Relationship Expert on Identifying Red Flags, Narcissistic Behavior, Surviving a Break-Up & Answering YOUR Questions about Love

Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist and bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, is helping us answer burning questions from our MBB audience like: “Am I in love or just attached?" “How do you know if you're in love?” “How do I build trust in a relationship?” From relationship red flags and how to communicate better with your partner to knowing when you’ve found "the one," Lori uncovers why we stay in toxic relationships, the truth about vulnerability, and how to fix your relationship after betrayal. Plus, get expert advice on setting boundaries, identifying red flags & narcissistic behavior, finding the right therapist, and how to move on after a break-up. Don’t miss her tips on keeping love alive and making relationships work. Plus, stay tuned for some surprising red flags from Mayim and Jonathan. This is the ultimate guide to unlocking your healthiest connections! Lori Gottlieb's Book, MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE: https://a.co/d/gDLLpsd Lori's TED TALK: https://www.ted.com/talks/lori_gottlieb_change_your_story_change_your_life?language=en Lori's Advice column, Ask The Therapist @ New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/column/ask-the-therapist Lori's Podcast, DEAR THERAPISTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dear-therapists/id1523340696 BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If your story is, "I'm unlovable," you're going to pick partners who treat you poorly? You will do things to actually make yourself unlovable? You will create friction, conflict? And so until you realize I am operating with this plotline, everything I do is dictated by this story.

• 0:24Mayim Bialik?

  Laurie Gottlieb, she's been featured on Oprah, Good Morning America, CNN, NPR's Fresh Air. Her TED Talk from 2019 was one of the top 10 most-watched of the year.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  It shouldn't take a betrayal for people to wake up in their relationships. Go out there and learn something about yourself. If your partner won't do that, then that's a marital issue. That's not an issue with his family. That's an issue in your marriage. We're telling the truth through our own perspective. And we think that our perspective is the objective perspective, that the other person's perspective is somehow subjective or off, but ours is objective. How well are you listening to the other person?

• 1:06Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:08Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:09Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown, the place where we break things down, so you don't have to. Today, we're going to break down some very important things with questions sourced from you all. We are going to find out what are the most common complaints that people have about their partners? How are we messing up the first date? Why do we stay in relationships if we know that they're not good for us? How do we know if we've found the one? Why do certain people struggle to be vulnerable in relationships? And why do their partners not like when they learn to?

• 1:42Speaker 03

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• 1:48Mayim Bialik?

  How did I not know Rack has Adidas? I always find something amazing.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Because the best deals go fast.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Save big on Marc Jacobs, Madewell, Steve Madden, and more. Plus, buy it online and pick it up in store the same day for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack. Not be vulnerable.

• 2:09Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to learn... When is it time to get married? Are you ready to take that next step? What are some of the biggest red flags in relationships? And what are the top tips to finding and keeping love?

• 2:23Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to talk about how to figure out if, guess what? The problem is you in the relationship. I really appreciated learning about this one.

• 2:32Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to cover a very tricky and nuanced topic. Should you cut off a family member or a parent? And it's a very difficult decision. A lot of conversation these days on social media about what constitutes toxicity? And what would be required in order to take that very significant step?

• 2:54Mayim Bialik?

  How do you rebuild trust with someone after an affair? Who's going to be helping us answer all these questions? Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. She is also the co-host of the popular Dear Therapist podcast, and she writes the new Ask the Therapist advice column for the New York Times. She's a therapist and New York Times bestselling author. She's been featured on everything as a go-to expert on Oprah, Good Morning America, CNN, NPR's Fresh Air. Her TED Talk from 2019 was one of the top 10 most watched of the year. She's going to answer all of your questions and more. And she does so with a lot of humor, a lot of compassion, and she's very straightforward.

• 3:36Mayim Bialik?

  And we are so excited to have Lori Gottlieb answering your questions and a few of our own as well. Lori Gottlieb, welcome to The Breakdown. We've got you here in person, which is so lovely.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Break it down. Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:50Mayim Bialik?

  We've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. And your book is so aptly titled, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. We would like to talk to you. So we're very excited you're here.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  I'm here for that.

• 4:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you speak a little bit about what the impact of us being stuck in our unreliable stories is by us believing something is the truth? How does that impact us physically and emotionally?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we don't even realize that we're walking around with these stories. So you might be walking around with a story that's like, I'm unlovable, or I can't trust anyone. I feel so seen right now. Or, you know, "Nothing ever works out for me," or whatever that story is. And what we need to understand is that those stories were told to us by people who had, were also unreliable narrators, and they had their own reasons for telling that story. So, like, in a family, there might be like, "Oh, you're the smart sibling," or "You're the, you know, this sibling. You're the sensitive one." And sometimes it can be couched as positive, right?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Like, "You have so few needs. I never have to worry about you. You're so self-sufficient." Yes, yes. And then sometimes it's not so positive, like, you know, "Don't be so difficult," or "Why are you so sensitive?" So the person thinks that because I have feelings, I'm overly sensitive, so I better stuff that down and not present that to people because they will think that I am demanding, needy, too much, right? So they walk around with that story. That's a real story. My story is, you know, not me, but my story is, "I am too much." So they navigate through the world with that story. "I will not try to get a promotion at work because I don't want to be too much. I don't want to burden people. I will not tell my friend that when she's late every time we

• 5:43Speaker 00

  get together that that bothers me because I don't want to be too much," right? So it affects every aspect of your life that you're carrying around the story about yourself. But you got that story from someone who was extremely uncomfortable with feelings. So that person became very uncomfortable when you had a feeling, and they didn't know how to deal with your feelings, which you had completely normal feelings. You were sad when something sad happened. You were anxious when something worrying happened. You see parents do this all the time where a child might say, "I'm sad," and the parent will say, "Oh, let's go get yogurt," right? Because they're so uncomfortable with the child's feelings. Or they might say, the kid might say, "Oh, I'm so scared about, you know, this," and

• 6:28Speaker 00

  the parent will say, "Oh, don't worry about that." There's nothing to worry. There's nothing to worry about, right? Or, "I'm so angry about this," and it's like, "Well, you know, don't be angry." And so... When we try to talk people out of their feelings, or we give them the message by literally saying to them, "You're too sensitive, get over it, don't be difficult," what happens is that parent is basically telling you, but you don't know this because you're a kid, is basically saying, "I can't handle feelings because I grew up in whatever kind of environment I grew up in, and when you have feelings, I get anxious and I can't tolerate that."

• 7:06Mayim Bialik?

  I'm gonna play the devil's advocate for a second, because I often think about, you know, people that I know who don't grow up in Los Angeles, or New York, right, or San Francisco, or, you know, a lot of these sort of like coastal cities where this vernacular is very familiar. What about someone who would say, like, "Can't people just get over it?" Like, sometimes parents don't want you to cry and be so needy, and like, "You're fine, it's okay." Like, what is damaging about that sort of perspective?

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:41Mayim Bialik?

  That feelings really don't need to be that cared for, and you'll just be fine, get over it, be quiet. What's wrong with that?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Well, there's nothing wrong with that when it's balanced. So, what we see right now is an overcorrection. So now we see everybody saying like, "Oh, your kid, you know, they can't have the ice cream before dinner," and you're like, "Oh, honey, I know you're so sad about..."

• 8:02Mayim Bialik?

  Do you feel traumatized because...

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. And it's like, "No, they can't have the ice cream," and that's the rule, right? So, it's not about having like a 20-minute conversation, or even a three-minute conversation. It's just acknowledging, like, "I know you're sad you want the ice cream, but we're gonna have it after dinner."

• 8:20Mayim Bialik?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Done.

• 8:21Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Okay? So, it's not this whole going into every feeling, because now, what happens with that is, what I see is these people who are now in their twenties, every feeling is huge. They have no perspective. It's like a thermostat that isn't set correctly. So, in other words, like, they think everything is 100 degrees. And really, it's like 70 degrees, but you're making it 100 degrees.

• 8:48Mayim Bialik?

  Or, I guess one of the things that can happen is, if a parent gives every single emotion so much attention...

• 8:56Mayim Bialik?

  That child grows into an adult who believes that every single emotion needs that level of attention.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Right, and everything is a crisis. And they also don't know how to handle their emotions. So they're not learning, so if you, if your child comes to you and says, "You know, I'm really worried about this test tomorrow." Okay, instead of saying, "Oh, there's nothing to worry about, you'll do great." Or instead of saying like, "Oh, you know, like, like, let's talk about it and oh my goodness." And, you know, you could say like, "Oh, well, okay." You know, "Tell me more." "Tell me more" are the three most powerful words. If somebody is coming to you with something, whether it's your partner, your child, anybody, "Tell me more." And so then your child might say, "Yeah, I don't know, I'm really worried. I, I'm not sure I know how to do these kinds of math problems."

• 9:46Speaker 00

  "Oh, well, what do you, what do you want to do about that?" Right? "I don't know, maybe I'll call my friend and see if she can help me. Or maybe I'll talk to my teacher." Right, so that's how kids learn to deal with feelings. Or, "I'm really sad that so and so didn't sit with me at lunch today." "Oh, tell me more." "Well, I think that maybe we got into a little argument about thi-" you know, like, they'll figure it out, just let them talk it through.

