Secrets From the Therapist's Couch: How Boundaries Actually Work, How To Come To Peace With Your Parents, and Why It's Not Too Late To Change | Lori Gottlieb

Plus: How your envy can be useful, why you're an unreliable narrator of your own life, and why you keep choosing partners who echo the unfinished business of your childhood. Lori Gottlieb https://lorigottlieb.com/ is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone https://www.amazon.com/dp/1328662055?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback, which has sold over three million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The New York Times "Ask the Therapist https://www.nytimes.com/column/ask-the-therapist" advice column and is co-host of the popular "Dear Therapists https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dear-therapists-with-lori-gottlieb-and-guy-winch/id1523340696" podcast and the advice podcast Since You Asked https://www.thesinceyouaskedpodcast.com/. In this episode we talk about: Why insight alone doesn't change anything, and what "idiot compassion" gets wrong Whether you actually need to like your therapist Why there's no such thing as a hierarchy of pain How to spot a help-rejecting complainer, including in yourself What envy is actually trying to tell you Why a real boundary is a bid for connection, not a cutoff Why we're all unreliable narrators, and how to edit the story you tell about yourself Why we keep choosing partners who echo our unfinished business Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone Workbook https://www.amazon.com/Maybe-You-Should-Talk-Someone-ebook/dp/B09L5BR22N/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=W79Xz&content-id=amzn1.sym.3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_p=3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=FX80K&pd_rd_r=d220e930-ce42-43be-9752-170f8b222aba Maybe You Should Talk To Someone Journal https://www.amazon.com/Maybe-Should-Talk-Someone-Journal/dp/0358667216/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_author_smart_catalog_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=2jmuh&content-id=amzn1.sym.aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_p=aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=f7Bbg&pd_rd_r=72ca8675-6aeb-4907-beb4-2936ad0323c6 Join Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18. Grab your in-person spot here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party, or sign up to livestream here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-livestream! This episode is sponsored by: Function Health: Join at functionhealth.com/happier http://functionhealth.com/happier or use the gift code HAPPIER25 for a $25 credit toward your membership. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  Hello. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, I'm talking to the great Lori Gottlieb, author of the massively popular book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. She's also the author of the Ask the Therapist advice column for the New York Times. She is, as you might imagine, a very accomplished therapist. And the first part of this interview, we're going to get some secrets from the therapy room. We're going to talk about whether everybody needs to do therapy, should you like your therapist, and things like that. And then in the second part, it's really actually the back two-thirds of this conversation, we're going to talk about some super practical pieces of advice

• 0:44Dan Harris?

  she has, often summed up in these very pithy phrases. We talk about why envy is often a good thing to pay attention to. It can be a very helpful signal. We talk about why you shouldn't compare your suffering to other people, how you can edit the stories you tell yourself about yourself, how you can come to peace with your parents, and much more. Lori Gottlieb, coming up after this quick break. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I highly recommend that you head on over to danharris.com to check out my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. Right now, we're in the middle of this really cool series where every Sunday, the legendary

• 1:24Dan Harris?

  Dharma teacher Sharon Salzberg is leading a live session where she does some teachings on the Buddha's Eightfold Path. You can think of the Eightfold Path as the Buddha's foundational list. It's his cookbook for leading a happy life. Sharon does some teaching on one aspect of the path. She guides a meditation, and then she takes your questions. We're in the middle of it right now, but it's not too late to join. You can sign up at danharris.com, and you can watch the first few sessions on video replay, and then join the rest of them live. It's really cool. One of the keys, I believe, and this is an evidence-based assertion, one of the keys to starting a habit or maintaining a habit like meditation is doing it with

• 2:07Dan Harris?

  other people. And that's what we're doing over on 10% with Dan Harris. Life is better in the carpool lane. Join the party. We'll be right back after this.

• 2:18Dan Harris?

  Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible, or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year. I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory, and it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video, the first-ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan, with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by

• 3:01Dan Harris?

  anyone, and about how small, everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago. What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person, rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain, or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.

• 3:41Dan Harris?

  Lori Gottlieb, welcome to the show.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 3:45Dan Harris?

  For some interview, I'd like to start just kind of on a high level with definitions, almost. So I'm just curious, how do you think of therapy? Like, what is it? And is it something everybody should be doing?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  There's so many different ways that people think about therapy. And I think that one of the big misconceptions about therapy, and the reason that people stay away from it, is that they think that you're going to come into therapy, you're going to talk about your childhood ad nauseam, and you're never going to leave. You know, sort of like the old, what you see in movies type of thing. And I think what therapy really is, is it is a way of understanding how to navigate through the world more smoothly, both internally, how do you navigate through the world more smoothly, and externally, how do you relate differently in all the different settings that we find ourselves in, with friends, with family, with work? What are some of the things that we aren't seeing, where we

• 4:42Speaker 01

  get in our own way? And what are some of these ways that we can have someone point them out to us, where we don't get defensive, or we don't feel blamed or criticized, but we actually look at it as, this is how I can grow?

• 4:56Dan Harris?

  I'm going to reflect you back to you, but I'm also going to add a little bit of my limited understanding, and then hopefully you'll correct me wherever I've gone wrong. But I kind of think about it as understanding myself, seeing my blind spots, and then also having some concepts that help me understand other people, so that I'm not just giving the most or the least generous interpretation for all of their actions.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  That's right. That's a really good way of putting it. In fact, when I have couples come in for therapy, because we often come in and we say, the problem is out there, or it's someone else. Whether we come in for individual therapy or couples' therapy, it's usually, I want something to change, but what I want is someone else or something else to change, as opposed to, I want to change myself. And so what I do with couples is I say, I want each of you, before you even come in for the first session, to say, if I were going to be the best version of myself in this relationship, regardless of what the other person does, what would that look like? What do I need to work on? And

• 6:04Speaker 01

  it's so interesting how just that frame alone changes how they relate to each other, how they think about themselves. And while we can't change other people, we certainly can influence other people by changing our down steps in however we're relating. So I think what therapy does is it helps you to see things that you haven't been willing or able to see about yourself, and then to say, what are some steps that I can take to understand why I react this way, and can I do something different? And then you go into the world, and you do something different. So one of the things we like to say is that insight is the booby prize of therapy, that you can have all the insight in the world, but if

• 6:48Speaker 01

  you aren't making changes out in the world, the insight is useless. So when you ask back to your question, what is therapy? It's not just about gaining insight, it's about gaining insight and making changes.

• 6:58Dan Harris?

  One of the knocks I've heard on therapy is that it can provide understanding without relief?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I think there's relief in being seen and heard and understood, but that will not lead to change. And it also is short-term relief. You can see this with friends. Your friends will validate you. They'll give you that relief. But it doesn't really help you in the long term, because you keep repeating whatever suffering is happening, it keeps happening. So then you keep going back to your friends for more validation, and then it feels good in the moment. But then you go back into the world, and you keep doing the same thing over and over, and then you need more validation. And so, you know, we call that idiot compassion. We talk about, in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone in my book, I talk about the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion. In

• 7:47Speaker 01

  idiot compassion, it's what we tend to do with our friends. We validate their perspective on what's going on. Yeah, that must be so hard. Yeah, your partner was wrong. Yeah, your mother's being annoying. Those kinds of things. But it's kind of like, if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. And I say that not to blame people, but to say, we all have a role in these interactions. And we have choices about how we show up in these interactions. And if we keep doing the same thing over and over, and we keep getting the same results, and then we want validation, we're not moving forward in any way. So wise compassion is what you get in therapy, where we're holding up a mirror to you and helping you to see something different. It's not that we're

• 8:30Speaker 01

  not validating you in therapy. It's like we're saying, yeah, it is genuinely a difficult situation. You know, we always say, before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes. So we're not saying there aren't difficult people out there. We're not being non-validating. There are difficult people. But then, how are you responding in these situations? And why are you, and if there are difficult people that you don't need to be involved with, or you can be involved in a different way with, can we look at that?

