Welcome to the Untangled Mind Podcast. I'm your host, Piper Harris, licensed professional counselor. This is a show 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, trauma, and other life stressors shape perception, behavior, and choice, and what actually helps people change. I'm an integrative CBT therapist based in the Atlanta suburbs. Each episode is designed to do 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're looking at bearing reality, thinking about thinking. It grew out of a period of reading and reflection where I began paying close attention not just to what I was learning but to how my thinking was forming over time. In the upcoming episodes, I'll be sharing examples from my own process of orientation, meaning the examining of patterns, questioning assumptions, and noticing where integration was required rather than agreement. The goal isn't to offer conclusions for you to adopt, but to model a way of engaging with ideas that allows thinking to be examined, corrected, and grounded in lived reality. Let's get to it. Well, hello and welcome to 2026. It's January 5th. It is hard to believe that I am going into my seventh year of this podcast. It's really fun because of the different iterations of this podcast. It wasn't always the Untangled Mind podcast. I've been an entrepreneur for quite a while and doing this podcast for seven years. So it's really fun to go back and to listen to the different iterations. And that really brings me to today's conversation is that each end of a year, so the last two weeks of this uh 2025, I took time off from the office. It was amazing. My husband actually didn't think I could actually rest. Um, but what I do every year, and what I did this year in particular is I take time to reflect on the whole year, what I learned, what I could do better, that sort of thing. It's a practice that I've been doing for gosh, over 15 years. I can't even remember when I started it. And it's, you know, along with the podcast and different iterations, the way my process that I process a year has also changed considerably. But it's just uh really fun for me to consider, gosh, this is my seventh um series or my seventh year doing this podcast series, and um it just feels really good. It feels really good. So we are going to be jumping into a podcast series and actually just kind of it wasn't something that I planned, honestly. Um, in fact, it was something a lot simpler than that. As I said, I took two weeks off. This is the first two weeks off that I've taken at the end of the year in at least five years, six years. Um, and like I said, I my husband didn't think I could rest because I'm not very good at resting, but I can tell you, I rested. I I woke up this morning energized and excited to be back to the office to hearing from my clients and just being with them, but I feel so very rested and it was wonderful. So as I was saying, I was I was trying to really take a um a pause and it there wasn't really any strategy in how this podcast series came up. It really was about I I have to give myself refreshment and retreat. I really have to actually step back. And so one of the ways that I told myself I was gonna do this is that I know that my nervous system settles really well through reading. And so I knew for my my two weeks that I was just going to devour books. Um, and so for me, um, it just it was a lot of different books that I was reading. At nighttime, I always read fiction because I need to turn off my brain, but typically during daytime reading, um, it's nonfiction. And so what I found myself doing is I was reading for hours a day while I was resting, obviously in between all of the hullabaloo of the you know holidays and getting ready for family and all of that stuff. But I really, I mean, I would move from one spot on the living room couch to my chair in my library lounge to upstairs. And I mean, like I just went all over the place. I couldn't put my books down. And so I read a lot and I highlighted a lot and I lingered on these passages that really stopped me. And somewhere along the way, um, something really shifted in me. And I noticed that I wasn't just engaging with the material, meaning I wasn't just kind of like reading it and highlighting it. I was actually recognizing that I was watching myself engage with it, if it makes sense. I was noticing what I kept returning to or or what I marked up real quickly. Um, I noticed what I underlined very slowly. If I I read a passage and I underlined it, I'm like, okay, hold on, what am I thinking about this? Um, and I also recognized what I was risked resistance to, and then um, you know, what I really didn't want to let go of. And there was a lot of that that came up during this rest and reading these books that just, oh my gosh, they gave me so much to think about and so much joy. It was just really wonderful. And so that really raised a question that I ask my clients all the time, um, but I don't always turn it back on myself as um explicitly as I really should. And I recognized, am I actually examining my thinking right now, or am I simply collecting these ideas that feel familiar, maybe they're reassuring, or maybe they're validating. Because often I tell people that uh, especially my clients that are verocious readers, I say to them, okay, you've read like five books. We need to pause and and see what we're learning. There has to be an opportunity for integration. Well, I had asked myself the same thing, and that question actually became the seed of um this series. I really did not plan this. In fact, it was just all about, oh my gosh, I have all these books, I can't wait to read. And then all of a sudden, the last couple of days, it's just kind of come to fruition in my mind. So, what you're listening to now is an introduction to a podcast and blog series, and I'm calling it Bearing Reality Thinking About Thinking. And I want to be very clear from the outset um that today's what today's podcast is, or even the first vlog in the series, it's not a book review series at all. And it's not even my reading list, however, I did provide those references. Um, and it's not a a summary of my ideas today that I found interesting or compelling. That's not what it is. It's actually a record of orientation. So orientation is a word that I'm using intentionally. Orientation implies um orientation, I said that funny, implies direction, not arrival. Does that make sense? So it implies uh responsibility without a certainty of what that responsibility would lead to. It implies a movement under conditions that aren't fully resolved. So orientation matters most when things are say complex or emotionally charged or even morally weighty, right? It's it's when um it's not very obvious what to think, who to trust, or how to proceed. Orientation is this really can tend to be uncomfortable place to be, but it's something that all of us need to get comfortable with. And so in my clinical work, I also ask people to do the very same thing, to slow down and examine not just what they think, but how their thinking takes shape over time, um, to notice patterns, behavioral patterns, thinking patterns, to question assumptions, to becoming curious about the stories that they tell themselves. And this is not necessarily just in order to dismantle them like reflexively, but in order to see whether those stories are actually helping them live truthfully and well. And we can see that even through my orientation that I'm gonna be sharing with you through my reading. So this is a series, um, this series is an example