Positive & Negative Affect Tolerance with Dr. Dodge Rea
This week, Dr. Dodge Rea rejoins us to explore the concept of Positive Affect Tolerance—the upper limit of how good we allow ourselves to feel before self-sabotage kicks in. Drawing from his integrative approach blending traditional psychology with ancient wisdom, Dr. Rea illuminates how this little-known phenomenon may be impacting those with ADHD far more than we realize.
The conversation delves into the complex interplay between our psychological baggage and neurological wiring. Dr. Rea shares insights on how deep-seated shame often associated with ADHD can fuel a subconscious drive to undermine our own well-being, manifesting in behaviors like perpetual overcommitment and resistance to much-needed downtime.
The episode sheds light on how gently expanding our capacity for positivity may be key to breaking cycles of burnout and reclaiming control over our schedules and lives. Dr. Rea reveals practical strategies, grounded in cutting-edge research and clinical expertise, to help listeners start strengthening this crucial "tolerance muscle."
Such are the invisible forces shaping our daily experience and this week we look for a path to embracing the joy and ease we truly deserve.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody and welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD podcast on True Story FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh, Nikki, we've got a show today.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, we do.
Pete Wright:
Do you know what our show is about today? Do you have any idea?
Nikki Kinzer:
I really don't have any idea.
Pete Wright:
I know because it was both a listener suggestion and the listener is also the guest. So it's worlds collide today. I'm really, really excited. We're talking about positive and negative effect tolerance and we have a fantastic guest to join us to do that. Before we do get into the good stuff, we have to head over to takecontroladhd.com, get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to the mailing list and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD, but the really, really good stuff is over on Discord. Join the ADHD Discord community. It's super easy to jump into the general community chat channel. Open to all. Just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord and you will be whisked over to the general invitation and login if you're looking for a little more.
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Dr. Dodge Rea is an integratively minded clinical and consulting psychologist in private practice at the Lotus Center, a holistic health center he co-founded in 2005 in Nashville. He was the co-host with yours truly of The Change Paradox, which was our shared pandemic podcast fever dream, which is still available on podcast players everywhere, and he is here to talk to us about a positive and negative effect tolerance. Dr. Dodge, welcome back.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Thank you. So glad to be here.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello. Welcome.
Pete Wright:
Are you? Because-
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I'm feeling a little overnamed. Yours says Pete, Nikki says, and mine says Dodge Rea, Psy.D. That just seems like an overdressed sort of thing. I didn't know. I just-
Pete Wright:
It is a little overdressed.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's suggested.
Pete Wright:
That's true.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So I said yes. What was I thinking?
Pete Wright:
You don't have to do what everybody says, Dodge. You could just be you. This is how this show started. This is how this episode came about because you were listening to another episode and you sent us ... I think the episode was our time-shielding values calendar and schedule saboteur episode, and you responded to that with the post and you said that in the clinical research community, there's a concept of positive effect tolerance that speaks to the upper limit of how good we are allowed to feel before we sabotage the feeling and bring it back down. I'll bet it applies here. I think just that phrase alone I found incredibly provocative, and so as I usually do, I said, "Dodge, why don't you come talk about it on the show?" and you foolishly said yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
And here we are. You're never going to do that again.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I know. I love that most of your guests have to do things like write multiple books and become world experts in the subject, and I can just post a sentence or two, and the next thing I know I have to talk about this like I know what I'm saying.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Well, we're lucky that you do know what you're saying, so just tell us a little bit about this concept and how we can break it down for ADHD.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So let me just say first, I say regularly to my son Benjamin, "Hey, a great question will take you a lot further than a great answer because it'll just lead to more and more great answers." So let's make this one of those episodes where I'm not arriving having written a book about this, I'm arriving with some interesting questions, I think, about maybe another way to understand ADHD. I think those are cool, the different lenses we can bring to any topic we care about help us sometimes see it from another angle or in another way.
Affect tolerance in the clinical world is important because affect is feelings, and our tolerance for feelings matters a lot. Often, we think about it around negative affect like, "Can I stand to be angry before I just have to discharge that? Can I be anxious for a little while and stay there or do I have to jump out of the situation? Can I be sad for a little while and grieve or do I have to immediately distract myself?"
