Glennon & Abby’s Guide to Confronting Crisis with Compassion
July 4, 2024
Abby Wambach:
Welcome.
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome.
Abby Wambach:
I’m sorry. I just need to interject a little bit of fun into our day.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you not think this is so fun, what we’re doing?
Abby Wambach:
No, I know, but we need to change up some of the vibe every once in a while because it’s just like, “Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Here we are again.”
Glennon Doyle:
Can you start us off in a new, shaky up kind of way?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Here we go, everybody. Hold on to your little hats.
Abby Wambach:
All right. Welcome. Welcome back. Welcome. Welcome back. Here we are. We’re about to discuss some really hard things today on We Can Do Hard Things. Welcome. Welcome back. Welcome. Welcome back. Welcome. Welcome back.
Glennon Doyle:
I can’t. Okay. Well, why don’t you all vote? Would you like us to do that each time or just go back to our simple, “Welcome back to We Can Hardly Do Things”?
Abby Wambach:
I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Today, we have-
Abby Wambach:
This, boring.
Glennon Doyle:
… your friend Abby Wambach-
Abby Wambach:
What’s up?
Glennon Doyle:
… and me. Sister is out. I know all of the sister fans are so upset when she’s not here, and what I want to say to you is join the club. We are also upset that she’s not here because who is going to know facts during this conversation? Who’s going to understand history and things like, I don’t know, facts?
Abby Wambach:
We can’t even think of a fact.
Glennon Doyle:
I can’t.
Abby Wambach:
We can’t even think of a fact of what she’s brought to the table because we just lean on her so hard for them.
Glennon Doyle:
We really do, so let’s see if we fall because we have no one to lean on. But we’ll just talk about feelings. How about that?
Abby Wambach:
How are your feelings today?
Glennon Doyle:
I, as you know, am overwhelmed. I am overwhelmed. I was laying in bed this morning wondering because I keep thinking that we’re just in a phase. Since the beginning of the year, we have had so many hard things happen to people around us.
Abby Wambach:
And to us.
Glennon Doyle:
Death, diagnoses, divorces, and it feels like every day, there’s a new… One of our friends or family members are going through some kind of horrible trauma, and we’ve been looking at each other each day kind of stunned by it all, just trying to respond appropriately and lovingly and hoping that it’s just a phase. We’ve been saying like, “2024 of you,” But this morning, I was thinking, I’m almost 50. I actually wrote this out to my new friend, Celise, who I love very much. But she checked in on me and I told her just what I have told you, pod squad. And then I told her that I’ve been wondering if this is just what life is when you’re older, if there’s a phase of adulthood that’s building where you’re building and building and building, and then there’s a very short phase of just enjoying what you built. And then is the next phase losing?
Abby Wambach:
No. I don’t believe that. I talked to my therapist about this yesterday and you know what we came to. Our world gives us these unspoken rules. It’s a fallacy that we are handed when we are children, that if you work hard enough, if you do good enough, then bad things won’t happen to you or your people. And I think that that kind of way of thinking is capitalism and all of it, but it also kind of keeps us safe. It keeps us safe in some ways and it hurts us in others. So the expectation that life is supposed to be butterflies and roses, and that when hard things come, they will be fleeting and you will then return to your normal life.
