Why You Feel The Way You Feel w/ Reneau Peurifoy EP 34

[00:00:00] Shanenn Bryant: Reneau, well welcome back. Thank you for coming back to the podcast. You have a new book out I am excited about. Tell us the name of that book and a little bit about it.

[00:00:13] Reneau Peurifoy: It's called Why you Feel the Way You Do, and it's been a real fun book to write. It's kind of a culmination of all the things I've been studying, looking at emotions over the last 50 years or so. It starts off basically with what are emotions and there's just some really exciting new stuff coming out of, uh, affect of neurobiology right now.

[00:00:32] Reneau Peurifoy: Then I talked a little bit about simple triggers and some ways to quiet them. Then more complex ones and core response patterns that you have, both negative and positive. And then it wraps up with the three key things that make a person happy in life.

[00:00:45] Reneau Peurifoy: What positive psychology or the, the science of happiness, as it's been called, that's been actually just started right around 2000. In the last 20 years, they've been doing a lot of research.

[00:00:55] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, well, we could all use some tips on how to be happier, right? So I'm sure that's a popular section in the book for sure. Um, I'm so glad that it starts with What aer emotions because this actually just came up. I was doing some research for one of the episodes and, it came up about. how we intertwine emotions and feelings and that there is a difference.

[00:01:22] Shanenn Bryant: And so, you know what's an emotion? What's a feeling? How are they different? That type of thing. So can we start there with what is an emotion?

[00:01:29] Reneau Peurifoy: Sure, and neuroscientists, they talk about affects. And affects are something that drives you to do something. They cause you to get up and take some action of some type. The most basic ones are sensory affect, you know, heat, cold pressure. And then, you know if you're cold, you wanna get warm.

[00:01:46] Reneau Peurifoy: If you're hot you wanna get cool, if you're being pressed on, you wanna get away. And then the next ones are what are called homeostatic affects. And these are things that cause you to take actions to maintain a balance in your life. Homeostasis is just a complex word for balance. So thirst and hunger would be the two basic ones.

[00:02:03] Reneau Peurifoy: When you're thirsty, your body needs to check its water balance. Of course, hunger you need some fuel for it. And then the emotions are kind of the next level up. And they've actually discovered, seven basic, affects or emotions that we share with all the other animals. And, uh, the two that I found just the most fascinating as I was reading about them, one is called, seeking.

[00:02:25] Reneau Peurifoy: And all mammals have this desire to explore their environment. You see this most clearly in babies. If you look at babies or puppies or kittens, as soon as they can walk and move about, they wanna explore their environment. They're checking things out, looking for things that are positive and negative.

[00:02:40] Reneau Peurifoy: And that's actually a drive in us, and that's why we like hobbies. That's why we like to explore new things. When you go to a new building or you're sitting in a new auditorium, the first thing you do is you look around and check everything out. You just, you just wanna make sure you understand what's going on.

[00:02:53] Reneau Peurifoy: That's, that's an actually emotional or affect, that's driving that behavior, uh, called seeking.

[00:02:59] Shanenn Bryant: I wanna stop right there if you don't mind, because I think this is really important. You know, the podcast is based on jealousy, anxiety, insecurity in relationships, and I think it's really important for people to understand that that seeking part, people looking around, wanting to see their environment, exploring, being curious is actually a very basic human thing.

[00:03:27] Reneau Peurifoy: And not only humans, but all mammals share the, these circuits. So it's very deep in our brain. In fact, the next one, the play circuit. You can take these circuits like with rats and you can delete the top part of their brain, the thinking part, and they still have these motives. So it's very primitive part of our brain that we have. Yeah, I know it's kind of gross, but that's neuroscientists. They do things like that to kind of figure out what part of the brain things are located at. Right?

[00:03:55] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. Wow.

[00:03:56] Reneau Peurifoy: The play one is actually how we learn social limits. And so, mammals are social. And if you've ever dealt with a little kid, like I've got my three-and-a-half-year-old, great-granddaughter that we watch and you know, they learn what too much is by doing too much. And you say, that's enough.

[00:04:13] Reneau Peurifoy: Stop. That at play is an integral part of that. And again, you know, it's all baby mammals. You know, all human babies, puppies, kittens, they love to play. You know, you watch a goat dancing around out in the pasture or even cows or horses or whatever. And again, part of that's how they learn social interactions. And as adults, we still like to play. You know, that, that's still a basic circuit inside of us. Uh, it, it brings us pleasure to do that.

[00:04:40] Shanenn Bryant: Hmm. Enter the word boundaries, right? Like in, in a way, adults saying, hey, this is my boundary, so that somebody knows you've went a little too far, right?