Pete Wright:
Is it affect tolerance that also describes sensory experience like it's too loud or too bright or too-
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That's a good question. I think of that as absolutely related, and I'll bet you there's some really interesting overlap that goes with that. Probably people who are more sensitive to say sound are going to also be more sensitive to all the sensations that go with feelings. Feelings are fundamentally in the body. We've got fancy words for them, but sadness is something across the world you'll feel like in your throat and in your heart. Fear, you'll fear as a recoiling, and anger as an expansion. These feelings are in the body. Our tolerance for the sensations of our feelings has a lot to do with how we move through the world.
It was a whole lot of years ago that a wise supervisor was talking about positive affect tolerance, and I was like, "Wait, slow down on that one again." They were like, Well, think about it. In the same way that we've got a floor to how much difficult, negative, downward feeling we're willing to tolerate before we interrupt it and jump to something else, we also have the same thing for the upper limit of how good we're allowed to feel before we do something about it." We can be just as mistrustful of our great feelings as we are of our difficult ones.
Nikki Kinzer:
Sometimes more so, I would think.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Absolutely, and because we're all a little ambivalent about everything, but I think the neurodivergent folks as those of us who really have both and brains more than either or brains have the gifts and difficulties that go with that. I think we can be simultaneously craving of positive affect and also scared of it.
Pete Wright:
That's hand to glove my experience, and that's my career is based on wanting to do right in a semi-public eye and also terrified, an imposter weighted by the shackles of imposter syndrome and purposelessness and in search of purpose. That that's the head voice that's constantly questioning. So don't get too comfortable and too enthusiastic about feeling good about the direction. Find a way to take it down a notch.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I used to notice this as a kid skiing, and I was noticing, "Why are my thighs on fire?" but just the fronts of them. It wasn't the whole muscle, it was just the front, and I realized I'm leaning back in my skis. Then I realized, "Oh, I'm leaning back in my skis every time I start to pick up speed and it feels really good," something about that scared me, which makes sense as you're zooming down a mountain, I could crash, but I don't think I was afraid of the danger of it. I think I was also afraid of, "This feels really good," 'and I'm not sure what to do with the wave of sensation that goes with a good feeling either.
Pete Wright:
We've been taught conditioned not to trust our emotional experience because we don't trust how we convey ourselves to the world, how we present. So of course, there's got to be an upper limit because how could it possibly feel good for an extended period of time, my place in the world?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
We can think about affect tolerance in a way as ... Well, you can think about it a little bit like wading into an ocean with a much younger child, let's say. A toddler, as a wave comes, could easily get swept right off his or her feet, and an adult for that same wave would be able to hold his or her ground in the sand. The feet might brace a little bit and that wave comes through and you feel it, for sure, but it doesn't absolutely wash you away. The same's true of big feelings. They really can overtake the nervous system.
If you've heard the phrase limbic hijacking, the limbic system is fully formed at four years old and it's where all the emotional stuff is happening in the center of the brain. This forebrain, our frontal lobe, when the limbic system is really hijacked, literally allows blood to flow from the front of the brain to the center of the brain. I was just talking with Doug Herr about this briefly this morning, and he was like, "It's amazing. With big huge feelings, we literally get dumber." What that really means is we just have a whole lot less blood supply to the thinking, judging, choosing, discerning part of our mind.
So there's a reason we're a little bit scared about being overwhelmed by a whole lot of feelings, and it starts with that one is we don't want to get swept off our feet, and it takes some skill and some maturity and a sense of self to stay present even when the feelings start to get big.
Doug had a nice way of talking about this this morning. He was like, "The thing about a really big feeling is it excites both the desire and the terror of wholesale change." When we're feeling something really big, there's this fear, especially on the negative side, and this fantasy on the positive side that if let's say, Pete, you were to step fully into everything you could be in the public eye and all of your talents are on full display and you're at your very best, there's this fantasy, but I think also this simultaneous terror that everything would be different.
Pete Wright:
I would first of all vomit and then I would just burn up into ash. I would just flame out.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
You would incinerate.
Pete Wright:
I would incinerate.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Complete incineration on on the spot.
Pete Wright:
I don't know who this guy is you're talking about.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That's right. So what I was starting to get at with the ADHD thing as I've been thinking about it is I think there's something really important about the chronic shame that stays with people who live with ADHD. Some of it is about, I think, how the both end brain can work. Some of it also is about how different we can be as we move through the world, especially when we're little.
