 Hey there, I'm Drew and you are listening to and maybe watching The Anxious Truth. This is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders, and anxiety recovery. So if you're struggling with things like panic attacks, agoraphobia, or OCD, this is the place for you. Today I'm joined by two very special guests, Joshua Fletcher and Kimberly Quinlan, two of my favorite therapist friends, and we're going to talk about the idea that in recovery from an anxiety disorder, it's very difficult to serve multiple masters. So stay tuned. Hello everybody, welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 242 recorded in January of 2023. I am Drew Lincellata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth, and I am happy that you are here on what appears to be kind of a bad hair day. So if you're listening to the podcast instead of watching on YouTube, consider yourself lucky. Anyway, welcome to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about the idea that serving multiple masters in the process of recovery from an anxiety disorder is really difficult. This came up in my Facebook group, basically centered around metaphobia, which is the fear of vomiting, and how it's very difficult to recover from your anxiety disorder and guard your metaphobia and not touch it if the two conflict, especially if one of the problems is that anxiety makes you nauseous or makes you afraid that you may vomit. And the conversation expanded from there to include other things like perfectionism and people pleasing and type A personalities and overachieving and multitasking and being the perfect parent. So it's a really good discussion to have because I think it's a topic that is underserved and we probably need to look at it a little more. So I asked my friends, Kimberly Quinlan and Josh Fletcher, two of my favorite therapist friends to come on the podcast. It's been a long time since the three of us did anything like this together. And we talked about that. So before we get to that, which is about a half hour discussion, I think you're really going to like I'm just going to remind you very quickly that the anxious truth is more than just this podcast episode. There's 241 previous free podcast episodes, all kinds of social media content. There's a monthly webinar I do with Joanna Hardis that talks about learning the art of distress tolerance. There are three books that I've written about anxiety and anxiety recovery. All of that can be found on my website at the anxious truth.com. So go check it out and evaluate yourself of all the goodies, take advantage of them because they are there. So let's get to the interview. Kim and Josh are here. I will come back at the end to wrap it up. See you in a bit. We're back. Jazz hands. Jazz hands. It's jazz hands. See, that's what makes you guys better than me, clearly. It's the ah. Anyway, we are back with Kimberly Quinlan next to me and Josh Fletcher down there. It's probably been a year and a half since the three of us did one of these sort of things together. Thank you guys. I think it has. I think it's been middle of 2021. Early 2021. Early 2021, maybe. One of the last times we were on camera together, Kim was huddled in her in-laws' closet with her laptop trying to livestream at a family. I'll never forget it. I'll never forget it. It's been a while, man. Barely spoken since. Yeah, barely. Can't get away from these two. Anyway, I've tried. I've tried, they think. Anyway, so thank you guys for coming by. I appreciate it. Why don't we take a second and just introduce, as if they don't know you. They know you are clearly. But for those of you watching in the future who are new to all this, Kim, tell us who you are. I am Kim Billy Quinlan. I am an anxiety specialist. And I'm a half-American and half-Australian. That's all I am. That's all I am. Joshua. I'm Joshua Fletcher. I'm a psychotherapist based in the UK. And I specialize in anxiety disorders. So there you go. We have a lot of expertise in this room. He's 100% UK and 100%. But there's always a background there, right? The Brits were just being invaded constantly for thousands of years. Yeah. And actually, a lot of my heritage comes from Wales and Scotland, despite having Fletcher, which is an incredibly English surname. Yeah. I mean, I'm not really that bothered into looking at family trees and stuff, but that's what I've been told. I'm actually 50% British myself. Yeah. This is what you guys tuned in for. Like, Ancestry. Yeah. I thought we were going to talk about anxiety recovery, but clearly it's a genealogy podcast. It's all fine. 100% Italian and completely boring. Actually, I think when I did the stupid genetic thing, I'm like 15% Greek islands and math, which was a surprise. Literally next door. So boring. I was hoping for some Viking or something, but nope. Anyway, I invited Kim and Josh on to talk about the idea that it's very difficult to serve multiple masters in recovery. And this started by way of background and a post about emetophobia, the fear of vomiting in my Facebook