#146 - Guy Winch, Ph.D.: Emotional first aid and how to treat psychological injuries

Hello everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I am your host, peter etia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter are focused on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible to everyone. Our goal is to provide the best health and wellness content. period and we have assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that gives you much deeper content if you want to take your knowledge from this space to the next. level at the end of this episode I will explain what those benefits are or if you want to learn more now head to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe now without further delay here is today's episode my guest this week is

winch

boy boy is a psychologist author, speaker and now recently a podcast host, received his doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University, where he also did his postdoctoral work at the medical center.

He's been in private practice in New York for almost 30 years and, as we learned in this podcast, he shares an office space with my therapist and that probably speaks to the state of mind I'm in when I come in for therapy and that I haven't noticed the names of no one else on the wall. That guy is the author of three books, The Squeaky Wheel How. to fix a broken heart and

emotional

first

aid, we got into a very good discussion about two of these three. He also co-hosts one of my favorite podcasts, Dear Therapists, which he hosts with Laurie Gottlieb, a previous guest on this podcast, he's given it three. fantastic ted talks and a number of excellent google talks, all of which i highly recommend.

I wanted to talk to Guy after having the opportunity to get to know Laurie a little bit and obviously since his podcast came out, which was at the end of July, I've been pretty obsessed with it and I think getting familiar with the style that he Guy and Lori worked together, I could tell he would be a fantastic guest on this episode. We talk a lot about his journey to the path he's on now through psychology and what he learned along the way, both about himself and perhaps most interesting to the listener, what he learned about human conditions, we get into many things that he later acknowledged that he doesn't get asked much during his frequent interviews, so I'm grateful that we were able to have that kind of nuanced discussion.

I could have talked to a guy for many hours, but before I knew it we were almost two hours into the conversation and he was already in Israel and it was getting late at night, so where we ended up was, I think, an argument. really interesting about

emotional

health, specifically in relation to the challenges that many people have experienced during the pandemic, and Guy said during our interview that he thinks it's the biggest kind of seismic shift. That probably affected our ability to recognize the importance of

psychological

and emotional health, so if you are interested in other episodes that we have done that cover mental health and emotional health, I think you will find this one very interesting and without further delay, enjoy my conversation with witch boy, it's great talking to you here today.

I almost feel like I know you because I've been listening to your podcast, yours and Lori's, pretty religiously since it came out, which I think was about August is right, July 30th is actually right and I don't really know, You can probably imagine the affection I have for Laurie that probably came through in the interview I did with her and now, by extension, I see you two as gone. and the right hand and I really enjoyed listening to them. I have to ask you a quick question about this when you read the letter at the beginning of each episode, actually, before I explain to people the format of the podcast and then I'll ask my question, how do you set it up?

Because they have a fairly specific format. Well, Lori is the advice columnist for the Atlantic and I write an advice column for Ted, so our initial concept was "hey, advice," but we wanted to do something different because,

first

of all, we're both therapists, which isn't always is the case when it comes to advice, and secondly, what always frustrates me about advice is that you can give the most brilliant advice but sometimes you never find out what happened. people will write to you and tell you, but it's still very curated, so our format is such that we bring a letter each week, we start by reading it to each other and we do a very brief case consultation like we would in an office. therapy and that gives you kind of a fly on the wall and perspective of the therapy office and then we immediately bring the guest in and do a session with them and then after the session or at the end of the session we jump in to give them very practical advice to follow in a week and then we give some predictions about what we think will happen and then we hear back from the guest and we hear what happened when they implemented the advice, how they felt about it, how it went, what they took.

From there and after that we give our final thoughts as therapists on the situation, so it's really complete and satisfying or not depending on the resolution you get and you can figure out what happens and that's what I really like. to find out how the therapists think and you can find out what happens after the session, one question I have is that usually you do an exchange, sometimes you bring the letter and read it to lori and sometimes it's the other way around and immediately after Do it, Two of you have some sort of banter back and forth before you have the consultation with the client before you come over and that's going to be three to five minutes, I guess that's what it sounds like since I'm not actually timing it like I'm listening, but that's what it feels like, are they doing that cold or is it written?

We're doing that completely cold, completely cold. The one thing we say to each other before virtually every recording of that section is fine, but let's be brief. because we can't go on for long so this is the warmest thing we can do and I don't know what she's thinking about this letter, she doesn't know what I'm thinking about this letter, we might be thinking about different things and when. We agreed to do this podcast together, you know, I'll just say this. I met Laurie once in June of last year. That's the sum of our knowledge before we started doing this, so it's not like we've been working together for years. and I know how she thinks and she knows how I think she doesn't and I don't or I didn't do it now I do it so we're completely cold and that's and the idea that there was, let's keep it organic, let's keep It was spontaneous because that will be more interesting than putting to all our ducks in a row and then sound like the same person.

Well, you answered another question that is somewhat surprising to me: how is it possible to have such apparent chemistry without a long history? together, that's not a simple thing, it actually could have failed, it could have gone wrong in so many ways and I think what saves us is that I have great respect for Lori as a therapist and I think the same applies to her and what That means I see her heading in direction a and I want to go in direction b. I guess the direction a isn't going to be bad, so yeah, let's explore a for a moment and then we'll get to b.

It hasn't happened. Having recorded a full 20-episode season, it hasn't happened that Laurie has gone in one direction. I'm like, oh my God, why are we doing that? It's all valid because she is a very good therapist and I think she feels the same way. and then we indulge each other because we haven't found something that makes us cringe and you know, we start to get into the panic pattern of, well, let's back up a little bit and talk about you and how you got here. It's been written about the fact that you wanted to be a therapist from day one, just like some little kids want to be firefighters or professional soccer players or whatever.

You wanted to be a therapist, when did you realize that? I wasn't sure when I realized that, but I think when one of the first articles I was interviewed in appeared in the press, I got a message, I think it was pre-Internet, so it was a phone message, a real phone message with rotary phones, you know what they're cool with the crib, yeah, and the person said and it was a friend from high school and she said, oh my gosh, I remember you talking to any psychologist about wanting to be a psychologist when You were 14 now. ding ding ding what was wrong with him that he wanted to be a psychologist at 14 years old but that aside for a minute apparently very young is when I wanted to be a psychologist did you grow up in Israel or did you grow up in the United States I was born in England, okay, and you know, I had a few years there and then a few years of training in Israel, okay, you have a twin brother, is he an identical twin or is he an identical twin?