Gabor Maté puts this really beautifully when he says we're born with these two fundamental needs that stay with us our whole lives, and the two needs are for attachment and authenticity. We have to bond to other humans and stay bonded to other humans all our lives and we have to be able to be in touch with ourselves and be our true selves to lead a productive, healthy, happy life. No problem unless you grow up in a family or a culture or a whole series of classrooms where you can't be your authentic self and maintain a bonded connection to people you depend on for survival.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, right, because you're masking, especially I see this with women is we're masking the symptoms because we want to fit in with everyone else and we don't want to look like we're not fitting in or that something's wrong, and men do it too. So that's where the authenticity just goes out the window because now we're pretending like we're something that we're not.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. The weirdest thing about those two twin needs is the wise priority begins to change somewhere midlife. So you have to in childhood prioritize attachment over authenticity because you can't survive by yourself. Human beings, of all the species, are the most helpless for the longest time. So that's a really good thing, but there comes a time where if we can't be authentic, the very attachment we most want is impossible because we're not loved for who we actually are, now we're loved for some performance we're putting on and we know it.
This really matters a lot because authenticity depends on us being connected to our internal selves, in our bodies and connected to that self, and that's where all those feelings show up. There's, I think, a really strong impulse learned really early for everybody, but especially people who grow up in households where attachment's really strained or traumatizing or where maybe their brains are built just a little differently, and all of it's a little harder, especially if parents don't know what to do and you don't have wonderful classrooms and schools that totally get it and they're like, "Hey, you're just built differently. We got a manual for that. We'll just help you learn what to do."
Most of us weren't so lucky. We grew up trying to fit something. Then I think it gets really scary later to say, "I'm going to step out of this shadow career that is an approximation of what I want to be and into the real me. Now I'm going to risk it all."
Pete Wright:
I want to talk about that switch because that's the switch that we have to come to with some intention. If you see yourself mirroring some of the things that you're describing here, "Now that I know that this is what I am, I guess the switch is flipped. Awareness is everything, and I can forgive my parents and move on with my life. Is that ...
Nikki Kinzer:
If it was only so easy.
Pete Wright:
I was initially trying to say hyperbolically, how do you get to the other side of it?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It is a process. I think a lot of it is a process of growing our capacity and willingness to have feelings that we find at first overwhelming. Some of them are the negative ones like, "How do I begin to realize I don't always have the effect on other people I want to have and I am different, and that's okay in a way, but not okay with everybody all the time, and I got to have some hard feelings about that."
I think there is a giftedness that goes with ADHD that I don't think we even fully understand yet. I really believe this. I know it annoys people to death sometimes when that gets said because I don't want to make it sound like it's always easy, but there is something extraordinary about a both and brain that creates potential that is quite remarkable.
You can know things that you shouldn't yet know. There is really strong intuition. There is extraordinary creativity. We're often putting together things an either or brain wouldn't normally put together. It's beautiful, but I think for the ADHD jump from who I am to who I could be can feel like quite a cavern to leap. It's an Evel Knievel jump because what's possible doesn't seem within reach. Then there's this shame you take with you too where you're like, "Who am I kidding? Could I ever really be that?"
Pete Wright:
Evel Knievel, who doesn't even know he's allowed to attempt to jump and he's carrying a U-Haul behind a motorcycle. You're stacking up the roadblocks behind seeing that in yourself.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Often, the building the bridge from one side to the other side does take a whole lot of ... It takes a lot of work, a lot of infrastructure, a lot of building of things that take steady progress, and I think often just takes help because it usually is leaning on what ADHD is not best for.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and it's so subtle too. So I think that with ADHDers it's so easy to miss when it's such a subtle change. In the work that I've done with clients, I see it in one instance where somebody will come to the group and say, "I didn't beat myself up over not getting this thing done." That's so subtle and such a win and it's getting closer to being more authentic, but they don't necessarily see it because then the next sentence is, "But I still ..." or whatever. It's like they acknowledge it for a split second and then it turns so quickly. So I think that the help is also somebody identifying and hearing that for them and sitting in that moment like, "Wait, this is that subtle change that's happening."
