The Patriarchy Within: How to Liberate Your Brain
Episode 454 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Kara Loewentheil
How has patriarchal socialization structured your thoughts and how can you take them back?
If you considered reprogramming your brain and taking back your thoughts to be mystical mumbo jumbo, get ready to expand your perspective. That’s certainly what happened to me when I read Kara Loewentheil‘s new book Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head and How to Get It Out.
Speaking with Kara on the podcast was an incredible experience—I was blown away by how in sync we are on so many topics around the insidious nature of our patriarchal society and the impact of that socialization on our brains. Kara is a reproductive rights lawyer turned Feminist Coach and Coach Instructor and the founder of A New School of Feminist Thought, where she’s teaching women how to rewire their thought patterns and “take back” our brains for socialization’s many influences.
The slow shift of patriarchal socialization
Kara’s knowledge and expertise shine through in her podcast and offerings as a coach, but if you need even more concrete proof that she’s the real deal, you need only look at her own trajectory, which is in itself an ongoing practice in retraining the socialized brain.
She calls her journey a classic “Ivy League lawyer to life coach pipeline,” in recognition of the many individuals in recent years who have made a similar switch after realizing they were sold a bill of goods about what would make them “happy.”
Like many women, Kara spent over a decade working toward her dream job, positive that she would feel like she was where she belonged once she got there. At each step along the way, that sense of the perfect fit kept eluding her. When litigation didn’t do it, Kara shifted to academics. She ran a think tank and was on track to become a law professor when she finally realized that the path she was on didn’t have an enlightenment ending, it just had more striving for goal after goal, chasing the “brass ring” of success.
During this career exploration, Kara was trying all the things to resolve the emotional discomfort, a move that started out, like it does for so many of us, with trying to fix herself, and eventually culminated in realizing she wasn’t the problem. The approach that finally worked for her, that started her on the road to changing how she thought and felt, is the one she ultimately made the leap for: in 2016, Kara left the career she had spent 15 years building to become a certified coach. Now, she shows other women the way that sexist socialization impacts their brains and helps them rewire their thought patterns for lasting change.
Recognize the wide-ranging impacts of the patriarchy
At the start of Kara’s book, she explains that what’s wrong with our current social system doesn’t have a quick or singular fix. “Even if we institute mandatory paid parental leave, make all promotion decisions gender blind, magically eliminate gender standards, and rid the market of diet books, we would still have work to do because the effects of all of these things still exist inside our minds.” In other words, if we don’t change our own thought patterns, over time we will just recreate all those systemic inequalities again.
Navigate the brain gap
Maybe one reason we think that disassembling the social structure will solve the problem is the common misconception that we can just overwrite beliefs in our brains with new ones. If we convince ourselves that the old ways are bad, we won’t go back to them, right?
In her book, Kara explores how our brains layer disparate beliefs on top of one another. Say a little girl grows up believing that she has to be a size 2 in order to be considered attractive and successful. In young adulthood, she is likely to encounter more liberating ideas of what constitutes beauty and success, and she might get to the point where she looks in the mirror and believes she is worthy and beautiful whatever her size.
But that later belief doesn’t just overwrite the first one. The old belief remains stronger because it has been there longer and is still reinforced in media and other social norms; it was part of how her perceptions of worth and value were shaped.
This reality creates a systemic gap between people socialized as men and those socialized as women. Though society has undeniably done a number on men, too, they are generally socialized to believe that their value is based on what they accomplish. Women, on the other hand, are almost always socialized to believe that their value comes from how they are perceived. As Kara says, we are constantly geolocating ourselves based on what everyone else thinks about us.
Get a handle on thoughts and feelings
To make meaningful change in what we believe about ourselves we need a clearer understanding of thoughts versus feelings.
Kara uses a cognitive behavioral model to differentiate between the two. A thought is something that creates an emotion, which leads to either an action or inaction. If you think asking for more money makes you seem greedy, you feel shame about this, and you don’t try to negotiate for a raise. If you don’t ask for a raise, you don’t get a raise, and you reinforce the thought that you can’t get a raise.
If this angle sounds a bit like manifesting your own destiny, Kara clarifies that she takes a firm middle-ground stance on that ideological spectrum. “I think humans overestimate the control we can have over other people or our bodies but underestimate the impact we can have on our beliefs.” Manifestation is often sold as something mysterious or spiritual. The approach Kara champions in her book is the opposite: she presents practical advice and straightforward facts behind why your mindset matters and makes a difference.
Excerpt from Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head and How to Get It Out by Kara Loewentheil
Kara acknowledges the issues with standard self-help fare (as I talk about with Sharon Podobnik in Episode 440, The Problem With Self-Help), but rather than aiming to separate herself from the genre, her goal is to reclaim it. After all, we have no choice but to help ourselves—clearly, the mainstream institutions built by our current patriarchal society certainly haven’t been cutting it. Kara’s book, Take Back Your Brain, is a great place to start.
Were you skeptical when you heard of the idea of rewriting your thought patterns? I was! If you have a hot take on this topic or a first-hand experience with how socialization has affected you (as I’m sure we all do), share your thoughts in our Courage Community on Facebook or in our group on LinkedIn.
