Feeling On Purpose With Judge Lynn Toler

JUDGE LYNN TOLER ON HEALING, GRIEF, AND EMOTIONAL STRENGTH

• Judge Lynn Toler • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Join us for an insightful conversation with Judge Lynn Toler, where she shares her profound journey through emotional healing after the sudden loss of her husband. Known for her wisdom on emotional intelligence, Judge Toler opens up about redefining her emotional responses to overcome trauma and fit the present rather than being anchored in past experiences. As she recounts her personal growth journey, you'll discover how this transformation has equipped her with the tools to be a beacon of support for friends facing their own emotional hurdles.

Life's pressures can often feel overwhelming, like a tangled web. Judge Toler shares her metaphorical journey of helping a friend unravel the challenges of family dynamics, societal stress, and external pressures that can heighten anxiety. She illustrates how by categorizing and prioritizing problems, we can convert overwhelming challenges into manageable tasks, providing a clearer path to relief and emotional control.

Additionally, the episode dives deep into the concept of "error hoarding" in relationships, where holding on to past grievances prevents emotional healing and healthier connections. Judge Toler emphasizes the importance of letting go of past errors for better emotional health and the power of informed civic engagement, advocating for a balance between political awareness and mental well-being.

We conclude with an inspiring message on embracing positive emotions, celebrating small victories, and understanding the ripple effect of kindness. This episode serves as a reminder of the importance of maintaining emotional boundaries and handling life's demands with resilience and grace.

This transformative discussion offers practical tools for overcoming emotional hurdles, cultivating emotional strength, and finding balance in the face of life's challenges.

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. How y'all doing this is Judge Lynn Toler welcoming you to another edition of my podcast, feel it On Purpose, a podcast dedicated to the proposition of thinking your way through how you feel. We all feel, we all feel furiously, we all feel very quickly, but we don't often feel correctly, and correctly doesn't mean how everybody else wants you to feel. Correctly means feeling in a manner that will allow you to do the things that you need to get done on any given day, despite whatever the people around you and the things that are happening to you try to push you into. You cannot beat the world, but you can. This is what my mother used to tell me that I cannot fix the world for you, but I can help you learn to live better in it, and at some times, sometimes, that is all you can do.

Speaker 2:

I've been in a position where for a couple of years, because of the sudden loss of my husband, I have been hysterical, overwhelmed and living an ongoing emergency. When someone first dies, especially unexpectedly, it's the spouse, and you have all of your chores divided and everybody knows what they're doing and what's going on, and one of them just gets sucked out of the picture by his sudden departure, the one that is left behind, that being me in this, with the widow or the widower, I was in a panic. I was in a state of emergency for the first six months, just hysterical. After that it got a little better, but what I didn't do was adjust my base emotionality in order to continue to live in a manner that was relevant to today, as opposed to the horror that had happened to me before. Now I realized this a little while ago, and so I went back, checked my program and purposely took out, you know, picked out, plucked out those things that were problems and reassessed them, because at that juncture I was dealing with all of my problems as if they were as emergent and urgent as the initial one that I had, because my body had gotten used to it, I was in my mind, had been ready for it and I was looking for it, and so, even if it was a small problem, it would build into a big problem and hence make me a little bit crazy.

Speaker 2:

Now I've gotten better, and the reason I know I've gotten better is because I got a call from a girlfriend of mine not too long ago well, actually this week and she's a girlfriend who knows me well. She supported me through the early days of my widowhood and we were in a conversation. She asked me how I was and I said I'm doing great, and she said good, because she wasn't. And after she said she wasn't doing great, she wasn't. And after she said she wasn't doing great, she devolved into a conversation that dealt with her husband, her children, her job, the guy next door I mean everything and everybody in her life was giving her problems and she was wound up, worked up and she was looking for a release and thank God, I had recovered enough to be able to provide that for her. So A I saw that as a demonstration of progress on my part.