Pete Wright:
What you're saying actually really, I don't know, this is maybe obvious, but I feel like coming at any experience of emotion and talking about the thing that I didn't beat myself up for doing is different and I think important to note that with affect tolerance, we're talking about who I am, not what I do. It's like the next level beyond what I do because I already know how to feel shame for what I do and don't do, I've been trained that all along, but what I'm opening to here is that affect tolerance describes the next level of climbing over the mountain of shame for how I exist, for the constant feeling of seeking exuberance in social situations and fear that I cannot live up to it.
That's more than behavior. It's more than an activity that I know or a schedule that I'm not able to keep very well or the alarms that I have to set just to live my life. It's the deeper part of I don't know how to share like, when you go back to authenticity, "I don't know how to share who I am in a way that doesn't feel completely foreign." Nikki, you brought up masking. Everything is a mask.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Well, the deep, deep fear that lives in all of us, especially those who carry some shame, is that, "If I become the real me, I'll lose everyone." Little kids and the most elderly will tell you nothing else matters, but the everyone. It's the relationships that matter the very most, and deep down we know that. There's this fear like if I go to where I got to go, like James Clear in his book Atomic Habits talks about this idea that you can build a habit, but the only way to fully sustain it is to become the person who would do that regularly.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right?
Pete Wright:
Right.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
A non-author can keep on writing kind of for a while and maybe through sheer force of will can do it for a long time, but until they see themselves as an author, they're never going to do it intrinsically. It's always going to be extrinsic, and that's not maintainable.
Pete Wright:
That's so ... Wait a minute. That's so good you got to say it again because that exactly describes what I was getting at, the difference between the activity and the identity.
Nikki Kinzer:
And who you are.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Until the identity shifts, the activity is all extrinsic and it's pure will, but until it feels like willingness, there's no real power in it. It's just force. I work with this with clients all the time. It's one of the most fascinating subjects in the world to me. It's what the Taoist would call Wei Wu Wei. It's doing without doing. Alan Watts has this great video clip somewhere on YouTube about Wei Wu Wei where he's like, "I've been thinking about this for years and I finally figured out the analogy."
It's like moving from rowing to sailing, rowing being this experience of arduous, dragging of yourself through the water, looking over your shoulder the whole time, everything being this. It's fully dependent on your effort, and sailing is where you attach to what naturally wants to happen anyway, this invisible force that's blowing your direction anyway, and for the first time you raise a sail to catch some of that energy and you just begin to steer. You're just willing to go that direction and it's steering instead of dragging yourself through the water.
I think all of us, but I want to say especially the neurodivergent, are often dragging themselves through their lives trying and trying and trying to make themselves do a thing often because it's who they think they're supposed to be or who everybody wants them to be. Then some of the time also because it's just part of what's functional in this culture. We do have to will ourselves to pay our bills and do some boring shit, but there's this deep change that happens when you realize, "Inside me is a real me that is a wind blowing in another direction, and if I can align with that truest self, I get to go that direction without so much effort." Some of that's practice and you get inhabits and you begin to see yourself that way, but all of this still depends on a certain amount of tolerance to feel that good.
Pete Wright:
Like we have brakes that work far better than the accelerator.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Ironically, right? For all the talk of impulsivity, I think ADHD is there is a deep emergency brake that's been pulled somewhere there that often holds us in place and keeps us from going to the very place where we would succeed the most or we leap that direction really impulsively and without enough support, without some help to get us there. We'll have an idea of like, "I'm going to do this thing," but we haven't really embodied it more deeply.
So I'll talk about this more personally where this is showing up for me. It doesn't escape me that I'm here talking about this because sometimes we have to teach the thing we most need to learn. I have this incredibly blessed professional life where I get to do the very thing all day long that turns my brain on. I took me the longest time to realize, "Oh, shit. I have ADHD," because I lucked into, once I escaped the excruciating process of going through school with a brain built like mine, I get to be with people all day, and people are the most fascinating freaking thing in the whole world to me. I love people and I love my clients, and one hour after another, I'm honored by this person who would bring me this precious material and we get to talk about it together and watch their lives become this amazing thing, and it's so beautiful that I can forget sometimes that I really have to write a book. I really want to have written the book, but I do not want to write the book.
