LARISSA: Welcome, everyone. You've met Janilee and Larissa at the corner of I'm Living my Best Life and Someone Else Isn't Happy about it. This is vilified.

JANILEE: Each week we come to the table with a question, and this week, our question is: How Do I Identify Emotions?  

LARISSA: That's a good one.

JANILEE: Yeah, right? Because we've talked in the past about feeling emotions and how we can experience emotions safely. But how do you identify what those emotions are?  Well, I mean, you don't have to answer. I don't have an answer.

LARISSA: I'm like, well, I have answers if you need. I've taught my daughter that. “Oh, you're sad right now.” “Oh, you're happy.” There's a really wonderful book called Happy Hippo, Angry Duck that I used to teach that.

JANILEE: That sounds like a good book.

LARISSA: Yeah. “Are you happy as a hippo or angry as a duck? Maybe sad as a chicken. Can you say cluck, cluck, cluck?” And then it goes on from there. {Mimics each emotion as she states happy, angry, sad.}

JANILEE: I want you to read every book you ever read! I want you to read it out loud to me now! You're so engaging. I love it.  

LARISSA: Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it took a little while for me to have that engagement with that book, but about time number three, I was able to read it like that to her and consistently teach her, “This is what a face looks like when somebody's mad or sad or happy,” and in the end, it says something about your feelings. “What are you feeling today?” And then I'd sit there and wait for her to respond.  I never got an answer for a long time, but I tried.

JANILEE: Well, I mean, I don't know if I'd have an answer either. Reading that book. We're growing up. We're emotionally toddlers right here.

LARISSA: {laughing} Right?!

JANILEE: So I wanted to start by just kind of taking a quick step back. We talk about emotions, right? But what is the difference between an emotion and a feeling? Or is there a difference?

LARISSA: For me, feelings are fleeting. So a feeling is just something that I have for a second, and I could feel angry and not know why and be like, Weird. Okay, move on. An emotion is something where I'm feeling it for longer. But that's just my definition. I don't know.

JANILEE: It's a valid definition, and everyone has different definitions of what they are. And so that's partly why I wanted to kind of bring it up right here and now, is because it will give us kind of like a common ground for the rest of the episode  just to make sure that we're on the same page and that we're talking about the same things.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: So let's start with the basics. I want to back up. So I want to talk about four things: feelings, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. But I want to start with just emotions and feelings and kind of talk about the difference between them, but then we'll figure out how those factor into what thoughts and beliefs are.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: Does that sound good to you?

LARISSA: Sounds great.

JANILEE: Okay, so simply put, this is the simplest way I could phrase it is emotions have to do with our mind and our body. It's something we experience internally, and it's very personal, whereas a feeling is something that is experienced external to ourselves, something that we evaluate and make decisions based off of. And often it will have a cultural or a situational aspect to it

LARISSA: That makes sense because we teach kids this is what you label angry as. Okay? Yeah.

JANILEE: So it doesn't mean that anger can't be both an emotion and a feeling, but anger is going to be let's say you saw something happen socially that was injustice. You would feel anger for that. But if someone offended you personally, you would internalize that anger more, and it would just be something that it would be a lot harder for you to detach from, and it would just stay with you for longer.

LARISSA: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes complete sense.

JANILEE: Okay, so when we think about feelings or emotions, we're thinking about anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, all of those things, right? But they can be both feelings and emotions. It just depends on the situation. And so when we're talking today about identifying emotions, we're talking about identifying the things that we are feeling internally, not interpreting things that are happening externally. Because most of the time, traumatized people are going to be pretty good at reading a room. They're going to be able to walk in and say, that person's angry. I'm not going to cross them, or that person's really drunk or really tired. I can totally take advantage of them. I mean, most of the time, chronically traumatized people are pretty good at reading the feelings of a room, but not good at identifying the emotions from within.  

LARISSA: That's really interesting because I know that it's a survival mechanism for me to know to walk into a room and be able to say, avoid those six people. But my picker is broken. And so I go, OOH, those six people, I can go fix them. And that's not good either, right?

JANILEE: So the first one is more going to be like, those people are going to pickpocket me or those people are going to cause conflict I don't want to be a part of. But those other six people, the ones that maybe aren't healthy for us and why we repeat a lot of patterns going back to Why Are We Here Episode. It's because our internal emotions are just foreign to us, whereas people's external feelings, we can read their face as easy as a book.

LARISSA: Yeah, I know. I definitely wear my emotions on my face. You can tell like, I don't have a filter for my face.

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: I would not be good at poker.

JANILEE: Have you ever seen those Memes Or videos where it's like when someone's being a total jerk what I think my face looks like versus what my face actually looks like?

LARISSA: Yes!

JANILEE: The first face is all calm and collected and the second face is like super disgusted. Like, what is happening?

LARISSA: Yeah 

JANILEE: We are going to have to take pictures of our faces and make memes of that. It's going to be amazing. We'll do it. If you want to see our faces, you can check out YouTube where these are uploaded with video now. This is the first episode that they'll have video on, so check those out if you want.

LARISSA: Okay

JANILEE: So let's move on to what thoughts and beliefs are though, because those factor into emotions and feelings as well. Do you want to hazard a guess at them or do you just want me to tell you I'm fine either way? I'm just trying to let you be as engaged as you want here.

LARISSA: Oh, no, it's fine. So for me, a thought would be like the thing that pops into my head while I'm sitting here talking. And a belief would be that thought is appropriate or not to say out loud.

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: Or that's a true statement or a false statement, that type of thing,

JANILEE: Essentially.

LARISSA: So a belief would be an opinion about the thought.

JANILEE: I like it, I like it. I'm just going to adjust the word opinion here because it's not necessarily an opinion. It's going to be how we interpret the information and what we do with it.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: Because an opinion comes down to if we view it as an opinion, we get in that risky territory of my opinion is that the sky is green and in the end is that the sky is blue. And we can't both be right, because there is a fact, and the fact is the sky is blue. But the belief comes in when I'm going to act differently and I'm going to choose to live my life differently than yours. Then you're going to choose to live yours. Because I believe the sky is green and you believe the sky is blue. Does that make sense, that difference there?

LARISSA: Yeah. Well, for me, I'm picturing  the difference between fact and opinion. And there's a meme from a Disney movie called Inside Out where he knocks over two boxes.

JANILEE: Oh, we're going to talk about that movie.

