#20: Counter-terrorism, self-hatred, & IFS, with J Stamatelos

Love Is Us: Exploring Relationships and How We Connect

James “J” Stamatelos graduated from the Duquesne University coaching program in May of 2013. Since that time, he has helped countless individuals – especially men – replace chronic insecurity and shame with a sense of internal peace and grounded confidence. J specializes in helping people break out of what he calls “anxious insecurity,” or the chronic feeling of not being “enough” regardless of how much we achieve. This was his battle as well. Plagued by intense self-loathing, this issue nearly cost him his life.

Learn more about J's story in today's episode. We also talk about IFS, J's beliefs about why there's so much violence and self-hatred in our world today, and how self-compassion and IFS can help us heal.

J recently completed book manuscript, tentatively titled Enough, that explores two major questions: why do so many Americans battle chronic insecurity, and what interventions actually work in resolving it? J makes heavy use of academic research and evidence-based modalities in his work. Real-life results – not theory of guesswork – plays the central role.

Learn more about J, his book, and how to work with him by visiting his website:

https://www.jamesjstamatelos.com/

Podcast Intro

[00:03] Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing, the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to love is us.

Episode Intro

[00:49] Karin: Hello, everybody. Today I talk with J Stamatelos. J is a Self-Relationship Coach. He helps a lot of people who have something that he calls anxious insecurity, so people who struggle with self-hatred, feeling like they can never be enough. He works with a lot of men, but also women as well, and he uses IFS not as his only tool, but one of his primary tools. And if you don't know about IFS and would like to learn a little bit more, I actually just dropped a bonus episode about this in my last episode, episode 19. So you can always go back and listen to that if you'd like.

It was really nice to talk with him. He's got this really interesting story. He did not come to coaching by what I would say is a traditional route. It's something very interesting, though, and I think you'll like his story. He's someone that really was driven to help people from a really young age, and I love how he came to do the work that he's doing now. I would not hesitate to refer people to him. I really just connected with him and appreciate his level of calm and realness. Yeah, he's a good guy.

[02:15] Karin: So, anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode. I'm not using the microphone I typically use, so my audio sounds a little bit different during this episode, but you can still hear it. So thank you for being here. I hope you enjoy this episode. And here we go.

Episode 20 Transcript

[02:34] Karin: Welcome, Jay. It's really great to have you.

[02:36] J: Thank you so much. It's good to be here.

[02:38] Karin: Yeah. And speaking of here, where is here? Where are you in the world?

[02:43] J: Physically? I am outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is where I'm originally from. Though while I love Pittsburgh, it is not the place that I plan on eventually ending up. So I've been many other places and spent a lot of time. My fiancee and I, we actually sold most of our belongings, and we packed up our old car and we traveled throughout the country and stuff for years. And we've been working remotely since before COVID but between the pandemic and the prices and everything out west and a few other things, we came out east, which has been good and rough in its own ways. So I'm in Pittsburgh, I've been many places, but yeah, that's the answer.

[03:24] Karin: Do you have an idea of where you'd like to end up?

[03:28] J: We thought it was going to be go out to California and it's all going to be great. And we went to California a couple of times beforehand and liked it. And then the last time we went out, it's so full of people and some of the things you just experienced there are so extreme that it just is not a place that I really felt like was home. So I know now the question is I really like Colorado, I really like parts of the west, she really likes New Mexico. So I do like the pace of life and the openness out west a lot more. But that's a question and maybe it's outside the US. Who knows?

[04:08] Karin: It's a work in progress, it sounds like.

[04:10] J: Yeah.

[04:12] Karin: So what do you do for work nowadays?

[04:15] J: So I am a self relationship coach and I help people heal the relationship they have with themselves. Both so that they can create a life that more honestly reflects and honors who they are as a person and also so that they can improve the relationships in their lives, so that they can be a good steward to others and be a person who offers good connection with others. And also so they can find that love and acceptance for who they really are. Because I do believe that the deepest thing we all want in life is to be loved for who we are, right? But we can't be loved for who we are until we're seen for who we are and we can't be seen for who we are until we're able to take off our own mask and let ourselves be seen. So it really is that self relationship that's at the foundation of it all.