group, where it becomes really apparent that there are people who are suffering from emetophobia, which is a real thing and quite common actually, more than I ever thought it was, where people want to get better, but also want to maintain they don't want to maintain their status. That's the wrong thing to say, but we'll draw a fence around emetophobia and say, I can't touch that. That cannot be touched. We cannot touch that. But I also want to intentionally make myself anxious and nervous and do scary things to get better from my anxiety disorder. And my assertion was that often leads to this, where you're having a hard time making any sort of progress because you're trying to hang on to that fear or protect it and accommodate it while being afraid of everything else. And it led to a discussion, excuse me, that expanded to a lot of other like multiple masters that we try to serve, like trying to serve perfectionism and trying to serve people pleasing and trying to serve being a type A personality or a multitasker or the person that makes everybody happy and also try to recover at the same time. And the assertion at that discussion was that that is a very difficult road to hoe. You're serving multiple masters at the same time. Who wants to jump in on that with thoughts? Something profound to start with. Profound. Kim's good. I'm not good at profound. I'll jump in on this. And if you put some melodic piano over what I say, then that would make it sound more profound than what it actually is. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people see anxious recovery or recovery from anxiety disorders through the lens of just kind of behaviorism sometimes, you know, like if I do my exposures and change my behavior, a lot of it physical, then, you know, I should see improvements. I should get to anxious recovery. And yeah, I mean, like physical exposures or exposures to stimulus are really important. But for me, as a therapist and I work with people, one of the biggest stumbling blocks that I see is the internal narrative that my clients or people take into these exposures. And they're usually restrictive self critical internal narratives. And I don't believe that you can kind of recover if that internal narrative isn't compassionate, or even rational sometimes, because I mean, I always kind of, you know, kind of shudder when people say, you know, I've recovered, I've been recovered, I want anxious recovery. And actually looking at its definition, you need to see it through the lens of compassion and kind of rationality. Interestingly, I had a kind of anxiety panic attack a few hours ago. And it lasted for about five minutes. It wasn't very nice. But what followed that was me saying, actually, I've been really stressed recently, there's been a very stressful day today. I've had a very stressful Christmas period. I've got loads of deadlines coming up. And yeah, it did tap into that panic side. Now, the me of years ago would have said, Oh, no, it's back. Oh, I can't recover. This is a sign of my failure. What have I done wrong? I'm going to go back to my 10 self health books, listen to drew and Kim's podcast, do all these things. What have I got wrong? What if I've got it all wrong, blah, blah, blah, and on the hamster wheel out of the gun? But instead, I was like, you know, that makes sense. You know, do I still kind of consider myself recovered from an anxiety disorder? Yeah, yeah, I do. I do. And interestingly, this weekend on Saturday, I mean, I'm perhaps I have a phobia of flying, both being in the air and also just being claustrophobic. And I'm going to go do it for your flying course on Saturday. And we sit on the plane, go around to exposures. Some people and the perfectionists and the old perfectionist in me might have gone, oh, you're not truly recovered, you can't get on the plane, you can't do that. But now I'm like, no, I couldn't access most of my life. And this is just, I think I'm going to do. And it's because of the way I see it, the compassion I have for myself. A lot of people, particularly in our community will be like, well, if I'm not completely anxiety free and don't have any reaction to anything ever, then I have not recovered and I have not affected it. And I think that's a really important topic. You're definition of recovery and also challenging that inner critic. Yeah. Okay, you said former perfectionist. That's that. Well, I wanted, I have to do this perfectly, but I also want to get over my fear flying. It's really hard to do both of those things because you're doing a hard thing and you're not going to get it perfect. Yeah, well, actually, I've put off flying for several years and because of this inner critic. And now I'm actually kind of looking forward to really scared. And I'm going to document it on my socials and record it, probably turn into a reel. And I'm going to show it all. And I just don't really, I don't have that kind of perfectionism anymore. I don't want, I'm actually looking forward to showing people my vulnerability, which, you know, I