LARISSA: He knocks over, Bing Bong, the imaginary friend knocks over two boxes and one's a box of facts and one's a box of beliefs, and he can't figure out where they go.

JANILEE: You mean opinions?

LARISSA: Yes. Thank you. And he's just like, “It's okay, no big deal,” and starts throwing them in bins randomly haphazardly. And he's like, “Happens all the time.”

JANILEE: Right?

LARISSA: I'm like, “Oh, so that's how you get your facts and your beliefs mixed up or opinions mixed up. That's great.”  

JANILEE: Right? So here's what I like to think of. The facts and the opinions are both thoughts, right?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: When it becomes a belief is when there's action involved. Okay?

LARISSA: So belief is when you act on the thought?

JANILEE: Belief is when you structure your life around a thought. When you give a thought enough credence in your internal world to say, “This is how I'm going to live my life based off of this.”  

LARISSA: Oh! Okay, that makes sense.

JANILEE: So if we think about it kind of in terms of, like, feelings versus emotions, right? Feelings and thoughts, there are things that happen, and we can think about them and analyze the crap out of them. But when like we've said in the past, “You have to feel in order to heal.” We have to feel those emotions. We have to discover what our beliefs are. We have to discover what thoughts we have latched onto that we are choosing to build our entire life, our moral compass, our personality, our social circles, our everything around.

LARISSA: Yeah, which is so difficult to do when you've lived through so much trauma.

JANILEE: Yeah, because I feel like when you've lived through a lot of trauma, you're kind of a little bit behind because you have to figure out what those beliefs are, and then you have to decide if you actually believe those beliefs, and then if you do believe them, then you have to reintegrate them with your life. And if you don't believe them very often, you will lose people in your life where the only the bond or connection you had with them was this shared belief.

LARISSA: Yeah, well, and I can completely understand that. Where do you go when you realize that your entire personality has been shaped by your trauma and you don't want that personality because it's been shaped by your trauma and you want your true personality? And then how do you figure out what is your true personality? That could be a whole episode is what is your personality? But yeah.

JANILEE: Well, I like that you said it could be a whole episode because we're not talking about what your personality is per se. That can be a future one for sure. But what we're trying to figure out today is how do we identify emotions and how do we identify beliefs? How do we identify these deeper things that are so intricate in building who we are that we're not even aware of them?

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: Because the first step to building and defining your own personality is going to be figuring out how to identify what you are feeling, what those emotions are, right. What you're feeling in a certain situation, and then how much of that is based off of a thought versus a belief. Because you can have two people watch the same movie and one of them is going to be like, that was crap, and the other one's going to be like, that was amazing, and what they witnessed wasn't any different.

LARISSA: Exactly.

JANILEE: But they might have the same outward feeling or outward thought because they're in a group of like minded people. But when they go home and they think and they critique that movie to, let's say that they write a review online, they're going to go inside, they're going to go into their emotions, they're going to go into their beliefs, and they're going to make their opinion around their beliefs. Their published opinion piece is going to be based around their internal belief system. How is all of this sounding? It's a very hard thing to understand when you've never thought about it before. And I've thought about it a lot. So, Larissa, do you want to take over for a second and tell us how you're feeling? If it makes sense, do you want to simplify it?

LARISSA: I'm having a lot of light bulb moments in my brain going, like light bulbs clicking all over my head. I don't know if you can see them.

JANILEE: I can see a couple of them, yes.

LARISSA: And I'm sitting here going, “Okay, so...Okay, so…” I'm just processing and maybe my processor is just running a little slow. The rats in my brain not running very fast today or something, I don't know.

JANILEE: But it could just be that this is a lot of information to take in. I mean, I listen to some of our episodes and I'm like, “You know, I wouldn't be surprised if some people have to stop halfway through and let this sink in and then listen to the second half of the episode some other their time.” Because we don't exactly always try and inject levity into what we're saying, but a lot of what we talk about is some deep, serious, heavy stuff.

LARISSA: Yeah, well, and I mean, that's an exact reason why it's so wonderful that we can push that pause button and come back to processing and understanding and learning more. It's one of the wonderful things about technology. There's so many things that so many people are like, “Oh, technology is awful,” but there's so many wonderful things for it too.

JANILEE: Hold on. Technology is awful. Technology has good things about it.

LARISSA: It can be two things at once.

JANILEE: What? That's crazy.

LARISSA: “Hi, my name is Larissa and I have a fact!”

JANILEE: Ah! Yes! Larissa and I were discussing this.  Larissa and I are working on an episode where we explain how to interact with people who are emotionally immature when you have to. And that is one phrase that we're like, “You know what? This is going to be a catchphrase,” so look forward to that episode when it comes out. But when it comes down to it, technology can be a good thing, it can be a bad thing, and whether or not you shape your life around technology as a good thing or a bad thing is going to come down to what you believe about it.

LARISSA: Exactly. But that's where that, that's where let's use the technology example and say you were told for 18 years, “Technology is awful. Don't touch it. Do not watch TV, do not read listen to the radio, do not read anything on a screen. No, you may not.” And then you experience it for the first time. You're going to be shaped and your beliefs and your feelings are all going to be shaped by the shame of, oh, this is awful, but is it really?  And so that's where that dissonance comes in.

JANILEE: Totally. I want to bring up something that really it just popped in my head because we're talking about technology, and I just want to say on the outset that no shade is being thrown. I'm bringing this up purely as an intellectual endeavor, so don't come at us in the comments,

LARISSA: Please.

JANILEE: But think about people who are Amish. They don't have technology, but they also have this tradition that I find really fascinating called Rumspringa. Do you know what that is?

LARISSA: Yes, they're at about 16 or is it younger? I don't know exactly what age. I could be totally off. And they get to experience as much of the world as they want, and they're basically sent out on their own to examine their beliefs and then come back if/when they decide to join the Amish faith permanently, right?

JANILEE: Exactly. So they're raised with these beliefs, right? And then they have a Rumspringa, a moment where they get to go out and experience things that they've never experienced before and literally redefine what their beliefs are. They choose to or they can say, “I understand that this is why we don't have technology, and I prefer the simplistic life.” I mean, they are literally given this opportunity, and it's a rite of passage for every youth in the Amish community to go out and determine, what are your beliefs?