[05:02] Karin: Such important work you also do IFS you're trained at the IFS Institute. Before we dive into the other things that you do, could you give us just a quick overview of what IFS is? It’s something that I'm going to be doing an episode on at some point, but I haven't and maybe I'll publish it before I publish this one, but it might be good for people just to know a little bit about what that means.

[05:28] J: So IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, which put very broadly is this idea that we are all made up of many parts. There's many parts of ourselves, and we use the word parts because that's how we all intuitively describe it. Part of me wants to do this and other part of me wants to do this and it's almost like there's a family of our own parts inside us that can be in dysregulation and can be in chaos. And part of helping improve our self relationship is to bring peace to that family, to realize we're all on the same team, we're all working together. My favorite way to explain ifs usually on a one on one basis, is to frame it in someone's life. So I usually ask them, tell me something you're conflicted about, or tell me something you're struggling with. And they'll tell me. And I'm like, okay, so it sounds like you have a part of you that wants this, but then there's something else that wants this. And then there's this. Then there might be this deep pain that you have no idea why it keeps coming up. These are all the things that ifs really excels at solving. And so we can be curious about this. We can dive into it and not just be something that has you like a ship out in the ocean that whatever part is up has me and it's pushing me. It can be something where you can show up in an open leadership role of being. Just as every family needs to have some sort of grounding adult presence, can we show up in that same way for our parts so that they know that you're here for them too? And that it doesn't just have to be everyone fighting each other in order to get what they want? We can work together.

[07:03] Karin: Great. I love hearing you explain it, which is totally different than how I might, and yet it's such a beautiful model and I love the different perspectives and the experiences that different practitioners have. So that's really helpful. Thank you.

[07:20] J: I am curious how you would explain.

[07:27] Karin: I say, well, I start similarly, it's about parts. But I also then would go into we have these three main parts of ourselves. And then I'll go into what the different parts are and how they can be in conflict and how that really can be disruptive to our systems. Bringing some harmony to that family of parts can really relieve a lot of stress. And then also understanding how those parts are working for us and have our best interests at heart is important because we get mad at our parts. We get mad at our parts for being such a people pleaser. Or we get mad at our parts for getting angry or whatever it is. And so, yeah, coming to really love and appreciate all our parts is such a big part of the work. But also then doing the deeper healing of those wounded parts that are deeper that are being protected, for sure. But yeah, I could probably go on and on, which I will at some point. But for today, let's take a step back. How did you come to do the work that you do? And I know you've got a really interesting story that I think a lot of people would be interested in hearing. So feel free to go in as much detail as you'd like because I think it's important.