[00:04:51] Reneau Peurifoy: And as infants or as children, you're supposed to learn those through play and healthy play. And if you have reasonable adults, they will, they'll set those reasonable boundaries and you, you learn it at that time. And of course, if you grow up in chaotic environments and stuff, sometimes those boundaries are getting really confused.

[00:05:09] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, they're very blurry and we're not really sure. Yeah, so then in a sense, not everyone, it's not like this black and white thing where we learn as children, this is a particular boundary. You don't cross this. This is a particular boundary. You don't cross this. For people it can be different and across the board, right?

[00:05:28] Reneau Peurifoy: Of course, of course. Because as you develop and as the upper part of your thinking, part of your brain develops, uh, you have experiences. You develop beliefs and expectations about who's safe, who's not safe, what can I do, what am I able to do? And these circuits get interweaved in all of those upper parts of your brain, and they get changed and they can be actually suppressed, or they can take forms that probably are not healthy.

[00:05:56] Reneau Peurifoy: Probably the saddest example are babies that come out of, um, uh, used to come out of Eastern Europe and they were in these orphanages where they were taken care of except for just a bottle would be put in. They, they were never held. They were never talked to, so they're just left in the crib. They were fed, they were changed, but that was all.

[00:06:13] Reneau Peurifoy: And as they were adopted, they all had attachment problems, so they failed to attach for the parents. So that seeking, in fact, there's two that bind us together. One is the, he calls it, panic, uh, sadness or separation anxiety are the names for it. So when you see babies, they have the separation anxiety, and so they'll cry for their parent.

[00:06:36] Reneau Peurifoy: These babies would give up crying because nobody would come and answer 'em, and so that circuit literally shuts off. Because of their experience. Right? Uh, now you can reactivate it if they get proper therapy and treatment, with their parents and they can learn how to attach. The compliment of that is a circuit called, caring.

[00:06:58] Reneau Peurifoy: And so in what you see is the baby cries, the parent, that circuit gets lit up and so you wanna come and take care of it. And it's fun when you go to like a Disneyland or a park or something, if you watch a little kid fall down or something, look at all the other little kids, they immediately turn, that caring circuit pops in.

[00:07:16] Reneau Peurifoy: And that's what binds us together as adults too. That interplay between separation anxiety, which now becomes sadness. When you lose something that's important to you, you feel sad. So it's that same basic circuit that's been, you know, modified through all of your experiences and your beliefs and expectations.

[00:07:33] Reneau Peurifoy: And of course, the caring circuit has to do with, who is lovable, how can I love them? You know, what's the appropriate ways, all that stuff modifies it because the upper part of your brain now becomes kind of like the executive for those lower impulses? It decides what do we do with those?

[00:07:49] Reneau Peurifoy: They come up and we have this desire. So our experience and our expectations and our beliefs have now channeled how we're going to, what we're gonna do in response to that. Just like when you're hungry, you know you're gonna choose what to eat, right? You have this drive, I'm hungry. Well, shall I eat chocolate cake or shall I eat something healthy? What should I eat?

[00:08:09] Shanenn Bryant: It makes me think too, because one of the things with jealousy and having those, um, feelings come to the surface or those emotions and, and it feels, and what I hear a lot and I experience myself is, it feels so out of control. Like I have no control over my reaction to this.

[00:08:29] Shanenn Bryant: And it's, as you said, it's like trying to do the opposite. So in a way it's like throwing that temper tantrum or doing that thing that gets us closer to whatever we want. Almost the difference of like, I'm hot, so I need to be cold, I'm uncomfortable, so how do I get comfortable? And those types of things.

[00:08:47] Reneau Peurifoy: And actually that takes us to the second danger circuit that we have, cuz separation anxiety is one, but the other one is danger, actual threats. And so there's actually a separate circuit for when we feel threatened and with jealousy underneath it, really is threat. 

[00:09:03] Reneau Peurifoy: I'm going to. 

[00:09:04] Shanenn Bryant: Ding, ding, ding, ding.

[00:09:05] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm gonna lose something that's important or something's gonna be taken away from me, I can't hang onto it and of course the compliment to that is anger, and anger and fear are both your two responses to threat. If the threat is manageable, I'm gonna go out and attack it.

[00:09:22] Reneau Peurifoy: If it's unmanageable, I'm gonna run away from it or I'm gonna get away from it. And a lot of times we're not sure. So, we have a mixture of anger and fear at the same time going on underneath.

[00:09:33] Shanenn Bryant: Oh, I love that. Okay. So, I know a lot of it ties to animals too, and we act the same way. I remember having different responses, right? Sometimes I'm just super angry and people experience it like it's this out of body like I'm such a mean person at that time.

