Practical Tips for Mastering Holiday Stress & Setting Boundaries with Dr. Ally Hicks

[00:00:00] Dr Ally: Sometimes shit's not going to stay holly and jolly. I heard someone talk about it as a room. It's like a big wedding hall or something. There are some people that are going to be at the table, the family table with you. Those are your people who have proven to you. They're tried and true. They're on your side. They have your back. And then progressively people get pushed further and further back. And if you're jealous of me and my progress, you might be almost in the lobby of my life.

[00:00:26] Mindfulness and awareness are some things that you can practice. When we took that deep breath, it's allowing us to feel our body. And it might sound all woo woo, but one of the reasons we want to be able to feel ourselves in the present moment is because we can detect when we're getting angry before we're too angry to slow down.

[00:00:44] We have this initial problem of we're already grieving a relationship that isn't what we wanted it to be, which is sad and difficult to numb. But when we add a lot of judgment on top of that, and now we're telling ourselves something bad about us, maybe it's my fault, now we're adding something additional to something already difficult. So try not to judge yourself this holiday season.

[00:01:18] Kate: Hey, there, and welcome back to Rawish with Kate Eckman. I have a really fabulous episode for you today. Very timely with the holidays coming up, 2025 starting, and everything beyond that, that we're all navigating, looking forward to, or maybe not looking forward to. Here to give us some mental health advice, some empowerment, some good juju all around is Dr. Ally Hicks.

[00:01:42] She's someone I met recently. We're about to do an upcoming event together. And so we just connected over Zoom and I said, "You got to be on my podcast." Because she was dropping so much wisdom that I know you're going to love. So Dr. Ally, thank you so much for being here today.

[00:01:57] Dr Ally: Girl, thank you for having me. You know I love talking, so you give me a platform, I will fill it up with nonsense. So here we go.

[00:02:04] Kate: What I love about it is that, first of all, you're just a wealth of knowledge. You're a fantastic speaker. And I feel like every question I was throwing at you when I'm playing MC of the event, which I'm doing where I'm like, what about the people in the audience who are worried about going home for the holidays because of different political opinions, or maybe they're estranged from a relative, but they have to see them and be the bigger person? But then that relative has a few drinks or tries to pick a fight, or maybe our parents are no longer around, and the holidays are here, and we're feeling grief."

[00:02:40] And so we're all navigating so many things. In my training this morning, the theme of uncertainty was popping up, people scared about losing their jobs or they just lost their jobs. So I don't want to start off with doom and gloom here. We all are struggling with things, but before we even dive into that, you have a PhD in psychology. You're a psycho futurist, so you're really into the evolution of human psychology. Can you just share with my audience a little bit about your background?

[00:03:09] Dr Ally: Yeah, I have a PhD in clinical psychology, and I actually got an emphasis in health. So my focus initially was on how stress impacts the way in which our environments impact our body. That's what we call the mediator. So I got a lot of experience in that, which really integrates well into where I am now looking at what's next, where it is that we are going.

[00:03:31] And once you understand enough about human biology, you can begin to figure out like, Hey, this AI thing may do something. Technology may impact the way our memory functions a little bit. And is that a bad thing? Is that a good thing? Is it something that we need to adapt to? And I think a lot of what I'm going to talk about today has to do with adaptation, which is one of the fundamental skills of humanity, and one thing that we are actually really, really good at, because we wouldn't be here if we weren't. And it's uncomfortable. It hurts. It's terrifying, but we are actually pretty good at it. So I work a lot in that.

[00:04:06] Kate: When you say adaptability, is that also resilience? Can you explain that a little further for people who are like, "What do you mean by that?"

[00:04:13] Dr Ally: Yeah. I feel like resilience is what allows us to adapt. Resilience is what gives us the energy resources to have enough momentum to push forward to change. So adaptation is meeting a difficult situation and being able to get to the other side of that situation through change.

[00:04:34] Kate: And your mother, is she the one who inspired you to get into this field? Because you have a show on Discovery Plus and Oprah Winfrey's network, like mother like daughter. What was your mother's role in getting into this field and diving so deep into it?

[00:04:49] Dr Ally: Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia. I love my mother. What can I say? Yeah, my mom has her degree. She has a PhD in clinical psychology in child pediatrics. And so I definitely grew up with her. I am actually the eighth doctor in my family. Everyone is a doctor. It is the family business. You got to get a doctorate in something.

[00:05:11] Kate: Wow.

[00:05:12] Dr Ally: So I was choosing between this, and of course, every young girl wants to be a neurosurgeon. That's what every young girl wants. It was between this and genetics actually. I was going into medicine and then in the middle of undergrad I took a course in the psychology behind medicine. And then I had an anatomy lab where we had a cadaver, which is rare to have a cadaver in undergrad.

[00:05:39] She was a trans woman, and this was in the early 2000s, so everyone was really interested in her biology. And I realized that I wasn't as interested in her biology if it wasn't her nails. They were chipped. Her nail polish was chipped. And I was like, "She's done so much work on her body and on herself. What happened those last few months of her life? What was going on?"

[00:06:07] Obviously something because she wasn't getting her nails done. Was it cancer? And so I was coming from the behavioral perspective to understand what happened as opposed to a purely, let's look for tumors. Let's look for this disorder, that disorder. And that's when I was like, "I think this is where I need to go."

[00:06:23] And so my mom's influence was there that I saw that she had made a career out of mental health because she actually owned foster homes in the Palms. She owned a school. She was a CEO for 30 years. And so I had seen what she did, but I knew I was going to do something different. So here we are.

[00:06:42] Kate: Thank you for sharing that. It's so fascinating to me. It just shows your brain and why I'm so excited to have you here, to dive in deep that of all the things that you choose to notice, you notice someone's chipped nail polish. And not as a judgment or like, "Girl, you need to get your nails done." But thinking deeper, which is why you're here, thinking deeper of what's going on in this person's life that, you're right, they spent so much time, energy, literally changing sexes and their nails are not done. And then coming to some conclusions there.

[00:07:16] Dr Ally: Yeah. I was thinking it must have been more of a long-term illness, maybe something that had-- like when we're talking about the health psychology. When our bodies don't feel good, our minds don't feel good. When our minds don't feel good, our bodies don't. So it was like something else was going on with her.

[00:07:33] I was like, this is the moment. Because we had literally snuck into the lab in the night. I was the girl who did extra work. I was the girl who bribed the TA so I could go in and take more notes. Who was I? I'm not that girl today. I'll tell you that right now.

[00:07:53] But actually, I still am. I was in there with my boyfriend and the TA, and I was just like so focused on it. I told them, "I think I'm supposed to be a psychologist." And then I changed my major. They wanted me to do an extra year of school, but I ended up taking 50 credits in one school year. So I could get everything done the way I could get done, so I graduated on time.

[00:08:15] Kate: I love that. Yes. Well, I want to dive into how we can help people with the holidays coming up because the holidays are like New York city. You can make it there; you can make it anywhere. The pre-trauma response is already happening. The holidays, we think should be a time of celebration, but sadly, I think for many of us, they have turned into a time of stress, grief, or, oh, the travel and that expense and that exhaustion.

[00:08:44] And then what if dad says this? What if Aunt Sally says that? There's always that one cousin at the party who's got to ruin it for everybody. And maybe you're listening to that and none of that resonates and your family is perfect. Ha ha ha.

[00:08:59] Dr Ally: Yeah. I will say everyone in my family voted in the same direction. I do feel very blessed. I don't have anyone who voted in the other direction in my family.

