Feeling On Purpose With Judge Lynn Toler

The Emotional Journey: From Watermelon Memories to Self-Awareness Strategies

• Judge Lynn Toler • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Have you ever thought about how something as simple as a watermelon could carry a lifetime of emotional significance? Join Judge Lynn on "Feeling On Purpose" as she unpacks this intriguing story and shares her personal journey with anxiety and depression. Discover how seemingly small past experiences can leave lasting marks on your emotional landscape. Through personal anecdotes—from an unexpected fondness for dental visits to a doctor's appointment gone wrong—Judge Lynn highlights how emotional memories shape our present-day feelings.

This episode also explores practical ways to boost emotional intelligence. Judge Lynn discusses the power of self-awareness, recognizing emotional triggers, and setting healthy boundaries to protect your well-being. By reflecting on your personal biases and past interactions, you can better manage your emotional responses and resist political manipulation. Tune in to learn how to take control of your emotions and cultivate emotional resilience.

Speaker 1:

You know her as the longest presiding judge on divorce court, for more than 14 years. Marriage boot camp and many other programs. A graduate of Harvard, judge Lynn Toler is the author of my Mother's Rules Making Marriage Work and Dear Sonali Letters to the Daughter I Never had, all of which are dedicated to the proper emotion, what it is and how to find it.

Speaker 2:

Remember under your skin is a sovereign country. Don't go passing out passports all willy-nilly to people who don't belong there. Let me help you protect your emotional borders so we can all start feeling on purpose. Hi, this is Judge Leonard. I want to welcome you back to Feeling On Purpose.

Speaker 2:

Feeling On Purpose is the podcast in which I ask you how you're feeling, and I don't mean are you feeling good or feeling feeling bad, or you're feeling happy. I mean how are you feeling? Are you feeling accurately, intelligently, consciously and in a way that will allow you to conduct the business you need to conduct? I consider myself an expert on the subject for a variety of reasons, but the most compelling one is this I was a woman, born anxious, depressed and reclusive, and I live a very public life. I live in opposition to how I feel all the time. Had I lived in accordance with how I felt, I'd be in a cave with a dog somewhere rocking back and forth, talking about how it's not safe and I can't leave. That's what would be happening. So I've learned over the years to fight how you feel, fix how you feel and pick how you feel. And wouldn't it be wonderful in this world where you know November, everything's going to just jump off In a world where everybody's upset, excited, rageful and upset. If you can manage your emotions, like the job they are.

Speaker 2:

I want to tell you a story about two doctors and a watermelon. The first doctor is a dentist Dr Hall, I think it was. I'm not sure. I love going to the dentist, I mean I just it's fun. During after my husband died, I wanted to do something fun, so I went in for some recreational dentistry. I got all my silver fillings out and they put white ones in. The fillings were like from 1960, something back when they used to fill them with silver, and so I did that. I love the dentist. Most people hate the dentist and I called my sister one time. I asked her why and we discussed it and I'll tell you what we figured out later.

Speaker 2:

The second doctor is Dr Clark. He was a physician physician. He was a friend of my parents and I couldn't stand him. I was standing in the basement looking at him one time, thinking I really hate this person, Couldn't figure it out. The watermelon is this my husband hates it when I eat watermelon, or hated it when I ate a watermelon. Uh, and I love watermelon, so every time I'd bring it in the house he'd screw up his face. At one time he was so annoyed he said must you be such a stereotype? And you know, to his credit, he walked that one back immediately. But he did say that and I could never understand why. He just couldn't stand the idea that I just loved watermelon.