would have never said that 10 years ago. But yeah, there we are. I think it's a good point because during the process of recovery, some of those old, I must call them identity markers have to start to crumble a little bit. I'm the perfectionist, I'm the type A, I'm the overachiever. If we don't drop some of those, it gets really hard, I think. Yeah, perfectionism is a horrible trait because it doesn't even exist. Nothing's perfect. You know, if you, nothing, there's no such thing as perfection. Yeah, it's pretty close. It's a good microphone. If you're listening, if you're listening at home, I love this microphone. It makes you sound 10 times better. You know, hello. Hello. Hello. ASMR channel. ASMR channel. There we go. Anyway, now you're right. Perfectionism is definitely a problem. I totally destroyed that. See, so when we're on TikTok and you're putting on funny hats, I got you. Yeah, yeah. Kim, you have anything you want to toss in on that? Sure. So I think to add on to what Josh is saying is, I think it very much, in terms of like, can you, this idea of recovery, and it's very much dependent on each person, but I think it also depends on your specific set of symptoms. So as a clinician, if a client came to me and we work in, we work in hierarchies in the work that I do. So if someone came to me and they said, I have, let's use Josh as an example, uh, plain phobia and I have social anxiety and I have a metaphobia to use that example, we could actually ask them like, what would recovery look like for you? What would fully functioning look like for you? And we could make that, those questions determine whether or not they actually do need to look at those disorders for recovery. So a really good example is a lot of people with a phobia are flying. They can go on to live highly functioning lives and never have to face that fear ever. They just might say, this is where I live. In fact, in Australia, I have a neighbor who is, they're from multiple different countries and they're like, I just will never fly again. I'm, I'm happy. I don't need to fly. It's a fear I don't need to face. I'm good. And so with that specific phobia, absolutely don't need to target it if you don't want to, if you've agreed to the consequences of not flying, right? Whereas there's other disorders like a metaphobia, the fear of vomiting, where the trigger can show up in any area of your life, the nausea, the, you know, the fear of other people vomiting in front of you. A lot of people with a metaphobia don't go to theme parks or fourth of July parades or whatever in fear that someone else might. And so therefore it's very difficult for them to say, I'm not going to address that without it impacting their definition of recovery or their functioning. So I think it's very much independent of each person. And I think it's also dependent on the disorder. Like to say, I'm not going to treat my social anxiety. I know I never want to see people again. That might, that may impact your ability to recover if you don't want to address it completely. Now, again, I want to be really clear. Everyone gets to choose what recovery looks like. Like I am in no place to tell people what they do and don't have to do. But depending on the diagnosis and the disorder may indicate whether that is needing to be addressed or not. Yeah. I think for me, it's a matter of addressing sometimes the frustration you see in people. And it came up with a metaphobia. I don't want to focus on that, but it is one. It's an illustration that brought it to life for me where people who are telling their recovery stories and will always qualify the work they're doing with. And I have a metaphobia. So remember, we have to be careful that I don't do anything that might trigger that. But I also, I want to do this thing, but when I have a metaphobia and for some reason I couldn't stay in the anxiety, I couldn't stay with starting to get nauseous because I have a metaphobia and then they bail and they want to know why they're not making progress, which I understand why they're confused. But then they start to beat themselves up. Well, you don't have to do that. Here's probably a reason why you're trying to serve those multiple masters. So it's more of a, we don't get to pick. I agree with that 100%. I don't get to pick with your recovery or even your life is supposed to look like. I could just sort of help you get to the life that you want to. But if those things are opposed to each other and you're getting frustrated and don't know why, that might be a reason, one of those reasons. We'll mess those things. Yeah. And also, like in most cases, a metaphobia is that fear of anxiety that lack of control. Kim came onto the panic pod and we did a specific episode on a metaphobia. It was really good and I've had a metaphobia in the past. It wasn't too long. It was just one of the many shape-shifting forms of anxiety and a fear of fear until I got neurovirus and that definitely cured my metaphobia. I really did. I was like, well... Pregnancy will do it too, you