[00:09:51] Shanenn Bryant: Almost unrecognizable, right? Of I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I acted that way cuz it's so out of character with so much anger behind it. And then there are other times where it makes me, it would make me more sad or it makes people more sad and they kind of retreat and they coil up wanting that reassurance from somebody. 

[00:10:16] Reneau Peurifoy: Yep. Yep. That's that sense of loss.

[00:10:18] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. So, it's interesting because it's almost like, do we think that we're gonna win this battle by being more angry? Like, do we feel like this is something, you know, we can win by being angry? Or are we so saddened by it that we feel like, oh, it's just overtaking me.

[00:10:33] Reneau Peurifoy: And I think it's important and to recognize that when you're highly emotional, the thinking parts of your brain shut off and you start to go back on basically automatic behaviors that you've learned in the past, positive or negative, right? Uh, and so one of the things that's really important, and this is true in just anger management of all types, is you need to learn walkaway strategies.

[00:10:56] Reneau Peurifoy: When you're angry, the first thing you gotta train yourself to do, no matter how much you want to take action, is to shut up and walk away, and let yourself cool down so that you can reengage the thinking part of your brain. And if it's anger, that means you're feeling threatened somehow. So what is the threat?

[00:11:14] Reneau Peurifoy: Did this person look at somebody else? Uh, were they doing something that was neglecting me or that I thought was neglecting me? Uh, and really take a chance to look at what is the threat that I'm feeling here, and is that a threat that's here and now, or is that a threat from the past that I'm just reliving because something reminds me of it?

[00:11:31] Reneau Peurifoy: And you really have to be committed to that walk away and taking time to cool down. And then, after you've identified where it's coming from, if it's here and now of course you take action, but if it's something from the past, then you need to go do some what we call processing of it.

[00:11:46] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. Because when we just go off that natural instinct, you know, whether like I'm, I'm angry, whatever it is, then we are really making a choice of are we gonna just go off our own animal instinct as we would say in that situation? Or are we going to, use tools and techniques and, things that will help us in that situation?

[00:12:09] Reneau Peurifoy: Right, 

[00:12:11] Shanenn Bryant: I Love it. Okay, so danger. Go ahead.

[00:12:13] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah. Well, I, I think we've covered all seven. We talked about seeking, we talked about caring, we talked about separation, anxiety, uh, play and anger. Oh, lust of course. Gotta throw that in the mix that gets activated at middle, middle school, right? Everybody knows about that one.

[00:12:29] Reneau Peurifoy: And, and, and those are the ones that basically bind us together. And it caused us to take actions to protect ourselves to become connected with other people and, uh, you know, have social interaction and that sort of thing. I think it's important to understand that as you experience things, especially as you grow up, experiences and memories that have a high emotional content, that there was something important going at that moment, they get an emotional tag.

[00:12:58] Reneau Peurifoy: And so one of the ways that your brain sorts information is it puts emotional tags on things that are important. This is why experience is more important than book learning. If I can sit down, I can read a whole bunch of books about driving a car and I can understand it perfectly, but until I get behind the wheel and actually start trying to drive, oh, that didn't work.

[00:13:16] Reneau Peurifoy: Oh, this feels good, those actions and those memories now get an emotional tag and they all become part of your subconscious. Most of your day, you're unconscious. Most of the day, your subconscious is deciding all kinds of different stuff. You walk down just the street, your brain is calculating distances, it's looking for objects, it's looking for things that might be threat or positive, and all this stuff is going on at an unconscious level that, that we're totally unaware of.

[00:13:46] Reneau Peurifoy: We're busy thinking about, what am I gonna have for lunch? Oh gee, that shows on tonight that I wanna watch. You know? And your brain's taking care of everything else, which is good because it can do that we can think about those other things, right? But then as soon as something that in the past has been tagged as important, either positive or negative, you'll become aware of it.

[00:14:04] Reneau Peurifoy: And a lot of times you'll start to take an automatic behavior that you've practiced in the past, uh, without even thinking about it. You know, uh, you're getting ready to trip. What's the first thing you do is you, you start to brace yourself, and then afterwards you say, oh yeah, I almost fell there.

[00:14:17] Reneau Peurifoy: so that's a lot of these types of responses come up too, and that's that unconscious part of it. It's really important to understand because then you have to train yourself to, in the case of anger, walk away. And, what I do with people is, uh, this is kind getting to a core negative response pattern, right, is I'd say the first thing you need to do is have a simple definition or explanation of why I do this.

[00:14:44] Reneau Peurifoy: And usually it's not a mystery, it's just that people waste a lot of time. They'll do it and they'll say, I don't understand why do what? I'm doing it again. Why did I do it again? And, and they'll get on that why thing and they never take action. So the explanation is simply so we can move on to take some action.