Speaker 2:

We've been trained, or you know, the world generally will get excited about new money, get excited about diviner clothes, get excited about you know, this trip, get excited about all those exciting things. But sometimes you got to get excited about the fact that you feel better, that you now feel better than you didn, better than you did before. You got to be excited about the fact that you are not currently, if you are currently healthy, that you are currently healthy, because when you're unhealthy, that becomes the only problem that you have. So when you are healthy, we should appreciate it, spike the ball on it a bit more. Having said all that, I was happy now to be in a position. This just shows growth on my part. So I had a little spike the ball party after the conversation, because it demonstrated that I was at a new level of emotional maturity and ability that allowed me, now that my friends were seeing me as someone they could talk to, as opposed to someone they had to coddle and they had been coddling me for two years.

Speaker 2:

But she called and she was falling out. I mean, she was just falling out, it was, and it was one of those conversations and I've done it myself. You get started and it's like pulling a string on some thread of a badly weaved fabric. The first thing you got to do when you've got a friend that has fallen off a cliff like that is you got to let her fall all the way down. You got to let her and not I mean I'm talking metaphorically you got to let her get it all out and not I mean I'm talking metaphorically you got to let her get it all out.

Speaker 2:

And I realized that when I was doing grief counseling with my, when I needed to yes, I see the dog back there. I don't know what to tell you is well, let's deal with that problem right now. But I let her get it all out because she had to unburden herself. What had happened? None of the problems that she had were extraordinary. They weren't mind boggling, they weren't life altering, but they were all a pain. And what she was unable to do by the time she got to me was see where one problem stopped and another one started, become emotionally undone. And as each problem loses its borders, they start to wind up together. And now it's not just the car ain't working, or my kids are a problem, or my husband's being a fool or an idiot, or my wife's being a pain and unkind, it's everything is wrong. So when she got through unburdening herself, the first thing I said was let's shake out the sheets of your problems. Everyone should shake out the sheets of their problems.

Speaker 2:

Look at all the pressures that we have. We got the family, we got the wife, the kids, the husband, the girlfriend, the side chick, the side dude, whatever you doing, baby mama drama. I don't know what your love life looks like, but there's always usually some drama. I was married for 35 years and listen, let me tell you, years 8, 17, and 18 were a. You know like it was like I want to call bumper cars. We were just bumping into each other the whole time, just being upsetting each other and being angry with each other. So it happens, it happens.

Speaker 2:

Then there's then there are those extraneous sources that aren't particularly a problem for you that day, but are a pressure like an existential threat the election in November of 2024, everybody, not everybody people who are interested. I know a couple of people ain't interested at all and I can't get them interested, but those people who are interested are pretty dramatic about it. I mean, I'm interested. I'm not dramatic about it, but I do read about it a lot, and the information that comes in is so all the way left or all the way right or all the way this or all the way, that I have begun to feel as if I have an existential crisis that's going to be determined in November, and I think all of us feel like we have some existential crisis that's going to be dealt with in November. And then internet in and of itself will start feeding you your fears because you watch those things more often. It will start feeding you your more and more and more heavy into that thing and that thing becomes bigger than it is because you sunk deeper into where it is.

Speaker 2:

Then you've got money, you've got your job, you've got coworkers, you've got the people at Target and McDonald's and McDonald's everyone seems to be just on the edge of angry, looking for a push. And my girlfriend I'm going to call her Susie because we all know I don't know nobody named Susie. Well, actually, no, I don't, nobody named Susie. Susie had a whole bunch of issues, from worried about the election, from worried about money, to worried about the husband, to worried about the kids and this and that and the other thing, and she was at a point where she says I can't take it no more. And what I told her to do was listen, shake out the sheets of your problems and start solving from the outside in, and what I mean by that is don't talk about them all in a pot.

Speaker 2:

If you are unable to excise individual urgencies and problems from the other issues that you have, I would get a piece of paper. I love paper. Now I use Remarkable. It's a pad that you can write and then you can convert it into text and for some reason I think because I'm old and I've been born in 1959, I've been at it for a while I says I still like to write, but write them down on a piece of paper. Everything that you whatever she listed I said I want you to put that on a piece of paper. Boom did it, boom did it. Boom did it. Boom did it, boom did it boom.

