Fear and Anger; Anger and Fear

This episode starts with work stress which leads to talking about prayer and then descends into a discussion of how Fear and Anger interact.

What is 2 Parachutes Podcast?

The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!

Scott: 00:03

Hey, Sean.

Shawn: 00:04

Hey, Scott. How are you doing?

Scott: 00:06

I'm doing good. How are you?

Shawn: 00:08

Awesome. I'm good.

Scott: 00:10

Good. I'm from our email traffic yesterday, I'm just curious as to if you're feeling some stress or you're just living in the overwhelmed world that is your life.

Shawn: 00:25

Yeah, I knew this was going to be a busy period, the first quarter for me, especially the first two months. So it's managed stress, which I think is probably the best that any of us can do if we have some stress management regimen that we, I am, as you know, and I've talked about my faith a lot over the course of our discussions, but I am learning how to pray in a way that I, you know, kind of meaningfully confront whatever the stress is that's, you know, that I'm being faced with. And then, you know, giving it to God after that saying, look, like, I'll do the best I can, arm me with whatever you you're able to, you know, prepare like the mind, the tongue and the heart, to kind of reflect your holy wisdom and divine truth and the rest is up to you. I'll do what I can. So it's weird, it's like this little mantra in prayer that gives me almost immediately a sense of calm.

Shawn: 01:29

That doesn't mean I don't feel stressed, it just means that I feel confident in relinquishing the fate of whatever is about to transpire, you know, and that whatever the outcome, good, bad, ugly, you know, it is his will, and I'm I'm I'm okay with that. So, it takes a lot of the pressure off of me from a performance standpoint. I mean, of course, I'm still going to aspire to be a polished professional, but you and I were chatting, I had a conference at the Defense Security Cooperation University does this annual security cooperation conference. And this is the second year that I have been fortunate to be part of a paper, author team that a paper was selected and I then got to represent our author team on the panel surrounding that paper topic. It wasn't just that paper, it was, you know, we were looking at security cooperation reimagined.

Shawn: 02:23

In other words, what could we be doing differently or better insofar as our country still engages in security assistance? And so, yeah, so it was for whatever reason this year, I I felt a lot more stress about it than I than I did last year. There's probably reasons for that, you know, I I you know, if I sat down and analyzed it, But yeah, I I was flustered. So, you know, I'm one of those people that until something is over, it's like it's hard for me to concentrate on other things because the one thing that's scaring me the most is sort of consuming my brainpower. And, and then I kind of just get, like, paralyzed.

Shawn: 03:06

So, I still function to stuff. And then we got this India, you know, India exchange that we're doing, at the end of next month, which as you very well know, having done international work, end of February and when you're at January 15, that's not a lot of time to get it all buttoned up. And yeah, we've got some pretty heavy hitters in the semiconductor space, both on the public government side of the house, as well as on the private sector. So I'm just a little fish that was the Nemo just keeps swimming. And there I go, you know, for all I know, I'm swimming in circles around my bowl, but you know what?

Shawn: 03:45

I'm going. So we'll leave it there. Hopefully, your week is less stressful.

Scott: 03:51

Yeah. I I I don't know. I mean, it's there are so many directions we can go 2four as we're of out of the aircraft and we're popping chutes. 2four Yep, Where do we want to go with this? I'm kind of thinking that I hate this term mindfulness, but the problem that I have is that I can't come up with a better term that actually encompasses it all.

Scott: 04:24

But it's interesting to me how many routes there are to the mountaintop and how many routes there are to the summit. And what route is harder for you may not be harder for me. And so everybody climbs at their own pace to grab the metaphor and take it down the road a little bit. Everybody chooses the route that makes sense to them. And it's interesting to me how you find your way through the stress through prayer, which is wonderful, but is also something that as much as it works for you, it's something fundamentally that I don't understand.

Scott: 05:09

I've always considered myself to be a person of faith rather than a person of religion. And as time goes by, more and more, I find myself thinking, Okay, what does faith really mean to me? I mean, my fundamental tenet, I can neither prove nor disprove is that I believe in god. I believe in this entity but my my understanding of what that is, whatever label is applied to it. Doesn't change over time, my understanding of what it is and how it relates to me changes.

Scott: 05:58

And so with that as sort of the aside, the route, at least the route I'm being drawn to, is how to deal with stress. And the reason I want to talk about that is because we see this in the modern discourse. We see a lot of people stressed out over a variety of things. And I think last episode or the episode before, you know, I shared the stories of, you know, coming from having been a climbing guide to going and being an FBI agent and sort of realizing as the years passed that I understood what a potentially fatal environment was because I'd been on mountains in glaciers. You know, never saw anybody killed, although I've had one or two friends killed climbing.

Scott: 07:01

But understanding as a teenager that I was in a place where if you didn't pay attention to your environment, you could get killed. Then going into the world of meetings and briefings and conference rooms and seeing people actually scared to terrified of going into meetings because they thought they were dangerous and just not understanding that the difference between them and me was that I sort of knew what dangerous was and they didn't. And so they saw this as different. So stressors are real, even if you look at another person and you go, well, they're stressed out about something that's not really a stressor. And I think the point of this, I am interested in hearing your views on is, how do you let go of that?

Scott: 08:05

And I think the reason it's important is because what I see in the modern discourse is people get stressed and they hang on to it. They either hang on to it and screech on public media or social media or they go out and protest, engage in varying levels of violent behavior because they're stressed. And so they scream to the world, but they're still not letting it go. And then there are the other people who have stress and they don't know how to get past it. And so since they don't know how to let go of it, they try and compartmentalize it, or they push it down, if you use parlance that I've heard before.

Scott: 08:55

I think the challenge and the challenge that leads to what I would call mental health with stressors has two components to it. The first is acknowledging that you're stressed, acknowledging that this thing that is impacting you is having an impact on you. It's making you scared. It's making you angry. It's making you fearful.