[08:55] J: So I am perhaps a bit odd for someone doing this work in that my original field is counterterrorism. And so 911 happened when I was about 15 years old. I was a freshman in high school, and it had a really deep impact on me. And up until then, I was really interested in natural sciences, like physics and chemistry and things like that. But then after that, I got really so I was in pittsburgh and going to a catholic school. No one actually told us what was happening because you never learn anything the way they all talked about. We thought some cessna hit something, and so we see all the teachers crying. But again, catholic school rules. You just have no idea what's going on. No one's telling you anything. And so it wasn't until we got home and being in pittsburgh, we did have one plane fly nearby. And so there was this question, could pittsburgh be a target? And of course, none of us really thought it could be. Like, what would be the purpose of that? But they allowed some kids to go home. But it really wasn't until I got home and I just sat in front of TV for hours and just watching people jump to their death over and over and over again, watching the towers fall over and over and over again. And maybe as a coping mechanism, I don't know, I just became really curious about what would make someone wake up and kill thousands of people they never met, and how could we stop this decision in advance. And so I really got interested in human decision making from the standpoint initially of violence. And so that defined, like, the next 15 years of my life. I went to school for international relations with a focus on counterterrorism. Got my master's in it. I worked in local counterterrorism. I used to deploy in support of pittsburgh SWAT to hostage situations. Active shooters would go out with the bomb squad if there was something in support, and then we were also collecting open intel and seeing, where are the threats and what do we need to prepare for. But it wasn't really I got into that field because I thought it was the biggest threat facing my society was terrorism, but it really wasn't, luckily, because it's not for lack of people wanting to cause harm. We have good people who are doing good work. The FBI does a pretty good job, and the other agencies do a pretty good job that have been tasked with this. And so even now, the office I now used to work for has all been converted to anti drug because that's the only thing going on. So earlier on, I started to get really unsatisfied, and even when we would have an event and we would have SWAT calls, it always felt like we were playing whack a mole, where the bad guy gets to do something first and we have to come and clean up the mess. It just seemed very inefficient to me. Like I'd rather prevent the problem. And I remember going to being on a SWAT call with it was a hostage. It was a domestic, which so many of them are. It was a guy holding his girlfriend and daughter hostage at gunpoint. And it was only when the negotiators were able to get his mom to call him on the phone that she convinced him to let his girlfriend and daughter out. And I just remember handing her water. She went to go get checked by the medics and she had that 1000 yards there. I'm like, all of this sucks. This is just no part of this is positive. And other things seem too. It's just, it's even when you get the guy and you arrest him it's not like there's a satisfactory feeling like that with that. It's just why did this have to happen? But there's not really. Prevention isn't something we really focus on. So I was already getting a little bit burned out from my job and at the same time I was going through my own personal crisis where I was in my early twenty s. I looked to the future. I didn't know what I was doing. I felt like I was making all these missed takes. I went into really deep depression. I eventually became suicidal and part of that was driven by me constantly pushing myself through self criticism. I was working full time in emergency management, homeland security and I was going to grad school full time at night. Why? Because that's what winters do and we're not going to go light. And so I burned myself out which people told me, you're going to do that by saying no, not me. And that would be weak. That would be weak of me to not push myself to do this. But I just motivated myself with kind of that self hatred really for lack of a better word. So it's feeling like I have no worth and just ripping on myself. I reached that point where I realized, you know, this really works because if you feel like your worth is on the line you're going to work really hard but you're also cashing checks without putting money ever back into an account. At some point it's going to go to zero. And so that happened to me and I realized I needed help. I realized I was suicidal. I was afraid of going into therapy because for my job, if I had a diagnosis there were certain jobs I wouldn't be able to apply to. So I went to a friend and mentor of mine who happened to be this Irish Catholic priest from Ireland who was the chapel at my high school too and was a chaplain at my college. And even though I was an agnostic atheist at this time, he and I were just friends and he had me come in. I went to him for advice and he said, well, can you just come and talk to me? I was like, that's not what I want to do, but I will. So I went in, and he just said, tell me every reason you have to hate yourself. And just for an hour and a half, I just unloaded. And just everything came out, even stuff I forgot about. And it wasn't until I was done that I started to realize, oh, my God, what did you just do? This is someone who's been your friend for, like, ten years, and you just told them things you've never told another person. And this dread came on me as I'm looking at all my snot covered tissues and stuff in my hands. He just said, Is that all? Is everything? And I said, yeah. And he just got up, gave me a huge hug, and just said, I love you. And that moment saved my life. Not necessarily because he did, but because he allowed me to see a model of, oh, this is what it looks like, to see deep imperfections and to still choose to show love to that. That was completely alien for me, and that changed my life. That changed everything. And a few years later, with my frustrations with work, I said, I really want to try to grow the good in the world. Instead just fight the bad. And I became really curious about why is it now that so many of my people, my age, people around me, are so hard on themselves, rip themselves apart, are killing themselves before they really even have a chance to live in the prime of their lives? Why is this happening? And that's gotten me where I am today.

[16:02] Karin: Such a great story. And it really kind of shows us that sometimes we just have to really go through darkest times in order to be able to see that there is something so much more there for us. So you talk about self criticism, and that's a big part of your work that you do now, is that right?

[16:27] J: Oh, yeah.

[16:29] Karin: So how does this show up in people that you see?