Speaker 2:

Now, once you've gotten excited about everything and you've collected them into one part of oh my God, my life ain't working out. Each problem becomes, can feel, has the ability to feel, as problematic, as dramatic, as difficult, as the most difficult problem that you have. I remember when Eric first died, my biggest problem well, I had a million of them, but as I started to solve them, my small problems started coming up from the bottom and I was addressing them with the same angst and urgency that I dealt with. You know what happened to him. You know the coroner, all of that. And I was like Susie, you're as upset about that D your kid got as you are about potentially losing your job. They are not of equal weight. It's an additional problem that you have, but they're not of equal weight.

Speaker 2:

So I want you to write out all your problems, list them and then actually weigh them. I personally give them numbers Well, this is a one problem, this is a two problem, this is a 10 problem. Then, once I have them all written out my one problem, two problem and actually looked at them and figured out how much of a problem they really were, I started to solve small and I worked my way in. In other words, if I got a little problem masquerading as a big one, I will try to solve that simple one. Simple, find the simplest, solve and solve it. That does a couple of things. Number one it gives you a win and when you're overwhelmed by your problems, all you tend to see are the problems and whatever you do well, whatever it doesn't get a hearing, because you're seeing through a lens of my life is a dramatic mess. Oh my God, now this is happening to me. So if you solve small, just find something you can fix. It gives you an emotional lift like, ah, everything ain't out of control. It gives you a sense of control and it gives you a victory. Then you solve the next one, the next small, easy solve, and those things can change how you feel about everything and you can start to step back off of the sense of I am overwhelmed and undone.

Speaker 2:

And let me tell you, I get a lot of letters from the women who talk, who I mean long expositions about all of the difficulties they have in their day and they don't quite know how they're going to make it to tomorrow. And there seems there is a sense of everything is wrong. There is a sense of everything is wrong. So once everything is wrong, you can't see individual wrongs and you just have one large problem. So if you shake out the sheets of those problems, see what they are and assign them real values, Sometimes you can say problem and say, look at a problem that you've written down. It's like, well, actually that's not a problem, it would have been earlier, it would have been, you know, but it's actually not a problem. So let me get it off my list. And the beautiful thing about actually having a written list is you can see your problems disappear.

Speaker 2:

You know, when you just feel things, when they're amorphous, when they're not right in front of you, it's hard to get a handle on them and deal with them. You know it's hard to, it's hard to right, but if they're laid out you can tick them off one by one, by one by one, I got a problem with my algorithm. On my internet I have been looking at too much stuff that has made me upset and what happens is they feed you more of what you look at and after a while it just gets dark. It got so bad for me and I don't know if I can tell you that, but anyway I got to a point where my algorithm was showing me Nazi executions. I had gone. I had gone that dark.

Speaker 2:

So what I do every once in a while, I walk away from my algorithm and make it do something else. You know elephants, Elephants and whales Large intelligent mammals, tickle me. You know what I mean. I'd come back to life as an elephant if there were no humans on the earth, because those elephants are very, very cool. But anyway, that is a sidetrack, but I actively engage my algorithm and put new things in so that algorithm can push me towards a mood that I'd rather be in as opposed to simply continuing to address the mood that I am in. Then I turn to my larger problems and I figure out which one is giving me the biggest issue and I do something about that one, and I do it first thing in the morning. If somebody I don't want to call and their office opens at nine, I'm calling at 901 because I want to get that off my plate.

Speaker 2:

And I solve, not just to solve the problem but to soothe my soul. If you solve early, you get rid of the angst of anticipation of that problem. You get to walk away from that because you've already done it. And then again you get another feeling of triumph and control because you solved something and you did it. And even if you haven't solved it, if you've addressed it, you've learned more about it and you're less afraid to go in there another time because you survived the first foray into whatever nonsense that it is.

Speaker 2:

Additionally, when I look at my problems, I try to figure out which ones I can put a period on. In other words, I can be upset about something, but it's currently not important enough to make the list. So I make a decision to call it unimportant to make the list and I take it off the list and I reward myself every time I take something off my list and my rewards are, like you know, I go eat something I'm not supposed to eat or I go. I reward myself and I beat myself up and I reward myself. I'm trying to stop doing the former and do more of the latter.