I think most of the time, if I'm honest about it, my fear is, "Oh, gosh, what if I write the book and nobody likes it?" I'm not sure that's really my worst fear. I think I'm worried everyone will like it.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I think I'm afraid it will work. I think I'm a little afraid I'm going to step into the rest of who I'm supposed to be even though I'll always want to be seeing clients because I love that. I think there is more I got to do and it scares me. Who am I to think I can write a book? Who am I to go teach this stuff I got to teach? Yeah, part of my brain can say, "Well, duh, you've earned it," but there's a little kid part of me that's like, "If I become the real me, I'm going to lose everybody."
Pete Wright:
And you don't know how to be that person. You know how to be the person right now.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's part of me.
Pete Wright:
It's part of you.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's not the guy I'm growing into being. It's hard.
Pete Wright:
It's a snake shedding its skin. There's something under there.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
What will that be like?
Pete Wright:
Can you just reflect a little bit on negative affect tolerance? Because I see this for everything when I talk about because I spend all day looking at sound waves. I look at this as gain versus compression. Positive affect tolerance is compression. We're taking the highs and bringing them back down so that they don't burn too brightly, and on the bottom end, it's gain. It's like there's sound down there and we need to make it louder. What are we running from or what is our toleration for the negative experience that maybe ... The thing I'm reflecting specifically on is, how comfortable am I in discomfort? Is my negative affect tolerance too good that I'm okay sitting in a space which is not my authentic self? Is that a fair correlation?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I would change it a little bit. I think it's a little bit more like, but let's come back to your point because, actually, you separately brought up a really, really cool topic too. I think you'd think of the positive affect tolerance as like, "How much can I stand the highs, the treble?" negative affect tolerance is, "How much can I stand the lows, the base?" and compression is squeezing both of those together, but you could also be just dampening the high notes or you could be just killing all your low notes.
Pete Wright:
Gating the low notes, right?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. When we go running away from feelings, negative affect, let's say intolerance, when we aren't willing to feel difficult feelings, it turns into all the things we do to stop feeling bad. If I'm willing to realize, let's say, maybe I feel a loss coming and I am feeling sad about what's going to change in my life when that loss comes, if I can sit still for that in a way, it metabolizes and moves through me, and if I can't, I then begin to do everything else but that. I go into my head and I think or I could go get a drink or smoke marijuana or get some substance that makes me feel something else or I could drink way too much coffee or I could get into Netflix or I could get into obsessive running or anything else I could do.
Generally speaking, if we avoid our pain in those ways, wherever we go with it, we make those painful. Instead of running for good exercise, I'll run until it hurts me if I'm avoiding feelings with it.
Pete Wright:
Right, or, "I haven't run in a while, so I'll go out and try and run five miles until I break something."
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. We'll do some version of like ... We'll just bring our torment somewhere else. If you think about it, really, our two seasons of The Change Paradox were almost entirely about that paradoxical reality that the more we go toward the thing we think we can't stand, the less overwhelming it becomes, and paradoxically, it allows it to change.
If there's a best example of that in a concrete way, when I'm really tired, there's a part of me that wants to reach for coffee and hijack my brain or I want to do something, I want to do jumping jacks until my nervous system has to wake up, but the very best thing I could do would be to go take a 20-minute nap, to go toward my fatigue, let myself go where I really need to go, sleep for a little bit, and then the whole afternoon would be far better than me being exhausted but jacked up on coffee.
Pete Wright:
You said I said something cool and I can't let the podcast go without shining a light on that because it happens infrequently.
Nikki Kinzer:
So not true.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
No, it does not.
Nikki Kinzer:
So not true.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So not true, so not true. You were talking about-
Pete Wright:
Well, it was like my level of tolerance of living in authentic or negative space.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Now that is a really freaking interesting subject right there. Okay. Here's interesting about it. There is a healthy form of negative affect tolerance where we are letting ourselves have the feelings we want to have. What you're talking about is a not so healthy version where we've gotten so used to feeling miserable that we don't feel it anymore-
Pete Wright:
Yes, that's it.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
... which is actually in a really subtle way a low negative affect tolerance. We're not letting ourselves have the feeling. We've just gotten super good at numbing, and so we can stay in a place where we are frustrated in a relationship that's not working or a career that's only half of what it needs to be, wants to be or any number of other situations where we've just learned to grit it out by going somewhere else in our heads or whatever we do.