• 10:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you get a little esoteric? My perspective is that a lot of the stories you're describing that we grew up with end up operating in the background and we don't even realize, "I don't feel good enough to get this task for this promotion. I don't feel good enough or confident enough to tell someone that they're pissing me off, so I just harbor it inside." Can you explain how these stories that we carry around, that we may not even realize, how they're influencing how we perceive reality?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they, they influence all of it. So, you know, it's kind of like wearing clothes that don't fit anymore and you don't realize it, you're still walking around with those old clothes. So if your story is, "I'm unlovable," then you're going to pick partners. Your picker is going to look for people who will validate your story. So you will find people who treat you poorly. You will find people who treat you in a way that makes you feel like, "See, I'm unlovable." You will do things to actually make yourself unlovable. So with friends, you will create friction, conflict, because it's going to validate your story.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  This is all completely outside of our awareness. And so until you realize I am operating with this plotline, and I am going through the world, and everything I do, every step I take is dictated by this story. And I am acting it out. And until you realize that, and by the way, it's not just realizing it and then, oh, you're free. Okay, so we like to say that insight is the booby prize of therapy, that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you're not making changes out in the world, the insight is useless. In fact, most of therapy takes place outside of the therapy room. So it's what did we talk about? And then how are you doing something different? Because if you aren't doing something different, it's not just rumination from the neck up, right?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  It's what are you doing differently out in the world? So someone might say, oh, now I understand why I get into that argument with my partner. We got into that same argument this weekend. And I'll say, okay, did you do something different? Well, no, right? So the next step is, okay, so what do you want to do differently? So if you are realizing, oh, I have this story that I am unlovable, and I'm seeing the ways that I'm acting that out in the world, then we're going to talk in therapy about what are some concrete things you can do this week that's different from what you might normally do? What is your instinct? Because you're sort of operating on autopilot with that story.

• 12:47Jonathan Cohen?

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• 12:49Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:56Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm counting down the minutes till Archie gets to climb up to tell us if he likes it.

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• 14:09Jonathan Cohen?

  That's article.com/miam for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

• 14:16Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:44Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  And then what is something you might do differently? And they're these very small steps. And I think that when people take small steps, it doesn't feel overwhelming. Because people, a lot of times, they think that in order to change, they have to like, do these big rehauls. And that doesn't work. In fact, often when people get stuck, I often say like, maybe the steps are too big. So we want to just go into the smallest possible chunk that you can do in the smallest possible time.

• 16:12Speaker 03

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• 16:19Mayim Bialik?

  How did I not know Rack has Adidas? I always find something amazing.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Because the best deals go fast.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Save big on Marc Jacobs, Madewell, Steve Madden and more. Plus, buy it online and pick it up in store the same day for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 16:38Mayim Bialik?

  We asked our listeners to submit kind of their most pressing questions. Most of them revolve around relationships, which I think makes sense. So we're just going to fire some questions out you and see what happens.

• 16:55Jonathan Cohen?

  These are the most asked, most anticipated questions that our audience has. And a lot of people. They don't know how to figure out the next step in their relationship, how to find love, how to navigate the relationship that they're in, if it's the right relationship. And so I think we're gonna break down a lot of information that it's gonna help a lot of people.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  I want to know how we're messing up the first date. What baggage, what baggage are we bringing even to a first date that is really making us destined to not have success in a relationship?

• 17:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Besides the story that they don't want to be here in the first place.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Right, of course. Well, there's probably some reality to that. But the biggest thing that people bring to a first date is projection. So they are projecting onto the other person all of their hopes and dreams of what this date is going to be. And if you start there, you're probably going to be disappointed. Not because there's anything wrong with the other person, but simply because you're projecting a fantasy onto another human being. So I think the thing you want to bring to a first date is curiosity. Just what, who is this person? I'm curious about them. What's interesting about them? There's something that when I was training to be a therapist as supervisor said, which was, "There's something likable about everyone.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  It's your job to find it." And I was like, "Yeah, I don't think so." Right? I mean, there are lots of people that I thought in that moment, "No, I don't know if there's something likable about them." But actually, when you do therapy, you start to realize, "Oh, there is actually if you get curious enough and if they're willing to be authentic with you."

• 18:37Mayim Bialik?

  So how do I stop projecting hopes and dreams onto someone? Isn't that the point of dating, that you have hopes and dreams?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  I think that you can be excited about someone, but that's different from a whole narrative. You know, again, going back to story of, and then, you know, you meet someone on a first date and there are all these projections of, "Oh, this person's like this and their family's like this and this is what we're gonna be like if we ever argue. And they're gonna have the same values as me and they're gonna have the same interests as me." Based on, you know, a 90-minute conversation.

• 19:08Mayim Bialik?

  Got it. Is there a way to know if someone is the one? Is that a thing?

• 19:17Speaker 00

  I think we place too much importance on "the one." I think it's, "Is this person the one for me?" And there's the difference in that. There's a slight difference, which is like, the one is this kind of idealized person, right? That you've been thinking about in your mind for a very long time. The one for you is, "How do I feel when I'm with this person? What is it like to be with this person?"

• 19:42Mayim Bialik?

  I feel like I'm projecting all my hopes and dreams and it's gonna be amazing and I think we should get married.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  You know, but I think that people don't pay enough attention to what it feels like to be with that person. So many times people will say, "You know, oh, I like this person so much. I don't know why he's not calling me." It's like, are you enjoying that experience of not being called by this person? Right? "Oh, I like this person so much, but I don't really know, like, he doesn't really open up to me." Or, "I don't," you know, like, all these things that are really difficult about the relationship, or, "I don't really feel comfortable around this person." Are you enjoying that experience? Because it's not just about what you like about the person on paper, or what, you know, what kind of ego boost you get by being with this person who seems to, you know, check off the boxes that you like.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  It's, what is the experience like of just being together?

• 20:36Mayim Bialik?

  That kind of leads to our next question. Why do some of us stay in relationships that we know are not good for us, instead of waiting for the right person?

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Because, well, a few reasons. The first is that change is really hard. So it's sort of like, human beings do not do well with uncertainty. And we would rather cling to the familiar, the thing that we know, than go off into the unknown. It's kind of like, the misery of certainty is better than the uncertainty of... There's basically a quote that like, we would rather be miserable, but we have certainty, than have uncertainty and have the possibility of misery.

• 21:22Mayim Bialik?

  Why is loneliness so scary for people?

• 21:25Speaker 00

  It's not just loneliness. I think it's the idea of, you know, when you're with someone, it's not just being with that person. It's the whole future that you had planned out with that person. And it's also you probably have mutual friends. You have rituals, traditions, daily routines. So part of it is just that your whole life is going to change at first in a way that's going to feel jarring. And that's really scary for a lot of people. But another reason that we stay with people who are not right for us is because we tend to, is this thing called repetition compulsion, which is that if you were raised by somebody, let's say,

• 22:09Speaker 00

  who was a yeller, or someone who drank too much, or someone who was avoidant and uncommunicative. We tend, if we don't kind of figure out what that was about, we tend to repeat that because we think this time, I will master this situation. This is, again, completely outside of our awareness. This time, I will win. And so when you meet someone, like you're at a party and you're like, that person, right? If you haven't done that work, that person will probably have some of those traits. You don't see it yet. You think, I've picked someone the opposite. This person's not a yeller. This person's not avoidant. This person doesn't drink too much. Give it a few months. See what happens. If you, again, if you haven't done that work,

• 22:53Speaker 00

  you will probably keep picking people who feel familiar to you. It's like a moth to flame. Like you have some draw to that kind of person. Until you start realizing, it's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. You know, people who will always say, like, you know, oh, you know, all men are terrible. All women are crazy, whatever they're saying. It's like, well, what's the common denominator here, right? Because not all men are terrible. Not all women are crazy. But yes, you keep going out with people who are, you know, kind of fit this type. So you're the common denominator. Why do you keep being drawn to people like that?

• 23:32Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of times, people describe feeling, you know, kind of supernaturally attracted to someone, or it feels magic, or it feels like chemistry. Is what you're seeing just a reflection of probably something that will be revealed as a repetition compulsion? Why did God make us that way?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  There is healthy chemistry and there is healthy magic. But what I'm talking about is when you are unaware and you keep picking people who disappoint you, who make you unhappy, who can't be in the kind of relationship that you want to be in, where there's a lot of conflict, where it's volatile, where someone can't commit repeatedly. You know, what is going on there? So, yes, there is healthy chemistry when you are aware of what are some of these things that were keeping you stuck and you're much more intentional about who you pick. Then, when you're in a room with people, you will notice, oh, look at that person. And that person will probably be good for you.

• 24:35Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to go even further on this point. And I think the answer may be that it's more of a sense of calm than a sense of sparks in chaos. Because there's the line that says, either you're going to marry one of your parents or turn your partner into one of your parents. So what does it actually mean to get out of that cycle when it's so ingrained?

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:01Jonathan Cohen?

  How do we become aware?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think that, first of all, it's not like all of a sudden you start picking different people. It's that you still are picking the same people, but you're realizing like week two, oh, wait, I'm noticing something. Oh, wait, do I want to stay in this? By week three or week four, you're probably like, you know what? I'm going to get out of this. As opposed to month four or year four that it used to be. So you're starting to notice more and more quickly what's going on. You're just being, you know, you're kind of observing yourself differently.

• 25:32Mayim Bialik?