[00:09:12] Kate: Okay, so that's even rare because that's been a source of contention I think especially for friends who in the LGBTQ community, some women who want certain white rights protected or want the body autonomy. And so there's a lot of different things going on.

[00:09:26] But what is some advice that you can give to everybody heading into the end of the year here, where again, sadly, I feel like people are in a state of frazzled as opposed to joy? So I guess how can we get in whatever you're celebrating, the Christmas spirit, whatever that means for you, or really navigate this time of year with more empowerment and more clarity?

[00:09:52] Dr Ally: One, I want you to look at me. I'm looking at what I think is a camera right now, so I think I'm looking at you. I want you to take one deep breath, in and out. One, we have to regulate our system because that's the one thing we can do. The one thing we are able to do is to calm down and slow down because we make a lot of probably educated guesses about how dinner's going to go. We do know our family, so we can't ignore that, but we have to come with our own sense of stability. That's number one.

[00:10:32] Number two, set some boundaries. I think we colloquially think of boundaries as these big mean angry conversations that you have to have with people where you tell people, "I'm going to go no contact with you if you say this and that and that." And those are boundaries. But you can make internal boundaries where you say, "I'm going to do 30 minutes with my mom this year at Thanksgiving, and then I'm going to excuse myself for other reasons." We've got 30 good minutes in us and then after that all hell breaks loose.

[00:11:03] So it might be about planning. Like, okay, are we best when we're in the kitchen cooking together? Is that when I should be there? Are we the best just sitting down at dinner? Are we the best after? Figuring out when you come when you don't. Then when I'm there, what do we talk about? Because we know there are certain topics that aren't going to be topics that we can really be responsible for having without yelling at each other.

[00:11:26] So what topics I want to talk about, and what am I prepared to do if a topic that I don't want to talk about comes up? So these are the types of plans that I want you to make as opposed to the plans of like, oh, it's going to be horrible. They're going to say this. They're going to say that. Just what do I do when I'm in the moment?

[00:11:40] And if I need to get out of there, what do I do? How do I leave? What do I say? How do I leave so that I can maintain this relationship? If you want to maintain the relationship. And then where do I go while I'm healing myself, licking my wounds? Because the capitalism of it all has us really turning Thanksgiving and Christmas into something that isn't necessarily what it could be.

[00:12:06] It is about spending time with people that you love, and people that you love don't have to be your family. People say blood is thicker than water, but I say, "Which one do you drink?" The friends that you've made are the people you've chosen. The family you were given, you did not choose.

[00:12:21] Kate: Yeah.

[00:12:21] Dr Ally: You woke up to them. And so I understand wanting to maintain relationships. I understand wanting to be close to these people that share your blood, your DNA, your bone, your everything. But taking a break and being around people that actually love you, that you chose to love you, is also really helpful. So those are some of my tips because loneliness is a factor, especially this time of year.

[00:12:45] Loneliness is an epidemic across the country, across the world, I'm sure. The pandemic pushed this loneliness, is isolation. People are working from home. People are doing a lot of things from home. A lot of people's family members and friends have passed because of the pandemic. And so you don't want to be alone either.

[00:13:00] So find a way. If you don't have friends to spend time with and you don't have loved ones to the time with, volunteer. Go somewhere where you can just touch the population, be close to people, giving food, giving support.

[00:13:11] Kate: I love that idea. Every time I am thinking about somebody else, it fills me up. And then you also realize, at least I do, just how fortunate I am, how much we have, how much we have to give, and how appreciative people are of-- I like to do the Secret Santa for Seniors, and all they ever want is socks and underwear. And it's so heartbreaking to me, and they're so grateful for a new pair of socks or underwear.

[00:13:39] Dr Ally: Where can I give socks and underwear? I want to give some.

[00:13:40] Kate: I'll send you the link. It's really, really sweet. So something that comes up for a lot of us, regardless of what time of year it is, is that we get triggered either by something that is said, unhealed, or disowned trauma that we know we have or don't even know that we have from childhood perhaps. And it's all fun and games, and we go in with these good intentions, and we prepare. And then someone says something, and we feel enraged. What can we do in that moment to keep things holly and jolly?

[00:14:12] Dr Ally: Sometimes shit's not going to stay holly and jolly. Things happen. Sometimes things get said. But mindfulness and awareness are some things that you can practice. When we took that deep breath, it's allowing us to feel our body. And it might sound all woo woo, but one of the reasons we want to be able to feel ourselves in the present moment is because we can detect when we're getting angry before we're too angry to slow down.

[00:14:38] Because we've all gotten to that point where things are coming out of our mouths and we're like, why am I saying this? Who is this person talking still? Shut up. Stop. It's too late. And what sucks about those moments is they can impact our sense of self-esteem and our sense of goodness to letting people take us out of our character.

[00:14:58] And so if not for others, we're doing it for ourselves to be able to say like "Oh, let me be aware of what my signs are for when I'm angry. So notice, what does your body tell you? Strangely enough, when I get really angry, I get an itch in my armpit. It's probably sweating. I don't know. Early sweating. But whatever.

[00:15:16] So I start to notice physiologically, like, okay. All right. I'm getting a little hot. Sometimes I'll get a little hot in my hairline, and so I can then tell myself like, Okay, you need to change your body posture. Sit back in your chair. I'm an edge of chair sitter when I get upset. I'm on the edge of my chair.

[00:15:34] So it's like, girl, lean back. Lean back. Take your hands off the table. Put them on your lap, calm yourself down, soothe yourself, stroke yourself. Sometimes I'll spin a ring. I have a ring spinning thing. So find ways to notice that you're uncomfortable, notice that you're upset. Then what do you do when you're upset to calm yourself down? If you can't leave, quietly take some breaths.

[00:15:59] Tap your toes. Spin a ring. If you can't leave, get up and say, "You know what? I'm going to go get second. Let me go to another plate." Hopefully by the time you come back they'll be talking about something else. If they're not, go get a piece of cake. You got to go back out. And then also you can leave.

[00:16:18] You can't actually physically leave and again, go someplace that you want to go. But when I think about conversations, I break them down into three parts, and it's all thanks to Marsha Linehan and dialectical behavioral therapy. And I think, one, what is my goal? So when going to something like Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner, I will say, what do I want to do when I get there?

[00:16:40] Is my goal to convince them that they voted wrong? Probably not. That's not my goal. My goal is to sit down, eat, have a good time, share what's been going on in my life. But sometimes I'll even write out a little script. What are the things I'm going to talk about? Because I have such a multifaceted career, whenever I go out, I have to say, "Who am I tonight?"

[00:16:59] I do 20,000 things. Who am I? So write out what you want to do, what you want to talk about. You can use SMART goals if you want. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-limited, and really say, "Can I talk about these things? Do these things make sense?"

[00:17:14] And then you rate it on a scale of 0 to 10. How important is your goal? How important is it for you to get the thing that you want out of this interaction? Two, how important is the relationship? So do you want to maintain relationships with people at this table? 0 to 10. If it's a 0, you're going to talk to them a lot differently than if it's a 10.

[00:17:34] Kate: Yes.

[00:17:35] Dr Ally: If your goal is to prove to someone they voted wrong and you believe in them and you want the relationship at 0, you're going to scream at them. But if it's not really that important for you to prove that exact thing, but it's more important for you to get caught up on their life, and you want to maintain a relationship at an 8, it's a whole different level of energy. And so you can keep that in mind.