know. Pregnancy, neurovirus, dodgy hangover, whatever. Yeah, that was it. I can sympathize with people who have a metaphobia as well. It's one of those exposures that you just, because everyone hates feeling nauseous, some of the worst feelings of going, when then you've got nausea and fear on top as well, isn't great. But at the same time, I encourage, don't restrict your life around it. You might be sick. That's okay. Trust me, it's worth it at the end. I remember just being bored. I remember actually having a conversation with someone when I went running to the toilet for a 10th time. I was so bored of it by then. I feared for so long, I was like, just chatting away. I was doing it. I was like, yeah, but it's one of those, I can also sympathize. Why would you wake up and purposely make yourself nauseous? I wouldn't. I didn't. It was just luck. It's a weird one. I know you don't want to focus too much on metaphobia. It's okay, but I think it's a good illustration of what happened. Yeah, but then there were some that were really kind of restrictive. I know a metaphobia can be restrictive because I would stop going to restaurants or would go eat a curry when I love a good curry or any kind of exotic food in the context of comparison to British food. I was just like, yeah, you notice that when your life becomes constricted, but when I started to get angry at it and stuff, I was like, no, I want my life back now and I want some of it back. It became almost like battle's the wrong word because you resist, but it was a bit like, no, I'm not my life back. Let's do it. I don't know if it's messy. Let's win messy rather than win perfect. Right. The way I explain it to my patients is a lot of anxiety disorders in general. If we took away the disorders and the diagnoses and the content of all of them, it's often the fear of fear. Across the board, it's like, I don't want to be uncomfortable. I will often say to my clients, while you don't want to do this one thing, let's say it's flying for an example or you have a fear of small holes or there are many different types of phobias that people needles and so far. While you don't want to do that, it's one of the best insurance policies for your life. I use that as a metaphor is to try to expose to all of them. And when I say expose, meaning practice doing them because really what that does is it teaches us one important lesson, which is I can tolerate discomfort. And so much of all of the disorders are I can't tolerate the discomfort. Whether it be facing one fear or reducing a compulsion or doing the avoidant thing, the thing that you've been avoiding. So so much of it is that's the insurance policy is at the end of the day, walking out of my house today, I have not a lot of fear, I will have anxiety, but I know no matter what discomfort I've experienced, I've faced it. You know what I mean? So it's a really wonderful insurance policy. But again, go back to people with phobias tend to have a phobia and panic disorder as well. That's two big things to hit at once. So we would do it gradually and slowly. Sure. I love you're right. It's that I cannot face this discomfort. So sometimes serving two masters is okay, I hear you can I hear you, Josh, I have to learn to tolerate discomfort in this part where I'm dealing with my OCD or my grophobia. But I don't want to tolerate discomfort and everything else. So I will over plan my entire life, I will control everything else, I will make sure everybody's always happy with me. Like I can't I won't tolerate any of that discomfort anywhere else. I want to control everything else. But I'll let go when I do my exposures. And that seems to put people in a weird spot where they don't understand why their wheels are spinning a little bit. Like, okay, you did your ERP homework. That's awesome. But then you went right back to trying to control every other aspect of your life, which they're almost diametrically opposed. Or maybe I'm completely wrong here. I don't know. It's I'm just observing, you know, trying to point out what I say sometimes. Well, I think in in general, when you're looking at recovery and overcoming an anxiety disorder, it's it's an attitudinal shift. I noticed when I compare myself to deep within OCD and panic disorder, to now is that the only thing that's really changed is my attitude towards it. My attitude is complete. It's not an affronting attitude. It's not it's not a defensive attitude. It's not an angry attitude. It's a very passive and compassionate attitude. It's like, whatever, you know, don't give it wrong. There's frustration and stuff that kicks in. Well, really now. But then it's soon replaced by a passive and well, that's just anxiety. I remember when I wrote, I sent sent through my first ever book there when I was 23, it makes me cringe because it's written really poorly. But people seem to like it. And it's just like one of the main takeaways from it that I was so passionate about writing that was just three little words like it's just anxiety. And what I didn't realize is