What other siblings do you have? That's all, it's just us. You two, how close were you, which sounds like a silly question maybe, but I don't know, I've known twins that aren't that close, yeah, just like me, we were always very, very close, we were one of the lucky or me. I guess what I mean is that my philosophy is that if you can't get along with the person who is most like you in the world, then you know you have some work to do to figure out why you don't like yourself. I mean, I think just because with twins, especially identical ones, this is your carbon copy pretty much if you love yourself you should love them we always got along we always had a very strong bond so you finished high school in Israel or the united states in israel i came to the united states says after my college degree with two suitcases and maybe a thousand dollars and I hope it's okay, so you went to New York University, if I remember correctly, and you did both your degree graduate as your postdoctoral work, that's right, yes, I did a master's degree in PhD at New York University and then You did a postdoc at New York University Medical Center, I got it and during that process, how were you able to refine your interest?

I guess at 14 years old, when you think I want to be a psychotherapist, or I want to be a psychologist, or I want to be something. type of therapist that helps people's minds and emotions, it becomes much more nuanced when you write your thesis, so what was that journey when you went from a 14-year-old kid to a high school student, from a college student? to a graduate student? You refine your goals. The good thing about a degree in psychology is that if you do it well it gives you a lot of exposure to different areas of psychology because psychologists is a general term but you can be a psychologist who runs rats through mazes or you can be a psychologist who provides consulting. for organizations, you can be a clinical psychologist and do therapy, which is what I do, you can work with children, etc., just psychology is very broad, so you get exposure and I was very clear about that from the beginning of my education because really before that I didn't have that exposure that I'm not completely interested in severe psychopathology;

In other words, everyone I studied was fascinated by schizophrenia, for example, and hallucinations, and because it was very wild to watch people. and people fervently believed in delusions and had paranoia and all that stuff that just never interested me, it seemed a little more like a sideshow and I felt like I wanted to help normal people deal with normal life, which was always my interest and I. I don't know why or when I had that interest. I think my interest in psychology all along was because I was watching the adults around me, probably when I was 14, and I'm not sure if they were communicating very well or if I had any others. notes probably for them and I thought, you know, I need to study this to understand this because I'm really interested in, you know, because I could see mistakes and I could see things and I just didn't have a framework with which to understand them or categorize them, so the interest probably It started there, but it continued because I was always interested in working with everyday people to improve their quality of life now when I think back to my degree, which was in engineering, my girlfriend for at least half of my time. in college he was in the psychology department, but he overlapped with business school and eventually did his PhD in organizational behavior and he never said this, but my impression was that the superstar people in the psychology department were the ones who did this. other things and there were fewer people staying to do How do I help normal people suffer less now?

It's true. Was there anything less sexy about wanting to do what you wanted? I will tell you and if that girlfriend is around, she will confirm it for you. The sexiest thing you can do with a PhD is finish it and there's a point where you just don't care about anything other than finishing it, so really everyone is really oriented towards how can I do that, other than my program in the New York University for graduate school was just clinical, it was just 10 people studying clinical psychology. I was torn between psychology and film, so I was in film school and the response I got from the psychology department was, "Oh, you'regood at this and the feedback I got from film school is that they love you in psychology, so I took a cue from how you think about your undergrad tour because I probably only took two courses in psychology and I remember thinking, "wow, There's a lot here, I mean, there's so many." different schools of thought, there are so many great thinkers in this space and they often disagree with each other, so it was less like physics, which was where I spent a lot more time where Schrodinger relies on the guy in front of him and likes it.

In other words, there is a continuity of science and a new discovery can change an earlier one, but there is general agreement about it. You know, relativity is based on Newtonian mechanics and people can understand where Newtonian laws break down. I didn't feel that way in psychology. I really felt it. Like there are different camps, does that resonate? Did you experience that as you went through it? Oh yeah, I mean you can't not be right, I mean you mentioned Schrodinger because it's one of the few areas of physics where there is uncertainty, but psychology is all about uncertainty we don't have that understanding of the human mind. we don't have that understanding of the brain we don't have that understanding of emotions we don't even have that understanding of consciousness yet and so we are in the infancy of understanding how we function and how we operate.

I mean, I would love to be at the point where we have an operator's manual for the human mind that we can all use to maximize our potential, but you're very, very far from that, so you get close to a science like that. I'll take what we know. Any certainty feels like an oasis because there is so much uncertainty. We do not have a unifying set of theories or principles. way we do it in physics and mathematics and I guess it just speaks to how much more complicated humans are than the natural world around us and also how much newer psychology is as a science than physics or mathematics, right, physics and mathematics is a couple thousand years old or more or several thousand years old in psychology, do you think that as you progress in your training, your impressions of what fields you tend to be in as students are potentially influenced by the people you meet? they present the information and the affinity you have for Hey, you know the way that teacher teaches that resonates with me or, alternatively, it's like an experience you've had where that school of thought really fits with my personal experience.

I guess what I'm clumsily trying to ask is how do I think a young student therapist creates the scaffolding that will become the mental model of him and, more importantly, how malleable it is. Over time, I can tell you about my scaffolding and it's such an interesting question that I've never been asked that before and I. I'm already enjoying this because it's really cool that you can ask me to think about things that I haven't necessarily thought about that way, but here's my response when you go somewhere and you're presented with 10 different religions that everyone who introduces them to, each one is presented verbally.

My response to that was to be agnostic. My response to that was not to believe in any of them, but to select and say what I can take, what in that I can take, what aspect of This resonates with me and that was from the beginning how I

treat

ed it and how I thought about it. These are all ideas from which I can choose what seems right to me, but I do not need to fully endorse or accept any of them. I never knew that the biggest compliment I can pay someone in that setting is to compare them to Bruce Lee, but that is indeed what you know, what is known as Jeet Kune Do, which is this in no way, what was his type of model of martial arts that was each one of them offers things that are useful and each one of them has things that are useless what if you could disassociate yourself from being a student of one exclusively and that is why he created this technique that he actually has the privilege of studying ? for two years and you study it individually with a teacher oh well, it was very, very interesting.

Spend three months interviewing me to confirm that I'm worthy of learning this, by the way, oh wow, yes, but it was beautiful and it was true to how it was presented, which was never about being married to a style, so it's amazing how that you described it as once putting you at odds with your colleagues who couldn't understand why you didn't fit in. in a box, yes, my program in the past was quite psychoanalytic, it was a very New York type of thinking and therefore in that approach, for example, when I had the first patient, because you have to start somewhere, you know that they don't know.

You're there, you're the first, but you ask me where I'm from and my supervisor said if someone asks you where you're from, you can't tell them and I'm like, why can't I tell them? because you're introducing foreign material, you should ask them what their thoughts and feelings and associations are about where you might be from and what that means to them and I had a hard time with that and I said, but if my accent were more obvious then I wouldn't have to go through that farce and it just seems held back and irrelevant because I don't know if they're there to spend their time arguing about where I could be from, it just makes me the center of something.

