Welcome to the Untangled Mind Podcast. I'm Piper Harris, licensed professional counselor. This show is for people who want to understand why their mind works the way it does, not just how to cope with it. Drawing from neuropsychology, neurophilosophy, and data-driven CBT, we look at how anxiety, stress, and trauma shape perception, behavior, and choice, and what actually helps people change. I'm an integrative CBT therapist based in the suburbs of Atlanta. Each episode is designed to teach you something concrete: how to recognize what's keeping you stuck, how to interrupt unhelpful patterns, and how to move forward with clarity and steadiness. On today's episode, we continue into part two of the Thinking About Thinking series. Today, I discuss what I read over holiday and what I highlighted and what it says about how I think. We dig into metacognition, responsibility, and relational dynamics. Let's get to it. Thank you for joining me. So what we're talking about today is we're going back into the Thinking About Thinking series, the bearing reality, and just to kind of go back to this, if you haven't been here before, I'm Piper Harris, and this series is really coming from accidentally my vacation. So this year I took two weeks off. The first two weeks off I've taken at the end of the year in over five years. And um, my husband didn't think I could do it and sit still and relax. And what I found myself doing was I was just loving my reading time. And as I was reading, I recognized some patterns in what I was reading, what I was highlighting. And that's really how this series came to be. So it really was a shift that I noticed from reading, and then I'm noticing what I'm reading, and then I'm reflecting about what I'm reading. And what came throughout my process is then I actually uh invited in AI to help me collaborate on my thinking, not just to shortcut it, not just to affirm what I was reading, but just to really see like what's going on with my thinking. And so, what I want to say about this series, what I want to clarify is this is not about me being well read at all. This is actually about how we orient our minds. So, again, I didn't plan this project or this series. I accidentally discovered this one, and that's what I want to talk to everybody about. So, um, this part two, last part of the series, I simply just laid out for you. You can read about this on the blog or listen to the previous episode 73. I just really laid out what I read and I shared the highlights. Um, so you can read those. I didn't give any information what I thought about them. I just wanted you to see what those highlights were. So as I was going through this on my vacation, I uploaded everything that I highlighted to AI just to find patterns. I was like, I need to use AI. I use AI all the time for business practices. How can it assist me in recognizing my patterns? So today I want to talk about what the highlighting revealed about my own thinking. And it really broke into three different clusters. And again, you can read part two on the blog for this as well. Um, so the first cluster that I noticed that I was um highlighting really broke down to moral cognition and responsibility. So I have a really deep attraction to agency, moral judgment, sacrifice, duty, and order. That's a lot. Um, I also have this real tension that I recognize with my highlights, a tension between that we need both accountability and compassion, that they cannot live in separation. Um, but I saw that there was definitely a tension between those two of accountability and compassion. And finally, there was a real interest when I was highlighting things in nihilism, and I'll explain that a little bit more, um, meaning or purpose, meaning in life, and attention toward the good. This is the capital G. So, what I want to do is slow down for a moment. Um, because even I had to ask myself, what does all of this actually mean? Um, this attraction, this tension, this interest. So when I looked at my highlights, I could definitely see a pattern, as I said. And I I pay attention to conditions which people lose meaning. And so that's when their suffering, maybe they feel pointless, they feel like the suffering is pointless, when their agency really collapses or when coherence really breaks down. And so that's one poll of what I was focusing on. The other poll is that of nihilism in the clinical sense. It's not just nothing matters, but nothing can be made to matter. So it's that demoralization that I really pay a close attention to. It's that learned helplessness, it's it's despair. So I noticed these two really enormous uh poles, you know, two different ends of the spectrum. But then I also noticed that I was highlighting pattern passages that move in um kind of an opposite direction from this kind of more, I guess you could say, negative poll toward um responsibility, sacrifice, finding belonging, communion, and what I would call the good with a capital G. So now that's not like the I just want to feel good. My um clients they have learned from me that um don't come in and tell me that they want to find happiness and feel good because that's not clear. But what I mean is not just a good feeling, not just like a comfortable path in life, but what the moral and spiritual good is, the kind that asks something of you in