Scott: 09:19

It's making you happy. It's making you sad because I don't think that you can allow something to pass through you if you don't first recognize the impact that it's having on you. And once you have this thing in hand, I think it becomes easier to set it down. And so that's kind of where you got me when you're talking about, you know, the prayer process that allows you to do this, give it up to God thing, which is something that I've heard a lot, which I don't understand because it's not a visceral thing for me. But the ability to let a thing go, I think only becomes possible once you acknowledge it.

Scott: 10:03

And that, I think from the standpoint of what we're trying to do here at 2 Parachutes Podcast is talk about things that are going be useful to people, about thought processes, talk about emotions. And it's in the context of what's happening in the world. And so some of that is current events and some of that is political. But the process of recognition and letting go seems to me to be important but elusive. I don't know if that shakes anything loose for you.

Scott: 10:39

And, you know Yeah. I'm Scott Olsen. I could go on for another two hours and you're such a good listener.

Shawn: 10:45

So No. Shut up now. I appreciate it. It's important to give you time to sort of fully articulate your thought because unlike what I think we are all led to believe by our consumption of polished media, it's like conversations are supposed to be naturally efficient and focused and perfect. No, they're not.

Shawn: 11:09

Know, they are most conversations that people have in their day to day life are meandering and sort of evolutionary and sort of that it's the literal stream of consciousness. You might be talking about one thing, but, you know, something patches your eye over here that spurns an association with this other thing. Now all of a sudden you're going off into a different, you know, gust of wind, right? We're taking the trip in a different way. What you're referencing, I mean, there's a few things I could probably speak to.

Shawn: 11:36

I'm trying to figure out in the spirit of giving our audience members things to operationalize, right? Like if you learn nothing after today's session, key things would we want you to take away from this conversation that you can then potentially think about for your own life in terms of its applicability or utility? And so for me, maybe it just helps to break down a little bit of my thought process as I go into a stressful period and why, you know, how prayer is the modality actually leads to some improvement in my stress level. And really what it comes down to, what I've realized is that if I am stressed about something, that is most likely an indicator of some underlying fear. And so what I'm really praying about is the courage to not be afraid and and and the courage to also accept that as a Christian, I I need it's my responsibility to do everything I can again to think and to speak and to feel those things that are affiliated with what we believe to be, you know, Jesus is a divine revelation and and gospel and preaching as to what a good person in this life is supposed to be pursuing and trying to achieve.

Shawn: 12:59

Now that is often not compatible with everyday life because we come across, I mean, I literally get caught on a doorknob and things come out of my mouth that are fully ungodly. You know what I mean? And that is not intentional. I don't willingly go into that sin, but it happens and I'm aware of it and I gotta work on that. So anger is another thing.

Shawn: 13:23

Usually, fear is the precursor to anger but I do think anger because again, spontaneous anger like being caught up on that thing. You know, that that is not, I'm not afraid of the doorknob. I'm not afraid of anything. I'm just mad because it, you know, it it did a thing. So we'll set that aside.

Shawn: 13:39

So let's just talk about stress that's maybe fear based. I think that's the majority of stress. And so for me, what helps is prayer is the modality that gets me in the frame of mind where I can quiet all of the competing screaming voices in my head, particularly those negative Nancy's that are like, You're not good enough. You're not qualified. You're not smart enough.

Shawn: 13:59

It's all the, Why am I not enough? And then to just say, Let's quiet those voices. You are enough as a child of God. So first of all, let's just check that insecurity at the door. And then secondly, having the courage to just accept when I say give it to God, meaning that I could be 100% on my game and something could still come out of my mouth that's going to hit somebody in the wrong way and it could lead to a negative outcome.

Shawn: 14:27

Giving it to God when I say that means that regardless of my performance, the outcome is, you know, based on a grander design for God's plan for me and then trusting that even if it's a disappointment, that that actually is going to lead to something really incredible. You know, it's just, you know, I'm focused and zoomed in on the now, but there's a whole, you know, open that aperture and there's a whole plan there that ultimately leads to goodness. So that's really what I mean when I say giving it to God and then using prayers, that modality, to calm the mind, to surface both good feelings, which is like, okay, quieting the you're not good enough kind of voice in your head while allowing sort of like the fear to surface. Because if I can identify what the root fear is, then I can sort of talk my way out of why that's a like that. That shouldn't probably be a fear.

Shawn: 15:27

So if it's this panel discussion, well, what was my fear? My fear was that I was part of a four person author team where I was concerned because a lot of the content was was about stuff that I wasn't particularly the specialist on. And in particular, one of my coauthors was unable to dial into the panel. So I kind of lost one quarter of my phone a friend, you know? So if a question surfaced in the conversation about that author's content, I was going to be in a really difficult position to be able to answer it.

Shawn: 16:05

That was making me very, very nervous. So then I was like, oh, okay, well, what's the answer? Let's get some talking points from that author, you know, and then just understand that if you're asked a question that exceeds your capacity to answer, that's not a failure to execute. That's just normal. They changed the the timing of this damn conference 20 times it felt like.

Shawn: 16:31

You know what I mean? And then he just couldn't come. So that's a very valid kind of, you know, response. It's just like, I'd love to answer that. I'm going to take the question.

Shawn: 16:39

I'm going to send it back to my my co author and if you want to share your Email address, we'd be happy to get back to you or the whole group, you know, the whole you know, attendee group who happen to be sitting in on that. So, so it's just yeah and and was I still perfectly calm and no, I was still nervous going into it because you're always a little stage frighty, even if these are virtual exchanges. And actually, in essence, I also think I actually get more nervous on virtual exchanges than in person because in person you have the audience to play off of and you have co panelists that you are warm blooded humans that are next to you, and you can feel a sense of solidarity with them. You can meet with them in advance and kind of build a rapport. So my response to managing the stress and using prayers and modality, that's kind of how I approach it.