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: I mean, that's a very good example of the difference here of what they do from that point forward, what they're going to shape their life around. It's going to be that belief. And is that belief going to match the belief that they were given vicariously through parents, through leaders and everything being raised? Or is it going to be something different than what those people said? And that, by the way, is not just for any sort of religious organization. It happens to everyone. This is why teenagers are moody, is because they're trying to figure this stuff out. So have a little compassion for them. It's a lot. And then you add in the fact that you can have traumatized people, and it's even worse because they have the same thing. They have an entire life's worth of teachers calling them dumb, or parents telling them that they should just not exist, or significant others telling them that they're worthless, or friends that only like them because they share a certain belief with them, or because they can benefit from that relationship somehow. And to break all of that down. I don't know about you, Larissa, but when I did it, for me, I felt very, very raw and exposed—almost naked like. And it was terrifying because I had no protection, if you think about it. If you're walking outside without shoes on.  This actually happened to someone I know. They were walking outside without shoes on, and they stepped on a bee stinger and then found out they were allergic to bees. Which is a terrible way to find out. But you don't think that you're going to step on a bee stinger, but if you have that protection, if you have that wall, you're not going to step on a bee stinger. So why would we want to let that wall down Larissa?

LARISSA: Because you will not be able to fully heal until you feel. You have to feel to heal, and healed is the place we want to be.

JANILEE: What's so special about being healed if it just means that you're going to step on bee stingers?

LARISSA: Well, I mean, for example, my daughter, her first bee sting was while wearing sandals and getting stung on the foot because the bee went in between her toes and under her foot. So, I mean, luckily, she wasn't the allergic one. But I was like, “Well, at least I know that now.” And five minutes later, she was running on again. I was quite impressed with her pain tolerance.  

JANILEE: Can I pause you for a second?

LARISSA: Yes, please.  

JANILEE: That's a very good example, because your daughter feels emotions and I've seen you interact with her when you're frustrated. When she's frustrated, it's “Take a hot cocoa breath.”

LARISSA: Or rainbow breath.

JANILEE: “Take a rainbow breath.” Yeah, but the thing is, she's had that experience and she's very young. And so for her to experience something as traumatizing as a bee sting I'm still scared of bees because of the first time I got stung.  Right, and you mentioned in the past episode you are too. But she's not, because of what you did and because of how you changed the experience for her.

LARISSA: She is still terrified of ladybugs, so...  

JANILEE: Sorry, Big Bang Theory quotes popped in my head.

LARISSA: I get it. I totally get it.

JANILEE: “You're terrified of bugs and women. Ladybugs must render you catatonic.”

LARISSA: Exactly. Yeah. No, a ladybug landed on her and she screamed bloody murder and I had to take it off of her and help it fly away. And then she told every single random stranger that we met, because stranger danger, why would she have that about the ladybug and is still talking about the ladybug that landed on her a week ago?

JANILEE: Well, that was a week ago. We don't know if she's going to be scared about it in a year. And even if we look at it in terms of that bee sting or in terms of emotions, right, she experienced genuine fear and hurt from that bee sting and she experiences genuine fear and hurt from her life, because we all do. What's a difference between her experiencing genuine fear and hurt and Larissa experiencing genuine fear and hurt when she was that age, when she was a young child.

LARISSA: The support

JANILEE: The people in your life.

LARISSA: Yeah. The way it was framed.

JANILEE: Yeah. The ability to decide if you're going to be scared of bees or not. So when we talk about these emotions, understand that if you don't have an emotionally aware person in your life, there's a really good chance that you're just taking what they believe and what they say and you're just going with it. Because it's a lot easier to have a pre-constructed personality or belief system than it is to go through the pain of finding out your own, especially when you weren't ever afforded that in childhood or in previous relationships or situations.

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: Anything else you want to add before we move on?

LARISSA: Well, I think that it's important to remember that you never fully are healed. You're always healing. And it's okay to not be fully healed  and it's okay to have the trauma in the back of your brain as that itty bitty shitty committee go in a mile a minute talking.  So if you're sitting here and you are like, “Well, I'm not healed, what's wrong with me?” Don't be shoulding on yourself. Don't be itty bitty shitty committee-ing on yourself. It's okay to be where you are in this moment.

JANILEE: Yeah. And just to add on to that, because it's easier for me to add on to Larissa because she says all the cool stuff, but when it comes to being healed, if you stop for a second, what does being healed even mean? Is it not having problems in life?

LARISSA: No, because there's I mean, the world we live in is going to have problems. You're always going to have something going on. Everybody does.

JANILEE: So what is being healed?  

LARISSA: To me, it would be where my trauma and my reactivity isn't there anymore.

JANILEE: Never going to happen.

LARISSA: And see, that's not fair! I want it to go away! It's not my problem to carry, it's not my punishment to keep, if that makes sense.

JANILEE: No, but it is your responsibility to manage.

LARISSA: Yeah. And that's what I mean.

JANILEE: Is that fair? No.

LARISSA: Yeah, well, in life isn't fair, and I know that, but it's also  to me, being healed would be able to be managing the trauma. That is what I mean. Where that reactivity is controlled, where the emotional immaturity has grown, where I'm able to take on the really tough stuff that I'm dealing with without falling apart.

JANILEE: Okay, um, to what extent, though? Because you already take on stuff in your life that you could not have taken on five years ago. So by the definition you gave, you're healed.

LARISSA: Dang, you're right. You are. You're right. You're completely right. Because, no, five years ago, this would have rendered me catatonic and I would have just never gotten out of bed. Right.

JANILEE: So you are healed. So what's your new definition of healed? To what extent? That you don't struggle in life?

LARISSA: No, because I know I'm going to struggle. I just want to be able to handle that.

JANILEE: You don't struggle with trauma triggers. That would be a good one.

LARISSA: That's a great one.

JANILEE: Because there will always be some triggers, but it's just minimized reactivity and responses. You already have minimized reactivity and responses. You just said five years ago you would have been catatonic.  

LARISSA: Yeah, but they're still not functional. Like, if I'm at a person that I'm crying and they're like, “Oh, you poor thing.” And they're patting my head and I'm like, “No, I just want to kill the person.” I'm never going to go kill somebody, but this is what I feel. {Stumbles on words.} That's still not functional.