• 8:58Dan Harris?

  Idiot compassion is, as I understand it, is actually a Tibetan Buddhist concept. And it's broader, and I'm sure you know all of this, I'm saying it to provoke discussion, not to mansplain. As I understand it, it's broader than just the context in which you used it, which is super interesting, the fact that you can get idiot compassion from your well-intentioned friends, but it actually just reinforces some of your dumb behavior. But idiot compassion is actually, anytime compassion is misused, misused in a wise way. So like, people-pleasing, or being a doormat and forgetting your own needs, that can also be a form of what the Tibetans would call idiot compassion.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's right. So it has a lot of different contexts to which it could be applied. But in the context of validation...

• 9:50Speaker 01

  That is where I think people think that they're helping their friends and they're helping people that they care about by saying, yeah, you're right, they're wrong, you go, girl, you know, and it doesn't, it doesn't help people to see something a little bit differently, which is why if you come into therapy and all you're doing is getting validated every week, I don't think that's going to really help you in the long term. It might feel really good and delicious in the moment because we all like to be understood, but you want a therapist who's going to both be compassionate, but also challenge you a bit. And I think that people don't really hear much about the challenging part. They

• 10:34Speaker 01

  don't think of their therapist as being challenging. And I think that a lot of what we do as therapists, the best work that we do is by gently and skillfully challenging people in a way that where they feel safe and they feel heard and they feel understood. But also, we're like, what about this? Can we think about this? I wonder about this? When this person did this, can we wonder about what might have been going on for them? Maybe the thing that you did or said landed on them this way. Why do you think that might be?

• 11:03Dan Harris?

  I mean, I think I mentioned this earlier. To me, one of the most powerful aspects of therapy, not only in my own experience, but in watching other people go through a lot of therapy is, is the, the sort of two-pronged nature of this. You can, you can achieve a level of understanding of yourself and you then have the concepts to understand why other people are behaving in which they're behaving. And that, those two in conjunction can make life so much smoother.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Right. It really transforms people's lives. And I don't use that word transforms lightly, that when you make these shifts in how you move through the world, it affects every aspect of your life. And so people will come to therapy for a discrete problem. I'm having trouble with this person or this thing. And when you start to make these more global shifts in you, it's not just solving that one problem. Our goal in therapy is, yes, we want to solve the problem you came in with, what we call the presenting problem, but we want to go deeper so that you don't have to come back to therapy every time you have a problem, that now you have the tools and the way of being where you're going to have fewer problems out there. It's not to say you can't come back to therapy. People

• 12:21Speaker 01

  do all the time because there's a life stage or something happens. But it's more that, you know, those, those people who are always saying, well, my therapist said this, my therapist thought this. It's like they don't have any autonomy. And what we want to do is we want to give you autonomy. We want to help you make these shifts in your life so that you are able to autonomously go through your life in a way that creates less suffering and more thriving.

• 12:48Dan Harris?

  But isn't that bad for the business model? Don't you want your patients to stay forever?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a terrible business model, but I think if you do good work, you never have a dearth of people coming to you, right? Because we're all human and we, people need support and they need understanding. And we don't, we aren't taught this when we're growing up. We don't get this a lot of places. If you're lucky, you get really good modeling in the environment you grew up, but we don't get a lot of it. And so a lot of people struggle in different ways, which, you know, we're human, it makes sense. So I don't think that the, the question is, you know, are we not going to have clients? I think if we do really good work, we're going to have an abundance of clients and we're not keeping people there for that very reason.

• 13:29Dan Harris?

  I asked this earlier, but I want to come back to it. Is your view that everybody should be doing therapy?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. And I think that's another misconception is that I think people think that therapists think everybody should be in therapy, which is not true. And also on social media, it seems like everybody on social media thinks everybody needs to go to therapy. I don't think everybody needs to go to therapy. I think there are lots of ways that you can learn about yourself, like a podcast like this, books, talking to maybe some wise people that you trust, who are not going to give you idiot compassion, doing some self-reflection. There are, there are all kinds of things that you can do. I think therapy can be very, very helpful, but I don't think every single person needs or wants this kind of experience.

• 14:19Dan Harris?

  Earlier, when you talked about the fact that if you go to therapy and all you're getting is validation, maybe you should rethink your service provider. I, I started to think about the fact that if you, if all you want is validation, you can talk to ChatGPT or Claude. And then that got me thinking, well, what do you think about the fact that so many people are getting the quote unquote therapy, or at least some cousin of it, maybe a malignant cousin of it, through their chatbots?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I'm advising a lot of companies right now who are in this space because they think that therapists need to be involved. A lot of people say, well, why would you get involved with that? It's, takes away the humanity, it takes away the relationship. And actually, study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of people's therapy is the relationship. It matters more than the therapist's theoretical orientation. It matters more than their number of years of experience. All those things matter. Their training, of course, that matters, but it doesn't matter as much as the relationship. The relationship is so important in healing, in self-understanding. The chatbot is going to give you something different. And, and I think we need to think

• 15:33Speaker 01

  of them as two different things and not as the same thing. And I think that's where people say, well, you can just use a chatbot for that. You can use a chatbot for certain things, but you're not going to get the uniqueness of sitting in a room with a person face to face. And I don't even know how to describe the uniqueness of the relationship for people who have not been in it, which is why therapists need to go to therapy as part of their training to understand what it feels like to sit on the other side of this. You're so much yourself in a way that we just aren't out in the world. You're so vulnerable. You talk about things that are really hard to talk about. We laugh a lot in therapy. Your chatbot's not going to laugh with you probably. We laugh at things together. We celebrate, you know, triumphs.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  We mourn losses. It's so human. And so I think what people get out of a chatbot, you can tell it not to be so sycophantic. They might get some questions to reflect on, but they don't have someone to reflect back with them. They have a chatbot to reflect back with them. It's, it's a wholly different experience. I, I don't think that it's useless, but I think it's not psychotherapy.

• 16:43Dan Harris?