[00:17:55] Then the third thing is self-esteem. How do I want to feel about myself when this interaction is over? I want that to be 10 out of 10 every time. And that means you don't lie while you're at the table. Because sometimes we will lie in different directions to get to help someone understand maybe how difficult something was.

[00:18:12] You might over exaggerate, or we might underplay or downplay our feelings and experiences. So we don't want to do either of those. We want to be authentic. We want to be honest. We want to be real in the moment so we can honor ourselves. So we don't want to exaggerate. We don't want to lie. We don't want to yell, scream, and act out of character. So these are the three things that I consider with every interaction and can be very helpful for people as they're entering into these tough holiday times.

[00:18:36] Kate: Thank you for that. What would say to someone where your desire to have great relationships with your family members, especially immediate family members is a 10? You genuinely want to have this picturesque relationship with them. And your desire to have a phenomenal relationship with yourself and prioritize your own health and well-being is also at a 10.

[00:19:00] And by both of those being a 10, and that being perfect, they are at odds. It's at conflict. For instance, I'll take myself, when I am honoring my authenticity, integrity, my own needs, and my own health, it's going to actually disappoint some people who I also want to have a 10 relationship with for various reasons.

[00:19:21] What do we do then? Because if we can't honor both at the 10, if you asked me, I'd say, "Well, my well-being, I have to put first." No one else is looking out for it besides me. So what do we do then when honoring our own needs means we're compromising relationships with people that we love?

[00:19:38] Dr Ally: Yeah. I think, one, is it the relationship that you want to have or the relationship that you do have? I think that's what's tough, is we get this ideal version of what a mom should be, what a dad should be, what an uncle and a sister and brother, how family members should act, and then we have how they do act. Then we have the reality. So given the reality that's in front of you, how important is maintaining that relationship?

[00:20:04] And being at a 5 doesn't mean that you're still out the door. It just means that you can interact with them a little differently, and maybe you can set boundaries with a little bit more-- and you can say like, "You know what? I'm going to leave this conversation because right now I'm really not feeling good. So I'm just going to go in the other room."

[00:20:22] Because if it was at a zero, you might not show up in the first place. Because you don't care if this person comes or goes. So that's my initial perspective on that. And then my second one is you're absolutely right that you do have to put your mask on first.

[00:20:36] And so at the day, those are the tough choices, is when you taking care of yourself hurts someone else, triggers someone else, bothers someone else, you do have to start looking at the quality and the reality of that relationship. That if this relationship necessitates that I be less of me, I be less healthy, and I participate in sometimes the pathology of our family system, because that's what's happening a lot, is we're seeing the "black sheep" are leaving the families. I put air quotes around it because I don't believe in black sheep.

[00:21:08] But what black sheep truly are is they are the pathology detectors. They're the ones that see the bullshit. And they've always seen it. And so for some of them, when they're young, they see the bullshit. They can't get away from it. So they use maybe substances. Because they're like, "This is crazy." Or they avoid the family altogether, like, I'm out of here. Y'all don't see that. This is nuts.

[00:21:29] Sometimes the people that stay are the people who ignore the pathology or who are uncomfortably comfortable with the pathology. So pivoting the way that you think, and it's not that I'm rejecting my family, but it's that I actually see them for who they are, and I don't want to spend a ton of time with that.

[00:21:48] Kate: And it's heartbreaking. Can you speak to us a little bit about the grief that comes from not just those who are mourning the death of people they love who are no longer physically present, but the grief of mourning relationships that if we're honest have never been and may never be what we had hoped for our dreamed for, especially with mom, with dad, with the sibling, or with our children?

[00:22:13] And the holidays really trigger this because maybe we're no contact, but it's like, well, I "should" reach out to this person, but not enough healing has occurred here for there to be a productive conversation here. Can you speak to us about the grief and how we navigate and manage it?

[00:22:32] Dr Ally: Yeah. Unfortunately, grief is one of those things that you have to go through. And I think a lot of us have a hard time with that. We're like, but don't I just read some book and then I'm on the other end of it? It'll just be gone? No. And grief, it's not a linear line. It's not like you just get progressively better every day. It's not. It feels bad. It hurts. It's uncomfortable. It leads to lots of tears, lots of rage.

[00:22:55] There's the whole Kubler-Ross stages of grief, and you go through the same similar stages with people that you've lost that are alive. Because we often associate grief with death, dying. But it's also associated with terminated relationships, with broken fractured relationships. And one, I think kindness is very important because we can tend to be really hard on ourselves.

[00:23:20] Like, I should be back to work. It was just a breakup. Or we always get these arguments. Why am I even so upset? I'm such an idiot. And that adds what we refer to as a secondary problem. We have this initial problem of we're already grieving a relationship that isn't what we wanted it to be, which is sad and difficult enough.

[00:23:38] But when we add a lot of judgment on top of that, and now we're telling ourselves something bad about us, maybe it's my fault. Maybe I'm the problem. Now we're adding something additional to something already difficult. So try not to judge yourself this holiday season. If you're feeling worried, that's okay.

[00:23:54] Accept that anxiety because we also, in our society in the United States, do not have a lot of tolerance for negatively valence emotions, anxiety, sadness, longing. We don't like it. And so we feel like something is inherently wrong with us for being anxious. Like, I've got to get rid of this anxiety.

[00:24:12] No, anxiety is information. Your body is telling you there's something big getting ready to happen. You don't feel maybe prepared for it. You feel maybe very excited, and that excitement is being miscommunicated to you as anxiety. Maybe you genuinely have had bad experiences in the past because we can't predict the future without looking back to the past.

[00:24:35] So if we've had bad experiences before, we tend to assume we will have bad experiences coming up. And so really breaking it down and just trying to understand, "First and foremost, girl, I love you. Thank you for protecting me, body, with all the sadness and all of the anxiety. You're really trying to take care of me." Instead of that, let's look into understanding it. So I'm a fan of journaling. As we have all these events coming up, as we have all this coming up, I really want people to be writing more.

[00:25:02] And I know we don't have a lot of time. I know we're all really busy. But even just taking the time to speak into your phone so you can just get some of these things out so you can start to process, well, what am I actually getting ready to step into? Is this more of an internal experience, more of an internal fear, or an actual fear? So that's one of the things, and I feel like I've gone away from the question. What was the original question?

[00:25:22] Kate: No, no. And it's good. It's about grief and grieving those who are no longer physically present, but also grieving the fractured relationships, grieving the best friend we no longer speak to, grieving the parent we no longer are willing to be in relationship with for whatever reason, grieving our niece is no longer all about us because they're a teenager now. So they still love us, but it's a shift in the relationship. There's so many things coming up for us right now.

[00:25:52] Dr Ally: Right? And so feeling it, accepting yourself for feeling it, then allowing yourself to feel it, processing it, understanding it, not just feeling it here in this cognitive think space, but feeling it here in the body space. Where do you feel sadness? Is it in your stomach? Is it in your chest? Is it in your shoulders, in your neck, your hands, your arms? Where is it?

[00:26:15] Getting connected to it, because I think that we often are too disconnected. Because a lot of people will come to me and say, "But if I start crying, I'll never stop." And I'm like, "Impossible. You will absolutely stop and probably feel a little bit better." Holding on to emotions actually ends up hurting us more in the long run than just allowing them to breathe through us, to wash through us, and to allow the experience.