And what I’ve learned, and not just my therapy, but over the course of the many months since I’ve gone through quite a bit of struggle is I was trying to talk to my therapist yesterday about this like, “Okay, maybe I’m getting it wrong. Maybe my expectation of things not being so hard or crisis coming, maybe that’s the issue.” And she listened and she said, “Yeah. That sounds like a very Buddhist way of thinking of surrender to what is, et cetera.” And I believe that that’s a beautiful way to live. I really think that that’s something to aspire to. But what she did say and mentioned to me yesterday that I’m going to be sitting with all day today is when there is crisis fatigue, you start to get confused. You don’t know how to make decisions or whatever. And something that I am working on is acknowledging that this just fucking sucks, and saying it out loud and actually having… The moment you acknowledge that something sucks is the moment that then you can also have sincere compassion for yourself around the sucky thing, around the crisis, around death.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you mean not just jumping into action?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, because what I think that I’ve been doing. I’ll speak for myself. My brother dies or whatever it is. I’m just like, “Okay, what do we need to do to get through this?” And I think I’ve been skipping the piece where I’m really acknowledging that this sucks.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s interesting. I’m just thinking as you was talking about this yesterday on the couch, another thing happened. I made a plan about where we were going to go. A person had a diagnosis, so I immediately figured out our calendar, how we were going to get there, when we were going to get there, who was going to watch the dogs, who was going to whatever. And I came upstairs, told the kids to sit down and presented what happened, and then presented the calendar and presented the plan, and then looked at them. And their eyes were just so big and they said, “Can we talk about what happened?” Tish said, “When are we going to talk about our feelings?” She literally said that. Yeah. Yeah. Well-
Abby Wambach:
Because we are in crisis fatigue.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re in crisis fatigue.
Abby Wambach:
And the analogy in my brain is I feel like I’m in a boxing ring and the hits just keep coming, and I can’t figure out how to bob and weave away from the haymaker that keeps coming towards my face. So today, I’m going to sit and be pouty about the things that have happened, and then really lean into this compassion and this sweet love, girl in here that wants somebody else to fix it and make it better. Because as adults, we have to do the fixing and making it better ourselves, but there’s also this part of us that’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to. I’m scared. I’m sad. I’m mad. I’m angry, whatever.” So that’s where I’m at today.
Glennon Doyle:
I think that both of the things are true. I think that both of what we are saying is true. I think that while I hear you saying, “No, that’s not what life is now,” I don’t believe you. I actually do think in my heart that I guess if you’re lucky enough that the previous ages haven’t been all crisis and sadness, you do hit a certain age where people do start getting sick and people do start dying and relationships do start ending. And the way you see the world changes so much, that your rose-colored glasses are gone and you actually see things for as painful as they are. So what I’m trying to figure out is how to have both.
I know that I can’t fight against the current of what life is, so insanity would be holding my breath until the loss stops because it’s not going to stop. That’s not life. So what I do feel committed to doing is figuring out how to do this phase of life, where there is so much loss, where there is so much caretaking, where there is so much shock and pain with some dignity and peace and power and joy and softness, and not bitterness.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I hear what you’re saying and correct me if I’m wrong here, but I feel like what we’re saying is we don’t want to lose our humanity in the things that are really sad because I think that when I look out and talk to my parents and folks who have lived longer than me and us, there’s a part of me that feels like so much trauma happens, especially in the older years like this, that it makes them become a little bit coldhearted, as a defense mechanism.
Glennon Doyle:
Sure, I get that. Just stiffening yourself. Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, I want to do that right now. I want to be coldhearted, and I want to not feel at all.
Glennon Doyle:
Harden, not soften. Harden.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. And I think that what we’re saying is we want to be able to get through, whether this is a new phase or forever phase, whatever. It’s accepting that what is, is and also not losing our humanity, so that we stay open to all the emotions that it brings. It just feels like so a lot. All of my emotions are just at the tips of myself. And that’s rare. I don’t know if that’s my therapy and getting more in touch with myself, but I think it’s rare to have so… I feel like I’m an exposed root.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I suspect that it’s beautiful.
Abby Wambach:
What?
Glennon Doyle:
This time. I suspect that it’s like before, we’re just adulting, adulting, adulting with flashes of humanity when something happens. We’re climbing. We’re climbing. We’re building. We’re putting it up. We’re hustling. We’re whatever. And then every once in a while, there’s a moment of true humanity or love, and it feels like now that’s reversing, that actually through no choice of our own, we are in the humanity and the gritty painful love of it all the time, with flashes of remembering to adult. And that’s got to be more true to the bone of what it means to be human. Anyway, that is what I’m thinking about.