  You mentioned the importance of sitting in a room with somebody. So, so many people now are doing therapy virtually. Do you see that as a problem? And just a second part to that question, hopefully I'm not being a bad interviewer by asking you two questions at once. But first part is, do we need to be in the same space? The second is, you also mentioned that the relationship is the most important part. Do you need to like your therapist?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Hmm. Okay. I'll take the first one then. The second one. The first one is really interesting because during COVID, for the first time, we all had to go to virtual therapy. And I had written, maybe you should talk to someone right before COVID. And I had said in the book that how important this space was, the physicality of being in the room together and breathing the same air and hearing the same sounds and sitting in the same way that the light is coming in the room. There's just something sort of sacred about the ritual. And a colleague had said that doing therapy online was like doing therapy with a condom on, which, so, so I quoted that in my book and then COVID

• 17:51Speaker 01

  happened. And then all of us were doing this. And there was so many surprises to that. And I do a lot of virtual therapy now. It's different from the in-person experience, but I'll tell you what was surprising. You see people in their own spaces. So all of a sudden, I was seeing someone that I had been seeing for maybe six months. And then I was doing virtual therapy with her during COVID and there was a cello in the background. And I just said, whose cello is that? And she said, it's mine. And it was a really important part of her life from childhood on to the present that she had never mentioned. And so we got into this whole conversation about it and it became a really integral part of,

• 18:35Speaker 01

  well, why wasn't it mentioned? And given how important it was in her life and, and then what it meant and, and, and what musicality meant to her and the parts of her that, that she had been kind of pushing down and what it meant in her family. And it was, it was this incredibly important aspect of her life that just had not come up in the therapy room. You see other things, like I was seeing a couple in doing virtual therapy and they were having a very difficult moment and she was crying and he kind of didn't know what to do. And then all of a sudden, she stopped crying and she smiled. And I said, what just happened there? And under the screen where I couldn't see it, he had taken her hand.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Now, in the room, I would have seen that. But I had to ask and find out what in the world had just happened that shifted something in her. So I think there are gains and losses to the different environments. But even when you do virtual, sometimes like a child will walk into the room or you see their partner because they, you know, were in the background or they had to call out something. And there's just a different dimension that you don't get in the therapy room. So I don't think it's inherently better or worse. I, I, I think they're different and I think that they're both very effective.

• 19:54Dan Harris?

  What about, um, do we need to like our therapist? If the relationship is so important?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  I love that you asked that because so often the question people have is, does my therapist like me? We all want to be liked by our therapist. And in my book, there's a whole section where I, I am telling my therapist a whole story, which really is about trying to find out if he likes me. You know, sometimes when I would leave my therapy, I'd see somebody else in the waiting room and I'd think, oh, she's probably easier than I am. You know, like I'm a pain in the ass. This person's probably easier. He probably likes her better. And so, and then when the book came out, people came in and, um, and said to me, I like that part in your book where you asked your therapist if he likes you. Which made me say, do you have a question for me? Or is that why you're asking me?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Right? Because I think we all, it matters. It's, it's a real relationship. It's a, it's, it's not a relationship that takes place outside of the therapy room, but it is such a significant relationship. So I think, A, yes, you have to like your therapist. But you're projecting what that means because you don't know much about your therapist. So you're liking a projection of who you think your therapist is. Your therapist will inevitably disappoint you at some time because we're human. Your therapist will, uh, be five minutes late because a session ran over. Uh, your therapist will say something that lands on you in a way that you don't like and it really wounds you, even though that was not the intention.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Your therapist won't be sort of like the perfect mirror that you need your therapist to be. You might, um, somebody wrote into my, I write an advice column for the New York Times and somebody wrote into the Ask a Therapist column and said, um, I Googled my therapist. And we, she said, we have been going to couples therapy. It was, it was two women who had been going to couples therapy and they loved this therapist. The therapist had helped them so much. And they Googled the therapist and found out that the therapist's father was a, a politician. And he, on his website, he was very, um, you know, anti LGBTQ, um, anything. And, and the, the therapist, who was the daughter, was pictured on the website,

• 22:10Speaker 01

  you know, with the, with the, the father. And so they said, should we bring this up? Should we just leave? What should we do? She's been so helpful. We liked her so much. We thought she liked us so much. And, um, and so people will see something online that may or may not mean what you think it means. In this case, you know, I don't think it meant that the therapist was homophobic and therapist probably had a lot of different ideas about who her father is and in the world. And it's complicated because she comes from a complicated homophobic family. But that doesn't mean she's homophobic. I think that you want to like your therapist, but I think the fact that you will have feelings about your therapist or your projection of who they are is grist for the mill. It's, it's very much what we want to discuss in the therapy room.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  So when people discover something about their therapist or have a reaction to their therapist, instead of saying, I'm not going to go back or I'm just going to kind of compartmentalize that, that's something you should absolutely bring up and say, when this happened, I felt hurt. When you said this, I was insulted. I found this on Google and I'm having a lot of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings about it. Can we talk about it?

• 23:21Dan Harris?

  That all makes sense. I don't know if I could bring myself to be, uh, that confrontational, but, um, uh, I'd probably, probably a good thing for me to work on. I, I guess a related question is like, as you're finding a therapist, so before there's, you know, a relationship that is built and in a way that you would then have, you know, um, grist for the mill and issues to work out between the two of you. Does it matter, you know, when you're doing the therapy, dating? A lot of people use online, um, uh, therapy services or you go meet a bunch of therapists, whatever your situation is. The kind of vibe, to use a non-scientific term, uh, should that matter to you? If, you know, if you just, is this somebody?

• 24:05Dan Harris?

  Should you be using a heuristic like, yeah, is this somebody I would hang out with, uh, you know, in real life?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Before I get there, I just want to say you said you wouldn't be that confrontational with your therapist and you use word confrontational. And I think that's interesting because everything that happens in the relationship between the therapist and the client is a microcosm of what generally happens between the client and someone else out there. So someone who says, I wouldn't be that confrontational, and I'm not, I'm not analyzing you whatsoever. I'm just saying in general, if I were to hear that, I would think, oh, that's interesting. That person, when they feel wounded or they're upset about something, is probably hesitant out there to bring up something with whomever, you know, they had this feeling about. And that's something that, that therapy is great at

• 24:55Speaker 01

  because you get to bring it up in the safest possible environment. There's nothing safer in the world than saying to your therapist, when you said that, I was really angry with you. There's no safer place to do that. So I just, I really want to encourage people to use the therapy as a sort of a, a microcosm of what happens relationally so that you can practice in the therapy room and then make some changes outside the therapy room. But back to your question about a heuristic, when you are looking for a therapist. I think that's so important because a lot of people say, um, well, I went to a session with that therapist. And they think either, well, I'm going to be in therapy with this person

• 25:37Speaker 01

  or I didn't like it, so I'm not going to do therapy. But they don't think this is an opportunity to see what it's like to sit with this therapist and see if it's the right fit for you. And that's really what a first, second, third session, that's what those are really about. It's what is it like to be in the room with this person? How am I responding to the interactions that we're having? And I would say two questions you can ask yourself about those first one, two, maybe three sessions is, did I feel like this person kind of gets it? And that's a, a kind of a very vague way to put it. But we know when we feel like someone kind of gets what I'm saying. They kind of get me.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  As much as you can get a stranger, there's a vibe. Like when you meet someone out in the world and you know whether you kind of vibe with someone, whether you get each other, that's really important. And the other thing that's equally important is that question we came up about, is that question we talked about earlier about being challenged is, did I leave where the therapist said something or asked something that made me consider what I was talking about in a slightly different way? Even if I don't know how I feel about it yet, did they make me stop for a second and think? And so we're not going to challenge people too much in the earlier sessions because we are wanting to create what we call a therapeutic alliance.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  But we definitely want to help them see something. In my, in my therapy that I write about, uh, in the book, I'm coming in because of a, because of a breakup. And I say something like, and half my life is over and I don't want to start over. And my therapist comes back to that statement and he says, I think you're grieving something bigger. And I do not like that at all. I'm like, no, that is not why I'm here. I'm here for this very discreet issue. But it was the reason that he was such a good therapist is that he just said it. When I got defensive about it, he backed off. He didn't, he didn't say, no, I know this is what's happening. He just said, okay.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  But it, but it sat with me and it sat with me for, marinated for a while. And then I realized, wow, that is really what we are dealing with. So you want a therapist who's going to both, um, kind of get you and help you feel comfortable, but also not so comfortable that you're not being challenged in any way. And if you, if those two things are true, that seems like that would be a good experience for you.