Related Links from today’s episode:
Listen to the UnF*** Your Brain podcast
EP 323: How To Lead With Emotional Intelligence | Best Of Bossed Up
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Speak Up: A Live Assertive Communication Course for Women in the Workplace
Reclaim your mind & learn to own your voice:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 454. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up, and today we are talking all about how to reprogram your brain,
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
how to take back your thoughts and way of thinking from the patriarchal world that has embedded so many of our underlying and unconscious beliefs about ourselves and what we should want and what we are capable of. Joining me to unpack this is Kara Loewentheil, a JD and master certified life coach, the founder of the School of New Feminist Thought, host of the internationally top ranked podcast Unf*** Your Brain, Feminist Self Help For Everyone, and the author of the forthcoming book Take Back Your Brain, How A Sexist Society Gets In Your Head, And How To Get It Out. I am so delighted to share this conversation with y'all because it's kind of like you're going to hear two grown women find so much solidarity and similarity in real time on air here. I knew I was going to love speaking with Kara after reading her book, but I just underestimated how much we'd have similar perspectives and experiences on things. It's really been delightful speaking with her.
But first, a little background on her forthcoming book, which comes out later this month, Take Back Your Brain, How A Sexist Society Gets In Your Head, And How To Get It Out. has been called a galvanizing debut by Publishers Weekly. It was chosen as a must read by the next big ideas book club and praised by New York Times bestselling authors, including Mel Robbins, Elise London, Dr. Marisa Franco, and Tori Dunlap, who has been on this very podcast, I might add. Kara is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, and like every Ivy League lawyer, she will tell you in just a moment here how she quit her prestigious academic career to become a life coach eight years after she stepped down as director of a think tank at Columbia Law School. She has created a multiple seven figure business, taught millions of women how to identify the ways that sexist socialization impacts their brains, and help women all over the world rewire their thought patterns to liberate themselves from the inside out. And I'm so excited to bring this conversation to you, and I hope you'll weigh in with your thoughts and feelings after the episode. Kara, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
KARA: Thanks for having me.
EMILIE: I am so delighted because I feel like I've stumbled upon a kindred spirit when I came across your work. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today as an author, a podcaster, and a master coach.
KARA: Yeah. Um, so I describe it as, you know, the well trodden Ivy League lawyer to life coach pipeline. I just like a normal career path. I started out in a very, like, traditional academic and professional career. I went to Yale undergrad. I went to Harvard Law School. I clerked on a federal appeals court. And then this was all in service of becoming a reproductive rights litigator. That was my dream job that I had wanted since I was in high school. I've been a professional feminist my whole life, one way or another, I usually say. And so that was, like, my career. And I got to that job, to that dream job that I had wanted, and that had taken me 15 years to get to. And, like, a lot of, you know, people, and especially people socialized as women. I think I had sort of been operating under the understanding that once I finally got to certain milestones, I was going to finally feel confident and worthy and, like, I belonged. And that kept not happening. But along the way, I was like, well, you know, okay, it's Harvard Law school. This is, like, full of very intense people here. Like, that's not gonna happen here. Or, like, I'm clerking on the fifth circuit, which is. My judge was a liberal, but it was a very conservative circuit. Like, of course, that's not my whole. You know. But when I get to that job doing the reproductive rights organizing at that place, I wanted, like, that's when I'm going to feel, you know, all the amazing emotions that are supposed to arrive when I get the pinnacle of my career success. And then I was, you know, I found it a real rude awakening to discover that I still had my old, all my same thoughts and feelings, and the circumstance hadn't changed them. So that was when I started to be. Just started to think about, like, something's wrong with this kind of bill of goods I've been sold. But I wasn't. I didn't really understand it yet, so I tried, you know, changing things up. Like, I was like, maybe it's litigation I don’t like. I'm going to become an academic. So then I did a fellowship at Yale, and then I did a fellowship at Columbia, and then I was running a think tank at Columbia Law School on religious rights, religious accommodations, and reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights. And then the next stop was, like, to go on the market to get a law professor job. And I just, I took a hard left turn and decided to become a coach instead. Because through the years of that journey, sort of from when I first started to be like, something's not adding up the way it's supposed to for the next kind of four or five years after that, I had been, you know, I had tried, like, yoga and meditation and talk therapy and, like, all the things you do when you are trying to sort of figure out. At that time, probably my thought process was more like how to fix myself, but how to, like, feel better or, you know, just sort of resolve what was going on emotionally. And it wasn't until I found sort of the form of coaching that I teach now. I found my teachers, you know, work that I have built on that I was starting to be able to actually change how I thought and felt. And I'm actually really glad that I had that sort of decision point of like, are you going to do all the work to get, like, a job teaching torts in Kansas, or are you going to, if you're, like, going to jump, jump now? Because otherwise it's going to be another five years. So I did jump, and that was in 2016. And my big goal, my first three years of my business was to, like, replace my academic salary. I thought I would, like, hang out a shingle and have a bunch of, like, little one to one coaching clients. I wanted to make like, six figures, you know, just the first six figures. And, like, that was my big goal. And instead of my third year of business, I made my first seven figures in revenue, and I already was growing a team. And now I have a podcast that has been downloaded 50 million times. I have 8-10 employees and run a kind of seven figure business. So it's been a real wild ride. That's how I got to where I am today.
EMILIE: Well, congratulations. I feel like there's a lot of courageous self knowledge in that story that I think relates directly to your work, which is listening to that discontent instead of in our consumerist society. You know, there's lots of solutions to plastering over that, that feeling of misalignment, that feeling of deep seated. Is this right for me? And I think so many of us, particularly women, are really taught to ignore those feelings and suppress those feelings.
KARA: But we're also, I think, taught that, like, we need to do everything perfectly. So my story is, like, I didn't feel when I, you know, took the plunge, when I finally tell somebody, like, I'm not doing that, you know, like, I'm not signing up for that, I'm gonna leave. I didn't feel the way I feel today now. Right? I mean, I coach so many women who there's, like, obviously one group of people who, as you say, like, don't even know what they want. They think they don't know. What I find is they always do know. They just think it's unrealistic
EMILIE: Or they've been taught to ignore it.
