Coping with Criticism that Feels Personal || special interview with Monica by Julie Rose of Top of Mind

I was interviewed by Julie Rose for her "Stick With It" series where I open up about my personal journey of facing uncomfortable situations, particularly one where my identity as a feminist conflicted with my role as a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I share the emotional and challenging experience of reaching out to someone within my faith for an interview, only to be rejected based on my online writings.

The rejection not only felt personal but also challenged my sense of belonging within my faith community. I describe my initial gut reactions, the subsequent email exchanges, and the ultimate resolution between us. This episode explores the complexities of identity, stereotypes, and the power of having difficult conversations. I hope listeners feel inspired to confront discomfort, seek understanding, and bridge gaps in their own lives.

This episode is brought to you by Vionic Shoes (use code PROGRESS)

About a few other things...

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This episode is brought to you by Vionic Shoes (use code PROGRESS)

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TRANSCRIPT

Julie Rose: I'm Julie Rose, and this is Top of Mind. I have been a radio journalist for two decades, but a few years ago, I found myself avoiding the news for long stretches because of how depressing and divisive it all seems. I still wanted to be informed and engaged on important issues, though, and I figured I couldn't be alone in that.

So we created this podcast. Each week, we tackle one tough topic in a way that will challenge you.

Today, I am so excited to have Monica Packer with me for another installment in our stick with it conversations. Series. Monica is a personal growth coach and host of About Progress, which is a podcast and also an online community. Her Instagram is really fun to follow. Monica, welcome. It's so great to have you.

Monica Packer: Thanks for having me.

Julie Rose: So as regular top of mind listeners know, stick With It is a conversation series where we talk with people about this thing that. is at the heart of what Top of Mind is about. That moment when you are confronted with a perspective or a situation that really challenges you. You're not in danger, your safety isn't at risk physically, but you immediately feel that fight or flight response, that defensiveness, and it's natural, but a stick with it moment.

is when you can opt instead to stay uncomfortable, to stick with that discomfort and see where it might lead. Listening to Top of Mind each week as we tackle these tough topics is a chance to practice staying curious as we probe the nuances of important issues that can be challenging at times. And this special Stick With It conversation series is a way to see what sticking with it looks like in daily life.

So, Monica, I'm so grateful that you're willing to share a story of your own. One of the things that so attracts people to you and to your work, I think, personally, is how honest you are about the hardness of life. And you are committed to doing things that are scary, that make you uncomfortable. It's a stated goal, even, of your work, right?

Monica Packer: Yeah, we have a big focus in our community to do something, not all, not nothing. And that came from my roots of realizing that I was a perfectionist. I say realizing because I knew I was a stereotypical kind until I was, you know, my early twenties. And then I became the non stereotypical perfectionist and the underachiever for 10 years.

And once I realized I was still, in fact, a perfectionist and it was holding me back, I had to learn how to not do all anymore and not stop. Stay safe in the nothing, but to do something. And a big part of that was to do things that were uncomfortable and scary and vulnerable. And it's totally changed my life.

Julie Rose: I, um, I have experienced a similar thing when it comes to tackling really difficult things in, in my life because I, I want to, like, I want to just be great at it. You know, there are a lot of things I don't, I won't do because I'm like, well, you know, I can never be a great accordion player. So what's the point of even trying, you know, or, oh, my garden's not gonna, all my plants aren't going to live.

So what's the point of even planting a garden? You know, like there is just so much that I can't control as both a perfectionist and a super anxious person who, uh, needs to feel in control of things. Um, and, and part of this podcast for me is this fear that I have that I'm not going to be able to, if I, if I.

You know, if I, if I engage in a tough topic, or if I decide to have a difficult conversation or lean into some tough information, uh, that it's going to fall apart, that I'm only going to get more confused or more angry or more uncomfortable, right? Um, and I think that's probably the biggest barrier for a lot of us is we're like, well, there's no point in having that conversation or engaging with that topic because I know how it's going to go and it's going to be bad.

Um, and so the do something piece for me is, okay, well, maybe just for five minutes, like I'm just going to ask one follow up question.

Monica Packer: Yeah, I think that's huge. I mean, I think just If we all did that, just imagine the difference it would make in our communities, even our homes, just those few minutes, just the one curious, curious question instead of a fear driven question.

It would go a long way. Yeah.

Julie Rose: So let's hear a story from you about a time when you chose to stay uncomfortable, um, Yeah. Rather than walk away. What, what's the, what background do we need to know going into this story, Monica?

Monica Packer: Well, I think that's a really important piece to this puzzle. I told you about how I realized I was still a perfectionist.