• 28:15Dan Harris?

  The first chunk of this interview, we've been very therapy specific. But I want to broaden now to talk about just things you've learned that can help us live lives, as we said earlier, that are just a little bit more smooth and successful. And you, and I love people who do this, you've got these like pithy, practical phrases that you use. Some of them have already come up, but there, I have a list of some others that I want to run by you that I think would be really helpful for people to hear and then operationalize in their lives. The first is, don't compare your suffering. What does that mean?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  So many of us do this strange thing with our emotional health where we think that if we aren't suffering as much as someone else, that whatever we're experiencing doesn't matter and we minimize it. So for example, if you fall down and you feel like you probably broke your wrist, you're gonna go to the ER. You're not just gonna walk around with your kind of wrist hanging off there. And you're not gonna say, well, somebody else has stage four cancer, or somebody else is in cardiac arrest right now. So I better just kind of walk around with this broken wrist for, you know, for the, you know, eight weeks or whatever

• 29:37Speaker 01

  it takes. And maybe it won't set right and I'm gonna be in pain. We don't do that. We go and we get it taken care of. But when it comes to our emotional health, we say, well, yeah, I'm feeling sad. Or, you know, yeah, I have a lot of anxiety, 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 and someone who loves me, I'm just gonna power through this. Right? Or I don't, I don't really deserve to have someone, you know, it's kind of indulgent is how people think. It's indulgent to kind of get help for something like that. And so what I say is there's no hierarchy of pain, that pain is pain and suffering is suffering. And when

• 30:19Speaker 01

  we start to compare on this hierarchy, it does nobody any good because we don't get to get help for what we need. And that affects not only us, but the people around us, and also other people who are struggling with something, get the message that they need to put their pain on a hierarchy too. And so people get really upset when I say this, that there's no hierarchy of pain. They say, well, of course, there's a hierarchy of pain. And what I mean by this is that your pain matters. And just like if you have a broken wrist, or you have stage four cancer, or you have, you know, something that seems more severe, it doesn't matter. If you have something that you want to get addressed, go get it addressed.

• 31:02Dan Harris?

  I'm gonna whip through these, although I may have follow ups for some of them. The difference between dwelling and feeling.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Our feelings are very important. Our feelings are like a compass. They tell us what we need to pay attention to and what direction we need to go in. So if you're feeling sad, what is not working in your life? Are you feeling disconnected from other people? Is there a loss that you're dealing with? If you are feeling angry, are you feeling like someone is intruding on your boundaries? Are you feeling like you're being taken advantage of? Are you not being treated well? If you're feeling envy, which people don't like to feel, I think it's great when you feel envy because it tells you what you want. It tells you what you desire. It tells you, oh, I need to go in this direction. Instead of saying,

• 31:53Speaker 01

  oh, I feel shame for feeling envy, you can say, this is telling me that I need to do something in my life that will give me more of what feels fulfilling or meaningful to me. So all of that is useful. Dwelling is just sitting with the feeling and doing nothing with it. And just kind of marinating in it without any intentionality around it. So instead of saying, I'm feeling sad, what does that mean? It's just, I'm feeling sad and there's nothing I can do about it. And I'm hopeless and helpless. And there's nothing that can be done. We talk about help rejecting complainers. So help rejecting complainers are people who dwell. We all know them. We've probably all been them too. A help rejecting

• 32:34Speaker 01

  complainer is someone who they keep complaining about the same thing over and over and over. And when you say, well, have you thought about this? Or have you tried this? Or what do you think would help? Oh, nothing will help. This is just the situation. So it's, it's almost as if they don't want to solve the problem that they get some satisfaction from just complaining. And so I think that that is what dwelling is. And a lot of people just want, going back to the validation, they just want validation, but they don't want to do anything about it. So we want to feel, that's really important. We want to use our feelings, but we don't want to just sit in them and say, there's nothing

• 33:16Speaker 01

  to be done and just get whatever, however it's serving us to get the validation of, of sitting in that place where we're dwelling.

• 33:24Dan Harris?

  I think about this a lot, the, the social media of it all, because, you know, on the one hand, I think it's great that we are more open about our mental health issues. You know, I, when I had my either famous or infamous panic attack on national television in 2004, you know, I had to lie to everybody because I couldn't admit I had a panic attack. Like, that was not a done thing. And even 10 years later, when I wrote a book about it, you know, but my mother and certain of my bosses were freaked out that I was gonna admit that I had panic disorder and that I had, you know, abused recreational drugs. Because again, this was still not a done thing. Now, we're in an era where it very

• 34:08Dan Harris?

  much is a done thing. And that's good in a way, but bad in that we, I find that on social media, too often, people are doing exactly what you just said. They're dwelling, they're trauma dumping, they're marinating in the problem. And too infrequently talking about what can be done about it, or what they've learned, or adding the piece that is, that is agentic.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  The other thing that I think we need to think about is when you're putting something out there, people will say, I'm being so vulnerable with you guys. Look, here I am. Here's a photo of me crying, or a video of me crying. What I think is true vulnerability is if you can do that with the people in your lives, where you actually have stakes. So being face to face, and being vulnerable in that way with someone who matters to you in your actual life as opposed to online, is so much more daring and courageous. And so I think it's kind of easy in a way to, you know, because what's gonna happen on

• 35:16Speaker 01

  social media? Everyone's gonna say, you know, is gonna give you a million likes. They're gonna give you all this positive feedback. Whereas, relationships are about the I thou of the relationship, that there are two people in it. It's not just someone dumping all their stuff on another person. It's, I'm sharing this with you. And then how are you going to receive this? And how does the other person receive it? And then how do they come back to you? And how do you receive that? And how do you get some kind of emotional, like a neurological resetting from that? Co-regulation, we call it. So you're dysregulated, something is going on, you come to someone else, and they might say, how can I be helpful

• 36:01Speaker 01

  right now? Right? We talk about help hug heard. You might ask, do you want, do you want me to brainstorm with you right now? Do you just want to hug right now? Do you just want to be heard right now? And it's so beautiful to have that interaction. It's not about likes on social media. It's not about, you know, sort of performative emotionality. It's about, and I'm not saying that their emotions aren't real, that they're posting on social media. I'm just saying, it's two strangers, for the most part. And it's to a big group as opposed to that one on one intimacy. So this interaction that you can have when you bring something like that to someone important in your life, can be so much more healing than anything that you're gonna put on social media. It can feel healing

• 36:45Speaker 01

  in the, in the moment on social media, but in, I'm talking about sort of longer term healing and deepening of those relationships outside.

• 36:54Dan Harris?

  Your mention of co-regulation leads me to another of your expressions that I really like. We change in relation to others. Can you say more about that?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  So there's an idea that floats around out there, which is that you have to really work on yourself before you can be in relationship with others. And I think that that is...