[00:14:58] Reneau Peurifoy: So a simple thing might be, uh, well, you know, my mom or my dad was a very jealous person and they were always screaming or whatever happens to be, right? But you have a simple, maybe a simple paragraph and you memorize that. So whenever you start asking yourself, why did that happen?

[00:15:15] Reneau Peurifoy: You say, oh, I understand why. This is why it happened. Next thing I have people do is identify specific places where they get triggered. The more specific you can be, you'll more successful you'll be. So I, I get, uh, triggered when I'm in a restaurant and the person thinks that when I'm eating is not the right thing to eat, or I get triggered, uh, when I'm with my kids and they do this action, or when my mate does this action.

[00:15:42] Reneau Peurifoy: And the more specific it can be, the better you'll be. And then you start identifying what are some opposite positive behaviors I can practice. So for example, if I tend to criticize, uh, my, my mate and my kids a lot, or my friends, what's the opposite of criticism? It's encouragement. Right?

[00:16:02] Reneau Peurifoy: So I need to start practicing encouragement, because somebody who's critical, often it's not a very good encourager, right?

[00:16:09] Reneau Peurifoy: Right,

[00:16:09] Reneau Peurifoy: And so I need to start practicing that behavior and I need to start commenting, boy, you know, I like the way you did that. Oh, you know, I appreciate that.

[00:16:18] Reneau Peurifoy: So starting practicing that opposite behavior and at the same time having some, this is the kind of the cognitive side of it, having things I can tell myself when these behaviors come up and I'm feeling this way, that would help to redirect my thinking into a more logical and positive way. And that becomes very specific to, the things that a person gets triggered by.

[00:16:38] Shanenn Bryant: And it can be so many different things for so many different people. I mean, I've, I've heard a ton of different ones where it's just something really simple that somebody does even in their daily life can be triggering for somebody because they experienced it, or as you said, something happened and they slammed that tag on there and now, you know, it's, it's something that maybe other people would see as just a normal everyday thing and it's really triggering for people.

[00:17:05] Reneau Peurifoy: So maybe take a real simple example. Um, a person I worked with once, when his wife would make suggestions, he would get really angry with her. And so we talked about it, and he said my mom was always criticizing me, and my wife, when she says, that shirt doesn't look good, you might, you might wanna think of this other color.

[00:17:22] Reneau Peurifoy: It reminds me of my mom. And so he gets angry, right? And so one of the self-talks that he did was, she is not my mom. She is, my, my mate, she loves me. She's just trying to help me. She's not trying to put me down or criticize me. And that would be some of the type of self-talk that he used in that situation.

[00:17:43] Reneau Peurifoy: And over time he found that she no longer triggered him. She desensitized except, and this is an important thing when you're sick, kind of retired, stressed.

[00:17:53] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:54] Reneau Peurifoy: Because when you're sick, hungry, tired, stressed, the thinking part of your brain is not working well, and so you tend to go back on old stuff and old triggers and stuff will tend to be more active at those times.

[00:18:06] Shanenn Bryant: Just being a little bit more aware, as you said, like, okay, if, if something comes up, this is probably not a good time to say anything because it's most likely there because of those things. 

[00:18:17] Reneau Peurifoy: In fact, if you've been making a lot of progress and you notice some old things coming up, oftentimes that's the first signal that you're stressed out or you're sick of you tired?

[00:18:28] Shanenn Bryant: Uh, interesting. Yes, I, I talked about, um, my husband and I went to Costa Rica that just earlier in this year and talked about how I had a little relapse of jealousy, and I was a little bit shocked by it, but it was one of those, I was super hungry, I was really tired, we had done a lot of things, you know, all of these things kept adding up.

[00:18:54] Shanenn Bryant: And I knew like, oh, right. And I ignored, ignored, ignored the signs. And then there you go.

[00:19:02] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah. And, and you know, that's something people do so often is they get out of touch of when stress and just daily life is affecting them. And it's important to understand what are your personal alarms, you know, what do you do? My dad was a sailor, you know, in 21 years, and I, I used to joke that, uh, there's a change in how I use language sometimes as an indication that, you know, I'm starting to get a little stressed out.

[00:19:30] Shanenn Bryant: Mmm.

[00:19:31] Reneau Peurifoy: So everybody has their own particular things they do. I'll start playing some stupid game on the computer and just kind of wasting time, my mind kind of rolling around just cuz I'm on overload. So things like that. You, you, you identify, these are my personal stress indicators, these are the indicators that maybe I need to do some self-care.