You know what’s really weird is that I read these questions that we’re going to read today from the pod squad, and I think we should go straight to Becky because well, we’ll see why in a second.
Becky:
Hi, this is Becky. I recently went through a divorce and I feel like I’m doing really well psychologically, but I feel like I have all this stuff trapped in my body, all this grief, pain and rage from a lot of things in my life, and I don’t know how to get it out. And I exercise and I’m in therapy and I read books and listen to books and podcasts and all. I do all this stuff, but I feel like it’s still stuck in my body. And I was wondering if you had any ideas on how to process grief, pain, and rage, all these shameful emotions, to move them through our bodies, so we can operate in a less weighed down way in the world and just get on with our best lives. I love what you’re doing. Keep it up. Goodbye.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. When I read this this morning… First of all, hi, Becky. I was thinking, babe, about our visit. Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley just came to visit us for a few days, and it was beautiful as one might expect it to be. And Megan was talking to me about how she has this new thing where whenever she’s feeling a big feeling, which Megan is dealing with her partner Andrea’s cancer diagnosis and a lot of, I can imagine, fear and beauty and sadness, she does this thing now where when she notices an overwhelm of feeling, she actually lays down on the floor and just lays there for a minute. Okay?
Now, I find this to be brilliant because she said that the reason she does it is because if she doesn’t lay down on the floor and stop herself, she knows herself and she will start wiping down the counter. She’ll start putting away things. She’ll start organizing. She’ll start doing an action that is distracting from the feeling. But when she lays down on the ground, it’s her way of telling her body, “We have something to process right now and we’re going to focus on it and process it, so it can move through us.” And I was listening to her thinking, “Oh, my God, is laying down on the floor…” Because I’ve seen this before, this laying down on the floor moment that people are doing and having. Is it like the new, “I’m going to go smoke a cigarette”? It’s like the healthy dramatic punctuation of it. It used to be you’d see the character go smoke a cigarette or when they had something deep to process, that was the signal of depth because that was the way the big cigarettes-
Abby Wambach:
Advertising, marketing.
Glennon Doyle:
… wanted us to feel that way. Right? But is the laying down on the floor the new, I have something deep to process moment? Because when she’s laying down on the floor, you’re literally putting yourself out of commission to do anything to distract yourself. Your hands can’t reach anything. Your legs can’t move. Everyone says exercise, exercise, and that’s not it for a lot of us. Exercise is an energetic release of energy, but it can also turn masochistic and I don’t know that it’s processing feelings all the time.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. For sure has a function of that for me. It’s almost like a moving meditation where if I’m moving, I’m not now in my head thinking, but I hear what you’re saying about Megan’s… It’s almost like a positive way of saying, “I give up and laying down.”
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like, “I have something to do. Oh, there’s something to do right now.” It feels so embodied. I feel something rising in me and it’s my body signal that we have something to process, so I’m going to give myself a moment to do that. It’s like, “Don’t jump in the pool right after you eat. Don’t move around the house right after you have a big feeling.”
Abby Wambach:
Also, what did she say? She says, “I’m becoming less of myself”?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. She’s just everything she says.
Abby Wambach:
It’s so cool. She’ll lay down and say, “I need to become less of myself.” And I’m like, “That is so smart.” It’s a time-out. It’s an adult time-out.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s like a time in.
Abby Wambach:
In. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a time in because we’re always time-outing ourself.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. That’s what Becky’s trying to get away from.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. She’s trying to time in. I will tell Becky this one thing. When I think about why I love painting, it’s not really because of any result because the results are not anything to write home about. It’s not that. I think that the reason I love it the most is because I am doing this because I am processing feelings.