KARA: Yeah, some people, I think we know, like, somebody will tell me they have no idea what they want, and then eight questions later, it's like, well, actually, I want to be a marine biologist who works on studying this specific kind of shark, but, like, that's not realistic, so it doesn't count. It's like, so what's really often going on is, like, what I do secretly know I want to do, I've told myself isn't an option. If that's not an option, then I don't know what else I want. Like, well, yeah, okay. That's because, like, you took off the thing you do want off the table. So I didn't. It's like, yes, there was. I'm not denying there was some courage of, like, being willing to take that jump, but I wouldn't, you know, women are socialized to undersell themselves, so I wouldn't say there wasn't some there, but I was not at all sure. Like, I told my parents at a family event because I was, like, afraid they'd lose their minds.
EMILIE: Yeah. I mean, I can imagine that. Yeah.
KARA: Yeah. I mean, and I don't blame them. Like, you have your daughter that, you know, is about to be an Ivy League law professor, and then she's like, I'm gonna be a life coach on the Internet. Like, I would also lose my mind.
EMILIE: I'm, uh, sure I called it when I made the big pivot from poli sci Ivy League degree to state director for the Obama campaign to, you know, six figure political strategist at 24 to then I'm gonna hang my own shingle and start Bossed Up. What the hell is Bossed Up, right? I remember thinking up until that point, I had been very good at merit badge chasing.
KARA: Yeah, yeah. Brass rings, I call them.
EMILIE: Right. All of those external signs of success people are so quick to laud you for. But when you know you've got to pursue that thing, you just can't stop thinking about and be a part of a messy solution to a really messy problem that you don't know how to solve yet, but you want to find out. Like, there's so much risk involved in that, and the rewards are rarely that quick. You know what I mean?
KARA: Yes. That was a quick rise, and I don't think that that's the standard, but I think what I want listeners to for sure take away is you look at somebody like me or someone like you. Like, don't assume that how confident we seem today about what we're doing is, like, what it's supposed to feel like, because I think people do think that. They sort of think, like, yeah, well, of course you could do it. Cause look how confident you are. But I don't feel that confident, which probably means that I'm not ready to do it or it's not right for me or, you know, I need to second guess myself. And I didn't know for sure I could do it at all. I just was willing to be afraid and try anyway. And that doesn't mean, like, pushing yourself. You know, I'm not. I'm not saying, like, traumatize yourself with terror, but, like, don't have the expectation that, you know, sometimes I say to my student, my clients, when I'm crazy, I'm like, okay, so let me get this straight. You want to do something big and bold and different that you've never done before, and that goes against the grain, but you want everybody to approve of it the whole time, and you don't want to feel scared at all. Like, that's not on the menu. That's not one of the options.
EMILIE: I love that. And I think, you know, it's interesting because you're coming to this conversation on this podcast at an interesting time in that, and I'll catch you up for the background here. I've been very transparent with my audience about the full on feminist existential crisis that I've been having for the past year, which was first prompted by big questions around, have we made any progress at all? It's been over a decade of working on the gender leadership gap in particular, and the stats are really bad and depressing and somewhat frozen in time in terms of women in leadership, in terms of the gender wage gap, and certainly in terms of, um, intersectional metrics around race and inequities. And I was starting to feel like this individualistic approach that I've taken at Bossed Up of here's how we can pull ourselves up by our, you know, Manolo straps, if you will, and, like, try to hack into a broken system is insufficient. And so over the past year, we've really made some hard pivots at Bossed Up. Oh, simultaneously, I should add. I had my worst year ever in ten years after nothing but revenue record breaking years for a decade. DEI corporate budgets, 2023 was not in the stars, laid off two thirds of my staff had a tough, tough last year that I've been very candid with folks about. So I don't think anyone's, like, aspiring to my level of confidence right now, because I've been very real here.
KARA: But you're still here. That is confidence, though, that you haven't taken it well, and maybe you have taken it personally inside, but part of you hasn't like.
EMILIE: Well, I can see the systemic forces. Yeah.
KARA: Also. And it's confidence. I think it's confidence to be able to talk about it, because if you were, some people would be ashamed and hide.
EMILIE: True, true. And so part of my crisis that I'll be honest, too, and say that I think I've come out on the other side of it, has been, how do we weave in the systemic change that was really at the foundation of my education in my early career life, in structured organizing and community organizing and political activism. And how do we weave that in while recognizing that the personal is political? And your book really struck me at first, I was ready to be very skeptical. I will be honest. I was like…
KARA: Like, it's a pink cover. What is this?
EMILIE: …I was just like, take back your brain. Like, is this just, you know, you talk about feminist self help, and I was like, my eye where I was raised, even though I'm very much in that line of work myself. And then I came across this, “social and structural inequalities can limit our ability to survive and thrive in very concrete ways”. This is an admission from your very introduction, right. If there's discrimination in the banking system, it's going to be hard to get the loan you need for your business to grow. If law enforcement can kill you during a traffic stop without repercussions, there's both potential physical threat to your well being every time you get in a car and a cumulative impact of that level of stress and fear on your nervous system over time. We need real social, structural solutions to these problems. We can't just think positive them away. And I was like, okay.
KARA: That's why we put that right up front. Had some fights with my editor, and I was like, this is very important. It needs to be. In the very beginning, that was very important.
