EPISODE 5 Karla McLaren part 2
Welcome to Sensitive with an Edge for highly sensitive people who embrace their intensity, uniqueness, and value in this world. Join us on the exploration of relationships,
complex trauma recovery, non -conventional mindsets, neurodiversity, and themes that involve healing, growth, and empowerment. Now this is going to be an illuminating ride.
We continue to chat with Carla McLaren, and we'll be talking about extreme emotions, cults, maximum security prison, empaths, and more.
But before we begin today's episode, I'm going to provide a content warning. In the following conversation, we'll be discussing sensitive topics, including early childhood experiences of abuse,
and interactions with individuals who've been involved in violent acts. While we won't be delving into explicit details, if you feel these discussions may be unsettling for you, I encourage you to prioritize your well -being and consider listening at a later time or reaching out to a trusted support system.
Carla McLaren has a master's in education. She's an award -winning author. She's a social science researcher, ground -breaking educator. her amazing work with emotions,
especially the negative ones, has been eye -opening and incredibly helpful to many people. She's the author of The Power of Emotions at Work, Embracing Anxiety, The Art of Empathy and the Language of Emotions.
So now you have done work on emotions for people in the work space. And so you actually encourage people to welcome their emotions at work.
Tell me what that looks like. - Talk about nine features of an emotionally well -regulated social structure. And when I looked at this, I looked at good relationships, healthy families,
and good workplaces of which I think I've only been into. And I'm in my 60s. So. (laughs) - It's rare for some people. - Family. extremely rare.
And a lot of it is, you know, you're not here to have your emotions. You're here to do a job. I'm not understanding that emotions underlie all cognition. Emotions are how we function in the world.
They're how we attach meaning to data. Emotions are older than so -called rational thought. They're faster than so -called rational thought. - Mm -hmm.
build the foundation of everything we think, everything we do, everything we are. So if we're at work, our emotions are there for sure. And your emotions are in having to do with pretty much everything you're doing at work.
Yeah, there's not a there's not an emotionless moment at work. The research I looked at said the United States is one of the most psychologically damaging workplaces in the known world.
And we have fewer work protections than any supposedly wealthy country in the world. So it's bad here. That's pretty bad. And putting this idea of if you want to create a healthy workspace,
you have to welcome emotions and know what the hell they are. And one of the features is people have workable emotional vocabularies and they have emotional skills.
And one good thing about vocabulary is that there's a lot of research showing that just developing a better vocabulary will give you better emotion regulation skills all by itself with no other intervention.
So that's easy. - It is easy. So can you give us a quick example of that? - On my site, carlamaclaren .com, I have a free emotional vocabulary list that everybody can download and-- - Yes.
languages. Nice. Yeah, people come to the site and they're like, it needs to be in German. So they do it. It's a worldwide empathic crowdsourcing.
So for instance, if I don't have much of a vocabulary, I might say, I feel upset, which could have a lot of emotions in it.
It could have some sadness. it could have some anger, it could have some grief, it could have some anxiety, shame, it could have some,
right, upset is like a weasel word. Stress is another one where people are treating stress as if it's a thing. It is basically four emotions.
There can be others in there. Stress is a weasel word for a multiple emotion. state. So if you understand what those emotions are, you're not going to be as stressed as people who don't know what's happening.
Oh my gosh, it's stress. Stress is me responding with my emotions to a situation that may be overwhelming, right? And my emotions come to help. But if I don't know that,
and then I've got an emotion pile up, and I've learned that emotions are negative, I'm going to start reacting against the fact. my emotions showed up, right? So it's anxiety, panic,
anger, shame, maybe some sadness, but it's those emotions coming to help when when the chips are down, right? The emotions help and we miss -identify it and call it stress.
Oh my goodness and then that is very confusing and that sits like a big stone doesn't get processed and doesn't get much better either. It's stress. What can you do? Yeah,
you have less stress. Do you live in the 21st century? Yeah, I know, right? So that does explain, that's a really powerful example of how just using different words would help you listen to and benefit from your emotions even more.
Love that, you're getting a masterclass right now. master class right now. I think my listeners are gonna be loving this. Now, you wrote the art of empathy and you have called empathy an emotional skill.