When I spend time painting, I notice that I am more stable, clear, maybe whatever Megan said, less of myself. Maybe it’s more of myself. I don’t know. But that time is different than any other time for me. It’s like my hands are moving, but I’m not thinking, thinking. And it’s not like writing where I’m forcing some kind of meaning onto the page. It feels like a passive surrender, so that I can process. It’s emotional digestion. It’s like a digestion system kicks in, and I notice things come up that I haven’t dealt with and they process through. And I wonder, is there a state of peaceful flow that people can get into where that is happening, where the emotional digestion kicks in? I think painting, walking, and writing when I’m not doing it for an audience.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s a lot of other avenues in which people and the world try to work through some of their grief, pain, anger, shame. Obviously, you have talk therapy. One for me that really works is IFS. Using the IFS approach, internal family systems, has really helped me really work into the grief, the pain, the anger, the shame. We’ve had Hillary McBride on this podcast before, talking about psychedelics, and that’s been scientifically researched and proven to really get into some of this stuff. More than anything, as these crises come to us now like we were just talking about, I’m having a weird experience around them. I feel more annoyed and sad and all of the things, but I feel solid. The thing about this whole experience in this last couple months is I don’t feel like I’m losing my shit.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. But what’s the annoyance?
Abby Wambach:
Well, like, “Oh, this is a new crisis we have to deal with.” Do you know what I mean?
Glennon Doyle:
Because you’re experiencing it as a constant interruption.
Abby Wambach:
Yes. And I think what my problem is I’m trying to figure out how to quell that annoyance. If I’m always expecting easy-breezy sailing, whenever a storm comes in, I’m like, “Oh, gosh.” Rather than actually being a sailor, going, “Oh, this is the way that the world works.” And sometimes storms bring real wind that can move us faster. So, Becky, I don’t have answers for you, but what I do know is the first step in dealing with all of these big things that you’re dealing with is, for me, I sometimes jump over it and try to fix it through all of this stuff, through running, through exercise, through books, through podcasts, through therapy, all of that. And sometimes I think we just haven’t even accepted that that shit happened. We’re already moving into taking care of it mode. So maybe you get to give yourself a compassion day. I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I mean, the word emotion is energy in motion, right? It’s like there’s something inside me that is swirling, and the idea is that that thing needs to keep swirling, keep swirling, and then be released. Who knows if that’s even true, right? But I do think that there are things that we can bring into our lives that allow a container for that. I mean, I think art for me is it, and not just creating it. Tish’s favorite movie in the whole world is Interstellar, so we have to watch it all the time and it’s like 400 hours long. So two nights ago we watched it, and this is in the middle of all of these crises, and I cried so hard at my seventh viewing of Interstellar. PS, it’s a very deep movie and-
Abby Wambach:
It’s really beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
… it’s about love and everything and death and time, and it’s just shit. But I was crying so hard and having this double consciousness of, “Oh.” I don’t know. All the crises kept coming in my real life. I haven’t cried about any of them, but these experiences that we can put on a movie that taps into something that’s tangential to our thing, that allows a release. It’s like this is about everything, right? So I truly believe that that is one of the reasons why we need and love art because it offers us a safe container to release.
Abby Wambach:
In the process, the hard feelings that may be in a conversation or… Yep.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Because I actually don’t have to solve Matthew McConaughey’s problem. I don’t know where I’d begin with time and space continuum, whatever the hell is happening there, but I don’t have to get out a piece of paper and make a calendar for Jessica Chastain and Matthew McConaughey. There’s no logistics to handle. In our lives, we get to skip to logistics all the time, but in art, we just have to sit there. We can’t solve it for them, so we are forced to feel it in a safe way, which is why I often avoid deeply feeling movies because I know what’s going to happen to me.
Abby Wambach:
And music.
Glennon Doyle:
And music and all the things. I’m like, “I need to be ready.” When I walk up the stairs and Abby has Adele or Tish, I’m like-
Abby Wambach:
Tish, her own daughter.
Glennon Doyle:
… “What are you doing? We need to prepare for this processing. It can’t just be sprung upon us.”
