again, gets down to these deeper things in terms of why am I here? What is the meaning of life? What does happen to me when I die? What is hardship all about? And again, purpose, they kind of interact with each other, but purpose is a little bit easier to define than meaning.

Jennifer Norman:

Okay. Would you say that meaning might be a bit more on the spiritual side versus purpose? Purpose can be more physical.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Yeah. And if you don't like the word spiritual, you use the word existential. Right. By existence. So your spiritual, religious, or existential beliefs in terms of what is my existence all about? I think that's something human beings have struggled with for centuries.

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah. I often will say to myself, the purpose of life is to give life purpose. The meaning of life is to give life meaning. So it all starts from within. It starts with the self. It starts with, you don't look for other people to give you purpose or meaning. You give yourself purpose and meaning, and you give the world purpose and meaning.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Well, true, it does come out, it has to start with you. You were talking about fear of relationships and stuff that maybe touch upon these core response patterns that we have. And in the last century, the two big ones that were identified for education were learned helplessness and something called locus of control. And kids who grow up in an environment where they never win, well, they actually came out of experiments with dogs where you give them shocks that they can't escape from and then you put them into an environment where they could easily escape. And they don't try. They've learned to be helpless. Interestingly enough, if you teach them how to escape, then they'll start escaping, which again with oster parenting.

Reneau Peurifoy:

When you have kids who are in learned helplessness, if you can give them a success experience where they can be successful in some area of their life, then that'll start to generalize into other areas of their life. Of course, locus of control was the idea that, do I have control or does everything happen to me? So a person with an external locus of control, things just happen to me. If I fail at a test, it's because I'm no good. I just can't take test well if I get a promotion, well, I guess there was nobody else around, so it just happened to me. Whereas a person who has an internal locus of control, okay, I failed at a test. What's because I really didn't study. If I work harder, study more, I'll do better next time. If I get a promotion, it's because I deserve it.

Reneau Peurifoy:

I work hard. They recognized it, and that's why I got it. So again, do I have some impact on my environment or do I not have it? And of course, now when I look at it, I see people have lots of different types of core response patterns based upon the way they were raised. And partly personality too. That's a whole nother thing with the personality types that people have. But you take a person, for example, who grew up. They use your example earlier with trust and intimacy. Person who grew up, a child with parents who would always distance themselves.

Reneau Peurifoy:

They could never connect. And so tremendous pain gets associated with intimacy. Now, as an adult, they start to get close and they push the person away because danger is coming up inside. They're sensing danger. In fact, they'll come into therapy and they'll say, I don't understand why every time things get good, I push the person away. I screw it up. I ruined it somehow. And it's because of this core response pattern that intimacy is painful or intimacy is dangerous.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Now you can change that, and you can desensitize to it. It's just very similar to desensitizing to a fear of snakes or dogs or anything else. You have to go through a period where you desensitize to that feeling of intimacy, which is interesting, too, because people who have that type of horror response pattern, all of their friends will tend to have a similar one. You tend to surround yourself with people that reflect who you are. And of course, it seems like the whole world's out of way. That because of that, I would say, okay, the first step we need to do is you need to identify some people who come from fairly healthy backgrounds and hang around them. And so we go through their church or their work or their school or whatever, and we identify one or two people, start having lunch with them, start spending some time with them. And the first complaint, these people are so boring.

Reneau Peurifoy:

There's absolutely no drama in their life at all.

Jennifer Norman:

They need some more gossip, they need some more drama, something to stir the pot, make life interesting.

Reneau Peurifoy:

If you can do it for six months, it starts to feel really comfortable because they don't know what the sensation of calmness really feels like. Kind of like with people with anxiety disorders, I would always give them a relaxation response program to listen to. And sometimes it would make them anxious because it was such a foreign feeling to be relaxed. And so a sense of just calm content sometimes is very foreign to people where drama is always in their life. And when things quiet down, of course, in the past, that meant danger, because something the other shoe was going to draw. And so getting desensitized and understanding that no, there's no danger, this is a good feeling. And pretty soon you start to like it. And you don't get reprogrammed by listening to tapes or reading books or going to therapy.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Once a week, you get reprogrammed through experience. This gets back to this experiential learning. So you have to be around people who do relationship well, hang around them, and you get kind of reprogrammed from the inside out from that experience. If you start to learn what normal feels like and what healthy feels like by hanging around healthy people.