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Not how humans work, that we are learning about ourselves so much by relating to others. So when people come into therapy and they tell me about an interaction that they had with someone else, that tells me a lot, more than if they were just saying, I feel this way, or I feel that way. It's like, let's look at what happened and how you felt while you were interacting with someone else. And sometimes it's about how are you feeling as you're interacting with me here in the room as a therapist, but a lot of times it's what was happening out there. And it's kind of like the difference between, like, my therapist used this analogy with me, that it's like, whether you're like shooting baskets while you're practicing, or you're playing in a game. And so when you're working on yourself,

• 38:02Speaker 01

  it's like you're shooting baskets. You're like trying to perfect your technique, you're trying to kind of, you know, learn how to, how to do the things that you need to do when you're in a game, but you're not in the game. And when you're in the game, you learn so much more. It's like, oh, this person ran this way. Oh, this person does defense like this. Oh, this is what happens when we, you know, do this play. So, all this stuff happens that you don't learn by just shooting baskets against a backboard. And that's what I think people need to do more is they need to get in the game, but not just be in the game, but then learn from the game. So don't just keep playing games and then doing the same thing over and over. It's what can you learn from being in the game that you didn't know before the game? Like, do the post-game analysis.

• 38:42Dan Harris?

  This is, I think incredibly important in an individualistic, and now increasingly isolated because of technology, culture, where we are really just focused on ourselves and self-improvement can, it can become very myopic. I think a lot about something that one of your colleagues, Dr. Ingrid Clayton, I believe is her name, who was on this show, once said, I believe it was her, she said something like, wounding happens in relationships, but healing happens in relationships. And that's really stuck with me.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yes. We don't heal in isolation. We can go to therapy and learn more about ourselves, but we heal in relation to others. So I think it's important for people to think about how this individualistic ideal that we have right now, which is, you know, we have to really pay attention to ourselves and our needs and our wants, and we have to set boundaries all the time. I don't think people really even understand what a boundary is in a relational way. So, a lot of times people think, well, if that person is upsetting me, I'm going to set a boundary. And if they don't respect my boundary, then I'm going

• 40:00Speaker 01

  to cut them off. I don't think you've learned much from that experience. What a boundary actually is, it's a request, and it's a bid for connection. It's not about I'm pushing you away, it's about I'm bringing you closer. If I didn't care, I wouldn't bother to set the boundary. I would just leave, right? So, a boundary is a bid for connection. And what I mean by that is, let's say that, I'll use kind of a stereotypical example, let's say that you get together with your mother and she always criticizes your appearance, right? You can say to your mom, well, you know, if you criticize my appearance, I'm never talking to you again. Right? Or you can say what you're going to do. You could

• 40:43Speaker 01

  say, if you criticize, you could, and by the way, you, you, you give context. You say, hey, Mom, I love spending time with you. But when you talk about my appearance, it makes it less fun, and it makes me not want to spend time with you. So, I'm asking you not to comment on my appearance unless you have something nice to say. And if not, and if not, it'll be more fun for us. And if you do mention things about my appearance that you don't like, I'm going to end the visit and let's try again next time. Now, the boundary is not, it's not incumbent on her to do what you are asking. It's what are you going to do? You just set a boundary with yourself, which is, if my mom criticizes my appearance, I'm going to very kindly, not in anger, I'm not going to storm out,

• 41:27Speaker 01

  I'm going to just say, hey, Mom, remember I said that, you know, it's less fun when you do that? So I'm going to end the visit today. I love you so much. Give her a kiss. I'll talk to you, you know, we'll try another time. You do this 100% of the time. What you do, you have to hold the boundary 100% of the time. And if you do that, she's going to come to learn that either she continues to criticize you, in which case, every visit ends early and she doesn't like that, or she's going to adjust her behavior because she wants to actually spend time with you. So, it's not about this binary way of looking at the world, like they do what I want, or we cut off. It's, can we say, here's, here's

• 42:08Speaker 01

  where my limit is, here's why, I really enjoy you, I want to be with you. That's the frame of a boundary. And let's see what the other person does, but more importantly, you hold your boundary. And, you know, then you can, you have control over the situation without having to completely cut off the person. I'm not saying there aren't circumstances where people are dangerous, and, and maybe there needs to be some kind of, of distance. But in the majority of cases that I see nowadays, people are very quick to cut people off, or insist that people are not respecting their boundaries, or, you know, they're not, they're not able to tolerate the normal friction of being in relationship with imperfect human beings.

• 42:54Dan Harris?

  Yes, and our intolerance keeps going up because we're in a world where our technology has, has made friction in many ways a thing of the past. And same with human relationships, you know, we, we're just, you know, we can get anything we want with a swipe. And so then when we are in the messy world of interpersonal affairs, you know, we, we just, we don't have the, we haven't been sufficiently inoculated.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think too, we see this where we have trouble accepting people for who they are. And we forget that people have to accept us for who we are too. So it's not like we're the, we're the consumers, and we're shopping for a partner, a parent, and, and, and we have an idea of how they should be. We forget that like, people are making compromises to be with us too. We are not perfect. We have quirks, we have habits, we have ways of responding that are not ideal. And so I'm not saying tolerate bad behavior, but I am saying that sometimes we try to change things about another person, instead of looking at all the wonderful things you're getting in that relationship, all the things

• 44:10Speaker 01

  you love about that relationship. It's like, but he doesn't empty the dishwasher, right? He doesn't respect my time. And I'm not saying he shouldn't empty the dishwasher, because yes, but, but at the same time, there are like different things, like, or he's not, he's not emotional enough, right? Like, in this instance, he's not emotional enough, and I need this. We expect one person to be everything. We expect them to know how to exactly mirror us, and exactly validate us, and exactly co-regulate with us, and also, you know, read our minds, and know exactly what we want. And it just doesn't work that way. Somebody said, a friend of mine said, you know, I realize that that is, sometimes with this one thing about my husband, because she's very happy in her

• 44:54Speaker 01

  marriage, she said, that's just the husband I have. And I thought that was exactly what people are missing, is sometimes there are things about another person, they're not going to change, but there's so much good that you appreciate about the relationship, that why do you want to like, turn your camera lens on that one thing, and just always focus on that, instead of just shift the lens a little bit and look at all the other beautiful things that you're not looking at when you're focused on this one thing that you don't like?

• 45:24Dan Harris?

  Again, and you said this, but just to emphasize it, sometimes we're putting the camera lens on something that truly is unacceptable. And we either have to, yeah, we have to get them to revise their, their views, or update their behavior, or we need to get out.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm not saying there aren't times that, that you need to, you know, that there are things that are happening in the relationship that are not something you want to continue. That makes sense. What I'm saying is, I think a lot of times we're expecting people to live their lives in the way that we want them to live their lives, and relate to us in the way that we demand, and I'm using that word, demand, instead of request. So you can request something, but sometimes we demand things. And sometimes there are things that are really hard for other people to do, and we forget that sometimes there are things about us that are really hard for us to change in ourselves, and the other person accepts that about us. Like, they know that, you know what, there are all these strong things about my partner, but, and I love my partner so much, this

• 46:27Speaker 01

  thing irritates me, but I don't focus on it. And when you actually talk to people who've been married for, you know, 50 years, and they talk about what they appreciate in their marriages, they're not always saying, oh, this person is perfect. They're saying, I just focused on the things that I love about this person, and it made me happy. So again, I'm not talking about abusive behavior. I'm not talking about dangerous behavior. I'm not even talking about just personality differences that are not going to be good for the long term. But I think that we have these expectations in others and it's influenced by social media

• 47:07Speaker 01

  and sort of the world we live in, where we expect other people to live the way we want. And that's not relational.