Can you talk about the power and benefits of empathy? - I think as a social species, empathy is our birthright. We naturally co -regulate each other emotionally and empathically.
That is, you know, there's an apocryphal story about empathy. coming together and then they all become, they all start cycling together. They all start having their period at the same time.
Or seeing a bunch of grandfather clocks in a room, they will eventually begin ticking together, even clocks do it. We co -regulate each other normally and naturally,
so empathy is a feature of any social species, but especially primates. and many mammals. In order to survive, we need to be able to read and respond to each other without words.
We need to read each other. And so the power of being empathic is the power of being fully human, but also it's the power of being socially available,
socially supportive, socially. healthy, socially, give me another word socially connected, connected, appropriate. It's very easy to come in and read the room wrong and,
you know, you just something in a punch bowl, it shouldn't be in the punch bowl. Yeah. Good point. So,
empathy is, it's huge. I think that a lot of people. don't realize that it gives them a benefit if they're using it. You have a term emotional emotion contagion.
Can you explain what that is? Yeah, emotion contagion is from the research and I use it as my first, my first aspect of empathy, which builds upon itself up to the sixth aspect.
Emotion contagion is, maybe we should better call it, emotion recognition is that you recognize that something is some some changes happen.
Some emotion is present. Some expectation is present and you are aware of it. We've all missed signals from people. So if we miss the signal,
we don't even know that something was sent to us. Then our empathy stops there because we're not even on the same page as the person. We don't know what's going on. - You wrote a book called Embracing Anxiety.
Can you tell us what's beneficial? What opportunities we have that are good for us when we embrace anxiety? - Anxiety is one of my favorite emotions and it's one of the most hated.
And when I was doing my research for the book, everyone I talked to, when I asked them talk to me about anxiety, they were, they were explaining panic.
So people didn't even know that it was its own emotion. Mary Lamia is the person who, who hit me to the fact that anxiety is the emotion that brings you the energy and the focus you need to either finish your tasks or gather everything you need to do.
to finish your tasks. Lots of energy and anxiety. So anxiety is a forward -facing, forward -leaning energetic emotion. And if you aren't grounded and you don't have very good boundaries,
anxiety may push you over because you don't know what's happening. Instead of guiding you. Yeah, instead of helping you get your stuff done. Yeah. Anxiety is energy because you prepared for it in any way and if you think it's panic,
then you're going to go some very different place with it. Panic and anxiety can work together because sometimes the tasks you need to do and the deadlines that are coming are dangerous.
If you miss your deadline again at work, your panic understands you could lose your job and that is not funny. The warning, sure. Yeah. Yeah, your,
your position at work, your face at work is a part of your survival. And if your face at work, I mean, in this sort of Japanese way,
the face you present to the world, the persona you have at work, if that's endangered by your own inability to get your work done, panic is definitely going to be there. So we call that anxiety,
panic plus anxiety. And I think that's why people can't see the difference between panic and anxiety. And so it's understanding first, thank you, panic for coming along. Is my life in danger?
And panic says, Well, your job is and your money is or they okay, okay, so I understand now anxiety, how do I get this done is to is to pull them apart a little and breathing space?
Absolutely, we keep going back to language. It's the language, change your language about what you're feeling and what you're experiencing. I love that, it's beautiful. So that's super helpful about anxiety.
'Cause a lot of people, I haven't made friends with anxiety in any way, shape, or form. - It's hard not to, I mean, it's panic. 'Cause panic is, panic, I mean, anxiety is powerful. But panic is powerful times 4 ,000 because it panic is the,
emotion that can help you lift a truck off of a child's leg, right? Panic is not fooling around. So it's a very powerful and often overwhelming emotion.
And we can be confused between the two. Which one is which without that understanding of our emotions. Yeah. And hypersensitive people, I think, have a leg up on this because they can become hypersensitive.
sensitive, let's not say hyper, they can become sensitive to their own emotional states and then begin to teasle them out. So this is some soft anger, plus some anxiety,
plus some shame, plus some panic. Let me talk to panic first to make sure I'm not going to die right now. Yeah. The panic will sit down and go like, OK, panic,
I heard you. Now let me let the other emotions help me. You know, OK, so how especially for a sense of people are able to be aware and kind of organize that and talk to each one.