return, um, and forms, excuse me, something asks something of you and forms you in return. So there was this movement in what I noticed I'm paying attention to with my reading. And so what I recognized is my reading and my highlights moved from meaning and collapse on one end toward meaning and formation on the other. So, in between these two poles, right? So you're seeing that some people saw meaning as only collapsing them, and some people moved toward meaning that formed them. And in between these two poles is this question of orientation, and that's ultimately how this series kind of came to be, and what I've learned on my own is how do we turn toward what is good, true, and worth suffering for? How do we endure pain without being destroyed by it or numbing ourselves to escape it, right? And how do we avoid the trap of sentimentality, um, which offered you know comfort without this coherence? And so, me, that's really part of um the answer to the question of why I highlighted what I highlighted. I'm not just collecting ideas for entertainment. I do that at night, I read fiction books at night. Um, but what I'm paying attention to is how um I resist nihilism and I move towards something worth living for. And that really is seen in my my work, and honestly, it's in my life, and that's the center of this. It's not feeling better, but orienting toward the good, the big G, even when it costs us something. So before I keep going on, I want to kind of list out how I recognized some of my own definitions of what I was highlighting and just how I was making sense, obviously, through the use of AI of what I was doing. So I want to kind of define some of these things. So when I say nihilism, what I mean is that um that meaning of collapse, that demoralization or that helplessness. I was reading that. Um, meaning, big M is um what gives us all coherence, purpose, and identity. The good, the big G, uh, what I'm saying here, the definition here is what is morally, um, relationally, spiritually worth suffering for. Orientation, which is ultimately what I want to teach you through this series, is how we move from collapse to formation. Um, sentimentality, y'all, if you hear that, I apologize. I have a new computer and I don't know how to use HPs. I'm a MacBook person, so it's actually shocking that I know what I'm doing right now. All that to be said, I apologize. Um, so sentimentality. Um, I believe that this gets rejected because it bypasses cost. I reject it, excuse me. Um, sentimentality is fine, but you can't only embrace that because it bypasses cost and we learn through cost, if that makes sense. Um, and obviously CBT is the overlap right here, right? And overlaps with also agency, coherence, and responsibility. And then ultimately, what you'll hear with what I went through in understanding my thinking, my thinking about thinking is theology really does overlap here. And it's through suffering, sacrifice, love, and endurance. So that's the first cluster. Um, so moral cognition and responsibility. So again, I noticed that I had an attraction to agency, that there was definitely a tension between this um accountability and compassion. And I really noticed that there was this interest in nihilism and um how we orient toward the good. So the second cluster that I recognized with all these highlights through the use of AI is cognition, emotion, and the brain. Okay. So as I read through this, I was reading neurocognitive books, I was reading uh what I call psychophilosophical books, um, I was reading psychological books. I mean, I was just kind of devouring any book I could get my hands on. Uh, what I recognized first and foremost, and this is not a surprise to me, but it's something that I obviously highlighted a lot of, is that when there's cognitive load where we're focusing attention, especially in our frontal or our frontal lobe or frontal cortex, uh we have a loosening of impulse control. So emotion and cognition are not really binary, as all of us have been told, you know, right lane, right brain, left brain dynamics, but they actually do have some competitive dynamics, but they need to work in unison. And also what I recognize through this kind of cluster of cognition, emotion, and the brain is that if we can develop a way to orient ourselves to look at the way that we're thinking, not fall prey to the way that we're feeling, we can then form our suffering as information. So this is another cluster that I recognized when I was doing my reading. The third cluster was really around what I call relational anthropology. So, what I say, what I mean here is that what I was highlighting shows that human beings, we have a deep desire for communion, for this belonging, for this interdependence. And so many of us refuse it. So many of us don't know how to embrace it, and so many of us kind of I think of us as uh like baby giraffes. Have you ever seen them when they start to learn how to walk on their legs? Like stepping into this relational dynamic of communion and belonging is very scary. And you're that little wobbly-legged, cute little giraffe that's trying to use its legs. The other thing I recognized in this cluster is that I really am against this idea of instrumentalizing persons, meaning that um a diagnosis is not who you are, right? You're a complex being. And so