[16:34] J: So I work with people in what I call anxious insecurity. That's how I define it. And for me, I define that as feeling like you're never enough, no matter how much you achieve. And so this often presents itself as, I've done all the things, I do all the things, but no matter how much I achieve, I never let up on myself. I still rip myself apart. I still feel worthless. I still have this hole inside me. And I start to wonder, is this me? Is there a problem with me? And that's just even more a reason for me to lay into myself. Yeah, there's a lot I can say about this, but I'll just start there.

[17:07] Karin: Okay. So how do people develop that anxious insecurity?

[17:14] J: This is a question I've been asked so often, and I wish I had a really quick response, but there isn't one. It's asking how? Because I tell people, it's like asking, why is there a thunderstorm? It's because of all the things. It's because that the earth rotates and one side of it gets heated before the other. It's because this causes there to be currents and because that there's a difference in pressure and there's so many things that go into it. But for me, I do believe a lot of it just has to come with how stressful and competitive the world has become. Like, if you were to ask me, why has this become such a big problem now, I would say the really short answer is stress. And if you ask, why are we so stressed? I'm going to say, really for the thing almost none of us can see, which are really the socioeconomic changes that have happened in the last 50 years and just the direction the world is going in.

[18:06] Karin: Yeah. And you've seen some of the worst behavior, right, and a lot of violence. And do you think that that also comes from the same stressors I do?

[18:18] J: There was a all my stories are going to be uplifting here today. Yeah, we were in Vegas and I was driving around and I really love Vegas. We were there for the shooting, unfortunately, and you have Mandalay Bay, you have the airport, Danielle, our hotel. And I saw all the cop cars going to the Strip. But being living in the south side of Pittsburgh beforehand, I'm so used to sirens, I went straight to bed. And it wasn't until waking up the next morning realizing what happened, but we went. What I remember about the Vegas shooting is showing up at 08:30 a.m.. And there being thousands of people already there to donate blood. There are so many people there that my place in line not to donate, just to put my name on the list to donate, was not registered in the office until 04:30 p.m.. That's how many people were there. And Vegas doesn't have a lot of disasters, so they're not really built with a lot of infrastructure. There's only four blood banks and every one of them became a village. We had people dropping off water, dropping off food. You had people from every walk of life in Sin City. You had foreigners, you had Americans, you had people of every political background. And everyone was just, what can we do to help? There was one woman who came and it moved me so much. She made like 200 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she just said, I couldn't think of anything else to do. I just wanted to help. And that moved me so much. And I remember telling Janelle, my fiancee, I remember telling her on the way out because the blood bank closed before we could donate, they were so overwhelmed. But I said, one person did an act of unspeakable evil and thousands instantly dropped everything they could do to help. I will take those numbers any day of the week. And so I really love Vegas, but then we have the opposite of this. To answer your question, a guy pushing his pregnant girlfriend island to the street in front of traffic. So we pull over, call 911. I'm on phone with the call taker. And to make a long story short, we're watching this guy. He's screaming at his girlfriend. He's yelling at her. He's not really hitting her, but he's, like, pulling her to the ground and yelling at her, intimidating her, pushing her, yanking her by her hoodie. And eventually Metropd shows up, and it's like, five foot blonde female cop just, like, jumps on him, pulls him to the ground, throws him in the back of the patty wagon. The cops come, we give them our contact information, but also our statement of what we saw and what happened. And I had the whole recording of 911. So they said in Nevada, the DA prosecutes, so this guy's for sure going to jail. Even if she wouldn't want to press charges, he's going. But she was still there, and we both work in this field. Janelle was the first one that went up and just said to her, what's going on? And she said, well, you know, he's had a lot of issues with addiction to meth, and he's been clean for a while, but he just found out that his two year old son, his lung cancer has come back, and he's been high ever since. And it's just any feeling I had of being so happy of, like, this guy's off the street, this is great, was just yeah. No one wins here. No one wins.

[22:18] Karin: Right.

[22:19] J: Everyone.

[22:20] Karin: Yeah. And and that really points to, you know, one of those ifs ideas, is that there's always a reason why we do the things that we do, and so often it's rooted in an old stuff that can be really painful.