I don't think it should be the focus, so I struggled with some of the techniques I was introduced to early on, but I was very fortunate because the professors there, at least the ones I interacted with, were very open-minded. They didn't assume you had to buy real things, they assumed you know you can wrestle with these things and come to your own conclusion. The students were sometimes a little more devoted, I should say, but the teachers were usually more. flexible, you know, I remember, I think even Laurie wrote about this in her book and I'm sure many have commented along these lines because it seems like such an important finding that's probably been around for some time, which is training. of the therapist the credentials of the therapist all of these things probably don't matter as much as the relationship that is built between the therapist and the client maybe I'm saying it a little incorrectly, but what I took away from this was that at least as important is the degree of relationship that the client and the therapist have like knowing how much knowledge the therapist has, that is, a precise statement, it is very precise, in fact, my dissertation in the past was about what are the aspects of the therapist, his experience, his gender, his age, that could influence the outcome of the therapy, but it has since become very clear and the research is very clear on this, that the most active ingredient in therapy is the fit between the therapist and the patient and specifically a patient if you go.

In therapy for the first time, what you want to feel is that the person you are the stranger you are telling everything to understands that they are responding, saying things, and asking questions that show they understand. We are very clear, it's like a target is a target or a mistake, you feel that that person understands me or not or not a lot or not a little, it doesn't matter. The ding ding ding of catches me is very, very specific, that's what you want to feel. when you go to talk to a therapist, who at least understands you now, the work starts from there, but without that it will be hard work, yes maybe it can.

That would be an easier way to say it. I suppose that is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, criterion for great therapy. That's been my experience in my own therapeutic journeys and I think that's why I ask the question, of course, go back to your original. The point is that if you sit down for the first time with a therapist who has an accent and you ask him where he's from and he evades the question, it becomes tremendously difficult to feel like you have any relationship with him when, instead, if you can spend two or three minutes having a relational discussion about where someone is from and oh wow you're from there, what a beautiful place I've been there, oh that's lovely, I find that at least as a non-therapist it's a classy way of at least trying to capture something of that relationality absolutely.

I mean, I remember when I graduated and started my practice and for the first time I was able to do what I wanted and I went on vacation and one of my patients told me where are you going? on vacation and I answered the question and I smiled not because of where I was going but because I could answer it and the moment I answered it all the curiosity evaporated because who cares where your therapist is going on vacation unless the therapist is making a big deal out of it, It's funny, there are parallels in medicine too.

I remember getting scolded for something when I was in my third or maybe fourth or fifth year of residency, a kid walked in. This is a sad story, but you. I'll understand the parallel, so a kid was in a car that was totaled, so he was in the passenger seat, he was hit in his side, someone had run a red light and died, it was unbearably tragic, so I It was the A senior resident who met him in the emergency room and tried, unsuccessfully, for 30 minutes to resuscitate him and that meant that I was the one who went and spoke to his mother afterwards and explained to her what had happened and I don't think there was a difficult scenario than telling a mother that she just saw her son two hours earlier, perfectly normal and healthy, that he is now dead through that experience, I became closer to the mother, went to the funeral three days later and during For years I kept in touch with her and talked to her. on the anniversary of her son's death and things like that, one of the older colleagues kicked me for that when he found out that I went to the funeral and said that it is an absolute mistake.

You didn't have to go to that funeral. You have to draw a line between you and the patients you can't, no, and again, no, I don't think he was saying this to be malicious, I think that was his way, I guess I never did enough research to understand what he was saying, did you? Was he saying yes? protect yourself from that or you have to protect the institute of medicine from that, I've never fully understood it, but I don't think his point of view was the only one, I think probably several people would have thought I made a mistake by doing that.

Again in Lori's book, I think she spoke very eloquently about going to her patient's funeral. That's a different situation. She had such a long relationship with that patient and the patient insisted that she go to the funeral, but I guess there are just different ways of thinking. In this regard, you know it's interesting because I've been in both experiences. I got the lecture that I shouldn't go when I started my practice. Do you know how you feel in practice when you're in New York City and there are four of you? Therapists for each resident, it more or less seems that way, maybe not, but how do you distinguish yourself when you are young and just finished school?

So, I would take on the cases that people didn't want and some of them I would take on. being children with terminal illnesses and so I had the experience of being told by a senior colleague that at that time I was not a supervisor because I had graduated, but rather a senior colleague that I really shouldn't go to the funeral and what they said You will find that the more time you spend practicing, the more funerals you will have to attend and at some point there will come a point where you simply will not be able to attend them all because as the years have gone by I have met many people, you cannot continue to attend. to all the funerals, but don't think that meant I had to go to all the funerals, but then someone died and they left me a letter that I received after their death in which they said I would like you to come to my funeral and speak, so now it's a relief because now it's okay, I can go, who knows who I am, but they want me to talk and they're hypolos, so I can't really say anything. about anything, so I went and I was surprised that almost everyone knew who it was, not from the Internet or anything, you just know I was the only one who wasn't familiar and it was oh, it's a therapist, this is a therapist, you know, so it's a fun room to walk in and then when it was my turn to talk, what I decided to do was say, you know I can't talk about him because of privacy laws, but I can talk about you because I knew all those people. , these are the people that The sessions were about and and obviously I talked about the good part because these are people at their funeral and I just talked about how this one was meaningful and this one was meaningful and this one and this one and that's how I chose to handle It was at that moment. and it gave me a lot of closure.

It was very meaningful for me. I guess it was meaningful to the people who were there. There were many things I learned from it. I remember it as a very important experience. I'm curious to know if you feel the same about the funeral you attended. I absolutely do. I just think it's a privilege to be in the position you're in or the position I was in once. time, where obviously the most delicate situation is a situation in a person's life that sometimes you can be a part of and sometimes it is very unpleasant. I mean, I had another patient that I had a very close connection with.

He developed a pulmonary embolism. We tried to resuscitate him and we couldn't and he basically suffered a catastrophic neurological injury, so now he was basically on life support and brain dead. He was very young. He was my age. So I probably hadjust over 30 years old at the time, just like him, and after a few days his family decided to withdraw support, but. his mother asked and they told her look, we can't be here when you take off the ventilator, but we would like you to be the one to stay in the room with him because we know how much he liked you and we remember the first day I entered the hospital, how much he connected with you and was so happy that you were part of his team.

That's another one of those questions. Which one is the boy? Normally I wouldn't want to be in the room having to watch a person. Take what are called chain breaths, which are not real breaths, but they look like real breaths just as they are. kind of gasping and dying, but I also thought that's the responsibility that comes with this and I think it's a reasonable request of the family, yeah, I'm sitting here thinking and that's why I didn't go into medicine because I don't know if I could do it well, but I think what you did is harder, I want to go back to something you said a moment ago, tell me about the first part of your practice when you take children with terminal illnesses, I mean, at that time you have two clients, you have the child and you have the parents, yes, and I was doing a lot of family therapy for that reason, I mean my training in graduate school.

