384. Feel, Heal, and Let That Sh*t Go with Rachel Kaplan

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Rachel Kaplan: 

And they're so afraid of their feelings, most people, that as soon as they start to feel, let's say, that question of if they're enough, if they're worthy, which I would call shame in my model, they're going to quickly talk themselves out of it. And all of this mindset kind of more surface level approaches will indulge that.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. 

Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strive to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And we've got a great guest to share with you today. Her name is Rachel Kaplan. She is a licensed psychotherapist and creator and the host of the acclaimed podcast, The Healing Feeling Shit Show. She is active on a variety of social media channels and has published multiple features in common ground. 

Kaplan has studied yoga, meditation, and hands on healing practices in India and Nepal and has earned a master's degree in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She's here to talk to us today about her book, which is now available everywhere, Feel, Heal and Let That Shit Go: Your Guide to Emotional Resilience and Lasting Love. It's going to be a fun one, Rachel. Welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today.

Rachel Kaplan: 

Thank you so much for having me and welcoming me to your world.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Welcome to my world. I feel like there's like a maniacal laugh in there somewhere. So Rachel, there's so many things we're going to talk about, especially your book. And I want to talk a little bit about your show but I'd love to find out why people are doing the amazing things in the world that they're doing. So let's go back in time. Let's jump in the Rachel Kaplan time machine. Talk to us about the seminal moments that put you on the path you're on today. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

Great question. And a little bit of a trigger warning. What I share might be sensitive for some of your listeners. When I was 14, my first love took his life by suicide. He killed himself and it was annihilating as anyone who has been close to that experience knows. I was in therapy probably by 16. By 18, had my first layer of healing, which of course I thought was more substantial than it was, but I really spent the next quarter century studying the path, traveling the world. I ended up, as you said, in India and Nepal studying their healing modalities, becoming a Western trained psychotherapist. 

And the thing that I've started really proliferating through my podcast and now this book is the technique that actually made the difference between me hobbling around compensating for a deep down sense of shame and worthlessness and me actually cultivating a baseline of self-love. And what I have found both through my work as a therapist and also just being a person is that it's a rare thing and that there's a lot of therapeutic approaches, mental health mindset, spiritual approaches that basically get people maybe, let's say 60 percent of the way there. And that deep down people have this lurking nine feeling that if people know them enough or get close enough to them, that they'll uncover that they're not good enough. 

And so as soon as I realized, and it was when I was 37, that I actually love myself, I just had this profound mission to just share the things that were so helpful for me. I feel like I was really lucky and some very off the beaten path help that I received. And so I've just made it my mission to translate that in the most applicable, grounded way. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So I want to explore a little bit more about that journey to India and Nepal. How old were you when that happened? 

Rachel Kaplan: 

I was 20.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So this was 20. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

I was a junior in college, and it was a study abroad program. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Were you looking for healing answers and there happened to be a study abroad program? Or did you say it would be really cool to go to India, Nepal, and while you were there, you bumped into these things that made such a profound impact on your life?

Rachel Kaplan: 

I would say that I had had the first layer of healing from the trauma of the suicide before at 18. And so with that healing came this sense of spiritual awakening. Returning to my emotions from being numb and in my mind brought this full spectrum, colorful, sense-based experience of myself, which had this spiritual orientation and that's what made me interested in studying more explicitly spiritual cultures.

By the time I went over there, I knew that my calling was to be a therapist. And so I was particularly looking for what are their healing modalities. It's a really humbling year. And I'd say the main thing I did that year was meditate and really learn how much I was still almost using all of the help I was giving people in my life to compensate for the wound that was still there. Really at the end of that year, I learned I'm still in a tremendous amount of pain. 

And I would say that what's been interesting is synthesizing Eastern and Western approaches. Like I taught yoga for many years, doing deep rounds of meditation, learning Western trauma modalities. The thing that I came to, that I think is so essential in determining whether someone's well or not, is something that we all have in our body. 