Speaker 2:

We all tend to beat ourselves up a little bit about the things that we don't do correctly. And what I would watch from the bench is people on divorce court. I would watch couples argue and oftentimes the women and I'm not saying that women are like this and men are like that, I'm just saying what I saw. The women were like I've done everything and I can't get him to hear me. And I usually ask the dudes what their wife just said and they never really know. And I don't think it's her fault and I don't think it's his fault. What I think it is is a collection of troubles. I know in my marriage let me put it to you this way I would collect sins and problems and I was an error hoarder a little bit. Uh-huh. He did this, collect that, keep it. He did this, collect that, keep it.

Speaker 2:

It's like this that uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and when you order error hoarding is like living in a bucket with your significant other and there's water of. There is a whole spout of errors that pours in. But the problem is no kindnesses, no love, nothing else. That he did would drain out the bottom, would drain out that water. Did would drain out the bottom, would drain out that water. So you both drown in mistakes that will necessarily get made, because we're all mistake prone, we're all human. And a lot of the women in there took all of the commentary from their husband to heart and it became just one big unpleasant scene that she couldn't quite. It was, everything was just awful. So she was just hooping and hollering all of the time because even the failure to pick up you know something at the grocery store became one more horrific act because the errors happened to be hoarded.

Speaker 2:

And it's not a woman thing, solely men hoard errors too, but they tend to hoard different kinds. My husband would hold my errors, but he would hold the different types of errors. We all tend to hoard different types of errors, but if you are an error hoarder, the thing is, even though it makes you feel good because you can always point to the other person as the person who is the problem. But the problem with being an error hoarder is when you never let go of any of the sins that the other person commits. You're both drowning in mistakes. They become less of the strong, wonderful person that you met when you pick at them and pick at them and pick at them.

Speaker 2:

Being an error hoarder is like owning a Ferrari, and when it doesn't work you go out there and kick it. It doesn't help it work and it just destroys the thing that you have. So if you are living with an error hoarder, if you are a error hoarder again, you are collecting problems and sins and you're carrying them along with you day after day, hour after hour, and it makes every small problem elevate to the level of a huge one, because every new small problem is so interconnected to the other ones. It implicates all of your upset and you go a little crazy. Another thing you got to do when you are overwhelmed and I had to tell my girlfriend Susie this because we got to talking about the election, and not just the presidential election but local elections and judges I spend a lot of time on my judges list, I go in, I read about them and all that kind of stuff, because you know, we're way down ballot and most people don't know what we're doing.

Speaker 2:

And if you're not a good one, you can get away with it for a while once you're there, because most people don't know unless they've already been in front of you. So the time to worry about who your judiciary is right now. Go look it up Some of them are good.

Speaker 2:

Some of them are good and there are ways to find. You know there's always a list of. Anyway I got sidetracked. But you know, vote down ballot and vote down ballot with information and you can get that information. It takes time, but go ahead and do it.

Speaker 2:

But anyway, I was talking about Susie and her troubles and she had gotten tied up. You know, not only is my husband not acting right and the money ain't right and the kids ain't right, the whole world's gonna go to hell in a handbasket in November. And I'm like, listen, girl, you can't do nothing about that other than vote or put up. You do what you can. You vote, you put up your sign, you give a donation to the party of your choice and then you let that go because you ain't got, there's nothing you can do about it. And she was talking about abortion rights and all of these things. And I was saying I understand that and you need to do what you can figure out how on a local level, if you're upset about it, to do what you can, to say your and then let it go. Then let it go Because you're being distraught about something does not serve to fix it and I don't care which side of either issue you're on. That's not the point. The point is not to carry your issues with you in a manner that it affects your day-to-day life. If you haven't done what you need to do to affect it and then once you've done as much as you can to affect it, then you let it go and don't let other people tell you what you need to do to affect it. You have to do what you find appropriate and then you have to decide which problems you're going to go ahead and solve. I've done what I can on this. Let me move on to that. But not let the uncertainty of that huge thing, your inability to control that huge thing, land on you like another emotional issue that you have. Don't borrow that trouble. Don't put your head in the sand. Do what you can and don't preservate. Preservate I think that's the word I'm looking for. It's like go around and around and around. I do that and both of my kids do that, so I think it's genetic, but anyway I don't know. So another thing I asked her to do is get more aggressive on her 3D 2D ratio. She was spending a lot of time on TikTok and all that kind of stuff, and I think she was doing that because the atmosphere in her home was so jacked up, but what the problem was, what she was doing on the internet was upsetting her emotionally. Now she didn't think it was because it wasn't the problems that she was currently vetting, but she was borrowing other people's troubles.