[00:19:51] Shanenn Bryant: I think it's really important to know your triggers. To learn your triggers so that it makes it easier. The more you know 'em and the more like, okay, that happened. Remind yourself that's just a trigger, as you said, using that, okay, this is because, you know, my mom was really judgmental.

[00:20:09] Shanenn Bryant: Whatever it is, then it makes it easier as you practice, practice, practice that the next time it starts to then not become a trigger for you because you know, and even if it does a little bit, it's so much easier to swoop away of this is not a problem.

[00:20:26] Reneau Peurifoy: And you've just said an important thing. The practice, practice, practice. We read a lot of books about how I'm gonna reprogram my mind. I'm gonna delete that old program. That's not the way brains work. We are organic beings. We are not digital computers and phones and stuff. Memory and behavior work more like a muscle where you have to exercise it as opposed to a program that you just delete and it's all gone.

[00:20:54] Reneau Peurifoy: And even when you're successful at changing behavior, again, some of those old programs and patterns are still in the brain and when the right set of triggers comes up, sometimes they'll get fired. Uh, to use maybe a different example, a PTS example, a person I knew that had been in a bad accident, rainy night on a curve of the road, and, uh, you know, they got desensitized.

[00:21:18] Reneau Peurifoy: They're doing fine. It just so happened several months later, she hit a curve of the road, on a rainy night and that it triggered. Because just the right set of things happened, right? The right combination of things came up. Uh, and, and occasionally that'll happen because those things are still down there somewhere.

[00:21:34] Reneau Peurifoy: Uh, you don't delete them. You just basically cover 'em over with new, more healthy programs that will function most of the time. 

[00:21:41] Reneau Peurifoy: And I think understanding that helps you to be a little bit more gracious with yourself, a little bit more forgiving when you do fall into old patterns and recognize that that's just the way human beings are. And we do that.

[00:21:52] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, and that's what I tell people, you know, you can't expect to say, I'm never gonna feel jealous again in my life. But you can get way better and you can feel better, and you can respond better. All of those things, which then makes your life feel very different.

[00:22:07] Reneau Peurifoy: And, and the, the reward is as you learn the new behaviors, that in itself is rewarding. Because you get the positive relationship and the positive stuff, which is really what you want. A lot of times, a person who's jealous has not had a chance to experience really deep, healthy emotions, and so the only way they know how to get a piece of somebody is through negative behaviors. It's like when you teach parenting classes, you tell the parents, you know that child is gonna get a piece of you one way or the other. If they don't get positive stuff, they're gonna get a negative piece. Uh, and that's just the way people are, is we have those circuits where we want connection.

[00:22:45] Reneau Peurifoy: It's important to us. And if I can't get or don't know how to get it in a positive way, I'll find other ways. By being dependent, by being irritating, by being, you know, powerful. You know, we go down the list of whole lots of ways that people will get something out of other people. But once you start to experience that healthy, deep, positive connection, you find, gee, this feels good.

[00:23:10] Reneau Peurifoy: I like it.

[00:23:11] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, you know, there's payoff to being jealous as you just mentioned. I know there was probably times where I had a little jealous fit, as you said, if to get attention, like not meaning to do it that way, but that's, that's the way it came out to get that attention or control for

[00:23:30] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah.

[00:23:31] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah. 

[00:23:32] Shanenn Bryant: But as you mentioned, it feels so much better when you get those things the proper way, the healthier way. There's so much more to that than the 10 minutes of attention that you got from, throwing a temper tantrum.

[00:23:51] Reneau Peurifoy: And the contrast makes the negative behavior more distasteful over time.

[00:23:57] Shanenn Bryant: Yes.

[00:23:57] Reneau Peurifoy: Because additionally, you know, it's all you know, so it's, hey, this is okay. But as soon as you realize there's a taste, a little bit of the opposite, then you begin to realize, this does leave a sour taste in my mouth, you know?

[00:24:10] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah. I got that momentary thing, but it's, you know, in the end, I'm not not happy with it.

[00:24:15] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm. So true. I mean, being honest, I think that is part of the reason, when my husband and I, when I was still in my, you know, really jealous stage, after I started working on it and coming out of it, and then I would say, I'm gonna get through this moment of time without doing the thing that I was doing in the past, as you were

[00:24:34] Reneau Peurifoy: Right, right,

[00:24:36] Shanenn Bryant: retraining my brain, putting something new in place of that and that feeling, you're right, of not having an argument that time and actually being able to stay and enjoy dinner and having a good night, versus the argument that I would've ruined the night going home, not speaking to each other.