[00:26:40] Because unfortunately, you're not going to live a life free of grief. You're not going to live a life free of sadness or free of anxiety. It's just about what do I do when I experience it? There was this Buddhist monk, and they were asking him about different emotions and just Buddhist shit. And they were like, "I'm sure you're never angry." He was like, "Oh, I get angry all the time. I just process it and think about it differently than maybe someone who lets the anger take them."

[00:27:06] And so when it comes to grieving people, this can be a really beautiful time. We just finished Halloween, Día de los Muertos. We finished a lot of the ancestry veneration time that is acceptable in American culture. But we can also venerate our loved ones that have gone on during these holiday times. Having a chair set aside for them. Having a picture set aside for them.

[00:27:28] In other cultures, they have [Inaudible]. And in in the American culture, we don't have such a connection to those that we've lost, but there are ways to honor them, through a prayer that you say before you guys eat. Thanking your ancestors for coming before you and giving you all the things that you have today.

[00:27:47] We wouldn't have any of the things that we have if it wasn't for the people who came before us. Or maybe doing a little poem if they really like a particular poem, a Bible verse, or something like that. We can integrate and bring in these types of moments because the sadness over time becomes bittersweets as we allow ourselves to process. And that's what I think healing starts to feel like it's that bittersweet moment and you having more access to the happy thoughts about people.

[00:28:13] Kate: Thank you for sharing all of that. I love even the idea of setting aside a seat for them or honoring them in some way, and then it brings them into the space. And I think also, at least in my belief system, that they're always with us. I feel all my people around me all the time. They're always here more than people who are physically present. And there's some beauty in some peace in that.

[00:28:32] And then I can hear them and feel them saying, "I'm so proud of you." And they see what we're doing, and they love us so much more. More so even in some people here, because when you cross over, it's all peace, love, and forgiveness. There's no ego stuff getting in the way. So I think that's part of it too.

[00:28:47] Something else that I've really been tapping into and even doing a training on, helping us with our triggers, is knowing why we're triggered. So for instance, something that drives me nuts that may not bother you is when I'm at a restaurant or any public place and someone is on speakerphone or Facetiming and they're loud.

[00:29:05] You're having 80-dollar bowl of spaghetti at El Paseo in Beverly Hills, and you feel like you're at a sporting event or something. It's so rude. And in my trauma healing certification, the therapist, coach, and professor really helped me with, it's, yes, we all agree that's annoying and that's rude, but you may not be phased by it.

[00:29:26] And I am like, "We have to leave. Get me out of this restaurant." And it's because of something that happened in childhood where I felt a lack of consideration from a caretaker. I felt violated. My personal space was violated. And so that is a reminder of that, and it's enraging.

[00:29:41] So then it' not being, "Okay, I'm not going to be triggered by this." But it's unhooking from that story, unhooking from that thing that happened 40 years ago that felt like a violation. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? How much we want to get in touch with some of that past stuff that is really affecting our present experience?

[00:29:59] Dr Ally: I will say, I think that can be very fundamentally helpful to be able to understand what we call the ideology, the root, the source of where these triggers or these buttons were formed. And normally, if you go back to original caregivers, whoever that may be, you will find the origin of these triggers and these frustration, traumas, things like that.

[00:30:23] But I will say, you don't have to go back. It's good to. It can help, but you don't always have to. So there are some moments where you can just start here because some people have memories that they've locked up, and they don't want to unlock them. My thing is, I don't break what I can't fix.

[00:30:45] If you don't remember something, I'm not the one who's taking you through a past life regression, because I don't know what's back there. I don't know what's back there. And I'm a coach now, so there's a number of different ways that we can do it. So you can go back.

[00:30:59] That's an effective, helpful way because I also talk about how I believe therapy in essence is time travel. Because if we're able to change the way we relate to a memory-- we only experience our past through memories, because the past is gone now. So if we're able to change the way in which our current self relates to that memory, we are therefore able to change the feelings and the way in which we function today as a response to that. So going back is fundamentally very helpful.

[00:31:28] Kate: Another theme that I think is coming up for a lot of us, especially in our generation, is that we were raised as nice girls. And I'm from the Midwest, so I've heard my whole life, be nice, be nice, be nice. Even when I was being treated badly or even violated, be nice, be nice, be nice. And it took years for me to realize how harmful that advice actually is.

[00:31:52] And when we're being nice, nice girls, and nice women, nice to everybody else, it seems, but then not nice to ourselves. Because when we are accommodating everybody else, it's at the cost of our own self-worth at times or well-being. So can you speak a little bit to that? Because again, the holidays is where we're seeing some people from the past, or maybe we don't see often. And when the nice girl becomes the kind woman, I think a lot of people may take issue with that.

[00:32:25] Dr Ally: No, absolutely. I think that there's a lot of expectations, especially placed on the behaviors of people based on their gender. People feel like because you were born this way, you have to act a particular way, which no sense. And I think that there's a lot of pressure on women in particular to fit this role.

[00:32:43] And then as you develop as you become who you are, you have maybe lines or stop gaps, and I think that you begin to develop this awareness that me being nice isn't actually important for society. It's important for maintaining status quo. And it's something that people want from me so that they can act how they want to act. And I'll tell you, this is a hard topic for me to talk about because I'm not nice, and I never have been, ever, ever. I'm not nice. I am nice when I want to be, but I'm not nice.

[00:33:14] Kate: I love you.

[00:33:16] Dr Ally: Yeah. I like people. I like to talk to people, but if I'm not happy with something, there is no universe where people aren't going to know that I'm unhappy. There's no universe. I literally almost made a man cry at a party. We were at a party last year. He said something I thought was absolutely ridiculous. I had to reinforce. "Are you sure? This is what you believe?"

[00:33:38] But that's partly because I was not raised by nice people. My family is wonderful, but one, there was no such thing as a child's place. So kids got to be in adult conversations, vice versa. We just all got to talk together. We're a very heavily debatey family. So if there was an article that came out, everyone can talk.

[00:34:00] Everyone's perspective matters. But if you're five and you have a perspective, it better be good. Because if it's not good, we're going to tell you it's not good. And we're going to help you figure out how to make it good. How do you think through something complicated?

[00:34:11] And we start very young in my family with debate practice, learning how to stand your ground. And I was never taught to respect people just because they're older than me or have a particular job. It's that, what is this person doing? And so I do teach some of my clients, like it's not-- obviously, we respect humans for being human.

[00:34:30] There's a common level of like, oh, you deserve to exist. But you don't deserve to infringe on my boundaries, on my personhood, on my existence. So now when that comes in, nice goes off. And also being honest about what you want and what you expect is not necessarily mean. And I think that's something else that we get fed into us, especially as women, especially as women who were young during the 90s.

[00:34:58] There's this idea of like, don't rock the boat. You don't want to be disagreeable. Guys won't like you. And it's like, fuck those guys. Because I don't need anyone to like me. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be cursing on your show. Anyway.

[00:35:11] Kate: You can curse here. But you just remind me of a colleague of mine who's a well-known sports reporter. We were at a restaurant, and some man said something to her, like, "You need to smile more." And I think if I'd probably react differently now, even how I've evolved this past year, I'd probably just smile and be hi hi hi, whatever. Because again, I don't want him talking crap about me. I met so and so at a restaurant, and she was rude. But I love that my friend said to that comment, "I didn't ask." And I thought, ooh. And I feel like maybe that's how you would have responded.

[00:35:46] Dr Ally: Why is your opinion so important?