EMILIE: And then you said, “ultimately, we have to liberate our minds if we want any hope of changing the world”. And this really struck me. I promise I'll stop reading your own words to you in a moment.
KARA: What author doesn't love to hear their own prose read back to them?
EMILIE: “Even if we institute. And this is what had my jaw like, on the floor, I had to stop and really put it down. Even if we institute mandatory paid parental leave, make all promotion decisions gender blind, magically eliminate unrealistic beauty standards, and rid the market of diet books, we would still have work to do, because the effects of all of these things still exist inside our minds. Without changing those thought patterns. Even if we waved a magic wand to reset the external circumstances of the world, the way we've all been taught to think would have us taking actions that would replicate the hierarchies and inequalities we were trying to escape.” It's not enough to reclaim feminism. We have to reclaim our brains, which is what you cover in part one, so that we can reclaim our lives, which is what you cover in part two. In other words, to learn how to change the thought patterns society has taught you, you must understand how your brain works. So help me understand that, because, like, how do we take this deprogramming of patriarchy approach that your whole book gets into and connect that to the systemic change that we need?
KARA: I mean, I think that the, it's almost like the fact that they've ever been divided in our minds is a misunderstanding, because if you think about what has ever changed the world. So I just went last. Just took my stepdaughter to Suffs the musical. I don't know if you've heard this on Broadway. It's a musical about the suffragists, which I've seen it twice now because I saw it when it first came out of the smaller theater, and now they've broadwayed it, and I, like, sobbed the whole time, both times. And they deal with, like, it's not really, um. It's not, like, whitewashed. Like, they deal with some of the problematic aspects of the original suffragists. But here's the point. Any social change that you want to see has come from a person's brain. Right? This is what I don't. It's like when people are complete, and I, you know, I was a structural marxist in law school myself. Like, I get it. Right? There's, like. There's this sort of determinism when you go to the extreme on almost any ideological spectrum, right? On almost any side, I think. I don't know if anybody, maybe. Probably someone has written a book about this. I'm sure I didn't just invent this idea, but, like, that any kind of political extreme has some kind of fixed determinism built in, right? Because it is sort of an extreme. Because reality is always more complex than, like, one theory of everything can capture, right? So if you think about, like, what has ever allowed society to change? Anybody who has changed society. So in Suffs, we're talking about Alice Paul, right? Who, like, changed up the tactics of the feminist movement and got the 19th amendment passed. Or you think about abolitionists, or you think about whoever, right? Anybody who has been at the forefront of social progress. The difference between them and everybody else was that they thought there was a different world possible, and they did not accept what they were told, but how society had to be. So I get, like, goosebumps every time I talk about this, and this is what I do all day long. So it's like, every time, it's just. It's such a like, cultural misunderstanding or social misunderstanding in progressive circles. And I say that as a progressive, you know, that we can, like, how are you solving a policy problem without a human brain? Where's the idea coming from? Are aliens dropping it with a drone? Like, our brains have to come up with it? And I'm not saying that that means that, like, the kind of stagnation or regression in some of the feminist victories we fought are, like, our fault for not thinking good enough. Right? But it's just like, the reality is we're going to have to change hearts and minds to get right, what we want. Or you might even be like, no, we need an armed revolution. Okay, great. How are you convincing everybody else?
EMILIE: Exactly. I think that's the piece I'm sort of seeing here, which is, it's not only do we need to liberate our own minds from accepting injustice in the form of the status quo and what's expected of us as women or folks who've been socialized as women. Right. But we also need to then have enough belief in ourselves, in our vision for the world to articulate that vision and convince others.
KARA: What do you believe is possible. Right. I mean, this is why I think, you know, Alice Paul, like, had some flaws. Certainly was not great on. You know, there was whatever. We don't get into the whole racist history of the white suffragist movement, necessarily.
EMILIE: We could but see racist history of the white suffrage movement.
KARA: Yeah. Right up front for a reason. So this is not. Alice Paul was not a genius angel who got everything, right. Right. But she was willing to believe that it was possible.
EMILIE: Right.
KARA: And she was willing to believe that something new was needed. Because for those who don't know the history, there had been, the American feminists have been working on trying to get the right to vote for 60 years they had basically gotten nowhere on a federal level. They had, like, gotten somewhere in, like, eight states. And there was, like, an old guard of, you know, Susan B. Anthony's next generation of her, like, students. And their whole thing was like, vote. Let mother vote. It was very like, women will uplift us and just please give us to us. And, you know, and those women, I'm sure, were rageful also and had shoved it down. But Alice Paul came along and with the women she worked with and was like, I think there's another way. I'm going to believe this is possible even when no one else does. I'm going to put myself on the line. During World War One, the suffragists protested and picketed Woodrow Wilson, which was enormously unpopular because he was a wartime president. So, like, liberating our own minds, to me, is the opposite of solipsistic. Like, what is solipsistic is when you hate yourself because of everything society's taught you. And so you spend all your time thinking about whether you're getting wrinkled. And, you know, does that person like you, and do you need to reread that email you sent your boss? And why is your skirt too tight? And are you supposed to go on keto? And are like, all the s*** that society teaches women to care about is actually what keeps us much more inward and self-focused in a way that drains our potential collective political power.
EMILIE: And so I hear the organizer in me is hearing agitation as a requirement for revolution. Right? [LAUGHTER] There's some friction, and you talk about it in different terms in the book, but, like, resistance to this idea that the perfectionism that so many of us bring to chasing merit badges or having the best blowout. Or I heard some women recently talking about getting their nails done. And I said, you know what? I thought getting my nails done was like a nice escape from a new mom. I would go and like, feel cared for. And then I realized I f****** hate getting my nails done.
