Huberman Lab - How to Find & Be a Great Romantic Partner | Lori Gottlieb

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

My guest is Lori Gottlieb, MFT, a psychotherapist and bestselling author who specializes in helping people build strong relationships by first understanding themselves and the stories they’ve internalized about themselves and others. We explore how our parents, wounds and unique strengths—both consciously and unconsciously—influence our partner choices and how we show up in relationships, as well as how to avoid and break free from destructive patterns. We also discuss the impact of texting, social media and dating apps on partnership. Lori shares which signals to follow to become the best romantic partner possible and how to make choices that lead to greater vitality, happiness and fulfillment in all areas of life. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman David Protein: https://davidprotein.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Lori Gottlieb 00:02:01 Patient & First Question; Talked Out of Feelings 00:06:15 Self-Regulation vs Co-Regulation, Tool: Pause & Perspective 00:10:04 Sponsors: Helix Sleep & BetterHelp 00:12:36 Relationships, Childhood & Unfinished Business 00:17:13 Unconscious Mind, Hurtful Parent & Familiarity, Role of Therapy 00:26:35 Excitement & Chaos, Cherophobia; Storytelling, First Date & Sparks? 00:36:27 Tool: Awareness of Death & Living Fully; Vitality; Fear vs Acceptance 00:47:27 Sponsors: AG1 & David Protein 00:50:35 Activate vs Energize; Tool: Technology, Numbness & Overwhelm 00:54:50 Numb or Calm?, Gender Stereotypes, Tool: Mentalizing 01:00:51 Feelings, Projective Identification, Tool: Owning Your Feelings 01:03:25 React vs Respond; Space, Tool: Face-to-Face Conversation vs Text 01:10:16 Behavioral Change, 5 Steps of Change, Tool: Self-Compassion & Accountability 01:15:38 Sponsor: LMNT 01:16:54 Deadlines & Rules; Idiot vs Wise Compassion, No Drama & Assumptions 01:26:27 Silent Treatment, Crying & Manipulation, Shame vs Guilt, Self-Preservation 01:33:01 Self-Reflection, Individual & Couples Therapy, Transference; Agency 01:38:56 Texting, Conflicts, Breakups, Pain Hierarchy, Tool: Move Forward 01:46:42 Relationship Breakups, Daily World & Loss 01:53:30 Bank of Goodwill; Talking About Partner, Focus, Comparison 02:01:13 Infidelity, What If vs What Is, Attention & Appreciation 02:04:56 Gut Instinct, Change Behavior, Danger, Productive vs Unproductive Anxiety 02:15:27 Knowing Oneself, Relationships, Flexibility, Shared History 02:20:30 Romantic Relationships & Teens, Social Media, Privacy 02:27:09 Online Apps & Choices, Maximizers vs Satisficers, Tool: Identify Your Weakness 02:33:09 Fixing Issues Early, Tool: Self vs Partner Lists & Character Qualities 02:41:51 Feeling Toward Partner, Calm, Content; Tool: Operating Instructions 02:46:48 Help-Rejecting Complainers; Relationships, Love & Core Wounds 02:51:22 Stories & Unreliable Narrators, Editing, Tool: 5 Senses 02:59:04 Young Men, Masculinity, Confusion 03:07:03 Grief, Making Sense of Loss 03:09:54 Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Workbook; Ask The Therapist, Choosing a Bigger Life 03:20:26 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Laurie Gottlieb. Laurie Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and bestselling author,

and is considered one of the world's leading experts on relationships, how to find relationships, how to be in relationships effectively, how to leave relationships if necessary, how to grieve them after they're gone, and how to renew them. All from the perspective of looking inward at ourselves and the stories about ourselves and others

that we tell ourselves that can lead us to what we want and what's best for us, or that lead us away from those things. During today's episode, we discuss how the feelings we experience when we're with certain people are the absolute best guide of how poorly or how well those people are suited for us as partners.

And the ways in which we miss key signals, both good and bad in relationships, by not paying attention to how we feel. Laurie explains how to better our communication skills, how to determine if somebody's critique of us is valid or not. That certainly is important for everybody. And how texting and technology has changed relationships

and how to navigate all of that by leaning into our own sense of agency, the things that we can control. And last but not least, Lori explains how we can all access more vitality and enjoyment of life. And how so many people don't allow themselves to do that, because the familiarity of their present circumstances

overrides their willingness to move forward. This was a really eye-opening episode, and one that I'm certain will help you better understand yourself and what your needs really are, and how you can be happier in or out of a relationship. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. in or out of a relationship. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Lori Gottlieb. Lori Gottlieb, welcome. Thank you, great to be here.

What's the first thing you ask a patient when you're meeting them for the first time? Usually it's something like, tell me what's going on. Tell me why you're here. Tell me what made you decide to come in. And are you listening both to the content of their words and their tone, their physicality? Everything, yeah, yeah. I think it's so interesting because sometimes people will say,

I'm here because of, and they'll talk about something very difficult, but they're smiling through it. I think it's very nerve wracking to come in and see a therapist and you don't know this person and you're about to share some very personal information that maybe you haven't told anyone in this way. And so you want to make somebody comfortable. You want to make sure that you feel like they are not being rushed to share something that they're not ready to share. So it's just the process.

I think it's a very human interaction. Therapy to me is not like expert and this other person and then it feels very asymmetrical. Of course we're using our training and that's why they're coming to us, but I feel like it's very much a human to human interchange. Do you think, because I've heard, but I don't know if it's true. Do you think that some people tend to create a lot of internal and perhaps external narrative about what happened, who they are, how people are in the world, how they're not in the world, you know, a lot of words to their experience, either spoken or internally versus people who maybe experience life a little bit differently.

Once somebody said in a comment on Instagram, and I still think about this, they said, I don't think in words, I think in feels. And my first reaction was like, yeah, I'm from Northern California. People talk that way sometimes. I thought that's interesting. Maybe there are a lot of people who,

for whom language isn't the primary mode of understanding what's going on around them. I think that as humans, we try to make sense of our feelings through stories. That we tell ourselves a story about why we're feeling a certain way. And sometimes we aren't that skilled because nobody taught us this, to access our feelings. And that we aren't that skilled because nobody taught us this to

access our feelings. And that happens because kids are often talked out of their feelings. So when you're young, for example, and say you say to your parent, I'm really worried about this. And your parent will say, oh don't worry about that. That's nothing to worry about. Or I'm really mad about this. You're so sensitive, right? Or because parents are really uncomfortable when their kids are feeling sad because they feel like it's my responsibility to make sure they're not sad, which is not your responsibility as a parent. You're there to sit with your child and be present for

them. So if your child says, I'm really sad that so-and-so sat with so-and-so at lunch today and you know the parent will say well, here's what you can do, or that's terrible, or right? Instead of like, oh, tell me more. And I think that as a parent or even as a partner, when your partner comes to you or your friend comes to you or a family member comes to you and tells you something, often what we do is we try to talk them out of the feeling that they're having or help them get rid of the feeling because we think it's a negative feeling. When feelings are all positive because they're like a compass, they tell us what direction

to go in if we can access them. So when you say to someone, tell me more, then the kid might say, well, yeah, it was really hard. And then they'll talk about maybe like why the person might have sat at a different table or what might have happened. And we really do have a lot of answers inside if we listen to the feelings. But we're talked out of the feelings. And then we grow up thinking, if I'm feeling sad or angry or anxious, then, you know, I

need to get rid of the feeling as opposed to I need to use that feeling. And so instead what we do is we come up with all these stories like the problem is out there, as opposed to, oh, I have some really good information in here. I had a now ex-girlfriend, we're still on great terms, who we had an agreement that served us super well and that I try and apply going forward, which is

Nobody tries to shift anyone else In my mind I was the one that came up with that but I think in reality she was the one that came up with it I'm like, there's no way I would have come up with that but I think it came about through a couple different interactions where I would get off work and and sometimes like the initial 20 minutes of interacting was much more difficult than it needed to be. And then I remember we just came up with this plan where we just decided no one's going to shift the other person unless they're like, shift me please,

you know, like help me relax or help me get excited about this, which we would never do, right? So like when, so a policy of not trying to shift anybody or somebody trying to shift our emotions, I think felt really liberating. Right, I think what you're talking about is self-regulation versus co-regulation. So self-regulation is when you're having

some kind of internal experience, you have choices. Like, I'm really angry about this. Okay, how do I self-regulate? Not to ignore the anger, because the anger is telling me that maybe a boundary was broken, or maybe somebody is treating me in a way that I don't want to be treated, or maybe I'm upset with myself for the way that I acted.

So it's good information, but then what do you do with it? Can you self-regulate? Can you find ways to look at the anger without screaming, yelling, self-sabotaging, whatever people do that's not a productive use of their anger or your anxiety or your sadness? Co-regulation is important though, and that's something that you see, again, you can see it with parent-child where if the parent can stay calm when the child is not calm, that helps the child to learn to self-regulate.

And with a partner, like say you had a really hard day at work and you come home and you're just not in a good mood, it's not your partner's responsibility to help you through that. You need to self-regulate. But it sure helps if your partner is regulated and they can help co-regulate you just because they happen to be regulated.

You want two adults in the room, or at least one adult in the room. If you have two children in the room, like grown children, adults, then everybody gets dysregulated. So it's really important that at least one person is being the adult in the room, and one person is regulated.

If both people, like you're in an argument, both people are dysregulated, nothing good is gonna come from that. In which case is the best option to just pause it until somebody returns to adulthood? Yes, and that happens so often. It's such an easy fix for couples because sometimes they think,

we have to deal with this right now. And it feels urgent to deal with it right now because I feel hurt right now. Or I can't believe you said that, or we need to resolve this right now. I can't believe you said that or we need to resolve this right now. That can be the worst possible thing. So it's not like let's forget about it.

It's I'm going to go take a walk or I'm going to go to the gym or I'm going to go read for a few minutes or I'm going to go relax, whatever that is. And then let's talk in an hour about it or let's talk tonight. And you can stay connected during that time. And then, let's talk in an hour about it, or let's talk tonight, right? And you can stay connected during that time. So what are you going to do in the intervening time if you're just making up stories about the other person? They're insensitive, they don't care about me, they don't prioritize me, then that's

not helpful. But in that intervening time, if you can say, if I were telling this story from the other person's perspective, what would their version telling this story from the other person's perspective, what would their version of this story be? And is there a nugget of overlap? And is there a nugget of something that feels really genuine to me that I can understand and even have compassion for?

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Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. One thing that I've observed, I don't have any formal data on this, is that some of the happiest couples I know are couples where I would refer to one person in the relationship as more emotive and expressive, and the other person as a little bit on the spectrum. And my observation is that part of the reason

those couples seem so harmonious is that the little things don't seem to bother the person on the spectrum because they don't register them. They don't get entangled in the other person's downs or ups, which I guess could be problematic in theory, but it just seems like they get along really well because, and I won't, you know, kind of stereotype the labels,

but these couples that I know, it does happen to be the male who is a little bit on the spectrum and the woman who is a little bit on the spectrum, the woman who's a little more emotive. And it just seems like there's so much harmony there. And when I talk to him, I'm generally closer to the man in the relationship, although not always.

They say like, yeah, like, you know, doesn't bother me. There's, I just like, will listen or if there's something to request, I'll respond to the request. There isn't this entanglement of, she's upset, so I like have to respond or this is really painful to listen to, it's more of like a kind of matter of fact. And I just think it's an interesting dynamic.

It's obviously not one that people can pre-program themselves for, but I do think it's an interesting dynamic. It's obviously not one that people can pre-program themselves for, but I do think it's an interesting dynamic, as opposed to what you're describing, where emotions can kind of ratchet together like gears. And that can be wonderful when people are in, you know, ecstatic states or happy or that there's like the banter of certain couples that seem pretty emotive is something I'm also familiar with observing.

But those couples also seem like more volatile. Like when somebody is upset, the other person gets upset that they're up. And it just starts to deteriorate pretty quickly. Yeah, you don't want too highly reactive people to be together. You also, I think, need to think about, there's a saying, we marry our unfinished business, right?

So let's say that there's somebody who had a parent who was very kind of avoidant or withdrawn. That person, if they haven't processed that, will be drawn to the partner who is more avoidant, but not because it feels good, but because it's familiar. And so sometimes in the kind of couple that you're describing, and I don't know the experience of your friends, but I've seen a lot of couples where it looks like that would be a good match

because one person is sort of more in the emotional sphere and one person is less so. But sometimes what that is is one person gets very lonely because they're not really getting that kind of emotional interaction that they want. So it can be a solution for some people because they don't know how to be with a different kind of person. But I also feel like you want to make sure that you have figured out your unfinished business, that you don't just have radar for the kind of person who hurt you. So what often happens is people haven't processed whatever it was that they wanted more of or

less of when they were growing up. And then they go out into the world and they're looking for a partner and they literally have radar for a person who is exactly like the person who hurt them, but doesn't look like that. So it's like, I'm going to choose someone who is the opposite of the person who hurt them, but doesn't look like that. So it's like, I'm going to choose someone who is the opposite of the parent who hurt me. And then you find this person, and after you get to know them a little bit,

you're like, wow, that person drinks a lot too. I didn't realize that. Or that person is really withholding too. I didn't see that at first. Or that person yells a lot. I didn't notice that at first. And you're like, how did I get into this exact situation that hurt me as a child? And that's because

your unconscious is saying, you look familiar, come closer. Because what we're trying to do is we're trying to win. We're trying to master a situation where we felt helpless as a child. We couldn't control the situation with our parents when we were growing up. And now we think, again, this is completely outside of our awareness. I'm going to win this time. I'm going to master this. I'm going to get love from that kind of person. And it doesn't work out.

So I think that you really want to make sure that you are choosing someone for healthy reasons and not because there's some unfinished business that you're trying to work out with this person who is not going to meet your needs. To go a little bit further into this idea, which by the way, I fully subscribe to, based on your explanation of this and my belief that our unconscious mind is driving a lot of our choices.

My understanding is that what you just described doesn't adhere to mom, dad, male, female, compartmentalization. And what I mean by that is that I think a lot of people will hear what you just said and assume, okay, if my dad hurt me in the following ways, then, let's say it's a woman, and she said, you know, my dad hurt me in the following ways. I let's say it's a woman. And she said, you know, my dad hurt me in the following ways.

I mean, he was a drinker withdrawn or he was violent or whatever. Then that woman will seek out men that mimic that. Here I'm assuming heterosexual relationship. But if her mother was the one that was the drinker, violent and or withdrawn and she's heterosexual, my understanding is based on the dynamics that you describe, if she will find those traits in a man,

because she's heterosexual, she's seeking men for romantic partners. And I think that's very important. I think that sometimes we put the mom, dad labels on top of the attraction to, again, staying in the heterosexual framework here, the opposite sex framework, and then people say, well, why is it that this woman always seeks out these,

what ended up being really terrible guys? She had such a great dad, but she had a dreadful mom. That is absolutely correct, and I think it's so interesting because I think that people think that having one parent that gave you what you needed is protective. And in some ways it is. But the thing that hurts is the thing

that gets the most attention inside of our bodies. So we don't necessarily think it, but we felt it. We internalized it. It lives inside of us. And so yes, having a good parent, one of the two, if you have two parents, one of the two is important, but it's interesting that it's not like we seek out

the person that liked the good parent always. Sometimes, again, because we're trying to work something out, we seek out someone like the parent who really hurt us. So, such a flaw in our wiring. Well, I mean, I think that's where therapy is really helpful. I think that's where people are like, well, what is therapy really for?

And I think it's really about what are the things that are outside of your awareness, but that are sort of driving the car? So it's like, we think we're the driver of our own car, but often like someone else is driving the car and we don't realize it and we think, why does this keep happening? Or what is happening in my life

that I'm not getting what I want in whatever dimension it is, whether it's professionally or personally. And so often it's because there's some force that you are acting out that you don't even realize. And I think the role of therapy is to kind of hold up a mirror to people and help them to see something

about themselves that they haven't been willing or able to see. You said that people will pick the person who's exactly wrong for them, who feels exactly right, at least at first, that it has this kind of come here, this summoning aspect to it. Like we feel drawn to it, it feels drawn to us. I mean, that's how relationships start after all,

one would hope. But in this case, you said that people come to find that that person is exact, harbors some of the exact same traits, I'm calling them that, behaviors is exact, harbors some of the exact same traits, I'm calling them that, behaviors, traits, so you know, whatever it is that hurt them in the context of their child-parent relationship.

Why do you think initially it presents as the opposite? I think it's about the familiarity that there's something so visceral about this feels like childhood and even if childhood was not optimal or even miserable, it still feels familiar and humans in general are very afraid of uncertainty. They're very afraid of the unfamiliar. I remember when I was in therapy, my therapist said to me, you know, you remind me of this cartoon, and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars,

desperately trying to get out. But on the right and the left, it's open, no bars, right? So why do we stay in this prison? Why don't we walk, why don't we even see that it's open? And why don't we walk around the bars? And it's because with freedom comes responsibility and uncertainty. We don't know what's, we know what it's like with freedom comes responsibility and uncertainty.

We don't know what's, we know what it's like to be in prison. That's been our experience. So that feels comfortable, even though we say we desperately want to get out. And then if we choose the uncertain path, we're responsible for our lives now. We can't blame it on mom or dad or this situation or that situation. I'm not saying those situations weren't impactful, of course they were, but we have choices as an adult. We have freedom as an adult that we didn't have as a child and sometimes it's really hard for us to say I'm going to have to be

responsible for my life. That's terrifying because we feel like we don't have the tools to do that. We feel like again the uncertainty, we'd rather have the certainty of like I know what it's like in prison, at least I know what that's like, and I know the devil you know. And that's not, again, that's outside of our awareness. I think what you're describing is a pervasive feature of being human.