I love that whole idea because I feel so badly that so many people are just avoidant about the emotions. And like you said, they'll say, I'm panicked when really it may turn out they're not or I'm stressed when you're just putting it in that one word.
What does that even mean? Exactly. You can't really work with that. With anxiety. one of the reasons is so beautiful to embrace it is anxiety is where your motivation comes from. It's the emotion of motivation.
So if you can't get your stuff together and get it on the road, you need your anxiety's help, but probably you need to make sure that it's not coming with its best friend,
Panic. And you may not know how to drive that car. - Man, Panic is much more laser focused. - Yeah. the survival thing. - It's got stuff to do, it's got people to save.
Come on, we don't have time. - Okay, very cool. You've done work in so many areas and I know I don't have enough time for me to list all of them, but as you say, the gay BLT, I love that.
You've done some work with that community who've had experience in fundamentalist religions. You've been doing some work in recovery. from religious trauma, maybe,
and also from cults, like your hardcore. Can you tell us about that? - I was in a cult when I was in my teens, and we wouldn't have called it a cult. And that's one of the ways you can tell it's a cult 'cause they don't say that they're a cult.
- Yep. - If anybody says, "Hey, we're not a cult," you'd be like, "You need to go." What we've learned, I started working with the cult reacher,
Janelle L. and I wrote a book with her about people who were raised in cults, like I was, and escaped, like I did,
although for me they kicked me. And one of our first research studies was on gay and lesbians, Jehovah's Witnesses, which is not a good idea to be born into that if you have...
a choice, if you are planning to be GLBT. - Not so much. - Okay, you just, yeah. And it wasn't a thing,
it's not allowed. It's not, you can't be, right? So to be that in a place where you literally cannot be that was a tremendous burden on these folks.
these folks and but they got out and then created this beautiful community for each other even though they had not had a beautiful community for the reality of their lives before that in the Jehovah's Witnesses right that they never knew one yeah but for me what that study was about was the flowering and beautiful nature of human the human spirit spirit,
that you would be raised in a place where you were a stain in the eyes of the Lord, right? You weren't, you weren't okay. And even within your own body,
you couldn't have those feelings, right? Because now the fact that you had them was showed that you were also a failure. So not only a failure in the outside world,
you're a failure in the outside world. And I was fascinated to see that these people who had no welcome at all, had all kinds of welcome for each other.
If you're in a religion or a group where the fact of your sexuality is not allowed, then go put the word EX in front of whatever the name of your church is.
Thanks. Mormon, EX, Jehovah's Witness, and you will find a world where you will be welcomed. Oh man, that's great advice. Go to the library if you don't have internet access.
Yes. EX - Jehovah's Witnesses, EX - Scientology, EX, and you'll find that there are people who will welcome you.
So you have done some very powerful and unique work in maximum security prisons. Could you tell us about some of the things you've done? It sounds amazing. - One of the reasons I wanted to go there is I had healed my own childhood sexual trauma and I had been working with people for many years on healing theirs.
And I was like, okay, I got this. Now I need to go look at the people who do this to other people, right? And now I need to go look at the people who do this. go look at the monsters.
I'm going to the monsters now. And so I went into maximum security prisons as a singing teacher. I teach acapella harmony singing. - Whoa.
- And I know that in prisons, you're really forced to be with people. You don't have your private time. You don't, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool for them to have a way to be together where the presence of other people wasn't beneficial?
a benefit and where you could create, you can create a joyful noise and harmony singing is one of my favorite things in the universe. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's an awesomeness.
And it's a great place to be a complete hyper empath with no downside. Right. And I went there. And what I found were people with my same childhood.
At any time. monsters. I found me having gone in a different direction. And I became very close to a lot of the men.
I was with the William James Prison Arts Program and they lost their funding after the first year, but I stayed on for another year for free 'cause I loved those guys so much.
There's a reality in prison. They already got caught. They weren't gonna get out. Most of these people were lifers. - It is what it is. - Yeah, and they just didn't have any bullshit left.