• 47:15Dan Harris?

  Let me keep working down my list of your excellent sayings. Think like an editor. What's that about?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I did a TED Talk about this, about how we all have stories that we carry around with us. We have stories from childhood that are things like, I can't trust anybody, or I'm unlovable, or nothing will ever work out for me. Whatever your story is, you might not even be aware that you're carrying around that story. And so you see the world as you grow up through that lens without realizing it. So you say, well, I can't trust anyone. But what you're doing is you're picking untrustworthy people. Or you're picking trustworthy people. And then you are assuming that they're untrustworthy and you make them so paranoid that they leave you, right?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Because you're acting in a way that is not, is not sustainable in the relationship because you're always accusing them of something, or you're always wondering if they're not being trustworthy. And at a certain point, you're creating your own abandonment by driving them away. And then you say, see, I couldn't trust that person. They said they love me and then they left. Well, no, they, they, they were in love with you. And then this behavior kept going on and on, and it was untenable. And they couldn't be in a relationship like that because that's not really a relationship. That's a, that's like a, an interrogation. We have these stories and we don't even realize we're carrying them around. And also on top of that, we're all unreliable narrators. So when we are telling a story about maybe something that happened with another person,

• 48:50Speaker 01

  we're telling our version of the story. And I don't mean that we're telling a story that's untrue. I mean that we're telling just a limited part of the story. We don't know what the other person's story is, or we make assumptions. They did this because. Here's an example. I had a client who said, I really like this guy. We've been dating for six months and I think I should break up with him though, because he always comes late when we're supposed to meet for dinner. And I feel like he just doesn't prioritize me. He knows that it matters to me that he's on time and he doesn't, he doesn't prioritize me and he doesn't care about me in this way. And I think that's a red flag.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out, her story, the true part of the story was, yeah, he comes late. That's true. The untrue part of the story, where she's unreliable, is she doesn't know why he was late. Why he was late, it turns out, when she finally talked to him about it, was he was so concerned about getting there on time that he would try to leave work early. And he was getting in trouble at work. And so he was like, trying to please his boss and trying to please her and getting sort of caught in the middle. And he was embarrassed to tell her that he couldn't leave work, that he was embarrassed to say he didn't have high enough status in the company, that he could leave work. And so all this was going on, but she had no idea, right? So the story, there was like half a story, but it wasn't the whole story.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And it was actually kind of a charming story when you heard his side of the story, that it was like, I care so much about her that I'm putting my job on the line here because I want to be there for her, but I also want her to respect me. Right? So his story was, I don't know if a woman will respect me if I don't have high enough status. So he had his own story he was carrying around. And they weren't talking about the stories they were carrying around. So I think when, it's interesting when I see couples and they'll tell me, they'll, they'll narrate the same event and they have, you know, there's some overlap of what happened. And then there's very different versions of sort of what motivated the other person to act in the way that they acted. And so I, I, I think it's so important to, when you are thinking about something in

• 50:58Speaker 01

  your life and you're telling a story, can you write the story from the other person's point of view? Can you imagine what it is? Maybe you can ask them, that's the best way. But if you can't, for whatever reason, can you, if you were telling me the story, sometimes I'll say to somebody who comes in as an individual instead of as a couple, I'll say, okay, that happened. Now tell me what your parent, your partner, your friend, your sibling, if they were sitting here on my couch right now, how would they tell me the story? And you know what happens? They sit there for a second and they have to think about it. And then they say, well, my sister might say this. And now we get a very different version of the story. And it doesn't contradict her version.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  It's just, it amplifies it. It gives it more, it flushes it out. It gives it more nuance. And then she has more compassion for her sister. And now she thinks, okay, I understand now what might have happened. Maybe there's a different way that I can talk to my sister about this.

• 52:04Dan Harris?

  And so that's thinking like an editor, thinking it through from another POV.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  So my background was, I was a writer. I was a journalist and I wrote books long, and I worked in, I worked in television and, and, and film. So I was a storyteller, basically, before I became a therapist. And I never thought that the two were related until I actually started training to become a therapist. And I realized every time I sat in the room with someone, that really what they were telling me was just a story. And I know as a writer, that there are many ways to tell a story. Do you start here? Do you start with the inciting event? Who's the protagonist? Who are the heroes in the story? Who are the villains in the story? And can, and what if we told the story from somebody else's point of view in the story? And now, who are the heroes and who are the villains? Now what is the plot? Now who is the protagonist? Now who is the antagonist?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  So now what is the conflict? Do we even agree what the conflict is? So I started looking at these stories that people would tell me in therapy through the lens of being an editor, which is, and being a storyteller, which is, what are we missing here? Can we tell the stories differently? And it was so helpful for people. And I found that in my own therapy too, that it was so helpful to kind of look at, can I question anything about the story that I'm telling? Can I expand on? Can I amplify? Can I revise? Can I edit? Because you never turn in a first draft. Your first draft is full of all kinds of, you know, this is a writer too, Dan. Your, your first draft is full of all kinds of things that, that need attention.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  So can we look at what our initial story is, it's just a first draft? And then can we go in and edit and edit and edit and edit until we get to something that is more authentic and truthful and helpful than the story we came in with?

• 53:54Dan Harris?

  Okay, here's another one. You have to grieve the childhood you didn't have before you can have the adulthood you want.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  The instinct that a lot of us have is that we have this hope for a different childhood. We wanted a different childhood. We wanted something to be different. And so we're carrying that around. And the only way that you can have a better adulthood is to let go of the hope of having a better childhood. You will never get another childhood. And that involves a lot of grief work. So how do I grieve the fact that I did not have the childhood as opposed to carrying around that hope that I can somehow get it by choosing certain partners who will give me what my parents didn't give? You know, succeeding and being wildly successful and that will give me the validation that I never got as a child.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  There are all kinds of ways that we try to recreate what we didn't get, but they don't actually replace the fact that we didn't get it. Nothing will replace the fact that you didn't get the childhood that you hoped for. So a better way to look at that is, I need to let go and grieve that so that now I can create the adulthood that I want. And that's a lot of what we do in therapy, is helping people. And it's not blaming parents, by the way. It's another misconception about therapy is that we're sitting there blaming people's parents. I think most people's parents did the absolute best that they knew how to do, given whatever childhood they had. And this is intergenerational. We talk about intergenerational trauma all the

• 55:30Speaker 01

  time. Intergenerational patterns get passed down through generations. A lot of people say, "Well, I will never do what my father or my mother did to me." And then they become parents and all of a sudden, they're doing exactly what their father or mother did to them because they haven't processed it. You know, my colleague Terry Real, he says, "We marry our unfinished business." And I think that if you haven't processed that stuff from childhood, you do marry your unfinished business. We tend to not only parent in that way that our parents did, even though we said we would never do that, but we choose partners who will recreate the feelings that we had when we were children,