And that's why I use the metaphor of shit. That's why I'm saying, Let That Shit Go. I call my approach emotional potty training because it's basically like, if we can't have our feelings move through our bodies, similar to how hopefully a healthy person has their food moved through their body through as in the form of poop, then we get deeply ill. We need to do all kinds of mechanisms for distraction, avoidance, compulsive consumption. 

And so essentially what I feel like I've started to do is just teach people how to re-regulate their emotional system so that they can feel and move their feelings through them so that they can clear out the backlog of the pain they're carrying and come into present time and be who they actually are.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

A few minutes ago, you said something that piqued my interest, but I wanted to save it for later because I wanted to hear about your journey a bit more. You said that a lot of the modalities are out there, and there are a gazillion of them, can get people basically 60 percent of the way there, but you found this other thing that can help get them the other 40 percent of the way. So what's the secret sauce? What's that other thing? 

Rachel Kaplan: 

Yeah. That's a great question. Part of what I mean, just real quick to tell you what I think is limited is that there are a lot of approaches that are essentially working with mindset and reframing things looking like cognitive behavioral therapy or affirmations. And my sense is that's like working with the top layer of a pond. It's like the ripples are there, but it's really not the thing that's causing the ripples. 

And so my sense is any approach that doesn't get to the core wound beneath, which is really deeply established in our earliest childhood before we're verbal, before we even have cognitive thoughts. And that's why it's so hard to reach. That's why so many people stall out at the 60 percent point is that they don't even know why they feel as bad as they feel. And they're so afraid of their feelings, most people, that as soon as they start to feel, let's say that question of if they're enough, if they're worthy, which I would call shame in my model, they're going to quickly talk themselves out of it. And all of this mindset kind of more surface level approaches will indulge that. And so there's this thing deep below that doesn't get addressed. 

So the two wing approach that I think is absolutely essential, the first wing is part integration. And parts are having a big heyday right now through the proliferation of IFF, but they of course didn't start parts work. I uncovered it through Gestalt therapy from the 70s existentialism. But basically, finding the parts of you that you needed to cast out to maintain closeness to your caregivers, your parents, as a child. Whether that was you were too emotional for most people, you were too sensitive, you expressed your gender or sexuality in a funny way. Whatever you learned as a kid would make mommy glaze over or daddy mad, let's say, or whatever version you had of that, generally people are deeply invested at a survival level to not be that way. And therefore, we end up pushing and repressing these parts out of our expression, right? 

And so it's very hard to feel lovable or whole or known if you're not fully expressing some of the most sensitive, quirky parts of you, right? So the first wing of the thing that I think that actually gets people there is you have to uncover who have you locked in your emotional basement closet. Right? And then you have to figure out how do you rebuild trust with these parts of you that maybe in the beginning of your life were scapegoated externally, but for most of us as grown adults listening to a self-help podcast, we're doing it at this point. We're saying, I don't want to be this way. Right? So how do we reestablish a connection and start inviting those aspects of us into our experience and into our lives? 

And what happened through that brings a second wing that I see. If we do establish trust and those parts of us start to say, okay, you're listening to me, you want to know me, what they're going to tell us is I feel like shit. I feel like if I show up, you're going to lose love. I feel like you don't like me, you don't love me, to ourselves, right? And it's funny. I'm like, I don't know if this will be familiar to your audience or not, but I'm obviously breaking down the self into multiple parts. 

But at that point, once they are back online, they're full of pain. And so how do we clear out that pain? And that's what I would call emotional release work or moving the feelings through the body like a poop. And so it's a really very specific practice of learning how to move your awareness, your attention into the parts of you that are hurting and clear it out, usually through physical means.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So before we even jump back in, I am curious. So everybody who writes a book, they usually, well, not everybody, but most people write a book, they write this book because they're deeply driven to do it. Was there something in particular that really moved you to write yours. And then I want to get more into the modalities.