JANILEE: It's pretty functional. Larissa, you're reacting soundly to a situation in which you're being patronized for feeling emotions. That is not you not being healed. That is you reacting to a situation where you have emotions and someone else decided to denigrate them and you stood up for yourself and you said, “No, my emotions are valid and they aren't what you think they are. And I don't need you to patronize me. I need you to get out of my way and let me fix this myself.” And if you can't fix it yourself, then yes, it's frustrating because “Life is hard and we struggle and all that stuff.” But I mean, if we're talking about in terms of being healed, Larissa, you reacted to an emotional situation in an emotionally aware way. You couldn't have done that five years ago. So you are healed to some extent.

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: That's the thing, I still struggle with that. I still struggle with trauma triggers. I still struggle to sleep most nights. It doesn't go away. Larissa is not here. We're not here to lie to anyone. This is a hard situation and it doesn't go away. But it sure as hell gets easier.

LARISSA: Exactly. I mean, yes, it's easier for me to stand up and say, “Hey, this isn't okay,” or “I'm not going to put up with this” or “I'm not going to have this person around me or my kiddo because of these six things. And this is within my control.” The thing is that there's still so much that isn't functional. So I guess I'm healed while still healing. Does that make sense?

JANILEE: Yeah, I get what you're saying.

LARISSA: Okay, good.

JANILEE: My question of you was not because I did not understand. It was because I was like, “Oh, Larissa's, itty bitty shitty committee has control of her mouth right now and I'm going to talk back to it and shut it the hell up.” All right? So if we go, let's go a little bit deeper into what emotions are and what constitutes an emotion. So emotions, remember, are that very subjective, internal, personal situations. I used the official search of the inner webs, and I have a definition for you.

“Emotions are natural, instinctive states of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.”

Which is kind of what we have already determined in defining them differently from feelings. But in looking a little bit further into it, there's three components to an emotion.

The first is it has to be subjective experience, right? Personal to us. The second is there is a physiological response, which spoiler the Just Janilee Episode this week is going to be on Emotions and their Physiological Response—the way they show up in our bodies, fun stuff. And the third component is there has to be a behavioral or expressive response.

LARISSA: Okay?

JANILEE: So if we talk about these things, I'm thinking back to let's say there's an emotion I felt ten years ago, subjective experience. It was real to me, and it happened, and there was a physiological response in that I clenched my jaw and shut up, but there was no behavioral or expressive response because I wasn't in a safe place to do that.  

LARISSA: So you buried it, you pushed it down. Yeah.

JANILEE: Okay, so what you're saying is that emotion is still inside me?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Also The Body Keeps the Score, a book we've mentioned before, it talks all about that.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: Again, not a self help book, but a textbook, if you're curious. And so when it comes to these emotions that we're feeling, if we in our past, our past patterns and dealing with emotions that occurred in the past is kind of a separate thing from what we're talking about because we're trying to identify emotions in the present. Identifying past emotions is a really good thing to go through in therapy, but we also will talk in more detail about it in the future. But we do have to realize that we have to feel the emotion, and it's different than anything that we've ever done because we've never allowed ourselves to feel what the emotions are. And we've talked about safe ways to feel the emotion. But for an emotion to complete its cycle, there has to be that physiological response which will be, like Larissa has mentioned in the past, like literally crying or shaking because of anger and frustration are very physiological responses. And a behavioral response or an expressive response where I'm going to choose to walk away and express this anger by punching a pillow or I'm going to choose to walk forward and express this anger by punching someone's face.

LARISSA: Or crying or cursing or...  

JANILEE: The crying is this physiological response. Right. Okay. But the punching in this scenario, you're punching a pill or you're punching a person. That's the behavior of it. The behavior can also be going and collapsing on the floor and crying it out. Yes. Right. Be resting. Our behavior is to just give ourselves time to rest through things. But the behavior response is how are we going to let the emotion finish what it's doing in the moment we're crying?

LARISSA: So the behavior would be like the fight, flight on or freeze of what you do with that emotion?

JANILEE: That would be the physiological response.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: The behavior is going to be what does that physiological response allow you to do? Do you fight?

LARISSA: Where the control level is? Okay.

JANILEE: Does that make more sense?

LARISSA: Yes, it totally does to me now.

JANILEE: Okay. So when it comes to understanding that emotions have these three different levels, it is helpful when we have there are things, each of those levels that can help us identify what the emotions are that we are feeling.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: I have a list of five things here that can help us identify emotions. Um do you want to say anything or just want to jump in?

LARISSA: I just want to jump in. I'm like, okay, what are they?

JANILEE: Okay, so there is one, do you know what a somatic release is?

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: Do you want to explain, or do you want me to how about you to talk? Because I feel like this entire episode is just me feeling like I'm a teacher, I'm teaching the class. I'm more than happy to explain it, though.

LARISSA: You have a psychosomatic, and you have a somatic response, and the psychosomatic is the thought and the brain, and the somatic is the body. Right?

JANILEE: Yeah. Okay. It's basically feeling things in the body. So where would that fit in with our three components? It would be the physiological response. Right. The way that things show up in the body

LARISSA: Yes

JANILEE: Oftentimes you'll see videos of people who are, like, having somatic releases, is what they're called, where they yeah, there's a lot of shaking. There's a lot of crying. There's a lot of pent up emotion that is physically being expressed because it hasn't been in the past. So that's awesome. So how do we apply that to how we're identifying emotion in here in the now? My therapist always used this question, and I hated it. And then when I hear myself in my brain asking myself this question now, I'm like, “Dang it, she was right.” But the question is, where do you feel it in your body? Because if we can't identify what an emotion is, we can sometimes still identify that our “Chest is really tight,” or “It feels like I'm going to throw up,”

LARISSA: Or “There's a frog in my throat and I can't get out what I need to.” There's a block.

JANILEE: Yeah. Or “My legs are really shaky and I'm feeling very weak and frail.” We can express where emotions are showing up in our body. Now, there's a lot of places and a lot of ideas and theories around this, and I encourage you to look into any that resonate with you. But simply put, for this episode and here and now, identifying where we feel something in our body, it's not going to necessarily give us a name of an emotion, but it will give us a way to feel our way through the emotion. So it's not necessarily that we're going to be able to be like, oh, “Well, every time that there's tightness in my chest, it's this emotion.” No, but what it will allow us to do is be like, if I stretch my shoulders, then it will lessen the emotion a little bit. Right.

LARISSA: Because that's where I keep my stress.

JANILEE: And Larissa and I are both doing it right now.

LARISSA: I'm like hearing the crunching as I do this. Yeah. I need a massage to get that stress out.