Speaker 2:

Doctor number one let me explain the dentist. Back in the day in the 60s, when I was going to the dentist, my dentist was a red-headed white guy with freckles and he used nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas, for every single solitary procedure that he performed. I mean all of them Teeth cleaning, everything. I was an incredibly anxious and distraught child, so the first introduction to real peace was in the dentist's office. He would put that nitrous ox on my face and that was the first time he was getting me high, he was making me happy, it was the chillest place in the world and his freckles used to dance and I still like redheads too, by the way. But that's why. Second doctor was Dr Clark. Dr Clark, apparently, was my pediatrician when I was very, very young, too young to remember his face and understand that. But emotionally I remembered his face and I asked my mother. I said why can't I stand?

Speaker 2:

that guy and he says well, he used to be your pediatrician when you were really young, but we moved on and you probably just remember him from that. I had an emotional memory of him but no actual memory of him. The watermelon is this my husband's mother used to love watermelon not unlike his second wife, which is me. And back in the day there were no plastic bags Everything you threw out the garbage in paper bags. So she would throw the watermelon rinds in the paper bag and they would soak through, and it was his job to take out the trash and so when he would pick it up, if there were too many rinds in there, the bag would break and stuff would go everywhere. He hated watermelon because of that.

Speaker 2:

Emotional memories are like the colorado river of your mind. You have deep-seated feelings of disgust, joy, happiness, uh, distress, fear, as a function of what you've seen. We all look at the present through the prism of our past and that just bends the light that. You see, I had an emotional memory of great peace and joy at the dentist's office and though I didn't have a specific memory of it until my sister told me about it, I didn't tell you that part. The way I remembered it was. I was talking to my sister told me about it. I didn't tell you that part. The way I remembered it was I was talking to my sister about it one day. She likes the dentist too. She don't love it like I do, but she liked it too and she says, oh, don't you remember? And then she told me she had a much better memory than me. It's a doctor hall or whatever his name was, and that's why you like the dentist and your brain can hang on to feelings about circumstances, people, substances, issues and ideas, and you don't know why you feel that way. I think it's very, very important that we all stand in front of our bathroom mirrors regularly and figure out what's there, why it's there and if it's doing us any good.

Speaker 2:

I've been spending a lot of time in the mirror myself these days as a new widow. The interesting thing about that is it's all new, right. You've got no emotional memories for it, and what you're doing in it is trying to figure out how to feel not only about it but about everything else, how to feel not only about it but about everything else. All relationships shift, all identities change and I have to figure out who I am again. From zero to 16, I was a lunatic that was being adjusted by my mother From 16 to 20 something. I was still a lunatic, but I was only half a lunatic. And after that, though, I got married at 29. I got with him at 27, and I was with him longer than I was ever single before I met him. And now I'm trying to find out.

Speaker 2:

I don't want to be the old Lynn who would want to be that 24-year-old or 20-year-old child. I mean, if I met my 20-year-old self today, I probably wouldn't like her. I think that bitch was crazy and I don't want to be bothered with her. I want to be somebody that feels safe, secure and happy and calm in the context of my life absent him. But my emotional memories of calm now all run through the river of his presence.

Speaker 2:

He was how I got calm for 35 years. 35 years. He was the guy he was like. He walked on to the University of Cincinnati football team and started in his second year there. I mean, he was that dude. He didn't know about fear, couldn't find, he did not own the phrase I can't, and he most definitely wouldn't allow me to say I can't. And now I'm still in the grooves when he is supposed to make me calm. I've got to rise up out of that because while I'm still in the grooves of him making me calm, I have to. I'm always short. I mean, I'm short anyway, I'm five foot one, but I'm always lacking because that's not there. I have to build new emotional grooves to get into, to teach myself how to be this other individual, a 64 year old single woman who tends towards worry and stress. Do y'all see my hair here? It's always a dramatic thing, it's never quite right, but that's you know, that's how you know it's me, because everything is not quite right. I want to show you something in the back there. I don't know if you can see it, I don't know if it's backwards, but it's a chopping board that I bought that says dine here at your own risk. I thought it was so hilarious I couldn't leave it in the kitchen. I don't know why I got on that, but I did.