Pete Wright:
It's the Joe versus the Volcano syndrome.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Help me with that. I haven't seen that.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Joe versus the Volcano, fantastic movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and Meg Ryan and Meg Ryan. He is stuck in the worst negative affect tolerance. He feels terrible, he hates his job, he's always sick, and then they tell him he has a brain cloud, and that shakes him out of his ... That's the jarring event and he goes to Zach and he's going to die. There was nothing wrong with him, but then he gets this diagnosis he's going to die, so he goes to throw himself into a volcano and sacrifice himself to the god of this crazy island. The point is Joe versus the Volcano, Joe Banks is like a role model for negative affect tolerance. Somebody out there in the Discord is going to get that metaphor. Somebody will.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Somebody way sharper than I am understands throwing yourself in the volcano.
Pete Wright:
Homework. You have to go watch Joe Versus The Volcano.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Apparently, I do, and I just need to apologize publicly to everyone that I haven't seen this movie because-
Nikki Kinzer:
I haven't either.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Nikki, you and I, we're-
Pete Wright:
ADHD movie club, we're going to have to do something. My goodness.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Got to fix that, for sure.
Pete Wright:
Anyhow, that's the whole thing that connects with me.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's the whole thing. I think this deepest piece that I'm freaking fascinated by though is, do we dare become the rest of ourselves? Do we dare?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, because what do we do with this awareness now? What do we do?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah. Now what?
Pete Wright:
How do we make it a practice to start stretching these muscles?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Let me say quickly that the negative affect tolerance part is it's a practice of, "Can I stay in my body for a minute and not do something about this?" Can I trust, that really a feeling if you stay in your body and don't go into your head, and this would be great to go hear Jerry Campbell's talk from our show where we interview him. He explains that very well. If you can just stay in your body, that feeling rarely lasts more than 10 or 15 minutes. You might cry a little bit. You think you're going to cry all day, maybe for the rest of your life and it doesn't really ... So you got to trust your body a little bit.
The bigger, much more mysterious one I think is, how do we start tolerating an idea that, "I might be meant for more. Maybe I have to grow now and I'm going to have to risk something"? Then we're carrying both because there will be disappointments and it's not going to change your whole life. As Doug said on the phone, he said, "The interesting thing is we're all both wishing and terrified that a big huge feeling will change everything." If I go become this writer and I publish this book, maybe everything will be different, and part of me is terrified of that even if I'm fantasizing that people will be all going my new abs that arrived because I have written a book, now I will be this beach god, I think. Wherever you go in your head for, "This is the new life, this is perfect," it's not that, it isn't that, and maybe very likely not that many people are going to buy this book, but I will have stepped into a willingness to finally be an actual author like you guys are.
Pete Wright:
Well, and share the value to become unafraid of sharing the value that you've collected all these years, all the wisdom that you have collected and processed, and recognize that there's value in that and not have it tied to the voice in the back of your head that says you're not allowed to feel good things. Those two things should be separated.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I think one of the ways to practice that is to in small ways and in huge ways sit down and practice in our minds being where we want to be. It can be manifesting. It can be also just as simple as, "I want to take on this new habit of writing every day," because that's a part of how you get to be a writer is you have to be a writer. I might sit down and imagine I've written again and there's another week of writing when I said I would write, and some of it was easy and some of it was hard, and that's all fine and I'm doing it and I'm still doing it and I'm doing it again and I have not lost everyone. I haven't lost myself and it feels good.
That right there, even if you do that for one single time like, "I am going to start studying for this test two days before instead of one day before," if you sit down and you imagine that vividly enough, imagine your chances of doing it when you say you're going to do it are way higher.
Nikki Kinzer:
Because you're becoming that person. Going back to what you said earlier, you're becoming that person.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yup.
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
To become that person, even if it's for one single event, let alone a whole identity shift, is to see it and hear it and feel it as vividly as you can and notice not just the easy wonderful things that come up with that, but the resistance we have to all of the good feelings that come with that. I was working with this at one point. You guys know I use this technique called the GRACE sequence, and it's a really cool way to work with something like that because I can go and one way I worked with it was to go visit myself in my '80s cracking the very first book I wrote and reading it for the first time in a long time, and as I was reading through it thinking, "Man, this was a really good book. I'm so proud of myself for letting myself do this."
Then what I did was to notice what does that feel like in my body. Part of me felt warm and good and another part of me felt scared. Then I went toward the part that felt scared, and instead of trying to chase it away, I tried to bring it some kindness and affection and worked with the GRACE sequence a little bit to process that through and then notice, "Now what am I noticing?"