[00:24:55] Shanenn Bryant: And so the more often that happened, you're right of then making that choice of like, ah, you know, would I rather have a great dinner and a good time cuz that's been so much better. And then operating from that way,

[00:25:11] Reneau Peurifoy: And, and I think, you know, as you're practicing that, something else that helps is to ask yourself, what do I really want here? You know, I know with various types of anger management, that's the central question you ask once you start to calm down is, what is it that I really want here? Do I really want to show this person I'm right or they wanna have a good time?

[00:25:32] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:33] Reneau Peurifoy: You know, what is my goal right here?

[00:25:36] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah,

[00:25:37] Reneau Peurifoy: And once the rational part of your brain Kicks in, usually that's easier to identify.

[00:25:43] Reneau Peurifoy: Yeah. Uh, what else from the book can you share with us Well, it's these core response patterns I think are really important. Back in the sixties and seventies, the two big ones that were identified and are really big in education, one is learned helplessness. And again, the experiments were done with dogs, and you give 'em shocks that they cannot escape from.

[00:26:07] Reneau Peurifoy: And pretty soon they give up trying to escape. You put 'em into a new situation where they just walk away from it, but they don't even try. Because they've been programmed that they're helpless and so they call that learned helplessness. You see that with people. You see that with kids that are in environments where they've been beat down or you know, they've just learned they can't win.

[00:26:24] Reneau Peurifoy: You see this in whole society sometimes, uh, and dictatorships and stuff where people just know they can't win. They come over here in a free country and they continue to act as if they're still in that environment. Learned helplessness. So that was a big one for education. Learn helplessness is one of those things that, again, education has found to be very useful in understanding why a lot of kids are underachievers and to try to break them out of that. And with people, one of the things you find is if they can have a success experience that helps to bring them out of that. 

[00:26:57] Reneau Peurifoy: A long-term study I saw a long time ago that really impressed me is they took a group of people that had been severely abused in a negative environment. So they looked at them as adults and about a third of them were in various institutions, jail or mental or whatever.

[00:27:13] Reneau Peurifoy: About a third of them were functioning marginally, and about a third of them were doing pretty well. And the third that were doing well, they had this particular study, two commonalities. One was that they, married somebody who came from reasonably healthy background so they could learn healthy behaviors.

[00:27:30] Reneau Peurifoy: But the other one is somewhere in their life they had a success experience. It could have been a school thing, it could have been a hobby, it could have been sports, uh, their first job, but they had a success experience where they got the concept, I can be successful at least one thing. And with adoptive parents who have kids that have that learned helpless behavior going on, if you can give them some success experiences, that's one of the key things to help. To bring them out of it so they can get the concept that I can be successful at some stuff. 

[00:28:00] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:01] Reneau Peurifoy: The other big one back then, uh, was locus of control. People can have an inner or an outer locus of control. So an inner locus control means I have power and control and I can make things happen. 

[00:28:13] Reneau Peurifoy: Outside means things just happen to me. You know, I have no control. So a person gets a, a promotion at work and you ask them if they have an outer locus of control, or locus is just a fancy word for center. So if their center is outside of themselves, then they would say things, well, I was just lucky, you know, I guess it was just they needed somebody and they didn't have anybody else to look at. They'll say things like that. 

[00:28:34] Reneau Peurifoy: The person with an inner, locust or center of control would say, well, you know, I worked hard and I deserve it. I'm a good worker and I think I'm gonna do well at it. So they're gonna look at it differently from the person from the outer. And again, someone who grows up in an environment where they don't have a lot of control, they'll have that outer locus of control.

[00:28:52] Reneau Peurifoy: And so they don't see that they can affect anything. And with kids in school, they would say things like, oh, you got an F, or you didn't do well in that test. Well, it's just, that's just the way it is. I can't do well. And, and the inner person would say, well, you know, I didn't really study, if I study harder, then I'll do better next time.

[00:29:11] Reneau Peurifoy: So it'll be a different perspective on what success and failure looks like and why it happens. So those are the two kind of classic ones. And uh, what I do is in the book is I say, okay, everybody has a whole set of these, response patterns and you can look at your background, you can figure it out.

[00:29:29] Reneau Peurifoy: And they are both positive and negative. They have to do with, yourself, with people and the world in general. So things like with myself, I can succeed. I can't succeed. I'm a loser. Oh, I'm okay. You know, I'm lovable. I'm not lovable. So, you know, you have those types of things, with people. 

[00:29:48] Reneau Peurifoy: People are dangerous. People are okay. Conflict is dangerous. Oh, I can manage conflict. I have some tools with the world. The world is dangerous. The world is scary. The world has problems, but I can manage it, you know, things of that nature. 

[00:30:02] Reneau Peurifoy: So I've got a long list of things that people can pick from both positive and negative.