There was no bullshit. And we were able to talk and cry and laugh together. One of my best friends was named Gray Eagle. So he had a lot of healing to do and our relationship was important to both of us.
And he didn't want to kill me and I didn't want to be killed. So I was like, that's fine. Simple as that, right? You're very much about seeing everyone as human, not the sociopath is one thing,
is all evil. Narcissist is just all bad and evil. These people who've committed these horrible crimes aren't just all bad. They're all people. And there's so much that we can learn from that.
Well that mentality It's not as ignorant as the us and them Yeah, I was I can't remember who said it. I'm gonna say it wrong But this is a person who who went I think she was a CIA person Who went undercover to talk to you know the really bad guys who were war lords and you know really powerful?
doers of evil She said she found that everyone is the protagonist in their own story. Nobody is the villain in their own story. They are doing what they think is right for whatever reason.
And if you can engage with them on that level, then they'll tell you anything. It's true. If you are understanding their intentions, what their intentions were.
Now you did, you were helping heal emotional traumas. You were also using singing, drumming, and drama. The harmony, the drums, the drama. - Yeah, I'll just-- - The poetry and what was really interesting there is like,
I've never seen such a sort of a cauldron of creativity as I did in prison. You know, I knew that these people were, were injured in the area of childhood trauma,
childhood violence, loss, death. I didn't know they were so injured in the area of education. These were undereducated people who were never given a chance to do much at all.
But once they were set free, you would just see this amazing art, amazing poetry. I would give them a song one week and I'd give them a suggested arrangement and I would come back the next week and the arrangement would have just blown up and it was gorgeous and I was like what are we missing by putting these guys away where no one can see them and just think of them as monsters and throw away humans.
And not helping. Not helping at all? Thank you so much. to give. Yeah. - Well, you've been there to do some helping and hopefully people are hearing more about this and can open their minds more.
Super, super helpful. Is there anything else that you'd like to add? - Book now, 'cause I'm getting cranky again about the empathy, the whole empathy thing. He's like,
"I'm an empath and you're a narcissist." I'm like, "No, you're wrong, narcissist, okay." (upbeat music) rubber room. Both go in there." Right. Or, "I'm an empath, and so I'm more special than everyone,
and I'm better than everyone else." Yeah. And I'm too sensitive to live in this world. Once I figured out my hyper empathy, once I figured out my hypersensitivity and developed the skills to be able to live it in this rough and tumble world,
I would go to prisons. And since the pandemic, started, I've been doing a volunteer work with our massive unsheltered population who have not been treated well.
And I'll go out alone. I come upon people shooting up I come upon people bleeding I come upon people having a, you know, I guess I got a break.
I'm like, okay, whereas the idea is that an empath is such a little. you know, delicate desert flower that only blooms once a year or something that it's like,
how could you be a hyper empathic person and go out there and it's like, because what I wanted to develop in my life is empathic badassery. Wow. That's already a book called empathic badassery.
Oh, what a brand. You know what? When you get over your damn self, there's so many things you can do and see. I've had it. get over my damn self many times. And I love that.
I think it's very healing what you're talking about. - We interact. You cannot go on a walk with me. It's like going on a walk with a six month old puppy. I'm like, look at that flower. Oh, that house. I like that green,
but the trim is wrong. Is that Mars? You know, like everything. I'm interacting with everything. And now that I have skills, it's awesome. - I'm going to continue.
to learn more about empathy. That's one of my favorite topics anyway in life. And I'm going to follow your work and really appreciate everything that you're doing, you're a big hero for me, and I know for many of us.
So I really appreciate everything that you share, all the work that you do. KarlaMcClaren .com, we will have the link down below. Please go and check it all out. All the stuff she's put out,
all the stuff she's going to be putting out. Beautiful. work, and really appreciate you. Thank you for being on this show with us. We appreciate it. - Thank you so much, Chris. - Thank you for listening to our interview with Karla McLaren.
You can find more information at KarlaMcLaren .com. That's K -A -R -L -A -M -C -L -A -R -E -N .com. In the meantime,
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Lyon for highly sensitive people seeking relatable and practical insights. While the content is designed to be informative and supportive, it is not intended as medical or clinical advice.
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