Shawn: 17:32

I kind of forgot what your original question was, and I'm not sure that I answered it, but maybe that shakes something loose for you further just to kind of keep the conversation going because I think it's worthwhile because we all get in these positions, right, where we were freaked out about something and, you know, it Oh, not letting it go. Yeah. Not letting it go. And all I can say to that is it's tied to my giving it to God kind of moment, which is that the outcome will be beneficial to my growth regardless of if it feels bad or feels good. And and and I can take a comfort in that because even if I stub my toe and it's not my best performance, something good will come out of it.

Shawn: 18:13

And even if it's not immediate, that's where my confidence is. And so then I'm just like, Okay, you know, if I stub my toe, then that just means this door needs to be closing for some reason or another. Or, you know, maybe it'll shake loose something else where somebody reaches out and says, Hey, I saw you struggle through that. I know a little bit about this. I love to chat with you.

Shawn: 18:31

You know, there's always a learning opportunity in there somewhere. So anyway, that's how I tend to let it go is just knowing that is it outside of my control? Yes. Then you got to let that go. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 18:44

That's it.

Scott: 18:45

And I agree, letting go is a part of this cycle. But yeah, I mean, you've shaken loose a lot of things, not the least of which is I love how you made me feel when you talked about how conversations go and conversations are not linear. That's not like this is a lecture and we're talking and people are taking notes. The whole point of this is for it to be a normal conversation. And what we want is for people to come and listen, and then go talk and think about it and disagree with us and debate, not necessarily argue, but let's debate and debate with your friends and the people you know and the person sitting next to you having a different cocktail than you are.

Scott: 19:38

You're eating a steak and they're eating a salad and let's talk about the health benefits of those things. We want that. But what really resonates with me is this, from what you said, is this notion of fear. And it's, you know, setting aside people who don't have well developed amygdalas because it's, you know, my understanding from watching a great documentary called Solo, which is about the climber Alex Honnold, who did an unrope free solo solo of El Capitan. It's just this incredible, amazing 3,000 vertical feet rock climb with no ropes.

Scott: 20:27

They actually in that documentary, ran him through a brain scan MRI of some sort. And basically his amygdala, which is the fear response just doesn't respond. It takes a ton of input for him to have a fear response. But I think that as human beings with all the gradations of amygdala response, fear is something that everybody feels and nobody wants to admit. It's not being a psychologist, having been an FBI agent and an interview and interrogation instructor, my understanding of how people function is through that lens of having a conversation with a person and attempting to extract information from them that they know that I need to know that they may or may not want to share with me.

Scott: 21:27

So that's my sort of professional expertise. But I think as people, we're all expert to a certain degree in human interaction. Everybody knows an angry face from a happy face. Maybe fooled, but in general, you know, everybody knows that stuff. And it's interesting when we talk about fear and that anger always has as its foundation fear.

Scott: 21:57

Over the decades when I've talked to people about that, particularly when I've talked to people that, you know, women I've been in relationships with, whether it's, you know, a long term romantic relationship, a short term one, a marriage. If they're angry, I've always tried to understand what they're afraid of, and that just makes them more mad. People in general get more angry, I have found, this is just my personal experience, when you attempt to work through that issue by talking about what scares them. And it makes a certain amount of sense upon reflection, because if a person is scared to the point where they're angry, that transition from fear to anger is the threat response. I'm afraid of this and I don't want to be afraid of it.

Scott: 22:56

And so I'm fight or flight all of a sudden, which is what anger is. And they're either running away or they're fighting over it. But fundamentally, they don't want to be afraid. And it's hard to be afraid, even though it's normal to be afraid. Just because it sucks and it feels bad doesn't mean that it's abnormal.

Scott: 23:19

And just because you feel bad because you're afraid doesn't mean that you're abnormal. It just means you're afraid. And the very hardest thing to do, and this is the how piece, I think, the very hardest thing to do is that self insight. I'm angry, what am I afraid of? And I love how your process is, you're going to go into your prayer space and that gives you the safe space to go, okay, I'm going to detach from all this and try and figure out what I'm afraid of.

Scott: 23:53

And it reminds me of an old story. Years ago, when I was a new FBI agent, I've probably been an FBI agent for four years, and I was pretty happy to, you know, have my credentials, have my badge, being able to carry a handgun in New York State. You know, there were certain things about being an FBI agent that were pretty fun. And I two brothers and a sister. One of my brothers lived Upstate New York in Ithaca.

Scott: 24:26

And I was taking my son, who at the time was about seven. And we were going to drive up to see my brother, we were meeting halfway, we're going up to some midpoint. And I had this little Ford Ranger truck and we stopped to get gas in Long Island, which is where we lived, and then headed up north and I had gotten, I don't know, 60 or 70 miles away, but it was, you know, through Queens and over bridges and through the Bronx, difficult driving traffic and I had gotten probably an hour and a half away and I realized that I had taken my credential folder, which also had all of my credit cards and all of my cash. And when I got gas, I laid it on top of the gas pump and I left it there. And I was so angry.

Scott: 25:29

I was beside myself. My poor kid is listening to his old man, you know, cursing and being pissed and I wheeled the car around. I'm driving like a maniac and I got back and it was gone. And it was gone. And I was absolutely red eyed mad.

Scott: 25:53

And so I got home and, you know, my wife was, you know, concerned and wondering why I was there. And I told her and I was like, almost uncontrollably mad. And so I went out to the backyard and I said, Okay, jackass, you think anger comes from fear? Here you go, dude. Figure this out.