[00:30:06] Reneau Peurifoy: And as you identify them, it's usually doesn't take a lot of work to think about your past. I forgot where this particular message or response pattern came from. And again, you do the same thing. If you wanna change it, you identify, okay, uh, I have this idea that conflict is dangerous because every time I spoke up, bad things happen to me.

[00:30:27] Reneau Peurifoy: So I learn to avoid conflict. Or if you're a fighter, you learn to fight, right?

[00:30:31] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:31] Reneau Peurifoy: So this is where it came from. Here's where I avoid conflict. I don't speak up at work. I don't express an opinion when I'm in a restaurant, you know? Uh, if I wanna watch TV program and my partner wants to watch something else, I will always agree to what they have to say.

[00:30:47] Reneau Peurifoy: Okay, then what are some opposite behaviors? Well, I can start to give an opinion and not apologize for it. I can express that I really wanted to watch this program instead of the other one. I can start to work out some of these compromises. And then again, you have the, different types of positive, self-talk that you memorize, you know, conflict I is not dangerous. Conflict just means there's two different needs and really that's all. 

[00:31:15] Reneau Peurifoy: When you look at conflict management. One person wants one thing, another person wants another thing. Reasonable people are willing to compromise. Unreasonable people aren't. I mean, that's important to acknowledge that as well, right?

[00:31:30] Reneau Peurifoy: Uh, if you're in relationship with a reasonable person, which you may not be, they will negotiate with you. You just need to speak up and start to do that. It's okay to have an opinion, you know, I'm worthy of having an opinion. So you come up with a list of things you can tell yourself, and you start practicing the behaviors in simple situations, working up to the more complex ones.

[00:31:50] Shanenn Bryant: I love the part where you said, when people who have the outer where stuff just happens to me and the world is hard on me and the world is scary and the world is dangerous and people are dangerous. All of those things. I think that is very common, especially as I've seen of, you know, people who are jealous in their relationships.

[00:32:16] Shanenn Bryant: They have a lot of that thinking sometimes, and that's where it's really important to know. And as you pointed out, there are ways though, if I have the tools to handle conflict, then conflict isn't as scary. And so a lot of times it's just people not realizing, oh, there are tools and there are things I can learn and there are skills that I can develop that then all of that is not so scary anymore and I don't feel like the world is just out to get me, so to speak.

[00:32:49] Reneau Peurifoy: And, and again, one of the core issues that frequently comes up is as a child, there was no control.

[00:32:56] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:57] Reneau Peurifoy: They didn't have any power influence. And so differentiating between now and the past, and you do this with a lot of different P T S D stuff is today is different from the past. You know, I have control now.

[00:33:09] Reneau Peurifoy: I do have the ability I'm a big person now. I'm not a little kid. And I can, I can voice myself. I can walk away. I have all kinds of things I can do as an adult that I didn't have the ability to do as a child. And sometimes looking at it from that perspective will really empower a person too. I know with people that are abused, uh, the idea that, you know, the abuser is no longer present.

[00:33:32] Reneau Peurifoy: You never have to be in that situation again and again. Indeed, you do have tools now because today is different and you are different. And you have the ability to think that a child did not have the ability to use their reasoning abilities aren't the same as an adult. You have experiences that they did not have.

[00:33:49] Reneau Peurifoy: You have perspectives. You have all the stuff as an adult that you did not have as a child. So all I need to do is start using it now. 

[00:33:58] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. You touched on personalities; it sounded like maybe you wanna talk about that. Let's wrap up with personalities.

[00:34:09] Reneau Peurifoy: There, there was a study down in New Zealand and it started in 72 and they took every baby that was born for one year. So, all those babies and they just start studying them physically, psychologically, socially, and as new things like, uh, you know, MRIs and genetics and stuff came out that you added that into the mix.

[00:34:31] Reneau Peurifoy: So they've been studying this group of people for 50 years. And fascinating things have come out of this study, a lot of which were very controversial at first. 

[00:34:39] Reneau Peurifoy: But they found that by age three, three and a half, the kids, all of the babies, uh, or now children, fell into one of five different groups personality-wise, and they could actually identify, and this maintained throughout the rest of the 50 years they've been studying them.

[00:34:55] Reneau Peurifoy: And so your big group, about 40%, they called the well-adjusted. And so these are the kids, they're kind of, you know, they socialize well. They, they manage risk fairly well. They're fairly easy going and they grow up unless they're in a really negative background. you would expect as healthy individuals.

[00:35:10] Reneau Peurifoy: Then you had, I call 'em the Evil Conival kids, right? Uh, the risk takers. Yeah. They're the ones they're running their skateboard down the banner, you know, as adults, they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff

[00:35:26] Shanenn Bryant: Jumping outta airplanes?