Jennifer Norman:

I've been very open on this podcast about my childhood. I was an adopted child and had sexual abuse young. And so relationships and close friendships were just something that I sucked at, all the way through two marriages. And so it took a while. And the thing that ultimately, I don't like to use the word healed when it comes to this because it's still a work in process, but it's really all about what is true and getting to that root cause of why rather than looping and doing the same behaviors over and over again, it's like you're not going to learn anything or you'll keep repeating, you'll keep looping until you finally do learn that lesson. And it's like, oh, this is why I'm acting this way. Okay, how do you start moving your behavior and your thought processes and your beliefs into a different paradigm so that you can be open and little by little, just like putting that crack in the door and then moving through that doorway into another way of existing until you're like, wow, this is so much better. I feel so much more love.

Jennifer Norman:

I feel so much more energy because I was okay with being vulnerable. I wasn't shutting the door. I wasn't armoring up. I wasn't trying to hide shame. It's like I was finally okay with expressing the fact that, you know what? This was my life before, and now I'm choosing to live and try other things, and you're going to be the better for it.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Exactly. In the book, I go into a lot more detail, but just briefly, kind of a four step process I find is useful. First of all, having a simple explanation for why you're doing what you're doing. Because people do a lot of circular questioning. I don't understand how come this has happened?

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah. Why me? Why does this always happen to me? Why do I keep dating or seeing the same people? Why do bad things keep happening to me? Blame, blame, blame. And it goes to the locus of control also.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And so having a simple two or three sentence statement that you can make to use our example, the example I was using, I grew up in a relationship, in a family where pain was associated with intimacy. And now I run from it when I feel it. Simple explanation, right?

Jennifer Norman:

Can you say that again? Pain was...

Reneau Peurifoy:

Pain was associated with intimacy.

Jennifer Norman:

Pain was associated with intimacy.

Reneau Peurifoy:

So now I run from it when I feel it.

Jennifer Norman:

And so that's why I'm running away from it whenever I feel it. So the explanation of why people act the way that they do when they get into that situation.

Reneau Peurifoy:

and the only reason for that is to get you out of circular questioning because that doesn't change anything, right?

Jennifer Norman:

It identifies it, it now puts a pin on it.

Reneau Peurifoy:

What can I do about it? Right?

Jennifer Norman:

What can I do about it?

Reneau Peurifoy:

So I'm no longer saying, why is this happening? I know why. So now what do I do about it? Okay. I identify specific situations where that response pattern comes up. Okay? When I'm watching a movie and a tender moment comes up, I make a joke, or I start thinking about something I got to do. When my kids come in and they're hurt or they're feeling bad about something, I need to make them strong. When my wife starts to get closed, I get antsy and I do something stupid. Right. And you go on and you figure out, oh, maybe five or six really specific situations where that response pattern comes up.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Okay, what's the opposite response pattern? Right. Because the way you change a negative behavior is you start practicing the opposite positive. Okay. When that sensitive time comes up in the movie, I can just be quiet and allow myself to experience what I'm experiencing. A lot of times, it'll be something from the past, because things in the movie that trigger you are oftentimes things from your past experience. And so when you're quiet and you let yourself experience it, you might remember things from the past that were painful, which is okay. It's part of the healing process, right?

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And just allowing yourself to go through it. And eventually you get to the point where feelings can flow through you. When you block feelings, that's when you have a lot of negative behaviors. You go into kind of a robotic behavior. In fact, that's kind of a way when you know that you're doing that, you're doing something terribly dysfunctional, because now you're spending so much of your mental energy blocking something you don't want to feel, you do something stupid. But after a while, you find that emotion can just flow through me. And, yeah, it may be uncomfortable for a moment or two, but once it's through, then it's done. Right.

Reneau Peurifoy:

So you start practicing the opposite positive behavior. And then you also start. You have coming in with things to tell yourself that helps to motivate you. The way I've been doing it for the last 20 years hasn't worked. It's really good to be close to people. It's really part of what I want deep inside. And you come up with whatever works for you in terms of those types of positive things. And it's usually helpful to put them on a card and a stick at someplace where you can read it for a week or two just to kind of drum it into your brain.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Then you put it away, and maybe a month or two later, you bring it out and you kind of look at it again just to kind of remotivate yourself again. And going through that process, you find you can desensitize and you can start to feel comfortable and start to change and do practice those new behaviors that you've identified very clearly. That I need to practice. Part of the reason why people don't change is they never really identify clearly what the negative pattern is and what is the opposite positive one I need to be practicing. And that is so essential for change. It's a basic behavioral approach, but it works over time. Throw in some of the stuff.

