ERP 065: How Complaining Damages Your Relationship & What To Do About It

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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Hi, thank you for joining me today. I hope you are well. I’m excited to be sharing with you today. Today’s episode is episode 65, and it’s How Complaining Damages Your Relationship & What To Do About It. This is really to kick off my mini-program.

I want to personally invite you, if you’re interested in shifting criticism and defensiveness patterns in your relationship into loving communication, where you feel connected to your partner and you feel a sense of understanding and you’re on the same page. I know firsthand how painful criticism can be.

If you’ve heard me talk about my personal story, what got me into the field of couples and relationship to begin with, you’ll hear me talk about a relationship where I experienced a great deal of criticism, and I remember how alone, how misunderstood, how disconnected and ultimately devastated and pained I felt. And the dynamic that we were creating, these repetitive patterns – we can get stuck there and not know how to get out of. So I am providing a mini-experience for you to engage with me and a small group of like-minded people to really shift and transform this critical approach, and these critical defensive patterns in your relationship. It’s a mini-program, so it’s not a big commitment as far your time and money, but it will be powerful. I have bonuses to offer you, and again, this is going to be unique, because this will be the first time that I’m offering it, and I’m tailoring this to your burning questions. I’m going to be creating the curriculum for you.

I have so much to offer you, but I want it to be exactly to what your pain points are, so that you can really feel emotionally safe and connected with your partner, feel like you’re on the same team, and feel a sense of bond and love in your communication and in your connection.

If you are ready to shift your criticism in your relationship into loving communication, reach out to me, e-mail me and let me know you’re interested and we’ll find a time, and I’ll be able to share with you more about criticism, help give you some tools and strategies, and if it seems like a good fit, enroll you into this program. Again, I’m so excited for what I have to offer you, and really ultimately helping you shift into more love and connection. You can e-mail me at [email protected], or you can call me or find the way to reach me on my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com

And stay tuned – very soon, in a few days, I’m going to be releasing an interview that I did with Kathleen Hendricks. I’m particularly excited to share this interview with you because not only is she one of the major thought leaders in the field of conscious relationship, she has also had a profound – her and her husband, Gay Hendricks, their work has been one of the major contributors to my getting into this field to begin with. It had a profound impact on me. I love what she has to offer in this interview, so I hope you’ll check it out. It’s going to be released in a few days, and it will be episode 66, with Kathleen Hendricks.

Okay, let’s get started for today. Again, today’s episode, 65, How Complaining Damages Your Relationship & What To Do About It. In part, this is playing off of an article that one of my clients sent to me and really wanted my input around, but I thought it was perfect for this discussion that we’re having around criticism, complaining, blaming and defensiveness. The article is Does Complaining Damage Our Mental Health? by Guy Winch, and I have a few other articles that I’m gonna reference in today’s podcast episode.

So today is about complaining. Now, is complaining helpful? Some people would think complaining is synonymous with venting. Venting is largely when we have a rant and we’re upset about something, and we need to get it off our chest. It’s a way of releasing and discharging some level of frustration. This morning I was asking my husband “When you complain, what’s happening for you?” And he paused and he thought about it, and he said “Largely when I’m complaining is when I feel frustrated and I don’t feel like I know what to do about it. So it’s just like a short term relief of trying to get it off my chest and kind of discharge some of that frustration”, which I think is really well said. So in this article by Guy Winch, “Does Complaining Damage Our Mental Health?” he says “The problem is that today we associate the act of complaining with venting far more than we do with problem-solving.” So he’s really identifying that often times we’re not focused on getting a different result. It’s almost like we’re just perpetuating in this vicious cycle of complaining, and it really doesn’t result to any long-term change. It’s just kind of a short-term relief.

It reminds me when I was young in undergrad and I lived in Miami, Florida. I was living with my aunt and uncle at the time, and they lived in Kendall, which is South Florida. I was working in Northern Miami, in Dade County, and I went to school at FIU, and they have a North campus and they have a South campus. I would go to work really early in the morning, before traffic, and it would take me 30 minutes. Then in the afternoon, when I was done with school and it was probably rush hour, trying to come home – I am not kidding you, I wanna say at least three times a week there was traffic that was so bad, and there were some type of accidents, and I’m talking 8 lanes of traffic, for an extended period of time. So if you’re driving 60, 65, 70 miles an hour, you can get a far distance in 30 minutes; so what ended up happening was it would take me, without exaggeration, at least 3 hours to get home on these evenings. And sometimes the accidents on the other side of the freeway, not even on the side that I’m driving on, but as you know, it slows everything down. So I would get home and I’d be really to pull out my hair, and like “Oh, I wanna get my helicopter’s license, this is ridiculous”. One commute – not even there and back, but just one leg would take me three plus hours. And it’s hot, and you name it.