[00:35:48] Kate: What do we say, whether it's the stranger, whether it's the relative, the colleague, the friend? I've had all, we all have, all sorts of things, where people, they think it's cute or funny, and it's at your expense and it's actually quite rude and hurtful. So what is a way where we can honor ourselves and be kind to ourselves when we get the comment, or, can't you just be nice? What would you say to that?

[00:36:14] Dr Ally: Yeah. One, it depends on who's saying it and where it's being said. So I've had men tell me to smile, and normally I just do it. If we're in public and I don't know you and I'm about to move on with my life, sure. If you're a family friend, you're someone that I know, we're going to sit down and we're going to have a conversation.

[00:36:31] And I might just be like, "I know what you maybe meant or maybe helped me understand what you meant, but this is how I took it. It didn't make me feel good. It didn't make me feel affirmed. It made me feel objectified. It made me feel like a piece of meat. It made me feel like you wanted to control my body and my emotions, which are very personal to me, and I'm not cool with being controlled." And then if you don't like my level one conversation and you're pushing back, you're getting level two.

[00:36:58] And that's a little bit more of, stay the fuck out my body. Stay the fuck out my mind and my emotions. Leave me be. I'm uninterested. I came here to eat yam. I did not come for this nonsense. This has to stop. But I'm all about reflecting the energy that was brought to me. So if you're a kindly old man on the street and really think that you're saying something nice to me and I don't care about you and I would never see you again, I may just go ha ha, and keep it pushing. I've done it.

[00:37:26] Do I love it? No, but if you're someone that I know I have to interact with, I'm definitely going to correct it. And I normally will start with how it has impacted me. "I don't feel really great when you tell me what to do with my body. Maybe you didn't mean anything by it, but I don't feel good." Instead of it being like, "You're an A-hole. I hate you. How could you?" Because then that brings up defensiveness. And if I want to maintain a relationship, I don't want to make them defensive.

[00:37:51] Kate: Yeah.

[00:37:52] Dr Ally: If I want to maintain.

[00:38:01] Kate: I think another issue and then there's another topic I want to move on to as well is when we have changed, and it is the holidays, or it is the time where we're going to see people from the past or people we don't see often, and we've had our glow up, if you will, and we're no longer willing to tolerate certain types of behavior. We've just grown and to a different person which is a beautiful thing.

[00:38:18] And not everybody likes that because maybe it shows them how much they haven't grown. Maybe they feel uncomfortable that they really haven't changed at all or have been willing or able to do so. And so there's a little bit of a conflict there. And here you are celebrating. You've put in the work. You're celebrating. You finally care about yourself in a really meaningful way. And not only is that not acknowledged or celebrated, but it's actually looked upon as a bad thing.

[00:38:43] Dr Ally: It's hard to be close to jealous people because they constantly want to tear you down in order to maybe make their decisions seem more right to them. Because I think that we do bump into that a lot when we make different decisions. I think you mentioned this earlier that it inadvertently invalidates people's decisions.

[00:39:00] You don't mean to invalidate their decision just by being yourself. But they can't see the separation between the two of you, maybe because of their own pathology and their own trauma. So also understanding that the people that we're interacting with are traumatized and have their own issues and stuff, so that's why they're coming at you like this.

[00:39:16] But then it's like, where do I put somebody that can't celebrate my win? My win, meaning I go to therapy, and I've worked on my anger, or my this issue, that issue, that issue. And if you're not able to celebrate that with me, when you're just trying to pull me back into it, you now have to belong somewhere else.

[00:39:40] So there's been a lot of black and white conversation about, going no contact with family. I'm not going to tell anybody to be in contact with someone they shouldn't be. So I don't have an official perspective, but I call it black and white because it is a little black and white, and there are shades. And I do believe a lot of people who go no contact have already engaged in the shades of gray.

[00:39:58] They've already done all the things to get where they are. But there are ways in which we can figure out where a person belongs. I heard someone talk about it as a room. It's like a big, wedding hall or something. There are some people that are going to be at the table, the family table with you.

[00:40:13] Those are your people who have proven to you. They're tried and true. They're on your side. They have your back. And then there's people who are close, maybe not at that table, who are in the front few rows. And then progressively people get pushed further and further back. And if you're jealous of me and my progress, you might be almost in the lobby of my life. That means I call you once a year.

[00:40:34] Maybe I don't come to Thanksgiving next year. Maybe I come for five minutes because I got to go to my partner's Christmas now or Thanksgiving now. But that's, again, a boundary that we set. It doesn't even always have to be articulated because sometimes you've expressed these boundaries ad nauseum.

[00:40:48] You've said it over and over again. And so you do get to make a decision to be like, this person can't even tolerate me being great. Because a lot of times it is triggering for them. And you know what? Maybe I just, again, come for five minutes, eat a little bit of the yams that I wanted, and I go home.

[00:41:03] Kate: Yeah. Thank you for that. I'd love to hear your perspective on-- diving into race relations and everything going on in your experience as a non-white woman living in America in these times. Again, that's a whole other show, and I'd love to have you back to discuss it, but there is some discomfort now I think, especially after the election. And I'll leave it broad, but is there anything that you want to say or express in terms of your experience?

[00:41:33] Dr Ally: I think it is incredibly broad, and I think that at the end of the day, these past few years, what these, especially with this election has shown me is that we have this impression that we can connect with everyone. Social media makes us believe that we can do something to fundamentally change six billion, seven billion, eight billion lives.

[00:41:58] Some people might be able to do that with their social media videos. I don't know. But not all of us. And humans haven't necessarily evolved to figure out how to extend all of this energy in eight billion different directions. So when it comes to race, ethnicity, culture, religion, orientation, identity, I think the same things can hold true.

[00:42:24] When you don't know something, listen. Ask, be inquisitive, be open, active listening, like, uh-huh, reflecting back, learning as much as you can without having to place too much burden on people sometimes. And then just being open enough to accept, like, okay, that's-- in yourself. You don't have to say it. But like, okay, that's not been my experience, but I'm glad that I've now been able to connect with this person. And if it's a question of, do you need something, do you need something?

[00:42:54] Because now I think post-election for me, it's who's in my group. Who's in my circle? Not like my group like my race, but who's in my phone? Who do I talk to? Who are the people whose lives can be impacted positively by me? Who are the people that positively impact my life?

[00:43:13] These are the people that I really got to dig in with and entrench myself with. And obviously those people for me are all colors, shapes, sizes, but it's honing in because I think a lot of times we feel like the problem is huge, and it's too huge for us to really understand or comprehend.

[00:43:29] So getting small, getting organic, actively listening, sitting down with people, and just being with them. Because we're different in a lot of ways, but we're also the same, and so many more. One study shows that things like prejudice, for example, are dismantled through proximity. The closer you are to a group that you may have pre-existing beliefs about can be dismantled if you just spend time with people from within that group.

[00:43:57] Kate: Yeah, that's why I just wish that people would befriend or get to know. And that's why, for me, I'm grateful I've spent most of my adult life in New York City and Los Angeles, very diverse places, people from all over the world, and have access to all people. I love meeting people so different from me because you can learn from them.

[00:44:18] And then you have the people who say, well, I'm colorblind. I love everybody. And I say, "That's not the answer either." You want to acknowledge somebody's heritage. Ask them about it. Ask them about their experience. They may not want to talk about it.

[00:44:32] For you, again, we could give a whole dissertation on it, but what has your experience been like being a black woman in America? I'm so glad that I was in grad school with a transgender woman. Because I see now her demographic is just under attack, and she feels unsafe. And she's just like all of us. It's just she chose to change sex and identity, and she's brilliant. But the persecution that she has been under because of that decision, I just think if people really knew her, just even her, they'd have a whole different perspective on all of it.