  Growth, you've grown.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, and at a certain point, you say, oh, I don't actually, the chemistry that I felt around people like that, I don't feel it anymore. So what happens is you start to shift. So when you're in that, you know, I had in the book, I talk about this woman, Charlotte, who keeps dating, you know, men who disappoint her. And there's a reason for that, which you can read about. And what happens is, once she becomes aware of this, she's still doing the same stuff. You know, like, nothing is really changing, but she's becoming more aware, more quickly. And it's interesting, because at that time, when she first came to me, she was like, when I go out with people who seem like really good people, like really, and they're attractive and they're, you know, employed, but they're also emotionally mature and they're funny

• 26:18Speaker 00

  and they're smart and, you know, all the things she wants. I don't know, just no chemistry, not attracted, right? She just didn't have chemistry for those healthy people. Because it was that repetition compulsion that was pulling her along, kind of like outside of her control. And then, when she started noticing, oh wait, I don't like being around men like this. I don't like being around people who are unreliable, or don't tell me the truth, or betray me, or whatever would be happening. One of them ended up coming into the, coming to, was in our waiting room, coming to therapy with his girlfriend. That's how she found out he had a girlfriend. So, small world, Los Angeles. But, um, but it was, you know, it's like those kinds of things where,

• 27:02Speaker 00

  when is enough enough? And you can tell someone that, but they're still not going to change their behavior until they start realizing what is this thing that is controlling them. And so, when she started really doing the work on this, then she started feeling chemistry toward those healthy people and was not attracted to in the same way. There was still like a little bit of a pull, but she wasn't as attracted to those people that would inevitably disappoint her.

• 27:29Mayim Bialik?

  I like this notion that one of the goals, you know, in therapy is not just to talk about your problems, but to be able to recognize patterns and then be able to say, how do I change my behavior so that I'm not as heartbroken about, let's say, ending a relationship that's unhealthy because it no longer has that pull for me anymore?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. And, and, and I think that what you realize is, I'm, I'm not so heartbroken about losing this person. I'm heartbroken because I would like to find a healthy partner. And so, those are two different things.

• 28:07Mayim Bialik?

  We all have that friend who like won't break up with the guy.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:11Mayim Bialik?

  And a lot of times...

• 28:14Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of times, like, it seems so clear to us. Like, why would you want to be with this person, right? What is going on when, like, we can see that a relationship needs to end, but that person doesn't see it? How do you get that person to understand it's time to give up on this? Or is that something that you need to let people just figure out on their own?

• 28:40Speaker 00

  It's interesting because in the book I talk about the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion. And what we tend to do as friends for a very long time, until we can't take it anymore, is we tend to offer idiot compassion. So, you know, your friend, and also going back to unreliable narrators, your friend will say, "Can you believe what my partner did?" And we're like, "Yeah, you're right. They're wrong. You go, girl," right? Because we think we're being supportive. And we also take their version of the story as the objective truth. But if you listen to your friends enough, right? You might hear the pattern, and you might see the pattern. And so at a certain point, you're not offering the idiot compassion anymore. You're not saying like, "Yeah, you're right."

• 29:25Speaker 00

  But you are sort of validating their experience, which isn't that helpful either. And so, you know, it's like, "Oh, I'm so sorry," or "Oh, that's so hard," right? But that's not really helping them, because then they're just venting to you, and it's just a pattern, and they're not doing anything about it, and they're not even aware of it. What you get in therapy is you get wise compassion, where we're holding up a mirror to you, and we're helping you to see something that maybe you haven't been willing or able to see. And the word compassion is in there because we do it compassionately, but we're also challenging you. And I think that a lot of people think that therapy is, you go into therapy, you download the problem of the week, your therapist says, "Yes, that's so hard," right? And they validate you, and you leave.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  That's not therapy. That's the idiot compassion you can get from your friends.

• 30:12Mayim Bialik?

  But much more expensive when you go to a therapist.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  And it's a waste of time and money if you're paying someone for that and you're driving to someone's office to do that. So, you know, if you're looking for a therapist, by the way, small tangent here, but if you're looking for a therapist, I think it's really important to say, not only, how do I feel talking to this person, but did they say something or ask a question that made me wonder about something differently, think about something differently? And so I think with your friend, when you have a friend who, you know, you say, why are they putting themselves through this? This is so hard to watch. You can ask them questions. So it's not, leave him, why are you putting up with this? It's none of that. They're not going to respond to that.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  It's more like, it sounds like, it sounds like it's really hard to be in this relationship. Or, what's it like for you when he does that or she does that? Right? Just a question. And I wouldn't ask more than one at one time in one conversation, just what's it like? Oh, well, it's terrible. Oh, huh. You know, right?

• 31:13Mayim Bialik?

  Tell me more. Or don't tell me more.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Right. Gotta go. But, but I think that when people are hearing themselves say, oh, I really don't like this, or this is really hard, right? You know, they start to, they start to come to some sort of awareness. It's going to take time, they're going to have to do it on their own. I mean, you know, you can say something like, you know, it really...

• 31:43Jonathan Cohen?

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• 31:46Mayim Bialik?

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• 32:57Jonathan Cohen?

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• 33:02Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:30Mayim Bialik?

  Starting my day with this easy ...health-focused task reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that MyobioX Breakdown sent you.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  It really breaks my heart to watch you be treated like this, or to allow yourself to be treated like this. And you can also say to your friends, it depends, are they in an abusive relationship, or are they just in a bad relationship?

• 35:11Mayim Bialik?

  I was just talking about general bad relationships.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Like, because abusive is different, but if they're just in a bad relationship, you can say to them, you know what? It breaks my heart to hear you go through this relationship that just doesn't seem to be making you happy. I don't think I can really be helpful with this. Because then they don't have you as an outlet for that. And that, the way, the fact that they can keep talking to their friends about it keeps them in the relationship. When people stop talking to them about it, they actually have to face it, and then they might go to therapy, or they might make a different decision. And this is not about abusive relationships, again, this is just about bad relationships.

• 35:48Mayim Bialik?

  You see a lot of people come in and out of your office. It's a somewhat gendered question. What are the most common complaints that women have about men? And what are some of the most common complaints that men have about women? And I'm asking you this because I hope you will validate what a lot of people experience. So, you had said earlier, like, women are crazy, and like, men are mean. But what is actually going on? What do the sexes get wrong about the other? Or what are they perceiving is not going well in trying to interact?

• 36:20Speaker 00

  I want to give some context to this, which is that I think that it's really hard, in our culture, for men to really talk about what they're going through. So, when men come into therapy, they will usually say something to me like, "I've never told anyone this before." And they literally mean that. Even if they have a healthy marriage, a great marriage, friends, family, they have not told anyone. When women come in, they will often say something at some point like, you know, I've never told anyone this before, except for my sister, my mother, my best friend. Right? So they've told one, two, three people. But they feel like, because they haven't told more people, that it's private. They really haven't told anyone.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  So when a couple comes in, often, and if it's a heterosexual couple, if you're going to talk about genders in that way, often the woman will say something like, you know, I really want you to open up to me. I really want to know what you're feeling. I just feel like we're so disconnected and I need you to tell me what's going on. And then, right there in front of me, on my couch, he will open up to her. And maybe he even tears up a little bit, or some tears start falling, or he's crying, and she will freeze. She will freeze like a deer in headlights. And what comes out is, I don't feel safe when you don't open up to me, because I feel

• 37:48Speaker 00

  disconnected from you. But I also don't feel safe when you're crying in front of me, because all this cultural stuff around, you know, men and vulnerability and strength and what it means in women and what we want from men. And it's so confused and conflicted, because we want to have authenticity, vulnerability, communication with our partners, and we still have these gendered stereotypes that get in the way.

• 38:20Mayim Bialik?

  So what do you do with that? What do you do for the female partner who has asked for vulnerability and then doesn't know what to do with it, or feels threatened by it, or doesn't feel safe? And what do you do for the male partner who's trying to express himself and is not being received and heard?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  For the female partner, you know, we talk about what I just said about this question of safety and what that means. And we talk about what safety means for him. He says, you know, he'll say something like, "Yeah, this is why I don't feel safe talking to you," right? So then we say, "Okay, how do we create safety for both of you so that he can feel safe talking to you and you can feel safe even when he's vulnerable, knowing that he's still strong? That vulnerability, actually, it's a sign of strength, that he is opening up to you, that he is so strong that he is able to show this part of him to you." And that reframe is so helpful for women to know, "Wow, the truly strong man is the one who can be vulnerable, who can open up to me, who can feel comfortable saying what

• 39:23Speaker 00

  he really feels."

• 39:24Mayim Bialik?

  I think a lot of women maybe have this complaint about their partners, and this may happen also in any variety of, you know, permutations of relationship. But there are often times when the partner who's asking for the other partner to be more vulnerable, there are often times when that person does not want to be vulnerable or doesn't have that vocabulary. Can you talk a little bit about what that is like? Because many men don't want to go there. Like, they don't just all sort of crumble in a therapist's office. And I guess my fear is that a lot of people want to get their partners to therapy, but that doesn't always happen. It doesn't always happen that they sit in a therapist's chair and all of a sudden they're

• 40:07Mayim Bialik?

  like crying and like, "Oh, I have, you know, issues and like, don't be afraid of my vulnerability." A lot of men don't want to go there and feel threatened by going there. So can you talk a little bit about that dynamic as well?

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's not as if you say to your partner, you know, "I really want to know what's going on with you," when they suddenly open up to you and that scenario happens. It doesn't happen that way on the couch necessarily, right? In therapy, it takes a lot of kind of creating trust and creating that space. But at the same time, I think that what we all want more than anything is to be understood. So I remember I had a couple and the woman said to her husband, "You know what three words I really want to hear?" And he said, you might guess?

• 40:53Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  I love you. I love you, right? I want to hear that more, I love you. And she said, no, it's, I understand you. And there is something so loving about someone taking the time to be present and understand you. It's really what listening is. Which is not coming up with what your response is, not, you know, telling them why they're wrong, not, you know, reflecting back to them what they said. It doesn't really matter. Like, that's really strange. I don't know why people do that in therapy rooms.

• 41:24Mayim Bialik?

  Well, because sometimes the other person's literally not listening.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think there are other ways than sort of verbatim repeating what they're saying. Because you can verbatim repeat what someone said and still have no idea what they're trying to tell you.

• 41:36Mayim Bialik?