KARA: Oh, yeah. Women are groomed to think that, right? Conforming to patriarchal beauty standards is self care. That's our downtime. Your downtime is getting a bikini wax. Like, what? That's a pleasant experience.
EMILIE: Yes. And so I said to these women, I said, it turns out I actually really don't like getting my nails done. And I figured if I do have any time at all as a new mom to get some self care, I'm gonna do something I actually like. And you know what the women around me said, first of all, one of them, who happens to be a few decades older than us. The rest of us was, like, nodding vigorously and was like, yeah, f*** that. And then two other women there who had beautiful mannies that I just complimented, by the way. Um, this is how we opened this conversation. They said, you know what? I just feel so much more put together when I have my nails done. And I thought,...
KARA: It's a classic.
EMILIE: …that is what they've taught you.
KARA: But it's true because of your thoughts. Like of course you, like women will say, no, no, I do it for myself, right? I get Botox for myself…
EMILIE: That's what we've been taught. Yeah.
KARA: …And I'm like, this is not to shame. We all are complicit in patriarchy in different ways. You can't see me, but my hair is curled right now, right? I'm wearing lipstick. Like, we all are complicit. We could talk about the differences in whether it takes over your life or not. But you don't just feel better when you look a certain way. You have been taught to think better thoughts about yourself when you look that way. And that is a really. The shallow version of the feminist analysis is like, I'm not getting my hair done for men. It's for me. And, like, I believe you consciously that you're not thinking, I'm doing this to look good to men, for instance, you may not care what men think, you might be a lesbian or pansexual or whatever, but the socialization of, like, why do you feel better about yourself when you're conforming to certain beauty norms? That is Socialization. It's not natural.
EMILIE: It's Socialization mixed in with Capitalism and our limited time, because then we look at, oh, wow. Women have less wealth than men. Oh, wow. A lot of it's going to the beauty salon. And you're just like, you know what makes me feel self care is having that cash in my bank account. You know what I mean? And having that time back, that you know, one of my girlfriends, who I was actively complimenting about her mani said, yeah, some of my friends, they get their brows done, they get their lashes done, they get their lips done, they get their nails done. I'm like, who has the time? And I thought, there's a scale for all of us in terms of where we would put ourselves.
KARA: And also your intersectionality if you are a thin able. But so people watching this can't see. For instance, I am a person in a fat body. If, depending on what social outcomes I'm trying to achieve and navigate, I have a different range of permissible expressions than someone who is thin or conventionally. Attractive, who can get away, quote unquote, with looking a certain way. I still think it's all thoughtwork, because I still have to decide, like, for instance, I'm not taking Ozempic to lose weight, because now maybe then I can conform to this norm. Like I'm going to live in a fat body. That's part of my radical politics. But I do wear lipstick. Like, we're all negotiating this, and that's fine. It's just being honest with ourselves about what is happening.
EMILIE: And how it's being policed. Right. Because I think about black women's hair and how, you know, being put together is so societally policed for black women, and that s*** costs a lot of money and time. Right. We want to talk way more than a manicure. And then that feeds into the generational wealth gaps between black and white households in this country. So it does radicalize me, as you can tell. But I want to get to the concept you introduced early on in your book about this that really articulates nicely what we've been talking about, which is what you call, The Brain Gap. Explain what the brain gap is.
KARA: So the brain gap is sort of. It's one gap that leads to another. So there's a gap in how men and women are socialized. A lot of different ways to articulate this. And I should always. I always like to preface this by saying socialization does a f****** number on men as well. So it's not like I'm just like, we know patriarchy is bad for everybody, so I could write a whole other book about what socialization does to men's brains. It's not saying, but they are more often socialized to believe that their value depends on what they do, what they accomplish, or, you know, sometimes even just for existing who they are, just some inherent value. Women are socialized to believe that their value comes from essentially how they're perceived, what other people think about them. So, so many women feel like their self esteem is like. It's sort of like you have to do a really complicated algebra equation every day based on what everyone, you know, thinks about you at any given time. And also people who, like, are dead or you haven't talked to since third grade or whatever else, right. You're constantly kind of geolocating yourself based on what you think everybody else thinks about you. And so this gap in how they're socialized leads to this gap that women experience, which is the gap between what they want to think and feel and how they actually think and feel. And as you said, you know, can't see on a podcast, but we put scare quotes around how you actually feel. Because I actually think understanding the brain gap is great news, because normally, how people present this is a unfixable conflict, which is, I think, one way. I feel a different way. I think I want, I should feel confident, I feel insecure, whatever. Or I should feel brave to go ask for a raise, but I feel afraid. And then you don't know where to go from there. You're like, well, I think one thing, I feel another thing. Now I'm just. I don't know, stuck. But actually, those are not a thought and a feeling. Those are two different thoughts you have. This is where we get to this layering, right? One of those thoughts you're not even conscious of really. Often you don't want to admit it. It's like you've been to too much therapy. You shouldn't think that anymore. Or, you're a feminist, you shouldn't think that anymore. You know, you're not supposed to think that way. You know, you're supposed to be confident, whatever. Women will take anything and turn it against ourselves. Right? We will take therapy, self help, and just, like, use it. It's like you'll learn meditation, you'll feel a little better, and then you'll start beating yourself up. You don't meditate enough. Like, anything can be turned into a weapon against ourselves.
EMILIE: I feel called out for that one. But I did just meditate before I hopped on this podcast. That's so funny.