JANILEE: Similar to how in the past we've talked about  if your butt is clenched, let your butt relax, and then a lot of your other muscles will relax—that's somatic. That's experiencing where the emotions are in your body and releasing the tension to help the emotion finish its way through the behavioral or expressive response. Remember what we choose to do. Our stretching of the shoulders, unclenching the butt, rubbing our arms, sitting down. If we're feeling weak or shaky, that's our behavioral response to the emotion. So we allow the emotion to run its course, even if we can't necessarily identify what the emotion actually is that we're feeling. That's a very good basic place to start if you don't have words to describe the emotion.

LARISSA: Yeah. So like that deep breath or that counting to ten, which we do in a song form in my house, because why not?

JANILEE: Yeah. Or like you taught your daughter, the hot cocoa breaths or rainbow breaths. It's that become being aware of your physical body and where it is in that moment and doing something about it.

LARISSA: Okay, that makes sense.

JANILEE: Do you want to know what number two is? {Larissa nods her head.} Okay. Larissa nodded her head and smiled very big for the people who are just listening to the audio.

LARISSA: {Laughing and jokingly} Oh, yeah, you can't hear my head rattle, can you? I mean, there are just marbles up in there, but they don't always make sound when they hit each other.  Not always. Sometimes, though. Sometimes you can physically see it the moment.  

JANILEE: Okay. Number two is ask yourself the question what do you want to do as a result of this feeling? Okay, very often, like Larissa mentioned earlier that she “Wanted to kill someone.” Not literally, but that's what she felt like she wanted to do. And so if we take that answer, what emotions? If we're really good at intellectualizing and not good at feeling, we can backtrack from what that emotion led to. Wanting to hurt someone or injure someone in any way. Anger, injustice, pain, frustration. I'm just naming emotions.

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: And I'm so excited about number three because  it just works into it.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: Anyway okay. But to finish up number two really quick, when you have this emotion, even if it was just like feeling weakness, it's like even if you aren't feeling where it is in your body, but you're in a situation and something shifts, and you're like, “I want to go home. I want to be in bed. I don't want to be social anymore.” You know what you want to do. And then when you get home, if you choose to think about it and say, “I was probably burnt out,” this is still finishing that emotional cycle all the way through, because you have the subjective experience of something shifted. You have the physiological response of, “I'm all of a sudden really tired,” and then you already have the behavioral and expressive response of, “I'm leaving this situation,” or “I'm going to sit down,” or “I'm going to give myself a drink of water,” or “I'm going to walk away.”

LARISSA: “I'm going to turn my phone off and set it aside.”

JANILEE: Right. So even if we don't necessarily know what the emotion is that we're feeling, what we want to do because we recognize we're feeling something, is if we do that, it automatically fills that behavioral-expressive response. Now, sometimes we shouldn't actually go injure people, and we have to have alternatives.

LARISSA: Yeah. We're not advocating that you use physical violence in any way, shape or form against people. That's what pillows are for.

JANILEE: Yes. But either way, that's another way. We can't necessarily name what the emotion is, but we can allow that emotion to complete its three step process.

LARISSA: Okay, right. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay.  

JANILEE: Okay. I'm excited for number three. Do you know what number three is?

LARISSA: I don't know what it is. What is it?

JANILEE: Okay. I'm just so excited. I'm like, “Guess Larissa. Oh, wait. She doesn't know. I didn't tell her.” Okay, I'll just tell us all. Have you ever seen emotion wheels? Yes. I know. I'm really giddy about this, but it was life changing. I'm such a nerd that when I first was introduced to an emotion wheel, I went home and I made flashcards out of the emotion wheels, and I wrote down the dictionary definition of the emotion. I wrote down different ways that I would feel the emotion. I would write down a specific experience that I felt the emotion in previously.  I went all out when I found this emotional wheel.

LARISSA: Yeah, the emotion wheel is amazing to me because I'm like, oh, so this is actually the emotion, and these are the feelings I'm feeling related to that emotion, if that makes sense.

JANILEE: Larissa, do you want to tell us what an emotion wheel is?

LARISSA: Ummm, so you have core emotions? Like anger, sadness, happiness, and let's just take sadness. Sadness can be despair and grief or devastation. There's so many different subsets of that emotion. Maybe I'm not describing it very well.

JANILEE: No, you're totally doing a good job. I've just practiced this because I'm a nerd and this is what I do. So every emotion wheel is different. But there are four emotions that show up on all the emotion wheels that I've ever seen.  And Larissa mentioned the movie Inside Out earlier. If you don't want to remember what the emotions are, just intellectually, just picture the characters in Inside Out. They're pretty close to a lot of the common ones. So the four main ones are joy, sadness, anger and fear. And then often some secondary main categories that are in different types of emotion wheels would be like power or disgust or being loving or peaceful, intrigued, proud. These are some like secondary motions that show up on different types of wheels. And so what happens is in the very center of the wheel, you have these core emotions.

Let's just pretend that we have a wheel that only has those four core motions. Sadness, joy, anger, and fear. Those are in the center of the circle. And then if we zoom out a little bit, there's a second ring in the circle that breaks those emotions down more. So next to joy, you can have I have an emotion wheel I'm looking at right here. You could feel connected, present, calm, intimate, safe, cared for, silly, or acceptance. Next to anger, you could be skeptical, resentful, protective, armored up, frustrated, mad, aggressive, tense. Next to sadness, you could be left out, disappointed, lost, tired, bored, unmotivated, lonely, lost. Fear could be insignificant, busy, threatened, surprised, uncontrollable, worried, insecure, fragile. And then when you pick one of those emotions, there's a third round on the wheel. Okay, so let's say that we were sad and we were feeling lonely. Well, maybe we could also feel isolated, but maybe we feel burnt out.  Both of those things could lead to being lonely. And so essentially, and I'm definitely going to be sharing pictures of emotion wheels. Don't even worry about it. Just check out our socials if you want pictures of them. But for people who are watching the video, this is kind of what they look like

LARISSA: The ones I am familiar with are in black and white because photocopies cost money, more money in picture or in color. So, yeah, it's much prettier in color.

JANILEE: I like it in color. So when you have this emotion wheel, if you've gone through either of the first two steps, you can just like, okay, the emotions run its course. And I'm going to pull out this emotion wheel and I'm going to slowly narrow down the exact emotion that I'm feeling. And then maybe the next time I feel it, I'll recognize it for what it is.