[22:36] J: Yeah. But if you don't have a healthy coping ability, if you don't have a network around you, that helps you deal with this, if you don't know how to process your feelings with so many people, especially men, have not had the opportunity to do that, then you have things like this happening more and more, and it's terrible for everyone.

[22:59] Karin: And so you do work a lot with men, but you work with both men and women?

[23:03] J: I do. I work with both, but yeah, around 80% with men.

[23:06] Karin: Yeah. And how do you help men?

[23:09] J: Same way as help anyone else. It's just, you know, what's going on and what what needs help and just working with it. And men the men I work with, I think, probably are self selecting. They're men who maybe feel more comfortable working with other men. They're probably men who feel more comfortable working with someone who's not coming with the traditional approach that maybe counselors would do even though you like for ifs it's the same training, right? There's no difference there. But there is a difference, maybe in how I'm approaching things. I don't know. All I know is that a lot of the guys that come to me, they have been in therapy before, and it helped them reach a certain better state, and that was really important for them. But there's still this gap, and usually we're able to help close that, which is what makes me happy.

[24:10] Karin: What's the gap about?

[24:15] J: I would say the gap is being unable to actually soften the shame and the self criticism I think a lot of men are taught, and especially if you're doing something like, really strict CBT, which you have people doing CBT for years, which makes no sense.

[24:37] Karin: Yeah. And maybe just explain a little bit what CBT is for people who don't know.

[24:40] J: So cognitive behavioral therapy, which I'm in no way knocking, just to be clear, I mean, even coaching is CBT applied. It was born out of CBT, but it's very much what cognitive. So what beliefs and behaviors can we look at changing to help improve your life? So if you say something like, I'm a total idiot, maybe finding a way to soften that or make it more factually true of, well, I don't know all things, but there are some things I know, and that would be seen as an improvement, or what behavioral changes can we make? It's good. But it's more at this point in my life and career, I view it more as a I don't want to say a bandit, because it's more than that. It's something that helps get you to a better place, of helping manage the pain, maybe imagining your reaction to the pain, but still doesn't solve it. It still doesn't really address it that much. Really what I focused on for a long time was self compassion, because that was what I learned in my work, and that was what I found just through experimentation with my early clients. That's what was needed. Even if they'd been in therapy, for whatever reason, they never were able to really have a strong sense of. If I were to see myself as an ally I want to help instead of an enemy I want to defeat, what would that look like? What would I change? What would I eat? What would I do? And we looked at a lot of those interventions, and it really helped. But even then, that's still you know, if they come in saying, hey, I have a 30% gap, that self compassion maybe could close 20% of it, but we still always had that remaining 10% of. I don't know why. I know this isn't right. I know this isn't what is true. I can't help feeling or acting this way. It's that old trauma work that ifs has really excelled at resolving.

[26:33] Karin: Right. So for you, your experiences using Ifs really helps to close that gap.

[26:39] J: Yeah. The way I do it right now, I use a mix of self compassion, ifs a lot more self compassion early on when you're still like, getting to learn the system and you're just learning how to maybe work with it. But I think there would be a good argument to say that ifs and self compassion are both self compassion interventions. They're just getting that compassion in different ways. The one is about seeing it as a behavioral thing we can do. The other is about allowing it to naturally arise from within as we do an ifs.

[27:11] Karin: Yeah. And do you ever have people who really struggle with that idea of self compassion?

[27:18] J: Yeah, and I'm one of them. I mean, everything I do has been hard for me on the client side. Ifs I have clients who have these amazing unburdenings and healing experiences after just a month of working together, I'm like, man, it took me a year before I could get to that point. So I'm like, happy for them. On the one hand, I'm like, I just know. And even meditation. Meditation, which so many people talk about. When I started meditating, I felt like I was on fire. I would break into sweats. I would take off my clothes. I would have to keep telling myself, you know, you're not on fire. You know, you're not on fire. And it took like, a month for me to actually be able to lay down without having some major response from within. Now that I have ifs, I have a totally different way, I would approach that. But yeah, the whole point of this is it took me years to figure out how to speak or act with self compassion. It's something I'm still doing all of this stuff. I am still very much just on the journey, too. And I think we all for me at least, I want to be honest about that, because when a client comes to me and they're like, this is hard, I'm like, yeah, I know, but it's better.