[00:45:11] Dr Ally: We all want some of the same things. We want to feel good about who we are, our identity. And for some people, identity has to do more with physical body. Some is spiritual body, some is cognitive body. We all have different parts. We can go down a rabbit hole of how different psychologists have interpreted the idea and concept of self, but we all want to feel good about ourselves.

[00:45:33] And we will do a lot of things in order to feel good. A lot of people who maybe do something to harm someone will engage in this cognitive dissonance process to make it okay that they did it. Because at the end of the day, they want to feel good about who they are.

[00:45:47] We want to be safe. We want to be able to maneuver through our lives without risk of harm. We want the people around us to be safe, and we want to thrive. I don't know of any group of people who don't want those things. And so when we start to align with our similarities, it can be very helpful.

[00:46:05] And then like you were saying, not ignoring the fact that there are very real differences. There's this joke. I watched this old episode of SNL from Hillary, when Hillary lost the election, and it's like Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock. And there's a bunch of the other white cast members are in the room, and they're all like, "No, no, she's going to win. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine." And Dave Chapelle's just like, "Okay. All right."

[00:46:32] And then they're like, "Oh my god, she didn't win. We're freaking out." And then him and Chris Rock are like, "For black folks, things have been hard always." Democrat, Republican, things get better. Things get worse. But when you have certain ancestral experiences, it's like, okay.

[00:46:50] But then a lot of my white friends are damn devastated. And I'm like, "It's devastating. This sucks. But listen, my mom couldn't eat in restaurants when she was a kid because of the color of her skin." So I think there's a level of what we do when things get difficult because we've had so much difficulties. No matter your socioeconomic status, no matter your perspective, no matter your religion, things get hard. So it's interesting.

[00:47:15] We could definitely talk about it forever. But it's one of the reasons why when I hear a lot of people talking about like, "Ooh, these universities are making kids liberal and this and that." No, what they're doing is they're exposing kids to other kids. That's one of the really big factors about college that helps to make people more accepting, is now they just met more people.

[00:47:36] They're going to classes with different people. They're sitting in the lunchroom with different people. They're going on trips, and they're in the dorms with them. And they're like, "Oh, your story and my story are very similar." And then they're taking a few classes that open their minds just about reading and literature, and really it's proximity. And so it's not a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing to get to contact other people and accept them and love them for who they are.

[00:47:58] Kate: If you were running for president and right now a huge issue in our country, sadly, is just the divisiveness for a million reasons on a million topics. But in your experience and from a psychological perspective, what is something that we can all practice that will help us come together even if we don't agree on big or small topics?

[00:48:24] Dr Ally: That's a hard one. I think one thing we have to do is accept that we're all not going to come together. We never were. Trump didn't start that. There have been lots of people that were like, "I will never change my mind about something," which is why when it even comes to connecting the family, there's a certain level of acceptance. We have to acknowledge that not everything is perfect. Not every family is going to look like the family that's on TV.

[00:48:50] And there's sometimes not enough therapy. There's not enough spirituality. There's not enough anything that will change that. So there's a level of acceptance that I think we must engage in as a country that there are going to be certain factions and certain polar sides that are never going to come together.

[00:49:06] And I think the wish was that that was fewer people than maybe we see. I think if we're hoping that more people were willing to come to the middle and agree, and we might end up seeing that soon once people calm down, but we also can't forget that we just went through the trauma of the pandemic. We've all been through a lot and pretended like nothing happened. We just came out of it and we're like--

[00:49:28] Kate: That we're not all traumatized and exhausted. I know.

[00:49:32] Dr Ally: We're traumatized. We're exhausted. We're broke. The financial instability we're experiencing with the perspective of more financial instability coming. And again, like I said earlier, we are good adapters, but that doesn't mean that you don't experience the negative effects of trauma when you are experiencing a trauma.

[00:49:50] And we have been through the biggest trauma of my life, the biggest trauma of my life. The pandemic was crazy. And it was just like, okay, it's over. Go back to work. Go back to the bars. Go back to restaurants. Go back to shopping. We're done. Hooray! I just got COVID three weeks ago.

[00:50:09] Kate: And it's awful. I was so sick with COVID earlier this year. It is awful. And then it lingers, and you feel like crap. That's going on. All the years of all this election and political trauma, the social, and racial turmoil that's going, the wars that are happening.

[00:50:28] There's so much, and I'm not bringing it up to be Debbie downer, but I want to just acknowledge how much we're all managing. I take so many classes and continuing ed, and you get in these courses with all these successful, brilliant people doing all this work, and everybody is dealing with so much. People who are 60 years old and crushing it in their career, they've lost their job because of the result of an election or because of this. It really is.

[00:50:54] And I want to acknowledge that and really just say to everyone how well you're doing. And then if you're listening to this show and doing this work and open to these conversations and reflecting and having these raw reflections, thank you. That's why I created this show, so that we can talk about these things and go much deeper than the makeup that we're wearing, what we're shopping for, and all of those things. And really just get in there.

[00:51:20] And it is going to be uncomfortable, but what are we doing here? What kind of life do we want to live? And that's why I appreciate-- I said in class this morning, it's getting more and more challenging to be close friends with people who aren't professional certified coaches or therapists, or at least people who genuinely care enough to listen to you and to talk about these things. And when you say you're upset, to offer more than, "Oh, well. That sucks." So anyway, my day, we're not seeing and hearing one another.

[00:51:48] Dr Ally: We're becoming fundamentally aware that there's different levels of consciousness, that not everybody has the ability or interest in really diving deep into who they are. And then using that as a reflection to understand the experiences of other people. We can call it consciousness, or we can call it like emotional intelligence, a lot of different words for it, metacognition, the thinking about thinking.

[00:52:15] We're even learning that some people don't see images in their mind when they think of things. I could literally taste an apple right now if I chose to. I literally can taste a Jolly Rancher in my mouth right now. People have different levels of connection, and so I think that we maybe have been historically expecting people who didn't have the ability to make these connections to make connection that we just assumed that they had, and it's not a bad thing because studies show that folks who don't connect to a lot of these thoughts all the time, the happier, happier. So you know what?

[00:52:52] Kate: Ignorance is bliss sometimes, right?

[00:52:57] Dr Ally: Right. And so what I do sometimes is I take a break from all the heavy thinking, the heavy stuff, and I do go, like when you're talking about, fashion, design, beauty. And I'm like, "Let me just go to a museum and look at something cute."

[00:53:11] Kate: Thank you for that.

[00:53:12] Dr Ally: Give me my desk pink.

[00:53:14] Kate: It's so funny you said that because I was looking at my calendar today, and I feel like the little kid with the reward or the dog about to get the treat. Then it's Thanksgiving. But it's just looking at my calendar and saying, "This day, I don't have to think deeply," which is one of my favorite things to do, but I do also need that.

[00:53:32] I'm like, "I want to watch some crappy show. I want to eat a little crappy food." I'm not even trying to eat healthy that day. I'm like, "I want some chocolate. I want some cake or whatever. I'm going to have my pizza." Whatever I'm going to have on my day off and just shut it down. And yes, think about fluffy things because we do need that break. But also, if you do want to evolve and reach some of these goals and things, we do need to have some of these conversations.