If I may, there's this kid, he's now a young adult, but I've watched grow up from a very young age who got into college, he was doing really well, then fell in love, he made the decision to leave school, the relationship ended and I was talking to him recently and he's kind of in this kind of dizzying spin of like thinking about how great things were, how he blew it, and he's young, I'm like, listen,

you're good, like he didn't drop out, he just withdrew, he's young, I'm like, listen, you're good. Like he didn't drop out, he just withdrew. He can go back and he'll find another relationship. But, you know, and I empathize with him, but I passed something along to him that was actually discussed by a former guest on this podcast, Josh Waitskin, who was a former child chess prodigy,

he's gone on to do a number of things. And he said exactly what you're saying, which is in a different context. He said, we get so attached to our current identity and our past identity and trying to resolve those that we're more willing to stay in that state of discomfort than we are to step into a path of potential success. It makes no sense, right?

I mean, and so I pass this along, we'll see what he does with that knowledge. Yes, it's kind of like the misery of uncertainty. The certainty of misery is sometimes more palatable to people than the misery of uncertainty. So you can be certain that you're going to stay miserable if you stay in jail, but the misery of uncertainty is worse. So it's really interesting that people will make that trade off.

And the other thing about this attraction question that you're asking about, it's like I had this therapy client and she would pick people who were exactly like one or both of her parents and she would pick people who were exactly like one or both of her parents. And she would be so attracted to those guys. She would always go for them. And she's like, men are terrible, guys are terrible. It's like, no, no, no, the men you're choosing are terrible to you.

But then you go out on dates with these like great guys and she's like, yeah, no chemistry, no chemistry. Yeah, let's talk about that. What is the flip side, is the lack of interest in somebody that doesn't overtly or covertly harbor the painful thing that you're so used to? Right, so that's the thing.

She was working out this way of, she hadn't separated yet from her childhood. So she was trying to kind of reenact her childhood, reenact her childhood with these men. And she didn't realize she was doing that. She'd just be like, oh I'm so attracted to this person. Or things like, you know, I just I like this guy so much I don't know why he doesn't call when he says he will. Right? And it's like, who is that like? Who does that remind you of? When have you felt that before? That like, I never know where I stand with this parent,

with this boyfriend? And then the people who are really reliable, who, by the way, it wasn't about their physical traits, like these men were all physically attractive. It was she felt no sort of, again, that word chemistry, because there's something very threatening about, like, oh, there's no friction. It's a frictionless thing where he says he's going to call and he does. He's reliable. He does what he says he's going to do. I don't know what to do with that. It doesn't light her up in that way

because she's not having that big emotional reaction to it because it doesn't feel like the thing that would give her a big emotional reaction. And so once she sort of works that through, by the end of the therapy, she became very attracted to the kinds of guys who would treat her the way she wanted to be treated. And she was no longer attracted to the guys that she... So she'd get that initial kind of like, oh, I feel something when I'm in the presence of a guy like that, but I'm not really interested in a relationship with that kind of guy.

So that's, I think, what therapy can do for people. Yeah, one of the things that I've noticed in my own life is that as I've gotten older, I'll be 50 later this year, been looking forward to that, I feel great, but some of the things that I assumed for so many years, like slow is low. Like when things are really slow, like for many years it felt kind of depressive.

Now I love slow, mellow, like peace is the thing that I'm, just I savor so much. But for so many years, I think what you're describing, that sort of activation state of excitement. I was a pretty wild youth. And then, I mean, I like adventure

and I'd taken on at times dangerous adventures that I shouldn't have lived. Told myself I wouldn't do them again, picked a different adventure. But even in like my scientific career or podcasting, things that feel at times like a bit of a tight rope walk, just given the number of variables that I can't control just by virtue of what they are and the challenge of like long cycles of trying to publish.

Like they're kind of scary at some level, it's your profession after all. But I did the same thing in a lot of my relationships, lovely people in some cases, some cases not, but in most cases, fortunately for me, lovely people. But there was this sense that like, if something felt like a little bit of an upstate, kind of like a bit more of autonomic arousal, or a lot more autonomic arousal, that it had this kind of magnetic quality to it.

Whereas I think, and I'm not joking or lying here, I think owning a Bulldog taught me how to really savor relaxing. I'm not saying this just to highlight Costello again. I mean, I observed his relationship to the world and the Bulldogs contract with its owner is an amazing one that I think I learned a lot from. The contract is, I will die for you.

I will literally give up my life to protect you, Andrew. But if that's not on the line, I'm not gonna do anything. Yeah. We're just gonna sit here and enjoy the sunshine. Right. We're just gonna breathe and we're gonna eat food. Right. Friends are coming over and I'll get excited.

And you know, and I'm not trying to make too much of this. I really noticed, I was like, wow, he needs so little to be blissful. And yet I know that if like push came to shove, like he's on my side, we've got each other's backs. As opposed to, let's talk about a more human contract of like this picture or story of a couple that they have about themselves.

Ride or die is something people say a lot nowadays. It's beautiful concept, right? Loyalty, like you're in it together no matter what. But there's a calm version of that, like ride or die. And then there's like ride or die, like we'll take on anything, we'll bring in chaos, we'll be the chaos and we just don't quit. Very different activation states.

Oh, absolutely. And it took me 49 years to learn this. I see it in professional relationships too. People want the exciting thing, the big build, and then they're like, it's the chaos of like, oh, this founder left and this person. It's like, well, of course it started in drama, it's gonna end in drama.

Does this, some of this resonate? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, two things. One is that there's this concept of cherophobia, which is kind of fear of joy. And so, so many people, because they grew up in a way where whenever, let's say the parent was reliable in moments, right? Like at certain times, and then they were unreliable or they were really calm, but then they would blow up. And you never knew what was going to happen.

It was like you were walking on eggshells the whole time, right? So you're very afraid of anything that goes well, you think the other shoe is going to drop. Like at any moment. So you don't want to pick something that, and again, again outside of your awareness, like you don't pick the calm partner because it feels too good, like something's going to go wrong. So I'll pick the volatile partner because I'm prepared.

I'm prepared for that level of volatility, right? And so people sabotage all the time, whether it's about a job or a partner or whatever they want. They think, I am not going to go there because it's not safe to feel joy. Because something will go wrong and I will be crushed and it will be harder to have the experience of joy and to have it crushed than to never feel the joy. So there was a woman that I wrote about in my book who she just, she wouldn't let herself feel any joy

or get excited about a partner or excited about she wanted to be an artist and doing her art and things were going really well and then she'd self-sabotage. It's like, you can't fire me, I quit, right? It's like, I'm going to create the bad thing to happen to myself because if it happens from the universe, it's going to feel even worse. So I think we need to kind of really be aware there are lots of people out there who are terrified of good things happening even though they say they desperately want good things to happen and so they make bad things

happen or they make sure good things don't happen to them because it feels so uncomfortable to sit in that space of the other shoe is going to drop at any moment and I can't deal with that. But the other thing I want to say about this this slow burn type of thing is there was a study that was done that I wrote about in one of my books where they did a longitudinal study and they looked at people over 20 years and they followed up with them every five years from the first date to where they are later. And they had them instead of like historically saying, you know, when you ask people in relationships

and you say, what was it like when you first met? And they'll tell you some story, but it's retrospective. It's not like you weren't there at the time. You're sort of telling it through the lens of where you are. Now, what was great about this study was people wrote down at the time, here's what, here's how I feel. So people who were, let's say, got married and were happy would say, almost unilaterally, like, there was so much chemistry, we had

such a good time on the first date, it was amazing. Whereas at the time they might have said like, yeah, it was okay, maybe I'll see this person again, fine, like no butterflies or you know, whatever. But that's not the story they're telling themselves about it. Now people who either are unhappily together or no longer together would say, yeah, there was nothing there, there was no chemistry, I didn't really like the person. But at the time they might have said like, wow, I'm really interested in this person. It was like, we had so much chemistry. So we change our stories based on our present experience.

And we think we're telling an accurate version of what actually happened. And the reason I bring this up is because since people who are sort of happy couples tell these stories to other people, we think in our culture that if you go on a first date and you don't have that immediate spark, that it's not worth it. Like don't go on a second date. And what happens is sometimes a lot of the time when you have that immediate spark, it doesn't mean what you think it means. It's not that a spark is bad.

It means that you really need to see what it means. And it's not that not having a spark is bad. If you go on a date and you feel like, it was a nice conversation, I had a good enough time, go spend another hour with this person. Just go on another date with them and see what happens. But we don't do that because we have this illusion that you can just go back on an app or there's so many people out there.

And so we try to optimize as opposed to saying, what would it be like? I felt good when I was with this person. I didn't feel that rush, but I felt pretty good. So I think I'll go see what that's like again. And that should be our bar, not like, do I feel this rush? Do I feel like this is amazing? But did I have a good enough time? Sure, let me go see what that's like.

Yeah, one certainly wouldn't want to be bored in somebody else's presence, but calm seems like a good touch point to look for, as opposed to this activation state. Maybe it's the neurobiologist in me, and I'm guilty of also working on this autonomic arousal thing for so many years, this seesaw in us of being like upstates that can either be stress or bliss

and downstates, which can either be depression and fatigue or can just be like pleasant relaxation. Like the label becomes critical, right? Alert and stressed versus alert and elated is very different. Same level of alertness, two very different things, same, you know, depressed versus peaceful when relaxed, you know, and looking for or trying to figure out what sorts of interactions

bring about that kind of even seesaw might be best, not one or the other, maybe a little erring even a little bit more towards peace. Yes. And when I see couples who come in and they've been married for a long time now and they say, you know, well, say, what is the origin story? How did you meet? What was that like? What were you attracted to in the other person? And so often I'll hear words like, it was so exciting. I found this person so exciting. And it's like, that's

the very thing that what you thought was excitement was actually volatility, or was actually sort of anxiety, as opposed to that sense of you can be calm and feel excited about the other person. So we're talking about a neurological state, right, your nervous system, and then we're talking about your interpretation of what that means. So sometimes calmness is exciting. Sometimes excitement is anxiety provoking.

And so you have to be able to tell the difference between the two. Yeah, I'll just say yes and yes to both those statements. I think peace is, it's not everything, but it's necessary, but not sufficient as we say. If I may, I'd like to get kind of a little deep and abstract along this dimension of why people are so much more willing to stay in a state

that doesn't feel good versus risk the unknown and the opportunity to win in relationship, in life, in relationship, in life, in career, et cetera. Cause I do believe that. I happen to be reading, it's a hard book, a genuinely difficult book, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm reading Ernst Becker's, The Denial of Death.

I highly recommend it to everyone. One a Pulitzer after all, you don't need my endorsement. And, you know, I mean, the central thesis of the book, right, is that we're a weird species because we understand that we're going to die at some point. We're all gonna die. And that humans go through these very complicated gymnastics related to ego and symbols,

and we create notions of meaning and story to try and distract us basically from this really scary reality. It's terrifying, right? It's terrifying. Nobody really understands or knows what happens next. We can't be sure. And I have this idea in mind, as you're telling me,

that indeed people are willing to stay in a set of circumstances that don't work for them, even ruminating on the mistakes that got them there for a very long time, willingly, when all they need to do is make some new choices that they're fully capable of making. And I wonder whether or not it's because they're alive now, they know they're quote unquote safe now, like they're not dead.

I mean, the number of people I know who stayed in circumstances that didn't work for them for so long, professionally, relationally, it's like, how do they do that? And I understand sometimes, there's kids sometimes, there's financial issues, but it's always the case that they've eventually gotten out, thank goodness. And they always say, I wish I had done it so much earlier.

And I wonder whether or not as a biological and psychological being, we do this because we're thinking, well, I'm alive now, I'm breathing now, I'm quote unquote safe now, but I don't know what's going to happen if I make this other choice. Like it defies logic, but at the same time, if one just assumes that our like our biggest fear deep down in our unconscious is fear of death. We'll pretty much stay anywhere where we're continuing to be alive and not like in the moment of fearing death.

Sorry to get a little philosophical here, but I think this unconscious thing, where a lot has been made of it, the word means, okay, well, it's happening, but we don't know what's happening. But like, what are we really afraid of? And I do think ultimately, we're all just really afraid of death.

I don't think we're afraid of death. I think we're afraid of not having lived. So what I mean by that is I think we deny death. We're all sort of death deniers. Like we know it's out there somewhere, but we don't know when or how it's going to happen. And so we just pretend because there's no real, no pun intended, but deadline, right?

And so we just think sort of, know intellectually we don't have forever, but we kind of think we do. And so when you think about sort of the stages of psychosocial development, you know, you start with, you know, these conflicts that you have to work through at every stage of life and sort of the one where you're sort of the last stage is integrity versus despair. So integrity is if you have lived a life where you don't have a lot of regret,

you feel like you lived the kind of life that you wanted, you accomplished the things that you wanted to accomplish for the most part, whether that's relationally, professionally, some combination there, you have a sense of integrity at the end of your life. If you didn't, you have this sense of integrity at the end of your life. If you didn't, you have this sense of despair. People who work through that and have integrity are not afraid of death.

The people who are in despair are very afraid of death because they have so many regrets and they can't go back. You don't get a redo. And so I like to, in psychotherapy, really remind people that they need to keep death awareness sitting on one shoulder. Not to be morbid, but to actually make you live more fully. If you are aware of death, if you really look death right in the eye, you have more intentionality when you wake up every day. You say, I

don't have forever, so it's not like sometime in the future I might die. It's like you could die today, tomorrow. Anything could happen. And I think when I saw I write about this in my book where I was seeing this woman who was in her early 30s and she was diagnosed with cancer and everyone thought she was going to be fine and then there was this sort of rare recurrence. And she was newly married and her whole life was like turned upside down. And she really made me as the therapist look death in the eye in that way. You know how like you want to say something

like you know, she was talking about the things that people would say to her because we all have this death denial and they would say, did you get a second opinion? As if no, she's not going to get a second opinion about whether she's going to die, right? They'll say things like, well, these experimental treatments might work. Anything to deny the reality that she was going to die and very soon. And nobody wanted to sit with her in that. And it was my job to do that.

Even her husband had trouble sort of sitting with her in that in the beginning, right? And there was this one moment, this beautiful moment between them that she came in and told me about where he was like, you know, doing something and trying to relax. And he was a great, like incredibly supportive of her. And she came in and said, hey, there's this thing and I read about this and I wanna talk to you about this. And he said, like, can't we just have one night off from cancer?

And she said, I don't get any nights off from cancer. There's no nights off, right? And I understand both perspectives on that, but it brought up this beautiful conversation between them that really helped them to think about how much do we let death in and how much do we let sort of life or whatever's left in and how do we let death inform the aliveness that we still have. So I think it's really important that, you know, why do people stay in relationships too long?

Why do they stay in jobs too long? Why do they make choices that are not serving them and that they will later regret? It's because they are in full-blown death denial. And I think when people really acknowledge their mortality, it's one of the most healthy invigorating things that they can bring into their lives. When people say, what is the opposite of depression? It's not happiness, it's vitality. And where do we get vitality from knowing that we have a limited time here,

and we get to choose how we spend it. I agree 100%. This is something I think about constantly, although I've never looked at it through the lens that you just presented it. And I love what I just learned from you, which is that vitality is the state, the state of being, vitality is so key. I think about death probably more than I should, state, the state of being, of vitality is so key.

I think about death probably more than I should, because for a kid who wasn't from the inner city or in the military, I've just had a lot of friends die, a lot of suicides, a lot of drug stuff, unfortunately, and all three of my scientific advisors, suicide, cancer, cancer. I was very close with all of them, and I got to say goodbye to the second one. That was a rough conversation.

Anyone that's ever had a conversation with somebody where it's a goodbye conversation. I had to do the like, this is it. And it was brutal, but I don't want to well up. I've cried before on this podcast. I don't feel like doing it today. I don't have a problem crying from time to time on camera, but I don't want the plot line here to shift too much.

But I started after that conversation to adopt a practice. I do this yoga nidra, non-sleep, deep resting every day for about 10 to 30 minutes. And there's this moment right at the beginning, you're supposed to take a deep breath and then a long exhale to relax your body. And then you go into listening to the script. And ever since that conversation,

I've insisted on doing that. And as I do it, I remind myself, this is if I'm awake, or if it's not an accident that happens very fast, this is probably what it's gonna feel like to die. And so just trying to like, so I like this idea of readying myself for death every day as a means to access what you're talking about,

which is trying to live better. Right. Again, not to be morbid, just try to like, yes, I'm like a biological vessel. At some point, my body, my brain or both will just give out. Or I'll get bullet buster cancers, kind of what I always say. Something will take me out and there'll be this final and that's it.

And the closer that I feel like that we can get to that understanding and be like, okay, super scary and I'm not there now. So I'm gonna go back into the world and do the best I can. And it doesn't have to be scary. It sounds like you're aiming toward an acceptance of death, which is, I think, the way that we get motivated to live. So it's not fear of death.

That's not what I'm suggesting at all. I don't think we should be afraid of death. I think we should say, we get this precious time, however long we get. Everybody gets their own amount of time in this life. And so it's an acceptance of that. It's not a fear of that. And I think about how when people are afraid of death, they do things that are counterproductive. Like a lot of affairs happen in the wake of a death. So a parent dies and somebody then feels like, oh, I don't have

a lot of time left. Am I really happy in this relationship? Am I really alive? Am I really living? And then they go and do something like have an affair because they want that sense of vitality because they're doing it out of fear, not out of, oh, I accept that death is a part of our existence. And if I'm not feeling alive,

is it because of my relationship or my marriage? Or is it because I am not actively doing things in my life to create that sense of vitality? So very often in the wake of some kind of brush with death, like some kind of closeness, like maybe you had a brush with death, or maybe parent died or someone close to you died or a friend or a sibling. So often people act out and they do these things to create the sense of I'm alive as opposed to saying, wait, what do I need to look at in my life that will make me feel more alive that is not self-sabotaging? I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. self-sabotaging. quota for daily vitamins and minerals. And it helps make sure that I get enough prebiotics and probiotics to support my gut health. Over the past 10 years, gut health has emerged as

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you can go to davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Again, that's davidprotein.com slash Huberman. So much to go into here. This thing about vitality is so key. A friend recently said to me something. I was talking about how, gosh, there's like these certain interactions in life that are like, I feel like they like pull me in,

I don't like them. And then it just like really takes away from what I know I should be doing. And he said, you know, you have to do things that energize you. Mm-hmm. And immediately I thought, yes, and be very careful about the things that activate us.