um when we say we hear this a lot in cultural terms now, it's like, well, I'm I'm ADHD or I'm bipolar. I've talked about that before, if you followed me, where I'm like, stop using these words. Um, for example, I've had people come to me say, I've I've got trauma. We assess, I use the DSM, I do all the diagnostics that I need. And ultimately, sometimes I have to say what you went through was very traumatic. We are not um saying that it wasn't traumatic. However, when it comes to diagnostics, it is not trauma, if that makes sense. This is not PTSD. And so we have to work through that. And with that relational anthropology, and when I'm working with those individuals, I have to say, you know, there is a human dignity that belongs to you with the trauma that you endured, and there's a moral seriousness that's that's um uh uh connected to this that more than likely is affecting your belonging, but it doesn't necessitate that I need to diagnose you with a a certain diagnosis, if that makes sense. So anyway, what I found is that how my mind clustered these highlights really reveal revealed what I value. And that was what was so fascinating about what I was doing, about this practice of orientation. Um, on a personal note, too, what I really discuss about is um that came about with my highlights. And this is just gonna be the most personal note because I really am trying to share what I learned, not as a uh psychological, you know, um focus of Piper's brain. That's really not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to show you the process of orientation, this metacognition that I think is so valuable to everyone. What I noticed, well, no, I won't say what I noticed. What's what AI pointed out to me is that I have a real aversion to sentimentality, meaning this is that um it's not necessarily that I don't believe in sentimentality. That is not it at all. But I reject the idea that comfort can be offered without cost, or that compassion can be meaningful without responsibility. I've always, always, always been suspicious of frameworks that promise this relief without some sort of formation, without some sort of um shift or integration, or that attempt to soothe suffering rather than make sense of it. This was an enormous highlighted area, this idea of sentimentality and suffering. It was huge. And on a personal note, you can read more about this in the blog. I really had to take some time and say, why am I so focused on this? What is this here? And frankly, when AI pulled it to my attention, like you focus a lot here, I had to take a step back and say, where have I heard this in my life? This aversion to sentimentality. And I can tell you, my husband has told me before, um, I think that you're probably much more compassionate to your clients than you are to me. And that was hard to hear. It's hard to say it out loud, but I had to understand what he was saying. And so I recognize that this is an area that I need to tread very carefully with. And so, what I also noticed with AI pointing out to me that I have real difficulty with this sentimentality, this idea of sentimentality is that I recognize that it formed early in childhood. This is definitely an attachment wound. In in my home growing up, I took sentimentality as something that was definitely invalidated or mocked. Um, and so and I want to be clear, this is how my child's brain interpreted this. Okay. As an adult, I can look back and I recognize this is a child's mind. This is my mind making sense of things. I'm not trying to attack anyone, but this is my belief is that, excuse me, sentimentality was mocked and invalidated. And so I had to learn how to make sense of um this dismissiveness of sentimentality, right? That it was kind of like this frivolous thing. And that unless I produced a status or achievement or even financial gain, there was nothing really to it. Like there's no, there's no room for this Piper kind of idea. And so from a very early age, I learned that suffering was not something to be sympathized with, but it was something that I had to endure. And ideally, um I endured it without paying attention to it, you know, because I'm young. So I learned that life doesn't spare people suffering. And the question is not whether we suffer, but whether we do it well. And so my early attempts of learning to suffer well were not great. Um, as a very young child, I coped through this over-exuberance and extra extroversion as a teenager. Um, and some college, it was through partying. Um, and then as I got a little bit later in college in my early 20s, it was through this over-performance. And I shared a little bit in the blog that rather than focus on the suffering that was causing me pain, I was like, well, I'm just gonna suffer through. So I worked three jobs um while going to school to get my undergrad in psychology. I literally slept in between classes in my car and my jobs um to study this field that I wasn't even really in yet because I didn't have the language at the time to be able to say, um, I'm suffering. And it's because I'm not allowed to share this sentimentality, this suffering, and I'm I'm trying to outrun the discomfort rather than learn from it. And so, really early on, suffering really led me to avoidance, then it led me to productivity, and then ultimately it's led me to