I had published some research before as a BA and that exempted me from some research courses in graduate school and that allowed me to double my practice and actually study couples family therapy from year one, so you can usually take that as a module at some point, but I had four years of intense practice and seeing patients and the way we teach couples and family therapy is with one-way mirrors, you know, instead of coming in and saying this is what I said this is what the patient is that what the patient said or is it that you don't know what you remember, but when you are doing it and the team and the supervisor are watching you and calling with suggestions if they have them, etc., it is a great way to study because it really you can not.

It hides number one so you learn more, so I did that and I had a lot of qualifications with that and that's part of the reason I got that job, so to speak, of working with these families because I had to do family therapy on top of see. Parents came to consultations individually, so it was a lot of that and when I started, it was couples, for example, where the husband was considered aggressive and if it was a therapist, they felt uncomfortable, I was fine with bringing these aggressive husbands to me. Now they weren't, they weren't aggressive, they were upset or, you know, angry, you know, sometimes a little bit, maybe with other issues that triggered their anger, but they want violent people, at least not the ones I worked with, like that. who would take the cases of those people.

I would be fooled and the other trick I learned was that you stay in the city in August when you're starting out, especially in New York, and then there are no therapists in the city and people will come to you. What year did you start your private practice? 92. So, are you going to lose your fingers and toes? You're going to be left without a dozen fingers. I love the idea of ​​staying in the city in August. I mean, yeah, New York is a ghost town. I guess the only thing that might be better is to go to Long Island in August and then you'll get invaded.

Well yes, you can go to Malta Vineyard, that's where all the therapists used to be. Apparently I don't know why you decided to go. private practice versus staying in academia it's very simple the dissertation was traumatic you know it is for a lot of people it was for me I had a difficult situation I had a five year visa I had to complete I'm an immigrant essentially to the United States so I had a visa that allowed me to study and stay for five years, but by then I had to finish. You were in a J-1, I was in a J-1 and when I finished, they allowed me to stay. for another 18 months for practical training, but if I didn't finish, I would have to leave, so the average graduation rate in my program was eight years and I didn't have eight years, I had to do everything very, very quickly, you know? and as soon as possible, you know, that affected everything in terms of how I did things, what I did, the thesis that I did and I had a thesis advisor who was difficult, a little difficult to work with, and there were At times I thought that If I had to do this I'm not going to finish, she just gave me a lot to do and objectively it was an unusual amount of the studying she wanted me to do was too big, so it was very, it was very. stressful and it literally took me, I'm telling you, it took me three or four years after graduating before I could walk into a library without feeling a real wave of anxiety, that's interesting, how did you help yourself get through that? therapist at this point that you could process that with, I did, but I just stopped going to libraries for a while, I was really traumatized and I really felt like it was really anxiety, like your heart starts racing when you walk into libraries, which normally doesn't happen.

Do that to most people, they usually find it boring rather than activating because when everything you have and every investment you've made, emotionally speaking, intellectually speaking and not financially speaking, can go down the drain if you don't finish and someone just he is achieving it. very difficult to finish it was very difficult and it is very difficult for many people many people are traumatized by the thesis process academia is a very difficult place but it still took me some time to recover therapy was extremely helpful at the time but it was very It was also helpful to be able to start my private practice and at that point it was like I didn't want to do any research.

I was associated. I have to go to libraries. I don't want to do that anymore. It just sounds familiar to me. something that has been very interesting to me is unfortunate now why did you decide to stay in the United States instead of, for example, returning to Israel or going to Europe, where you had spent some time? You still had a fondness for New York. I had to call. we from new york since my first time I visited new york the first time I visited new york I said out loud to several people who remind me I'm going to live here I was captivated by new york and then yes to me new york was where I was in number one, but number two, when you go through five years of school, then you do a postdoc, then you do a year and a half of hands-on training, all your contacts are there so you can start a private practice because you had enough. contacts to do it if I went anywhere else, even if it was Israel, my professional contacts weren't there.

I'd really have to start from scratch and not quote Frankie too much, but really, if you can get there, why not? I want to do it anywhere else. I read it once. I don't know where I read this, but in some of my preparations for our discussion, one of the things you struggled with when you started practicing right away was a kind of endless rumination and an inability to turn it off when you got home, can you tell me a little more about that? Yeah, that was my third ted talk, so that's probably where you saw that and it was about that exactly, that talk was actually about reflecting on it. it was that we experience work stress, most of it actually outside of work because when we are at work and working, when you are absorbed in your work, you are not aware of whether you are stressed, you are just doing it, that is when you stop and you're driving home or in my case you're walking home or you're sitting at dinner or you're trying to fall asleep at night, all those worries and you know the ruminations come and if you're not diligent in managing them and limiting them, they can really take Control and rumination is a really harmful

psychological

practice.

What I find interesting is that psychologists are supposed to welcome any kind of self-reflection like, oh, reflect, that's great, well, no, there's something healthy and adaptive. self-reflection and there is unhealthy and maladaptive self-reflection and it's very clear what's helpful and what's not if you're thinking about things in a way that's trying to gain knowledge or understanding or meaning, you're trying to solve a problem. you're trying to deal with it, that's adaptive if you're just repeating the same disturbing memory or idea over and over again if you're just walking around your house at night mumbling so much about doing tomorrow I have a lot to do tomorrow isn't helpful, you're getting stressed because When you do that, you actually activate your stress response, so you're really stressing yourself out, it's associated with lack of sleep, eating unhealthy foods, irritability, you're in control with your family, you know?

It's bad in every way, but it's not something we pay enough attention to, so we talk about you know work stress happens outside of work, so you need to manage it because you'll like your job a lot more if you don't. . burned out, so how did you start dealing with it? How did you start

treat

ing yourself when you realized this was happening? I guess I will before I ask you that question, let me start with another question, do you think this? Rumination was the natural consequence of now being the last person; In other words, you didn't have a superior or a supervisor, the responsibility was yours.

Do you think that was really the source of the rumination? Absolutely because you know I opened private practice. and suddenly the responsibility for that falls on you you know you're advising people and again half of my practice has always been couples and families who are very active they sometimes live in intense situations right this couple has had an affair this couple is dealing with this this family The fight is that individuals don't go crazy in a session, usually alone, but a couple that you take your eyes off for a second can go very wrong very quickly and people came to see me with their children who were dying with their husbands. who were they afraid of, if you know that you are responsible for helping and having an impact, and that is a big responsibility and I think it's just an adaptation process to get used to that, to the enormity and the responsibility. of it and that's what it was and if you're conscientious, which I tend to be, then you ask yourself if you're doing the best thing, you ask yourself: do I have enough experience to do this?

