Here is the full transcript and summary of Karen Faith’s talk titled “How To Talk To The Worst Parts Of Yourself” at TEDxKC conference.
In this TEDx talk, people researcher and empathy trainer Karen Faith discusses how to talk to the worst parts of yourself in a way that is both honest and rational. She notes that therapy or other forms of self-care can be helpful in managing hard thoughts and feelings. Ultimately, she advocates for an open mind and gratitude for all aspects of the self.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
It isn’t true what they say, that you can’t love anyone until you love yourself. Have you heard that? People say you have to learn to love yourself before you can love anybody else. But it’s not true. I loved everybody before I loved myself. Love doesn’t care which way you come or what state you’re in when you get here. Love welcomes everyone unconditionally. Oddly, so do focus group moderators, which is how and why I learned to do it.
If you’ve never been a part of a focus group, you’re missing a really special cultural experience. So, in every focus group, there’s a range of characters, right? There’s always a shy one and a chatty one, a grumpy one that doesn’t want to do any of the exercises, and a very excited mom with a notebook, who wants to get an A plus in all of the exercises. There’s a student who lied on the intake because they need the money, and a dad full of jokes who can’t read the room.
And usually, there’s one ex-military guy who keeps staring at the two-way mirror suspiciously. It’s a situation where a group of people that may not otherwise ever meet have the chance to share their perspectives. And it’s my job as the moderator to make sure that they all get heard.
Now, it’s not quite a classroom. It’s not group therapy. And while the community feel has some elements of holiness, probably no one would call it a spiritual experience. I mean, no one else. Because moderating rooms of strange and difficult voices is what taught me to welcome all the strange and difficult parts of myself. No kidding.
I start every morning meditation with the same opener I use as a focus group moderator: “Thanks, everyone, for being here. Your input is valued. I’m going to hear from each of you. I’ll give you all the chance to speak. Just do your best to be completely present, honest, and try to make any requests reasonable.”
So I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of me in here, in the mind of Karen Faith. I’m not referring to psychiatric illness specifically, but I don’t exclude that. My mind has plenty of quirks, but what I have to share is for anyone with an inner dialogue. Though I admit, it’s especially for those of us with a really noisy one.
So I noticed some time ago that I was arguing with myself. And then I wondered: If I didn’t agree with me, who is I, and who is me in that scenario? And it turned out that there are quite a few of me. There’s a really sentimental, emotional me, an intellectual, analytical me. Those two argue a lot.
There’s a me who loves being on stage. There’s another one who is pretty shaky at the moment. Some of us – at this time, I include you – some of us regard these as feelings or thoughts. And maybe we’ve done our personal homework, accepting that we can have conflicting feelings at the same time.
We can be excited about a new job and also dread going back to work. We can be tired and want to stay up. We can adore someone who also annoys us. We can love someone who has badly betrayed us. We know this. And when we’re honest and rational, we can see that these are common experiences. But we’re not crazy to both love and hate camping. It does me no harm to embrace that I feel both ways about it.
But what about the thought that I’m worthless, that I don’t belong here? The mistakes I’ve made are unforgivable, that the bad things that happened in my life were my fault. Those thoughts are just as real as the rest of them, but they’re harder to live with. And they send many of us to therapy or to yoga or the nearest bar, which more or less describes my daily commute for many years. Because I wanted to silence those thoughts completely.
And let me tell you: I tried. I have done every kind of therapy I have ever heard of. I have done talk therapy, energy healing, body work, hypnotherapy, soul retrieval, the tapping stuff, the thing with the lights. I did seven kinds of yoga. I drank the “special tea” with the shaman in the forest. I admit I did pass on the acupuncture they do with live honeybees – people do that. Suffice to say, I tried.
And still sometimes, when I was alone, I would hear myself shouting: “Shut up!” or worse to my own mind. In my work as a people researcher, it’s my job to practice empathy with strangers, to receive everything I can about their world in order to understand them as deeply as possible.