Speaker 2:

Back to the matter at hand about feeling on purpose. I know that I am frustrated and frightened, in part as a function of my changed circumstance. What I must do is not allow that to be my understanding of my current circumstance, and here's what I mean by that it's not as stressful as it seems, and I have to keep remembering that Everything strikes me as more stressful than it is simply because he's not here. So the first thing I have to do as an emotional management is to bam every morning Any situation you run into Toler is not as bad as it seems. I have to repeat that self. It's a mantra and what I do for my emotional management, the processes and procedures of is I make it a job like I'll put stickers on my computer that say it's not as bad as it seems.

Speaker 2:

When I was a was, I was a judge in Cleveland Heights putting people in jail. I had a screen sever says don't worry, work, because I would worry about things. You have to have emotional reminders to do the right thing, especially if you're trying to change one of your emotional rivers. It's like the like the grand canyon, colorado river. You get one emotion that just runs and runs and runs and runs. It gets deep and it gets down there and you're going to have trouble finding it. So you have to always ask yourself how am I feeling? What am I feeling and is it going to do me any good? Just the other day I lost my mind because the dog was choking on a ball. Sell that you know. He'd have thrown the dog on its back, pull the thing. All of that I didn't have that. I called 9-1-1, which was inappropriate. They told me that I ran down to the neighbors I had just scurrying about and she had my neighbor come and she ran back with me and she younger than I am. She's at a 40s.

Speaker 2:

By the time I got home I was huffing and puffing and I was trying to get the dog in the car to take it to the vet. I was so worried. I'm 64, I'm not supposed to be running nowhere. But she picked the dog, she manhandled that pup, put it in the back. I finally got it.

Speaker 2:

But I just spent all my time panicking and I was watching myself from my second set of eyes and I'll explain that to you at another time. But I was watching myself with my second set of eyes and I was seeing me. Oh yes, you're out of control, you're upset, you're walking around and you're doing a lot of stupid things. In fact, I told the 911 operator when I called. He says 911, state the address of your emergency. And I said well, I don't even think I should be calling you my dog's choking on a ball. Y'all don't do anything about that, do you? And he said no See, I knew I was wrong.

Speaker 2:

I was in the process of panicking and I was watching myself on high, panicking, panicking, panicking. And I got to the vet's office. The vet was closed. I'm in a parking lot in the phone, my hair standing straight up on him because it was wet, and then I went out and you know, you can't do that as a sister. That just is. That's just. This is an ugly thing. And I'm panicking and I call my sons and I'm running up and down and I said you don't know what to do and you can't stop. I was actively angry with myself as I was buzzing about, unable to stop. So now I know that I got to find. I got to find, I got to find a, I got to find a snap. I know that I know when I'm panicking. I know when I'm doing that now. And I got to find a new stop. My old stop used to be panic, getting ready to panic before I started doing anything.

Speaker 2:

It was a call, initially to mama, and the funny thing was she taught me this. He said I used to get very angry at people, very, very angry at people, and I could undo you, I mean I could just level you with. I could just tie up a bunch of words and just slam them right into your heart, hurt you at your weakest, and it was always unseemly and it was usually unnecessary and I usually regretted it greatly. So I was talking about it to my mother once. She said you know you have a go phrase and I said what do you mean? I got a go phrase. She said you got a go phrase. She said you know what? And I said you know what. You know what. She said if you ever hear yourself saying you know what, call me, beg off and call me me.

Speaker 2:

And confused a lot of people for a lot of years, because sometimes I would be in the middle of a. I think I have something wrong with my eye shadow. I am the worst. I am a court low on estrogen. I swear I have no feminine abilities whatsoever. Just, I mean I can have kids, but that's about it. Look at that. But anyhow, anyhow, um, what was I talking about? Oh, the snap the trigger and it would weird people out because I off, I gotta go, I'm out, hang on bye, whatever, because I knew I was about to act a fool and I had to go by. I had to go call my mother, talk to her about the circumstance and then after a while I could stop, do the pause after I heard my go phrase. And then I learned just to say something like I'm upset, I want to talk right now. And then over the years I got better and better and better.