Am I qualified enough to do it? And yet you seek help. you try to do the best you can, but if you are conscientious it is stressful, yes, and I imagine, going back to your point about adaptive versus maladaptive, a certain amount of stress is actually very adaptive, without it you become very complacent, but in It is actually an inverted situation. you and at some point you go further and become quite maladjusted and it seems to you that in the early years you probably went too far in reflection, did you recognize it at the time or is it more like something you see now?

In retrospect, well, I tell part of the story in the ted talk and I'll only tell it briefly because it's quick, it was the moment that made me realize that it was Friday night, it was July, it was very, very hot and I was coming home from my office and I left, I lived in Manhattan, my office was there, I was walking and I got into the elevator in my building with a neighbor who was a doctor in an emergency room and the elevator, you know, went up a couple of floors, then it shuddered and stopped and the man who handles emergencies for a living started banging on the door and pushing all the buttons.

This is my nightmare. This is my nightmare. And instead of being compassionate, as I would have been in any other circumstance, I found what came out of my mouth was and this is my nightmare, which was funny to my ears at the time, not so much to him and really horribly unpleasant and really cruel and also, to remind you, this is the neighbor. I'm going to see them again, it just wasn't wise. but it was so unlike me and I felt so bad about it the moment those words came out of my mouth I literally said what's going on with me, that's not me at all and that's when I started to realize I was exhausted, but I had only been in practice for a year, how is that possible?

And that's when I started thinking about how many hours I'm working and that's when I started to realize that it's not the hours I spend in my office, but the hours I work in my head. Afterwards, it doesn't stop and that's when I started to realize that I needed to control it. This is really an epidemic, isn't it? I think this concept is probably not appreciated by I certainly don't think I have appreciated it as much. a lot until recently and I and I think that certainly in the era of non-stop electronics it is more difficult to separate yourself from work, you are more tied to it even when you are not there, I mean, look these days most of us all work from home, which is nice, but it also means you're at work all the time.

I think that distinction is very good, right? Burnout may not be the result of just how much time you are at work, but rather how much time you spend at work. How much time are you thinking about work when you're not at work and that's the part you can control, that's the part you have control over and yes, to amplify your point, the pandemic has been terrible for thepeople that way because it's not that you're home all the time it's that your bosses know that you are and you know that they know that you are like why didn't you answer the email it's not like you're anywhere it's not like you had something to do is the kind of subtext of a lot of that right you weren't traveling for an hour and you couldn't respond because you weren't in the movies because most of them don't exist you weren't in a On the Broadway show you weren't doing nothing important, yeah, so it's been a real problem because it's hard enough to make a separation when you don't have that door of physical space to close and you have to do it psychologically, but then they keep bombarding you. with emails and requests and all that stuff, so really, unless you create firm guardrails for yourself, unless you have the discipline to actually determine if I'm done by this time, then you're going to have a hard time getting through it.

What do you think are some of the antidotes? pondering what would you tell me? I could just give you the right case study. I have many patients who fit this description, very successful man or woman, professionally correct, so by any external measure, whatever the world can give them as a measure of success. Financial company that builds entrepreneurial spirit. Whatever. It seems like they've done it all, and yet when they're at home they can't interact with their kids because they're constantly lost in thought or their spouse has trouble sleeping. It is not difficult for them to fall asleep, but once.

They wake up and they can't go back to sleep and that's usually around one or two in the morning. They tend to numb that behavior with maybe a little more alcohol than they should. What I just described is that sometimes that's me, sometimes that's my pain. I mean, I think we all fit this description, it's just that we can all put parts of ourselves into this description, how do you start to help that person? So the first thing that person needs to realize is that this is not going to happen naturally, it's not like that. that you can say to yourself yes, I'm working too hard I'm going to do better that doesn't work because intentionality will be good for a day or two and then it will fade away you can't direct yourself To not think about something, you can redirect your thoughts to think on something else and that will work as long as the other thing you are thinking about requires concentration and is absorbing if you are trying to drown out thoughts of work by observing.

On television, you won't be able to watch the first commercial without knowing anything about what's happening on that show because, unfortunately, your mind will immediately wander off when reading, so it has to be something active where you're actually occupying your head and doing something. That requires concentration, that's one thing, so if you're really stuck in a loop, distracting yourself by doing something that requires concentration, whether it's a memory task, a puzzle, or whatever, research is two or three minutes of a task. that distracts you and requires concentration. be enough to make that initial urge or desire to ruminate go away, the other thing people have to understand is that it feels very satisfying to ruminate because it feels like you're doing something important.

Here's something that worries me. I'm thinking what could possibly be wrong with that, well you're not thinking about it, you're just repeating it, you're just obsessed, you're on an emotional hamster wheel and you're just spinning your wheels, you're not trying to figure out anything, like that that the second key is to take whatever it is that worries you, usually it is one or two things that people tend to reflect on in a day or a morning about the same thing that worries them, whatever it is, they pose it as a problem to sell because when you pose it as a problem to be solved let's say the very common reflection I have a lot of work to do or when am I going to do this when you pose that as a problem it is a scheduling problem it is when I make my schedule I will have time to deal With this, what can I do to make that time?

And if you really think about it that way and put it on your schedule, move things around to do it, so the stress you'll feel will be relieved and the urge to eliminate will be relieved. With that, the other thing you can do and I think this is the most important thing is these railings that you need and it's not just about that night, it's about at what point your family or you, if you don't have one, can rely on It's up to you to show up and not be at work mentally and you have an obligation to them, so when you think about it that way, what you do is whether you decide it's eight o'clock at night, seven o'clock at night or nine o'clock. turn on whatever, then that's the time you let everyone know and then you have to create transition rituals that make you feel like you're not at work anymore, then you have to change out of your work clothes and you have to put on a little music and change the lighting and if you have kids you have to put yourself in ten year old mode or four year old mode or the four year old shouldn't be awake at that time, but anyway you know what.

What I'm saying is you know you really have to do it or if you have a spouse, you have to get into romantic mode, you have to get in the mood and really engage with them, you can't just sit there passively, engage with them, which means you plan the evening, you organize the game, you organize the outing, you organize the dinner, you really have to mark a territory on purpose to have a life and if you don't do it, you won't do it, how often do you collaborate with psychiatrists, where they also incorporate pharmacotherapy that can help with that, you know medications that can help with sleep by facilitating some of these circuits, you know things like tracing or thorazine, things like that where you can start to short circuit it a little bit and it becomes somewhat accretive with that. process you describe I work with psychiatrists all the time my first instinct would not be to refer someone to a psychiatrist when they are reflecting this way simply because there are so many things they need to try.