Rachel Kaplan: 

Yeah. At the end of 2017, when I was 37 and realized I finally actually loved myself, had zero repulsion or avoidance to who I really was, and realized, because I had been at the healing journey since 14, it was a stark contrast. And so I remember at some point, one of my deepest mentors saying what you're receiving, the help you're receiving is a debt. And like, there's no way to repay this debt other than really claiming your life and sharing it. Like moving it forward, paying it forward. 

And at that moment I was like, okay, okay. I didn't really understand what he was saying, but then once I had this experience of realizing how much I had healed, there was this profound drive. I mean, it's insane because I have just been, I have a full-time therapy practice, I have a podcast, which I'm not actively doing a lot of episodes of right now because I feel like my mission is more to champion this body of information, but it has been a relentless pursuit to just share this in ways that will help people as what I want to leave behind in my life. So it's really just, it's deeply, it feels like why I'm alive and why I went through the gnarly shit that I went through as a child. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

That's amazing. And I find that people like you who are shining a bright light in the world and trying to heal people, they have this realization that things happen to them, and you can either kind of get angry and blame the world and a deity or whatever, or they could find a way through it and then use that to help other people. So I commend you and applaud you for the work you're doing. 

All right. So let's jump back into this. So I love the analogy. It's sturdy and fun, you know, that it's poop moving through your body. Just like in real world. If you're backed up for a while, body has problems with that. So decades even, right? You have problems with that. That's physiologically a really bad idea. So you said that there's a step in moving through this and it can even be, there's a physical component of this. That's curious to me. 

So talk to us, we're working our way through the book. We're getting some insights into some of these traumas and end. And the thing about trauma that most people don't realize that there's this general belief that trauma means you're in an explosion or you're in a crossfire, there's terrorism. Traumas relative to the individual and trauma could mean something terrible that your parents said to you when you were four. Right. And I think you alluded to that a little bit. 

So let's say we're working our way through this book. We're starting to uncover some of these things that we didn't really know were there. Talk to us about how you go through letting that shit go.

Rachel Kaplan: 

Right. Well, you were right when you said we're getting into the book material. So I call it EPT and break it down. The two main umbrellas are the first half is just finding these parts and courting them, meaning establishing a relationship. And in the book, I'm very specific around things to reflect on about your childhood that will help you understand. It's the one place in my approach where I think understanding is useful. I think our brains are not that helpful when it comes to healing, to be honest. 

And that so many people, it's another way people are stuck. They have these very nuanced ideas about why they're wounded or their trauma, but they're still stuck, and they haven't actually overcome that experience, and because it's way deeper than our thoughts, right? But it's a good place to reflect on who did you cast out. And then there's very specific steps on how to bring those parts back, how to create trust with them. 

But then I think the thing you're most curious about is really the second wing, which is once you have some of that pain online, how do you move it? And what I would say the way I describe emotions, the way I define it is that they're intense clusters of sensations that roll in squad. And that's why the metaphor of pooping is so useful because we get a sensation-based signal that it needs to happen, and we were trained how to respond to it. We were not really trained that when you're, let's say when you're aren't swell with blood and you feel like you're about to explode, that means you have an anger movement happening. And the safest way to address it would be to get yourself to a place, as an example, where you could have a little anger tantrum, right? Instead, even the industry is saying, let's manage it. Let's keep it down. 

And so each of the emotions, anger, sadness, fear, shame, I address happiness, but it's quite different, but those basic primary colors of emotions, they need to be moved physically. And so what I break down in the book is like, there's a basic understanding of the energetics of what the emotion feels like. For instance, anger is explosive, right? Blood moves out from the center to the limbs. We talk about wanting to destroy, explode. As opposed to sadness, which is implosive, where there's a collapsing, achy, pooling energy. 

And so you're going to set up a session where you would try to physicalize or feel that emotion quite differently, just based on that first dichotomy, right? Like, if you felt like you were sad, you realized you're grieving, you just had a breakup, or you miss something in your life, maybe you would set yourself up in your bedroom under a lot of blankets with a pillow to hold and a sad playlist, or in a bathtub where you have that sense of being held. 