Scott: 26:17

What are you afraid of? And so I started, even though I was still I'm really angry, you know, about the inconsideration of people and you know, why they would take my stuff and everything. What I was what I was afraid of was to be stopped by the police without a driver's license and carrying a gun. But I realized that I still had my shield. I still had my badge.

Scott: 26:46

So it wouldn't be great, but it would be okay. I realized that my license and my credit cards, I could shut all that stuff down and it would be fine, and I had cash at home, so I would be okay. I would be driving back and forth in my bureau car, so I'd be okay, and the only thing that I really had to worry about is that I had to report that I had lost my credentials, but the discipline for that usually was a reclamation letter. So it's not great, but it's not bad. So I went through these, I came up with four or five things that I was scared of, And all of a sudden I realized I wasn't angry anymore.

Shawn: 27:32

So awesome.

Scott: 27:32

Was like this light switch went off. And what's funny is most people hear this story and those of you who are listening to this story and you think that it's complete nonsense, you are not alone. Most people who listen to this story think that it's absolute and complete nonsense and I would have thought it was nonsense too but it happened to me. And then I started, and of course denouement, the ending of this story is the next day. I mean, next day I drove into work.

Scott: 28:04

I reported that my credentials were gone. I got called on the carpet, you know, told to write a little letter. I get back home and about 06:00 that night I get a phone call to my house and it's from the local US Post Office regional clearinghouse and they say somebody dropped my credentials in a mailbox and they have it And so I drove over there and got it back.

Shawn: 28:37

Amazing. That's amazing.

Scott: 28:38

And then the funny thing was I walk up to the window and I told them who I was and they're holding my credentials in their hands and they go, Well, let me see some ID. And I started laughing. And I said, You have all my ID. It's in your hands. My driver's And license is they're like, Oh, yeah.

Scott: 28:59

And so I ended up not even getting the reprimand because I got everything back and it was okay. But I'd forgotten where I was going to with the story. It's when I had, you know, based on that experience, I start seeing, you know, all the other places where you get this concept of fear leading to anger. It's in Star Wars. The Yoda character, when he's talking about why he's worried about the Anakin Skywalker character, says fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

Scott: 29:49

And when you do a little dive into the backstory of that story, that's Eastern thought. That comes from Eastern religious traditions. But it's hard because nobody wants to be afraid, they want the fear to be gone and it's hard to feel the fear because it hurts. If you allow yourself to feel it then I think you have the ability to put it down and that's the how, but that's also the challenge. I mean, you hate Donald Trump and Donald Trump is president and you're panicked about it.

Scott: 30:31

Yeah. You hate Gavin Newsom and you think he might be the next president and you're panicked about it. Yeah. It's hard to let yourself feel that. It's easier to push it away.

Shawn: 30:46

Yeah. I don't know if

Scott: 30:47

that

Shawn: 30:48

It shakes anything loose for does, it does. So a couple of just anecdotal things. One is I so feel your pain on that situation. There was a point in time in my life where I had every piece of identification that I've ever had from Social Security card to birth certificate to passport to, like, all my rental. I don't know why I had all this stuff.

Shawn: 31:09

I don't remember. I just did. And I was doing something with it. My driver's license, everything. It was all in a folder, and I did the exact same thing.

Scott: 31:19

Oh, no.

Shawn: 31:20

And I drove off without it, and it was not there when I came back. And unlike you, I never recovered it, and I had to go about, like, replacing all of that stuff. And it was just a, first of all, just from one human to another, I deeply empathize with that and it is really stressful and it is really scary. So there's that. Secondly, as you were sort of going through your story, one of the things that popped to my mind was also, and I think this was like some Cornell Penn State study at some point somebody did, but one other aspect of managing stress, which is managing fear.

Shawn: 32:03

Right. And again, really leaning into the fear piece of this is that 85% of the things that you are stressing over end up never manifesting to begin with, kind of like in your situation, right? Well, I mean, it did manifest, but like you it resolved itself, right? So that's just something I think for people to take away from all of this is not to minimize the fear and the stress that you feel and to or to delegitimize it in any way because, you know, as human beings and, you know, sentient creatures, we are programmed biologically to be triggered because it is safeguarding us in some way. Right.

Shawn: 32:47

From just sort of a physiological, you know, existential sort of, you know, framework. It's like we're designed to be fearful because that fear is telling you something's wrong. You better get safety, you better avoid this harm, whatever it is. So it's not to say that I think what at least either of us are saying is like that, it's just saying that a lot of the stuff in today's society where we have so many inputs and we have so many signals coming in such unnaturally large quantities and from this diversity of locations. I do think that it's important for human beings, regardless of what your path to mindfulness is, which is going back to what you originally started this conversation with, that to have something because otherwise you're going to be just you know, this is why anxiety is on the rise globally, I think, and among young people.

Shawn: 33:42

And it is because we're just over people are overwhelmed. You know, for whatever reason, normal therapy just isn't cutting it, I don't think, these days, you know, and people need practical, actionable tools that they can use to apply to their day to day life that they can, in some cases daily to manage those stressors. Right. Whether it's political commentary and geopolitics, you know, that you're dealing with on your you're being bombarded with on social media or, you know, just your everyday situations in work or in life, such as we kind of have referenced. The final thing that I think that this also surfaces for me, which is, sort of the counter sort of statement to what you your situation was, which is there are going to be times when things don't resolve and that those fears are actually very well founded And some practical harm is going to come to you, whether it's professional, personal, physical, emotional, like that.