[00:53:59] Dr Ally: Yeah. There's a book that I would recommend. It's called It's OK That You're Not OK. And I've never just read it all the way through, but I read the chapters that I need. And I think it, for me, has been very self-affirming that when shit goes wrong, the most natural thing to be is uncomfortable and upset. And how do we continue living while that's happening? Because we're definitely living in wild time, something we haven't seen since 1920s.

[00:54:33] Kate: And that we're here for it. And I try to say, "We all chose to be here." I do believe in that too. We chose to be here. We really are living. What did I say? I felt bad for the younger kids, the kids that were in high school and college during COVID. I really felt for how it disrupted that experience and that special time in our lives with connecting socially, especially.

[00:54:54] And it was a few years ago that it was just people who are, let's say 18 years old, most of their life, every year there's been an unprecedented event. Every year, this unprecedented thing happens in that. And so I want to acknowledge it not to exhaust all of us, but to pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves a high five. Because we truly have lived through so much. And let's honor ourselves for doing that. And that we're still being parents. We're still creating things. We're still showing up and doing our best.

[00:55:30] And that's why I want to do this show too, to just give people the encouragement, the empowerment, the advice, any tips that can keep them going. So there's one more topic that is important that I'd love to talk to you about before we head out today, about beauty, and it's about a book and a project that you're working on.

[00:55:47] And that's another thing. Even with you, I don't know if it's ever happened in your studies or in your line of work where people don't take you as seriously because you're so beautiful. I had a colleague, was going to raise money as a CEO for her company.

[00:56:00] And the man said to her, "Well, you're a little too hot to be a CEO." And so I put you in that category because you're so stunningly beautiful, and you have this higher education. And beauty is just such a subjective thing, but also it plays such a role in our lives whether we care about it or not, whether we're deemed beautiful or not. What do you want to say on the topic of beauty?

[00:56:29] Dr Ally: Listen, I'm trying to control how much I do say, because I could say everything. But at the end of the day, you're absolutely right that one of the ways in which beauty changes us is it changes us because we see ourselves in the eyes of society. So how society sees us is how we begin to evolve our concept of who it is we are.

[00:56:50] And obviously our family of origin can change that, but we can't forget our family of origin might have been raised in our same culture and society. And so something as what really is trivial as physical appearance can actually tell us what our worth is, and tell us if we feel like we're more valuable or less valuable.

[00:57:14] And that's referred to as the concept of the halo effect, is this idea that when you first encounter somebody, if they're like really good at a sport, or they're really pretty, or they seem to be really smart, you tend to put them in this little bubble of like, "Oh, they must be better than everybody else."

[00:57:29] Look what happened with like R. Kelly. He has this talent, so people ignore all the other bad things and focus on the good things. So the beauty is good principle is a concept that came from the halo effect. It's this idea that beautiful people are somehow better, are somehow smarter, faster, stronger, all of that.

[00:57:50] And then because of that, sometimes beautiful people actually do perform better, because they think they should perform better. So they feel comfortable enough to. Whereas when you're told by society that you're not attractive, that is actually more harmful than being told you're beautiful is helpful. Because it pushes you to the fringes. It tells you, don't try. Don't work hard.

[00:58:10] And I think as a society we've got to figure out what we're going to do about this because we've got to fix it. We cannot lock people into place because it's something that's actually supposed to be fun. Beauty is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be fun to choose what you want to wear today and what kind of makeup.

[00:58:25] You don't have to wear the same type of makeup that everyone else on social media is doing. If you want to do something entirely different, you should and can do that. But what traps us is the way in which society judges us based on something we can't control, the way we woke up in this planet and in this world. And I have had professors and supervisors when I was training in psychology. They would tell me like, "You've got to stop dressing well at work." I wasn't crazy. I wasn't crazy. But I would wear colors because psych hospitals can get sad.

[00:59:07] Kate: Yeah

[00:59:07] Dr Ally: And they were like, "Wear more khaki." And I was like, I "can't." I was like, "All the people are khaki. All the clothes are khaki. All the buildings here are khaki. We're in the middle of the desert. The sand is khaki." I was like, "If I see one more khaki thing, I'm going to be in the psych hospital. I need some color."

[00:59:24] So I would show up to work in yellow and stuff like that. But there was a conversation about the way that I physically looked and how I use that or can't use that in therapy. And I even ran into an issue where I got out of grad school when I was really young, and I was in grad school when I was young, and I looked young. I don't know if I look young anymore, but--

[00:59:47] Kate: Yes, you do.

[00:59:48] Dr Ally: It was hard. Thank you. Appreciate you. It was hard for older people to connect with a 26-year-old-girl, 27-year-old girl with a PhD. And I looked even younger than that. So they're like, "Baby, child, go home."

[01:00:03] Kate: Yeah.

[01:00:04] Dr Ally: And I still think it was a blessing. So I'm not like, "It was so hard. It was horrible to be young." But it was just another factor that I had to negotiate, again, adapt with. Because we're all given something, and we just have to figure out how to use it. And beauty is another one of those things.

[01:00:22] Kate: It is. And then it's how do we define beauty? I'd love to get a definition, but on the flip side, there's plenty of physically beautiful people who the way they treat other people or the way they act makes them ugly. Or maybe it's the blonde in me. I'm grown up. There's the dumb blonde stereotype. And I know I get judged based on how I look all the time.

[01:00:43] I can see it in people. But you get the positives. So we've discussed that, but there's also the people who think you're dumb, who think you're a bitch, who you remind them of the mean girl in high school because of how you look. I've had people communicate to me in a shocked way about how nice I am, how smart I am. And I've been underestimated my whole life, but the fact that people are surprised-- usually women are surprised how nice I am, genuinely nice, and caring, and loving.

[01:01:12] And men it's, they're a little pissed by it, some of them, how smart I am, how educated I am. I remember one guy, this sports agent at Northwestern where I went to grad school, and I was there for an ESPN show taping, and he came up to me after, and he said, "Are you a model? Are you just in the audience to look beautiful?" And I looked at him like, "What is he talking about?"

[01:01:34] And then his next comment was, "You're not a student here, are you?" And I said, "Why? Do I look stupid?" And it was like a whole thing, so there's also that too. There's some people who are beautiful and can be vapid or they think you're vapid as well. But what even is beauty? Again, it's subjective, but beautiful according to whom?

[01:01:57] Dr Ally: One, when people underestimate you-- this is a little sociopathic piece of my brain. I'm not a sociopath. I wished to be. It's not my lot in life. But the little piece of me that can connect with it, let them, and take everything. If someone's going to come to you acting stupid, being a jerk, and trying to take advantage of you in a way and say like, "Oh, you're only this one, two-dimensional thing," that sets something off in me. And I'm like, "Oh, you think I'm dumb. Okay." Because I've definitely had a lot of that.

[01:02:33] Kate: I'll show you. There is something about that. And I will say, and it makes me sad-- again, we all do things in our teens and 20s-- but I remember going on job interviews right out of college, and I would never wear my hair down, because I've got a lot of it, and I would make it darker and wear it back, and I guess in many ways I didn't even fully consciously know I was doing it at the time.

[01:02:55] I would make myself look uglier. I would wear the frumpier clothes, the ugly khaki skirt, conservative. And it makes me sad because it was communicated to me early, you're threatening. You're intimidating. Again, I'm 5 foot 10 and look like Barbie. And it is that notion of ugly yourself down, dumb yourself down, tone it down, quiet down so you don't upset or offend or intimidate anybody. And it's like, F that. And now I'm like, "Let me be blonder. Let me be bolder. Let me talk about all the things." But it's sad.