Whereas with anger, you might want to set up in a bedroom, but with a blanket that you're going to use to beat your bed or in a gym, or you're throwing a weighted ball. I will say that before you can do any of those things, there's also instruction in the book on just how do you actually feel your feelings? Like, how do you get your attention into those sensations to even know what's happening in there and how therefore to move them? 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

It's interesting because there are therapy techniques that really involve yelling and beating pillows and things of those natures. And so this feels like it's got some of that, but it also feels a little bit, I think of the term equanimity from meditation that you're being aware of these emotions that are there. So it's kind of like this chocolate and peanut buttery kind of blending of the two, which is --

Rachel Kaplan: 

That’s my favorite blend of anything, Dr. Richard. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Hey, listen, I would have concerns if it weren't. Okay. So this is really cool stuff. So now that we start doing this, we start being able to assign a physiological sensation to an emotion, which I think is really important.

Take us through the next piece of this, Rachel. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

Yeah. Well, what's so strange about this practice is that what we're really doing is learning how to allow ourselves to be as we are. And the reason I say it's strange is that it's an organic thing. Like if you're feeling a feeling, the work is really getting out of the way of trying to avoid it, trying to numb out just to allow it and to connect with it at a depth, whatever the feeling is, where it can flow. Like emotions are very short lived. If you break down the word, it has the word motion in it. It literally means to move. 

And so, so much of the work is about learning steps like permission, allowing ways that you're going to approach with your mind these sensations in the body. Once you have a sense of I know I'm carrying a lot of anger, or I know I have to ultimately get to a place where I can feel and clear my shame, what you would be doing is you'd be setting up proactive emotional release sessions, where you'd be very much like you'd go to the gym, right, or you'd go to yoga, where you'd block off an amount of time where you're going to slow down with yourself and try to create a container to move the feelings.

The thing that I said in the beginning where I'm like, there's one more thing I could tell you is that I think the thing that I understand that is misunderstood, like the real difference for me is that in so many of these approaches, including things like meditation, you brought up mindfulness, what we're taught is that we're taught that we're not our emotions and we're not our thoughts. And that, like, a lot of the attempt is to observe these painful thoughts and emotions from a distance, to identify with the observer versus the part that's in so much pain. 

Now, it is true, the ultimate reality is that we aren't our emotions or our thoughts any more than we are our poop, right? Emotions and thoughts are very transient experiences that happen inside of us. But for most of us, we were dismissed out of our emotional realities as kids. And this could be as benign as a parent saying, you're okay, there's nothing to be afraid of, which is a very loving gesture by a parent. But it tells the kid, you're having an experience you should dismiss, right? So that would be one very benign example. The more extreme example. You have parents shaming their children for how they are, absolute neglect, abuse, all these things. 

So the experience of finding our pain and then telling ourselves it's not true is actually very similar to this early conditioning away from our truth. And so for me, the crux move in this whole process is as you start to learn how to connect to the emotions in the body and how to have some flow, it's learning how to let yourself, for this temporary moment of release, how to let yourself identify the truth of that feeling, meaning that you actually feel like, oh, I am a piece of shit. And you grieve from the place of I am a piece of shit, and nobody loves me because that's like the peak where that part can really clear. 

And because you're choosing to do it, you're choosing I'm going to go have a feeling session. And you find the pain and then you let yourself what I call become, this is the step of becoming, you become the pain and then you're crying you're moving, maybe you're hitting your bed, maybe you're shaking, whatever you're doing, depending on the feeling, you're feeling how terrible that feeling feels in the body, how true it feels in the body. And then after you're like, all right, that's all I got or you got to go pick up the kid from work, then you would do some aftercare, which looks like what I call reality testing, which is where you go back to really questioning. Is it actually true that no one loves me? 