Give some examples. I can give you four more examples of techniques and things you can do to limit rumination that will work. If there's one of those things you can do without medication, you should do it if it's hard to do without medication. I actually take four medications and work with psychiatrists all the time, but this specifically will be more effective in changing the habit that makes you ruminate rather than just medicating the rumination because the habit is preparing you to do it a lot. Yes, I completely agree that it is more durable, of course, and it is much more difficult.

I mean, that's the reality, having the durability of the response comes at a price, which is that you have to work harder from the beginning, it's much harder to change habits. As you describe them to take a pill, one of the things for me from a ritual perspective that has been very helpful, you mentioned briefly is the ritual of playing with children, so if you are lucky enough to have children, which I don't A Sometimes I don't always feel lucky to play with them in a truly engaged way, so that means at least for my two youngest kids they're on the floor like they're not on the floor, yeah you have to be on the floor, On the ground, yes, you have to do it. being on the ground and you have to be doing exactly what they're doing, you can't even be half-doing it, that's a real antidote to sort of reflecting on that negative loop, but it's also not easy to do at first, it turns out. be a shock to your system because I think we lose this ability to play pretty quickly, it fades from us, you know, when we're adults we've lost it, we don't know what that means anymore, so it's actually it's a beautiful thing, I don't I know, I'm sure there are other ways to capture that if you don't have kids, but for me at least it's been a very powerful tool in that toolbox, let me tell you how to capture that.

If you don't have children there are many aspects of each person's identity you are not just a professional you are an individual you are an amateur tennis player maybe you are an amateur cook maybe you have this hobby or a sports fan maybe you can access any of those aspects of your identity and bring it out in that moment because when you're yelling at the TV because your team is doing something you really wouldn't want them to do, you're not thinking about the work. You're just thinking about just getting the ball down you know like you know that's where your mind is so you can access that, you know you sign up for a race and you're going to train and then the question is can you improve your time? you put in the miles that you need to do or if you're an artist then you go to the studio because that's where you're going to create best or create a studio-like atmosphere so the many aspects of our identity that we can access really No We will make a big deal of ourselves when we are too preoccupied with work and we will suffer from not accessing these parts of ourselves that are meaningful or to the extent that they are meaningful to us, that they know make us feel like us and make us feel like us. .

If we feel important, we need to give them stage time and doing so is a good way to get two birds with one stone in the sense of giving that stage time access to that part of your creativity, your personality, whatever it may be. and at the same time. If you are doing one thing, there is no room for the other. So how long did it take you to experience this transformation early in your career? Well, it's actually a long story, so I'll just give you some highlights. Because I went through a scan, it didn't take me long to limit the hours and limit the reflection, but what it brought me was okay, here I am, a year or two ago in my private practice, I've been full steam ahead.

Forward since my days as an undergraduate and graduate student, then postdoc, and then practicum, I had not stopped to consider how I feel about what I am doing and when I did it in those moments, in addition to limiting rumination, I realized that I can't do psychology 50 60 hours a week is too much for me. I need to do something else. I need to balance that it can be related to psychology but it has to be different and then I went through a two-year exploration of what that exploration would be. Through some perhaps unusual seasons, there was a point where I was chatting with NASA's head of behavioral sciences because he wanted to be an astronaut.

I'm not saying it was a wise tangent on my part because I didn't actually become an astronaut. astronaut, but I was curious, so I decided that maybe I should enroll in space college again. Astronaut dreams, then I realized there isn't much behavioral science in space. Maybe that's not the best place. Also, I heard about this float idea. what's the problem with bathrooms in the space you end up with, sorry that put me off, these little things sometimes make a difference so I ended up realizing that I wanted to write and at that point I decided to limit the hours of the week and day I see patients and create space to write and that's what I did for many years how good were you at writing when you started I'm going to answer you this way I did it for 14 years I didn't publish a word, I didn't even get paid a penny that might hold some clues about my abilities at that time as a writer.

Now to be clear, I was writing screenplays at the time. I returned to I had an acquaintance with cinema. and I was writing scripts, a couple of them got options, so I wasn't completely in the dark, but you know, it's the luck of the draw. I was in New York, I wasn't in Hollywood and it was in 2008 that this one. The script got optioned a second time and it started to look like it was going to happen and I got my hopes up and I was working with this company and then the financial crash happened and that fell by the wayside and that's when I was like, Oh my God!

Oh my gosh, it's been 14 years and then an agent that I knew and already knew told me like I was telling you to just write psychology and I didn't want to write psychology, the whole thing about writing was not doing psychology and then I'll tell it very briefly. just because it's so stupid, but it's like life, don't tell it briefly, just tell it. I love history. I went to Best Buy to buy headphones and tried to get someone's attention to help me. and three people walked by and didn't help me so I got upset and walked out of the store and when I walk out of the store there is a big picture of the manager like I'm talking about a four foot picture of the manager. smiling and saying how was our customer service, send me an email and let me know, so I emailed them and let them know and the surprising thing was that I received an email the next morning saying I'm so sorry about what happened, here is my personal phone number.

I know when you come I will make sure someone helps you with whatever you need and that email made me think, wow, if I had gone to a customer service hotline or been on a customer service line, that would have taken oneeternity. It really made me think that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and that gave me an idea. I wondered what the psychology behind it was and started searching to see what books had been written on the psychology of complaining and there weren't any. A week later I saw this agent at the Christmas party and I said no, I had this idea for a psychology book, but she finally said, what is it?

I said no, I'm not even sure it's a book. book, it's just an idea and it's about the psychology of complaining and I would call it the squeaky wheel and she looked at me and said, I can sell that, I'm like there's no such thing to sell, you know, and she said, I'm telling you. You do your research, write a proposal, I can sell it and it sells at auction, so let's talk a little about the book. I've seen your talk on Google, I think since 2011, where you presented this. I love history, by the way, when you walk into the bookstore ready to sign your copies, we'll let you say that, but where did her research take you?

How did she begin to discover what was known and, more importantly, does she know what the downside of complaining was? That to me is what you learn from that talk, right, there is a hidden cost to complaining incorrectly. Well, at that point I was cured of my anxiety-related libraries. I was able to walk into a library without having a panic attack, which was very helpful. when you're researching a book, so I went back to the libraries and went and started looking at the research, but most of the research was actually in the customer service realm or in the couples therapy realm, but very little about our individual psychology, but since I started interviewing people I started thinking a lot about it and what came up.

What was brought up over and over again was that complaining is a way of expressing empowerment as we try to get a result, but the research was, for example, that 95 of the people who have a customer service complaint with a product does not express it. even though they are very upset because they feel and fear that it will be too difficult, too time consuming and too irritating to do and this is the fun part, they will tell that to 12 to 16 people on average. The incident spent much more time escalating each time again with no results, and that fascinated me.