  Right, that's a step.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Right, right. So there's sort of like content up here and there's process down here. And we're talking about process, to be understood, to be truly understood. And so I think that when you realize that everybody just wants to be understood, that that's where people are more likely to talk to you. So if you say to your partner, I want you to open up to me, and then they open up to you, and you're like, oh, but it didn't really happen that way. Or, you know, no, that's not really what happens. Or, oh, you want me to do the dishes? No, I don't really like this whole opening up thing. So, you know, how can you create an experience for them?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Where you don't have to agree with them, but can they feel understood when they're talking with you?

• 42:25Mayim Bialik?

  And what do men report about women? Because what I usually hear from every relationship I've ever been in is that I have too many feelings and I want to process them too much.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Jonathan?

• 42:37Mayim Bialik?

  True?

• 42:39Jonathan Cohen?

  I've never heard that.

• 42:42Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I think, I think men feel a little trapped by the moving goalposts.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:50Jonathan Cohen?

  We want to hear everything that's going on. Actually, when it's shared, we don't, either don't want to hear it, or women sometimes act like men and try to fix it and say why it's not true. And then we're told, actually, don't fix their feelings at all. Just listen and hear and understand and let them process. So I think... I think the move in goalposts and the swinging expectations is a big factor for men.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Right, and so what I often tell men is when your partner is talking with you and they come to you with something, you say at the very beginning, "How can I be helpful right now? Do you just want to vent? Do you want to hug? Do you want to brainstorm ideas or solutions? What do you need right now?" And that just means "right now," by the way, because right now you might just want to vent. Right now you might just want to hug, but then tomorrow you might come with the same thing because now you've sort of thought about it. You vented, but it's still in process. And now you've come back and then he's like, "Well, wait, we talked about this yesterday. I don't understand. I gave her what she wanted." No, ask her what she needs today. Today she might say, "Actually, I'm thinking about this and I want your thoughts on what I might do with it."

• 44:01Mayim Bialik?

  I think a lot of people want their partner to serve the function that many of us would probably be better looking for from a friend.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Right, well, you know, obviously you want your partner to be your friend, but the relationship with your best friend is that you can, you're not living with your best friend. You're not also showing your best friend, like all of that stuff that we're carrying around from our childhoods doesn't tend to come out as much with our best friends as it does with our partners. Our partners trigger us in ways that only an intimate relationship does. It's very different. So you could say, "Oh, no, my best friend, we've been through everything. We've known each other since childhood." Totally different relationship. Have you ever freaked out on your best friend the same way you freaked out on your partner? Probably not. Has, you know, have you ever, you know, like just totally lost it with your partner in a way that you haven't totally lost it

• 44:55Speaker 00

  in the same way with your best friend? There are certain rules about friends that we know we can't cross, even with someone we're completely comfortable with. With our partners, we tend to just get really dysregulated. And so we forget, "Oh, wait, there are rules. We do have to treat the other person with humanity and respect." But we forget that because we're so, we're so dysregulated and we've regressed. We don't regress as much with our best friends. So we say, "Oh, I wish that my partner, my relationship with my partner were like my relationship with my best friend." Well, then have your partner move out, have them be your best friend, and it'll improve.

• 45:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we talk a little bit more about why it is that we regress with our partners? Why is it sometimes? Whatever they've done, all of a sudden, we feel like we're a child and we're furious. You know, you hear people be like, "Oh, I'm like really together everywhere else, but this one person drives me nuts and I'm so angry here." What's happening? What's going on that we're playing that out with our romantic partners?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  It's the primary experience of love. So you learned, you know, I always say to people, you know, "Tell me how you love and I'll tell you how you were loved." And you can see that. Somebody can, you can talk to anybody, see how they love now and you can find out how they were loved. I love people to death.

• 46:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Explain that, though.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  So you were smothered. You were, you were, you were, were you smothered?

• 46:17Mayim Bialik?

  No, I actually wasn't. I mean, my mom's gonna listen to this. Hi, Mom. No, I wasn't, I wasn't smothered, but there was a real urgency to love. There was a real life or deathness to love. And I think a lot of this is epigenetic. I come from a post-Holocaust family. So, you know, everything was very, very urgent, critical and chaotic.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So that's how you were loved.

• 46:38Mayim Bialik?

  I'm just a hoot.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  But, but when you think about it, right? So you...

• 46:45Mayim Bialik?

  I also like, you know, slam doors and stuff because I was raised where like people slam doors. It's apparently not good. I mean, the habit was broken, but yeah, like that was my way of interacting. Like get louder, more angry, throw things, scare people, you know, just standard things.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  And so our primary relationship like goes through the same sort of neurological pathway that the relationship of love, like what it meant to feel loved, even if it wasn't loving. Like someone can grow up in an abusive household and that was their experience of love.

• 47:17Mayim Bialik?

  It all gets mixed up together.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  It gets mixed up because you're dependent on that person. You don't know it. So you kind of, you love that person, but you hate that person, right? You need that person. So part of you loves that person because they're feeding you and keeping you alive.

• 47:29Mayim Bialik?

  And part of that, if you can talk a little bit about this, what happens is when we get into relationships that... Even unconsciously, right, end up repeating some of these patterns. It's not so much that we like it. It's that it's comfortable enough. It's comfortable. So it doesn't feel... Because I remember when I first slammed a door, my then-husband was like, "Oh, no, we don't do that." And it was like so matter-of-fact to him. Like, "No, no, that's not gonna happen." And I was like, "Ooh, what is that like?" You know, and now 15, 20 years later, I'm like, "Oh." His nervous system was just like, "That's a no, we don't do that." What does that feel like?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I think it's important that we understand that in this primary relationship, that we are going to get triggered in a particular way. So, you know, in my book, I talk about the Viktor Frankl quote that everybody loves. You know, like, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space, basically, we have a choice. And there's our growth and freedom. So what do we do in that space? So with our friends, we might react to something, but there's that space. We aren't like immediately regressed to, you know, seven years old. But with our partners, we don't often have that space. We have to be really intentional about it.

• 48:47Mayim Bialik?

  Well, because they're right in it. They're right in my space. How can I have it?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Well, your friend could be in your space, but you still won't do that.

• 48:54Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Right? So what is it about the loving experience? That you're neurologically wired to go right down that pathway? So can we... It's like a big freeway, right? So can we open up other side streets? So that when something like that happens, it's not going down the 405. It's not going down this big, you know, highway that it normally goes down, but it's gonna get rerouted a little bit. So now, we have a little space to kind of figure out, "Okay, what am I reacting to? Am I reacting to this person in front of me? Or I'm reacting to something from the past?"

• 49:24Mayim Bialik?

  What's the best tool to use if you feel like you're gonna lose it with your partner?

• 49:29Speaker 00

  The best tool is, first of all, to take a breath. And just keep breathing. Say nothing. Do not say words. Any words that come out of your mouth are not going to be words that you're gonna be proud of. So don't say words. Just take a breath, take another breath, and you might say, you know what? I need to take a 15-minute break right now, and then we'll come back and talk about this.

• 49:55Mayim Bialik?

  What happens in those 15 minutes physiologically?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  In those 15 minutes, you should move your body. So, take a walk, do some jumping jacks, whatever you need to do, move your body. And you might want to just think about, like, instead of ruminating, like, I can't believe the person did that, I can't believe they said that, and then you're just working yourself up, to think, if the other person were telling their version of this story right now, what would they be saying?

• 50:23Mayim Bialik?

  But you have to do this after you move your body, because when you're in it, like, and you're seeing red, if anybody's ever seen red, like, you're not, those thought processes are not online.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Right, that's why you're moving your body.

• 50:34Mayim Bialik?

  A whole bunch of other stuff is online, right? So you want to move it through your body. And I sometimes will say to Jonathan, I'm not just protecting me from this conversation. Consider this a present that I'm giving you for me not to open my mouth and keep speaking, because no one is going to like what comes out of it, and I may feel differently once I move my body and talk to my therapist.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yes, and you don't have to talk to your therapist. This is something anyone can do. That's great. And, and, you know, one of the things that I really love about therapy is that I think there are people who go for all kinds of reasons, but I think most people go because they want to learn how to navigate through the world more smoothly, and they don't want to always have to ask their therapist how to do that. So, what we're, it's like raising children. You don't want them to be dependent on you. So, they're going to go, they're going to launch. You want your therapy clients to learn how to navigate through the world on their own, and maybe they come back for a tune-up, maybe they don't. But it's just these simple practices. You know, people don't know this growing up. They've seen parents who fly off the handle, and they think, okay, well,

• 51:40Speaker 00

  that's what happens when you get angry. They don't know that there's another way. Some people are so afraid of anger because they saw what it did when somebody else got angry, that they won't even acknowledge their own anger, which it's dangerous in its own way.

• 51:53Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I hear a lot of people talk about is that their partner won't talk. Can't talk. Often, we're dealing with a partner maybe who's got addiction issues or came from a very, very traumatic childhood. And it's someone who's learned to function and they've done their thing. But there comes a point when the partner really cannot do it anymore. And for many people, what they say is, will you go to therapy? What do you do if someone will not go to therapy? Or is forcing someone to go to therapy in that kind of situation ultimately going to be helpful?

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could force someone to go to therapy, but you can't force them to do the work. So, you know, I don't think forcing someone to go to therapy is necessarily a great idea. What I do think is that you need to decide what your limits are. So I think there's this big misconception on social media. You know, if you look at social media, it's like everyone's a narcissist.

• 52:57Mayim Bialik?

  Misconception on social media?