A big part of what I was going through at that time was kind of an early, early midlife crisis. I would say I was approaching my 30th birthday and kind of realized I was. Stuck on the sidelines of my own life. And not only was it about achievements or goals or even habits, anything like that, although those were all included, it was far deeper.

It was about my identity and who I was. And a big part of my identity and why I felt stuck was because I had some contradictory parts of myself that were at play. I am a member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. I would consider myself faithful. And at the same time, I'm also a feminist and you can imagine in many ways how that can be very contradictory, not only internally, but externally in the ways that people view you, especially if you start to share a little bit more about your viewpoints, even within the faith context.

And even growing up, I would say feminist was kind of a dirty word in my household. And I wouldn't say my parents were extremely conservative people by any means, but I just knew growing up that that was something that was something to be cautious of or even to fear, but you know, as I moved through my twenties, I just gradually realized more and more that this is actually a big part of who I've always been since I was a little girl that I believe so strongly and, um, and, and women being Not equal to men in terms of we're the same, like we have to, I have to be like a man, but more in terms of valuing what we do and who we are and being better supported.

And anyway, that was a big interplay of where I was at in that point in my life. And because I was on that do something track of doing something, not nothing, I was picking up all these pieces of the puzzle that I had left behind along the way, different parts of myself that I had denied. And one of those parts was as a writer.

And I wanted to start writing more and I started a blog and it was past the blog prime days. Like this was not the time where everyone was starting a blog. It was past that. And it was just more to start learning how to express myself. I wrote a lot of weird things, you know, it was just like recipe development, interior design.

Here's a DIY I did. Oh, and here's boom, a big post about my faith crisis. I think you all want to know that. And this was big for me because I had had those faith crises very related to this, this contradiction I was holding about my faith and feminism. I had been in those trenches for quite a long time.

So it was a very vulnerable and tender place for me to be in and to begin to start sharing about it when nobody really was at the time, like nobody. Now in the midst of all this doing something, I also started a podcast. It was just part of this flood of let's try things. That's the thing that actually stuck.

I've now been doing it for over seven years. In the beginning, my podcast was about people's stories and I got to know really where people were at in their, in their lives and, and how that related to progress for themselves. And I interviewed some great people and one of them had a recommendation for me about a relative they had who they thought would be a good fit, who had overcome a lot of obstacles in their lives, in their life, and who had some amazing stories to share.

And I invited him on and he accepted. Now, the thing to know about this gentleman is that he is a seminary teacher. So a seminary teacher in the church of Jesus Christ, Latter day Saints is, uh, typically if you live in, live, live in Utah, they are under, they work for the church and they teach youth, you know, so from middle school through high school, they teach youth one hour a day.

Um, the kids come down to the seminary building and they learn religious teachings every day. And. I loved my seminary teachers growing up. I had such high regard for them. Many of them shaped my life in, in just really profound ways. So right away, I had a lot of respect for him, just knowing a little bit of the story and also the position he was holding with the youth.

I was really excited to have him and we were, you know, scheduled. The questions were sent. Everything was ready to go. And shortly before we were supposed to record, I got this email from him and it was very brief and it was very blunt. He said he couldn't be on the show anymore, but he said something that was so clear and so, you know, a punch to a gut to me that I have never forgotten the words.

He said, I cannot associate with you in any way. And when I read that I just felt like I said, that, that punch to the gut, like a sucker punch, like what? And so I wrote him back to ask him, what do you mean you can't associate with me. I'm a faithful member of the church. I don't understand why that's a dangerous thing for you to be associated with me.

His initial email back that had a bit more of an explanation was because of the things you've written about online. It's not safe for me to associate with you as a representative of my faith and that's when the floodgates opened for me. It felt like I had been treading water for 10 years of trying to piece these pieces of myself together and to make them compatible.

And someone reached down and pushed my head back under the water just as I was barely having my, my little nose over the, over the surface of the water. And it was so personal. It felt not just personal to me because it was about me, but it also felt personal because it felt like a rejection, not just from him, but my whole faith and my whole faith community.

You don't belong here. You are not. Safe. We can't associate with you.

Julie Rose: And so what was your gut reaction? Uh, I mean, your, your instinct at that moment.

Monica Packer: Well, first I have to say I am not a crier, like at all. It's actually a problem. I'm working on crying more often, but I cried for days. In ways that alarmed my husband, um, we lived in the Bay area at the time, and I called him on the phone almost immediately.

And I read the email to him and he could hear how distressed I was. I was so distraught. I was also very angry. I called my parents and they hear the same kind of reaction. And the first thing I said to them after I read the email was, See, I can't ever move back to Utah. I will never be accepted there.