Shawn: 34:43

So that's a very real thing. So what I where that leads me then, is to then say, Okay, well, I think we've covered, you know, some pretty good ground and said, you know, most of the time this isn't gonna happen. The thing that you're worried about, the plane's not gonna fall out of the sky, the you know, you're not gonna flop sweat on stage, you're not gonna, you know, be fired, you're like, whatever. But for the other 15% of the times, which actually is important, for me at least, I've kind of shared my methodology with letting it go or being okay with it in the sense that I just reconcile, I manage my own expectations by saying, look, I know this is a possibility. I have to be okay with this because A) I can't do anything about it anyway.

Shawn: 35:28

But also B) my belief is that this will lead to some positive outcome somewhere further down the line, if even it's hurting me in the moment. That's not to say to stay in a bad situation or to just take abuse or anything like that. It's just saying like, you know, learn to sit with the disappointment and then try to turn that into a potentially positive sort of future outlook. Because if you sit and root and rut in the in the negative, you know, I see people do this all the time, Scott. I've got friends and family who just live in the negative and they can see the negative in every single thing and it's perpetual.

Shawn: 36:08

And, you know, look, life is ugly. Life is messy. Life is broken and life is filled with disappointments and nothing is guaranteed and it's often not fair. These are all adages our parents have told us since the time we could And think and there's a lot of wisdom in that. And I do think we need to get back to kind of embracing some of that, because I think that part of these younger generations now, I get older, it's somewhere along the line, I feel like somebody told them either that everything is bad all the time or everything needs to be good all the time or that you should be free of pain all the time.

Shawn: 36:44

And none of those are compatible with what life is actually like. And so, you know, we got to get real comfortable with the disappointments, with the discomforts and with the, you know, the setbacks because they're going to happen. But it doesn't have to mean that that's where you sit and live and stew, you know. So I'm going to toss that one back over to you.

Scott: 37:03

Yeah. And I think that the way that I process it is that, you know, we're capable of feeling all range of emotions, and therefore all range of emotions are normal. It's normal to be sad when something sad happens. It's normal to be afraid when something scary happens. It's normal to be angry when something makes you afraid.

Scott: 37:29

You know, it's normal to be happy when something happy happens. What's not normal is when your emotional state doesn't correlate to what's happening to you. If you are sad all the time regardless of what's happening, well that's depression. If you are happy all the time regardless of what's happening, well that's manic. And again, psychologists, trained.

Scott: 38:03

I am a consumer in this. Having been married twice and divorced twice and been through a lot of marriage counseling, I understand the language. But, you know, it's like music, I can't write music. I probably can't play music anymore, although I grew up playing the cornet. And so I'm a consumer of music.

Scott: 38:28

I am a consumer of psychology the way that we all are. But I look for the correlation and what you say I think really is true, which is it's not that you feel sad so something's wrong with you. If you feel sad because you're dealing with something sad, that's normal. And what's not normal is to deal with something sad and not be sad. So the fact that you have an emotion that you don't like, or that you think is wrong, either because somebody's told you that it's wrong or because you don't want to feel this way.

Scott: 39:11

And so you're trying to find this way out of it. It's the correlation that I think is the window into normalcy and not the emotion itself. And so, yeah, I have a lot of friends that are, not any that are really my age but you know ten years younger and younger who you know live in this anxiety world and they're anxious about stuff that you should be anxious about, but they think something's wrong because in their worldview anxiety is bad and therefore they should never feel it. And it's like stage fright. I mean, I used to give block of instruction on public speaking as part of being an instructor for the FBI and I would get stage fright going in to talk to a group about stage fright, and I would open my presentation on public speaking by telling them about my commute into the classroom and how I was, you know, having stage fright as I was getting ready to talk about stage fright and everybody would laugh and I would laugh and my stage fright would go away.

Scott: 40:32

And so the mechanism is revealing it, and do we reveal things? No, because if we reveal things, we're hardwired to not reveal weaknesses because weaknesses are a threat. I think it takes a certain level of maturity, not age, maturity to get to this point where we're willing to share. Not to cram it down people's throats, not to get them to agree, but simply to say to the world, this is how I feel. And so it's, I think the first point that I'm trying to make is that it's the correlation between what's happening around you and the emotions you feel that lead to normalcy and the lack of correlation is cause for concern.

Scott: 41:28

And you're right, you know, life is a challenge. My favorite metaphor is life is a full contact sport. And if you play without pads, you're going to get hurt. It pays to be a little thick skinned, but then you know, course, what do people do? Well, if I'm thick skinned, other people are getting away with offending me.

Scott: 41:51

Okay, now we in a downward spiral. And what it really comes back to is a personal choice. And this is something that I have struggled with for most of my life. You know, what do I really want? You know, when I am sitting here in my cabin on the lake in the mornings, and I'm drinking coffee, sometimes it's hard for me to decide what do I actually want and what I need to do is sit for a minute and not think or analyze, but just what do I actually feel like?

Scott: 42:28

And for some people what they feel like is instantaneous and I'm the type of person that I need to sit for a minute to not reach out and touch the force, but to try and understand how I feel. So yeah, there I got 14 other things to say.

Shawn: 42:52

I know.

Scott: 42:54

Where are you on this concept of correlation? Does that make sense to you or do you reject that?

Shawn: 43:00

No, I think it makes sense to me. Again, it's all just part of the path of each individual for how you because everybody has a unique set of experiences and then your environment, it's nurture nature, you've grown up in a certain and that can't be discounted. How you were raised to deal with fear and anger, you know, and how you do or don't manage your expectations for what life should be like. You know, for me, I tend to be a very like, you know, kinetic person. So like for me, it's the physical manifestation of what does this do to you, right, that I'm constantly kind of going back to, you know, because I feel like I literally what was it you were talking about?

Shawn: 43:46

The amygdala like that it can be and that's the thing I didn't like. I know about the amygdala. I did not know about the thing that you had referenced, which is, you know, which makes a lot of sense as people can have varying levels of sensitivity or, you know, receptors or whatever that was, that point you were making. But I also feel and I don't know if that is the part of the brain that governs fear or what that does, but like, I do know that like human beings vary in terms of their sensitivity levels. So the other thing is like what, you know, my sort of threshold for what's going to trigger my stress or my fear or my pain, I firmly believe is different than every other person in the room.