So I would come home and I would need to vent, I would rant, to get it off my chest. This might give me some short-term relief, but does it really solve the problem? Does it really help my situation? Is complaining a habit?

In thinking about complaining, sometimes this is a learned behavior. This could be our family, it could be cultural… Just the other day, I think it was last week, I have a friend that I play volleyball with, and she – it’s so cute – is constantly talking about the weather… It’s commentary, but it often can sound like a complaint. We were with a group of people, and somebody had mentioned that she often complains, but it was in a very playful, affectionate way, and she was like “What are you gonna do? I’m Jewish!” So it was really cute, it was just that cultural reference, that it’s a very common thing to complain in some cultures.

Part of the invitation here, as we’re discussing complaining and the impact it has on your relationships and what you can do about it is to gain awareness around the tone and the flavor of your complaints – I think that’s a big key here.

If the complaining is taking a really negative tone… Another article that I’m referencing is “Why Complaining Is Literally Killing You And Making You Sick, And Here’s How To Stop”, this is by Sharmini Gana, and she is talking about neuroscience. So if you’ve ever taken a neuropsychology class or a neurobiology class, you might have heard the instructor or the professor say “Neurons that fire together stay together.”

This is basically letting you know that when a neuron or the synapse fires, it creates a bond. So the more you do it, that neural pathway is going to strengthen.
Sharmini says in her article

“Every time you complain, you are reinforcing that wiring and making it easier to trigger it. Do it often enough and it can become your default setting. Negative thoughts beget more negative thoughts and you can easily fall into a cycle of negative thinking and chronic complaining.”

Obviously the tone of this is negative, it’s viewing things from a negative viewpoint and getting stuck in that… Almost like you have these glasses on that are shades, and you can’t see anything other than the shade of those glasses. And more than anything, this just becomes the habitual pattern. This becomes, like she’s saying, the default mode. This is your mode of operating, it doesn’t change a whole lot, just that complaining and that negative outlook.

It’s interesting, if we’re referencing this being a habit and talking about even family or cultural experiences that this is the norm, it can be a form of relating. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but it’s almost like you’re bonding through complaining.

I was thinking about this and I remember, it’s a long ago example, but I remember being a teenager, and at the time, my group of friends, it was the way that we talked to one another. It sounds so catty, but it was complaining mostly about our appearance. It was almost this pattern of “I complain and then you say something positive. Then you complain and I rebuttal with something positive.” She’s saying, “Oh, my genes are too big here and too small here”, and I’m like “Oh no, they look great.” It’s this back and forth, but there’s this bonding around complaining, particularly around appearance. I think back on this and I’m like “What was that all about?” and it could have been a way to deal with insecurities.

When we feel insecure, it’s a way to kind of put it out there before anyone else does, and it’s a form of bonding, a style of communication.

One way to really look at your habit here is to ask yourself honestly how many things do you complain about on a regular basis. I was just kind of jotting down some notes here, and I was like “Hm, I have complained about a fair amount of these things”, so I’ll list a few here.

The weather – it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too gloomy.

Traffic – I just gave you a perfect example of traffic.

Work

Your boss

A co-worker

Your kids

Your spouse

Money

Taxes

The meal you ate at a restaurant

Feeling stressed, overwhelmed

Lack of time

Too busy

Politics

Health

These are all things that are commonplace to complain about. If you want to just reflect – again, if you want to look at the show notes to come back to this, if you’re driving or doing something where you can’t really take a pause and note, I would encourage you to kind of really reflect and do some self-inquiry. Or just even to pay attention to, in the next couple days, are you complaining? And catch yourself. Is it a habit? Are you even thinking about it? Is it just kind of that automatic habit?

Do you avoid the source of the complaint?