Like there's this difference between activation and being activated versus being energized. I mean, it's a little bit semantic, right? But I feel like something that energizes me is like, I love cephalopods. I used to have cuttlefish in my lab. I love octopuses. And by the way, it's octopuses is the plural folks,

not octopi, we go into a whole thing here, but I won't. the way it's octopus is, is the plural folks, not octopi. We'd go into a whole thing here, but I won't. And, you know, looking at one of those guys or gals solving a puzzle, they just energizes me in a way. I feel it in my body. It's energy that I can use for other things. It's, you know, it's like an inspiration for me. And there are many other things that do that.

And then there are things that activate us, like where we, it's like a stress response. It's arousal, but it's negative valence. Right, it's draining. It's like pulling and it's taking from these things that energize us. And I feel like it's being able to notice those subtleties is hard in real time.

But I feel like vitality is about the things that energize us. Right, and so when you talk about that draining kind of activation, sometimes what we do when that happens is we go numb, right? So we don't want to feel anything. So, you know, there's this great expression that the, like scrolling through the internet

when people mindlessly do that, it's a colleague of mine said it's the most effective non-prescription painkiller out there. Can you repeat that? Because I want people to understand this. So yeah, so it's the most effective non-prescription painkiller out there. Can you repeat that because I want people to understand this. So yeah, so it's the most effective non-prescription painkiller out there, right? And so it's interesting when you think about numbness because people think that numbness is the absence of feelings. But actually numbness is the sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

And so you're shutting down. So when people say, oh, I'm numb, I'm not feeling anything, actually, you're feeling so much and you're feeling flooded, you're feeling overwhelmed. And so we need to figure out what are you feeling? So it's actually a state of arousal that you can't handle. And so then you're shutting down. But it's not that you're not having feelings, you're having so many feelings that you can't handle. And so then you're shutting down, but it's not that you're not having feelings, you're having so many feelings that you can't tolerate it.

And that is not, you know, that is not the, you know, people say, oh, I'm feeling numb, I'm feeling nothing. No, we need to figure out what is so overwhelming to your nervous system right now. Gosh, that's so important. I hope people will listen to that a hundred times because we've heard so much about dopamine hits that I think people have lost sight of the fact

that when you're online and you're just awash in all this information and videos, you're not getting those hits. You're in the post dopamine hit trough and we've been there for a long period of time unless we're judicious about our use of social media, an hour or three minutes or 15 minutes, whatever it is, but hours upon hours, there's no dopamine hit anymore.

The peak is gone, you're in the trough. And that's why it feels kind of like, how did all that time go by? The importance of this really can't be overstated. I think that we hear so much about fight or flight and the stress response that I think people forget that another component of the stress response of drama, of being awash in all this information and like movies and politics and violence and sex and all that stuff coming at us at once as we just scroll our thumbs is this thing of brachycardia.

You know, there's this phenomenon where when we're stressed, our heart rate actually slows down. Freeze. And that's the kind of numbing and you're just kind of blanking out. And I think that's a lot of what people are starting to experience with a lot of high drama input. Yeah, I see that in couples a lot where they come in and one person is saying, you know,

like, I feel nothing. I don't know what this other person's so upset about, right? And then when you really get into it, it's like this person's feeling all kinds of things. And it's really important that we understand, you know, when we are shut down versus when we are calm. Those are two very different states. Could you go into that a little bit further? Yeah, well, here's an example. So a couple comes in, let's say it's a heterosexual couple,

but it could be any couple. Often it is the woman in the couple who will say something to her partner, like, I just feel like I can't reach you. I feel like we're very disconnected. I want you to tell me how you feel. And because of our cultural stigma around men showing emotion, he has told himself, like, yeah, this bothers me or that bothers me

or I'm unhappy in this way, but I don't feel anything. I'm fine. Our marriage is good. So he doesn't even understand why he's there. And he thinks he's there for her because she insisted on it. And so when we finally get to maybe something that he's feeling and he finally does open up, it's so interesting because maybe he's sharing something

very vulnerable or maybe he tears up a little bit so that you can tell, like your body will tell you what you're feeling even if you aren't aware of it. You see okay there's some moisture there in his eyes or maybe a tear falls or maybe he actually starts crying. And her reaction and her whole reason for bringing him in was you know I need you to open up to me I want to feel connected to you I want to understand your inner life more. Well he does it and she then looks at me

like a deer in headlights, like, oh, wow, I don't feel safe when he doesn't open up to me, but I also don't feel safe when he's being vulnerable in this way. And these are sort of gender stereotypes that we think we might not fall prey to, but we do. And so it's so interesting that often men are the ones who seem sort of numb or calm, right, which are two, again, very different things in the relationship, but that's not really the case. It's that there's no room for him to express anything, so he has to kind of push everything down,

probably, again, outside of his awareness. And then the couple feels disconnected and both of them are unhappy. This idea that more words means more emotional, I don't buy it. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's interesting because men will come in if I'm seeing them alone and they'll often say something like, I've never told anyone this before. And they literally mean, I've never told anyone this before. Because when men hang out, they're not, it's not the same sort of level of,

let's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, right? Women will come in and say something like, I've never told anyone this before, except for my mother, my sister, my best friend. Right? So they've told maybe before, except for my mother, my sister, my best friend. So they've told maybe one, two or three people, but they feel like they haven't told anyone because for women, that's kind of not telling anyone. Well, now you have people concerned.

So if a woman says to me, I didn't tell anyone, that means she only told four people? I don't mean secrets. No, I'm just kidding. I mean like something about themselves where they feel maybe hesitant to share that or they feel ashamed about that Or they're not sure about something so you can see that difference, but I also think it happens very early So I'm the mom of a boy

I mean he's now a teenager But it's interesting because when I didn't notice this till I was raising a boy. I grew up with a brother, but I didn't notice it. When he would fall on the playground, right, like at two or three years old, everybody would say to him or the boys around him, like, oh, it's fine, brush it off, you're good, you're good, right? Even if he was in pain. And if a girl falls and she's in pain, they're like, oh honey, come here, how are you? Let's see, how are you feeling about this? Are you hurt? Are you okay? So very early on, they get these

messages like, girls can talk about it, boys can't talk about it. I remember when my son was, he was a basketball player in high school and he had, or this was in actually middle school. And in a practice, he got pushed down and his arm was kind of like not right. And everyone was like, get back up, it's fine. Well, his arm is like hanging off, right? And so, I was like, no, I think he needs to go to the ER. And of course he was mortified that I said that,

but in fact he had broken his arm. So go to the ER. And of course, he was mortified that I said that, but in fact, he had broken his arm. So that's the difference. If a girl had fallen down and her arm was like that, people would say like, oh, why don't you get it checked out? So what happens when these people get into adult relationships and this was what they were told about words and talking about things? You really see those differences. But the other thing I want to say about words is women are brought up to think that whenever

you have a feeling, you should share it. And my response to that is no. And people say, what do you mean you're a therapist? What do you mean don't share your feelings? You don't need to share every thought or feeling that crosses your mind unfiltered with your partner. That is not healthy communication. Healthy communication means we have filters and we get to think about, and we call it mentalizing, how will what I'm about to say land on the other person? It's not like you're regurgitating all of your thoughts onto the

other person. They're just supposed to deal with them. It's about like you're regurgitating all of your thoughts onto the other person, they're just supposed to deal with them. It's about relationally thinking, how will this person respond to that? Not like you have to take care of their feelings, but is it kind? Is it true? Is it useful? Does it meet those three criteria?

And if it doesn't, why am I talking? Why am I sharing this? You said it, not me. But I'll wager a theory that I think that some people, when they feel something, the kind of relief that comes from evacuating that feeling or trying to evacuate it with words The kind of relief that comes from evacuating that feeling or trying to evacuate it with words feels reflexively better to them

than sitting with it internally. So I think people, when they feel an emotion, I think sometimes they feel like if they just talk about it or evacuate it, then it's like they get rid of it, but they forget that it has an impact. Yes. Yes.

And what you're talking about is projective identification. So projection, right, is when you're feeling angry about something. Say you had like your boss did something to you at work and they upset you in some way or they were unkind and you're angry about or they're gonna make you work all night and you're really pissed about that, right? So you're angry, so you come home and you end up yelling at your partner, right? So you're projecting, you're really mad at your boss, but all of a sudden you're like yelling at your partner, you're angry at your partner.

That's projection. You're projecting one feeling about someone onto a different person that had nothing to do with the situation. Projective identification is a psychological process where you actually insert your feeling into the other person so you're angry about something that happened at work. It's not that you are now angry at your partner.

It's that you make your partner angry. It's like a hot potato. Like you take your feelings and you toss them to someone else, because you can't tolerate the discomfort of that feeling. So I don't want to deal with the feeling, so I'm going to say something to you that's going to make you angry, right?

And now they have to hold all the anger. You feel great. You're fine, because you're not holding the anger anymore. And now they're the ones who can't sleep. They're the ones who are upset, they're the ones who have to deal with what you couldn't tolerate. So again, we have to think about, you know, do we need to, like, why are we saying what we're saying? Can we be more intentional about how we communicate? Which doesn't mean you have to walk through a minefield. It just means that you have to be more aware of your feeling state and owning your feeling state

and making sure that you aren't using other people in your environment to release your feeling state to something else. That you need to learn how you can shift your own feeling state to one that feels better for you. I love that. I realized recently that thinking is something that we can practice.

For all the tools and protocols that I talked about on this podcast and elsewhere, like physiological size and morning sunlight and working out and zone two cardio and cold and all the things I realized recently, like spending five minutes just thinking about something and really trying to work through it linearly, like a challenge, like a life challenge is so valuable.

And I didn't come up with this on my own. I now have a practice of like, when something feels irritating or activating, I'll just like stop, put everything away and just sit and think like, what's going on here? And inevitably there's some, like some growth in understanding at the end of that. But it's hard work like to think like, what's going on here?

Am I activated because it's like true? Am I activated because it's false? Am I, you know, like having to sort all that, you might think, well, who has the time for this? But actually I would argue you don't have the time to not do it. I think that's the difference between reacting and responding.

So often what we do is we react to something and that's not processed, not thought through. And again, it doesn't have to take, like you're saying, it doesn't have to take a long time to just even count to five and breathe and see, you know, because reacting, reacting means acting again. So you are normally when you're reacting and it's like that zero to 60, you're acting on something that happened in the past and you're layering it on to whatever's happening in the present. So you're having a big reaction to something. We like to say if it's historical, if it's hysterical, it's historical. Meaning if you're, and by hysterical I mean if you're having a big reaction, there's probably something from your past, some reaction that is visceral to you that you're having

that is getting layered on to this current situation, experience, problem, and you don't realize it. So that's reacting. You're acting again. You're acting on something that happened in the past. If it's hysterical, it's historical. Responding is, I'm going to take a breath. I'm having a big reaction.

I'm going to sit for a minute, again, regulating your nervous system, and now I can kind of think about this differently. So we need space between, you know, there's that famous Viktor Frankl quote of, you know, between stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space lies our choice and our freedom. That's a paraphrase of it. But you need that space between the stimulus, whatever the thing is that activated you, and your response. So that's the difference between reacting and responding.

I totally agree, and yet life happens in real time. I mean, parents with kids, they got to pick them up and they're working and there's stuff coming through on the phone. My question is, do you think nowadays there's too much communication bombardment through text social media phone and real life that we We've eliminated all the space. I think what we've eliminated is there's so much more space in a face-to-face conversation so when I have young therapy clients who are you know, maybe in their early 20s and I had one client who was telling me this story

in therapy a while ago. And now I understand what this means, but this was several years ago. And she was telling it like this. She had her thumbs in the air and she said, and then I said, and then he said, and then I said, and I'm thinking, what is she doing? And then I realized, I said, wait,

you had this conversation on text? And she said, yes. And it was a really important conversation. And I said, I was trying to explain to her why they were missing certain cues. They were missing what it feels like to be in this space together. They were missing the experience of looking

in each other's eyes, of seeing facial expressions and body language. And she said, oh, no, but we also used emojis. And I had to explain to her why an emoji does not replace face-to-face interaction. Face-to-face interaction slows you down. You can just text anything, and you don't realize there's another person

at the other side of this on their phone who is reacting to your reaction. And I think that, you know, this is when we go back to comment sections, we don't realize like there's another person out there. We know that. But when there are so many times that we would have a very different kind of conversation with our partner, with family members, with friends, in our workplace, in comment sections, if we could remember that there's a human there and the easiest way to do that is to see someone like this looking across the table

at you. We can't always do that, but I think when you're having important conversations that we should remember, wait, this probably isn't appropriate to talk about on text, even though people think that, well, of course, it's so much more efficient. Actually, it's not, because now you're going to have conflict, now you're going to have misunderstandings, and now you're going to spend all this time trying to repair the rupture that just happened because you had the conversation on text. I refuse to argue over text.

Yes. I just won't have an argument over text. And I'll say to people, you know, because, because like I have a client and he's always sort of, he says, well, I just get pulled into it with my girlfriend. And I'm like, really? Does somebody have a gun to your head? Right? And this is where I think change, you know, we talk about what we want to accomplish in therapy and it's change. It's not just coming in and downloading the problem of the week and leaving and downloading the problem of the week again and leaving.

I like to say the insight is the booby prize of therapy, that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't make change out in the world, the insight is useless. So someone will say, oh, I got into that argument with my, you know, whoever, my partner over the weekend. And I'll say, well, did you do something different? They'll say, well, no, but I understand why. Great. And I'll say, well, did you do something different? They'll say, well, no, but I understand why. Great, that's good that you understand why,

but you need to do something different because we're all doing this dance with someone else, right? And if you change your dance steps, so people say, I want the other person to change. And I say, well, you can't change the other person, but you can influence the other person by making changes yourself. So if you change your dance steps, the other person will either have to change

their dance steps too because you're not doing that old dance with them anymore, or they'll leave the dance floor. And people are so afraid the person will leave the dance floor, and it's like, well, if they're not going to dance with you in a way that is the kind of relationship that you want, it's okay that they leave the dance floor. Go find someone who will dance with you in the way you want to dance. When it comes to behavioral change,

are you a fan of small one degree turns, or I'll propose an alternative, not as a counter, but just to explore next. But do you like, do you encourage your clients, do you call them patients or clients by the way? Either. I don't think either is a good word. I think it's so interesting because I think that

it's just, we're just humans and I don't mean to sound all woo-woo about this, but I really feel like the relationship that you have in that room, it's so unique and I have not figured out a way to describe it. And I don't think client or patient quite does it, I really feel like the relationship that you have in that room, it's so unique and I have not figured out a way to describe it. And I don't think client or patient quite does it, but for simplicity sake, we use either.

Okay, thank you. I've always wondered about that. Do you recommend that your clients make specific subtle changes, behavioral changes when they're, after they have an insight, or maybe, after they have an insight, or maybe even before they have an insight. I think the reason that people have so much trouble changing is because the step that they've chosen

is too big of a step to take at once. That you need small, manageable steps. And I think people also forget, this is why New Year's resolutions tend not to last very long, because change is a process. And there's a chapter in my book called How Humans Change, and I think it's so important for people to understand that there are stages of change.

And it starts with pre-contemplation, where you don't even realize that you're thinking about making a change. You think like, something's not right, but I don't really need to change. Like, something's just not right in the world. You know, it's my partner, it's my child, it's my whoever, right? Then there's contemplation, which is, oh, maybe I could make a change, but I'm not quite ready to do it. And that's when people usually, they come to therapy somewhere

around pre-contemplation. It's kind of between pre-contemplation and contemplation. Like something's not right, they come to therapy somewhere around pre-contemplation. It's kind of between pre-contemplation and contemplation. Like, something's not right, they come to therapy, we get them to contemplation, which is like, oh, maybe I'm contemplating making some changes. And then there's preparation, which is you're taking some steps to prepare for the change. So it's not like I'm gonna dive into the deep end

of the pool, it's like, oh, maybe I need to take some swimming lessons, or maybe I need to get a swimsuit, or maybe I need, you know, whatever it is, like, I need to prepare to make this change. And then there's action, where you actually make the change. And people think that's the last step. That's action. No. The last stage is maintenance.

And maintenance is how do you maintain the change? And maintenance does not mean that you are perfectly maintaining the change. It's more like shoots and ladders, if you remember that game where like kind of you go up and then you go down. If you can make mistakes during this time, because you're forming a new habit, you're forming a new way of being.

And until it becomes familiar, going back to our discussion about how the familiar feels really good to us and the unfamiliar feels really scary, the new thing will take a while to feel familiar. So let's say that you say like, I'm going to eat healthy. And that means that I'm not going to, you know, like, eat an entire Haagen-Dazs or something when I'm sad, then I'm going to do something different. Well, sometimes when you're sad, you might do that again. But then you don't self-flagellate.

So it's not like, oh, it failed, so forget it. I'm not going to, like, I failed and I'm not able to make this change. No. Or you don't say like, oh, I'm so terrible and that was awful and I'm so weak. Self-flagellation is not helpful. Imagine if your kid came to you and they said, like, I did really poorly on this test. Are you going to say, you're so stupid? You know, like, what's wrong with you? No, you're going to say, let's talk about what happened. And they might say, I needed help and I was embarrassed to ask, or I didn't understand it and or I didn't study, I messed up, I should have studied and I didn't study.

Okay, well, what are you going to do differently? Next time, let's come up with a plan. So you need to have just like you'd have some compassion for your child and hold them accountable, both. It's hard to hold yourself accountable when you self-flagellate. In the short term you can, but it doesn't last because it feels so unpleasant. You're just sort of bathing in shame. What you need is self-compassion. And actually, if you have more compassion for yourself, you're more able to hold yourself accountable. So you can say, oh, you know what happened? I was feeling really sad.

I had this whole pint of Haagen-Dazs, but it's okay that I was sad, and there's another way to do this. So next time when I'm sad, I didn't have enough support, so I'm gonna call a friend next time. Oh, self-compassion with accountability. Or I'm not gonna keep the Haagen-Dazs in the house because I know that when I'm sad, I'm susceptible to that.