And there's a lot of instruction here because people want to go to things like my sensitivity makes me amazing, but our wounded parts for a good long while aren't going to believe that. If they felt shame about being sensitive, telling them that that's what makes them amazing, it's like, it just doesn't get anywhere. And so I teach people, how do you have a reality based approach that even your wounded part can believe? So that might look like it's really too bad that my family wasn't able to support my sensitivity and that I learned that this was something that's wrong with me. 

And then at the end of any feeling session, you'd say, given how sad I am, given how scared I am, what do I need right now? And really try to kind of gently come back to your grown-up self that knows how to take care of yourself. And so that move of dipping into the pain, feeling it as truth, coming out of it skillfully will bring someone, I think, to a place where you're just no longer carrying it because that part finally feels loved and allowed and they heal.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

This is beautiful. And there's some roots there. I heard a little Judith back in there, whether intentional or not with the --

Rachel Kaplan:

I don’t know her but --

Dr. Richard Shuster:

She's the mother of cognitive behavioral therapy. And she, part of that is Socratic questioning. Well, how do you know that person doesn't really like you? What evidence do you have to support this thing that you believe to be true is actually true, right? And so what that starts doing neurobiologically as you start engaging the prefrontal cortex, you start engaging the logic portion of your brain to start challenging our emotional part of our brain, which can quite often be irrational and ridiculous so. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

But what I would say is that that is what's primarily people are doing. And like when you do that without the other step where you actually let that part that I agree is not rational, but it's just a different system. It's emotional. It's not -- it doesn't need to be rational. Without actually giving that part some airtime, I think it's the equivalent of you get cut in the woods, the cut is all dirty and you stitch it up without washing it out. You're going to get infected. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Without peroxide. Yeah, I get it. I mean, it makes perfect sense, right? You are taking this extra component to allow us to experience, to make sense of, and to reframe that trauma, whatever that is, to us. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

To release it first and then reframe it. And then reframe it really slowly from the ground up. So that by the time you're saying, you know what, my sensitivity is what makes me amazing, your little parts have gotten so much care, so much permission that they're actually, yeah, we're amazing. So eventually you get to that place where you're like, I rock, but you do it slowly so that all of you gets to go.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I love this. Rachel, before we close here, tell us a little bit about your podcast. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

So my podcast, I'm going to do actually the very distinct pleasure of interviewing Gabor Monte coming up, but I am mostly not really making episodes. My podcast, the season one will bring you through this same body of work in a slightly less refined way. Of course, it's free and available for you. 

The main way I'm teaching and offering is I have a bunch of kind of coursework, a DIY course, different modules of teaching bundles online. And then this book is really going to be the six years after I wrote the podcast content, it's much more refined, kind of like the best version of this map that I could offer someone.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Fantastic. So this has been really cool. The book is Feel, Heal, and Let That Shit Go, which is now available everywhere. Rachel, as you know, I like to wrap up every episode by asking my guest a single question that is what is your biggest helping, that one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our chat today?

Rachel Kaplan: 

Thank you for that. What a beautiful question. I'd say it's twofold. One is that you have the power within you. Like you don't necessarily even need a therapist. What you need is to cultivate this relationship between these parts of you. And that it's really about being willing to turn toward the pain that you're carrying and just let yourself have it, let yourself clear it. And that is the single most important/only way to feel better is to feel how you actually feel.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Well said. Rachel, tell us where people can learn more about you online. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

Thefeelingsmovement.com, you'll find everything there, all my workshops. And I'm on socials, partly under my podcast name, which is @TheHealingFeelingShitShow, but thefeelingsmovement.com will get you everywhere. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Perfect. And we'll have links to everything Rachel Kaplan, including the book. If you are in the car at the gym, we got you covered. Well, Rachel, this was a blast. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Love the work that you're doing. 

Rachel Kaplan: 

Thank you so much for having me. I loved it also. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Absolutely. And I also wanted to thank each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to our conversation. If you're excited, if you're going to get some pillows and bury yourself in them and get in touch with your feelings, buy the book, go give us a follow on a five star review on your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show. 

But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post in your social feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.