In this article that I keep referencing, Guy Winch is talking about often times when we have a complaint, whether or not it’s with a company, or a restaurant, most of the time we will not fill out the survey, we probably won’t mention it, because we think it’s not gonna matter, or we don’t want to rock the boat or get somebody into trouble, and we want to avoid it. So we’re not very direct about expressing our complaint or our issue. This seems so normal and common. I was reflecting on my own life and I referenced a lot that I play beach volleyball, and there’s a pretty big community here. We have 25+ courts – depending on the weather – at East Beach Santa Barbara, so there’s a fair amount of people that love to play and play often, so there’s a pretty tight community. And it’s funny, you hear people commenting about other people, and I can tell you it’s most likely not to their face. And it’s nothing major, or kind of this backstabbing, but it’s like “Oh, she doesn’t move that fast” or “She’s kind of a downer” or “He’s too intense” or “She’s not competitive enough”, or “He’s too quiet”, “She’s too loud”.

There’s all these comments, and I remember thinking “Hm, I wonder what people say about me, because I never hear it directly to my face.” It’s just interesting, we largely don’t offer this feedback, and most of the time it’s because I don’t think we think anything’s going to change; this person is who they are, and it doesn’t seem kind or nice to really offer that.
In this article, Guy Winch says:

“We are equally avoidant when it comes to complaints to our loved ones. We fear voicing them will only lead to an argument and resolve nothing. Instead, we reach for the phone, call our friends and vent to them instead.”

Sound familiar? I know I’ve done it, but I try, I’ve been really committed in the last 10+ years, particularly with my husband, to not engage, really go direct, really reveal. So again, in my interview with Katie Hendricks she will talk a lot more about this, so I hope you will check that out. It will be released, like I said, in a couple days.

Does complaining lead to feeling helpless?

Again, as a reference, often times when we are complaining we think the thing we are complaining about is something we don’t have control over. So for complaining as a source of discharging some of that frustration, getting some relief, again, we’re focused on more venting that we are problem-solving or finding a different outcome or solution.

When we are chronically or habitually complaining, it tends to lead to that feeling of feeling helpless, where we don’t take action. It’s interesting, in psychology we’ll call this ‘learned helplessness’. There’s a video of an old professor describing this. They did a research study –  this was years and years ago – and they had a fish tank, and they had fish on one side of the fish tank, and they had it partitioned off with a glass partition in the middle of the tank, hence half of the tank was not accessible to the fish; they all kind of crammed on one side. They kept trying to swim over, they kept trying to swim over, and kind of swim into the other part of the tank. Well, they were never able to get through. So at some point, the researcher lifted up that partition, and interesting enough, none of the fish ever tested that. They learned at some point that they can never go over to the other side. It was this termed of learned helplessness. If you want to check that video out, you can find it on my show notes page. Again, that’s at DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast and you can find the most recent episode there at the top.

So really what this has to do with is that when we are feeling helpless, we’re likely to not take action. We’re not likely to be clear or direct about what we want, we’re not even really thinking about what our needs are, because we’re already feeling powerless, we’re already feeling hopeless, so why even entertain what I want if there’s not way I can get it? So with the complaint, we’re largely focused on what we don’t like and we think there’s no other way, so we don’t even entertain the possibility that it could be different, hence the helplessness. It limits our thinking, and this does affect our state of being.

Guy Winch says:

“When we have so many dissatisfactions and frustrations, yet believe we’re powerless to do much about them or to get the results we want, we are left feeling helpless, hopeless, victimized, and bad about ourselves. Obviously, one such incident won’t harm our mental health, but we have so many complaints, this scenario happens many times a day. This accumulation of frustration and helplessness can add up over time and impact our mood, our self-esteem, and even our general mental health” and that’s not even to mention our physical health, right? We’ve all heard that stress is one of the major contributors to most diseases – the levels of cortisol, our stress hormone in our body that interferes with our functioning, our brain capacity and just the way our organs function. It’s an enormous factor in our overall well-being. Complaining can have an impact on our emotional well-being, or sense of feeling helpless and hopeless, and our belief system, our outlook, not only to mention our physical state. When we’re feeling stress and overwhelm, we typically feel lethargic, and that’s where adrenal fatigue comes into play, and there’s lots of physical tolls from stress. If you add all these together, yes, I would say it does have a real negative impact on your overall well-being.

The last question to really point out how complaining can have a negative influence on you and your relationship here, it’s how does complaining affect your relationships?