[28:33] Karin: And how do you help them take steps toward practicing self compassion?

[28:39] J: This is where ifs is great. Where even if you're not explicitly doing ifs, you're still doing ifs. And I do believe that once you get trained in this, it's impossible to see the world in a different way. But really, what is the resistance to it? So almost to a fault, everyone who I bring up the idea of self compassion to early in our work pushes back against it, which I want, because the first thing I want is, tell me why this sounds like a terrible idea. Why would it be a terrible idea for you to be kinder to yourself? Oh, well, if I do that, I'm going to fall behind. I'm going to be that lazy sack of shit who sits on the couch and does nothing. I'm going to stop caring so much. I'm going to stop producing. High quality work. I'm going to stop self improving. I'm going to stop wanting to have better things for myself. I'm just going to write myself a blank check to do whatever and not care anymore. I say, okay, well, what if I were to tell you that even though that makes total sense, that there's actually other ways we can look at this, and we have even research around this that shows that might not entirely be true? Is that something you're even interested in hearing about? And then the conversation goes from there.

[29:50] Karin: And so it sounds like you get also some of those self critical parts that come up.

[29:55] J: Oh, they are my bread and butter. They are my favorite parts. They are the one I know best, and there is nothing well, that's not entirely true. One of my favorite parts of my job, or the moments I like most, is when a client's able to turn to that critic inside, see how that critic has been trying to help them and really from their heart say, I am so grateful to have you. And that critic is able to soften and say, I'm so used to being the bad guy, and I'm so used to doing this job that I hate, and it's so nice for someone to show me love as well.

[30:35] Karin: And I've had the experience with clients where they talk about, all right, I might ask them, how do you think your self critic might be actually trying to help you? They might have these big reactions.

[30:51] J: Yeah, what?

[30:54] Karin: Trying to help me? It's awful. I hate that part of myself. Right?

[30:59] J: Yeah, exactly.

[31:01] Karin: So tell me how that plays out.

[31:03] J: For me, I bank on just pure curiosity, and I do have to, for those, anyone here who knows ifs or knows the ifs world, paul was my trainer, and he would just always in my level one, and he would just say, yeah, I just get really curious about that. So I just get really curious. I'm like, okay, yeah, so that makes sense because this has been causing you pain your whole life. But just as a mental exercise, if we were just to play with this, just be a little curious about this, what could possibly be some ideas? Maybe it'll be true, maybe we won't. But how is it useful for you to have something that's ripping you apart all the time? And for me, a lot of times I see this as a coping mechanism for living in today's world. If I feel the world is very judgmental and if I feel that there's a lot I need to achieve, it is in my interest to be hard on myself, especially if I feel like I'm in this alone, which most of us do. So if everything rests on me, how could I afford to have faults? How could I afford to be making mistakes? And the only way I can prevent those from happening is if I'm constantly analyzing myself, looking for them, looking for the weaknesses so I can fix them before they cause me more problems in my life.

[32:27] Karin: How does that self critic end up showing up in people's relationships?

[32:33] J: I'd say there's both. I've seen realizing that each person has their own flavor of it. I've seen both internal and external manifestations. So the internal we know is ripping into ourselves. So especially if something happens in a relationship, maybe that pokes an old shame. Let's say that your partner does something or you behave in the way that you feel ashamed of, or your partner points out. And so you kind of revert to that little kid feeling, that excel feeling inside. And that self critic comes on to try to make you fit in. I'm going to rip into you this way to try to remind you what the external world requires of you so that you can achieve it. And I think it's Cece Sykes who came up with this, who said really that critics are often seen as a form of manager, though they could probably fit into both roles. But managers are there to make you safe in the external world, to make sure you fit in, to make sure that you are safe with others, while firefighters are more internally focused. And these are the parts that really try to self soothe us. And that can be done in healthy ways, that can be done through things like drugs and addictions and things like this. But they try to deal with internal problems. These critics often respond to anything that causes external shame.

