Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, all the best. One of the questions I get most often from listeners is, how do you handle all the anger that comes up as you read all of these books and confront all of these issues from patriarchy?

And a recent episode that we released in season two dealt with rage, and it got a ton of comments of

appreciation and feedback.

And I think that learning the history of patriarchy brings up a lot of fury for people,

but then we don't know what to do with that anger.

And on a personal note, this past week was actually

really heavy for me. Someone I care about a lot has experienced abuse throughout her whole life,

first as sexual abuse when she was a child, and then later verbal and emotional abuse for her

entire marriage. And this woman has just been so beaten down. And I became enraged that no one has ever been

held accountable for what they did to this individual person who's dear to me and I ended up venting

about my anger to my sister and then I noticed that immediately after expressing all of that anger,

I felt guilty. I felt guilty for being angry and I didn't know

what to do with that anger. So a couple of days later in preparation for this episode, I was

reading the book, Fier's Self-Compassion, How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim

Their Power, and Thrive by Dr. Kristen Neff. And I felt like entire chapters of this book were written just for me, explaining how to let

ourselves process anger in healthy and productive ways for ourselves and for those around us.

So today, I am so honored and excited to welcome to the podcast, the author of Fierce Self-Compassion. And she also

wrote, Self-Compassion, The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. So welcome to the show, Dr. Kristen Neff.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be talking about this issue. Yeah.

Can't wait to dive into this. And first,

we'll just start with a little introduction. Kristen Neff is currently an associate professor

of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She's a pioneer in the field of

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