If you think about it, if you’ve ever been around somebody that complains a lot, what’s your natural feeling? Or if you notice you tend to complain a lot, do people lean in to what you’re saying? Do they seem interested, do they want to know more? How does complaining engage people? When I think about it, I think most of the time people tolerate it. They love you, they care about you, they’re interested to some degree, but does it really draw them into conversation, does it inspire them, does it move them to really want to engage in conversation? You might vent together, sure, but how does that feel, when you go on this venting back and forth and you leave the conversation just thinking “Okay, all we did is really complain.” How do you feel after that?

Think about the people that you’re really attracted to. Most people would say there’s a sense of empowerment and vitality, and they’re positive, right? Where sometimes when people complain a lot, particularly when the tone is negative and a little chronic, it can feel heavy.

I have family members, my husband and I both have family members where they tend to have a victim viewpoint, all the complaints about why life is hard, and it’s really lacking self-responsibility. And sure, there’s hardships, we  all endure that, and it’s nice to feel empathy from others and sometimes commiserate, but when it’s this repetitive, habitual cycle that becomes your environment more or less, it becomes the environment of your relationship, and it kind of builds the association of this is how you relate to people.

Again, all of these questions are really invited for you to consider how does complaining play a role in your relationship. To recap, the five questions I am posing for you to consider here are:

1. Is complaining helpful?
2. Is complaining a habit?
3. Do you avoid the source of the complaint?
4. Does complaining lead to feeling helpless?
5. Does complaining affect your relationships?

What to do instead of complaining?

First I want to suggest the concept of your empowerment – where is your power in the situation that you’re complaining about? If we just referenced how most often we’re complaining about things that we feel we have no control over, and considering what your role is and whatever your circumstances, the first thing might be to just notice, like I suggested a moment ago, what is your level of complaining? Really track how often you complain and what you complain about. That’s going to give you the indicator to start with, and like most things, you want to start with awareness.

Then the honesty – really being honest with yourself. I recently just posted on my social media channels an article by Eric Barker, and it’s a neuroscience researcher reveals 4 rituals that will make you happier. I thought it was a great article. Not only is he referencing different studies, but he’s giving some really great points around just 4 rituals that will make you happier.

One of the things in his tips, I think it’s number two, is to label your negative feelings. He’s giving you some research here that basically says when you put your feelings into words, the research shows that people are able to reduce the stress of that emotion so you can find that there. Basically he’s saying when you can label an emotion in one word or two, it really just helps reduce the intensity and the upsetness around it, it helps alleviate some of that distress. So if I’m encouraging you to build awareness around what your complaints are, it might be really helpful for you to check in, feel into your body, what are you feeling? And it might be obvious, you’re like “I’m frustrated” or “I’m angry” or “I’m annoyed”, and then underneath that, what else is there, just to have the inquiry, and also to recognize what you’re wanting. Now, this might be easier to do if you’re at a restaurant and you’re not liking the meal, or if you’re contending with difficult traffic. It might be like “I would like to be able to get home efficiently. I don’t want to spend a big chunk of time on the road, in traffic”, but when we are in relationship, especially with a significant other and we’re feeling some annoyance or difficulty and we have a complaint about the other person, we might be easily able to articulate the issue we have with the other person, but I can tell you over and over and over again in my line I’m constantly coaching people to tell me more about what their experience is – “when that happens, tell me what’s happening inside you? Help me understand your inner world, what are you feeling, what are you wanting?” It helps… When you can own it and take responsibility for it, there’s a lot more empowerment, you’re more likely to lean into doing something about it, working more collaboratively, and your partner can guarantee you, is going to be able to hear what’s true for you much more easily than your critique of them.

Once you’ve owned it, you’re going to be really set up. Your natural tendency is to want to look for solutions. If you’re taking responsibility that “I have a part in this”… Not only is there the responsibility, but there’s also the power to instigate change, to be involved in the process of what you’re experiencing, looking for solutions, where your power is, what you can do differently.

I mentioned that I was getting stuck in this traffic. Well, circumstances had it, and maybe it was also a conscious choice – I honestly don’t remember – but I moved to the South campus. So I worked – I went to work very early – in the morning, I made my way down South, so I was doing that commute in the morning, kind of late-ish morning, and I didn’t have to contend with the rush hour traffic. So even though I can’t change the rush hour traffic, I can change my participation with it, right? I found something that I could do, I found a different result that I could have, and some power that I had in that choice.