Shawn: 44:31

And we're all on some kind of little like, you know, spectrum. And so I feel like it's important to also sort of understand who you are. Where I think people kind of take things a little bit too far in their own way that they experience suffering or stress is that, you know, kind of projecting that on to others, you know, and then being really upset if they aren't like with you on that, you know, where it's just like, well, I'm really upset about this. You should be really upset about this or this. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 45:05

Or this really. And this kind of goes back to your point that you were making about people who get worked up about like, oh my gosh, Donald Trump is president or oh my gosh, Gavin Newsom could be our next president. It's kind of like maybe like one understanding that not everybody's on the same stress fear level as you are. But if you go around exporting and you're on a very high like, I don't know if it would be low or high spectrum, like if you have high sensitivity, you know, or sort of sensory like, know, you're you know, you get triggered maybe more easily or you feel pain more acutely. Again, like if if you become one of those people who are like on online a lot and vocalizing a lot, you're now exporting that to others who now you're kind of like bringing that.

Shawn: 45:50

That's and to me, that is a very slippery slip. That's dangerous. And that's, you know, it's not modulated in any way. Right. And now you're kind of let loose the hounds of war emotionally because, you know, it's very easy to get human beings sort of ramped up, even if they hadn't been.

Shawn: 46:10

And even if they have moderate to low sensory reaction or response, it's not difficult to get people built up to a point where they're highly reactive. And so I just think it's, you know, we actually should be celebrating normalcy. We should be expecting life to be painful and challenging and and to be uncomfortable much more than what people are currently expecting as that sort of norm. And normalcy is also about like most people fall in this bell curve spectrum where you 're going to have people who are like highly susceptible and maybe those are people who are like toxic empathizers. And then you're going to have people on the other end who don't.

Shawn: 46:54

And those people are probably sociopaths or psychopaths or I don't know. Those are the people who don't feel anything. Right. Then the rest of us are in the middle where it's like we have normal levels of like, okay, that is a healthy reaction to that stressor. So we should make that, whatever those parameters are for reacting, think that should be the norm.

Shawn: 47:14

I think what goes on sometimes in our country right now is we have too much in the fringe side of either one of those where it's like people are not sensitive enough or they're they're oversensitive to a point. And then those things are driving, you know, kind of policy and sort of norms of behavior, which I think is a very dangerous place for us to be. But yeah, so so for me, I don't know. I think I don't have any big thoughts on this other than just to say that the lessons I've learned in my life leading up to this point and even talking about it in this conversation is that just again, nine out of 10, well, nine out 85% of the time, worst of the worst is probably not going to happen. So take comfort in that, if nothing else.

Shawn: 48:02

Secondly, understand that fear leading to rage and then exporting that rage is a toxin for humanity. So try not to do that because it is you know, it's okay to, like, want people to sympathize and or even empathize with you. It's okay to let your emotions out. Trust me. I you know, if I had a punching bag, I'd be out there.

Shawn: 48:22

I didn't think I'd break my hand. You know, I'd be beating it up and, you know, but also just, you know, try to accept that, like, you know, Okay, this is normal. It sucks. I don't love it. Doesn't feel good.

Shawn: 48:36

But like life is life. You know what I mean? And don't live in it. Don't live in the muck of like, woe is me, woe is me, woe is me. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 48:44

Because it just doesn't it doesn't help you. It doesn't it doesn't buy you, you know, kind of a fan club of people who are and it actually emotionally stresses those people out if you do it pretty regularly. I actually have some lovely friends who I adore, but like, you know, online, I'm just stunned at, like, the emotional manipulation and chronic, like, woe is me. And I'm just like, this is is hard on me. It makes me want to turn those people off.

Shawn: 49:08

It makes me not, you know, so it's sort of like kind of it's like the, you know, the boy who cried wolf model where it's like if you if you're constantly in that chronic state of like, you know, suffering, pain, misery, like at some point, people stop being able to empathize or to want to reach out because it's like they're going to take you down. You know what I mean? With the sinking ship, right? And you're like, I can't afford to be in that headspace this this often. And I actually don't have any real way to help other than to just cheerlead you and be like, I'm so sorry you're going through that.

Shawn: 49:41

I'm here. I'm praying for you. I'm like, you know, I can do what I can do, but like, you know, so yeah, I guess what's the thing I'm afraid of Scott is I get kind of worked up about it. Well, thing I'm afraid of is that kind of thing is infectious and it'll take all the humanity down if we let it run too rampant.

Scott: 50:00

I'm with you. What keeps running through my brain as I'm listening to you is we really need as human beings to take more time to understand fear, because all of these things are driven by fear. I saw a very interesting statistic a couple of weeks ago, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but I think it was eighty one percent of college students when they are talking either just informally with other college students or when called upon in class, they don't say what they actually think because they're afraid of you know being cancelled or whatever. Yeah. And it's they're afraid of being hurt, being you know verbally assaulted or taken to task on the receiving end of somebody else's anger which is somebody else's hurt for saying what they actually feel and that's I see that paradigm of I'm not going to communicate to other human beings what I actually think because I'm afraid of dot dot dot and then you have the other group, which I think in terms of numbers is smaller, which are the people who do exactly the opposite.

Scott: 51:32

I think this and you all need to agree with me, otherwise you're bad. And when you look at this notion of, you know, let's not talk about religion or politics. It seems to me that the reason people do that is because they don't want to have the disagreement on things where people probably can't be talked out of their political opinion they probably can't be talked out of their religious opinion. And so we're going to disagree. I think most people don't understand that when you disagree, the fear is I could be wrong.