[01:03:28] Dr Ally: Yeah. And it was a different time because when we were younger, you genuinely wouldn't get the job. If you were too intimidating, if you didn't fit the culture. That was the language that I got. Like, do you fit the culture here? But luckily, we've seen society shift and what they accept and how there are segments of society that still may have this older perspective of like, you've got to dumb it down. You've got to look less than.

[01:03:54] But then there's another segment of society that is much more accepting and welcoming. And also now that we work from home more, I think there's a little bit more flexibility and people are able to have their own personal style because they're not having to go into an office every day that has rules about that.

[01:04:08] But yes, society wants consistency. It wants homogeny. It wants to know what it is it's going to get, which is economical. We create these things called heuristics because we can't know, let's say, every woman on the planet. So we create a shortcut in our mind of what a woman is. And given how you were raised, where you were raised, your mom, your aunt, your sister, you formed an idea of what a woman is.

[01:04:40] So when you encounter a woman, most people will say like, "Oh, okay. This is my do do do do of a woman, but if she's not like that, I have to adjust." And hopefully you do this privately so you're not looking like an ass while you're talking and being like, "Oh, you're a blonde and you have thoughts? Weird." Like, what? Why would you think that?

[01:05:06] I know why you would think that. Because you watch too much TV. Because there's actually no correlation to hair color and intelligent. You just watch television shows that played up on old tropes that makes sense. So it shows to me that your parents left you in front of a TV for a long time, and maybe you don't interact with a lot of people to a deep level. And then you can't accommodate new information.

[01:05:27] So you meet a woman that has blonde hair and is very smart and wonderful. And now you need to change your perspective of what a woman is. You have to add that to your little heuristic, but a lot of people can't do that. They just say, "No, you're just the weird outlier."

[01:05:43] And so we've, as a society, got to start doing better to open up our perspectives and understand that there are some things we didn't ask for. Like I was saying, I was considering a PHD in genetics. I do not know of a correlation between genes for blonde hair and genes for IQ. There isn't that. As far as I know, that has not been discovered.

[01:06:09] And so it's not founded in reality. It's founded in social perspectives and social desire to limit people's mobility. Because we also can't forget that we have a society, and this gets to what beauty is, an American society, white women have been the standard of what is beautiful. And not all white women, but a certain segment of white women.

[01:06:32] And if you don't fit that very small sliver, they want you to know that bad things can happen to you. We won't marry you. We won't treat you as well. We won't esteem you. But if you do fit this tiny sliver of what is beautiful, we'll give you the moon. When in reality, they'll give you containment.

[01:06:50] They'll have you on shelf in a cage so everyone can look at you. And I think that women are noticing this now, and we are realizing slowly that there's not as much benefit for the women in the cage on the shelf. They're not getting as much as maybe they might really want because now we're seeing women's health rights are being stripped away.

[01:07:15] So am I really this protected thing, or am I actually a commodity where you actually taught that me, my hair, my skin, my sides, my nose, my eyes are just something to make you look better? And that maybe none of this really means anything. So maybe this idea of what is beautiful in our country, because our country has seen a few things as beautiful, bare skin, body size has changed. It changes, but it's normally lean, slim.

[01:07:44] Kate: Yes.

[01:07:46] Dr Ally: Lean, slim. We've seen pivot, large eyes, smaller nose, smaller round mouth, longer hair, for women, shorter stature. We've seen these types of things repeated over and over again. And we see little changes, eyebrows change, hairstyle changes, updo's, downdo's, body size, but consistency. Skin color, light. Hair color, typically light.

[01:08:14] Body's typically small, eyes typically big, things that are youthful, make people look young. These are things that we see over and over again. But I think we need to liberate beauty from culture. I think it is something that is for us to enjoy. Beautiful people, beautiful places, beautiful things, beautiful vistas and park.

[01:08:36] It is something that is meant to make us feel in awe, to stop us in our tracks and have you go like, "Oh my God, look at that sunset. Everybody, gather. Look at the sunset." And we've removed human beauty from that, and we've turned it into something that's rejecting, limiting. And I want to undo that.

[01:08:57] Kate: Is that why it was important for you to take on this topic of beauty?

[01:09:03] Dr Ally: Yeah, because I saw how much it shaped people and how much it changes you if you are beautiful or if you're not beautiful. And there's negatives on both sides for people, experiencing both, the really pretty girls who experience a lot of the rejection. Men don't want to come to them and talk to them, and they feel like they're always called stupid and this. And then the women who aren't attractive who are also rejected, told they're not good enough.

[01:09:23] They're not smart. You're sharing the same things on both sides because the problem isn't beautiful. It's women. The problem is they hate women. They want us to be controllable. And once we start to realize that, it's not really about this. This is just an excuse to tell us how to feel, what we should do with our body.

[01:09:49] We should smile. We should cover it, we should expose it. Everyone has an opinion. And at the end of the day, my beauty is for me. I want to be able to look in the mirror and say, "Girl. You look great no matter what." Whatever I'm wearing. But society wants to dictate what we do because it wants to control women. It's a whole thing by the book.

[01:10:08] Kate: Yeah, I can't wait. It's coming out in a year or so. What is it called?

[01:10:13] Dr Ally: It's called The Problem With Pretty.

[01:10:15] Kate: Ooh. 2026. The Problem With Pretty. I can't wait to read this and dive in and have you back to talk about it. And I think I'll just leave everyone with this and we'll head out here is about pretty and beauty to me is connection. It's conversations like this. It's feeling comfortable in your skin, regardless of your weight, what you're wearing, and all those things.

[01:10:42] I love nice clothes, nice things, nice hair, makeup, and skincare as much as the next person, but you will never feel more beautiful than when you are in the arms of someone who sees you, loves you, and cares for you. And even if that person is you or your puppy, whomever, but just being able to look in the mirror and just say, I'm proud of you. You've been through it. You keep going. You've stayed in integrity and authenticity. You know who you are. There's so many things that make us beautiful.

[01:11:12] And I really want to start cultivating more of those characteristics and learning what that even means. We can change things. That's the thing I want to do on this show, is change consciousness, change the world by these conversations, these ideas, these thoughts, and that we can have a different thought.

[01:11:30] We can change. We can have different opinions. It doesn't matter if everybody else thinks this thing. If we think something different and that becomes our truth and how we choose to live our life based on that truth, that's power. Beauty is power and power is beauty.

[01:11:47] So anyway, we could go on and on, and you clearly need to come back, but I'd love to give you just that final thought that you'd love to have. We've tackled many topics, and we've talked about many things, and there's so much swirling around, but I'd love if you could leave us with a piece of advice that can give us more inner peace as it relates to all these topics as we head into another beautiful new year.

[01:12:11] Dr Ally: Yeah. So many final thoughts, but I think one is that wherever you go, you are there. And so when we do the work to connect with ourselves, to constantly learn ourselves, because we change all the time, so we are constantly having to be with ourselves, date ourselves, and understand the motivations that we have, the better off we are. Because we can't control the outside, but we can control what's going on inside.

[01:12:39] Kate: Yeah. And to partner with an incredible therapist or coach like yourself, like me, or all the people out there. And it is so important to have that thought partner in life who really can see you and help you navigate. And I just appreciate you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom and your knowledge with us.

[01:12:55] You're such a gem. And thanks to all of you for being here, especially until the end. We appreciate you. Happy holidays. I'm giving you a big hug, wishing you all the best. May all your dreams come true going into '25. Thank you so much. We'll be here next week, same time, same place, and we'll see you then. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.