KARA: That's that weird coach intuition that happens all the time. So that's really that gap. But when you understand, oh, these are actually just two conflicting thought patterns. And then in the book, I'm teaching, obviously, like, how to change your thoughts on purpose. That's the key. Right? But it makes sense. You just have two different thoughts. It's like, if you believe that, you know, there's a cat in the house and a dog in the house, like, they're both in the house. If you don't take any active action to change them, you're just gonna continue existing with both of them.
EMILIE: Right. Can you help me understand the difference between how you conceptualize a thought versus a feeling? It seems kind of basic, but.
KARA: I use a model that is kind of grounded in cognitive behavioral psychology, which is the idea that a thought creates an emotion, which creates a behavior, an action, or an inaction.
EMILIE: Right. I'm actually looking at this wonderful visual, which I should find a way to put into our, uh, blog post that corresponds with this because it is really helpful, and it's a cycle. Right. You have a thought, you experience an emotion that leads you to take a behavior.
KARA: Or to not take a behavior. Yeah. A thought is like a sentence in your mind or an image. If you're a visual thinker, a feeling is a sensation in your body. It's confusing in English because we'll say things like, well, I just feel like my partner should take out the trash. That's not actually a feeling, that's a thought. A feeling is like happy, sad, you know, mad, joy. There's really not that many feelings, actually, and it's something you can physically experience in your body. I think this is partly why so many people don't know how to. Like, when people say, feel your feelings, most people are like, I don't. What does that mean? Like, a lot of the time, people are just thinking their thoughts over and over again and being like, yeah, I'm feeling my feelings. No.
EMILIE: Totally. I'm spacing on his name. But the head of the Yale School of Emotional Intelligence came on for his book Permission To Feel. Love that book. It was, like, one of the best books I read that year. And we did, we talked a lot about, like, how slow it requires a lot of slowing down to feel our feelings, which is inconvenient.
KARA: Yeah. Most of us don't want to.
[LAUGHTER]
EMILIE: Yeah. But with a two year old, it's become very apparent to me how important that is.
KARA: They're such beautiful examples, though, because their emotions change so fast, and we think of that as being, like, so weird. But actually, that's the normal human state, and we are the ones prolonging our emotions really unnecessarily with our resistance to feeling them, with our stories about them. If you, the more of this work you do, the more you, a little bit feel like a toddler, you have more self control, but your mood can really be like. It can really be like, you feel really sad for a minute about something, and then it's over, and then you're, you're like, on, on I go.
EMILIE: I love that. So when you're talking about rewriting the code, how to change the program, obviously I don't want you to give away the whole book, and our time here is limited, but, you know, help me understand the return piece, help me understand the completion of that thought, emotion, behavior, return cycle or process. And how does that inform the whole point of your book?
KARA: So, um, this is a sort of modification, a, uh, tweak on how, uh, the coaching tool I was taught which was, like, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results is the language that my teacher uses. I talk about returns because I think it really helps bring that model into conversation with the structural analysis that we have been having. Because the idea is that any mental or emotional investment you put into a thought, meaning just like, literally, the electrical impulses in your brain, like, the calories you spend thinking it, like the time, whatever it is, right. Anything that you are thinking and then feeling and then doing or not doing is producing some kind of return on your life. It's like an investment and a return. Right? Behavior can be an inaction. So if you are constantly thinking to yourself that you shouldn't ask for a raise because you don't want anybody to think you're greedy, and that if your boss did think you were greedy, it would be the end of the world and all bosses would think that, and you can't go anywhere else and get a raise. If that's, like, how your thoughts are, you're creating a lot of, like, resignation and anxiety and shame and all these negative emotions. And there's nothing inherently wrong with negative emotions, but the behavior in this case is going to be to continue to never ask for a raise. And then the return you're creating is just, like, reinforcing your belief that kind of, you can't get a raise because you've never asked, because you have this thought pattern.
EMILIE: And this is what a lot of coaches call limiting beliefs. Right?
KARA: Yeah. There's a real range of, you know, people. If we think about the ideological spectrum as being from, like, structural determinist to, like, pure manifesters, like, right. In terms of, like, how much control you have over your life, sort of from, like, none. Like, you're completely in charge of everything that happens to you, including acts of God or your fault, from your thoughts. Right? I am, like, in the middle here of, like, we. I think humans in general overestimate the control we can have over, like, other people or our bodies or, like, things that we don't really control, but we vastly underestimate how much impact we can have on our own lives because of these beliefs. Yeah, I always try to, like, avoid a lot of the terms that have been kind of, I don't know, limiting beliefs or.
EMILIE: Well, I think that's prudent. I think that's prudent of you because you can sort of recognize the manifestation extreme in what you just said, which is if we can reframe our thoughts, if we can deprogram some of our thoughts and really be conscious and put that energy towards even that mental energy, towards the way we want to feel, the thoughts we want to have, then you will see an ROI, a return on that investment.
KARA: Yeah, but I don't think it's, so the thing with manifestation is that it's, like, mysterious. I think this model explains what happens. It's not that, like, you. Like, you can't, I always say, you can't sit in your apartment and manifest a partner unless you want it to be the UPS person. Like, you have to leave. [LAUGHTER] But what we know is that if you think and feel a certain way, you're going to take actions that align with that. That's going to produce certain returns. But I also view this thought work, this mindset work as, the most powerful practice for the times. You can't control the circumstances when something. A lot of my work is based on the work of Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust and wrote a book called Man's Search For Meaning, which is all about the idea that the ability to determine one's own reaction to circumstances is the last freedom that no one can ever take away from you.
EMILIE: Wow. I mean, what an extreme and powerful example.