I got to a place where I was neither feeling some crazy elation of, "Oh, my God, I'm this failed author," or this terror of it never worked or I was terrible or I wasn't enough or nobody liked me, but instead this easy joy of, "I was a sincere self. I took a risk I can feel proud of and I'm glad I did and I'm enough."
Pete Wright:
Lovely, Dodge, and I also know that we have snuck in on your lunch hour and that you have to go back to see clients, and so we have to wrap it up, but my goodness, I feel like we could talk for another two hours.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's a huge topic.
Pete Wright:
It's a huge, huge topic. What do you think about ... Where would you want to point folks to learn more about some of the things we've been talking about?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's funny. It's hard to point to, honestly.
Pete Wright:
We want to point to the book you haven't written yet.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Exactly. That's completely it. It drives me crazy because I want to say, "Here, go down look ..." Oh, no, don't do that because I don't have that up yet.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, but we can have you come back.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, you can come back.
Nikki Kinzer:
We can have you come back and have more conversation around it.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I will. I will. It's going to happen and we're going to talk about it when it does because I think it's wonderfully useful for this kind of work. In the meantime-
Pete Wright:
I will tell you, we're going to put the link, and Melissa already put it in the chat room, the dynamic tension between love and fair, the conversation you hosted with Jerry Campbell from The Change Paradox podcast, which we'll put in the show notes to distill. Such a valuable listen and worth-
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's a cool one.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it's a really, really good one. So check out that podcast.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Same with the one with William Martin. I think we talk about Wei Wu Wei. He's the Taoist author. There'd be some great stuff there. Manifesting, especially if it doesn't get into too much of the hokey stuff of just material gain, if it's rooted more in the becoming someone of value instead of just someone of success, that stuff can be really great.
Pete Wright:
Oh, so good.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's a really good-
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That's a [inaudible 00:40:11] quote.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's a great way to look at the difference there, for sure.
Pete Wright:
I'm going to put the third episode. So we've got two episodes already in the can for the show notes, but the third one is the set of the Trance of Scarcity episodes, which were very powerful on that vein. So there are a couple of things to follow up and listen to for those who are interested.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
There's one more, Pete, and that would be the one with Dave Rico on the Five Things. The five things we cannot change is really entirely about like, "Can I tolerate that I'm not in control of everything, that people are not loving and loyal all the time, that things don't always go according to plan?" because I guess as we build tolerance for all five of those, life becomes a lot more doable.
Pete Wright:
So really in the show notes, we want you to just go listen to all the episodes of The Change Paradox because they're all great.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That's all it's going to be.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's good work.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Just some quick homework on that one.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you. Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Thank you so much, Dr. Dodge, for hanging out, for coming back, and I think we only have one more and you will be officially a Hall of Fame guest of the ADHD podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
How exciting.
Pete Wright:
You'll get a smoking jacket of some sort.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
The smoking jacket.
Pete Wright:
There is something that comes with it, some valuable prize. Dodge Rea, we sure appreciate you and we appreciate you. Everybody else who's out there, whether you're in the live stream listening to us and commenting along in Discord or if you're listening at home, in your car, wherever you are, we sure appreciate you. Thank you for your time and your attention.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Thank you-
Pete Wright:
Don't forget, if you have something to contribute ... What?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I'm sorry. I totally was interrupting your spiel. My bad. I would just want to say thank you for this amazing show. I didn't want you to stop before I got a chance to say I love this show. I love your connection. I love the approach you guys take from both sides of this subject. It's a real gift to the world.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Thank you do, Dodge.
Nikki Kinzer:
So kind.
Pete Wright:
I didn't expect it. We're old friends and sometimes I don't know when to expect sincerity or when you're just going to bust my chop. That was really-
Nikki Kinzer:
I know, sincere.
Pete Wright:
That was awesome. That was really nice.
Nikki Kinzer:
Now he has to go so that he's not late.
Pete Wright:
If he is late, it's his fault at this point, so at least we know where that goes.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
You were mid spiel, I interrupted.
Pete Wright:
I was. I was mid spiel. Anyway, continuing the spiel, heading over to the show talk channel in the Discord server, and you can be over there with us at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Dr. Dodge Rea, I'm Pete Wright, and we will see you right back here next week on Taking Control, the ADHD podcast.