Now, it’s noteworthy that I found this career at a temp job, writing meeting notes, when my supervisor noticed that I wasn’t just paraphrasing conversation, I was recording body language, micro-expressions, tonal shifts, specific verb choices. What neither of us knew then is that the qualities which made me seem skillful were the symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress.
The most reasonable results of an appalling upbringing, and a fact I share not to set me apart from you but to welcome you in here with me. Everyone in this room has walked through something difficult in order to be here.
And I want you to know that whatever path you’ve taken to get through it is honorable. Whether you never talk about it, or you write bad poetry about it, whether you make tons of money prosecuting it, or if you just hit the gym like a champ to sweat it out of your body, there is truly no wrong way.
There are some ways that cause other problems. You know the ones. I’ve done some of those. I still do some of those. And I don’t judge those either, because gifts and curses are “buy one, get one.” And mine were no exception. My early life gave me heaps of shame and a splintered sense of self – hence all the different mes – but it also gave me super antennas for the emotions of others. This hypervigilance made me a certified mess of a person but a damn near-wizard-level observer. So I got to work.
The last 20 years I’ve shadowed people in their homes, at their jobs, while they shop and drive, and go on dates. I ask them to be honest and vulnerable with me, and to do this, I practice something that I call unconditional welcome, which is like a researcher’s neutrality, but a little extra. The day I discovered it, I was sitting in the living room of a research subject. She was a very unpleasant woman, if I’m honest.
Feeding french fries to an infant, as she snapped at me that she would never have her children vaccinated, not even to protect them from polio because she didn’t know what was in those shots. Now never mind that she said this an inch of ash deep into a Virginia Slim, right. I was judging her, I know. I’m not proud of it, but at least one of me is a jerk.
I needed to connect with her, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t like her. I didn’t respect her. I didn’t want to spend a single moment with her. And the project required that I spend hours. And that I used that time to get to know her: what she values, what she believes, where she finds strength. Researcher neutrality was unavailable to me at the time, so I had to get out the big guns.
I called up my New Age visualization skills, and I took a deep breath, secondhand smoke and all. And I imagined that my breath was inflating a shiny soap bubble filled with unconditional welcome. Not tolerance. Not even compassion. Total welcome as is – no comments, no notes. And as I inflated the bubble, it became big enough to contain my whole body. And then hers.
And in that moment, I saw a mother feeding her baby in a world that she didn’t trust. I told her that I could see that she cared about protecting her son, and I asked her if she got that from her parents. And then we had a conversation. And I learned about her. I learned why she was afraid and angry, and how she fought through that fear to make a family. When I welcomed this woman unconditionally, I saw her more clearly, but I also loved her instantly.
We have been told too often that love is hard. It’s not. Love is what happens when we stop trying to figure out who deserves it. It’s right there when we stop trying to figure out who deserves it, and we welcome someone, anyone, exactly as they are, in the moment. It’ll be two more years before I learn to do this with all the parts of myself. But it started just as simply; a part of me had become very chatty – a part that was afraid and angry, whiny, demanding, unreasonable and relentless.
She told me that we were never going to get better. She wanted out of here. I asked her what I could do. She only told me she wanted to die, over and over and over and over. I begged her to shut up, and she did not. Finally, after weeks of harassment, whether out of exhaustion or epiphany, instead of shouting back, I took a deep breath. I became my own moderator.
I said out loud in a voice that surprised me: “Thank you for sharing. I’m going to remind you of our agreement to be honest and reasonable.” And she answered me – that voice. Now, don’t get spooked. This is all just thinking happening. But the part of me asking and the part answering did in fact seem like different parts. She told me that she was in a lot of pain. And I told her: “I know. And I promise you I’m going to take care of you. But I need you to get on board. I will listen to you, but I will not obey you.”
And as clearly as I’m speaking to you now, she said okay. And then we started to talk. As I continue the dialogue with myself, I found more of me, more voices with more points of view, some of them more fun than others. And the imagined landscape of my mind began to look a lot like a focus group. This round table of wildly mixed characters and one moderator keeping some kind of order with honesty, boundaries, kindness, and most importantly, gratitude.