Maybe one day I'll be able to do it, but right now I'm not going to keep that. But there's something else I can do, which is I really feel like I want, for me, self-compassion is related to I'm going to give myself a treat. So maybe my treat is I'm going to have a healthy snack that I like. Or maybe my treat is I'm gonna go to a movie, or whatever it is. But you have to figure out what works for you, and what works for other people might not work for you.

So it takes a little bit of experimenting. So maintenance is this kind of experimentation, but having self-compassion with accountability until you find a system that works for you, and the new thing becomes a habit, it becomes familiar, and the thing that you used to do becomes unfamiliar and doesn't feel good anymore. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, but nothing you don't.

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with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Yeah, for so many years, the field of sight, popular psychology was obsessed with, you know, how long does it take to make a change? It was like 28 days and it was like 90. I was like, as somebody who studies neuroplasticity,

I can tell you that there's one trial learning, you'll never go back, and there's stuff that takes years. It just depends on the intensity and the consequences, right? And even with consequences, I mean, anyone that's seen somebody relapse from drugs so many times over, clearly they're working with more complicated dynamics there. I think that this notion of reinforcing change is super key.

I'm really glad you raised that. I want to ask as a, I don't know how to phrase this, as a counterpoint or as an alternative, there we go, as an alternative to one degree shifts or I'm somebody that I've always benefited from deadlines. I love deadlines. Like a deadline is how I get things done. And I just, if there's a grant deadline,

a paper deadline, you know, deadlines work. And even if you don't meet them, it's great to see how far off you were, you know, if you did your absolute best and the mistakes you made to lead to the place where you didn't complete things in time, it's just, I love deadlines and I love rules. And so I've become a pretty strict rule enforcer for myself in my life.

And I think one of the rules that's really helped me in recent times with vis-a-vis relationships has been no drama, just none, like none. I don't tolerate any drama, but that's rigid, I realize, but it's helpful, far happier than I've ever been truly in large part because of that, like no drama. But the thing that I had to accept with a hard rule like that is that I'm going to lose people. So earlier you said that this patient client,

maybe he doesn't have to put up, maybe there's somebody better for him. There's someone else out there that they don't have to deal with. I think that one of the things that I notice in my own past and with others that I know struggling with a dynamic with people, typically it's romantic relationships,

but could be anything is you have to be willing to let go. You can't like always resolve the conflict. And I find that a lot of people, maybe it's this childhood thing, they feel like they have to like remain on great terms or they have to stay friends or they have to like remain on great terms or they have to stay friends or they have to put a bow on it. And I so admire the people in life that are like,

yeah, that didn't work, done. Because I look at the time wasted. Yes. And I think that in our desire to make everything kind of okay in the end, we burn valuable life energy and incredibly valuable time. And so some people might hear like no drama and think,

well, you're gonna lose a bunch of people. And I will, I certainly will. Or they'll rise to the occasion or whatever you wanna call it. But I have a full life of many people with whom I have zero drama and wonderful relationships. So I'm full, my dance card's full. But I'd rather, I feel so firm about this,

given the piece that it's brought me, and that I realized like, yeah, like I may never talk to that person again. I might, I might not. But at the first hint of drama, like I may never talk to that person again. I might, I might not. Right. But at the first hint of drama, like I'm done. And I think it's because I forced so much suffering on myself for so long of trying to resolve these things

that clearly wouldn't work. And I don't know, I feel immense freedom from it, but I think I hear this with other people like, oh yeah, but you know, they're gonna change or you know, he's gonna stop drinking or not referring to me, I'm not a drinker, but there's a heart and fat, I quit drinking. Didn't have a problem with it,

but I just was like, I'm done with alcohol. Just like that relationship's over. And they just cling to this like thing that it's gotta, like they just won't let go. Yeah. And I don't, what is that about? Why do we hold onto the thing that it's got, like they just won't let go. Yeah. And I don't, what is that about? Why do we hold onto the thing that doesn't work, even if we know we're not gonna like stay with it?

Yeah. What is this obsession? It's interesting. So I'm thinking about how, when you say no drama, what does that actually mean? And it's really important because when you look at why people who are most satisfied with their lives, you know, what is it about their lives?

They're surrounded by people that they feel good about. Now, let me be clear about what that means. So, you know, we talk about this concept of idiot compassion versus wise compassion. So idiot compassion. I love that phrase. I don't even know what it means and I love it already. So idiot compassion is what,

if you surround yourself with people who are only going to validate your experience. When you say no drama, that's not necessarily a great thing. So like for example, let's say that someone says to her friends, like, I don't understand why he broke up with me, or I don't understand, you know, why this keeps happening to me. And your friend's like, no, you go girl,

he's wrong, you're right, you know, whatever. Or, you know, my partner's doing this. And we tend to kind of feel like our job as a friend is to support the position of our friends. That's idiot compassion. Wise compassion is what you get in therapy, where we say, you know, like, what might be going on here? It's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. We don't say that to our friends in

idiot compassion, okay? So think about that. So is it that you want no drama, meaning you want your friends to kind of back up everything you're saying? You're not going to grow as a person. You're not going to hear what you need to hear. The friends you want to surround yourself with are people who will tell you the truth in a kind, respectful way and that you're willing to hear it. So some people think that it would be drama if their friends kind of called them on their bullshit, right? That's not drama.

So that's a healthy, communicative, open, honest relationship. I agree, by the way. I think that my definition of drama is when challenging things are presented in a way that's not in effort to resolve. Right, right. What I'm talking about is evocative expression.

Yeah. Like when things come, you know, I mean, and I'm sort of chuckling on the inside too about this thing about friends. I mean, I would say my group chuckling on the inside too about this thing about friends. I mean, I would say my group of friends, they're amazing. I'm blessed with incredible friends and friendships. I'm so blessed.

I only wish I had more time for all of them. We're pretty hard on each other in terms of being very blunt, very like, that was dumb. Is maybe more male specific kind of language. Like that was dumb. Maybe more male-specific kind of language, like, that was dumb. Like, why'd you do that? That was super stupid. Or, yeah, don't be an idiot, don't do it again.

Or, no, I totally disagree. That's a lot of the exchange in my friend group. I would say, maybe just the culture I grew up in, and academia, very little validation. Validation isn't a big part of it, but I am also surrounded by people that are very self-critical. So it's sort of inherent to the way they work

in their work and their relationships and their life and their fitness, like pretty much, everyone's pretty get after it. Right, what I'm talking about is when people say no drama, what they mean is don't bring anything up, right? Don't challenge anything, don't bring anything to my attention that maybe needs to be brought to my attention because I could be better

in this relationship. To me, I think what you're talking about is volatility, which is drama, right? Can you express the thing you want to express in a way that feels like an invitation or like it comes from a place of curiosity as opposed to blame? So often people will come at the person and say,

you did this as opposed to, I was confused by what happened back there. What happened? Why did you make that choice? Or what happened between us here? Can we talk about that? So you're being curious about the other person's experience as opposed to blaming the other person and assuming their intentions or why they did something or something about their character. So drama tends to be from all the assumptions. Like I know that my truth is the right story. That's

how you would come at that, right? And yours, you were wrong. And I think it's so interesting because people come to therapy with these faulty narratives. You know, we're all storytellers. We all try to make sense of something. And we all believe that our story is the absolute accurate version of the story. And it's actually so funny when you see couples and they experienced the same, they were part of the same experience and they have wildly different versions. And then there's some part where the Venn diagram overlaps.

And then finally they can see, oh, that person's not a bad person. They were coming at it because they, in their story, they believe this. And that's so important. So drama happens when assumptions are made. People characterize the other person's story as inaccurate, their own story as accurate.

And then there's lots of kind of, there's no space for curiosity or connection. It's all rupture, no repair. As you're saying this, I realized what I mean by drama, because it's a very broad term. And I come from a background where, my dad's from South America, my mom's from New York. So like emotive expression is not what I'm referring to,

right? Like people being passionate about something or even angry about something or even having a problem, like, hey, that didn't feel good. That's not what I'm referring to. I realized as you were saying it saying what it is that gets me, it's when that I put under the category of drama, which for which I have zero tolerance for,

unless you can convince me otherwise, is when people dynamite the mind on the way out. It's, I'm telling you how much this sucks. This is how I feel, or this is what you did. And then I'm inaccessible. Yeah. And, you know, so they're not really interested, it's this evacutive expression or projection, as you said.

That's what I'm defining as trauma. That to me is far and away different than saying, hey, listen, like this sucked. Can you think about this? Can we talk about this? Andrew, you screwed up. Like, okay, great. Like, let's figure it out.

Absolutely. But it's this, I'm rolling a grenade in the door and I'm out of here. Right. That to me is the one that I'm like, I just, I'm too old for that shit. The silent treatment is actually incredibly aggressive and hostile.

People think that the loud one is the problem in the relationship, sometimes the silent one is the one who's the problem. You know, it's the person who smiles through everything and doesn't really say anything, but they're being so passive aggressive. Or the person who then, as you said, detonates the bomb and then goes silent,

and that's their punishment, they're punishing you by not talking to you for a day or two or three. That's incredibly hostile. And the other way that people do that is you bring up something in a nice way to someone and here's how they create drama but they're shutting something down,

they're shutting down any possibility of communication is every time you bring up something to them, they cry. Now, people don't like it when I say this. They say as a therapist, they should be able to feel sad or hurt when someone brings up something and they should be able to cry. And I'm saying, no, sometimes crying is a manipulation. You can manipulate someone. So I'll see a couple and one person will bring up something, let's say, you know, like when

you do this, you know, like, when you do this, you know, or this hurts me, or I don't like this, or I need more help with this. And the person cries, like, you're hurting my feelings. This is, you know, as opposed to saying this person is trying to communicate with you, you're going to have feelings about it. But there's a manipulative way in which people will cry every time or many times. And it shuts down any possibility of communication. And so we have to say, you know, what are you doing here?

Every time you cry, then the other person feels like, well, I can't bring this up because I'm hurting my partner. And now we can never have communication because if I bring something up, I'm going to catch 22. If I don't bring it up, we have a problem. If I bring it up, you're going to say I'm hurting your feelings and then I have to stop so I have to be extra careful. And I don't know, there's no way to move forward here. So what do you do in that instance?

We have to talk about the functionality of the crime. Why is it so hard for you to hear something that your partner is saying? Do you feel blamed? Do you feel shame? Shame is something that we avoid at all costs, right? No one wants to feel that. Do you feel like this person is making a global statement

when they're not, that they're saying you're a bad person as opposed to what you did here was bad? So there's a difference between who you are and what you did. And bad. So there's a difference between who you are and what you did. And often we paint with a big brush when we're trying to communicate with our partners, you know, like you're bad as opposed to that thing that you did, that was not good.

That thing you did was bad, but you inherently are not a bad person. And we tend to tell our partners in all kinds of ways that they're bad people when they do something that displeases us. We have to be really careful about separating what they did from who they are. And we need to do that with ourselves. So often we do something and then we feel so much shame around what we did and we say, oh, I'm a terrible person. I did something that doesn't align with who I want to be. It doesn't align with actually who I am.

And that's good that you feel bad about it because if we didn't have guilt, right? So guilt is a good positive feeling. Shame, nothing comes from shame. We just tend to sort of like retreat from shame. Guilt is great. Guilt is saying you're not a sociopath. Guilt is saying what I did did not align

with the person that I am. So I am a good person. I did something that felt not aligned with that. And so I need to be aware that it's good that I feel guilt. If I didn't feel guilt, that would say something about my character. But the fact that I do feel guilt means that I'm willing to look at myself

and I'm willing to do something different and I'm willing to do something different and I'm willing to make a change. And here I'm making a bunch of assumptions. I wonder if the crying is pre-programmed in some people because it's what was able to elicit sympathy and protect them. Like if they didn't do it that they'd get hit or if they didn't do it,

it would like the bombardment would continue. Yeah, absolutely. Everything we do is for self-preservation, and we're just not aware of it. Like we want to avoid pain at all costs. And so even though a lot of what we do to avoid pain creates more pain, but that's not our intent. So anything that, you know, when people, there's somebody that I write about in my book who

comes off as very unlikable at the beginning of the book, and people say, why did you even take him into your practice? Why did you work with him? Why did you treat him? And when they get to the end of the book, not to spoil everything, but they, he's probably the person they love the best. And it's because I'm looking at that person's actions as they're coming from a place of he's protecting himself from pain.

So he's an asshole to everybody because it doesn't let anybody in. It doesn't let him have the possibility of being hurt again because he was terribly hurt. And so, you know, we say hurt people hurt people. What are they doing? They're protecting themselves from more pain because if they let themselves be vulnerable, they're exposed to the possibility of pain and they don't want that. Are there some people for whom therapy

just ain't gonna help? Yes, people who are not willing to self-reflect. And it's hard, right? I think a lot of people come to therapy and they say, I want something to change, but what they want to change is something else or someone else. And you, again, you can influence that.

You can't change another person. Before people come to couples therapy with me, I ask them to each separately come up with the one thing that they want to work on about themselves. So it's not what do you want to change in your partner, it's if you are going to be the best possible version of yourself in a relationship, what is the one thing that you really want to work on

in our couples work together? Well, no, I want to work on things, but I really need the other person. No, wait a minute. I won't even see them in the room until they each have a very clear sense of this is the thing that I want to work on. Now, that might change over time, depending on what we uncover, but they need to come in with a goal. Like, we all know that there's something about ourselves that we can do better at in a relationship. And so what is that thing? What do you want to work on?

And if the other person happens to change, great. If they don't, that's good information too. But you're not coming in because you think the other person's going to change. You're coming in to grow on your own. And you're growing in the context of this relationship. But you are doing some personal growth in the couples. I happen to think couples therapy moves us along faster individually than individual therapy does.

Interesting. Because in individual therapy, you're telling a story, it's your perspective. I have to, as a therapist, intuit what else might be going on out there. In couples therapy, I see how this person reacts with other people. Now I can see that in the therapeutic relationship

individually, like whatever, this is a microcosm of how they interact out there. But I'm different from the people they interact with out there because of the nature of the therapeutic relationship. So there will be what we call transference, where they transfer some of their feelings about other people into the relationship

with the therapist, and that gives me a really good idea of how they interact out there. Could you give me an example of transference? Yeah. Positive and negative? Yeah. So let's say that I say something and it turns out that they felt criticized. Well it could be that I said something in a critical way. Maybe.

Entire entirely possible. It could be that they have kind of transferred feelings about a parent onto me if I happen to be the age of their parent or similar to or if there's enough of an age difference between us. And they heard something that was meant to be compassionate, but it was also true and something they need to look at, but they heard it as criticism. Sometimes you transfer, there's romantic transference, people get, you know, romantically attached

to their therapist, and you have to be able to talk about that. Obviously, you know, you have very clear boundaries, nothing can ever happen, all that, but it's okay to bring that up. People think I'm not allowed to say that, you know, I have these feelings, and then we deal with them and we see, you know, how we can talk through that. But it's okay to bring that up. People think I'm not allowed to say that, you know, I have these feelings and then we deal with them and we see, you know, how we can talk through that. And it's generally not that the person wants to get with you. It's really more about like what it means to feel romantically loved or what it means to be loved in general and that they put like a romantic veneer over that. So you know, love is so complicated and it's so multifaceted.

So there's that kind of transference that happens. But I think with couples when I say you need to be able to work on something that would if you were to be the best possible version of yourself in this relationship, what would you want to work on? It might be I need to self-regulate better. It might be, I need to be less needy. In other words, a lot of people think that their partner needs to be like everything. You need to telepathically read my mind and if you don't, you don't care.

You need to intuit what I wanted to do for my birthday. And if you didn't, then you don't really know me. And these sound like kind of extreme, almost immature examples, but these are the kinds of things that people get caught up in. And I'm giving kind of like the highest level of that, but they can be much more nuanced and much deeper.

And so, I think that people, you asked, who cannot be helped? People who are not willing to self reflect and look at themselves. I love that statement you made, which is if people are coming to therapy, they need to ask about the change they want to make in themselves.

Yeah, and what their role is in what is not going the way they want in their lives. And this isn't about blaming them for the problem at all. It's about saying there might be some truly difficult situations out there. You might have a parent with mental health issues, and what are you going to do about that? You probably aren't going to change the fact that they have mental health issues, but your

reaction can change. So you can do something different. We can talk about what that might look like. You cannot engage in that dance. You can talk about what that might look like. You cannot engage in that dance. You can set boundaries. You can, you know, there are different ways to make choices about that. There are sort of like societal things that we can't change. But like what can you do so that you feel like you have agency in the world? Because we all have agency to some degree. So where do we find that agency

as opposed to going into this like helpless, I'm the victim position. And people don't like to hear that. They say, what kind of therapist are you calling people victims? I'm not saying people are victims, I'm saying people have the mindset that they don't have agency and then they become victims.

But when you realize that you have agency, you realize, well, there are really difficult people, things, circumstances in the world, but I get to choose how to respond to them. Going back to this thing about texting, how many of the challenges that people present to you in your office these days incorporates or starts with, yeah, so I got this text versus somebody came to me

or called me and we had a hard interaction or we had a conversation or something happened at work. I mean, how much of it is in the digital world nowadays? Yeah, so here's what's interesting about texting is so many times people will come in and they'll say, we had this conversation on text and I'll say, can you show me the conversation? Which people think, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you want to hear the narrative from that person? Well, I just heard the narrative, but I want to see what

was actually said because they're like, oh, I don't really know. Or let me read you what they said. And so, but I want to see what both parts of that were. And then the person can see, oh, here's how I contributed to that, or here's a choice that I made in that moment. Again, I prefer that these conversations that people have are face-to-face conversations when they're kind of about something in the relationship. You know, text is great for like your dailness of, hey, look what I had for lunch, or how you doing, or I love you, or whatever, right? Or, can you pick up the kid? But when you're having some kind of,

again, rupture or conflict between you, that's not a text conversation, but many people will do that on text. And then now we have a record. So it's not just like what my client is saying to me. It's like, this is how the conversation actually went down. We have a transcript of it. And it's really helpful for people

to be able to look at that transcript. I agree. At the same time, I feel like breakups are much harder than they used to be because you can block someone on social media, but then the block itself becomes this thing. A symbol. You can mute people. You can put your phone away,

but unless you block their number, they can send you things. You can go back and read texts if you're an obsessive person. so you can go back and read texts if you're an obsessive person. There are just so many venues or avenues, excuse me, for people to access our psyche when we're trying to move on.