Scott: 52:14

And if I'm wrong, then there's something wrong with me. And it takes a certain maturity to say, this is my considered opinion and it's not relevant whether you agree with me or not because I am confident in my opinion and I think maturity part of comes from being thoughtful. But part of that maturity comes from recognizing that you don't have all the information. Even if you think you have all the information, you may find new information and it may cause you to change your mind and that is a mature thing too because if you change your mind, what's your fear? People are going to attack you, particularly if you're a public person, particularly if you're a politician.

Scott: 53:06

Now you're a flip flopper. And what's your fear? You're not going to be elected or you're not going to be reelected because you flip flop on this thing. And it's all driven by fear. The reason that we have people passing laws in transgender world is because they want the transgender people who are struggling and in pain.

Scott: 53:37

It is a difficult path to walk a transitional path like that. They want that person's pain minimized. And one of the mechanisms is we all have to agree that this is okay. And my response to that is no, what we need is a person who is transgender to be so confident in who and what they are that they don't need everybody to agree. Now, where's my bright line?

Scott: 54:11

You don't get to treat somebody differently, particularly in public life, if they hold a philosophy or are doing something that you disagree with. If somebody dresses in a certain way and it makes me feel uncomfortable, it's not their problem, it's my problem. It is equally wrong for me to say your clothes make me feel uncomfortable. Therefore, you have to change as it is for them to say, you know, my self image is important enough that you have to agree with it. No.

Scott: 54:47

In my view, all of that is driven by fear and the answer to it is to do a deep dive into fear and that's a big ask because what's scarier than turning around and looking at the things that scare you and know trying to get a hook into them so that you can let them go. It is much easier to ignore the fact that fear is leading to your own pain, that fear is leading to your anger which leads to your own pain and it's much easier to say well this is an evil world that is causing me to be mentally unhealthy and so I need external psychiatric help and I need the world to change so that I won't be in pain. I don't think that's the pathway. I think as difficult as it is, we as denizens of the planet will be better off if we do a better job of understanding fear and in particular understanding what scares each of us. And I think if we do that, then we can start taking this next step where we're willing to articulate what scares us and I think that is part of the process for letting that fear go because when you identify it and you own it and you say it, poof, it seems to disappear.

Shawn: 56:28

Well, so you've unlocked two new video game levels of this conversation. And so that was very exciting. It was very hard for me to contain myself while you were finishing up your stuff because I didn't I wanna lose the was like, Oh my God, oh my God, there's two things that I wanna dig into. And so I'm gonna try to do this in a way that is a natural segue to what you were talking about. But, you know, so the first thing that I was that that clicked in my mind was that, you know, this notion of weaponizing our fear to create deliberately fear in others.

Shawn: 57:07

And so that is your example of, you know, cancel culture, thought policing, bullying on college campuses of nonconformers, you know, who are essentially outside the progressive liberal viewpoint or mindset, which is, you know, weaponizing that. So those those people as a group are have fear that they then weaponize to create fear in those who would, you know, present a challenge to their worldviews. Right. And so I think that's that's one example of weaponizing fear to create fear in others. And I think that's very dangerous and very unhealthy.

Shawn: 57:47

It's it's it's harmful to both, you know, the people who are engaging in that, but also the people on the receiving end of it. The second example I have of that, and you know, and this one is particularly close to my heart, is I live right up the street from a a I have to assume a abortion clinic or a health clinic that engages in the practice of abortions. And, you know, my entire whole adult life, since I've been familiar with the term abortion and what that means and what that implies, you know, I have only ever seen activists who are pro life, of which I am in that camp, and I have a very, very deep and intimate relationship with this topic. It is not something I came to lightly. And so and it is also not strictly driven by my faith.

Shawn: 58:40

So so that's a separate conversation for another day. But suffice to say that this is going to frame what I'm about to say. So one of the most disappointing things that I have, you know, just wrestled with for years is this idea that those abortion activists who are out there I don't know if you've ever seen one of these activist movements. You know? I've seen many in my day because I used to live in a lot of the poor places in town, those seem to be where all the clinics are.

Shawn: 59:06

So, you know, so I've actually and and our our neighborhood isn't isn't isn't one of those. So interestingly, this is for me, that was a really interesting phenomena that we would have such a thing in our area. They're horrible. Like, their their hearts and their minds are in the right place. But the way that they engage in their protest or in their activism is by weaponizing their fear, which is a very valid generated fear for the life of an unborn child, an unborn human, you know, to then create fear in those young women or older women.

Shawn: 59:39

It doesn't matter. Mostly in my day, it was always younger women, you know, to create fear. And they're and they're so hostile and they're so graphic and they're so I mean, they're screaming at them. Their their posters are graphic of like these mutilated like fetuses. I mean, it's just horrible, Scott.

Shawn: 59:54

I cannot tell you, how distressing it is. And that is the point for it to be distressing.

Scott: 01:00:00

Yeah.

Shawn: 01:00:00

So but that is another example of weaponizing your fear to create fear in others or your pain, because I genuinely believe a lot of these activists feel pain over this issue. I know that I do, and it hurts me. But the way that I would engage in that, just as on the college campus, right, which is like, let people have their freedom of thought and try to mitigate your, again, incendiary hyper overreaction to just somebody exercising a different sort of world, like talking about a different worldview or perspective, maybe try to learn from it instead of rushing to judge it. You know, that that would be a way to handle that. In the abortion activist example, and this is very important to me, and if anybody's out there listening who's Catholic and has time to get involved, you know, I think that there's such an opportunity here to change the narrative.