[33:55] Karin: I'm going to interrupt you for just a second, just to say that. Yeah, jay is talking about some different parts that we have. And we have these protector parts. And some of them take these roles as managers that try to get in front of the problems. And then some of these protectors take the role of firefighters and they try to essentially put out the flames and try to soothe you when something is triggered, something painful is triggered.

[34:20] J: Exactly. So, see, your three parts did come in the episode.

[34:25] Karin: I did get to talk about it. Yeah. The other part that I've noticed is that people who have strong self critics are often really critical of other people too.

[34:40] J: That is the external.

[34:42] Karin: Yeah.

[34:43] J: And the more rules I follow, the more rules often I think you should follow too. And this can be a very polar thing where some people feel like everyone else is allowed to be human and imperfect, but I have to hold a high standard. There is that type of client, but then there is certainly a client who says, no, we're all being held to the same standard, and I'm going to lash out at you just as much as I lash out at myself. And I've seen this often. There was one guy I was working with once who was a parent who really didn't understand why he would scream at his six year old son the way that he did when he would make a mistake. And I just asked off the cuff, well, how do you treat yourself when you make a mistake? And he sat back and he said, oh, my God, I do the exact same thing.

[35:28] Karin: Yeah, I remember learning about we have a strong reaction about somebody else in our life. Oftentimes that other person has some quant equality that we have in ourselves that we don't like, that can be really a mirror and also can point us in a direction like, oh, that's where I can do some work here.

[35:50] J: Right, absolutely.

[35:53] Karin: So you have a book?

[35:55] J: I do, a book in progress. So it's not available for purchase yet. It's in what seems to be a constant stage of final editing. But it is a good, proper book, and it's a mix of so what it does is it's currently titled Enough, which can mean so many things, but it's really about this question, why do so many of us feel like we're not enough, no matter how much we achieve? And the book really has technically three, but really two big halves. The first is, how did we get here? Why is this happening the way it's happening, where the problem is so big? And then the second one is, what things actually resolve this? And this is a book that's woven from primarily my work with clients and then my personal life. And then throughout all of it is data and research, because this can't be something of it sounds like a good idea. Well, what does the research actually say? And so pulling from all of this, it just seems that the world is changing so much, sometimes it's hard to keep up with that first half of the book. But, yeah, the book is out. No, it's not out. It's hopefully going to be out sometime soon. But if anyone is interested in it as they're listening, please come to my website and drop me a line because I am just building a list of who's interested and so I can be in contact about in the future.

[37:18] Karin: Okay, yeah, and we'll put your information in the show notes as well, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But I'm wondering if you can give people, like, a direction if they're recognizing themselves in this conversation. The anxious insecurity, the self criticism is something that they can do. What steps can they take toward healing?

[37:47] J: Right, so I have a whole list of books on my website, but I will say that the two that if you were just to be anyone, which is how you're posing this question to me and say, what should I engage myself with? I would say probably the two things you should become acquainted with are self compassion and IFS just even as ideas. I'm a huge fan of the work of kristen Neff who has to be the world's foremost researcher on self compassion and her book Self Compassion I loved. I read through the whole thing in like two days and it's a good mix of her experience as a researcher and what she found in some of the students who she's taught and just stories tied in with it from personal life. And then you have a book like no Bad Parts, which is all about ifs, but shows you a different model for how to engage with ourselves. Now I would say both of these are things that anyone can easily engage with. I will say that I think self compassion is something that's much easier to do on your end than ifs. So if you are really just starting out, I would say maybe lean into that a little bit more. But both of those would be two books that I would recommend to anyone off the bat.

[39:08] Karin: Yeah, and I'd second both of those as well. Those are really great resources. Great. So what role does love play in the work that you do.

[39:24] J: Without sounding cliche? It plays the role of everything. In what way could you possibly hope to resolve any of these issues without love? And maybe this begs the question, what is love? Because I do think one of the things that was really helpful for me early on my journey was the parable of the two wolves. For whatever reason, the Irish Catholic priest friend of mine had his own version that was the wolf and the eagle, where the eagle was like the white wolf and the and I assume you know what the two wolves are.

[40:18] Karin: I'm not sure if I do.