In the old days, kids, you had a phone with an answering machine, you broke up, it sucked, you looked at the photos, you put the photos in a box or you burned them and you put the box in a shelf. And then when you got into a new relationship, you either hid the box or you destroyed the box and you moved on. And people's phone numbers changed.

And it was so much easier. I noticed that one tended to just remember more good stuff because there wasn't other stuff coming in. The bad stuff tended to dissip remember more good stuff because there was another stuff coming in. The bad stuff tended to dissipate, or maybe it didn't. It was just so much easier. You weren't being infiltrated by the past. And because of the nature of electronic stuff, I just feel like it's like the past

trying to like hold us back. And this is on both sides. So, you know, it doesn't matter if the breakup was amicable, then you long for the person now and again, or the breakup was rough, and then you like, you relive elements. There's so many variants on this that, I don't know, it just feels like breaking up's already

one of the hardest things. People, I think, don't acknowledge just how hard breakups are. Right, they don't. And I think there's this hierarchy of pain that people have about certain things. Like, well, you only dated for this amount of time. How can it be that painful

this amount of time after the breakup? You know, that like, there's this hierarchy. But if it was a divorce, then people understand why a year later you're still dealing with it. Or, you know, if you were only married for five years versus married for 20 years. There's some hierarchy of pain that we have around things.

It was a miscarriage, but your child, your eight-year-old didn't die. You know? I'm sorry, I mean, that's just, people say that kind of thing? No, no, no, they don't say it, but that's how they treat people. It's like you had a miscarriage,

like what they say is like, oh, it's okay, you'll get pregnant again. If your child dies, they're not like, it's okay, you'll have another child, right? But it feels the person who had a miscarriage that they lost their child. It's very, very painful. But listen to how we talk to people

who have these experiences that we tend to think that some experiences are sort of higher on the hierarchy of pain than others are. And so we think like a breakup is not as bad as, like a breakup in a non-marriage or a short marriage is not as hard as a breakup with a long marriage or whatever the hierarchy is. Or even someone who, you know, it's like, well, and this is the reason that people don't actually get help for things because they think, well, you know, it's like, well, and this is the reason that people don't actually get help

for things because they think, well, you know, it's just this, it's not really that bad. Or I'm feeling kind of sad or I can't sleep or I'm having trouble in this relationship, but it's not that bad because I have a roof over my head and food on the table, so I don't need to go get help. But let's say you fall and you clearly have like, you know, broken your wrist.

You're not going to sit there and go, I don't need to do anything about that because I don't have stage four cancer. You're going to be like, I'm going because I need to get my wrist repaired. So we treat sort of physical health and mental health as two separate entities when of course the mind and the body are all intertwined. And I think that with breakups it's the same thing. It's like people think, well it's not that big of a deal after the first X amount of time. And breakups can really mark you depending on how they went down. Like if it was really volatile, if it was one of these things where you got no sense of, if you were cheated on, if you didn't understand why the breakup happened, like it was very surprising to you,

you know, all those things. It can really be a different kind of breakup than a breakup where a person, it might be very painful, but you understand sort of why the breakup is happening. It doesn't mean you don't feel the loss, but there's something different about the quality of the breakup. And so then people tell stories about the breakup because they didn't get the real story. So the story now becomes like you don't really understand why the person is breaking up with you because they didn't communicate during the relationship that maybe they were unhappy.

And now you watch them on social media. So you're watching a story and you have this whole story in your mind of, look at them, they're on this vacation or they're not even like with another person. They're just like, look, they look so happy, but it's social media. Of course they look happy. People are not posting on social media of, I'm so sad about my breakup, generally. There's a whole sort of subculture of people who do that, but it's a different thing.

Very generational. Yes, yes. But I mean, in general, you're having to, you sort of like, you want to move forward. And by the way, about grief, it's not like moving on, because we're sort of shaped by every experience that we have, but it's about moving forward. So people always say about grief, you need to move on. No, you

need to move forward. Let's just talk about that. So you let's say you have to move forward. It's very hard to move forward when you're watching the other person's life. You're not moving forward at all. They're moving forward, maybe. You don't really know. But why are you spending so much time watching someone else move forward? Can we focus on how you might move forward, whatever that might look like? But it's really hard when you have this like split screen of their life is happening and your life is happening. I definitely want to talk about grief.

Before we do that, I'd like to double click into this breakup thing. In my observation and experience, one of the hardest things about breakups is this idea that we wanna somehow come to a common narrative. And there seems to be a lot of desire to kind of understand where the other person's experience of what happened. And a very, I don't think it's intentional,

but I think people can be somewhat destructive in a breakup by sort of changing the whole, this notion like it was all an illusion or something, or, you know, where, you know, I mean, I guess I've had enough relationships and breakups to realize that, you know, there's love that continues. There's things that you thought were love that weren't. I mean, there's love that doesn't continue

and there's all sorts of shapes and forms of this stuff, but that like good, well-meaning people that take divergent paths, I've learned it doesn't mean anything else sometimes. It literally just means that. There isn't a need to rewrite the script, like it wasn't what I thought. It actually was what I thought,

and then it was something different. Or it just circumstances changed or things changed. I'm not trying to make light of this. I mean, I would argue I'm probably one of the least skilled people at breakups, although I've gotten quote unquote better at it. It's always super painful. Like I've never had a breakup that didn't really hurt.

It doesn't matter if I left or they left, that just didn't really hurt. And I think it's this idea of like, and this is why I think it's an interesting, perhaps segue to grief is that it's almost like as something ends, we look back and we evaluate the story and try and figure out, was that real? Right.

Was it not real? How could that have been real? And then we're here, right? There was all this hope and expectation. And yeah, I think about this a lot. Yeah, so sometimes what the loss is about isn't so much about the other person, it's about the loss of what it feels like

to be in a primary relationship. So you're losing the primary relationship and then it happens to be with this specific person. And so there were good be with this specific person. And so there were good qualities about that specific person and qualities that maybe weren't right for you, but what you're losing is the dailiness. So so much of what feels good about being in a primary relationship is, you know, you get to tell the person the minutiae of your day, the little things, the shared history and the

shared experiences that become the shorthand and the inside jokes and the routine of, you know, your flight landed, who you're going to text, oh, text your partner, right? You know, just the built-in infrastructure of being in a primary relationship and someone who knows, like, what kind of pizza you like and you know all those little things that come from you know going through daily life together and you know all the things about their families and you know all the things about the people in their lives and the people they're talking about like this friend and this boss and whatever their co-workers. So it's this whole world that's been co-created. And then all of a sudden, when that person isn't there

anymore, that the dailiness of your life changes drastically. Like, you're not waking up with that person. You're not eating meals with that person. You're not talking about what's for dinner with that person. You're not saying, you're wondering how that thing with their sister worked out. But you don't know now, because, right, and you're losing the side kind of shared people too, like you might have liked that person's family a lot. Sometimes you stay

in touch with the family, but sometimes you don't. So like your world changes so much in the day to day, you're not just losing that person, you're losing an entire world that you were living in. And now your world looks so different and you have nothing to replace it with yet. So it doesn't mean you have to replace it with another partner. You might replace it with things in your own life. But you just, you know, breakups tend to happen. Maybe you saw the breakup coming, but you're not really imagining what it will be like after until you're not really imagining what it will be like after, until you're in it. And you can't really understand what it's like

until you're in that breakup phase. So I think that makes it so hard because you're losing a lifestyle, right? Like the dailiness of your life. And, you know, it's like when you're in a relationship, you're in the present, but you're also in the future. So you imagined that the present was going to be the future. And now, mother of all plot twists, the future was just taken away along with the present.

So it's not just you're losing the day to day, you're losing what you imagine next year was going to be like, and five years were going to be like. So it's a huge thing. It's so interesting because in my most recent book, it starts with my breakup, and that's how I end up in therapy. And my whole thing is like, you know, the idiot compassion, what we were talking about with my friends,

of he's a jerk and he's terrible and you dodged a bullet. My therapist, who I thought was going to validate this position, didn't, for the better. And so by the end of the book, you know, people even write in now, they're like, oh, I can't believe I call him boyfriend to the book. I can't believe he did that. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I was trying to say he's a good guy. Like, you have to understand that I was seeing this through the lens of the breakup. And then over time, I see that I was responsible for this too. I had a role in this too. I chose not to see

the things that I didn't want to see because I didn't want to live in that world of the breakup. Right? So I think it's wanting what you were saying earlier about wanting to have a shared narrative. Like we feel so wounded by the fact that the person, let's say that they broke up with us, or even if you break up with them, that they don't see the relationship the way you saw it. They had a different experience of it, and you feel like, well, they're not seeing it in the right way. No, they're just seeing it, they are seeing it in the right way from their perspective.

And I think that we have this way of wanting to heal the wound by their saying, oh no, no, you were great in this relationship. It was me. Or we were both great and it just didn't work out. Yes. Yes. Right. Right.

And we so want that. And the reality is that your partner is going to see things about you that maybe you don't agree with or maybe they're true and that's why they hurt. I always find I miss the person's smell. that maybe you don't agree with, or maybe they're true and that's why they hurt. I always find I miss the person's smell. Yes, it's those little things, those second of intangibles. I think that takes the longest.

Yeah. I have a really good audio memory too. I can like close my eyes. I've been able to do this since I was a kid and hear people's voices. And yeah, but like smells, I think we come to expect them. And then we don't notice they're there. And then the person's gone.

And then like, smells different here. So there's this theory, it's from the Gottmans who do this research on couples and they talk about the bank of goodwill, that you need five deposits into the bank of goodwill for every one withdrawal. And so we tend to, when we're in a relationship, we don't like something about something that's happening in the relationship. We think about what's not working.

We're taking all these withdrawals from the bank of goodwill. But things like smell, that's a deposit. Like, you smell so good. I really like your smell. Do we say that enough? Do we focus on the things? How many deposits are we actually making so that when we do make a withdrawal, it doesn't empty the bank account?

And it's usually when a breakup happens that all of a sudden we think about all those things that we didn't deposit But now we miss Right that we're sitting in our bank account and we don't have access to that account anywhere the accounts closed But when the account was open we didn't look at what we had in there And I think that the people who are what I see with couples who are most successful Are the people who do notice what's in the bank account, even if they have to take a withdrawal every now and again. I'm always struck by how people talk about their partners

when their partners aren't around. Very important. The other day, this kid came up to me in the gym, Kid. He was probably in his 30s, but there I go again. He was a podcast fan and we were just chatting. I like to ask people like, what do you do? And he's in tech, I think, I don't recall, but and it's like, where are you from?

And he's like, he's from Brazil, cool. And then we were talking about something. He said, my girlfriend. And then we got into some discussion about travel in South America or something. And then at one point he said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, she's like my flower. And the way he said it, I was like, wow, that's beautiful. You know, again, I'm half Latin,

and but I haven't heard that enough. And I was like, wow. And I said, that's amazing that you just referred to her as a flower. He goes, yes, she's just, she's like the flower in my life. And I was like, wow, like you don't hear that that often. I also don't get into conversations like this very often, but somehow he just shared that spontaneously.

And she wasn't there to hear it. I can't remember the guy's name, forgive me. She'll never know that he referred to her that way. It was really beautiful. And there's certain people, like I heard Rogan one day talking about his wife on a podcast, he was like, she's just so nice. Like he just, the appreciation he has for her

in the small details of how he refers to her. And those are just two examples. And then I could give a bunch of negative examples about people, gosh, I don't want to put it on one or the other side of the male female dynamic, but like, but when people say like, oh yeah, like they're a pain in my ass or like the referring to people as their old lady or their old man,

like that's, that's an interesting, but kind of in my mind, not the sweetest way, maybe it could be, maybe it depends on the tone. Anyway, I'm casting a lot of shadows and light where perhaps I shouldn't, but that interaction was delightful. And I thought awesome for him and awesome for her. That's why I often start a couple session with how did you meet?

Because usually when people come to couples therapy, they think the first thing that's gonna happen is you're gonna say, so what's going on? What's not, you know, what's then they'll start with the problem. And then they're like in that withdrawal from the bank account space. So I like to say, well tell me how you met. And immediately, usually, there's like, oh, and they have this great story, right? And they remember what they love about the other person. So we start with that. And you can see them sort of remembering

who the person is that they fell in love with. Like, oh, I thought he was so cute, or, you know, oh, was this really, we were friends for a year, and I didn't know if he liked me, and then this happened, and then I really admired this about him or her, right? And so they start in this different space.

And I think about it like, and this is going to sound like a weird metaphor, but you think about like nonstick pans versus like, you know, a regular pan that you have to put something in so that the stuff doesn't stick to it. When I think about like, there are people for whom the good stuff, they're like Teflon pans, the good stuff, they're like Teflon pans. The good stuff doesn't stick, but the bad stuff about the other person sticks like a non-stick, like a pan that sticks, right? So it's like, you think about like,

what is sticking about your partner when you think about like what they're putting in the pan, right? Like, are you in a Teflon pan for good things or are you in a different kind of pan for good things? Because you have to think like, what am I focusing on? Where does my attention go? And so, why are you focusing on the things that are upsetting you so much?

And there are certain things that you're never going to change about your partner. Like your partner, we don't get to order up our partners a la carte. We don't get to say like, I'll take these qualities of my partner, but I'll take this thing that I don't like about them on the side. You don't get to order up our partners a la carte. We don't get to say, like, I'll take these qualities of my partner, but I'll take this thing that I don't like about them on the side. You don't get to do that. People come, there are no substitutions. They come as a whole.

That's it. That's what's offered on the menu. And so people think, well, I can change the thing that I don't like, and I can make that person a la carte. You can't do that. You can't order them up that way. So there are always going to be things that irritate you or that are suboptimal in a perfect world

about your partner. Are you gonna focus on that or are you gonna focus on the things that you really love about your partner? There's a saying from 12 Step, which is identify, don't compare, which is like, cause you'll hear people outside

of 12 step talking about, for instance, you know, like, you know, well, he's this, this and this and ambitious and this and that, but he's like kind of emotionally unavailable, but he's more available. And people will talk about male or female partners, right? Or potential partners is like, or people that they're dating,

as if you could clooch together the best of all people and get this like perfect tapestry of the person that's got all the features you want. Because yeah, some people are a little more easygoing, lighthearted, and sometimes not always, less ambitious. Those things, in my experience, tend to correlate, not always.

Some people are super hard driving, they get it done, and they have the capacity to be immense providers, but they have less time, and sometimes they're not as emotionally available. Again, stereotyping like crazy here. But people get this idea that they're sort of like, through the comparison,

they can arrive at the perfect person, when in fact, I think appreciation, not being Teflon about the positive stuff comes from kind of shutting out the idea that there's an alternative. But of course, you don't want to end up in a situation where the person is, you know, not truly not good for you, right? Well, right. That's not what I'm talking about. Right.

And I don't think you are. But yeah, with that caveat, I think that accepting that people are complicated and there is no clujing together of people. At some point, you make a choice. Right. And this is when people cheat. What often happens is there's a specific quality about their partner maybe. Sometimes it has nothing to do with your partner, by the way.

And I think this is so important to talk about when we talk about infidelity, that often it really has nothing to do with the partner, that somebody is expecting their partner, again going back to vitality and aliveness, to provide that for them. And if the partner doesn't provide that for them, but your partner shouldn't be providing that for you, they're additive, they're not providing a lack or a deficit in you. Sometimes that's why people cheat, but other times they say like, there's this quality about my partner that is really, you know but other times they say like, there's this quality about my partner that is really, you know, like I don't like it.

Like, let's take for example, I wish that my partner were more, let's say ambitious. So they go and they like cheat with someone who's more ambitious, but then the person isn't loving or isn't communicative or isn't, you know, whatever the other good qualities that the partner they have has. So they think that by replacing this one trait that the other person's gonna have all the other great traits that the existing partner already has. And generally you're treating like one set

of problems for another set of problems. So it's interesting that people think like I can fix this problem because this person has that thing that I really want. Now if your partner doesn't have any of that, like it's a degree, it's on a spectrum. So is your partner not ambitious at all? Or is your partner ambitious about different kinds of things? Like they want to be a really good parent and they're really invested in that. Or they want to do something like philanthropic and they're really invested in that, but it doesn't pay a lot. You know, so what are they, like what energizes them?

What, where's their purpose? Where's their meaning? You know, there's different kinds of ambition. I feel like placing one's attention on the good things as much as possible, and really letting those fill us up as much as possible is really really letting those fill us up as much as possible is really key. I didn't say this, I borrowed this,

but that two of the most dangerous words in the English language are if only. This idea like if only this, because for two reasons, one is it's very unlikely that if only comes true, but the other one is it takes our attention away from seeing what's there. Right, so I like to say it's the difference

between the what if and the what is. And people who focus too much on the what if, what if this? They lose sight of what is. And usually there's so much good that they really don't wanna give up in the what is. So if you're going to keep focusing on the what if, you blind yourself to the what is.

And I think the what if is a big trap. Yeah, I think this notion of attention and appreciation just seems so fundamental. Well, it's kind of like, think of it, so I am sort of an amateur photographer, and I think about it like, of like think of it, so I am sort of an amateur photographer, and I think about it like you can take a picture of, you can like focus on the same subject, you can focus on one part of it, or you can just move the camera slightly, and then you're

focused on something entirely different, but it's the same thing that I'm taking a picture of, right? So I always say to people like, can you, your focus is always on this, can you like move the camera slightly and focus, you know, find a different part to focus the camera on. If you're always focusing on something that makes you unhappy, you're gonna be unhappy. So why don't you just move the camera and focus on the other things?