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Social media is just a misuse of, you know, everyone's toxic, everyone's a narcissist. If someone upsets you, estrange yourself from them, which I'm very against in many cases. You know, you're being gaslit if someone has a different opinion of a situation than you do. Those kinds of things. It's really frustrating as a therapist because then so many people cut themselves off from learning how to relate. So what people also misconstrue on social media is boundaries. People think that a boundary is, I'm going to make a request to you. And if you don't do it, then you're not following my boundary. Okay, you broke my boundary. Your boundary is with yourself. So your boundary is not with the other person.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  So you make your request, like, you know, if you yell when we have an argument, I'm going to end the conversation. Right? That's something you did with yourself. So the person yells, you say, oh, I'm going to end the conversation. We'll come back later. Right? You have to do it not 99% of the time, 100% of the time. Because if you only do it 95% of the time, the 5% of the time that you don't do it, the person thinks like, oh, it's cool. It's okay. Like, I can yell sometimes.

• 54:15Mayim Bialik?

  We teach people how to treat us.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Right, right. Well, we decide. We make that decision, like, I'm going to let this person yell this time. Why did you decide to let the person yell? What happened there? That was your decision. So the question is, you know, if your partner, you know, you want to work something out with your partner and your partner won't go to therapy, but you feel like you're at an impasse, you can set a limit. Now, you might be dating this person and say, you know, I think we really have things that we don't know how to talk about, and it's really important to see what's going to happen with us if we can learn how to have these conversations. I can't stay in this relationship any longer if we don't go talk to someone. You can choose the person, it's fine, you know, like, let's go find someone we both

• 55:01Speaker 00

  like, but we need to talk to someone to see what's possible here, right? But that's your boundary, and then the person doesn't want to go, or says no, and then you just stay in the relationship for another, you know, six months, or a year, or more, well, that's on you. So it's really about, you know, when you want to set a boundary, first of all, ask yourself, is it reasonable? Because a lot of times, based on social media, I see all these boundaries out there, I'm like, people need to live. You can't just ask people to, you know, like, live in these little fish bowls, like, give them an aquarium, right? So, you know, I think that sometimes people give an ocean where there's no boundaries, and sometimes people give a fishbowl where the boundaries are so restrictive that nobody can possibly, you know, like, honor your request.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  You need an aquarium. Everyone needs an aquarium. There's some room, okay, to be human and to live your life. Like, you can't just micromanage and control every aspect of another person's behavior. That's not healthy for either of you.

• 55:57Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about attachment style? We hear a lot about attachment styles.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:04Mayim Bialik?

  And, you know, what one of our listeners asked is, how do you know if you're the problem? And I wonder if, in, you know, kind of the scope of attachment styles, you can talk about this. Like, if you're trying to predict which couples are going to break up.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:18Mayim Bialik?

  Am I going to be the one that messes this relationship up? Does it come down to if you have a disorganized attachment style, if you have an avoidant attachment style, are there certain ways that you should be navigating so that you're not the problem in the relationship?

• 56:31Speaker 00

  So there are certain attachment styles that tend to attract to each other.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Securely attached people tend to pair with securely attached people. That's nice. They want to give all their healthy genes to the next generation and just keep making happy securely attached babies. Well, I think when you think about, right, like what I was talking about earlier is like, you know, who do you have chemistry with? Who are you attracted to? What is your picker like? Your picker is going to be for securely attached people. Because you don't want to be in this volatile relationship or an avoidant rela-- like, you're not going to last very long in that. It's not going to satisfy you. People who have an avoidant attachment style often pick a very volatile person.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  It's interesting because it's the opposite, sort of, of what you would want, right? A volatile person will probably pick a very avoidant person because neither of you really has to deal with anything. And that's keeping you safe, you think, but it's actually not. So it's not really about what your attachment style is. It's what's going on in the relationship and are you both aware of it and working on it? So it's not like you're doomed if these two attachment styles get together. It's are you both aware of it and are you both doing something individually? Before couples come to couples therapy, I always say, "I want you each to tell me what you want to do,

• 57:57Speaker 00

  each of you separately, to make, to be the best possible person you can be in this relationship, even if the other person makes zero changes." And they're like, "What? No, no, no, no, no. I'm here to change the other person. They need to do this, this, and this." It's like, "No, no, no. I can't do that." But what I can do is I can help you meet your goal and I can help them meet their goal. Can you talk a little bit about anxious attachment? Some of us might be curious about that. Anxious attachment is you never know what to expect.

• 58:27Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  So, um, sometimes, so when you were growing up, sometimes you got what you wanted. You got attuned parenting or whoever was around you and you felt really safe and comfortable. Other times, you were, you never knew, like, if the person was gonna be available or not. And it was always a surprise. Like, what am I gonna get today? Which, which version of mom or dad am I gonna get today? Um, and so, you're very hypervigilant. You don't trust the other person. Um, you often think that if some, if you're feeling good, that makes you so anxious. Like, you're feeling good and you think, oh, my gosh, like, the, the sky's gonna fall. Because something bad is gonna follow this, cuz that's what used to happen. You'd have, like, you couldn't feel comfortable in the calm.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Because the calm would be followed by the storm.

• 59:15Mayim Bialik?

  How do you fix that?

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Um, first of all, you do some, you, you do some updating of your story. Like, when does this actually happen? What evidence do you have for this? Let's talk about the last week. Okay, what evidence do you have that when you were feeling good, that something bad happened? Because you were feeling good, that that was the reason? Like, oh, and then I got into a car accident. Right? Um, well, maybe, there's some unconscious process there where you're creating the storm, right? But maybe there was a drunk driver and you had no control over that. And it wasn't because you got the promotion at work and your partner was loving to you, that this drunk driver happened to be in your path.

• 59:54Mayim Bialik?

  I wonder if you can talk about long-distance relationships? Or relationships that people get into that, um, specifically have an ability to kind of escape? Can you talk about what's going on there? Can long-distance relationships work? And is there some underlying mechanism that's at play when people are seeking out these kind of relationships or situation-ships?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, I think it's really important in a long-distance relationship to be very clear about what you both, uh, want out of the relationship. Like, is this something that, where we want to be together long-term? And if so, do we have plans to be in the same city? And what is that going to look like? And that needs to be discussed very early on. And so often what happens is people meet and then they happen to live in different cities or they've known each other for like a month and then somebody gets a job somewhere or you know they have to move and they think, okay, well, we'll make this work and we'll figure it out. No.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  It's like you need to, you, you, yes, you might need to figure out the logistics later, but you need to know now, like, what are we doing here? What is the point of this? And I think also with long distance, you don't have shared experiences. It's almost like parallel play where, you know, one person is saying, here's what happened in my life today, and the other person is saying, here's what happened in my life today, but you didn't actually go to that event together. You didn't actually have that dinner together. Your shared friends are in different places. So your lives are very siloed. And so you have to be very creative about how do you bridge that gap? And if you're doing it for the short term, like I have a three-month assignment where I have to be here, okay?

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  But if you're doing it longer than that, it can be really, really challenging.

• 1:01:51Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm curious about a word I keep hearing, which is planning and intention. A lot of people meet and they're like, they're interesting, like, as you said, we'll figure it out. Do people plan? And is there a difference between those who are clear on what they're, they want and are building that versus people who are figuring it out as they go?

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  So I like this metaphor that relationships are like cement. That whatever happens in the beginning

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  is going to dry, the cement's gonna dry. So let's say that, for example, you haven't talked about like, you know, say, say a person is always coming late or they're always canceling. And you're like, oh, I don't want to make a big deal about it. We're just meeting, I don't know, you know, whatever. Right? And then like three months in, you say like, I can't stand it when you're late. Why are you always late? And they're like, I didn't know it was a problem, right? But the relation, you know, the cement has dried. And so when the cement is wet, you have time to kind of like mold it a little bit and see what's possible and who's flexible and what can be done. Once the cement is dry, it's so much harder.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  So when we talk about planning and intention, it's because people are afraid to bring things up early. But what are you doing with your time if you're just coasting along and thinking, I'll bring that up later? What's the point of that? Don't you want to know earlier whether you can maybe work this through with that person?

• 1:03:22Mayim Bialik?

  I'm gonna answer, no. Because I think what the fear is, is if you put these things in place, the person's gonna go away. I mean, I'm just being super honest.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:31Mayim Bialik?

  That like, why would I bring up hard things that we may have conflict about? Because then they're gonna go away. So if I'm just okay with everything, if I act like I'm okay with everything, if I try and like bend myself into the pretzel that I'm okay with everything, they won't go. Isn't that how it works?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Right, but they will go away either way. Let's say that they go away because you say, you know what, let's figure out... By the way, this late thing happened with a client where she was so upset that he was always late and she, her story around it was, "He doesn't like prioritize me. He doesn't respect my time, he doesn't prioritize me, I'm not, he doesn't think about me." He was leaving work early, because she likes to eat early, to prioritize her, but he couldn't quite make it on time because it was so hard for him to get away and his boss was always like, "Don't leave." And, you know, so he was actually trying to prioritize her, but without communicating about it.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  So often if you talk about it while the cement is wet, you find out, "Oh wow, we actually both really care about this, let's find a solution." If the person is gonna go away because you brought up something that is important to you, good, bye. Right? I mean, why do you want to be in a relationship like that? Because that thing is gonna stay, and so if you wait six months to bring it up, they're still gonna go away. So now you've got six months of a relationship where it's gonna be even harder to see the person go.

• 1:04:58Jonathan Cohen?

  How do you know when a relationship is working and you should actually get married?

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  How did you know?

• 1:05:07Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know that I did. I don't know that I was young and it was, I was with someone who was older than me and actually they were kind of on a different clock than I was and it was an ongoing conflict. And if I look back at it, I wasn't strong enough to say, "I'm not ready for this."