LARISSA: Yeah. And it's okay to feel more than one emotion at the same time. And that's actually something that you learn in the movie Inside Out. It's great for little kids.

JANILEE: It's great for adults, too.

LARISSA: Yeah, quite honestly, it is. I mean, there's so much humor in it. I love Pixar.

JANILEE: And also in the movie, you can feel more than one emotion at the same time. Benefit in feeling sadness. One perspective shift I had that actually really helped me is to not view emotions as good emotions or bad emotions, but to view them as difficult emotions or non-difficult emotions. Because classifying it as good or bad, that was the whole point of Inside Out. Spoiler alert if you haven't seen it, is that no one wants to feel sadness, but then realizing at the end that feeling sadness is actually a beneficial thing to do. Right.

LARISSA: And you can't enjoy the joy until you understand the sad.

JANILEE: Yeah. It's also like if you were if, Larissa, can you explain to me what salt tastes like?

LARISSA: Well, the one time I accidentally made fudge with salt instead of sugar, it tasted like throw up. So that was the first thing that popped into my head.

JANILEE: Not making fudge for a bit, but moving on. But can you describe salt without referencing sugar? Or alternatively, can you describe sugar without referencing salt?  

LARISSA: Sugar is sweet.

JANILEE: But what is sweet?  

LARISSA: It's a form of taste. 

JANILEE: That's not salty.

LARISSA: Yes, I know that's not what you want.

JANILEE: Yes.

LARISSA: Well, I'm wanting to say “It's a place on your tongue that identifies a certain taste and texture so that you know whether or not something is safe to eat.” I know that's not what we're getting at.

JANILEE: I mean, let's go let's go down that path though. That's something that applies to both sweet and salty, though. It's not exclusive to just sweet.

LARISSA: No, it's not.

JANILEE: This is just a silly little exercise. But sometimes it's helpful to understand that you can describe things better in contrast to other things and you can have some emotions. Like the term bittersweet is literally something that is both bitter and sweet. If we want to refer to a memory, it could be a memory that was bitter because it was a hard moment, but it was sweet because a very common one would be like the death of a person. It was bitter because they're gone, but it was sweet because everyone came together and celebrated their life.

LARISSA: I was going to bring up melancholy as another example. You can feel like something was not really sad but not really happy either. It was just that in between.  But that brings in senses because you have to sense that more than you feel. That I think I'm up in my head a little too much with this.

JANILEE: Well, I mean, that's kind of what we're doing though. We're intellectualizing emotions so that we can feel them in the future. That's the point of it. And so, yeah, you have to sense melancholy, but you have to sense everything else too.

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: You have to be able to sense that you're experiencing an emotion the same way that you can sense when there's feelings that are occurring outwardly in any situation.

LARISSA: Yeah, it's very much the case. I mean, you have sensations that are going to occur and you have for example, when your kiddo says that they've had a bad dream, you're like, oh, I'm so sorry and I'm sad for you. Let's walk through this…That's all I got.

JANILEE: Cool. Sorry. I was, like, waiting for you to keep telling the story. Okay, so moving on to number four on the list that I have here, ask yourself the question. Have you ever felt this way in the past, similar to how I did when I learned of this emotion wheel? I was like, “Oh, I want to find a time that I've felt these emotions in the past, so then when I feel them in the future,” I can just I'm feeling something. And it reminds me of the time that I got pushed down and people laughed at me. “Oh, I know that when that happened, I was feeling embarrassed. Maybe what I'm feeling now is embarrassed.” Okay. I was also feeling isolated and alone back then. Maybe I'm also feeling isolated and alone here and now. Does that make sense?

LARISSA: Yeah, that makes complete sense.  The example that I bring to mind is I was in third grade, and I actually made my third grade teacher quit teaching in his second year.

JANILEE: It was powerful.

LARISSA: Well, I mean, it was his own choice, but I'm pretty sure I played a huge part in it with my behavioral issues.

JANILEE: Oh!

LARISSA: Because of my ADHD that's uncontrolled and was undiagnosed. And I remember one day for, like, two weeks straight, this boy kept spitting on me, and I finally threatened him with: “You spit on me again and I will pants you.” Well, he spat on me again on purpose. Had it just been him spitting on me, not on purpose, it would have been completely different. So I pantsed him, but I didn't know that he wasn't wearing underwear.

JANILEE: Oh, my gosh.  Oh, no.

LARISSA: And he went to our teacher, and our teacher is screaming at me in front of the entire class because he can't handle behaviorally unacceptable children. And I'm standing there in front of the whole class: embarrassed, angry, frustrated, and going, “Hey, he's never going to spit on me again.”

JANILEE: It's true.

LARISSA: And he never did. He never spat on me again. I remember and the shame, that shame of feeling bad, that my threat plus my boundary, which was me going through with my threat,  resulted in him having his genitals shown to the entire schoolyard, which is really not nice or appropriate or…

JANILEE: But if you look back now at your teacher yelling at you in front of the class, if you are able to identify some emotions, then if you were to ever feel something and you're like, “Oh, I feel like I'm a little kid again. I feel like my teacher is yelling at me again,” then you can identify the emotions you felt back then as a way to identify the emotions you're feeling now.

LARISSA: Yeah. Yeah. And that injustice, the social injustice, plus the shame and the pain and the embarrassment and the well, “You know what? I fixed the problem that you've never fixed.” Yeah.

JANILEE: And you are able to identify multiple emotions, and so you can just take a second with each one of those and sit with it. “Do I feel shameful?” “No.” “Do I feel unjustified or untaken care of because I'm having to enforce boundaries that no one else is taking care of?” You're able to sit and think about it in a way that's not as hard when you have something else to refer back to.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: And again, just to be consistent here, we have the three components of an emotion. You have a subjective experience and you have a physiological response, but that physiological response reminds you of a previous physiological response. And so then your emotion and behavior can be informed going forward into, “I understand that I'm feeling embarrassed and I'm feeling shamed, and I'm going to use this information to make a choice going forward to put myself in situations where I won't be embarrassed in this way again.“ 

LARISSA: I never pantsed another person again.