You get to choose. People think they have no choice in the matter, right? Like, well, my brain just goes there. My mind just goes there. It's like, no, you get to choose what you put your attention on. You actually have a choice. What I love about what's coming through here

is that you emphasize the role of these unconscious processes. We default to people that aren't healthy for us, sometimes, not always. And yet you also emphasize that we have a lot of agency. These days, it seems like there's a default toward looking outward. For all that's been said about meditation

and reflection and journaling on this podcast and others, like we all know these tools are available. They basically just take time. I mean, with meditation, you don't even need a pen and paper, but we tend to look outward for answers. Do you ever give homework to your patients to just like think or journal, or is there work tend to be more behavioral?

It's kind of like, I feel like the work that we do in the room is about understanding I feel like the work that we do in the room is about understanding and understanding sort of like where the gap is between what we say we want and what we actually do. So usually it's all about what is in that gap, what is getting in the way, because we're very clear, by the way,

about what we want usually. And then there's like some gap between our behavior that isn't moving in that direction. In fact, moves us often either keeps us stuck or moves us in the opposite direction. So it's kind of out in the world between sessions. We're working on the behavior around what is getting in the way in that gap. And then we're doing kind of the thinking and the feeling in the session. I don't mean that people aren't thinking and feeling outside of session.

It means they're using their feelings and their thoughts differently. They're taking different actions with the feelings and thoughts outside of the session. Do you ever tell people, whenever you think that, just do the opposite? So it's really funny because so many people say like, your gut knows, right? Like listen to your gut.

And for some people, because it's historical, right? Like what's in their gut? It's like, no, no, no, don't listen to your gut. And it sounds really strange for a therapist to say to somebody, no, don't listen to your gut. But sometimes you literally have to say to people, whatever your first instinct is there, do the opposite. Do the thing that feels uncomfortable.

Because your gut is what feels comfortable. And the thing that feels comfortable, again, is the familiar. And the familiar isn't necessarily the thing that is going to lead you to where you want to go. So it's not like I want people to second guess themselves or not trust themselves. It's that sometimes you have to learn how to hear

that very, very quiet voice inside you, because your gut is the louder one. Right? Your gut is your first instinct. And it's kind of the pre-programmed, the pattern, the automatic response. Like if you think when we talk about sort of like neurological pathways, there's this like freeway that's been built with this one response. Like here's the input, right? And here's the map that follows. Like this person did this

and you're going to like travel down that freeway because that's been the well-paved road because you've done it a million times, doesn't really work out for you. I want people to create kind of side roads and different roads and let's take a different path and let's kind of dig out a new, like a new road, right? That now, so your first instinct is still gonna be like, let's get on the freeway. And I'm like, no, let's take a new road, right? That now, so your first instinct is still gonna be like,

let's get on the freeway. And I'm like, no, let's take a side road. Let's do something a little bit different. Let's take a different path. And that path will now become the new freeway because you're gonna keep going down, we're gonna dig out that path, the freeway is gonna not be trafficked on,

we're gonna shut down that freeway eventually, and you're gonna have a new freeway that's your automatic path. So right now you've gotta do the opposite to build this new freeway. I just mixed 20 metaphors, but the point is that sometimes your gut is just taking you down a well-trodden path that is not the best path for you. There's a great line in that movie, High Fidelity, based on the Nick Hornsby novel, which I also highly recommend, where he's like, you know, people tell me that we should listen to our gut.

Well, after whatever it is, 30 years, I've come to the conclusion that my gut has shit for brains. He's just realizing that his reflex on what to do with his relationship life is completely off. Some people will hear what we're talking about right now and will say, yeah, but my gut also tells me when I'm in danger, we're obviously not talking about when you can sense danger.

So here's the thing. So what feels dangerous sometimes, so your gut is trying to protect you. So what feels dangerous is going into this new situation because it's uncomfortable to do something different. So your gut is saying, oh, let's do the comfortable thing that we've always done. Even if the comfortable thing makes you miserable,

let's do the comfortable thing that we've always done because it feels very dangerous to try this new thing. But sometimes doing the thing that feels dangerous is actually less dangerous. Oh my. So in other words, people say, a lot of times people say, I don't wanna take a risk. It's too risky.

But sometimes the safest thing you can do is to take a risk. Doing the safe thing is actually, you know, you say it's too risky. The safest thing you can do is to take a risk because it's going to lead you closer to what you want to accomplish or the thing that you're trying to get toward.

I completely agree. I also in my life, I've had the experience of I've taken big risks with my career multiple times and it's always worked out, thank goodness. A lot of my teen years and 20s and 30s were spent learning to overcome the adrenaline response. And I learned to take progressively more and more risk and ended up having a air failure, scuba diving,

KJX diving with great white sharks. I don't say this to sound tough, ended up having a air failure, scuba diving, KJexa diving with great white sharks. I don't say this to sound tough. I say this because it's like, what was I thinking? I took it too far, right? So I think learning to overcome the adrenaline response and be calm and adrenaline I think has its value. I also took tremendous risk in my personal life getting involved with people

I never should have gotten involved with. And I blame myself, I don't blame them, right? I mean, I was in choice. So I can imagine that some people are so averse to danger that they don't put themselves into circumstances in which they could really come to thrive. And some people are just wired to go into the fire to the point where it's destructive,

either with physical pursuits or in romantic relationships. You know, I'll take it outside my own story. I mean, I have a friend, a dear friend, who, you know, was in like an incredibly physically abusive relationship, number 12. And she eventually came to the conclusion that her threat sensing threshold was just way too high. Mm-hmm.

Did some really good work to understand why that was and realized that her fear response didn't kick in until it was like a nine alarm fire. Right. And so, you know, she needed to listen to that, as you mentioned that like super quiet whisper early on because anyone else who didn't have her history she needed to listen to that, as you mentioned, that like super quiet whisper early on, because anyone else who didn't have her history,

which is sadly a very, very challenging history in her family would have immediately been like, yeah, I'm out. But she was like, this is normal. Yeah, when I was in medical school, I remember the people who wanted to work in the ER, who were like, I want to do emergency medicine, were people often who grew up in environments where danger was a part of it, right?

So they're used to that, and it doesn't really strike them as like their sense of danger, their barometer is different from maybe a different person's. I think of it as like a thermostat. When you think about like, let's say you want to set your thermostat at like 72 degrees, right? Some people, their thermostat is off because in their house, like they did the slightest thing and their parents treated it like it was a huge, horrible mistake and they're, and it was an emergency, right? So they don't know how to calibrate, like what does 72 actually feel like? Or the opposite, like some big thing happened and their parents underreacted.

And so they don't really know kind of like, what does 72 feel like? I don't really know what that like good temperature is like. I don't really know what that like good temperature is like. So I think that there's a lot of people who stay in situations that are like, it's like other people would say, whoa, it's like 100 degrees in here, get out, there's a fire, right? And this person's like, no, it just feels like 72. They don't know. And so it's really about recalibrating. And I think when we talk about risk and danger, you have to learn how to calibrate your own thermostat. And I think that that's really important. We talk about the difference between productive anxiety

and unproductive anxiety. So unproductive anxiety is there's some kind of danger and I'm gonna ruminate and ruminate and ruminate, and I'm thinking about it all the time, and somehow that's gonna keep me safe because I'm thinking about it. And then there's productive anxiety, which is, oh, it's good that I sense the danger because I'm going to do something about this.

Like, I have a plan for how to deal with this. So it might be I'm in this relationship, and it just doesn't feel right, and this person is acting this way toward me and I know I shouldn't be treated this way but I don't know, maybe it's okay. That's not productive, that's just anxiety. You're just circling, ruminating. Productive anxiety would be like, something's wrong, I shouldn't be treated this way so my plan is I'm going to try to talk to my partner about this or we're going to go to therapy about this and see if it improves and if it doesn't is I'm going to try to talk to my partner about this or we're going to go to therapy about this and see

If it improves and if it doesn't I'm going to leave to find a different relationship You're right. You want to sense danger, but the question is is it productive or is it unproductive? What do we do with it? So people when I say like trust your gut that some Somebody might say well my gut is that like when things are really, you stick with it because my parents stuck with my other parent when things were really unpleasant, that's what you do, right? So that doesn't make sense. So I think that do the opposite in that case.

It's like, oh, you think you're supposed to stay in this case? Cause your parents did like, do the opposite, see what happens if you do something different. We hear that there's value to being able to be on one's own. Some people seem to always need to be in a relationship and some people probably don't.

But do you think there's value to people really understanding themselves first? I know some couples that got together in their first year of college that are still together. They have kids now in college, which is a trip and they seem super happy. They are super happy from what I know.

And I know people that have had many relationships and then find somebody and some people take time on their own, some people don't. How important is this notion about knowing oneself really? Yeah. So when you look at what are the factors that determine the success of a relationship or a marriage, emotional maturity is number one.

Number two, by the way, is flexibility. That being with someone incredibly rigid is very hard. Define rigid. Rigid is things have to be this way. In the practical space, like toothpaste has to be on the right, not on the left kind of thing. And emotionally rigid, like this is wrong, this is right. This is the way you do it, this is not the way you do it.

You behave this way, you don't behave this way. As opposed to people have different personalities, they have different ways of communicating. And yes, the rigidity around sort of like the household, of course, too. But just a rigid personality, you know, like, I can't leave it this time, I have to leave it this time, we have to be here now, you know, like whatever, we can't, there's no flexibility around anything. Or even flexibility around plans, like, when you get married, you don't know what five

years, ten years down the line is going to be like. Are you flexible with how you're moving in whatever direction, the other person is moving in whatever direction? If you need things to be static, that's very rigid. And it's hard because people are not static. There are things about their core personality that tend to be static, but people evolve. And so you have to leave room for the evolution of their three entities. There's you, there's the other person, and there's the relationship.

And all three of those entities are going to evolve over time. And if you don't have flexibility and you insist that they stay exactly the same, that's going to be problematic. Going back to whether somebody needs to spend time alone before they get into a relationship or how much you need to know yourself before they get into a relationship or how much you need to know yourself before you get into a relationship. I think people have this misconception that they have to be fully formed

and then before they can get into a relationship. And the thing is that you grow in connection with others. And so people, you're saying you're so surprised that these people met in college and they've been together all this time and of course they were so young. Oh, no, I'm not surprised. Oh, you're not course they were so young. Oh, no, I'm not surprised. Oh, you're not surprised, okay.

No, no, no, I'm envious. Okay. Because in a light way, because they got their first jobs in parallel. Yes. Sadly, their parents passed away in parallel. They went through a number of life evolutions together. Their life story is a commingled story.

Yes, it reminds me of, I had a therapy client who was divorced and she was talking about dating again and she met someone great. And she said, I love this person so much and this person is actually a much better person for me. But there's a sadness that she said, he will never have met my parents because they had died.

He will not know like all these things about who I was when I was 25 or 35 or you know what it was like when I went through this particular thing in life or you know again like the you know wasn't there with the birth of our children. Didn't know our kids at that age. So it's true that there's something very important about having a shared history. It's not end-all be-all, she's happier in that second marriage, but there is something to be said about people think, well I have to wait until I'm at this point before I can seriously consider dating someone who might become my life partner. And I think that you grow in connection with people.

Or people say, you know, like, I'm not ready to be in a relationship because I don't know enough about myself. You're going to learn so much more about yourself when you are with someone because you're forced to. Someone's holding up a mirror to you. It's like how I say that, you know, I was saying earlier that when I see couples, people grow individually so much faster because they're in relationship with someone and really having that mirror held up to them. I mean, you can sit there and think like by yourself

till like, you know, till you turn blue in the face, but the reality is no one's giving you feedback. You're not interacting. You're not pushing up against anything. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, certainly most of my evolution has been in relation to other things and not just romantic relationships.

I mean, like jobs that didn't feel right that I eventually moved on to a different job. Like you just learn so much based also on what that didn't work. Yeah. I mean, there's real information there. I definitely wanna go back to grief and talk about loss, but I feel like there's a hatch that we opened earlier

that I'd like to peer into for a bit, which is this male-female distinction dynamic that nowadays is very prominent, especially in, I would say people like 40 and younger. It's so different now in terms of the dynamics of what boys and men hear about boys and men generally, what girls and women hear about girls generally and therefore how like we think about ourselves.

But you have a son. What do you think are some of the positive things that have evolved in this kind of landscape? And then what do you think are some of the things that are creating problems for sake of romantic relationship but also just relationship to self? I think romantically, it's very hard for young people like in their teens and early 20s,

because they don't have kind of an infrastructure around romantic relationships. There's not the typical kind of courting, because it feels kind of old. Guys don't ask girls out on dates anymore. They do, but they don't really know how or they do it on text, right? As opposed to just like, there's something really profound about having to call someone on the phone and ask them out on a date.

You grow so much as a person by doing that and it kind of sets the stage for the relationship as well. Or asking someone out in person. It's hard. You're really vulnerable. So it's easy to kind of avoid vulnerability because you can do so many things on text and pretend that it's not a vulnerable act. And people don't necessarily even call it a date. It's like, hey, you wanna hang out. Which is just kind of the language around it. So there's not sort of like the structure of we're going on a date.

That's much less common. Whereas in your era and my era, it was much more like you knew when you were being asked on a date. It was not so ambiguous. And I think social media makes it really hard because any misstep, someone's gonna post about it potentially or they've got you on video

or things that are really embarrassing or scary when you're first getting into a relationship with someone, that could become, if you're with the wrong person who's emotionally immature, and many young people, they're learning and growing, they do all kinds of things that humiliate the other person. You know, like, here's a list of someone's red flags that I'm gonna share with everybody.

Can you imagine? And it's on social media. So teens are doing this, people in their 20s are doing this? Yes, yes, yes. Or can you believe someone, you know, like, information that should remain private does not remain private. I'm not talking about things that are bad that someone did that are like, need to be reported. I'm talking about, like, embarrassing things, or someone was, you know, socially unskilled.

Her breath was bad. Yes. His, his, his, he stu-, he smelled bad. That kind of thing. Yeah, anything, like, or, or, you know, this is, this is what you know, this is what he did on the date that was, you know, embarrassing. You know, he did this weird impression or, you know, whatever it is. But also just like sexual encounters or, you know, like nothing feels totally private. Like you just, the level of trust that you have to have in your partner now that was just taken for granted.

Like sure, people might have said something to their best friend, but they also had better boundaries around that. Like you kind of knew in our society what was private and what was not. And because people grow up on social media, they don't really have experience with this sort of there's a private sphere and there's a public sphere. So it's all kind of blurred and they don't really learn like what is private and what is not.

And I think it's really nerve wracking for people. So people don't take, we were talking about risk, people don't take risks in relationships. They don't, they aren't really vulnerable because they're afraid that, you know, they will be humiliated. So what do you think the need is to share that with the world?

Is it because then they don't have to acknowledge that it might've been at least in part them? Like if you paint red flags on somebody, then the person painting is not the one under scrutiny, right? I think they just feel hurt and they wanna feel, and so they feel like a dip in their self-esteem and they want to feel validated. And of course, if they make this list, their friends are going to say, yeah, you dodged

a bullet. This person wasn't right for you. You deserve better. And then they feel better about it, but you don't grow from that. So the thing is that if you can sit with, that really hurts and this isn't, this person is not the arbiter of my self-worth, whoever broke up with me, and for whatever reason,

just because someone doesn't value you doesn't mean you don't have value. And you think that's a really important lesson for people to learn. So if I took some gold, like a brick of gold, and someone said, I don't like that. I like silver or I like whatever I like. It doesn't mean the gold inherently lost value. It means that for that person, that block of gold didn't have value, but the gold has the same amount of value that it had. And I think that we tend to kind of consider

somebody else's opinion of us to be the arbiter of our worth. And it's not like your worth is stable. And people, some people will value it, some people won't find the people who value it, because those are the people that you want to be with. But it doesn't mean that you have less value because somebody doesn't value it or you have more value because someone does value it. You have the same amount of value either way. But I think young people are not, you know, it always hurts. We talked about breakups earlier.

They always hurt. And especially when you're young and you don't have experience, but my concern is that they're not getting the experience of kind of sitting with it. And yes, you want to have your friends support you and all of that. But I think once you start posting about it, or once you start kind of vilifying the other person, you're not learning the lesson. You're not learning how to deal with loss. In your adult clients,

how much of the struggle that you hear about in terms of romantic relationships relates to, again, online aspects like apps and things like that. Do you think they facilitated things or made them relationships more challenging? Well, I think what the apps do is there's a phenomenon that Barry Schwartz talks about in his book, The Paradox of Choice.

And it's the idea that the more choice we have, the less happy we are. So you need some choice, but it's kind of like, think of like a fishbowl, an aquarium, and an ocean. Fishbowl is not enough choice, just too constrained. Ocean, too much choice. You're like, yeah, there's no direction. Oh my gosh. The aquarium is perfect. It's a certain amount of choice, but it's manageable. You don't get flooded. You don't get overwhelmed.

So they did these experiments where you'd be able to test out, like, we have this new jam and we have 10 different flavors. And which one do you like best and which one are you going to pick? People would get so overwhelmed, they didn't even want to try them. They're like, it's too much. Or we have two flavors, which one do you like better? Right? Manageable.