endurance. And so, when I first learned the difference between suffering and suffering well, um, I would say is when I really shifted out of living in the shadow of attachment wounds and learning the metacognitive process of thinking about my thinking, thinking about my thinking of childhood, thinking about my thinking of self and and learning to suffer well. It really took a lot of work. And there was this huge intersect with CBT during this time. I was introduced to CBT in 1996, um, and I had an amazing undergrad um supervisor. I didn't like him at the time, um, but I really hold him in high esteem now as I look back. And I also had a phenomenal first therapist, Dr. Brown. Um, and both of them really helped me weave third wave or just CBT. They didn't really talk about third wave back then. Oh my gosh, I sound so old. Um, but they really taught me how to weave those CBT um core tenets into how to bear or suffer well, um, how I could both embrace sentimentality and suffering. And so, what I want to say, one of the key concepts that I learned here as A and I AI was kind of calling me out on stuff, is I recognized avoidance is not resilience and performance was not my piece. And so that was something that I definitely highlighted a lot. I had a real hard time with um overbearing sentimentality. And so I had to step out of that and say, why am I why am I struggling with this? Whereas I highlighted sections where people suffered well, where it was teaching about suffering well, and that spoke to me highlight uh highly so um another area that really um stood out to me with this highlighting process, and again, this is not about a psychological look into Piper's mind. I'm trying to show you how I used AI to help me discover more about self. So let's go back to that. As I said, I highlighted all these things in the books I read over holiday. I uploaded it to um AI. What I specifically said to AI and what we're discussing today is kind of like, what am I paying attention to? What is it? Because I need to understand what I'm paying attention to because what we pay attention to is the thing that most broadly speaks to us. And so that's what we're talking about today. In the next part of the series, I'm going to talk about the things that I avoided. And I so what I did is I would say to AI, what am I paying attention to? What are my patterns of attention? What do they say about my mind? What did they say about my life? And I would say, I would say to AI, number one, don't fluff me. You have to tell your AI not to do that because affirmation does nothing for you. Um, but I had to continue to prompt it. Like, you need to probe and ask me questions so I'm deeply understanding my thinking. This is not about how I'm feeling, I need to understand the patterns of my attention. And so that's how I worked with AI. So the next thing that came up was um this idea um of kind of authenticity that was really important to me. That um there needs to be an internal alignment. There needs to be thinking as a moral act. Too often people say, Well, um, I just didn't think about that, and that it it reverses beh their responsibility on the behavior that they perpetuated against people, or I was just feeling that way. You know, you've heard people say that. Well, like they just had no um control over how they behaved, and they blame it on, well, it's just how I thought about it, or just how I felt. I know you can see the people as I say that. I'm throwing my hands up in the air right now because we can all we all know people that use that. So, what I saw when with my highlights is thinking is a moral act, not this base level, surface level thinking, which most people do. And the whole point of this series is that we have got to think about our thinking. Because if we don't, we're gonna be these Neanderthals. We might as well be dragging our knuckles on the floor, and I know that's pretty harsh, but we might as well be dragging our knuckles on the floor if we are constantly being overcome with the same pattern of thinking that's surface level. Thinking is a moral act, just letting your brain do its thing is not thinking. Does that make sense? So there's a real consistency between belief, value, and behavior. But again, thinking is a moral act. So if you're not thinking about thinking, you're not morally thinking, which means you're not able to see the consistency between your beliefs, your values, and behavior. Does that all make sense? So I saw this as an enormous area that I highlighted. Um, and where I still kind of fracture a little bit is acknowledging these kind of things without self-flagellation. So I still noticed a fracture there. Um, that we can acknowledge that we're not thinking about our thinking. We can acknowledge that thinking is a moral act, but we need to do so without falling into self-flagellation, which can be really quite difficult. So, what I would ask you is what do you refuse to integrate because it would cost you coherence? What does that mean? What do you refuse to think about your thinking because it would cost you your current identity? That's the hard part about metacognition. That's the hard part of me stepping in saying, okay, I AI, rip me apart, tear me to shreds. I read a book a couple years ago that did the same thing by James Hollis. And it really forced me