Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. I'm going to start this episode off with an old legend.

One evening, an elderly Cherokee brave told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, my son, there are two wolves inside of my heart.

They fight each other terribly.

Each is trying to destroy the other. One wolf is evil.

It's anger, its envy, hatred, self-pity, arrogance, greed, selfishness, resentment, lies, superiority,

inferiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. It's joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence,

empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The young grandson looked nervous. He thought

about it for a minute and then he asked his grandfather, which wolf will win? The old Cherokee

simply replied, The one that I feed. I wanted to start this course off

with some things you could act upon right away. So in the previous episodes, we talked about

how to soothe the body, how to identify unhelpful thinking, how to practice willingness with

emotions, and so much more. But now it's time to step back and look at the

big picture. Now, you want to feel happy. You want to feel in control of your destiny and you want to

know how to resolve painful emotions. In this section, we're going to talk about how to create the

life that you want. But before we do that,

let's talk about the big picture of how to create change. Okay, so welcome to section four.

So here are the two main ideas from this 30-part course. Number one, we create our happiness

in a gradual choice-based approach. And number two, we create power to choose through careful emotion processing.

When we process our emotions, we're no longer reactive to them. So let's talk about number one, right?

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