Speaker 2:

People talk about their losses and this, and that it can be a very sad place. I think it's a wonderful place for people who have been isolated, like I've watched Dan and his mother and his father. You can be isolated taking care of an older person who was suffering from dementia. But if you have the outlet to do it online, I just think that's a wonderful part of what we can do with the internet. That having been said, don't borrow the pain from other people on there trying to avoid your own. Yes, you're not dealing with what's happening and you're entertaining and you're distracting yourself, but are you distracting yourself by taking on more emotionality of other people? Because there's a lot of negativity on there. There's rage bait, there's this, there's that and the other. So when you think you are vacating your stress and being and distracting yourself, you really feel feeding the wrong dog.

Speaker 2:

Let me tell you about the dogs. There are always two dogs. Discontent is dog. A Discontent is a loud yappy mutt. He hoops and he hollers, he barks and he carries on, he nips at you, he bites and he demands your attention. Contentment, however, is a quiet canine, all calm, curled up in a corner somewhere. Just yeah, I'm cool, I'm fine. It's those two dogs and the way they behave are the reasons why we will write letters of complaint before we will write letters of complimentary letters, because things that agitate us demand our immediate attention, or at least try to demand our immediate attention, and things that are going fine, we don't tend to acknowledge as much because they're not bothering us. So when that discontent barks and carries on it leads you to believe that you got to deal with it and you got to feed it and you got to argue with whoever it is, or you got to this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this, and contentment is over here. Well, yeah, I'm here, I'm calm, I'm cool. Why won't you feed me?

Speaker 2:

If you just deal with the drama and don't work to feed the joy, you can make decisions to do something different. When I do elephant videos, I'm feeding the right dog. When you're taking a moment to call somebody you ain't talked to for in a while and you really love to hear from them. You're feeding the right dog. I remember one time somebody called me and I picked up the phone and he said hello. And I said Patrick because he sounded like my cousin Patrick and I love my cousin Patrick. He is the sweetest thing in the world. And the guy on the phone other name phone was Steven. He was a work buddy and he said before he got off the phone he said by the way, when you get off this phone call, you need to call whoever Patrick is, because you seem so happy to hear from him and if you haven't heard from him in a while, you should make that call. That is an example of feeding the right dog.

Speaker 2:

As my dog comes into frame, I have two dogs and spike the ball for your victories, no matter how small they may be, your victories, no matter how small they may be, because we certainly, you know, smack ourselves up and down about all the stupid things that we do. At least I do. I remember once my husband pulled me to the side and he said could you stop calling yourself a simple B, because every time I would make some particular type of mistake I would say you simple B, and I didn't think it was a problem. How you doing there, doctor? I didn't think it was a problem. How you doing there, decker, I didn't think it was a problem.

Speaker 2:

But that was me feeding the wrong dog, that was me highlighting my errors, that was me not checking out the sheets of my problem and listing my failures and faults and fails in a way that elevates them to a place where that's all I can see. So all I'm saying is this we got a lot of stuff going on. The world is a crazy place. Everybody you know everybody's predicting the worst and the horror and the happenings. I need you to shake out the sheets of your problems. Take a look, just step back, because you get up all on them. They're harder to see and when you shake them out, you deal with what you can deal with and you work through what you can work through.

Speaker 2:

We can go out in the world not with an emotionality that is filled with distress and anger and division and dismay. You can fill your mind and your feelings with the best that you can be and you can go out and ripple that into the community. You know what I mean. Just ripple it out and it doesn't matter if anybody else is doing the same thing, because it affects your emotionality and some people will really come along. I love nice people. If you're nice to me, I'll do anything, not that one. What is the stupidest thing I've just said today? But then maybe that means it's time for me to get up and go. How about that? Listen, under your skin is a sovereign country. Don't go handing out passports all willy-nilly to people who don't belong there. No matter what's going on, how you feel about it makes a difference, and you can decide how you want to feel about it If you work your emotions like the job you are, work your emotions like the job they are, so we can all start feeling on purpose.