Again, if you start focusing on this, it is feeling less helpless and more hopeful. You’re going to want to participate in creating a different outcome. You’re going to get excited about possibilities and work in collaboration with your significant other or whatever you’re up against to have a different outcome. So in this article that Guy Winch wrote he quotes:

“Think back to when you called a customer service hotline and were successful in resolving the matter, or when you voiced a complaint to your spouse and they responded with an apology and a promise to make better efforts in the future. Do you recall how pleased you were with yourself? How happy that made you in that moment? How empowered you felt?”

I hope you have an example in your life to reference where you took a risk, you spoke up and someone responded favorably, because you could feel like “I could have overlooked that. I could have easily bypassed that but no, I actually spoke up and I influenced my experience in a positive way” and if anything, if we’re going to talk relationship, you’re probably going to feel closer to the person that you brought the issue up with, particularly if they respond in a way of caring and wanting to work with you and wanting to help. You can say “I did it, I actually helped create change in a positive way.” That’s a very different feeling in contrast to feeling helpless and complaining and nothing really changing.

This really creates the experience of being able to take care of yourself, and this is  like believing that your needs, your desires, your preferences, your feelings matter. Because truthfully, the level of intimacy in your relationship requires your involvement; because if your relationship doesn’t represent you, you’re probably not fully in it, it’s not representing you. So if you have a particular complaint, I would imagine your partner wants to hear about it, but probably doesn’t want to hear the negative critique about them, they want to hear about you, which is what I was referencing a moment ago. So if you can really take care of yourself, believe that you’re worthy, think that it’s a good thing, that it’s gonna help your relationship strengthen, that it’s going to uplevel your way of relating, both of you are going to have more of what you’re wanting. Then it’s going to be worth it to pause, to feel into what you’re needing, what you’re wanting, and it’s going to be worth the risk to reveal that, to reach to your partner and to share.

Some of this taking care of yourself also relates to giving yourself decompression time, self-care time. I have a friend, she’s had a lot going on lately and been working really hard, is in some transition, and she’s like “I don’t know what’s going on for me, I just have been feeling really emotional”, and she’s talking about just not feeling her normal mood. I remember leaving her and we were getting in our cars and  we were taking off, and I was obviously projecting, because this is what I feel sometimes, so whether or not it had any relevance to her life or not I don’t know, but for me I was feeling into “Wow, maybe you just need some time to decompress, and maybe you just need to cry”, because she was saying she feels emotional and feels tearful, and I know for me sometimes if I’m stressed, if I’m overwhelmed and it’s been kind of building and building, one of the ways that I release is just crying, just allowing myself to let go and release some of that tension. And I cry really easily, so it’s not a difficult thing for me to use tears as a form of release, so this can be a form of self-care and taking care of self.

This relates to complaining because this is about you taking care of you, feeling worthy, and feeling empowered to be in a really co-creative space with the people in your life and what you’re creating in your life in general.

Again, that feeling of helplessness versus feeling more empowered in your power to create change in a positive way. One point I want to make here is that it can be helpful to give yourself some structure. So if you’re wanting to address an issue with your significant other or someone in your life, or with your boss or your co-worker, I think it can be helpful to give yourself some structure. You want to be clear, you want to be direct, you want to be specific and positive about your language with your complaint. One of the great tools is just to be able to say “When X happens, this is my experience and this is what I’m wanting.” You can be very succinct.

I get that this is a really quick and dirty high-level description. If you’re wanting to practise with this and integrate it into your life and learn more about this, I encourage you to reach out to me, you can e-mail me, and I’d love to help you consider enrolling in this mini-program that I have to offer you around turning your criticism into loving communication.

In addition to your being intentional about addressing a complaint with someone, you can also just do some general structure for your life. If you know you want to vent, and you know it’s just a vent, give yourself five minutes and maybe even just ask “Hey, do you might if I vent for a minute or two?” and then really look at the time and give yourself that cutoff, because it can tend to have life of its own, and “Then there’s another thing, and then there’s another thing…” so you want to give yourself some boundaries here. Or if you recognize you’re in that kind of loop and it’s just that you can’t think of anything else positive, you’re just in that complaining mindset, just recognize when you’re gravitating towards that, be aware of the topics of conversation and recognize when you’re going on and on.