that over time, and I kept repeating this and that is an attitudinal shift instead of going, Oh, no, it's anxiety. Oh, it's my metophobia. Oh, it's my trauma. Oh, it's all these things. It's just, it's just anxiety. My body's going to threat. Whatever, you know, and but also what it's just anxiety in terms of the attitude towards what that means to me. A lot of people step one get the anxiety, then they step two, they get the fear of the anxiety, the fear of fear. And step three, what does that mean symbolically? Oh, well, I've got anxiety, I fear that anxiety. And now I'm afraid of what people think of me. I'm a failure. I've never going to overcome anxiety, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I must I love the umbrella of just, just anxiety. Like it's, it's not a big deal. And of course, it is a big deal. You know, I'll live with panic so I can leave my house for six months. It was awful. It was a big deal. The suffering was awful. But actually, when I started working on the attitude towards it, and that's what I do with my clients is just like, it's just anxiety. So someone sat in front of me and like, I'm having a panic attack. Like, all right. What do I do? Shall I box breathe? I don't really recommend you do that. Is there anything, is there a technique? Shall I look at five things that you can see in here if you want? Actually, why don't you just stay talking to me? Let's just have an inane conversation. Well, yeah, you know, we're going on holiday next year. I don't know. Okay. Well, where's your favorite holiday been? All right. Yeah, I went to, I went to Spain last year, right? Tell me about it. I can't, I can't concentrate. I think I'm going to die. I can't catch my breath. No, think about this. Because watch what happens. You don't actually have to do anything. And it's, again, it's the attitudinal shift. I think it's really important. It's just like, yeah, my attitude to it isn't a big thing. We don't need to fix it. Don't do anything with it. And you're not a failure for having it. And that attitude you would think would spill over outside of just recovery from your panic disorder, for instance. Like it's just anxiety also becomes it's just the napkins at Christmas dinner, as opposed to, oh my god, it's the wrong napkins. This is wrong. I'm a failure as a mom of terrible wife, terrible. Do you know what? Yeah, that actually happened with me. I didn't even think about it like that. Yeah, I didn't even acknowledge that. But yeah, actually it puts, it put a lot of things into perspective for me when I went through an anxiety disorder afterwards. I just didn't care. In fact, it put a lot of my OCD themes that just didn't ever come back because I was like, I just don't care. You know, because it puts it kind of into context. Don't get me wrong. OCD always comes back and bites me now and then. But in general, it's, yeah, just yeah, that attitude towards it I've also found that when I'm trying to be a perfectionist in my personal life, I won't control over that. Maybe it's, maybe it's healthy kind of stuff, you know, ambition. Maybe it's things I want to do in my work life, in my career. That can actually have an overspill as well. Oh, that's suddenly I'm getting anxious again and then I'm getting annoyed and getting anxious. So hold on. This is a reminder that I'm not always in control. Yeah, for me it was overachiever, multitasker, fastest guy in the room. You know, do I still have those propensities? Yeah, but they're just not so important to me anymore. I don't have to be that guy anymore. So it would have been really hard for me to take that attitudinal shift that you took, Josh, that I had to go undergo also. If I also continue to insist that I have to be that guy also, they can't coexist. So I think that these are subtle things that people might not even think about. But if you really think about that, oh, yeah, okay, that's cool. I could say, oh, it's just a panic attack. But then if I go and turn Thanksgiving dinner into a complete meltdown because the turkey is the wrong size, how can I have those, how can I have that attitude in one place but not the other in a way? Yes. Yeah. And I, sorry, I think that what's, what's laced here is with, to, to build off of again, what Josh is saying here about it's just anxiety is for me personally, I had generalized anxiety and needing disorder is, it wasn't just about feeling anxiety. It was also a lot of my perfectionism, which I still probably have a great deal of, is because I don't want to have other feelings as well, right? Like I don't want to feel ashamed. I don't want to feel humiliated. I don't want to feel out of control because if I lose control, well, then I won't achieve. And if I don't achieve, I won't feel good about myself. And I don't want to have the other feelings that are associated that. So it's easier just to control, right? Which is an anxious behavior, but it's actually functionally to avoid other feelings I would have to feel if I didn't keep my, my stuff together, right? And so for me, a