KARA: This is why I try to proudly reclaim self help. And I totally understand why anybody who reads feminist self help might be like, I don't know about self help, because, first of all, women have to, and women and other marginalized people have to help themselves. Are the mainstream institutions helping you? Not that much. Psychology and coaching, mostly created by straight, cis, Christian, white men who really didn't think a lot about how socialization might impact your brain.
EMILIE: Yeah. What I love is there's something kind of the word is escaping me, but what's coming to mind is insidious about this.
KARA: Yes, I use that word in the book. It's very insidious.
EMILIE: And what you're doing is you're waging that internal battle. Much like, I want to see us wage a system change battle from the inside out. Like, I think more women in government, more women in represented offices can help us change these f***** up systems from the inside out. And you're saying the battle starts within yourself and that, you know, there's also a war to be waged to kind of counter the patriarchal program we've all been raised with to at least get our thoughts and behaviors realigned.
KARA: How do we get more women running for office? Women have to be, ro run for office, you got to be willing to be rejected a lot. You got to be willing to be critiqued in public. These are like women's worst fears because of how they've been socialized. So, like, you want more women running for office, that's the stuff we have to resolve. Like, it is not. And it's not like, okay, so we just pause on policy, and we all get our minds straight, and then we begin the policy work. It's that the feminist movement has been 98% focused on policy. And I'm like, let's just spend 5% of our time talking about the mindset piece. Like, that would improve things.
EMILIE: Yeah. I mean, that is radical. I do think this is like. It's kind of like radical self care, right? It's that concept of, we can have both, we can do both, but we have to take care of ourselves.
KARA: Right. And why do people burn out? Like, people burn out because they get hopeless and discouraged, because they don't have these skills to create a different way of thinking and showing up to these problems.
EMILIE: Totally. One of the last things I wanted to ask you about that I was really glad to see you include at the end of your book, right next to each other are two concepts around radical acceptance and radical action. How do you sort of conceive of those two things together?
KARA: So, acceptance is such a fascinating concept, and I think there's such a mixed upset of beliefs in the progressive world, especially around acceptance, that we could have a whole other podcast on. But I, when I talk about radical acceptance, I'm building on Buddhist, traditional Buddhist concepts from Buddhist philosophies. Right.
EMILIE: Detachment. Right. Buddhist detachment, yeah.
KARA: Yeah. Acceptance is not condoning. Right? Acceptance does not mean, I think it's cool that the wage gap exists. No problem. I'll just go about my day. But there is a difference between arguing with reality and being able to actually take action to change reality. And we are all socialized, for whatever reason, to believe that. I don't even know if this is patriarchy, really. It's just this idea that, like, hating things is what makes you change them. It's sort of a vision of what human nature is like and what motivates people, really more. It's more of a, like, I guess, fight between enlightenment philosophy and other philosophy. But. So it's like, if our idea is that people only change things when they hate them, and so therefore, if we, like, accept, quote unquote, that something's happening, then we're condoning it and giving up, and we don't care. And I'm talking about emotional acceptance, which means it's basically the difference between saying this shouldn't be happening, like, in some objective global sense. I personally am correct in my belief that the world should be a different way, and I am emotionally fighting with this, versus I would prefer the world were different. I wish things weren't this way, which is like, even just framing it that way. You are acknowledging that you personally have a value or an opinion or a belief that is different from how the world is, but it does not have the same sense of sort of pushing energy against something that you aren't going to change just by pushing energy against it. And what happens is people burn out. They especially, I think now when we are, that second part of radical action is like, we are exposed to so much that's wrong with the world all the time now in ways that we can't even impact, like your Instagram feed. And then there's this, like, globalization kind of, of political discourse. And it makes everybody feel pretty much, unless they are a professional in this area, that they are overwhelmed, everything is terrible all over the world. There's nothing they can do. And that, like, doom scrolling, is somehow their act of civic participation, which does f*** nothing for anyone except Mark Zuckerberg, who makes money.
EMILIE: When you doom scroll, that is important to remember everybody. Are we listening? Yes.
KARA: That's why that's happening.
EMILIE: It's designed to be addictive. It's designed to make you feel like you're producing value in the world when you reshare.
KARA: Yes. And every single social movement is just made up of humans. And in any group of humans, there's a small subgroup of humans whose favorite thing to do is monitor and censor the other humans. And those people on, in progressive circles, those people are online, and that's what they're doing. And, like, every, every group has this from the beginning of time, but, like, that's where ours are right now. So, online just becomes this echo chamber. Whereas if you put down your f******* phone and spent 40 minutes every day, 20 minutes every day, whatever, thinking about, like, a concrete problem in your neighborhood that you could try to solve. Right? And, uh, this does not mean everybody. Some people listening to this podcast probably do get to talk to the president. Great. You should, yes. Keep the global picture in mind for you.
EMILIE: Please do that. Yes.
KARA: Those of us who are not, like, yeah, you can vote, you can donate money, but, like, what could you do in your community to make life better? And this is why, where I, like, I'm sure you and I could have a huge conversation since you used to be an organizer about, like, where progressive leftism has gone, like, off the rails with a complete, like, there's just the lack of solidarity and organization work on the ground that is necessary. So radical action is like being willing. And this all goes back to Socialization. Hilariously enough, because women are socialized to not be willing to do things imperfectly, we're supposed to do everything perfectly. And because we're being, we believe we're valued based on what everyone thinks of us. We need to perform the correct, like, emotions and beliefs and actions. And so we would feel like we were, this is what's really weird if you think about it. We would feel like we were a worse person if we did not share anything online about global traumas and we like, went to the soup kitchen once a week and served food. There's something going wrong in our thinking when like, that's how we're thinking about it.