It reminds me – gosh, I’m telling you all these personal stories today – another story from adolescence, this was when I was in middle school, junior high – I sound so appearance-drive as I’m thinking about the stories I’m sharing with you today, but nonetheless, I was with my mom and we had gone somewhere that was about a 20-minute drive and I think I was talking about my nails, my hair, whatever I was talking about, and my mom was a little annoyed, she was a little fed-up with the superficial talk, so she said “Okay, just for this car ride, I’m gonna ask you to refrain talking about things that are related to your appearance. Can you talk about other things, or can we just be silent?” I said, “Okay”, and it was about a 30-minute drive and I probably was quiet for 15 minutes, and at some point I forgot that she had asked me this and I just happenstance started talking about my clothes, or something appearance-related, and she crept up because she was like “You can’t do it!” And it was more of a joke, because that’s just the mindset I was in. I couldn’t get out of that loop, I was heavily focused on appearance at the time, and in that moment. Granted, I had more depth to me, but I think the whole appearance thing, just in my justification or defense, largely has to do with peers and belonging and all of that.

Feeling socially connected at that developmental age is really important, but still I think it’s a great example of my mind was stuck in this loop of talking about this one topic, and I think we can do that with complaining, so it can be helpful to give ourselves some structure, and hopefully you’re able to actually get out of the loop, instead of just waiting it out and then forgetting, and then re-entering into the loop.

The last point I want to make here is the act of practicing gratitude. It’s commonplace to hear this this day and age, and it’s a powerful practice. Anytime you can shift your focus from complaint to something you’re grateful for, and really feeling it, there’s actually neurochemical responses that affect your body.

In today’s podcast I’m referencing the mind, body and emotional interchange here, they’re all related, so when we change our thoughts and our beliefs, it affects our body, it affects our emotion…

In the article that I’ve mentioned already to you by Eric Barker, A Neuroscience Researcher Reveals Four Rituals That Make You Happier, he’s talking about gratitude and how it really supports serotonin – which is also what Prozac does – it supports the brain activity that produces dopamine, which is the same as Wellbutrin. So these are a couple of examples of what’s happening in your brain functioning – not only will we feel emotionally different when we start to focus on things that we’re grateful for, but it has this feedback loop with other people that if we’re thinking more positively, they’re going to respond more positively to us, and it just is this positive cycle.

In this article, Eric’s also mentioning it’s not finding gratitude that matters most, it’s remembering to look in the first place, remembering to be grateful is a form of emotional intelligence. With higher emotional intelligence, it simply takes less effort to be grateful. Again, this is another form of that positive loops, so if you’re in the thought and in the practice of looking for gratitude, you’re going to find that – again, that’s that whole neurons that fire together stay together; you’re going to build new networks for gratitude, and this has an impact on your body, this reduces your stress, this helps your emotional state, it helps your relationships…

Gratitude might seem like a foo-foo, kind of light thing, airy-fairy thing to do, but it’s got a lot of substance to it, and it’s easy to forget, it’s easy to do it a few times and then lose hold of it. So I encourage you right now, right here, perhaps think of three things you’re grateful for, and one of which could be about you – that’s sometimes the harder practice, to think what are you grateful for, that you’re doing, or about you, or your efforts.

Again, in recap, these are things that can help counteract complaining. The first one has to do with taking responsibility, looking at where you have power, looking at what your needs are, what your feelings are, being able to name it, then taking action – if there’s something you see or feel opportunity around, really taking an advocation role for yourself and really stepping into that, leaning into that opportunity and co-creating more of what you’re wanting, so taking action, having a different result, taking care of yourself, being there for yourself, showing up for yourself, believing in your worthiness, giving yourself some structure. If you’re wanting to be intentional about something and take action, can you be clear, can you be direct? And practicing gratitude.

I am grateful for your listenership, I am grateful for your participating in this dialogue with me, and I’m grateful for you ahead of time if you’re interested in stepping into this deeper experience with me and helping shift criticism. You can reach out to me via e-mail – my e-mail is [email protected]. If you’d like to find other ways to reach me or access the show notes for this episode – again, today’s episode is 65 – you can go to my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com and click on Podcast and find the episode’s there. Just click See More and you’ll have the whole show notes and all the links mentioned.

I look forward to the next episode with you, and until then take great care.

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