Welcome to Unfuck Your Brain, the only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism

and coaching to rewire your brain and get what you want in life.

And now here's your host, Harvard Law School grad, feminist rock star, and master coach,

Tara, Lowend Thile. Hello, my chickens. It is time for another listener Q&A episode.

So on this episode, talking about three things that come up pretty frequently, I would say,

in my coaching. So I think you guys are going to get so much value out of these. The first

one is phobias, like where phobias come from and how we can use the work to deal with phobias,

which is possible. One of my students had a serious spider phobia, a rack nephobia, and I will

never forget her posting a picture in the clutch in the Facebook group of her holding a spider

and feeling totally chill after she had used thought work to change her thoughts about it.

So amazing. So we talk about phobias. We're talking about a question that I get a lot,

which is sort of like some version of like our some circumstances worse than others,

or our some circumstances harder to neutralize than others or to get neutral about. And one

thing that I think is like so important, I talk about this in the episode is even the

way we talk about our thought work matters because it's just another thought, right? Something

we say about our thought work is itself a thought, an optional thought, right? And when

people are working on trying to understand circumstances, they will say something like,

I'm trying to neutralize the circumstance. I'm trying to make the circumstance neutral.

But that still sort of has embedded in it. This idea that the circumstance is not neutral,

but it's actually bad. And you're trying to get it to be neutral somehow, right? Or you're

trying to neutralize the badness. But that's not what I'm teaching. That's not what we're

doing, right? Circumstances are neutral means a circumstance is neutral because until a human

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