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Right. So to answer your question, that's part of the answer is if you don't feel ready, right, you're not ready. It doesn't really matter why. You need to figure out why. But if you're not ready, you can't say, "Oh, I'm not ready," but you know, it's not really a legitimate reason. If you aren't ready to marry somebody, do not marry them. Be honest with them. Try to figure out what's going on. Maybe this is the right person for you and you have something to work through and maybe it's not.

• 1:05:58Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk about, in the book, you're very, very honest, in the first section of the book in particular, you know, you go into some detail about a person that you almost married.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Mayim Bialik?

  And they chose to share something with you that led to the relationship ending. Can you talk a little bit about that and what it would have been like if boyfriend, ex-boyfriend?

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:18Mayim Bialik?

  Had not shared what he shared?

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  So for context, in the book, I follow the lives of four of my patients and then I'm the fifth patient in the book and I go to therapy after a breakup. And the breakup happens because the person that I thought we were going to spend our lives together with, he tells me one night, and by the way, when I say tells me, it's sort of like he's unusually quiet and there's just this sort of sixth sense that something is off in my mind. There's just, you know, that kind of, something vibe-wise felt weird. I was not

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  expecting this to be the weird thing, but when I ask him, after a few questions, sort of like, "What's going on?" His kids were teenagers and they were gonna go off to college.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  And he said that he's decided that he can't live with a kid under his roof for the next 10 years. Which I am astounded by. Now, before you all hate him, there's much more to this story and he's a lovely person. And I make that clear in the book. But in the beginning, people hate him, the way I did. And I think this, again, goes to stories and perspective and all of that, because I was complicit in this too, not realizing it. I think, wait a minute. My kid was six when we met, so it's not like I hid him in a closet. You've been living here, like, what are you, you know, I don't understand. Where did this come from? Right? And so, you know, all my friends, of course, do the idiot compassion, oh, you know, he's

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  an asshole, he's this, he's that, he's a narcissist, you know, whatever they want to say. Right? And it feels deliciously, you know, validating in the moment. And at one point, one of my therapist friends says to me, you know, maybe you should talk to someone. And that is how I go to Wendell in the book. And I expect that Wendell, and I pick Wendell very, very intentionally, like, he is married, with kids, and you know, if he's like a guy who's gonna say that boyfriend was an asshole, then I know he really was. Right? And I fully expect that to happen. And so, I get there, and that is not what happens. And one of the things my friends, in their idiot compassion, would say is, oh, boyfriend

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  was so avoidant, what kind of person doesn't share this kind of information? Right? But so was I. So, you know, I noticed so many things that I would ignore about how he felt about kids. And I noticed it all the time, and I would just kind of put it away. Give an example. Put it in a box. We'd be at a restaurant, and he'd be really annoyed by kids, which I get, but at the same time, it's kind of like, he would be overly annoyed. Right? He said that he and his wife, they had to use fertility treatments to have their twins. And he said, I would have been fine without kids, but she really wanted them.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  File that away, forget about it, right?

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  When I would go off and leave him with my son if I was running an errand, or whatever, wherever I was, he was just not that interested.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  You know, in a way that if you're dating someone and this person's gonna be a part of your family, you're gonna make an effort.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  And so, there were a lot of little things like that. They weren't big red flags, but taken together, it was something that I never said, "Hey, I've noticed this, let's talk about this." Because I thought, like you said before, he'll go away, right? So if I bring this up, he'll go away. That would have been great, because I wouldn't have deluded myself that whole time. We wouldn't have wasted all that time in this relationship if either of us had been able to really talk about it.

• 1:10:21Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that comes up in the book, and this came up in some of the questions that we got also, a lot of grief came up.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:28Mayim Bialik?

  And a lot of grief that actually didn't have to do with the relationship per se that you were in. How is a breakup like grief?

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  When you lose a relationship, you lose not just the person in the present, but you lose the past. You lose the shared history together, because now it's yours to remember without the other person.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  You lose the future that you had imagined together. And then you lose just, not so much, again, this specific person, but the dailiness of, "How was your day?" You know, someone to have dinner with, someone who's your plus one, someone that you text with during the day. All of those kind of, just parts of being in a relationship, with anyone, doesn't have to be this particular person, you're losing. So there's so many layers of grief. There's the particularities of what you loved about this person. And then there's what you loved about being in a relationship. And then there's all of that stuff that happened that you're holding and it feels very lonely, because you're not sharing it with anyone anymore.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  And it's not building on anything. And then there's that future that you, that was just given to you. And now you have, it's blank. Now the page is blank. You have no idea what it's gonna look like. You're not making a very good argument for breaking up with people. Oh, but, but then, but that's, that's the grief and the loss. Um, I think it's much more devastating to stay with someone when the relationship is not working. Um, you know, because then you're grieving every day. Every day in that relationship. You're dissatisfied, you're sad, you don't have what you want. You're hurt, you're lonely. I know so many people who stay in relationships and I see them in therapy. And they're like, yeah, I've been in this relationship for five years.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Well, when did you realize that you were lonely? About a year in, right? So four years. And they're so afraid of leaving. And then when they do, they think, oh, I wish I had done this so many years ago. I never hear people say, oh, I wish I had, I'm so glad I waited this long to break up. I never hear that. You always hear, I wish I had done it a long time ago. Because it sounds really scary because for all the reasons I said. But you're already going through grief and loss. So you're gonna go through a different kind of grief and loss if you break up. But now you can start something new in your life. Whatever that looks like. It doesn't even have to be a new relationship. But you're going to write things on that new page in this new chapter.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  What should men know about women that they don't understand? It's so interesting. Like, I, I think that there are definitely differences between men and women. But I also think that people are so individual. So I don't, I think what you need to know is, you need to know about the specific person that you're with. You know, because they're gonna be different from the last person you dated. And I think maybe that's what it is, is that whatever you think, whatever you come into, a lot of people. They take their former experiences in relationship, and they think that they've learned something that will work with this new person. But it doesn't necessarily work with this new person because this new person needs something else.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  Also, we punish people for crimes they didn't commit, but that someone else in our lives committed. So like, if your last partner lied to you, then you come into a new relationship really hypervigilant. You're gonna push that person away because they didn't commit that crime. They didn't lie to you, they didn't betray you, they're being honest with you. But if you treat them like they're guilty of a crime, they're going to start hiding things from you, not because they want to lie to you, but because you're just so in their face that they need a private space.

• 1:14:15Mayim Bialik?

  How does it look to rebuild trust with someone who has lied to you? And in particular, I think I'm asking the question about infidelity. And you know, there's a lot of conversation about is all infidelity sex addiction? Is there overlap here? How do you rebuild trust with someone when you've been lied to, in particular in a betrayal?

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  You're talking about a physical betrayal, an emotional betrayal?

• 1:14:40Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, you could talk about either. I think emotional betrayals happen a lot. I blame the internet, I blame, you know, sort of the way that we can communicate for that. But really, either, you know, rebuilding trust. Yeah, I'd be curious for either.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  It's interesting because sometimes people say, "I never suspected anything, this was a total shock, I don't know where this came from." Other times, people say, "You know, I kind of, something seemed off." But they were afraid to bring it up. So sometimes, and this is not at all, to be very clear, to blame someone for being complicit in somebody else's betrayal.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  So I want to be really clear about that. But sometimes we invite a betrayal by inviting lies. Like, we know that something didn't sound right, but we don't say, "Hey, I'm confused in the moment. I'm confused about that. I thought this, but you said this. What's happening?" Right? We just let it go because, again, we're afraid of what we might. We're afraid of the truth. So we don't want to know the truth. There are so many couples where, for so long, people have known things or suspected things, but they don't want to know the truth. And so by sort of being complicit in this system where one person is lying, they know the other person isn't going to call them on it.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  The other person is like, "Well, I kind of know this is going on, but I don't want to believe it, so I'm going to just pretend, la, la, la, la, la, that this isn't going on." And then both of you are kind of doing this thing together without talking about it. So I think it's important that we realize that it's not always just like one person is doing something in isolation. Or to take a, you know, a common example. One person is terribly lonely in the relationship, and they have tried to talk to the partner about, "I am really lonely," you know, and tried to, "Can we go to couples therapy? Or can we do more things together? Or can we figure this out?" And every bid for connection is either given lip service,

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  but nothing really changes, or rejected. And so the person, instead of saying what they should do, is say, "I can't be in this relationship anymore." So, you know, cheating is never the great solution here. But they don't know what to do. They feel like, "Maybe it's me. I don't know. I don't know why this person doesn't love me. They feel unlovable now." And then something happens where, out in the world, someone pays attention to them. And they think this feels really good. This is showing me that I'm lovable, but I'm not going to cross any lines. Okay, that's what they tell themselves. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do anything about it. And then they're just so lonely that they do.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  And then they feel terrible about themselves. And then they don't know what to do. And then the other person discovers it and says, you, you're horrible. You had an affair, you cheated, how dare you? I could excuse anything but this. Even though the other person has really left them starving. Just absolutely starving for affection, uh, for any sign that they care, anything like that. So again, having an affair is not the other person's fault. Okay, um, you have control over whether you have an affair. But there's a systemic thing going on sometimes, not always, but sometimes. And I think when you talk about rebuilding trust after, it's about, okay, this thing happened. It was terribly hurtful and traumatic.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  What happened that led to this? And are we both willing to see whether we can rebuild trust? And whether we want this relationship to become a new version of the relationship? And if both people are not on board with that, that's not gonna happen. But if both people are on board, maybe on board meaning like, I'm not sure, but I'm willing to try? Because you don't know yet? Okay, great. As long as we have willingness, let's see what we can do here. And it shouldn't take a betrayal for people to wake up in their relationships. But unfortunately, so many times, people will later say, I wouldn't want to go through that pain again of this affair. But it saved our marriage. It saved our relationship. It was the wake up call we needed.