big part of like my recovery, particularly from eating disorder is it's not just like have the fear and do it anyway, like just eat the damn burrito if you're afraid of gaining weight. It wasn't about the just facing fear. It was like, no, I'm going to have to feel vulnerable or I'm going to have to feel not important or other emotions that are under there, which is very common for perfectionism. They're often, it's not just fear based, it's other emotion based. And so it might be good for people who are stuck doing sort of these more controlling safety behaviors with perfectionism to actually look like what is it that you're actually trying to avoid here? Is it just fear or is it a narrative about yourself or a story or an emotion you'd have to feel? That's so good. I would suggest, this is off the top of my head here based on this conversation that it would be really hard to say I'm going to learn to accept this set of emotions, fear, anxiety, uncertainty when I'm in panic or when my thoughts are in overdrive, but I will continue to draw a line around these emotions and I won't accept them and those I will control and push away. I think maybe based on how our brains work, I don't know, I'm making this up as I go along here, so feel free to critique or add. Theoretically, if we numb one emotion, we numb them all in some degree. If you're numbing all of the negative, you're most likely numb the positive too. That's theoretical. I don't think we have research to prove that, but I think I could vouch for that. The more I refuse to feel shame or the more I refuse to feel anxiety, the harder it is to really enjoy life and drop into the beauty of life. I think that is true for me. I don't know about you guys. Yeah, I think that would be true for me too. If I'm going to refuse to feel anger or sadness or big emotions outside of my anxiety disorder, then it's really hard for me to say, oh, well, this is a panic attack, so that I will allow, but I won't allow them in the habit of blocking and stopping all of my big feelings. That's why I like the role of kind of humanistic and talking therapy, and that's why I don't really like to be an integrative therapist and I like to combine modalities where I completely follow in what Kim says, and I believe in it wholeheartedly, like you can't just take a robotic kind of empirical mindset to your own recovery. If I fulfill all these boxes, I've done all this and it's not as simple as that. I'll have sessions in here where we don't even talk about our anxiety disorders. We just talk about perfectionism. We just talk about what's been going on. Why are we like this? Why do we take such a rigid, binary view of success, I often call it? Why is everything pass and fail? Why can't things be a spectrum? Why do we have to be kind of, if you're not willing to show emotion to say your husband or wife or your partner, then how do you expect to be able to show a very powerful emotion enduring exposures and things like that? It's one thing being able to show your kid that you're vulnerable. That's one thing I hear a lot as well. Here's a big one. I need to overcome my anxiety disorder before my kids notice. That's a big one I hear. It's like, well, what are you, one, showing in your brain by doing it in the shadows, doing it in the hidden, and two, what are you teaching your children about this emotional conservatism that often concerns me? There's two lessons they'll take from that. One, shame. And if you do have an anxiety disorder, you've got to do it in the shame of secrecy. And two, you're also teaching them inadvertently that being anxious is not okay because you have to remove yourself from the room or you have to remove yourself from the normalcy of your life in order to sort it out to then come back in. And I think that's really, I mean, emotional conservatism is a drama I'm going to be banging a lot this year and next year because I think it's huge. I think it really is one of the biggest things that we need to look at as a collective. And it's that whole kind of stop revering the repression of emotions and start to reveal your ability to convey them. And I've actually added a quite controversial, but revering your ability to convey them tastefully because no one likes someone who's neurotic, but also people like that brave person that's like, you know, I'm not gonna panic. I'm having a depression. I'm struggling a bit with OCD at the moment, but I'm still ready to go for dinner as opposed to, no, the world needs to stop because this is really bad. And it's about just being able to do that. And I think the more we look at that on a wider scale, the healthier it is and the better conditions that we create for ourselves and others to deal with anxious recovery. Yeah, the two masters there, I want to recover, but I want to keep a stiff upper lip. I want to recover, but I also need to be the perfect parent. I didn't want to recover, but I also really are. Sometimes, if we look at the title, right, I want to recover. So that's one value, but I also want