So there are people who are what we call satisficers and people who are maximizers. So satisficers, well, let me tell you about maximizers first. Maximizers are people, let's say you wanna buy a sweater. You go into the store, you find a sweater that you like. It's the right material, it's the right price, it fits you well, it's the right color, it's good, great. The maximizer says, but maybe I can find something better. So I'm gonna take that sweater,

I'm gonna put it on the bottom of the pile so that nobody buys it. I'm going to go to the store next door and I'm going to see if they have something better. Maybe something's on sale. Maybe it's slightly higher end material, whatever it is, right? But they keep going to stores and they keep doing this. And then they think, oh, well, I found the greatest sweater ever and I'm gonna get that one. Guess what? They are less satisfied with that purchase than the person who the satisficer who would have bought that first sweater in that first store and would have been super happy with that sweater. It's all opportunity costs. Okay because all of the the energy the emotional and cognitive energy that

went into maximizing something for what kind of benefit, like what percent benefit? Not much compared to the amount of energy that they spent trying to maximize. They're never satisfied, because even when they get that great product, something better is gonna come out. There's gonna be a new color that comes out

like two weeks later that was in none of the stores. So you're always kind of looking over, if you're a maximizer, you're always kind of looking over your shoulder for like what if something better is out there. In dating, that's what the apps are like. You go out with someone, you have a good time, you think, well, no butterflies, you know, no sparks, pretty good time, but I don't know. I can go back on the apps, you go back on the apps, look at all the people there,

maybe they're better on this dimension or that dimension. And so what it does is it turns everyone into maximizers, because there's an illusion of choice. Like not everybody you see is going to be better. And again, we don't get the a la carte option with people. So there'll be different dimensions in which people are more aligned with what you're looking for, but no one's gonna be like perfect, right?

So why are we looking for perfection? Why don't we look for, and by the way, the satisfacers are not settling. This isn't about like, eh, I'll just settle for something. It's like, that sweater was great. You liked everything about it. You don't need to look for anything more. Will there be, if you pick a partner, will there be someone more attractive?

Of course. Will there be someone less attractive? Of course, right? And by the way, if we treat dating like shopping, we forget that in shopping we're the choosers, but in dating someone has to choose us too. And we, by the way, are not perfect. So an exercise that I like to do with clients is I want you to write down all the reasons that it would be difficult to date you.

So instead of making a list of all the qualities you want in a partner, like the partner has to be this, they have to be that, they have to have these interests, they have to have this amount of ambition, they have to look a certain way, they have to have these interests, whatever it is. I want you to write down everything that would make it difficult. What a great exercise. To be with you. And some people, it's kind of like in a job interview when they say, what are your weaknesses? And we tend to say things that sound positive.

You know, like, my weakness is that I work too hard, but I'm too dedicated, that I can't, you know, let go. This is a non-answer. It's a non, right. So you have to be scrupulously honest with yourself. So what makes it hard to be with you? And if you're really honest with yourself, suddenly you're less of a maximizer, right? Because suddenly you're like,

oh, someone is thinking about the things that, you know, they're looking at me holistically as well. And overall, I'm a pretty good package, but there are things that, you know, maybe they could maximize if they really wanted to, but then they're going to have to give up some other qualities that I have that the other person might not have. So I think it's really important not to think about dating as shopping. And I think that people who grew up on apps tend to treat dating like shopping and they don't sit there and make the list of, oh I can be this way

and that makes it hard you know for someone to be with me and you could name a million reasons. Oh and by the way I tell them that for all the traits you're looking for however whatever that number is because they tend to have a lot right it's not just like I need these three not just like, I need these three things. It's like, I need these 20 things. The list. Right, the list. So I said, for every quality that you're looking for,

whatever number that is, if it's 20, you need to name 20 things that make it hard to be with you. So it can't be like, there are two things that make it hard to be with you, but you have a list of 20 things that you want. Do you think that after people make that list that they might take a look at that list and make some effort to like reduce or eliminate some things from that list?

Is that good self work? Like if somebody is super rigid about punctuality, anyone that knows me clearly, that's not me. Like I know some people that are so rigid about that. Let's say someone identifies that as one of the things that can be really difficult. Like they get really upset if somebody's five minutes late, I've interacted with these people.

You're very difficult to be around. As an academic, everything starts 10 minutes late, we end late, that's how it works. But should they try to resolve that or reduce that feature? Or should they look at the list and say, you know what? Like, I'm not going to change that. This thing, well, I should probably change that. What else can the list do for people?

Okay. So relationships are like cement. So when you're first putting down, right, the cement, it's wet and it's malleable. When it dries, it's very hard to then, now you have to like dig it up. So let's say that punctuality is really important for someone and they think, well I don't want to rock the boat, it's the beginning of the relationship, so yeah this person comes late all the time but I'm gonna say nothing about it and I'm gonna be cool with that, even though I'm not and I'm sitting there seething every time they come late, right?

And it's kind of like in the first three months of a relationship, I think it was Chris Rock who said this, in the first three months of a relationship, you're not you, you're the ambassador of you. So sometimes people will, you know, who really are not punctual will be punctual and then they'll change. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about someone who, you know, someone has, they're just not a punctual person like you're saying you are. So if you're dating someone and that person

is telling themselves like, I'm not going to bring it up, I don't want to rock the boat, it's early in the relationship, the cement is wet. This is when you need to bring it up. So because if you don't, what happens is it's like six months down the line, the person is like, I can't believe you're late. What just happened? You know, why are you, you're always late. You don't prioritize me. It's like the person's like, I'm, this is the first time hearing about this. Like the person has had A, no opportunity to change it if they want to, but B, no opportunity to explain. So it might be that as happened with one of my therapy clients, the person was always late, but it was because he was trying to please her

because she wanted to have dinner. He knew that she liked to eat on the earlier side. He worked really late. So he was trying to kind of like get his work done and get there, and he was always late because he was trying to like be there when she wanted to have dinner. So he said like,

I'm late because I do prioritize you. I'm actually leaving work early to be with you, but I should have just said I can't be here at this time. That's what I should have said, and I was worried you would get mad because it would be too late for you. So you see the assumption that she made was you don't care about me, I'm not important to you, your work is more important, and he's saying, no, I actually was leaving work to be with you, and I still couldn't get there on time.

So we need to figure out how to work this out. Like, can we have dinner later? Because I'm just going to be late if we do it earlier. And what can we work out? So that's an example of if you just bring it up early, you don't build up all these stories about the other person. This person doesn't care, they don't prioritize me, whatever the story is that you're making about that person.

And you have a chance to see is the person willing to do something about it or if they're not, are you willing to be flexible and say, you know what, this person, they just run late and I like so many other things about them and I'm going to adjust to the fact that this is one thing that in a perfect world, I would like them to be more punctual, but there's so many great things that this is one thing that I'm gonna adjust to.

Weaving this with what we were talking about earlier about gut sense and the validity or lack of validity of gut sense, I certainly have had the experience and I know many other people have that after a relationship ends or when it's ending, they think back and they go, you know, there was that thing at the beginning

and I knew it then, but I pushed it aside. Like, is that just a story we tell ourselves? I think that the most important question to ask yourself after you go on a first date or a second date or a third date is, how do I feel when I'm with this person? Because all the other stuff is just kind of like a cognitive exercise, right? Like, so one of my clients, she was said to herself, like, I don't want to date any, she was in

her early 30s, and she said, I want to have kids with a partner. I'm 31 years old. I don't want to date anyone. I'll date someone who's divorced, but I won't date someone who has kids. She met someone online. It didn't have the kid question in that particular app that she was using. She went to meet him on the first date. She's having such a good time and it comes up that he has a kid.

And she was having such a good time that she really debated like, should I go out with him again? Should I not go out with him again? This is not what I want. I don't want to deal with that. It's too messy and it's not what I imagined. If she had known on that dating app that he had, you know, that it asked if he had kids and he had put that, she would never have met him.

That is her husband. She is so happy. I mean, they've been married now for like 15 years. They have kids together. They have the other kid. She's so happy. So I think that when we make that list that you said like, should you take things off the list?

I think that you need to have flexibility about things that may not matter, but you have to be very inflexible about the things that do matter. So character qualities, they matter. Values that align, that matters. So those are things that don't be flexible on that. So I just wanna make sure I understand. So we're talking about two different lists here. One is a list about features about the other person.

This is what we hear as like the list. The number of times that friends are like, you have to make a list. I'll never get around to making a list. But I like this other list that you described, which are all the things about ourselves that would make us difficult to be with. Which list or both do we need to have rigidity

versus flexibility on? I'm saying that when we think of that list, and by the way, a lot of people don't sit there and write a list, but they have it in their head. You know, there's this process of, I know what I'm looking for or whatever. Some people say like, I know it when I see it, but there's really a list in there because you know what you'm looking for or whatever. Some people say like, I know it when I see it, but there's really a list in there

because you know what you're looking for and it matches this list in your head. So on that list, I'm saying you need to put more things like character qualities. Are they honest? Are they reliable? Can I trust them? Do we have the same kind of vision of the kind of life that we want to lead. You know, where are we aligned on those important things? Because those things are, those are, those are sort of hard to bridge those gaps. You know, like they're just

gonna keep coming up and and be very difficult to deal with. Things like, do we have to have all the same interests? No. You know, do we, you know, does the person have kids or not? Well, that may not be the ideal choice, but look what happened to this other person. You don't know. I think that question that I'm going back to of how does this person make me feel

if the character qualities are there? Because sometimes people who don't have the character qualities that you want are very charming and they can make you feel great. But if they have the character qualities, do I are very charming and they can make you feel great. But if they have the character qualities, do I feel calm around this person? We're going back to this idea of peace and calm. I like this idea somebody had mentioned

that I love this metaphor of being able to bring your rough drafts to the other person, meaning that you don't have to be on all the time with this person, that you can bring sort of the rough draft of yourself, of this idea of, you know, your kind of imperfect draft. And they collaborate with you on that. And I think that's so beautiful, right? That like you can be, what it means is you can be yourself.

And yourself doesn't mean I can be, I can act in any way I want. I can have no boundaries. I can be abusive. No, that's not the rough draft. But it's kind of like, I am working this through. I'm trying to understand this. I'm not perfect. Sometimes I will make mistakes.

And can you be comfortable enough around each other to hold yourself accountable, but still feel loved by the other person. I love, love, love the criteria, for lack of a better word, of how do I feel when I'm around this person? Yeah. Peace being an anchor point or a place to look for.

And when I say how, I mean, do you feel calm? Do you feel content? And so calmness is different from sort of the activation. Contentment is different from like out of your mind happy. Of course in the beginning and hopefully throughout the relationship there will be times when you feel this like incredible energy around happiness and joy and being around the other person. But most of the time what you're going to feel around your partner is a sense of safety, a safe place to land, contentment.

I enjoy this person's sense of humor. I enjoy sitting with them even through our silences. I enjoy like sitting on the couch and watching a show with them. I enjoy basically doing anything with them just because I like their presence. That's what I mean. How do you feel? Does their presence feel additive to you? Does it feel like you just are happier with their presence than you would be without their

presence? Sometimes people feel like, oh, we have such a strong relationship, we're so drawn to each other, but what you're drawn to is when you're with each other, the presence is volatile. It's either like the high highs and the low lows. And that's not, you know, I'm talking about that sense of contentment just being

in the other person's presence, the dailiness of it. There's so much made of these love languages, like their acts of service and gifts, all that kind of stuff. I've heard it said, what's your love language? And someone, I would say, all of them. That person was me, all of them. Who doesn't like all of those?

You know, both, you know, I like to think I offer them too. You know, who doesn't like all of those things? But I realized that some people place more value on certain gestures and expressions. And I think that's all fine and good. What I love about what you're saying, however, is that it's more about like a, now we're sounding woo, but it's more of like an energetic match.

This feeling of safety. You know, the word peace to me just feels like holds so much value these days. I feel like the two things that have come to really value more and more are peace and self-respect, because it's hard to have peace and self-respect. Mm-hmm. Because it's hard to have peace without self-respect. Yeah. Certainly hard to have self-respect without peace.

Now, sometimes lack of peace can be from external things, but then we have to ask ourselves, like, do we have any control over these external things? Yeah, I'm curious what your reflections are on, like, an energy match. So instead of love languages, I look at it as understanding each other's operating instructions. like an energy match. So instead of love languages, I look at it as understanding each other's

operating instructions. We don't get a manual, like when you get it by a car, a piece of technology, right? It comes with operating instructions. So you know exactly how it works, like don't push this button, do push this button, this makes it run more smoothly, this will destroy it. Right, so you understand those things. So we don't know that about the other person. and this makes it run more smoothly, this will destroy it.

So you understand those things. So we don't know that about the other person. We make so many assumptions. If this person is coming to me to talk about this, here's what I would want in that situation. So we do that and the person's like, no, no, no, I came to talk to you about it. I just wanted to vent. I didn't come for you to fix it. But maybe you like it when people fix it.

So you have to learn the other person's operating instructions. So we talk about this idea of love languages. People like all those things, as you said. Operating instructions is something so much deeper and more intimate, which is, I understand that being late means this to you, right? I understand that it helps you when you're anxious if my voice gets quieter instead of, you know, I understand that you need a hug in this moment.

I understand that when we're going on a trip, you like to pack this way and I like to pack this way and let's do it our own ways, right? Or just like, I understand these things about you and you understand these things about me and so if we understand them, we know how the other person operates and we're going to operate ourselves with an eye toward that. And there's something so loving about understanding somebody's operating instructions and honoring them.

And we don't try to figure out the other person. We try to think like, why are they acting that way? We don't get curious and ask, hey, why are you acting that way? What's going on? And you learn then, oh, well, this is why. And then now you know that in those situations, here's how they can go more smoothly. I rarely ask guests on this podcast to editorialize about other guests, but here it feels appropriate. Bill Eddy was on this podcast.

He's a therapist and lawyer and he wrote the book, I think it was like five types of people that will ruin your life. And one of the cardinal features of a person that he claimed will ruin your life is somebody, one of the early warning signs, let's not say cardinal features, but is somebody who has a story about their past failures that's always about how they were wronged by somebody else. Yes. Like the victim stance.

Like there's no other word for it. People who are constantly talking about how they were a victim of somebody else. There is a word for it. People who are constantly talking about how they were a victim of somebody else. There is a word for it. It's called help rejecting complainers. Help rejecting complainers. So a help rejecting complainer is a person who is always telling you, you know, this went wrong and it was somebody else's fault. And they're seemingly coming to you for advice or guidance. And no matter what you say, like, how about this?

Or have you tried this? Or have you thought about this? No, that won't work because no, I've tried that, that's not gonna help. No, because people are like this and that won't help. So they don't actually want help. It serves them in some way to complain and be the victim and be wronged.

And so it's almost like, you know, that makes them feel better. They don't want to look at themselves. They don't want to look at their role in things. So beware of help rejecting complainers because they're always going to come to you and you're going to at first feel bad for them. You're going to be like, wow, they've really had a hard time. Wow, you know, I wonder if I could help them this way. And then you start to realize they don't want help. They don't want to be helped.

They will reject any help that comes their way because if they get help, they can't complain anymore. I'm guessing you see this sometimes in therapy. And in the world. Yeah. We've been making a fair number of assumptions about relationship structure. There are so many different permutations these days

that we don't have to explore them all, but do you think that some people are just not well suited for romantic relationships? I've known a few people in my lifetime, a former advisor who who he passed away, as I mentioned earlier, but who had tried romantic relationships and decided they weren't for him.

Most everyone I know in my life is either partnered or yeah, pretty much. Thank goodness, happily so. But are there people for whom like, they just opt out of the game for reasons that are healthy as opposed to fear of rejection or otherwise? I think that we are wired to want to love and be loved, whatever that means.

There's all kinds of love, there's all kinds of ways to love. I think that people don't know how to love and be loved if they haven't seen it. So generally you learn that because you've had it modeled for you, or if you haven't had it modeled for you, you by trial and error start to learn these things. Maybe you go to therapy and you learn more about it. But I think no matter what people come to therapy for, no matter what we call the presenting problem, you know, they're coming because whatever they want to say it is, deep down, something got kind of ruptured in the love or being loved area of their life.

And really that's the core of it, and we have to solve that problem so that the problem they came in for, you know, it's kind of like you're dealing with content, which is like here's the problem, and process, which is what's going on underneath. And if we can solve the process, then you solve content in multiple areas of your life. It's not just this one problem that you came in with,

but generally, if you learn at the core what the issue is that gets in the kind of love or be loved area, you learn how to navigate through the world differently in your professional life, in your romantic life, in your platonic friendship life, in your family life. So it's not just therapy isn't just about solving like that one discreet problem, sometimes it is, but many times it's about if we can get to the deeper process issue, then you will solve so many different problems simultaneously. Throughout today's conversation, I feel like

what seems to be in contrast is our stories about ourselves and other people and life versus just really being present. This image of the Teflon pan is really kind of looping in my head because this idea that positive thing happens, it slips right off. Negative thing sticks. What does that mean? It's like we create a story about the negative thing

and that the story about the positive thing was a very brief story. It was like one of those three sentence poems or something and then it's gone. Versus presence, like the more presence we can bring to something, the more positive, meaningful experience we can extract from it. I really believe this.

I learned this in science actually, because I had an absolutely spectacular neuroanatomy professor when I was an undergraduate and he said, when you look down the microscope, if you're looking for something, you'll find it, but you're gonna miss all this context of like the inputs to that structure and you lose the pattern recognition

that's gonna serve you going forward. So I learned I had this, I had so much time back then. I would just sit at night as a graduate student after I left my undergrad and went on to a lab. And I would just like stare at brain tissue and you learn that and about it in conscious and unconscious ways. And then later when you're doing an experiment,

you see things like, oh, you know, there's a deficit here, there's a real effect here. And you learn that through presence, you're like experiencing things so much differently than if you go looking for something. In science, if you go looking for something, it's actually bad science. And I've tried to transport that onto relationship

in some ways, like in relation to things and people and dogs and all the things in life, if you're really present, like the story's writing itself, but you're not scripting it out. I don't think I have a language for this. Rick Rubin's talked a little bit about this in his book, The Creative Act. Like we need to be on the front end of the vehicle experiencing space and time

as it's happening, as opposed to sitting next to it or in it and kind of creating a narrative about what's happening around us. Does that make sense? Yes, right, so most of us, all of us, myself included, you all of us, we're unreliable narrators, because we're only telling the story through our own lens.

And so it's really important for people to kind of be expansive about what the story might be about themselves. Like someone might have a story, I'm unlovable or I can't trust anyone or nothing will ever work out for me. That's their story that they're carrying around from childhood or from some experience that they had in life, and they don't realize that they're carrying that story around.