JANILEE: Here's a silly example, okay? A silly example is one time I was driving out of a grocery parking lot, and everyone kept waving at me. And I'm like, “What is happening? I'm not famous.” And then someone knocked on my car window and said, “You have a gallon of milk on the car roof” that I'd forgotten to put inside my car. And so that was an emotion, the subjective experience of realizing that I had the jug of milk on the roof of my car and the physiological response of my face flushing. And I was able to realize I'm embarrassed because I felt embarrassed before. And then the behavioral and expressive response was, “I don't like being embarrassed, so now I'm going to double check the roof of my car every time I pick up groceries,” to this day, still do it right. So, I mean, being able to identify an emotion BEFORE we have that behavioral or expressive response is really powerful.

If you haven't, I would recommend listening to the end of the 2.5 episode on Developmental Trauma Disorder. I talk about an athlete versus a nerd and how are they going to win. And we talk about it on a neurological level on episode 6.5, for instance. But when it comes down to it in the moment, sometimes we don't have a second between that physiological experience and the behavioral and expressive response. But as we kind of work our way down this list of five things, we get more advanced and we're able to stop: There's a physiological response, and I'm going to stop myself right here. I'm going to identify the emotion, and then I'm going to choose what to do.

LARISSA: Right. And that's where,  for me, that feeling of heal-ing comes into play. Is theres more time in between that pain or that sudden feeling and my response. Yeah. And that not nearly as reactive as an eight year old who's pantsing the kid on the playground.

JANILEE: No. And that comes with time. That's literally just something that comes with time. Nothing else is going to give it to you, so be patient with yourself.

LARISSA: All right.

JANILEE: You want to hear the last one?

LARISSA: Yes, please.

JANILEE: This last one, it touches a little bit on experiencing past demo motions.

LARISSA: Okay. Okay.

JANILEE: Something that we haven't really been focusing on this episode that we'll talk more about in the future, but it does kind of play into both current and past experiences or emotions. Sorry, current and past emotions. It's asking yourself the question, “Does this emotion remind me of any type of art form?”

LARISSA: Art form?

JANILEE: Like paintings or songs or movies or anything like that? And to flip it, does this art form remind me of any feelings that I've experienced?  And if the answer to either of those questions is: “Yes,” ask yourself the follow up question: “What is this art trying to convey?”  Would you like an example?

LARISSA: Well, yes, please, because I'm still processing, but I'm coming up with examples in my brain as well. I'm thinking, but I'm not sure that I'm on the right track. So let's hear more.

JANILEE: Okay. I'll tell you my example, and then you share yours.

LARISSA: Okay, sounds good.

JANILEE: Spoiler alert. Just FYI. But the movie came out years ago. So if you haven't seen it and I clear my throat at a specific coworker of mine, it's your own fault.  Have you ever seen Spider-Man No way Home or Far From Home? The Second Spider-Man movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

LARISSA: I think so, but there's so many

JANILEE: There are a lot of Spider-Man movies. Let me explain. So this is the Spider-Man movie where there's this villain who is using this technology that creates realities that aren't actually real, and Spider-Man keeps falling for them. So this villain named Mysterio, he spends the majority of the movie being this hero. He's saving everyone. And then we find out that he's been creating these false problems. He's been creating monsters using drone technology that don't actually exist so that he can go and defeat the monster and be the hero.

LARISSA: Oooh! Okay.

JANILEE: Okay. And so there's a fight that happens near the end of the movie where Spider-Man is fighting Mysterio. And the only way that he can make it through is to rely on his Spidey sense of being able to tell this isn't quite right. This is part of the manufactured thing.

LARISSA: Right?

JANILEE: Because of the drones.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: And so when I watched that movie, I went to the theater, I watched it, I was excited. And then I could not watch that movie for almost a year because every time I thought about watching that movie, it reminded me of emotions I was feeling in my real life. Of being gaslit by my mother to not knowing what my reality was, to feeling like I was just going absolutely batshit crazy. And I could not watch someone else go through that, even in a fake art form, even on a movie screen, because it hit too close to home.

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: No pun intended. Because it's the name of the movie. And so when it comes to art forms, right. Sometimes realizing that these art forms, they can be very therapeutic in helping us figure out what our emotions are, why they bother us, and how we can work through them to get it. Closure or to be able to finish out the behavioral expressive response of realizing this. Right. We have the experience, the subjective experience of consuming the art form, watching the movie, reading the book, viewing the painting, and then we have a physiological response to what did I say? Observing. We have a physiological response to observing the art form. And then in this case, because it's more of this abstract thing, our behavioral and expressive response is going to be figuring out why we resonate with that art and deciding if we need to do something about it.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: Do I need to work through feeling scared of not knowing what's actually real?

LARISSA: Yeah, like the Mommy Dearest movie. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It was recommended. Someone was like: “Oh, my goodness, that sounds like this. You should watch this.” And so I rented it, and I watched about 5 {to} 10 minutes of it and could not watch anymore because  it was so bringing up issues for me that I was like, “No, I'm done.” And I've never actually seen it. Another one is Maid, I think it's on Netflix. I don't even know what it's on, but somebody was like, “Oh, you should watch this. You'd resonate so well with it.” And I was like, “Nope, nope, nope, nope nope".”

JANILEE: “I resonate a little too much with this.”

LARISSA: Yeah, I can relate way too much. My situation was not nearly as severe as that. But some of the stuff that I went, that I went through was enough for me to go, “I can't do this.” And I think for me, there have been times where art has really helped me. I used to pour all of my emotions into my dance, to ballet and dance and feel so cathartic at the end of it because I've just put everything I have, all of my feelings, all of that emotional energy into moving my body and just

JANILEE: I've done the same thing with playing the piano. Yeah.

LARISSA: Exactly. But there are times where I ahhh, there are situations where I have emotional responses to things like a picture that's taken and I see it and everybody's smiling in the picture, but, boy, do I not feel happy. Okay. “Why?” Or certain music. I used to leave work at the end of the day from working in the prison, and if it were a really bad day, I would play Limp Biscuit, Break Stuff in the car on the way home, on repeats for 30 minutes,  and just rage and let out all of those feelings. But I've always used that as more of a cathartic release, not help me identify the feeling, if that makes sense.  

JANILEE: Yeah. So there's ways that art can be very cathartic in releasing emotions. Right. And so maybe you consume a movie that you resonate with, and so you listen to a song to help you. That's your behavioral-expressive response to follow through on it. Right. But there is also have you ever heard the song: Songs I can't Listen To by Neon Trees?