• 56:13Speaker 01

  of what we, you know, the ways in which we were maybe disappointed by our parents. So, you know, it's interesting because we don't do this consciously. This is an unconscious process. It's like, we see someone and we think, "That person's very much not like my parent. They're gonna be so loving and warm and nurturing." And then we find out, "Oh, my gosh, they explode when they get angry, or they drink too much, or, you know, we didn't realize this." But unconsciously, we, our unconscious said to us, "You look familiar. Come closer." So, why would people do this to themselves? They do it not because they're aware they're doing it. They do it because unconsciously, they think, going back to the hope for a better childhood, they think, "This time, I can win. This

• 56:54Speaker 01

  time, I'm gonna be in the face of someone just like my parents, but I'm gonna master it and I'm gonna make them be different, and I'm gonna get everything I want from them that I didn't get from my parents." This is completely outside of our awareness. And so, in the book, I write about a young woman that I call Charlotte, and she keeps choosing all these men who disappoint her. And it's very clear that she's recreating different things from both her father and her mother, that kind of, "Go away, I love you, go away, I love you," that kind of thing. And, and just a lot of, you know, she had a mother who was depressed, and then when her mother wasn't depressed, she was a great mom. But when she was depressed, it was very confusing for Charlotte. And she had a father who would kind of go away and come back, and go away and come back.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  So, those were the kinds of men she chose. And then she'd go out on dates with people who seemed like they were reliable and responsible. And, and also, she was, you know, they were attractive and they were interesting, but she would just say, "No chemistry. I don't know why. I don't know why. I have no chemistry." Right? Unconsciously, she wasn't going to be able to, you know, recreate the childhood with those stable men. So, she wasn't drawn to them. And it wasn't until we worked through some of this stuff in therapy with her, that it started to change, where she was, she was still drawn in certain ways to the unreliable men, but she was now drawn to the reliable men more. And so, she might have an initial kind of jolt when she'd encounter an unreliable man, but then the, the reliable men became

• 58:22Speaker 01

  very attractive to her, and it ended up changing who she ended up with and, and how her life went. So, I think it's, it's really important for us to, to think about, you know, how do we grieve what we didn't have, instead of carrying it around and trying to create something that we can never have? We can never go back and do it again.

• 58:40Dan Harris?

  Let me ask you a question about attitudes that we have toward parents. And this question, I'll apologize in advance, because it may be just too much of a local concern, too specific to me. I do represent, I think, a phenotype. I tend, tended to really idealize my parents. And I didn't have some story consciously that I was trying to heal my childhood. I thought I had a great childhood. And I still kind, largely, I think I have a less overly rosy view of my parents than I did for a long time. But I'm just checking with you, like, is that, is that common? Am I an outlier here?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  No, you're not an outlier at all. I think when people either idealize or devalue, that they're missing something in the middle. Our parents are just humans. And again, they grew up in certain, you know, they were, grew in certain soil, and that soil formed who they were, and they either figured stuff out as they got older, or they didn't. And if they didn't, we're gonna grow up in maybe similar soil. So, I think that when we demonize or idealize our parents, and by the way, there, there are situations in which parents were truly, truly damaging, in, in really severe ways. But it wasn't because they were

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  evil. And I'm not, I'm not excusing them or condoning their behavior at all. So, I wanna make that clear. But I'm saying, there's a context in which that behavior happened. And it's extremely unfortunate that the child then had to endure that childhood. So, there's no excuse for it, but there's an explanation for it. So, I think that when people say, "Oh, my parents were perfect," that's great, that you, they got, you know, you got a lot from your parents. That's, that's fantastic. And probably, you know, they had their own issues too, but we're not looking for that. We're not, we're not trying to look for problems. We're not interviewing for pain in therapy. We're trying to say, "Look at the person

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  in front of me, sitting on the couch. How do they move through the world? Where's the gap between what they say they want and how they behave? Where does that come from? How can they understand it better?" We're not blaming parents. We're saying, "This might help you understand why you're stuck. This might help you understand why you have panic attacks. This might help you understand why you're having trouble in relationships in this kind of pattern that we've seen three times now." Right? So, it's not, "Your parents were bad parents, or your parents were perfect parents. It was your parent, you grew up in whatever environment you did." We're just looking at how that informs what's happening now for you, so that you can understand it better. And then, separate from the soil

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  in which you grew up, we are born with a certain temperament. That's genetic. You know, so there's genetics and there's environment, and how do they interact? And it's, it's complicated. So, I, I think that people, you know, when, when we talk about our parents, I'll often say to people, the easiest way that I can get to what was the essence of their relationship with their parents, is I'll say, "Give me three adjectives that describe your mom. Give me three adjectives that describe your dad. Don't think about it. What are the three things that come right to mind?" And what they say is so informative. It's unfiltered. It's just, they're sort of, you know, visceral, "This is how I think about my parent." And it just helps us not to blame the parents. It just helps us to

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  say, "Okay, these were the first three things that you thought of. Let's see how they are informing the way you move through the world today."

• 1:02:24Dan Harris?

  Let me go back to your argument, that I, I think is very well supported by the data, that we all have these stories that we carry around about ourselves. I wanna get your thoughts on like, how we can arrive at a degree of peace with these stories and not be so owned by them. Mine, which I really was only fully aware of, you know, as of a couple of years ago, was, and I had a kind of ambient awareness of this story, but really, it crystallized for me in recent years. My story was that I was a bad person, just like inherently selfish, incurably selfish. And I don't think I actually articulated that

• 1:03:08Dan Harris?

  to anybody until like, 2018. It was the first time I had sort of had the courage to like, say those words aloud. And if I think about like, what implanted that story, I love my mother. We, we have, we had and have a great relationship, in my view. But she had a, she's very funny, and she has a kind of cutting sense of humor. And a running joke, starting when I was very little, was that I was vain and a kind of no-good Nick. I remember, I have this very early memory of my parents getting us ready for a photo shoot on the front lawn. They had me and my brother in like, onesies, and they were combing our hair. And my mother kept joking to my dad about how I kept looking

• 1:03:52Dan Harris?

  in the mirror. So, that was one little thing. And I was a kind of a bad student, and hung out with bad kids, and had a little weed business, you know, in eighth and ninth grade. And they used to call my friends the, the brain trust sarcastically. And so, that, and, and my parents have just long joked about me being kind of a difficult kid. And, and then, certain behaviors in my life, I don't know consciously or subconsciously, I was like, "Fuck it. If I'm a bad person, I might as well like, you know, really go for it."

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Embrace it.

• 1:04:22Dan Harris?