Abby Wambach:
I’m trying to get those streams for Tishy.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
What I’m trying to do.
Glennon Doyle:
Anyway, it would be very cool for all of us to figure out why isn’t that a part of wellness? This whole wellness world, where the hell is the processing of emotion in all of it? Green juice doesn’t do that for us. Red light therapy does not process our… We need focus. We need focus upon emotional health.
Abby Wambach:
I think that’s what therapists are trying to do.
Glennon Doyle:
No, but therapy is all brain. Look, I am-
Abby Wambach:
But there’s many kinds of therapy though that also deal with the body.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I just think for the majority of people, it’s talk therapy, talk therapy, talk therapy, which for me is just more hamster wheel stuff. I think that therapy is where we dredge up all the things that we’re going to have to go process on our own. It’s not the processing often.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, I think that that’s interesting what you just said. It’s like accepting real accountability and responsibility for actually having to do the personal work yourself.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Becky, I love you and I hope that this sounds loving and sweet, but maybe there’s probably no exercise or therapy or a book or a podcast, even this one, that you can find that’s going to actually do the work of processing it, all of this stuff. Maybe it’s just you.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. We can’t outsource the processing of emotions.
Abby Wambach:
It sucks. I wish we could, but you really do have to actually go through it and process it. We’re not therapists, so who knows.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you, Becky. We’re processing alongside you.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. We’re with you.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Let’s hear from Lindsay.
Lindsay:
Hi, my name is Lindsay. As a former college athlete, I love listening to your sports episode. Glennon, something you said resonated with me, that the word agony and agony of defeat sounded hyperbolic to you when you were a kid. And it just reminded me, I was thinking about as a high school basketball player, I always wanted to win. I cared about winning and I tried my best every game, but I don’t remember ever feeling the emotion or emotional anguish of losing, until one bus ride home after a loss when our male coach ripped into us for enjoying the ride. We were talking, laughing even though we have lost the game. After he yelled at us, we spent the rest of the ride sitting silently, stewing for being chastised. So perhaps this question is for Abby. Do you ever remember a time when you were taught to feel this anguish in relation to sports and is this a thing? Okay. Thank you so much. I listen to your podcast every week. I really enjoy it.
Glennon Doyle:
That is such a fascinating question, Lindsay. Is the agony of defeat inherent, internal or is it something we’re taught that we’re shamed into?
Abby Wambach:
It’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
Abby Wambach, what say you?
Abby Wambach:
Both.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Abby Wambach:
I think every person is kind of… Based on their circumstances, the relationship they have with their competitiveness is individual. Mine, because of the family I was raised in and because of the energy and the dynamics and the readings of how I felt like my family system worked, I knew that I was going to be seen as a valid person if I excelled at something, if I excelled at this one thing that I felt really naturally gifted at. So it wasn’t conscious then, but my competitiveness was absolutely due to the attachment issues that I had as a young child and the way that I might not have handled it that well, but then I was able to transfer that competitiveness, that feeling like my life actually depended on it because I do think that there was a part of me that really felt like my life depended on it.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s attachment theory.
Abby Wambach:
That as I got older, I didn’t go back because it was affirmed in what I was doing in sport, that competitiveness actually is really good for outcomes. Being really competitive is really good for success.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. But what she’s saying, is an important part of competitiveness feeling absolute agony and misery after you lose? Because I have seen you, Abby, secretly say to me when one of our kids loses something, and then is okay, is laughing with their friends, is whatever, you have said to me that makes you nervous, that they don’t have what it takes to succeed because they are not crushed and destroyed after a loss.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Because in my experience in professional sport, that is kind of one of the things that allows some athletes to rise and others to not. I think that there’s this emotional component and this vulnerability about being competitive that some people embrace and other athletes don’t. I’m not judging other athletes. I’m just saying that if you wanted to do this thing at a high, high level of professional sport, it’s almost a requirement for entry that you need to have a competitiveness, a self-assuredness, this matters to me mentality in order to really succeed.