to think about my thinking. And do I want to integrate this information that I'm learning? Because it's gonna cost me, because it's gonna tear me up, or am I just gonna ignore it? And that's a really important part about this series and about as you're going through reading or your thought processes, capturing yourself, saying, wait a second, is this the same thought that I've had for the last 20 years? What does it say about who I think I am? Am I willing to lose that I think I am, that coherence, that identity to think differently? Because if I think differently, the potential of suffering well rather than just suffering is there. It's hard to explain. That's I don't know if you've noticed with some of what I've been talking about lately in 2026, is kind of this idea of a psychophilosophical lens. I recognize that I'm not just strictly C B T, A equals A plus B equals C. I I that's not my how my brain works because I ultimately look at the good, the G, the moral component, the spiritual component. And so that is theological, that is philosophical, that is psychological. We are complex, we can't be broken down into A plus B equals C. So, what do you refuse to integrate because it could cost you coherence or identity? It's a huge one for you to ask yourself every time you get caught in the same thinking pattern. So again, I really want to introduce the concept of patterns of attention. This is key for you to grow in your life. So what you pay attention to is what you prioritize, right? And what you prioritize is really your moral hierarchy. And this hierarchy, really, really what that is, is your identity plus agency. So the things that we highlight in our books or the things we highlight in our mind highlight us. Does that make sense? The things we highlight highlight us. The things that we pay attention to means the things that we prioritize, the things that we prioritize tells about our moral hierarchy. And our hierarchy is really the components of identity and agency. So what we attend to absolutely matters, and what we avoid matters even more, even more. So next, what I really am going to dig into into the next uh part of the series is omissions, what those actually reveal. So that was the third part of this kind of experiment that I was doing on myself over vacation was okay, you've told me my patterns of attention. I recognize how those have developed in me, but what are the areas that I am avoiding? Because again, I'm taking pictures and uploading to AI a whole page. So AI looks at those and says, wait a second, you only highlighted over here where you're talking about suffering well, or you're talking, you know, about um cognition and emotion and how to control those things. But over here, Piper, you you're omitting some things. And so what omissions reveal are our shadow priorities. So we're going back to Jungian theory, we're talking about our protective mechanisms and our unarticulated fears. And so that's where um this started getting harder for me. Where I had to, where I kept prompting AI to keep digging at me. Because again, if we don't learn to think about our thinking, we're just knuckle draggers. That's how I think about it. You might be um happy, finger quotes happy, you might be finger quotes good, and that's fine. There's a continuum of goodness, right? But if you want true integration of self, if you want to go through this life and learn to suffer well, learn to continue to grow, learn to understand what you actually value and prioritize, what your hierarchy of self is, you have to look at what you omit, what you're not paying attention to, because it really does reveal shadow priorities and shadow, the shadow self, that thing that hides in the corner, if we don't look at it, it's going to overwhelm our life. It really does, um, the things we omit really show those protective mechanisms. It's it overshadows those. So, for example, going back to my childhood experiences of feeling that sentimentality was something that was mocked, I can step out of wounded child self, right? And recognize that the protective mechanism there was in my family of origin that to embrace sentimentality meant vulnerability. So, therefore, attachment figures could not embrace full sentimentality because it afforded too much vulnerability and they couldn't do it. It was a protective mechanism. And again, this is a way for you to step out of those attachment wounds and traumas and have them hurt less or suffer well with it. And then again, what we avoid, what we omit in what we're thinking or what we're reading is those unarticulated fears. So we're gonna dive into that. So next week, I'll look at not what I noticed, but what I ignored and why omission is its own form of information. Thanks for joining me, and I'll see you next time. That brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you learned some tools that can equip you to untangle your mind and untangle your life. If you're curious about working with me for your anxiety or trauma, head on over to my website at untangledmind.net to connect. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review me on your podcast listening platform and share it with your friends and family. As always, thanks so much for listening to me, Pyper Harris with the Untangled Mind Podcast. I'll talk with you next time.