It's not a safe place for me to ever return to. And I, you know, it was a lot of, a lot of sadness, a lot of anger, a lot of, you know, fight or flight too. Like I wouldn't just run away or go and like beat him up. Like I'll come all the way across, across the Western states and, and find him and give him a telling to, um, so it was pretty complex.

Julie Rose: Um, what did you choose instead and why?

Monica Packer: I think a part of me knew that I had been really brave in starting to share these complicated pieces of myself. And I knew that in being vulnerable, the positive far outweighed the negatives because I had already received so many emails and messages from my friends and people in my faith community and outside of it who said, I relate so much to what you said about how you were struggling with your faith, or I related so much to you sharing about how, even as this feminist, you decided that you still wanted to be a stay at home mom and why that was the case. And knowing that I shared those things and the benefit of that pushed me to pause a little bit and to not stay in that fight or flight angry mode, but also to know that I owed it to both myself and to him to build up some understanding.

Because if I wanted, not just My faith in feminism to be compatible internally, but I also wanted to be compatible for other people who I knew were struggling with this. I owed it to all of us to try to bridge some gaps here. To help me understand him and for him to understand me, because if he is this leader of kids, I want him to, to better know what this really looks like for someone like me, who might have the stereotypical label slapped on me, that's all he can see when there's so much more there that I wanted him to also know so that he can better guide those under, you know, in his little flock and as well as for years to come.

So that led to me just replying with another email and him responding to me with another email and we went back and forth on some church history as well as my own personal history. Funnily enough, the blog post he read, he actually had misread. Um, and I was able to help him see, no, this is what I actually said.

And also, even if I had said the reverse, that's not something for you to judge because, you know, it's up to me and God to decide if I'm going to be home with my kids or not. And, you know, at the end of the day, we still were kind of just spinning in circles a bit.

Julie Rose: And what, um, was there any strategy that you were using to try to, I don't know, to try to keep this in a productive realm?

But what was the mindset that you had to maintain throughout these back and forths in order for this to be worth it for you? For you to feel like you were actually, like, accomplishing

something?

Monica Packer: I am one of those weirdos that is good with difficult people. When I was a teacher, I was voted the person on the team who had to talk to the other person on the team about some issues we were having or within my roommate group, I was the one who was the messenger and, and I kind of learned over the years how to talk to people that were a little hard to understand. And he was a difficult personality. It was just a difficult situation. So I do want to be clear on that. And so I had learned to really try to be careful about how I set up conversations.

I tried to state how I heard him and if that was what he was saying and then to also go into what I was trying to say in my own personal story and a little bit of history that might help or some facts that were important and to do that all with this. With this tone of respect and seeking to understand just as much as I was seeking to be understood.

Both pieces of that puzzle mattered to me in the end. I knew he might not understand, but again, I had to go back to that deeper why of why this mattered, not just for me personally, which it did. I wanted to feel accepted. Or at least understood or heard and, um, I knew I had to do that in return. So we did do that, but it, we kind of got to this point where there was only so much more email writing we could do and then the great amount of time that entailed for, for both of us. I would say.

Julie Rose: And so what happened next then? How did it resolve?

Monica Packer: It did get resolved and how it came about was the person who had originally connected to us in the first place, uh, understood that we were having some really serious conversations and also understood that he had denied doing the interview with me.

So, um. This person stepped in and said, Hey, listen, I think it'd be great if you two just got on the phone and had a conversation. And I said, yeah, I, I'd be open to that. And I had a lot of anxiety going into this again, he's a representative of my faith, right? And it, it felt like a pretty important conversation to be having.

And I went into that with a lot of prayer and a lot of thought about how I wanted to set up the conversation and to listen. And then to speak. And that's how it went about. First, we started with him telling me more. And what he told me was so enlightening. I'm going to be vague about his story, but the vague and nutshell version of it is that he had a parent who had a really important part of his story that he started to share more publicly.

And that story was twisted and told in other ways. And the way that story began to be told made him subjected to criticism in our faith by other members and even leaders in ways that were really scary. And he saw the devastation that's incurred, not only for his, his parents, but also his, his family and you know, how it affected him with other people and how they viewed him.

And he did not want to cross those lines ever again in his life. And he didn't want to share any part of himself that could be twisted in a way that his father's story had been twisted and as I listened, it really helped me understand one, his history, but also how his fear had led to him reacting to me in such a visceral way and knowing that weirdly helped me take him out of the stereotype because I felt judged.

As a label and misjudged, I didn't feel seen as a real person with a complex history and lots of thoughts and, and more all behind my label that he saw me as, as a feminist. But honestly, I was doing the same thing to him. I thought, Oh, just great. Another white male seminary teacher who thinks I'm a threat and he wants to ostracize me from this community. I had had a hard time seeing past his own label and stereotype in my mind. So that conversation not only helped me see him past the stereotype, it also helped him see me past that too. And we left on really good terms and saying, thank you for this conversation.