LARISSA: No, but I should. Sounds like a good

JANILEE: I'll send it to you. Basically, the source of the song is: “There's a whole bunch of songs I can't listen to anymore because they remind me of you.” That's a very simplistic way of putting it. I can't listen to the song because it's tied with a good memory and we no longer have a good relationship. And so that's a very simple way of putting it. You can get to these more deep levels to kind of um, come full circle moment.

The movie Schindler's List, it's not easy for anyone to watch. And for people who don't know, Schindler's List is about World War II and about Nazis and just indiscriminately killing Jews. And so it's not going to be an easy movie for anyone to watch, but it's going to be feeling pretty bad for people who aren't Jews, and it's probably going to be hard for people who are Jews because that's their ancestry. That's their heritage, right? And this is how we can relate to people as well. We can feel things and understand that they are just having this emotion on a much deeper level. But we can feel these things, and so therefore, we can have compassion and we can have empathy. A lot of people like to say that sympathy is if you've never experienced something, and empathy is if you have. And that's a very basic way of looking at it. But I like the more nuanced term of sympathy is, “I'm sorry that's happening, and that sucks for you. Good luck.” But empathy is “Okay, you're feeling an emotion” or “You're experiencing emotion. I'm going to experience a feeling so that I can relate to you. I know it's not going to be as deep as yours because it's just a feeling for me, but an emotion for you. But I can still connect with you and help you through this.”

LARISSA: In nursing school, we studied sympathy versus empathy because you have to keep that professional boundary or you're going to burn out real, real quick. And I explained it as sympathy is feeling sorry or sad or whatever they're feeling.  And empathy is putting yourself in their shoes.  And imagining that and walking a mile in their shoes doing that. And that's where  sometimes you have to have boundaries with certain people, and sometimes you can be sympathetic versus empathetic, or sometimes you can be empathetic, not sympathetic.

JANILEE: Yeah. And it doesn't have to necessarily be people. It can also be situations. It can be, “I really care about you, but in this situation, I'm not able to have empathy. I have sympathy, and I care about you, so I'm going to send someone else to check up on you. Because they have the capacity to have empathy in this situation.” And it's not anything wrong with certain people. It's not anything wrong with relationships. It's just situational. There's some things that I can handle that Larissa can't because I can detach from them a little more. And there are some things that I can't handle that Larissa can handle because she can detach from them a little more.  

LARISSA: It says more about you and me, for example, when we aren't able to be in that empathetic mode versus sympathetic mode, or even if you don't have the emotional capacity to even be sympathetic sometimes, and you just have to detach all the way, it says more about what's going on with you than it does that other person. And unfortunately, us as humans, we like to take that on a lot more. We misappropriate that.

JANILEE: Yes. Because if it's our fault, it means that we can fix it. And we like to feel like we're in control

LARISSA: Even though control is really just an illusion.

JANILEE: It totally is. Larissa, I want to end the episode today. It's going to be a little bit of a longer one, but I want to end it today with of briefly talking about something. I don't really feel like it needs a lot of depth, but it's a phrase that I use a lot, and I feel like it's a very useful one.  Sometimes when you listen to a podcast that talks a lot about emotions very deeply and heavily, or when you watch movie or consume art that you feel things or you're in situations that you're feeling a lot of things, you will often have an emotional hangover.

LARISSA: Yes. Oh, my goodness! Emotional hangovers. Ugh! I would rather have an alcohol hangover.

JANILEE: Yeah. Same that can be fixed with hydration and time. Emotional hangovers can be fixed with time, too, but they take a lot longer and they're a lot more intense

LARISSA: And they're a lot more exhausting.

JANILEE: Yeah. So if you experience something very emotional and you're not really up to doing things for a while, don't be down on yourself. Just be aware: “I'm in an emotional hangover. I'm experiencing an emotional hangover. And that's okay.”

LARISSA: Yeah. For example, I've had a very emotional weekend because of certain things happening and  the perfect storm of stuff happening all at once.

JANILEE: When it rains, it pours

LARISSA: Of course, because why not, right? And I got done everything that I could today, and then I texted my friends and said, “I'm taking a nap. You will not hear from me for at least an hour.” And I did because that's what I needed was that emotional hangover healing. And there's still, like fog. I'm still not quite all there, but it's coming back. And the hangover will pass and the hangovers will get shorter with time as your emotional regulation gets better.  

JANILEE: And if you are just starting out, experiencing emotions, for me, it very much felt like: “I experience an emotion. I have a hangover, I'm happy for 30 seconds, and then I experience another emotion, and then I have another. Emotional hangover, and then I'm happy for 45 seconds, and then I experience…” it's a very cyclical thing. But as Larissa said, over time, it does lessen and it does get better. But it's easier to have grace and understanding and compassion for ourselves when we understand that this is normal. Right?  There is an episode coming up soon. I'm not sure if it's next week or not, but it's going to be on the vagus nerve. And we're going to talk about the polyvagal theory, which is usually something I would talk about in like a Just Janilee episode because it is more sciencey, but it has so much application in how we experience emotions that I feel like it needs a main episode and it needs Larissa's nurse perspective. So that is coming. Be excited about it. But it is essentially just the scientific version of: “You are experiencing emotions, give yourself grace because you're not a superhuman.”

LARISSA: Yeah, exactly.  It will be a really exciting episode. I'm I'm over here, like, doing my evil finger pointing thing at each I don't even know what to describe that as.

JANILEE: Yeah, I mean, it should be, like, our official, like, podcast. Like, you see someone in, but it's going to be how our community identifies each other. We'll just be, like, making this little evil thingy, and then if they do it back, we're like, “Hey, you're a villain! You listen to Vilified?”

LARISSA: Because I'm Larissa and I'm a villain.

JANILEE: I'm Janilee and I'm a villain too. But as a villain, I do have one last request for you. For those who have listened and are enjoying it, if you could just spread the podcast by word of mouth. This is, like, an uncomfortable thing for me to do. So maybe Larissa wants to do it this episode.

LARISSA: Yes, sure. I can totally do it. Okay, sweet. I'm not great at this. We are just trying to help as many people and outreach as many people as we can. So if you please share and like and if you have somebody that you know who is going through a rough time, please share our podcast so that we can get the voice out there and have people understand that it's okay to be vilified and there is safe place for you.

JANILEE: And that safe place is here in the Villains Club, where we end every episode by saying, my name is Janilee and I'm a villain.

LARISSA: And my name is Larissa and I'm a villain, too.

BOTH LARISSA and JANILEE TOGETHER: This is VILIFIED.