I thank my selves for their contributions. No matter how bonkers or twisted they may seem, because we’re all me. I think of my fragmented self less like a broken mirror and more like a prism. We’re full spectrum. Today, there isn’t a voice in my head that I don’t welcome. And while some of us are occasionally unreasonable, we’re not mean. Even my whiny, shamey voice is trying to help in her weird way.
But when I ask her to be clear and kind, she tells me exactly what I need to know: what she needs to feel better and what she’d like for me to learn. But just like the scared and angry mother, she only does this when I accept her exactly as she is in the moment. So while my openings for self-talk and focus groups sound almost identical, the closings are a little different. At the round table, I would hand out parking validation, remind everyone to sign for their cash, but when I’m with all of me, I say: “I love you. Thank you for helping me see what you see.”
Which is why this practice is so useful for all of us here with our different perspectives, inside and outside of one another. If we can receive one another with the curiosity and welcome of a focus group moderator, perhaps we can do a better job of love. Because it is not true what they say: that you can’t love anyone until you love yourself. Love is a house you can crawl in through a window. If you can’t start with yourself, start with the person next to you right now whether you know them or not.
All you have to do is let them be here. It’s easy, isn’t it? Wherever they’ve been, whatever they’re carrying, whatever talents they have or don’t have, whatever mistakes they’ve made, can you just welcome them here? Can you welcome you? We’re here right now, like this. We’re beautiful and strange and complicated and scared and sometimes kind of horrible. But all of us are worthy of welcome.
And everyone that you show unconditional welcome may show you a part of yourself to love. You are welcome. Thank you.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Karen Faith’s talk “How To Talk To The Worst Parts Of Yourself” offers a rich perspective on self-acceptance, empathy, and the complexity of human emotions. Here’s a summary highlighting the key takeaways:
Debunking a Common Myth: Faith begins by challenging the idea that you must love yourself before loving others. She shares her personal journey of loving others before fully loving herself, emphasizing that love is unconditional and non-discriminatory.
Lessons from Focus Groups: Faith draws parallels between the diverse personalities in focus groups and the varied aspects of our inner selves. As a moderator, she learned to listen and give equal importance to all voices, a skill that she later applied to her internal dialogues.
Embracing Inner Multiplicity: She acknowledges the presence of multiple ‘selves’ within her, each with different characteristics and viewpoints. This recognition of inner diversity is crucial for self-understanding and empathy.
The Challenge of Inner Conflict: Faith discusses the internal arguments and conflicts that arise from having multiple facets of personality. She stresses the importance of acknowledging and engaging with these conflicts rather than avoiding them.
Unconditional Welcome: Faith introduces the concept of ‘unconditional welcome’ – accepting every part of oneself without judgment. This approach, inspired by her work in focus groups, helped her to see and love the more difficult aspects of her personality.
Dealing with Negative Thoughts: She candidly shares her struggles with negative self-perceptions and how she tried various therapies to overcome them. Her journey underscores the difficulty of dealing with self-criticism and the importance of persistence in self-acceptance.
Empathy as a Tool for Self-Understanding: Faith’s career in research, fueled by her own emotional sensitivities, taught her the power of empathy. She argues that understanding and empathizing with others can mirror back insights about our own selves.
Practical Application of Unconditional Welcome: She describes an encounter with a challenging research subject and how the practice of unconditional welcome allowed her to connect and understand the person better. This experience was a turning point in applying the same technique to her inner voices.
Dialogues with the Self: Faith likens her inner dialogue to moderating a focus group, where each part of her gets a voice. This dialogue is based on honesty, boundaries, kindness, and gratitude.
The Power of Acceptance and Gratitude: She concludes by emphasizing the importance of accepting every aspect of oneself and being grateful for their contributions, regardless of how irrational or negative they may seem.
Faith’s talk serves as a powerful reminder of the complexity of the human psyche and the transformative power of empathy and unconditional acceptance, both towards others and within ourselves.