Jennifer Norman:

True. And it's interesting because I know that when people start thinking about things that may have happened in the past, which are emotionally charged, then they feel those reactions all over again. And so it's the continuous suffering. And suffering is wishing that the past was any different than it was. And so coming to that moment of acceptance, being able to rewrite your story going forward. And then soon, even if you were to think about those things, you recognize that little by little, it doesn't hurt anymore. The pain is not as deep. It's just like something that happened in your past, and you accepted it and you moved on, and you have your future to look forward to.

Jennifer Norman:

You have all of these new things to look forward to, rather than continuously cycling and feeling it somatically in your body.

Reneau Peurifoy:

If you look at little, I watch my three and a half year old great grandchild right now. Emotions flow through them. She's angry. One moment, she goes off, stomps off, and you come back and she's happy.

Jennifer Norman:

Good.

Reneau Peurifoy:

It's only when you start stuffing that stuff that it creates problems. So learning to just allow yourself to experience what you're experiencing, identify where it's coming from, and take action if you need to. And if you got some old negative behavior patterns, practice doing the opposite. And it's important to emphasize that old patterns will reemerge when you are sick, hungry, tired, or under stress.

Jennifer Norman:

Yes. When you're all of those things, there is a certain amount of stress.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Any one of those, right.

Jennifer Norman:

I know if I'm hungry, it's hangry. I'm definitely not myself.

Reneau Peurifoy:

But also start to use the reemergence of old patterns as a message that you need to take care of yourself. Right. Because a lot of times they'll reemerge of people. Oh, my gosh, I'm right back to square one. None of this stuff has done any good. I don't know why you tried it, but. No, a lot of times it's just a message that I'm sick, hungry, tired, or some stress is going on. And if it's not just a simple thing like sick, hungry, tired.

Reneau Peurifoy:

I used to call those the three great evils for little children. Right. Those first three are kind of out of the way. Then there's something going on in my life. So you go through the checklist again, okay. How is my primary relationship? How's my work, how my kids, how my life goals? And at some point you'll oftentimes say, well, this was going on, but I didn't really think it was that big a deal. But the way I'm reacting is telling me maybe it was a big deal and maybe I need to maybe take a look at it more closely and say, make some decisions about what I'm going to do, how I'm going to react to it as opposed to ignoring it and just letting all this other stuff go on in my life. My bad.

Reneau Peurifoy:

That anxiety come up or anger or whatever.

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah. And being able to recognize those. You're sick, you're tired, you're hungry, you're angry, you're stressed. And discussing that with the person that you're with or the people that you're with and saying, I am under a lot of stress right now. And just being able to call it what it is rather than what people would say, taking it out on everybody around you. And so it's just like, okay, you need a little bit of quiet time. You need some space. And that's part of communicating effectively in any relationship, is just being able to identify those feelings rather than letting them just seep out into your language and in your behaviors and in your mood.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Which is, again, why you got to have those relationships. Right?

Jennifer Norman:

Yes, exactly.

Reneau Peurifoy:

And I think it's important to say that not everybody's capable of intimate relationships.

Jennifer Norman:

And that's a good point. Okay.

Reneau Peurifoy:

It's a mistake that people sometimes make, is they'll choose, why can't I partner who really isn't capable of intimacy? And so early on when you're in that dating mode, and again, this is not popular to say, but one of the things I always emphasize is stay out of sex right away. So you get a chance to evaluate, is this person capable of having the type of relationship I want? As soon as those hormones get in there, forget it, that frontal cortex starts turning off. I mean, you look at MRIs of people in early relationships, and the frontal lobes, it's like they're all dark. The emotions are all bright, going on like crazy.

Jennifer Norman:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, my guest today is Reneau Peurifoy. He is the author of the latest book, Why You Feel The Way You Do. And the wonderful thing about this book is that at the end of it, there are these activities and exercises so that you can put it into practice just like he was saying earlier. It's not just the words on the page, it's actually being able to go through those motions. Actually get yourself involved in these activities so that you can start reshaping your future and have a good handle on your emotions. Renault, thank you so much for being my guest today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Reneau Peurifoy:

Thank you.

Jennifer Norman:

Thank you for listening to the Human Beauty movement podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at TheHumanBeautyMovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.