I was like, wow, our complaining psychology is really broken, you just don't know, it used to be a transactional tool and now it's just a What we do is let off steam and the problem is that when you tell 16 people how they hurt you and they don't If you do anything about it, you will feel like a victim, you will feel helpless because that is the story that What you are telling here is a story of my anger at not being able to do anything about it, it is the subtext of the story that you are telling, you Whether you realize that or not, because it really reinforces it, I mean, it would be one thing to not complain to the entity that could right the wrong and if it stopped there, that could be quite problematic, but then go and tell the story to 16 people. who are not empowered to solve it, I mean the guy who really myelinates, I'm using the term. vague myelination, but almost you know, over-myelinates a whole new set of pathways that creates a narrative that's probably pretty unbearable, right, yeah, and I love that phrase so we should use it from now on, but yeah, it does and especially when you think. about how many complaints we have on a daily basis is not one, so that's one thing and the other is when you work with people in psychotherapy and individual psychotherapy and they mention problems with their brother with a sister with a brother with a friend with a mother with a couple, whatever it is, and you ask the most obvious question: did you discuss that with them?

The alarming number of times you hear no and the astonishing number of times they look at you like why would you argue? with them that's just going to cause an argument, I'm not stupid, it's really powerful when you think about it like people are absolutely convinced that expressing something that's really important to them and meaningful to them is impossible, now they're right. true because the vast majority of people phrase their complaints so badly that they actually get the wrong result, they actually cause the argument, they actually make the customer service rep angry, it turns out that when strangers yell at you on the phone, they curse at you and They threaten you.

You're not necessarily motivated to try to help them as best you can, let me just confirm that. Joking aside, do you get the sense that this is a process that has changed over time? So let's take a very extreme example of what he did. the complaints seem like when we were hunter-gatherers, obviously we don't have data, but can we rely on any idea to say when we were walking in tribes of 18 if you know Johnny was supposed to go out to dinner that night and he didn't? and the tribe can't eat, do we have any idea how that was handled and then what that evolution has been to where we are today?

So how did we get to the point we are at today, where 19 out of 20? people won't voice the complaint to the entity that can address it, but we'll spend an average of 12 to 16 times, you know, complaining to the wrong people, like we want to understand that transformation through our history as much as possible. Do you think it's understandable? I can't say much about hunter-gatherers in that domain except to say that what happened with hunter-gatherers is that the research on ostracism and rejection tells us that the risk you ran as a hunter-gatherer of offending your fellow tribe was harsh because the implications were that if you were excluded from the tribe you weren't going to make it, so really pissing off your tribemates was something he probably did very judiciously, so I don't know how that was phrased. at that point I can go back 150 years to the origin of the term the squeaky wheel, it came from a poem by a guy named Josh Billings who was a comedian in Mark Twain's day and the poem was kind of like everything I know, I forget. but it's something about I hate being a kicker and I always long for peace but the squeaky wheel is the one that gets greased it's something like that the problem there is the word kicker the word kicker was the very insulting word associated with people who complained too much, in other words, as a society at that time, 150 years ago, complaining was frowned upon and because of that it was mostly used transactionally, if the blacksmith didn't put the horseshoe on correctly, you'll go and say.

You know my horse is lame, but if your horse was only slightly lame, you probably didn't do it because you didn't want to be a kicker, so it was frowned upon back then and now you'll become a reality TV star if you complain about it. enough, if you know, express something on social media, in other words, the idea of ​​today and I think it's really developed because the complainers culturally did it, the squeaky wheel, I'm not sure if they got the grease, but they got attention and, sometimes, attention. It was better for them than grease and you know grease is supposed to silence the wheel and they weren't looking to be silenced, they were actually looking to get a megaphone and be louder to a lot of people and culturally they were rewarded that way. number one, number two, our expectations have grown with the industrialization of society in such a way that we would never complain about the discomfort when we shared a bed with four people and went to the latrine to go to the bathroom in the snow, but today knowing if There is something slightly wrong with something we are going to do because our expectations are very high and complaints are generally triggered when there is a large gap between expectations and reality and because expectations have increased, the gap has increased and complaints They are triggered and then reinforced by culture and society.

How much general discontent do you think can be attributed to what you just said? This gap between expectations and reality, I mean, do you like it? What percentage of this is probably an unanswerable but only directional question? the suffering the psychological suffering comes down to that delta, a lot true, I mean, you're asking for numbers, I don't know, but a lot and more so because of social media, because if your expectations were to know that you could see what your neighbor did. It was okay, I mean keeping up with the Joneses was keeping up with the people next door because you could see what car they had, but now you don't have to be next door, you can see that person you grew up with lives far away.

Now they have this car and they have this house and their wife looks like this, you know, in other words, social media has it and because it's so well curated, it's the best highly curated thing that in most cases sets expectations. very poor or very wrong expectations. about what we should expect from life and how much work we should be expected to do to achieve it, so that doesn't help, do you think people of your generation say that they didn't grow up with social media and now as adults they experience social media ? Media has a set of potential disadvantages based on what you just described, but let's say a 10 year old today who has never known a world without social media when they are your age will be in a different situation, how would you compare it? the experiences of someone like you versus the person who will be you in a few years who has never known you any other way and I guess what I'm trying to get at is if there is any harm to someone as an adult today, is that true? better for someone who hasn't had some kind of foundation at least without social media, I think so, because for me, you know, I grew up without social media, so for me what stands out about the social media applications of the Internet , all those things, they are their convenience because I remember before social media I had to call people to see what was going on with them or write to them and post it in a mailbox and now I just need to look at my phone and that comfort of being able to keep in touch with so many people from a distance, you know and see what's going on with them and enjoy the pictures here and there, just knowing what's going on or, you know, communicating if I see something not very good happening, It's very, very convenient, but for someone who grew up with this it's not about convenience, it's about image curation, it's about comparison, it's about how everyone else has more followers than me, why does he have more followers or why did you know it's just very, very, very, very seen.

In a different way, it's seen as a way to measure your worth rather than a way to do something that you've talked about and I want to talk about it with you. You've spoken extensively about the impact of failure on our emotional health. Much of what you just described can be seen as failure by definition. If you're willing to compare yourself to a wide enough range, you're a failure. I mean, there's always someone who is smarter, looks better, is richer, and is more popular. There is no metric. which is why I couldn't in 30 seconds find 10 people who are better than me, so what is the antidote to that misery that comes from comparison?

First of all, it's a real misery and the problem is that, for example, I work with many. of successful people don't consider themselves failures, it's more painful, they just don't consider themselves successful because they've only made 20 million and they're looking at the person who made 50. And there's something extraordinarily tragic. about someone who went from nothing to $20 million and you don't consider it a success, right? I mean, it's unfortunate that you try so hard to get somewhere and don't appreciate the fact that you're there. Job. With someone who once tried to climb Everest and only made it to base camp and I was like, “Oh my God, you made it to base camp” and they said “but you didn't make it to the top of Everest.” get to base camp in other words that's really impressive it's not that simple it's not that easy and if you keep looking up you'll never be satisfied you'll never be happy and one of the things I tell my patients all the time is that if You just pause and celebrate these seasons along the way, it doesn't mean you're done.