Speaker 2:

I can hear the go phrase now, adjust my attitude in real time, because I know when I go phrase means you're about to get excited about something. The first thing I need to do when I hear that go phrase is say something nice to the person that I'm dealing with. I don't care Not to make them happy, not to make them okay, but to adjust me, to see them as human and multifaceted and not just the person that was causing me inconvenience, trouble, trauma or anything like that in the moment. And that's how you change, how you feel. You watch yourself, you critique yourself and then you put procedures in place for when your emotionality might get in front of you and get you to do something you're not supposed to. What is this dark stuff on my eyes? Anyway, given that emotions are the Colorado River of the mind.

Speaker 2:

You know just, I always recommend debriefing. At the end of the day, how do you feel? Who made you feel that way? And, before you add it, before you allow it, to tell you how to feel about a certain certain like if you never run into anybody blonde before I'm just making this up and your first interaction with this blonde person is just awful, you got to go home and say I met one blonde person I don't know all blonde people and I have to withhold judgment specifically next time I run into a blonde, because I had a negative experience with this one and the thing that you don't want to do is allow any individual fold and there are many out there of all hues, genders, sizes, cultures, nationalities. I think it was. What was it? Was it Les Brown that said everybody, all cultures, have a liberal springing of fools? Well, it's true. So what do we look like letting one fool define a whole category of people for you? What do we look like allowing one incident to define how you feel about anything involved in that incident? What do we look like when we are hooping and hollering every day about not much of anything and then we took at our children and wondered why little Johnny is hooping and hollering too.

Speaker 2:

You know, I think emotions are so important, and it's not just because you have the right to feel the way you do. You do. You have the right to feel the way you do, but you can also feel in a manner that allows you to conduct your business, in a way that makes it easier, more pleasant, less stressful. You know politicians that use emotion all the time. They gin up fear of something or somebody that's unlike them, and then they say they're going to solve that problem for you and therefore, so they scare you, so you'll vote for them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, lbj said something like you know, if I, you know, I can pick his pocket. I can pick a white man's pocket as long as I keep pointing at the black man and saying he's better than him. And he says you know, it's just a matter of using differences and fears. You know fears. The only thing you have to fear is fear yourself. You better believe it. But anyhow, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the ability to modify how you feel, and the ability to modify how you feel is in understanding how you feel and understanding your base emotionality and also understand what the Colorado River has done to your brain. The Colorado River of whatever history, trauma, happy, lovely.

Speaker 2:

I remember one time, twice on the bench, I caught the colorado river rolling through my head one time. This guy came forward and I just didn't like him. Didn't like him and I kept thinking to myself what is? Because I have a second set of eyes, and I'm gonna tell you about that second set of eyes on another day. But a second set of eyes was something that my mother made me create in order to always have vision about my emotionality. So I said, why don't I like this guy? And so I just and I made extra sure that I I was extra fair, I did it all that. And then I thought about it later. He looked just like this individual I dated once in college that I cannot stand and I can't even believe. Well, anyway, in college, that I cannot stand and I can't even believe, well, anyway. And that was it.

Speaker 2:

And then there was another time on the bench, a Muslim guy came up and said to me not guilty, because I obey the laws of Allah, not the laws of man. And that went right up my back and I was like what? Because I've had a lot of Christians come in and say the same thing. You know well, you can't judge me because God judged me and I never get excited about it. I always smile and I say, yeah, but we kind of got to live here together and you know, if you look in the Bible, there's some rules about. You know how you get along and within the context of a community you're a blue one. That's not why you're here. But it is not inconsistent with the Bible is what I was trying to say.