EMILIE: And I think what's giving me hope there is that the people I know who are most plugged into their communities deeply feel this alignment that you talk about with their values and how they're spending their time compared to. And I will claim this as my drug of choice lately, those of us who are atone attached to our phones habitually and who find ourselves scrolling far too much and might feel isolated or detached from others. Right? And certainly those in our own backyard, like those of us who are in that camp, feel less, I think, healthy about how we're spending our time.
KARA: Yeah. And your community doesn't like, I don't personally know. My community is like all the people I'm reaching on the podcast. The people read my book. It doesn't really mean I don't personally have a garden, a plot in our community garden. Like, it's whatever your community is, you get to decide. But the big difference is that my activism is I am actually taking action and interacting with people and trying to help them as opposed to just sort of like posting, resharing, doom scrolling. Posting, resharing, doom scrolling. That's the cycle that I think people bottom out in. And that's why people feel so hopeless when there's a lot. Like maybe the world is burning and ending and we can still help each other in the meantime, but we got to actually do that and not just doom scroll.
EMILIE: So for those of us who feel overwhelmed, and honestly, I could talk to you forever. But if for those of us who do feel overwhelmed and now might be adding you addressed this in the intro, might be adding this to the top of our to do list. Oh my god, I must fix the way I think now. Like yet another thing I'm failing at. How would you advise, they begin thinking about your, and how can they access, quite frankly, some of your resources around how to take this approach that balances action with acceptance, and how to be kind to myself while assessing and analyzing, like, how my own thoughts and behaviors might be actually just a reflection of a broader social programming that I wasn't even aware of was happening to me.
KARA: I mean, honestly, you know, if you want to buy the book, they would just Take Back Your Brain. You can get it takebackyourbrainbook.com. You can pre order. I also have a podcast called Unf*** Your Brain. Obviously that is free. So for those who really need the free thing for it to be accessible, the podcast is great for those who would like to have everything put in one place sequentially. The book is great. 350 podcast episodes is like a lot to try to organize in your own mind. And the book is really written to be a one stop shop. Like, you can come in a total newbie and by the end you will understand how your brain works, how you've been socialized in the major areas that impact women's lives, and you will have concrete skills to change them. I read a lot of self help books, obviously during this journey, and a lot of them are like 80% filler and like one idea that could be five pages long. And I feel confident saying my book is not like that.
EMILIE: I've openly critiqued books like that on this podcast before, and yours is not at all like that. Just see the footnotes for evidence.
KARA: Hired my own fact checker and everything. But also, it's just very dense. Like, it's not dense in a hard to read way, but just there's a lot of value packed in there. But even if you are more sophisticated in terms of like, you already know about mindset work, you feel more aware as a feminist, the book is still going to help you take that work a lot deeper because you're going to become aware of a lot of the ways that you don't even know you're thinking, which is, man, is it a wild ride. When you learn how to access your subconscious, there's a lot in there. It's like a closet you haven't gone into. So if you go to takebackyourbrainbook.com, it's the same amount as it costs to give it to Jeff Bezos to pre order the book, but we're giving away a bunch of free bonuses. There's a 30 day guided journal that takes you through, and you get that right away to start figuring out your thinking. If you decide you want to, if you're really into this, you can pre order three books. We do a live book club with me, so there's amazing bonuses.
And then the week this podcast is coming out, if you pre order this week, we're giving away just this week a full guide to how to use the organizational system that I teach, which is really a mix of concrete things, like, here's how you should run your calendar. Here's how you should organize your projects and stuff, but also the mindset stuff that most organizational systems don't have, which is why, just like diets, they don't work. Because if you are, for instance, avoiding a project because you're scared that you will do it imperfectly, because you've been socialized that way, all the structure in the world's not going to help you. You got to deal with those thoughts.
EMILIE: Yeah, I love that. I'm so excited. I want that project plan. I want to get that. So Take Back Your Brain, How A Sexist Society Gets In Your Head, And How To Get It Out. We will drop those links that you referenced at the top of our show notes for those who are listening right now. Where can we keep up with you and the rest of your amazing work?
KARA: Like I said, my podcast is Unf*** Your Brain. You can find that on any podcast. Everything else, honestly, my last name is a pain in the spell, so I just go to takebackyourbrainbook.com because it has. Even if you're not going to order the book, which obviously you should, there's, like, social media links and stuff there. It's easier than trying to google my name.
EMILIE: Amazing. Well, Kara, congratulations. This is quite a feat. I kind of love how much the classics emerge in all of your work and even the bust behind you and on your website, I'm like, she's really a classics gal.
KARA: I did direct to studies at Yale. Man, that was a lot of old white dudes I had to read.
EMILIE: Well, you've really co opted them in a feminist and radical way. I love that. Well, congrats. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thanks so much for being here.
KARA: Thanks for having me.
EMILIE: Okay. For more links and details and even some visuals that really help round out this conversation, you can find a corresponding blog post and a full transcript at bosssedup.org/episode454. That's bosssedup.org/episode454. I want to hear what you have to say about today's episode. Were you skeptical like I was about this whole concept of self help and rewiring our own thought patterns? Or has she convinced you? Has Cara really made the case for how patriarchy relies on our internal programming to keep us stuck in patterns that do not serve us?
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If you've experienced this firsthand, which I think, honestly, all of us probably have, but if you're conscious of how you've experienced these thought loops firsthand, I would love to hear about it in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook, or in our Bossed Up LinkedIn group. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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