Now, the players in my mind mentally speaking… Because at that level, even in high school basketball, everybody’s decent enough. They can dribble-ish. They can shoot-ish. But when you get to the professional ranks, what are the things that you can set yourself aside and apart from other players with? Everybody’s strong. Everybody has the basic abilities. Everybody has certain qualities, and mentality is this one piece. I would also put emotionality and emotional intelligence in that bucket of mentality. Even though I know that they’re kind of separate, it’s just in the sport world, we talk about it as sports psychology. If they can have more access to themselves and that vulnerability piece and that competitiveness… Because really, what is competitiveness? What is it?
Glennon Doyle:
Isn’t there a form of this? To me, it feels like it’s old thinking. This idea that there must be a purgatory of misery that is a manifestation of humiliation and that you must prove your suffering after a loss feels to me that it is rooted in the old belief that shame is motivating. I don’t know anything about sports, but I do know about people and motivation, and I don’t think that that… Okay, it works.
Abby Wambach:
It might not be healthy.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. It might work.
Abby Wambach:
I’m telling you. Yeah. I’m not saying it’s healthy.
Glennon Doyle:
But so does screaming at a kid. That works until they’re broken and they spend the rest of their lives trying to recover their humanity from that. So I’m not saying it doesn’t work in the short run, but is it possible for a human being to work their off for what they want, come to a field, give everything they have to give, lose, then gather up their people and find peace and joy and yes, maybe even some laughter, having known that they laid it all out on the field?
Abby Wambach:
I don’t know. I don’t know because I never experienced that. I can’t speak to that. I would like to think that that’s possible, but what I know from listening to some of the best athletes in the world, the Michael Jordans, the Kobe Bryants, all of my former national team players, we knew we were going to survive the event, but there was a part of us that felt so bad. And it wasn’t like I felt bad about myself. I felt like I let everybody down and I didn’t do my job, and if I did my job, we would’ve won. And there is a motivational component to that. So do I think it’s a hundred percent healthy? No. Do I think it’s required for professional sports or even sports in general to need to be competitive and successful, so that you can be successful? No. I do think that there are people out there that have a healthy relationship with their craft, that they can go to the office, essentially play, win or lose, and then go home to their families, and have a normal existence. I wasn’t one of those people.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. And that could have been part of your greatness.
Abby Wambach:
And I can’t for certain say it was or it wasn’t. What I have a hunch about is that the kind of way that I experienced loss and the kind of way I experienced failure, because I do think that we get the word failure wrong, is I was able to transfer that into fuel and into a way of motivating myself to think about things differently, to be better. Do I think that there are some people who can dance around after losing a game, a really big one? Yes, I do.
Glennon Doyle:
Our kids do.
Abby Wambach:
I do. And do I also have an old-school self in here that thinks that’s wrong? Yeah. I do think at times, maybe that behavior isn’t right and I also have the awareness to say that might not be correct, that thought. That thought might be an indoctrinated thought of how people should be. My only experience is having gone through it, acting really sad after a loss or really disappointed.
Glennon Doyle:
Acting, you said. You said acting.
Abby Wambach:
Well, no, being really sad. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
All I know is when I watch our youngest who plays very competitive with the soccer, when she and her teammates have played a game and they’ve left it all out in the field, it’s just amazing, the vulnerability of how hard they try and how they show up for each other on that field and they pour it all out, and they lose. And then I watch them walk. They meet with their team. They have their post-mortem meeting. And then when they are walking towards us after the game and I see her with her friends and they are laughing, I feel so grateful. I feel like, “Oh, they’re going to be okay,” because I sometimes feel like the price of greatness is too high.