So everything that they experience is viewed through that lens. And so, of course, they're not finding people they trust, because their whole worldview is, I can't trust anyone, even though the person might be trustworthy, or they feel unlovable. So, of course, they can't take in the love that they're getting because again, what are they paying attention to? This predominant storyline. So they need to rewrite the story.

I created this workbook that's like a step-by-step guide. I'm not sort of doing this to plug the workbook. I'm saying it's a very methodical process. You have to break down the story. And my background is that, you know, I come from a writing background. So I feel like I'm almost like an editor in the therapy room when people come in and they bring this story. And my job is to help them edit the story so that this faulty narrative that was never

true or someone, you know, whoever told them that story, whether they explicitly said you're not lovable or showed them through their actions that they then felt not lovable, that story was told by another narrator. So that narrator was unreliable, gave you this story that now you take as gospel and you move through life with that story. So let's examine that story and can we look for examples of, counter examples of when that story is not true. Because generally, there are stories of you being lovable. There are stories of people being trustworthy. There are stories of things working out for you.

So we have to really rewrite those narratives and say, what is true and what is an artifact of somebody else's story that we're carrying around? And why are we like writing the next chapter with somebody else's narrative that we never owned anyway? Yeah, it seems that like one of the challenges of being human is unless somebody is a narcissist where they basically dismiss anything

that doesn't make them feel good, in which case they miss out on so much of life and everyone can't stand them anyway. If you're a permeable person, like you're paying attention to what people say, you're trying to integrate that, you're trying to do better, be better. The hard part is being semi-permeable.

You have to know what to let in, what to reject, what to accept, what to work on. I mean, it's a challenging thing, this process of being a person in relation to others, right? Well, right. And again, the story, think about like, how much we tell stories about ourselves and other people. That example I gave you earlier about the person who said,

well, he doesn't prioritize me because he comes late and work is more important to him. And in fact, he was prioritizing me because he comes late and work is more important to him. And in fact, he was prioritizing her. So we tell all kinds of stories and we make meaning of interactions with people. And generally we don't have enough information and we need to say, can we expand this story?

What would that story look like if I got curious and asked more about it, or even just things that happen in our own lives, can I examine that story for myself? Is that the story I want to tell myself about that experience that didn't go the way I wanted? Or can I look at it a different way? Like am I a failure or am I actually growing? You can look at the same story the same way.

I'm a failure, that didn't work out. Or oh, that's really interesting, I learned something really important and I'm really a courageous person for trying that and now I learned something. Totally different experiences of the same event. And I think sometimes the way we get to that story in the moment is to look at our senses. So we have five senses, we don't tend to pay much attention to them, we just think through everything. So can you say in a moment, right, like even about your partner, when you're upset with your partner, can you say like with each sense, like here's one thing I see about my partner

that I really like, even though I'm upset about something they just did, right? Here's something I hear, I like the tone of their voice or I like the way they laugh. I like the way they smell. Whatever it is, I like the way you can just reach out. By the way, touch is so important. What I have couples do sometimes when things are getting a little bit escalated in the therapy room is I'll say, can you take each other's hands right now? This is the last thing they want to do in that moment.

I'll say, can you just take each other's hands? Calmness, right? Their nervous system is calming down. And all of a sudden they feel, oh yeah, I forgot what that touch feels like. And they feel connected now. So can we use our other senses sometimes when we get really in our head and use it

to kind of expand the story and connect, and whether it's connecting with yourself, sometimes with anxiety, we do that, something I can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, we can do that with a partner too. I feel like the whole landscape around relationships has changed so much in the last 20, 30 years. It seems like in some ways for the better,

like there's a lot more discussion about the sorts of things that you're explaining and better understanding of self, how to show up better, better choice-making and so on. I was thinking about the, at the same time, this example you mentioned before, like someone in their teens or twenties will, a couple will break up,

and then somebody's posting all these things about them, that kind of quote unquote feedback, because it's not really feedback, it's more signaling and posturing about what they aren't as opposed to what the other person is, has got to create pretty detrimental stories in the person that it's about, right? Because they either, they have the choice

of either believing those things or disbelieving them, but it's not really an opportunity for growth in the same way that sitting down with somebody and saying like, hey, these were some things that you did well and here are some things that didn't go well. And I guess how much of the story for men and women, young men and women nowadays and older,

do you think like is being written through like what we hear about the opposite sex, right? Like in the last, I would say 10, 15 years, there hasn't really been a moment of really trying to prop young boys up and men of it's like, like maleness is great. Like that's not something you hear very often. Yeah.

And I certainly understand why there was a need and an effort to balance opportunities, right? But a lot of young guys grew up hearing that maleness, having a Y chromosome is a bad thing, that testosterone is bad or something like that. You know, and I've been asked to comment on this more and more recently in the press. And, you know, I only know my experience and what I observe,

but I mean, you take any group and tell them that they're bad. And that hasn't really worked out well for any group or for society. When my son was in preschool, there was a shirt that girls would wear, little, you know, preschool girls. And it said, boys are stupid, let's throw rocks at them." And it was supposed to be somehow girl power, empowering, but you don't empower by putting down another group, right? You lift up, but you don't bring down. And my son was so confused by that.

I remember he was like, why? What does that mean? And can you imagine if some boy showed up at preschool that said, girls are stupid, let's throw rocks at them? Yeah, he'd be in a different preschool pretty quick. Right, I mean, you know, it's, so I think it's interesting to think about how it became that it's very hard for young men to navigate what does masculinity in a positive way look like. And they get all kinds of messages, you know, all men are bad, men should be more like women, men need to be this way or that way, but no, if they are more communicative, then they're weak, but if they aren't communicative, you know.

There's no kind of right way to be, and I think that, I think it's very confusing for young men. Like, if a young, like a teenager or someone in college wants to kiss a girl, right, like on a date, and they don't do it because like it for, like they don't know what to do. Like, do I need to say, can I kiss you? Right? Which feels a little bit like, takes away from the moment. But at the same time, they don't want to assume that she wants to be kissed. But like, it seems pretty obvious to him that like they're standing out in front of their cars in front of the restaurant and like maybe she wants a good night get you know, it's just so confusing.

And I think that, you know, there's definitely I think a positive correction and you know, what we call toxic masculinity, the ways that that men didn't really assume the personhood of women, but I also think that it's gotten to a place where it's so confusing for both young men and young women to understand sort of how can we be with each other, how can we relate to each other, where we won't be criticized, canceled, we don't know what's right. Like, is it, do I put myself out there?

Do I not put myself out there? Will I get in trouble? And so, you know, obviously it's a good thing that people are having conversations and there's more communication around, like, what is okay? What do you want? Is this okay? But at a certain level,

it becomes people are afraid to do anything Yeah, talk about lack of presence It sounds like they have to like write the story all the way to the ten different outcomes for a given action You know evaluating if then they're no longer reading the other person's signals. I mean, it sounds incredibly complicated Right. It is very complicated. I think there's progress too. I mean, I think it's much better than having these situations where men just assumed like it was okay to do certain things, whether the woman consented or not.

But I also feel like the education that they're getting around this, which again is so complicated, because it's positive that they're getting this education, but they don't know what it looks like in practice because the way that, you know, even when you think of like corporate training and you have to watch those videos, right, and, you know, what is okay and what is not okay, they give the most obvious examples of what is not okay. But then there's just sort of like how, like say you're at work and there's someone that

you, you're a woman and you're at work and there's a guy that you're attracted to. Because a lot of people meet at work, right? Because it's hard, and where do you meet people when you're an adult? Where do you spend all your time? You spend a lot of your days, five days a week at work, so you might meet someone through work and then there's this sort of, and maybe it's not someone you directly report to or reports to you, they're in like a different department, there's like a cute guy, what do you do? People don't know, so women are confused too.

What is okay, what is not okay, in the ways that organically, people used to be able to say like, hey, that guy, you know, I'm gonna go talk to him, right? But people don't know what to do. Wow, tricky landscape, but you're offering tools for people at least, not at least, but to communicate better and certainly to understand

themselves better so they know what they're bringing to the table. Well, I think that it's about understanding that whatever we see in TVs and movies, you know, it doesn't look like that. You know, there's always like, somebody doesn't know what to do in a certain moment or something doesn't go the way that you imagine

It will go or sexes can be ridiculous at times and you know, all these like weird things happen I don't mean not consent. I'm talking about like sure It's just it doesn't look like it does in the movies all the time Well, and sometimes there's great chemistry and guess what? Sometimes there's not yeah Like this chemistry thing is a real thing and sometimes it develops over time and sometimes it doesn't. The idea that there wouldn't be much room for healthy exploration, error and adventure

kind of breaks my heart. I guess that's what I was referring to about things. But young people are smart, they can figure it out. And they also like to throw off the kind of like rules and standards of the adult generation. So I trust they'll come up with a better alternative for themselves, right? I wanna make sure that I ask you about grief.

When a client is grieving a breakup or a loss of some sort, do you tell them to feel their feelings or do you tell them to compartmentalize and only feel their feelings certain times a day or do you ever have to say, hey, listen, it's time to bury this thing? I'm laughing because there's no one way to grieve a loss, and even the same loss. Siblings can lose a parent, and they'll have very different ways of grieving the loss of

the exact same person. There's just no right way or one way, And I think you really have to honor that person's process. And what I mean by that is, it doesn't mean sort of, you know, just spend the rest of your life, like dwelling and not living, right? But I think people have this misconception about grief that somehow you're gonna get over it. And often we carry those losses with us throughout our lives.

Like you lose someone important to you, you're going to feel that loss. And you might feel it in different ways at different times. If someone was important to you and you lost that person and you hadn't thought about them in a while and then you're in an elevator and you hear this music, this song, and all of a sudden it's like someone just stuck a knife in your heart, even though you were doing fine. So people, you know, I think that we are the accumulation of all the different people who have been in our lives, for better or worse, and everybody makes some kind of impression on us that sticks with us.

So I think it's really important for people to understand what the loss is about, because the loss can represent lots of different things. You lose a parent, maybe it's the loss of your youth. You're like, oh no, I'm now the older generation. So part of it is the parent, part of it is this kind of I'm closer to death. And what does that mean? You know, you lose a marriage and it could mean, oh look, just like my parents, they got divorced and I failed, even though that's not necessarily the meaning of it.

So we make meaning of the loss too. So it's what does this loss mean to you? How do you make sense of the loss too. So it's, what does this loss mean to you? How do you make sense of it? How do you sit with the loss? And then how do you, again, not move on, but move forward? I love that concept. We integrate the things better, for better or worse, into us, but moving forward is something I think

that everyone would probably want, one would hope. Yeah. I know you're not here to promote anything, but you caught my attention with this workbook because I think I and a number of people probably want to think about how to put some of this into action, and you've given us a lot of great tools to do that and a lot of different ways to think about things.

I certainly am taking notes. Can you tell me about the notebook and what the notebook is and who can make use of it? By the way, folks, this wasn't preceded into the conversation. We'll talk about the notebook. I just wanna know for people who wanna understand how to do good work, it sounds like a great tool.

Right, so the workbook came about because I wrote this book called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and it's the stories of, it's my story going to therapy and then it's the story of these four other patients that I had and my working with them. And people said, wow, there was so much that made me think or feel or resonate with, but I need some structured, like sort of a step-by-step guide to how I can make those kinds of changes

too. And maybe they don't have access to therapy or they don't want to go to therapy, they want to work on it in a different way. And I really wanted, I feel like therapy is this thing where certain people, you know, it's sort of like one-on-one or if you have a couple, it's like, you know, three people in the room. And how do you bring that out so other people can use those tools? So I created basically a workbook that's a companion to maybe you should talk to someone.

And it's, I really focused on stories because I feel like the narratives that we carry around shape so much of how we think, feel, and act every day. So it's a guide that really, it's what I would do with someone in the therapy room if I were helping them to rewrite their story and to look at, is this a faulty narrative? What does this look like? What are the true stories? What resonates with me now? this part of my life?

Where do these stories come from? Who told me these stories? Can I try this out in real life? Here's an exercise to do this week. So I think that more of us Sometimes need that kind of guidance. It's one thing to theoretically think about something and as a therapist I'm just very direct and active anyway, as I said, you know, the insight is the booby prize of therapy that I want people to have more than insight. I want them to have a plan with action and I want them to have small manageable steps because I feel like if you get overwhelmed and the step is too big, that's really the only reason that people don't succeed at a change they want to make. It's that you need the steps to be

manageable. So I really break it down for people, you know, how can we do this? It's kind of like weekly therapy. It's like, how can we do this this week and work on that? And then you can kind of reflect on it. And there's all these different exercises that take you at the pace that works for you. It's great.

I'm a huge fan of workbooks and online courses. I'm taking an online course right now, just for my own enrichment. I'm a huge fan of workbooks and online courses. I'm taking an online course right now just for my own enrichment. I'm going to get your notebook. I think it's a fabulous idea. I think there's so many books about the changes we can make and in any domain of health, wellness, psychology, fitness, whatever. And we read it, we might incorporate one or two little snippets and then it goes on the shelf and then we're proud to have it on our shelf

because it says something about how we view life and it's cool to see those books elsewhere and all that's wonderful. But I think workbooks are like a real thing. So we'll put a link to that. Again, this came up spontaneously, but I know a number of people want to know that. I have one more question.

You write this column, is it a weekly column? Every two weeks I write Ask the Therapist, yeah. Are there things thematically that are coming up more these days? Like you're getting a thousand letters about blank and then two about something else? I mean, where are things batching these days? And there can be more than one bin, excuse me,

bin to how it's batching. Yeah. So I think the same things come up. I've been doing this for so many years. I wrote it for six years at the Atlantic and I'm writing it at the New York Times. And it's interesting because people talk about the same issues differently,

but it's the same issue. So someone might say, you know, a lot comes up around, should I cut off this person? Whether that's a family member or a friend, you know, should I, you know, this person did this and boundaries are a big thing. And everyone thinks everyone's a narcissist, which they're not.

Everyone thinks everyone is, you know, gaslighting them, which generally they're not. It's all dopamine. I'm just kidding. They're these by the... But, I mean, like, the language is different, is what I'm saying, but I think that what they're really struggling with, and what we all struggle with, are, you know, relating. It's hard. Humans are unpredictable. Humans are... Well, in some ways, they're very predictable,

but I think they're hard for another person to understand in that way, going back to the operating instructions that sometimes you think this is going to be the expected response and you get something completely different. They can't understand why a friend or a family member or a coworker or whatever would do or say or think something. I think at the end of the day, people really know what the answer to the question is, but they want permission. So, so many times people say like,

what do you think about this? Or I really want to do this, but the people in my family think this. And so they're almost asking for permission that it's okay to want something, it's okay. We are so cautious about desire in our culture that sometimes we think that if I have a desire it's indulgent as opposed to you should, you know, you have desires, live a big life. I always say to people when

you're making a decision, choose the bigger life. That's how you make the decision. And I heard that somewhere, it's not mine originally, but I think it's so true that, you know, it's okay to have these desires, but then we get these messages from our culture or our friend group or our families

that no, no, no, it's not okay. And so a lot of people want permission that it's okay that you don't want to go to medical school. It's okay. It's okay that you don't want to have children. That's okay. So I think sometimes people want permission, but I think what they're really, I think most of the letters are about, I'm having trouble relating and I don't know if I'm crazy, they're crazy, what's happening. And so they need sort of that person who's going to zoom out and see it from a more objective place and help them to see, again, going back to narrative, both sides of the narrative. So I'm not just in my column, I don't just say, here's what you should do. I do do that. But I first say, I want you to have some context around this.

So here's how you're thinking about it, and that's understandable. Here's the other side of the story that you're not really paying attention to. Now that you have this wider lens, here's how I think this might be managed. Love it, I love this concept of make the choice that is going to bring the bigger life.

Yeah. Because as you pointed out, it's so easy for people to stay stuck in what is unpleasant, but hasn't killed them yet. Or they're waiting for something like, I will buy a house when, I will look for a partner when? As if there are these prerequisites that need to happen because that's the conventional

view of the order in which you should live your life. You know, like I won't buy a house until I'm married as opposed to why? Why can't you buy a house that you like if you have the money to do that, right? You know, why do you have to wait for marriage for that? Or I won't look for a partner until I have this kind of job. That you have to have all these little pieces in this order and there are so many different ways to live your life. And sometimes, by the way, you might want to live your life

in that conventional order, but it just doesn't work out that way for you. So you might have to switch up the order and that's okay. I love a vote in favor of people enjoying their life more and hopefully deriving more self-respect by doing it. This asceticism of like we're going to deprive ourselves of things in order to respect ourselves, even though I value discipline and I think learning to enjoy life is also important. Right.

And I think that, you know, when we talk about, we're not talking about hedonism, we're talking about reflecting on what will make a meaningful, purposeful life for you. And then being very intentional about going after that goal. So much here. Lori, thank you so much for the work you do with your patience, client,

we don't have a better word for it. And also your willingness to get out and teach, and literally every two weeks, you know, field questions from the general public. It's not easy to do, I imagine. And clearly, you're thinking about things past, present, you know, field questions from the general public. It's not easy to do, I imagine. And clearly you're thinking about things past, present and future, and you know,

people really need these tools and not everyone will make it into your office, unfortunately, and have the experience of working one-on-one with you. But I think that the workbook, I'm so glad that came up so that people have an opportunity to put these things into action. And you've given us a ton to work with here.

I listed out many things. I won't list them out here. We'll timestamp this episode in detail so people can go back and find them. But yeah, I've learned a ton. I'm going to put this to action and hopefully you'll come back again and talk with us about what's new

because I know this is an evolving field and as the landscape of society changes, we're gonna need new tools, but it sounds like the fundamentals are really in there. It involves self-reflection. I love this thing about a list of the things that make us difficult to be with, as opposed to the list of the things we want

and other people. And that Teflon pan is something I'm gonna think about a lot. Yeah, well, thanks so much for this conversation. I love having these longer conversations and really exploring what it means to be human. Well, thank you. You've certainly enriched my thinking about it.

And I'm sure everyone listening as well. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Lori Gottlieb. I hope you found it to be as interesting and as actionable as I did. Thanks so much. zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple.

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For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled, Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years

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