fill in the blank to be perfectionistic or I don't want to feel less feeling or whatever. Is what I would, the way I would interpret that is that's just two values of yours. And sometimes our values compete. Like I really want to be a good mom, but I also love having a business. So they're going to compete sometimes. I'm not going to fulfill both of those all the time because sometimes I have to work or sometimes I want to have to cancel my day of work to be with my kids because they're sick. So competing values often happen. And we have to sort of make space for that too, right? Like you can't have what's the saying, you can't have your cake and eat it too, but you also can in that if you're, as Josh said, like you can be kind and accept that you're not going to be perfect. You're not going to get all your needs met. You're not going to meet all your values all the time. Can you, can you be accepting of that? I think there's a negotiation we have to go through. Like a good, a client of mine was like, I am literally going to like slay at work this year. Like that's my goal. But I also have this goal to recover, which is going to take a lot of time. They have a lot of exposures to do. Like they actually will have to practice for several hours each week doing something that's really scary that's on their hierarchy. So they've got two competing values. It's a matter of them choosing which one gets priority and there's no right. Or which one for now gets priority. You know, that's that thing too. So maybe you got to, maybe you, if part of your value is to be a perfectionist then okay, who's to say that you're wrong, but for now you may have to relax that a little bit and then come back later. It's a, you can't keep everything at the very, not everything could be number one in the priority list. No. It has to be a number two and a number 10. So yeah. It's very interesting. Like sometimes with here with perfectionists in particular, I set homework, we set homework. I set homework about kind of the homework isn't necessarily exposures. It's every day I want you to fail at something. I want to show you that. That's an exposure. Sure. Sometimes, sometimes I see it more as as learning the skill of not things not being a hundred percent. Yeah, it can be an exposure, but I suppose you're exposing yourself to certain emotions like shame and things like that. But I just more like, I frame it as like, you know, you suck at failing and we're going to get really good at failing. How good, and it's such a manipulative tool because you're taking their need to be good at something and you're flipping it on its head and you're going, how good at you at sucking? Yeah, you're better at sucking. Yeah, and it's like, well, I want to be good at it because you're setting me the challenge and now I need to come back. And it's great because it always works. And it's like, and you know, bringing a diary, what did you purposely do? So, you know, you look at perfectionists and be like, you know, purposely misspell something in an email, you know, fluff something or whatever, wear a crease shirt to work, do all these kind of, it's very REBT stuff, early stuff, but you know, it's kind of like doing all these things. And it's like, now that's great. Look, the world didn't fall apart. Just know the very basis of what exposures is. Now, let's go do these anxious panic OCD exposures with that fresh in your mind because it isn't going to go perfect. You know, I've now, I think I did like two or three exposures in my life where I was like, yeah, nailed that. But in general, I've done a lot of exposures and some of them were like, wow, I really struggled to get through that, but I got through it and that's okay. Yeah. In ERP school, we talk about, which is a course for OCD, we talk about how you can hit. I know this is like politically not correct, like to hit two birds with one stone. I know there's another more politically correct way of saying that now, but I don't remember. How is that not politically correct? We don't want to hit birds with stones. That's fair. But let's just go with it. Okay. So I've ignored. Bird lobby get involved with that. But the beauty here is any exposure you do, any, and we can call it exposure, we can just call it facing your fear. And I have a fear of throwing stones at birds. No. If we do it with a B minus attitude and an aim to do it at a B minus, then you actually hit two birds with one stone. You get your fear exposure and you get your perfectionism exposure all in one. And so I would the way. I'm not wild like in the process. Yeah. So we want, I actually always encourage my clients to do it with a B minus. Like that's as far as, that's as great as I'm looking. Yeah, if you get an A plus by accident, just because you slay, that's great. But that is the beauty here is we're actually practicing being human beings while we do the facing of the fears, right? Like B minus is great. I'll take a B minus any day for an exposure. I think that there are lessons there. In 2018, I took on a challenge to fail 100 times. And I swear to you, it opened me up in the most beautiful way. Like the goal, like big fails, like push yourself or aim high, not like in a perfectionistic workaholic way, but aim so high that you are determined that it will fail somewhere. It was such a beautiful process. 