  Yeah. And so, anyway, I say all of that, perhaps I said too much. But how do we arrive at some degree of peace with it, some clarity, and then not be owned by it?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  So, the stories that our parents tell us about ourselves, say more about the storyteller, meaning our parents, than about us. You see this with siblings a lot, where in adulthood, a lot of siblings say, you know, they don't get along, and it's because, "Well, she was the pretty one. She was the smart one. This was the responsible one. This was the lazy one." Right? And it's like, "Who told you that?" Well, the adults. The adults labeled the kids. You tell people who they are, and then they start to take on that identity. Just like you, when you thought that you were the bad kid, you thought, "Well, screw it. I'll just be the bad kid." That's what happens. And so, we come into adulthood, and

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  then we have the freedom now to say, "Is that true? Am I the lazy one? Or did I just not like taking physics?" Right? Was I, was I a creative person, and that's where I put all my energy, and I wasn't lazy. I was very motivated to do the things that I liked to do. And the things that I liked less, I just didn't put a lot of energy into. You know, is this person difficult? Or is this person someone who is a truth teller? And really felt like it was important to be authentic? Is this person too sensitive? We get a lot of that. Or was this person somebody who was able to feel her feelings in a family

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  that denied all of their own feelings, even though they were extremely obvious? Right? Like, the parents who wouldn't talk to each other, because they were so angry. Well, they were furious. But they didn't show their anger in that way. And maybe this person, when she got mad, she got mad. Right? So- There are all these labels that become our story of who we are. And we get to, going back to the editing, we get to edit that story. And I like to say, what evidence do you have? Where is the evidence? Let's talk about that. And they'll say, well, I really did do that. Or I really was lazy. Because it's like, really, was that what the label was? Or was that something else?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  And if you start to believe your story, as many children do, like, this is who I am. All the adults say, this is who I am, so it must be who I am. It's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy in childhood that we start to act in ways that give us a cohesive identity. Like, well, I guess if I'm the creative one, or I'm the smart one. Let's say someone says, she's the smart one. And she's like, three. What do you know who's smart, right? She's the smart one. And there's lots of different ways, by the way, to measure intelligence. So what does that mean? It doesn't really mean much, anyway, because people are intelligent in lots of different ways. There's emotional intelligence, there's kind of academic intelligence, there's all kinds of intelligence, creative intelligence.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  That person who is told, you're the smart one, that person feels like they can never get anything less than an A on anything, because they will feel so much shame about themselves. Because it says, oh, they were all wrong about me. I'm not smart. Look what happened on this test. Look what happened in this class. I'm not smart. So they go through school with this sense of perfectionism. And, you know, I can never fail. What failing is to them is not being perfect. And they grow up to be these incredible perfectionists who are very risk averse. They're very unaware of what they actually are interested in or passionate about, because they always take the safe route that they know they will succeed in.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  So a lot of what happens with these stories is we get to revise them as adults. And I think that is the beauty of therapy, is we get to revise those stories. Again, it doesn't have to happen in therapy. You can do this all different ways. But I actually have a workbook about this, which is all about how do you rewrite your story? And how do you edit your story and examine it? And, you know, there are lots of very, the whole book is these concrete exercises. And so you can use things like that. You can listen to podcasts, you can self reflect. But I really want people to think about, you know, what is the evidence for this? And what was me kind of trying to fit into this story that was given to me, but that I did not ask for?

• 1:08:46Dan Harris?

  One thing that's been helpful for me, and I'll say this, and I don't, we'll see what you think of it, is, you know, I'm very influenced by Buddhism. There's this assertion that one of the well springs of human suffering is that we have what the Buddhists call wrong view. And wrong view is really just believing that there is some core, permanent, immutable, unchangeable sense of yourself. Immutable, unchangeable, fixed in the pejorative, and then we behave accordingly. But in seeing through that for myself, seeing that, of course, I'm constantly changing. I can change.

• 1:09:31Dan Harris?

  I am change. Because everything's changing all the time, has really kind of opened things up for me. And so when the story arises in my head, I see, well, that's just a thought, which, by the way, is going to change and be replaced by another thought in the next nanosecond. So does that, any of what I'm saying, make sense to you?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that ties into this idea that we forget that we are the authors of our story. That we let everybody else write our story for us when we're young. And then we grow up and we forget that we get to write it. So we can turn the page and say, when people think, oh, I can't change, or it's too late to change, I always want to question that with them. Why do you think you can't change? Why do you think that things will never change? That you don't have any agency over your own life?

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  My therapist, at one point, I write about this, where I was feeling this way, like a very trapped about what was going on in my life. And he said, 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. So the question is, why do so many of us sit there shaking the bars when we can walk around the bars? And part of it is, because with freedom comes responsibility. We are responsible for our lives. If we walk around those bars, we are the authors of our story, to mix a bunch of metaphors here. We are responsible for our lives. And that can be scary. We might think, well, who am I to know how to run my own life?

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Who gave me that power? And I think it can be scary at first, but I think it's also incredibly liberating when you realize you don't have to do it all at once. It's like, one sentence at a time, rewrite your story. Write one sentence. That's all you need. And when one sentence follows, another sentence follows, another sentence. And it's a way of exploring something on the page, too, when you're rewriting your story. It's like, you don't know what the story is yet. It doesn't matter. You're just exploring. Just put it all out there.

• 1:11:40Dan Harris?

  It's been such a pleasure to have you on. And I regret that I haven't done so sooner. And I hope this is the first of many. Let me just finish with two questions that I often ask at the end of interviews. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  I would say one thing that I think I want to just call out, as we're talking about vulnerability and connection, is the ways in which I see men and women come to therapy. Because I think that a lot of men feel like they can't talk about their emotional lives. And I see this when men come in and they'll say something like, you know, I've never told anyone this before. And they literally mean that. They could have a great marriage, great friends, great family. They have never told anyone before. And it's not even some deep, dark secret. But to them, it feels very vulnerable. And it's not that men aren't deep. They are equally deep as women.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  It's that they've been socialized in this way. When we talk about the story, the story of being male, is you don't talk about your feelings, right? And women will come in and they'll say, you know, I've never told anyone this before, except for my mother, my sister, my best friend. So they've told maybe one, two, three people. And I saw that as someone raising, you know, I have a son. And I would see him, you know, when he was like, maybe two years old, and he'd fall down in the playground. And, you know, if he fell down, what would the adults do? They'd say like, ah, get up, shake it off. And if like, a little girl fell down, they'd be like, oh, honey, come here, let me give you a hug. And so it's just, I think we need to think about that in our relationships, whether

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  it's our partners, or our brothers, or our siblings, or our fathers, or our sons. How do we receive male vulnerability? When I see couples, and I'll see, often it'll be like, a woman saying to her husband, you know, I just don't feel like we're connecting. I really want you to open up to me. I want to feel closer to you. And then he does, and he opens up. And let's say he starts tearing up a little bit, or maybe he even starts crying. Inevitably, I get some version of her looking at me like a deer in headlights, as if, I really want him to be open with me. That's what I asked for. And I will feel closer to him because of it.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  But I also don't feel safe when he's crying in front of me.

• 1:14:13Dan Harris?

  Right.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Right? So I think we just want to think about that in terms of the stories that we tell ourselves. Like, what is the story we're telling ourselves about vulnerability and gender, and who's allowed to have feelings? And going back to the hierarchy of pain, who's allowed to feel pain? At what level? And how do we rank that, depending on who's the person suffering? Just something to think about as we're all trying to connect more.

• 1:14:38Dan Harris?

  The final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book slash books, your podcasts slash podcasts, your New York Times? Just plug everything, please.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  The book that I was talking about today was called, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. And it follows the lives of four of my therapy patients. And I'm the fifth patient in the book as I go to therapy. And I hope that everybody sees themselves in each of these people. I write the Ask a Therapist Advice column for the New York Times. And there's a TED Talk that I have on how changing your story can change your life, which we talked about a lot today. There's a 16 minute version of it. And there's a workbook about how you can change your story if you want really, sort of a concrete program to go through to kind of edit your story. And I have two podcasts. One is called Dear Therapist, and one is called Since You Asked.

• 1:15:36Dan Harris?

  Such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Oh, such a pleasure. Thank you, Dan.

• 1:15:41Dan Harris?

  Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast

• 1:16:22Dan Harris?

  with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14 day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

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