[40:19] J: Okay, so the two wolves is this supposedly Cherokee, which it's absolutely not tell, but it's this idea. And I'm going to botch a little bit, but a young child goes up to their grandmother or to one of their grandparents and says and just asks them about life. And the grandparent answers, there's a battle inside me, no battle inside you and a battle inside anyone. And it's a battle between two wolves. One wolf is light, hope, peace, generosity, caring, friendship, peace. The other wolf is separation, darkness, anger, hatred, bigotry, angst, resentment. And the young child asks, well, which one wins? And the grandparent answers, that which you feed the most. Great story. Great parable. And this was shown to me and it really resonated with me of this idea of, oh, I can look at these as behaviors, I can look at this as how do I want to solve this problem? And one of the things that really struck me about that parable is you don't defeat, quote unquote, the bad wolf by fighting it, you defeat it by starving it. So it's something you heard me say earlier is grow the good. And that became my mantra. I don't want to fight the bad, I want to grow the good. Yeah, and so if you have a garden and you just water the plants that you want, that's all you're going to get in the end, they're going to overtake the other plants just because they're the ones getting all the nutrition. So to me, love is everything that comes from that lightness, right? Everything that is that openness. And so love simultaneously must include, yes, this compassion and peace towards ourself. But it must therefore, by definition, also include seeing all of our deepest flaws and faults. It must include that. It must include seeing our deepest pain because that is the truth.

[42:33] Karin: And if we refuse to see it, then what happens?

[42:38] J: Then it's just going to stay there. It will faster we'll become afraid of it. I've had clients who, especially men, where if you're not taught, if you never have emotional skills and you never were shown them by anyone, it's really easy to be afraid of your emotions. And again, this is something that I resonate with too. I thought I knew how to deal with my feelings because I knew how to analyze them. I didn't know how to actually feel them. And an analogy I've found myself using is it can feel if you feel this shame or this grief or this pain, it can feel like a monster banging on the door and you're thinking, oh my God, listen how hard it's banging. This thing's going to be huge. It's going to destroy me. And then it's saying, no, the reason it's so loud is because it's being ignored. It's just trying to hit harder and harder so it can be heard.

[43:30] Karin: And that's so powerful. And I love that about IFS it's really helping you see all your parts and value them and listen to them and learn from them. And there's so much healing that happens when you're able to do that and get curious, like you said, and compassionate.

[43:49] J: So powerful.

[43:50] Karin: So how can people learn more about you?

[43:53] J: So you can come to my website, which will hopefully be in this show, Notes, because there's an obnoxiously long Greek name, Jamesjstamatellos.com, and you can contact me there. I'm not a huge fan of social media, so it's not something I really dabble in. So it's really podcasts and building these relationships with people like yourself is really the best way I found the connect. So if anyone wants to get in touch with me, that's the best way.

[44:19] Karin: Wonderful. Anything you want to leave people with.

[44:22] J: Before we end, it's okay for this to be hard and just because even I'm saying if you're listening to me and saying, oh my god, this guy's saying he's been doing this for how long? He's been in this career for ten years and he's still saying it's hard for him sometimes. What hope does it have? For me, it's all relative. I mean, the place where I'm at now is light years better than where I was. And even doing this imperfectly. What is a better practice of self compassion than trying to do self compassion? Realizing you're constantly messing it up or not doing it and just realizing, yeah, I'm human. It's okay to be human. So just because it can't be done perfectly isn't a reason to fear it. It's really just another invitation to really allow the beauty of this work to present itself. So it's definitely worth the effort, even if it's just in a small way each day.

[45:24] Karin: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jay. It's been really a joy having you on here today.

[45:28] J: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

[45:30] Karin: Thanks for joining us. Today on Love Is US. If you like the show, I would so appreciate it if you left me a review. If you have questions and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram, where I'm the love and connection coach. Special thanks to Tim Gorman for my music, ali Shaw for my artwork, and Ross Burdick for tech and editing assistance. Again, I'm so glad you joined us today because the best way to bring more love into your life and into the world is to be loved. The best way to be loved is to love yourself and those around you. Let's learn and be inspired together.