Now he didn't get on my show after we both agreed that we were both tired. It was probably a good idea for us to both move forward, but we left on, on good terms, I would say.

Julie Rose: That is, thank you so much for sharing that so vulnerably, Monica. So what, um, how did that change you in any way in terms of the work you were doing or the way that you thought about, um, the scary things that you were trying to tackle in your own life, your own personal growth?

Monica Packer: In some ways, uh, the, the, the public sharing of where I'm at personally has ebbed and flowed. Sometimes I feel more brave to share different pieces of my life and even my faith. Other times I know it's safer for me to just retreat, even because I might just be in a fragile place myself. So I wouldn't say there's been a straightforward answer that way, but what it did change for me is, is one knowing that it is worth having hard conversations or at least trying to not because it will always turn out well, but because you have a chance to help someone see a different piece to the puzzle that you may have that they don't and hopefully vice versa, especially if that's the intention behind my side of it, that it's not just about me forcing acceptance or being heard, but more about me wanting to do that in return.

And hoping that that can happen for me as well. So that changed that. But I'd also say over the years, I have learned, um, to see past the stereotypes. And in order to do that, I have to be willing to be that person who can do that for other people. And You know, I shared earlier about how my initial reaction was like, great I can never move back to Utah because we had thought about that for years. I had special needs kids who weren't really getting the help they needed where we lived. And we were always thinking about, should we move to Utah? And we did, we actually did move back to Utah during the pandemic. And it was a scary move for me.

I'm not going to lie. It was intimidating and I worried about being seen and accepted for who I am. But now that we are here, we are happy and we love it. And I can say that my neighbor and my faith community here, my congregation, I feel like they see me for who I am. But it's also because I still share.

I share the complicated. I share the gray. I share the nuance. And I have found that people need that more than I thought they would. And they've been able to see me past a label that maybe they would have slapped on me otherwise. And I hope vice versa too.

Julie Rose: Do you think you would have been able to overcome that barrier, been open to coming back to Utah if you hadn't sort of pulled the thread with that man, that seminary teacher, to kind of be able to realize that so much of what he was putting on you was not you couldn't generalize that to all faithful members of the church, or even to all white male members of the church.

You could it was so much more about him and his own personal reaction because of what he'd seen with his father and his upbringing, which you never would have known if you hadn't really gone there.

Monica Packer: To be honest, I think I still could have, even if that hadn't we, if we hadn't resolved it and had that final conversation. And because I know I could have, because I've had so many other conversations. outside of that one. So even though that was honestly one of the hardest conversations and lengthy conversations I've ever had over time via email and then in person or over the phone rather, it still set me off on a trajectory of knowing that it was okay for me to speak up.

To open my mouth and to share and, and to hear other people too. So I had so many other experiences with both locally and, you know, across state boundaries with people who might be a little different from me or a lot different and, and know that. It's possible to be seen for who you really are and to see other people, too.

And that's what I tried to do, actually, on my show. I don't exclude people. I've had people of all political backgrounds, of all extremes, and also personal experiences and life paths, and I have learned from every single one of them. And that gave me so much hope that people could learn from me, too, if I had the courage to move back to my home of Utah.

Julie Rose: Monica Packer is a personal growth coach. She is the host of About Progress, a podcast. And just let people know, what can they expect from the About Progress podcast? What are you hoping to accomplish there?

Monica Packer: This sounds really big, but my, my overarching mission is to change the world by changing women.

The primary listenership are women for my show. And, um, when I say change women, it's not about changing who they are. It's more about helping them change into who they really are deep down. So we're a personal development show, but outside of perfectionism and. There's a lot of hope. There's a lot of practical tips.

There's a lot of deep work and a lot of learning. And I love it.

Julie Rose: So it's about progress. You can find it on all the podcast platforms and be sure to check out Monica Packer on Instagram. About Progress is her handle there. Um, just lots of really great, funny, personal, um, and really informative, uplifting material there.

Monica, thank you so much for taking time today. I really appreciate it.

Monica Packer: Thank you for creating such a safe space. I, I'm, I'm so glad that I was able to share so honestly and openly here.

Julie Rose: I can't wait to share it with our listeners. And speaking of listeners, I would love to hear about a stick with it story from your own life, about a time when you encountered a perspective or a situation that really challenged your way of seeing things.

And you found a way to stay curious in that rather than get defensive and shut it down. How did that decision come about? What was the result of sticking with it, sticking with that discomfort? Email topofmindatbyu. edu with your story and we'll be in touch. Maybe you'll even have a chance to share it with me on the air.

I'm Julie Rose. We'll talk soon.

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