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  It's unfortunate, it had to happen that way. But this is what we credit our, our happiness to now.

• 1:19:05Mayim Bialik?

  Um, so that's definitely helpful for that kind of scenario. I wonder if you can speak a little bit to what rebuilding trust looks like in a different kind of scenario? Um, where, um, you know, someone is caught off guard, uh, by someone going outside of the bounds of the marriage. Um, and, and maybe that wasn't the dynamic. Maybe it was something, um, you know, that, that happened that the person regrets. But how do you rebuild trust? Like, what does that look like? Are there exercises? What are the steps? Does it just take time?

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  The person who went outside the bounds needs to take full responsibility. So it's not, yes, I did this, but you this. Okay? It's what I did was wrong. I betrayed your trust. I am so sorry. Full stop. Okay? So it's not, you know, the other stuff can be talked about in couples therapy. But if you cannot just accept responsibility for what you did, then there's not going to be trust there because the other person's going to think, well, you think that under certain circumstances, it's okay. Like, you're saying, I'm sorry I did this, but I did it because. So if because happens again, you might cheat again.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  So we need to know that whether there's a because or there's not a because, that this is, you realize this is not okay. You were responsible for your behavior. You're not going to do it again. And here are the steps we're going to take to rebuild trust. And they might look like, besides talking about what the dynamic was in the relationship and what wasn't working. And sometimes it's just that person's life wasn't working. It wasn't even about the partner. Like, they were feeling bad about themselves and they needed to do some work. And they dealt with it in a, you know, very unhealthy way. But it might be like, you know, I need you to let me know where you are. Or I need you to let me see your phone. Or, you know, it depends what the betrayal was and how it happened. But I need access to that.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  And the person can't balk. They can't be like, no, because, you know, sometimes I just talk to my friend. It doesn't matter. And you, by the way, as the person who is given permission to look at their phone, that doesn't mean that you are on their phone 24/7. That means like, you know what? You're going to work on building up some trust. And sometimes you might need to look and you're going to look and you're going to tell the person, hey, I need to look at your phone right now. Okay. But if you're doing that 24/7, then nothing's going to get better there.

• 1:21:36Jonathan Cohen?

  How does someone know if they are ready to date again, either after a breakup or a traumatic experience? How do they know if they're healthy enough to be out there dating?

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  So many people think that you have to work on yourself before you go out and date. And that, to me, makes no sense because it's kind of like you're just in your head thinking about things. But until you're in the situation, it's like saying like, I'm gonna, if you're a basketball player, right? If you're like in the NBA, I'm gonna think about basketball. And I'm gonna think about it and think about it and think about it. And then, you know, maybe I'll like do some drills, but I'm not gonna play in a real game until I'm really ready. It's like, no, you need, you need minutes. Like, you can be the person who is the bench warmer, but you still need minutes, right? You've got to be in a game. You've got to go out there and do your minutes.

• 1:22:27Speaker 00

  So you're gonna learn so much more by being on the court than you are just sitting on the bench. So go out there and learn something about yourself. Because you're gonna find all kinds of things that happen when you're interacting with someone that you didn't anticipate. And so it's kind of like when people come in and they say like, I'm having this trouble with my partner. And I'm like, let's bring the partner in, right? Like, at a certain point, if I realize, like, we need, we need the other person here because I'm only hearing one side of this. And it sounds like there's something, like, we need that person's version of things and we need to see the two of you interact. I will learn so much more in that first session than maybe I could have had five sessions with this person.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  And they told me whatever they told me and I learned whatever I learned. Then I see these two people in action in front of me. It's like, oh, right? So when people say, I need to work on myself, first, part of working on yourself is go get some experience and let's see what happens.

• 1:23:27Mayim Bialik?

  Positives and negatives of being with someone who has been freed from a relationship.

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  If you're, if you're a woman dating men, men who have been married.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  If you go on a first date with them, or you're starting to get to know them, and it comes up what happened in your marriage, and they say some version of, "It was all her fault." Okay, so they won't say it that way.

• 1:23:57Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  But she this, she that, she that, she this. And there's nothing about, "I had this role in it," or "I could have done this," or, right? Run as fast as you can. Because that person didn't learn anything. And the things that he's saying might be true.

• 1:24:18Mayim Bialik?

  But he's only telling his side of the story.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  But he hasn't really learned anything. Someone who's learned something from a relationship will say, "You know what? We really had trouble communicating about this issue. And this kept coming up, and I wasn't able to this, and she wasn't able to this. And we tried this, this, and this. And we realized that this was irreconcilable. We couldn't make it work." Right? And also, if they have a good, positive, healthy relationship with their ex, that is a great sign, too. Because this is a person that you loved. And so, to treat this person like they're the devil, or the enemy, or to speak poorly of them, and if you have children with them,

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  to speak poorly of the parent of your children. Right? So, any of that, those are red flags. So, if you are dating someone who has gotten out of a long relationship or a marriage, and they're able to talk about it in a balanced, nuanced, thoughtful, self-reflective way, that's going to be a great partner.

• 1:25:24Mayim Bialik?

  How do you convince your partner that their family's behavior is not okay without them taking it personally?

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  That's so funny that you ask that. So, I write an advice column. I have a new one in the New York Times called "Ask the Therapist." That is probably the question I get most frequently. Is, how do I talk to my partner about a problem with their family? Right? And it's really tricky. Because sometimes your partner does not see the problem. Because they're in that environment. It's like asking a fish, you know, how's the water, right? That's their environment. They don't know anything different. It's like you with the slamming doors. Like you just thought, well, that's what you do. You slam the doors. And then someone else is like, oh, not over here we don't. Right? So it's someone else's family. And that's kind of the norm for them.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  So you want to talk about how whatever is happening. And by the way, if they're just weird, that's fine. But if they're doing something that is hurtful to you, that's something else. So if you don't, if they're annoying, or they're weird, or whatever, like, that's the price of marriage. You just, you know, you, when you, you can't order somebody à la carte. They come with what they come with. So you can't leave like the brother on the side, or the father or mother on the side. You know, like, that's how they come. But if they're doing something like, let's say that you have kids, and the parents of your partner are giving lots of unsolicited parenting advice that you don't really want.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  And your partner's like, whatever, they're just trying to be helpful. Right? But you feel overwhelmed, and judged, and criticized. And you just don't need that stress with, as a new parent. You can talk to your partner about, hey, this is really stressing me out. I already feel like I don't quite know what I'm doing, but I want to trust myself as a new parent. I don't want their input. I feel like I'm being criticized. It might not be their intention, but that's what I feel like. So I would like not to get parenting advice from your parents. Can you talk about that with them? Right? Now, your partner should be able to say, hey, Mom and Dad, you know what?

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  We're really trying to figure this out. We really value your experience as parents, but we're really enjoying figuring this out. If we have any questions, we'll come to you. Okay?

• 1:27:54Speaker 00

  If your partner won't do that... Then that's a marital issue. That's not an issue with his family. That's an issue in your marriage that you need to talk about in terms of, "I really need your support as my co-parent here." And so what do we do about this?

• 1:28:10Mayim Bialik?

  You kind of mentioned on social media, a lot of people talking about cutting off your family.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:28:15Mayim Bialik?

  I wonder if you can speak about some of the things that you see that do justify cutting off a family? If there's some way that you can kind of paint that? And what are some of the reasons that that's not a solution all the time?

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  I don't think people realize what the repercussions are when they cut off a family member, because it doesn't just affect you and that family member. It affects the whole family system. Because now there are people who are in touch with both sides of this. And there are family occasions where people will be in the same room, or some people then won't show. You know, it just, it affects so many different people. People feel like they have torn loyalty because they want to be in connection with both of you. They can see both sides of things. Or maybe they see that the parent is really difficult, but they also don't feel like the parent deserves to be persona non grata. So that puts them in a weird situation. If a parent is truly abusive, and I think we need to define that,

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  because on social media, that could be, you know, anything, right? If a parent is cruel, if a parent is dangerous, if a parent is... I mean, those are two things, I guess, like cruel and dangerous, right? And they are not able to hear what your limit is, and you can't be around them, because every time, you know, they, again, holding your limit with yourself, you basically, every time you get together with them, you have to leave. At a certain point, you're just like, "It's not worth it," right? Does that mean that you have to cut them off entirely? Meaning, it might not, it might mean that you don't get together with them.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  But maybe you have a call that is superficial and empty, but fine.

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  For 10 minutes, once every few months.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  Those kinds of things. Why would you want to do that, someone might ask? Like, if I don't, if this person is not somebody that I enjoy, why do I want to be around them? Because you will find that if you cut off your parent, again, if they're abusive, you might find absolute freedom in your life, and you will find grief and loss, even with the freedom that you have. But they're still, you're still connected to the whole family system, and you cut off the parent, even though you can have a relatively normal conversation with them that might feel empty and superficial, but it's fine, you're gonna not have a parent. And someone might say, "Well, I don't feel like I have a parent anyway, because they're not really parenting. They're not the kind of parent I would want."

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  It's the parent that you have. And so, you know, I think there's some value in that. I think there's some value in accepting that you can get something out. Like, maybe you sort of enjoy the fact that this parent remembered that funny story from when you were seven. Or this parent actually was kind of nice in this one. You had this one conversation, it was kind of nice catching up with them. Or we talked about this, you know, the parent who died, and we both had the same memory of that, and that was really nice. So you have all this shared history, and maybe most of it is not great, but some of it might be really meaningful.

• 1:31:35Mayim Bialik?

  What are your top suggestions to find love and keep it?