Shawn: 01:00:51

It should be people who are going and they are comforting and they are loving and they have information brochures and they have families who have adopted children from unwanted pregnancies and it nurturing and it is supportive and it's saying this, you do not have to make this choice. I mean, you have to make a choice, obviously, but you do not have to opt to for this to be your choice. There are people and there's funding and there are support structures and systems in place who can help you and educate them and show them God's love and show them God's mercy and show them Christ's, you know, the fullness of Christ's love and the value of that little priceless human being who has no say over this situation. And so again, what I am fundamentally opposed to is weaponizing fear to create fear in others, because as you rightly noted, I'll keep going back to fear leads to rage and anger. Anger leads, you know, and that turns into suffering.

Shawn: 01:01:51

So that's the first thing. We'll set that aside because I just think that's such a valuable point. The second thing that you were talking about was how when people are engaged in fearful, stressful and then anger behaviors, it's typically unlocking a deeper fear that challenges your initial viewpoint. And that was your statement of, Oh, I could be wrong. Okay.

Shawn: 01:02:15

And that is a very scary place to be for a lot of reasons, because you were raised a certain way. Have certain cultural and religious and just societal beliefs that are based on your nurture, right? Like how you were nurtured and what you've experienced in life. And those are all very valid. But when you take a position of openness to hear what others have to say, What I think makes people the most angry, which then again, let's unpack the layer.

Shawn: 01:02:46

So what is it that's scaring you about that is not that you're gonna change your mind. It's that you're not going to be able to defend your belief because you haven't taken the time to do the homework. You have not actually learned how to defend your point instead of just adopting a worldview because it's the easy and, like, you know, lowest sort of, you know, burden thing to do. It's it's one of those things. It's like, well, I trust those people.

Shawn: 01:03:15

And if those are their perspectives, then I'm pretty sure this is my perspective. And on the surface, it makes sense and I see a logic to it. But then you don't do the extra layer of homework to actually break down why you actually agree with them. You're sort of abdicating trust in a group of people that you trust. It's like our governance system, right?

Shawn: 01:03:34

It's it's like, you know, I'm I'm trusting that that this electorate is the Electoral College is going to vote on my behalf because that's what they've been told they need to do. You know? So so I think that what really bothers people and makes them the maddest is when they're probably are maybe right. Like, you know, because I do believe in certain universal rights and wrongs and truths and untruths. You know, I think there's probably a lot of people who could who who are probably in the right camp.

Shawn: 01:04:00

They just don't really fully understand why they're in that camp, and they certainly aren't in a position to eloquently defend it. And and to be fair to people, it's hard. We're all busy. We're all living our life. We got to put food on the table and gas in the car and, you know, get kids through school and, you know, get parents, you know, taken care of.

Shawn: 01:04:18

So it's hard to be like, well, you have to at some point just trust your community and be like, Okay. But then there is this sort of thing is like you can't go and rage about things and then expect to be challenged and then not have an answer to it either. There's a little bit of accountability and responsibility that you have in order to support your position. Otherwise, you're actually doing the opposite and you're making it really easy to tear people away from the position because you aren't doing the homework. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 01:04:49

And so I just thought that those were two really compatible, interesting and, like, valuable takeaways from, like, what you were saying. And yeah. So I don't know what else to say about it, but it it was just really great, great points.

Scott: 01:05:04

So I I I love that. And that's that's the whole point of what we're trying to do here with this 2 Parachutes Podcast. With this conversation, we've come to the end of an episode, but we really truly hope that it's the beginning of the thought process and the beginning of the conversation. I think in terms of a final thought, would offer this in complete agreement with you that it is sometimes oftentimes really difficult to articulate why you have a belief or why you think something and so we're ending the note or ending the episode with a note of permission, which is it's perfectly okay just to say that even though it's not something that you hear a lot, which is, you know, I believe this and I probably can't explain to you why, but I believe this and that is perfectly valid. It is perfectly valid to say that you are in the middle of your thought process to be able to articulate it because what is that?

Scott: 01:06:14

That's growth. And everybody wants to grow, but nobody wants to change their mind. And, you know, growing means you change your mind and growing means that you are willing to acknowledge that you haven't figured it out yet. And sometimes I think that takes strength and sometimes I think it just takes being human. Yeah.

Scott: 01:06:36

So, yeah, final word to you if you have one.

Shawn: 01:06:40

I just will build on that by saying, you know, ultimately we're animals and we have instincts. And so I will just double down on your point that, you know, my point wasn't to say that, you know, you're a bad person if you can't defend it. Most of us can't, but it's because we're we're operating on instinct. We're we're following the way of our tribe because that's what we are taught and that's okay. But just remember that when you put yourself out there in the media world, people are gonna come after you for that, and then don't get mad about that when it happens, and then you can't defend it.

Shawn: 01:07:09

Because, again, that's that's what our world has become, and and that's kind of where the forum the public forum is is discussing these issues. And just take it as a challenge. I did when I couldn't defend certain things of my Christian faith, but I knew inherently that I felt strongly this was the right thing. I was okay with my lack of knowledge in that. And I just used it to challenge myself to like really dig in when I had the time, which is not often.

Shawn: 01:07:33

And I take it one thing at a time, but, use it to better yourself is all, you know, and, you know, and just try to exercise a little understanding from the other perspective and just be like, hey, I get why they don't think why that person may not understand why I feel that way. You know, everybody has their own unique experience and just don't let it define you, you know?

Scott: 01:07:53

Yeah, we we hope everybody does the work.

Shawn: 01:07:57

Yeah. Do the the hard work of interacting, Scott. That's our thing. Yeah. We're doing the hard work of interacting.

Shawn: 01:08:05

I love that so much.

Scott: 01:08:07

Yay. Yeah. Me too. Alright. Well, I'm gonna let you get back to your day job, and I

Shawn: 01:08:13

Sounds will talk to you great. See you next Bye. Bye.