[00:35:27] Reneau Peurifoy: They're, they're doing all the stuff you expect them to do. And again, they do fine if they're in a reasonably healthy environment. And then you have about 15% were what they called, shy. And, they were slow to warm up to people. Slow to go into things. And as a group, if they're in a reasonably healthy environment, they did okay.

[00:35:45] Reneau Peurifoy: They were always gonna be a little bit, kind of hanging back a little bit on the quiet side, but they can manage and do fine life.

[00:35:51] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:52] Reneau Peurifoy: And then the two groups that had problems were the extremely shy, and especially if they had a negative environment. If they were in a really positive environment, they could do fine.

[00:36:00] Reneau Peurifoy: But uh, they were the ones that were most vulnerable. And then there was the group they called the under controlled, and this is the group that had the most problems. In fact, they identified that with children, the one thing that you can give them is the ability to control themselves. And exercise, you know, the old marshmallow test. I'll give you another marshmallow if you don't not eat this one for five minutes and some kids gobbled them up so fast. That, that sense of being able to control and teaching them that at an early age really helped. 

[00:36:27] Reneau Peurifoy: And of course, if you had one of these kids in a negative background, they're your prisoners, your drug addicts, and that type of stuff.

[00:36:37] Reneau Peurifoy: Maybe to just kind talk about the nurture nature thing. There was a guy who was doing studies on prisoners who were sociopaths, and he was doing all these brain scans and stuff on 'em. And just for fun, he said, I'll do my own. Guess what? He had the same brain scan as all these sociopaths.

[00:36:56] Reneau Peurifoy: And when he started looking into his environment, he'd been adopted as I believe. But anyway, he had all these murderers in his background. In fact, Lizzie Borden, the ax murder was his great grandmother.

[00:37:10] Shanenn Bryant: Oh,

[00:37:11] Reneau Peurifoy: But he turned out really well, uh, because he was adopted.

[00:37:17] Shanenn Bryant: Wow.

[00:37:19] Reneau Peurifoy: he would say, I'm very competitive. I really don't like to lose. And, I could sometimes rattle the cage, but I'm learning now and I know my background to, you know, to counter that even a bit more.

[00:37:29] Shanenn Bryant: Ooh. 

[00:37:29] Reneau Peurifoy: Ya know, just because I proudful.

[00:37:31] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, I'd be a little bit worried like, oh gosh,

[00:37:35] Reneau Peurifoy: Well, and it turns out that there's a lot of this stuff out in the normal population. Uh, And the difference, again, has to do with, that early nurture nature thing. So just because you got some genetic programming doesn't mean you're destined to be a certain way. Certainly, the healthier the environment you're in, the more that'll counter that.

[00:37:54] Reneau Peurifoy: And the negative environment you have, the more it'll tweak that in a negative way. But again, we are able to, we are malleable beings, and the brain continues to put new neurons down and to grow and develop until we die. That was one of the big discoveries of the early part of this century.

[00:38:12] Reneau Peurifoy: You know, up, up until 2000., most people believed the brain after, you get through adolescence, your twenties, it quits growing. There's no new neurons, and if you lose something, you lose it. But they started realizing when they started studying older people is, hey, you give new experiences, new neurons, start connecting.

[00:38:31] Reneau Peurifoy: New connections start happening. And so, yeah, you never lose the ability to learn and to change. Certainly, it's a lot easier if you got a nice positive background to start with. More difficult if you got a difficult background. But change is possible. And like I said that old stuff will come up when you're sick and retired or stressed out, so just be aware of that.

[00:38:53] Shanenn Bryant: So, what you're saying is it's never too late. You can never be too old to make changes. You can still do it, right? Yeah. Well, where can people find your book so they can start to make some of these changes?

[00:39:06] Reneau Peurifoy: Well, it's available Amazon, uh, you know, bookstores. It's in audio and eBook as well as the, uh, paperback and actually it's just hit Amazon. so yeah, just go in why you feel the way you do. Uh, you can also go to my website, whyemotions.com, so W H Y  emotions.com. And I've got links to all my other books and my YouTube videos and all that type of stuff there.

[00:39:31] Reneau Peurifoy: So, easy to find.

[00:39:34] Shanenn Bryant: Well, I know that's a big question on everyone's mind, right? Like, why do I feel this way? Why do I feel the way that I feel? So, great title, great book. Go out, get the book and start making those changes. Thank you so much! 

[00:39:48] Reneau Peurifoy: Well, thank you. This is always a delight to be with you.

[00:39:52] Shanenn Bryant: You as well. Thanks.