2018. I love that. When did we meet? That might have been one of your fails. Become friends with you. Well, I actually ended up getting a very chronic illness that year and I inevitably had to fail in so many areas, but I'd already set the intention and so it made it so much easier. The B minus thing. That's cool. Yeah. I'm a B minus girl. Fair. As you can tell. There's a rap song there somewhere and there's a crow giving me the side eye outside the window. Don't be thrown rocks, man. All right. Who knew? This was great. You guys have anything else you want to add? We're about 35 minutes. I will wrap it up here, but I like this. This is a good conversation. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks for inviting me on. Praise my own podcast. Nothing wrong with that. This was great. I enjoyed listening to me speak to you. Honestly, I love self-aggrandizing, whether it's me or someone else. I really like. Well, if it's backed up with actual quality stuff, I like self-aggrandizing. I like it after you do a really bad job. That's when it's most entertaining. I'm a fan of that, too. Anyway, I'll put you guys up on the screen here. So to find Josh, where can everybody find you? Confirming. I'm an anxiety Josh or school of anxiety, which is the kind of new British based kind of umbrella term that I'm going under, which I really like. This behind me, if you're looking on video, is the school of anxiety. There's a bean bag over there and multicolored furniture and plants. Is that the student union behind you? Yeah. Yeah, anxiety Josh. And if you want to check out the books, Drew and Kim have been guests on my podcast. And yeah, there's those things on there if you want to check it out. Yeah, cool. Kim, where can we find you? Sure. You can find me on your anxiety toolkit podcast or your anxiety toolkit on social. You can go to CBTSchool.com if you're wanting online courses or kimbillyquinland-lmft.com if you're wanting private sessions with myself or one of my therapists. Awesome. You guys go to theanxioustruth.com slash 242. I will have all of their links, all of the good links to get to Kim and Josh. So thank you guys. I appreciate you in the time. We need to do this more often. So I will keep inviting you. You just have to turn me down. No, I'm not. I'm going to be great. I will come back in a minute to wrap this one up and I'll see you guys in a little while. Alrighty then. We are back to wrap it up. I really, really enjoyed that conversation with Josh and Kim. I think this is a really interesting topic. It's not so much nuts and bolts. It's a little bit more of the philosophy of recovery. And it is a good illustration of how recovery spills out into other areas of life sometimes. So sometimes we make the mistake of thinking, oh, I will just address my anxiety disorder in a very mechanical way, which is part of that. That's true. But it can't help but impact other parts of your life. And I think this discussion kind of highlighted that, not only the difficulties of trying to serve multiple masters, but how the recovery process sort of impacts other parts of what we have going on on a daily basis. So I hope it was enjoyable for you to listen to. It was certainly enjoyable for me to have that conversation with my friends and frequent collaborators. And that's it. That is episode 242 of The Anxious Truth in the books. If you want to find all the links to get to Josh and Kim and everything else, you can go to the anxioustruth.com slash 242 if you're watching on YouTube. I have it at the bottom of the screen. I will have all of their links right there and all the other goodies from this podcast. Some show notes will be there for you. And that's it. Episode 242 in the book. You know, it's over because... Let's try. We're listening to Afterglow as usual. That is by my buddy Ben Drake who is gracious enough to let me use that song at the beginning and end of most of my podcasts. If not all of them, you can find Ben in his music at bendrakemusic.com. Go check him out. If you are listening to this podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify or some platform that has a rating and review system, leave a five star rating. If we dig the podcast, write a quick review. It helps other people find the podcast and then we get to help other people and more people. If you're watching on YouTube, like the video, subscribe, hit the notification bell. You know the deal. Leave a comment. I promise I'll circle back and get to them. I get to all of them sooner or later. And that's it. I hope this has been helpful to you. I will be back next week with another podcast episode. I do not know what I'm going to be talking about, but I'll be here anyway. And remember until then, this is the way.