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  Be very self-aware about how you get in your own way when it comes to wanting to bring people closer to you. So sometimes we do, like, the thing that we want and the thing that we do are in opposition. So I want someone to come close to me, I want to love and be loved, but I am either not loving to other people because I'm so worried about protecting myself that I end up pushing them away unwittingly, or I don't put myself in situations where I will find healthy people, which we talked about earlier. And I think one more thing that's really important is how we love ourselves, which sounds kind of hokey, and I get my, sort of, like, you know,

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  I get a little weird about this, the cheesiness of self-love. But I think how we talk to ourselves is really important. And what I mean about cheesiness of self-love is I don't mean that we should not be loving to ourselves. What I mean is that I think people take it to an extreme and then they become very self-centered and they don't think relationally. So they think like, "This is about self-love, so I'm not gonna let anybody do anything that annoys me in any way, shape, or form. You're gone." Right? And it's like, "Well, you're cutting yourself off from the possibility of connection here."

• 1:32:57Mayim Bialik?

  You've just introduced when self-love can be an impediment to being in a relationship.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, because it becomes very self-centered. And it becomes, again, when you're in a relationship, you want to be relational, which means you have to compromise, you have to be flexible. In fact, study after study shows that the number-one factor that predicts whether somebody can be in a healthy relationship is flexibility. Flexibility.

• 1:33:22Mayim Bialik?

  What does that look like practically?

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  What do you want for dinner? You know, "I want this. Oh, no, no, it has to be this. No, it has to be this, this, this, and this. I can't have thi-" right? It's like, "Okay, then you deal with your own specific needs there."

• 1:33:36Mayim Bialik?

  So no one in Los Angeles can date?

• 1:33:38Speaker 00

  I'm like the only person in Los Angeles who has no dietary restrictions. But flexibility is like, "Hey, you know what? What time do you want to leave? Oh, how about this? Oh, wait, I have to do this thing. Can I do that yet?" You know, just like, can you be a little bit flexible? Can you allow someone some grace when they're imperfect?

• 1:34:00Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  So what I want to say about self-talk is that I think it's so important that we listen to how we talk to ourselves because how we talk to ourselves will bleed into how we talk to others. So I always say to people, "Who is the person that you talk to most in the course of your life?" And everyone is like, "It's my partner, it's my mother, it's my best friend, it's my sister." No, it's yourself. You are the person that you talk to most in the course of your life. You are talking to yourself all day long. And what we say to ourselves often isn't kind, or true, or useful. So those three things are so important. Is it kind? Is it true? Is it useful? So I had this client who was so self-critical. I mean, just, and she had no idea. She couldn't hear herself.

• 1:34:46Speaker 00

  And I said, "Listen, I want you to go home and I want you to just listen to how you talk to yourself and write down what you say to yourself over the course of this week, and then come back next week and let's talk about it." And she was very skeptical, like, "Oh, you know, nothing, and we're not gonna find anything weird there." She comes back, she's got it all in her phone. And she starts scrolling through and she can barely talk. And she says, "I am such a bully to myself." And I said, "What were some of the things?" And she said, "I was writing an email and I made a typo and I immediately said to myself, 'You're so stupid.'" And I said, "Well, if a friend had sent you that email with that typo, would you think, 'She's so stupid.'" She said, "Of course not." Right?

• 1:35:31Speaker 00

  Um, she passed her reflection as she was walking down the street in a, in glass. And she said, "You look terrible today." I said, "If your friend looked like that, would you think she looked terrible?" "No, I looked fine. It was fine." Right? So, how do we talk to ourselves? You asked, "How can we be in loving relationships?" If you are someone who beats the crap out of yourself like that all the time, you're not going to be, to show up in a loving way. If you can't be kind to yourself, you're not going to be able to be, to show that version of yourself to others and you're not going to be able to be kind to others as well. So, when you learn to be a little more generous with yourself, you will be more generous with other people.

• 1:36:12Mayim Bialik?

  I once heard someone say that if they were in a relationship with a voice in their head, it would be an abusive relationship.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:18Mayim Bialik?

  A toxic abusive relationship. If I was with someone who said the things that I said to myself.

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  Right, so it's not just noticing that you're saying those things. It's then saying the correct thing. Like, okay, you're, you're writing the email, you make the typo, "I'm so stupid." No. Oops. How about, how about, "Oh, I'm really tired." Or, "Oh, everybody makes these typos." Right? Like, that's the normal kind of interpretation of what happened. Or you're walking by that mirror, it's like, "Oh yeah, I just like, you know, I just walked out the door the way I walked out the door today and I'm a cute person." Like, you know, like, I look like a normal cute person.

• 1:36:58Mayim Bialik?

  What are the biggest red flags to look for in a relationship?

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  Um, somebody who isn't emotionally mature. So, emotional maturity is the most important thing in a relationship, that, that's a non-starter. Um, if the person is emotionally mature and what that means is they can take responsibility when they mess up. Um, they have grace, but also set limits when you do.

• 1:37:26Speaker 00

  So it's both that they can be emotionally generous about it, but also say, "That's not okay. And here's what I need." They can self-regulate. So with emotional maturity comes self-regulation. So it's noticing, "I'm really angry right now. I'm going to need to calm down for a minute." Or, "I'm really worried about this, but I'm not going to take out my problem with my job when I come home and then be really unkind to you because I'm really worried about my job." Right? So that kind of self-awareness and then regulating, "How can I deal with my anxiety? How can I get help with it in a productive way?" If you have someone like that, then you have something to start with. And that doesn't mean you're perfect all the time.

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  It doesn't mean that sometimes, you know, we get overly stressed. But it's then being able to, we talk about rupture and repair in relationships. So important. We talk about the bank of goodwill, which is you need five positive deposits in the bank of goodwill for every withdrawal that you take. So part of that is rupture and repair. So there's a rupture, you guys, you know, somebody did something that maybe they wish and if they were being their best self, that they didn't. They come and they say, "I'm really sorry that that happened. How can I make it better?" Right? A repair is, "You know what? I thought about it and actually I see that now." Right? Or, you know, or a repair is, "We feel differently about this and I didn't know how to talk

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  to you about that." I like that.

• 1:38:59Mayim Bialik?

  Lori Gottlieb, I highly recommend everybody read, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone." It's, first of all, very enjoyable, but a really wonderful exploration of the complexity of the human experience, which even therapists get to experience. So, thank you so much for answering our listeners' questions. We really appreciate it and some of ours were sprinkled in there as well. Where can people find out more about you?

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, my pleasure. I love talking about emotional well-being and bringing it to more people. They can, they can read my book, they can watch my TED Talk if they're interested in stories and how we can change them, they can read my advice column in the New York Times, and they can find me on social media.

• 1:39:38Mayim Bialik?

  Great. Thank you so much.

• 1:39:40Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:39:44Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan, I'm gonna ask you a fun question.

• 1:39:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's go.

• 1:39:47Mayim Bialik?

  What's the biggest red flag you've ignored? In dating someone?

• 1:39:53Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know that I have something. I tend to...

• 1:39:57Mayim Bialik?

  You just go straight from the red flag to the altar?

• 1:40:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Just go right from meeting someone to, "Let's move in." No, I don't know. My biggest red flag is if someone can't laugh at themselves or be funny. If that's the case, I'm out of there really quick.

• 1:40:16Mayim Bialik?

  I went on a date with someone who wore cargo pants.

• 1:40:20Mayim Bialik?

  That wasn't why I didn't go on a second date, but when I told my kids, this was, I was divorced, I told them later in life, they were like, "Yeah, that's a good thing you didn't go on a second date." He also mentioned that when he had to go to the restroom, that he was gonna go drop the kids off at the pool. I was like, I don't...

• 1:40:38Jonathan Cohen?

  I was gonna add that part because you've told me this story before and I thought you were gonna make me cut that.

• 1:40:44Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, he was funny, but it wasn't the kind of funny I wanted on a first date. That's like...

• 1:40:50Jonathan Cohen?

  On a first date, if you're telling someone you're gonna drop the kids off at the pool when you go to the restroom, I don't know that that's the right tone.

• 1:40:57Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know if it was a red flag, nor were the cargo pants. But yeah, that just felt like, that wasn't the only thing, but that just felt like, it's not the kind of humor I'm ready for when when we're on a first date.

• 1:41:09Jonathan Cohen?

  It also depends what type of cargo pants, because cargo pants have come back, but like, the stylish designer ones?

• 1:41:16Mayim Bialik?

  This was a minute ago, but you know, I think back then, I possibly didn't understand myself to the level that that Laurie Gottlieb says I need to, so I'm kind of glad I didn't keep moving forward and marry cargo pants guy.

• 1:41:30Jonathan Cohen?

  You could've been Mrs. Cargo Pants, but for that one decision that you had.

• 1:41:35Mayim Bialik?

  Actually, Laurie, as she was leaving, I wish I had gotten this on camera, said that people bring up our podcast in her office. People bring things that they heard about on our podcast, and they talk to her about them in her sessions. She also said she recommends that people listen to our podcast.

• 1:41:53Jonathan Cohen?

  That's good. That doesn't, that means that when they're bringing it up in their therapist's office, it isn't because the episode has traumatized them and they need help to metabolize.

• 1:42:01Mayim Bialik?

  That's true, but also, we don't get paid $200 an hour. I don't know how much therapists get these days, but we definitely are being helpful to people without, I don't know, without even realizing that kind of impact might be happening, that people are bringing us with them to therapist's offices.

• 1:42:18Jonathan Cohen?

  If you would like more therapy from us, specifically answering your most pressing questions, message us on Instagram. They may make it on to the next Ask Mayim Anything. And follow us on Instagram if you're not already.

• 1:42:33Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.