of me doing the same work I asked my clients. So as I was doing this reading, I hadn't even thought of this series yet. Um, I thought, you know what, I'm gonna invite Chat GPT into this. Um, and this is what I want to say, not as chat as an authority. I know there's a lot of talk about chat GPT being used as a therapist, which is scary, um, and not as a replacement for my own thinking. In fact, what it was, not even to affirm anything that I was I was reading. In fact, I use um AI actually extensively in my work for business processes, and it's really been incredibly helpful. And I thought, why can't I use this rather than a mirror or to affirm me, but to help judge me? You know, just like I say, okay, chat, here's a business process. This is what I put in, you know, what's what's missing? I did the same thing. So instead of asking it to summarize or interpret the books, I asked some different questions and they were actually pretty uncomfortable. So I asked chat, um, I actually throughout the time, I went back through the pages and I took pictures of all of my highlighted pages, every single one of them. So in instead of asking for a summary, I asked what patterns are emerging and what I highlighted. What does this reveal about how I tend to think? What themes am I drawn to and which ones am I totally avoiding? And just important, what am I missing? What are my blind spots that um might be actually reinforcing my preferences rather than challenging them? This is a very interesting process, you know. So I'm inviting a tool in to basically interrogate my thinking rather than affirm or confirm it, because that is a very important part of the orientation process. And it's it that's important for us to recognize because the series isn't really about me, and I want to say that it um starts with my process, but it doesn't end there. What this is really about is the discipline of orientation, of examining one's own thinking carefully enough to allow it to be corrected. And it's not a process that's um has to be private. Um, it's actually, I believe, a human necessity. And so um the first blog post in this series is intentionally very sparse. You can find the untangledmind.net under blogs. There's no commentary, there's no interpretation of what I read. It's just really a long list of those highlighted learnings extracted directly, like I said, from those highlighted passages. And so um I followed these and I didn't even um what I posted on the blog, I didn't even say which book they come came out of. And I did that on purpose because again, before we can interpret our thinking, um, before we defend it, before we try to integrate it into something coherent, we have to be willing to look at the raw material honestly. What we attend to, what we return to, what we elevate, and what we skip. And you can see what I tend to. I mean, it's pretty clear if you've listened to me for for very long, you know what I'm leaning toward reading and and my my focus. But attention needs not be neutral over time. It does shape belief, and that belief shapes our actions, and so we have to be acutely aware of what's taking place with that. So the first entry is simply the material that shaped my attention. Now, in the episodes and posts that are going to follow, I'm gonna examine what these selections reveal about how I think, um, what they exposed that I initially amiss and how they ultimately required integration, really, rather than agreement. And that last distinction really, really matters. Agreement is very easy, integration is costly. What I will say through this experience and what I'll be sharing with you is that I shared it with my husband, I shared it with a friend, and I was like, dang, this this process was not easy, nor is it easy to share it with others because it um was a little eating crow. Um, and so, but it's required, it's required to do that because um I don't want to just be highlighting and you know, uh collecting belief systems. I want to integrate. I I do, I don't want just agree. Agreement only allows a collection of ideas, but without being changed by them. So integration really requires us to adjust. Sometimes it's subtly and sometimes it was significantly. And I will tell you this was tough. So how we learn, how we relate, how we pace ourselves, and how we understand responsibility is so key to our growth and improvement. And one of the things that I do want to make clear through this process is that I um even well-informed frameworks can become distorted if they're held with um certain stabilizing conditions. So what I want to say is responsibility without grace becomes brittle, truth without mercy becomes unbearable, and discipline without sustainability eventually collapses. So these weren't new ideas to me, but they were way underemphasized ones for me. And noticing what was underemphasized was just as important as noticing what um I was defending. I also want to say something directly to those of you listening who come from difficult or um painful backgrounds or beginnings, because this series will touch on questions of origin, identity, and responsibility. But when we talk about origin stories, about understanding where we come from, I'm not talking about ideal childhoods, I'm not talking about intact families or these perfectly benevolent caregivers. Okay. So most people come from pain, um, at the least, chaos, maybe neglect, harm, or just rupture. So what I want to say is an intelligible story of origin does not require positivity. It requires you to be honest and coherent with that story. It requires a way of um locating yourself within what actually happened without being trapped there. And so what I want to be clear about is orientation is not about denying your suffering at all. It's about refusing to let that suffering be the story. Um, that it's the only story that you tell yourself. So I as the series unfolds, you'll hear me talk about neuroscience, uh, you'll hear me talk about psychology, theology, and moral formation. You'll hear references to responsibility, agency, capacity, and limitation. Okay, you're going to hear those references. You'll hear language that's going to resist both sentimentality and cruelty, cruelty, meaning that that that balance matters to me. Um, I don't believe people change through pressure alone, and I don't believe people change through reassurance alone either. So change happens when truth is held with conditions that make it livable. And this series is my attempt to name those conditions more clearly. And it's really by submitting my own thinking to examination. So um, that'll be fun. Y'all will get inside my mind. So if you're listening because you're curious, thoughtful, skeptical, or simply tired of frameworks that feel um like they're too soft or too harsh, I'm really glad that you're here. You don't need to agree with everything that follows. In fact, I don't want you to. Agreement isn't the goal. Orientation is. So in the next coming episode and blog, I'll begin unpacking what this material revealed about how I think and why that matters. So for now, the invitation is simple. Notice what draws your attention, notice what you are resisting, and notice what you might be missing. That's where orientation begins. That brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks 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 anxiety or trauma, head on over to my website at untangledmind.net to connect with me. If you enjoyed the show, please rate or 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 to you next time.