I feel like we look at people who achieve the highest in wherever they are, and we think that is success, but I wonder if some of the people who achieve the most greatness are the people who are the most threatened. Their self is most threatened by any sort of loss like you. You’re so devastated when you lost because your attachment to your family felt based on whether you won or lost. When I see a kid who leaves it all out on the field and then is able to understand, “That was a game and now it’s done, and I am still a whole person deserving of connection and joy and no matter what happened on that field-
Abby Wambach:
I think it’s an and both. I do hear you and I do agree with you. I think that that feels like a healthier relationship with game, with sport. I also think it takes an extraordinary amount of courage and bravery if you do have competitiveness in you to be actually outwardly upset.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, I hear that.
Abby Wambach:
Especially a young teenage group of young women, young girls, I think that the desire to want to jump over the sadness and into a normal life again happens too quickly only because they don’t want to stay in the pain of the discomfort. So I think both things can be true at the same time here. I don’t necessarily think my way was the healthiest way. I also don’t think that Amma should look to the way that I did things, and I don’t think that I should project onto her the way that I did things.
Glennon Doyle:
Is that the answer? Is it whatever way you feel is the right way? But what is not right is to look at a bunch of kids and say, “You are not experiencing this right, so you should be full of agony.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Or what I’d be more prone to is if my child came to me in agony, I wouldn’t be able to handle it, so I would be like, “You should feel proud. You should feel happy. You should feel connected.” So I’m not shitting on anyone’s feelings post loss and allowing them to experience whatever they experience.
Abby Wambach:
I think that it’s so important because rather than a coach standing in front of this crew on the bus, shaming them into silence for the rest of their ride home, a better coaching move would be, girls are talking, laughing and the coach comes back and says, “Hey, I really want to talk and I want to ask you guys some questions, so that I can understand what you’re feeling. We just lost, and maybe I’m old school here, but I’m sad and disappointed and upset and I want to know more why you all feel like you’re happy and/or mid or whatever.” Maybe the new coaching model is to invite everyone to talk about how they’re feeling, so that they can also understand and acknowledge if they are just jumping over the sad part.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. That’s good.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t know how I would do that necessarily. You guys are all happy-go-lucky right now, and back in my day, and I don’t want to project on you, we would be sitting in silence. I just want to make sure that we’re not missing this huge thing that just happened, that we’re not missing this huge emotion that actually really benefits us.
I think that worry about the pain of it, worry about our children being sad, we all parents try to fix it for them or whatever, but really having them move through the sadness… And I get it, as a teenager, you don’t really know how to process some of this stuff, so sometimes you learn, “Oh, if I just pretend to be happy, then I’ll just inevitably be happy.” But it’s the process of winning, dealing with that. It’s also the process of losing, dealing with that. And that’s their journey and they will become who they need to become based on the wins and losses, and based on how they learn how to handle those wins and losses. And it’s the job of a really good coach to be in touch with what the players are feeling.
Glennon Doyle:
And not just telling them that they-
Abby Wambach:
And not to drive the feeling, to guide them, at a bowling alley, to be the bumpers, to be like, “Hey, I don’t know. Are we getting a little bit too off the lane here? Let’s talk about it.”
Glennon Doyle:
It’s interesting because it feels like what we keep ending on… You know I’m always looking for a theme, babe. It feels like what this episode keeps being about is that the answer is never how we should be feeling, that we keep asking ourselves how we should be feeling, when really the only thing we can ever do is acknowledge how we actually feel and process it with other people. What you keep saying and what we keep coming back to is not living outside in on what should this look like and are my feelings matching the picture I have in my head of how this is supposed to feel, or do I not start with the map outside of myself? Do I actually start with the compass? Is it I acknowledge how I actually feel and start there? And allow the other people in my life to do the same, so it’s not about how you should feel. It’s about how do you feel, and there’s a curiosity to it.
We love you, pod squad. Thanks for all of these incredible questions. We love speaking with you so much, and we will see you back here next time. Bye. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod.
While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Weiss-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner and Bill Schultz.