Speaker 2:

But this guy came and I was really angry with him and I thought about it and I did the same thing. I made extra sure that I was fair, that I did everything just the way I did it for everybody else. And then I got home and I thought about it, because you can't have a thought, a feeling and just let it happen and let it go by. There's a reason that you felt that way and you will feel that way when the the same, when the same impetus arises again and you can't allow yourself not to learn. So I went home and I thought about it and then, as it was two things I had not been married very long and my husband had four sons with his first wife and his oldest had become Muslim and he used to write notes.

Speaker 2:

When I had the like I'm writing out my grocery list and I'll put porkchops on there, he says no pork should hit your fork. I mean, he was just real, you know 17. He was being 17 about it and I thought, well, that's a dumb reason not to like somebody associated with Islam. And then I called my sister I have a horrible memory and talked, called my sister. I have a horrible memory and I called my sister and, and then I remembered it, the first Muslim that I ran into was a guy that married a friend of my sister's and he was not a good person. And it's not that he wasn't a bad person because he was Muslim, he was a bad person because he was a bad person. And I know he was a bad person because when he was administering discipline to her, he killed her, beat her to death and left her on the kitchen floor with her four preschool-age children and ran. And you know, can you imagine the oldest like five mommy get up, mommy get up, and mommy ain't gonna get up because she got disciplined to death.

Speaker 2:

That was my entry to Islam and it was not what it was. So I went and studied a little bit about the religion and did all that because I don't have the right to coddle my prejudices, I don't have a right not to know what they are. I don't have the right not to fight all the prejudices I have and the fact that you know judges have biases just like everybody else, and to the extent that we don't, you know, I mean you have to mind your mind. You know you got to get in there, you got to look and you won't know what to look at or look for until you have your second set of eyes. And that's the next thing I'm going to talk about is your second set of eyes. But before I do that, I always promise that I'm going to answer at least one question on my podcast. So I have one, and here we go.

Speaker 2:

This is from a woman and I'm answering this question because she's after my own heart. She is my husband and her husband is me. Basically, she says one of our biggest realizations is that we might not be entirely compatible. Last December, an argument escalated to the point where he packed his bags and said he was leaving. He was upset that I wasn't overly emotional about something, although I did calmly ask him to stay. He left, came back and took two days of talking for us to get back on track. He is a worrier I'm not a worrier and he doesn't think that, basically, that she takes him seriously because she doesn't worry the way he does. I'm answering this question because I noticed one from what I lived.

Speaker 2:

My husband used to feel the same way about me. I was convinced that each and every day, the world was going to end necessarily, and I would go in there and try to convince my husband that, yes, in fact the world is ending and it's going to end today, and there's nothing he can do about it. But I wanted him to worry about it with me. I wore him out, I wore myself out and we used to fight about it until we realized that we were on the same side and the worry was the problem. So what we did was one we discussed it and we discussed it. So I knew that he wasn't disregarding my angst, but that he didn't share it and that it was good that he didn't share it. That was an adjustment that I had to make. I knew that I was the anxious one and I knew that I had to make that adjustment. And then we would talk about it and we would talk about things that he could do to make me feel safer. And then it was all about making me feel safe, not about him being equally upset. You have to enjoy the differences, not be annoyed by the differences. So you to sit on one side of the table and say his worry is over here. What are the things that we're gonna do, do about it? Is it a money thing? Can we do something about that? You know, help him with his worry. Just don't get excited when you do it and you got to listen a little. I know we're a pain in the behind, but we got to listen a little Just let us get it out and then, once it's out there, you and him on his side, worry on that side 's. That's that's what I got for you on that one. It's a matter of perspective. It's a matter about feeling about appropriately, about the problem. The problem wasn't him, the problem isn't you, the problem is the worry and that's what should take you on. So thank you for coming along. I hope you, uh, do feel on purpose all day long, because remember, under your skin is sovereign country, so you shouldn't be passing out passports all willy-nilly to people who do not belong there. You need to defend your emotional borders so you can always feel on purpose. Don't let anybody back there mess with you. I don't like it. You shouldn't either. See you next time.