This idea that I only celebrate when I reach the top of a pile that has no top is a bad life plan because you will never be satisfied you will always feel envy you will always feel insufficient even though you have done so many things that are unfortunate and very difficult to achieve Has it ever been difficult for you to have people look down or look to the side instead of continuing to look up? finding empathy within yourself for your patients who, by any objective metric, had enormous success but couldn't appreciate it, for example, when that person comes in and says I started with nothing, I'm worth 100 million dollars but I'm not sorry. as a success because you know all my peers are worth five times more than one could take a very jaded view and say, "shut up like I can't even relate to what you're complaining about.

I'd give anything to have a fraction of it." of what you have, but I don't feel that in you I feel that our genuine empathy for that person is actually suffering, as strange as it may seem to an outsider, it was so natural for you to be able to have that. empathy and being able to communicate what you just said yes,It was natural for me the job of a therapist is that I see it well, I don't say that for everyone, but as I see, my main job is to see the world through that person's eyes to really understand their experience and if they tell me that I'm ridiculously successful financially but I don't feel successful, my job is not to react to that like I would if I heard it from a stranger.

The work is really trying to understand well why what is happening, why they can't afford what happened in their childhood that put them on this path to keep moving forward and not stop to celebrate anything, because if you dare to take your leave If you look at the finish line or take your foot off the pedal, you will come to a shuddering halt and never get going again. Usually it's some kind of fear that it's very old, that fear is obviously not something from your adult life, but once you figure it out, once you really understand someone once you really see the world through Through their eyes, two things happen: first, you have compassion for that person and second, for me, personally, you like them because when you really understand someone, there is an affection that is activated at least for me and for one of them.

Sometimes I and I discuss this with people and they look at me like I don't understand these terms to myself. Client service as a therapist is very important and client service, what does that mean? It means that because I have those feelings, it is important to me. that when I go to see you in my waiting room or these days when you show up on my zoom I'm usually happy to see you, you're going to see that in my face and I think there's something very powerful about that for the people who come to see you and you seem being genuinely happy to see them, that you're genuinely interested in how they've been and what's going on, and that you're generally compassionate about things. that doesn't go well with them or me, it's a natural result of using empathy to gain understanding so you can do your job.

I love what you said before and I really want to go back to that and even come up with some of the kinds of thoughts and behaviors that one can use because I certainly see this a lot in my patients and I see it a lot in myself, which is an inability to just recognize that something done was successful and I certainly suspect that what you said resonates with me. It will also resonate with anyone who is honest with themselves. There is a fear that if I stop and acknowledge this I will lose it. I will give you even the most trivial example.

People who listen to this podcast know how much I love archery. and race car driving, that's why I drive my simulator almost every day and you know that when you take a new car to a new race track, you will start to set goals like: I want to achieve this, I want to rest for one minute and 14 seconds in this circuit in this car and it could take me months to achieve. Invariably, whenever I finally achieve my goal, the happiness lasts maybe 13 milliseconds and then I immediately think: how much faster can I go? It's almost like he's afraid. just saying wow peter, that was amazing look at that, it literally took you six months to shave two seconds off, which is a big deal, two seconds less per minute, you know, a 16th minute to a 14th minute is a big deal, but it than knowing what we are afraid of, what we are afraid of losing and why and instead, wouldn't it be?

I like the way you said it. How about we do both? How about you say it's a wonderful achievement, Peter, you should be really proud. of yourself and yes, try to take more time off, but not at the expense of appreciating what is happening. How do you help people do that for things that are much more important and much less trivial than what I just described, for example, building a business or achieving financial security or repairing a relationship as if you know things that really matter in the world? life is fine so we will exchange secrets well I will tell you this is one of the things that I do there are many avenues that you can take but here is one of them, what I would do and it is difficult, it might be a little difficult to do with an example of race car just because it's a short period of time, but if you take someone who's been working on something for a long period of time or the person who finally made their first million dollars or whatever or made the first start, whatever I'm going to take you through a visualization exercise now the keyboard visualization exercises are the details the more detailed the visualization the more you'll connect emotionally and so you're not really thinking quickly about it you're actually in a therapy you're going to spend time really painting the picture so I want to take you back to when this was a dream I hope where you were, let's find a time when you were thinking about this where you were what the weather was like what you were wearing who you were with how you were feeling in back then what was the context for you what did this mean to you that idea of ​​one day you know and yes you can really help connect people with what they were feeling at the time when they were just dreaming about it, thinking about it, wishing for it and waiting, but not really knowing if they will ever have it, and then you have them insert their present into that visualization.

Me coming to break the news to their past self about success and you make them really visualize and imagine that whole conversation, how you say it, how you reveal it and what that younger version of yourself thinks when they tell you a little bit. yeah, this isn't just a dream, you make it, how they would react, how wonderful they would feel, how excited they would feel, so that's one way you can really try to connect with someone by giving them the perspective of the person who doesn't. he has achieved it. however, at a younger age and looking at the achievement from that point rather than from the point of view of the person who the day before came close to achieving it and now just did it, that sounds incredibly like emdr and trauma work where you take the adult version of yourself and go back to the child version that has been traumatized and you go back experientially and almost try to help them and rescue them.

I mean, it's a pretty profound exercise that you just described, it's very profound and it's and it's very, very moving for them and for me, really those are the moments that I remember very strongly in certain treatments where the person really connected and You could see in their face that they were experiencing it from that perspective rather than the current one, but it doesn't have to be about trauma right, you don't know, I'm not necessarily opposed to and I'm not sure oh no, that's my point, yeah, yeah, just from a previous perspective and you're right because from anywhere from one day to the next it's very difficult to appreciate a change, but over a decade, I mean, it could be a step function right now.

The other thing that's very, very helpful is that a lot of times these people who don't want to celebrate have people. around them who does it and what I sometimes say is that and I'll say this because it's going to sound silly but it works, I'll say you know if you don't want to go and have a celebration for yourself. It's because they want to celebrate, you please them and the thing is that they may start to think that they are pleasing them, but most likely they will get carried away in that moment when they are actually celebrating what they really did.

They didn't want to, but their family or friends also thought it was important, they get caught up in it and they can connect to it at some point, so actually sometimes from the outside it works to start celebrating, you will connect at some point. moment what are you celebrating with, so how was your book received, what was the first one, sorry, yeah, going back to 2008, so the squeaky wheel book and how much of an itch did it scratch compared to what you're now. you're an author, it's a new part of an identity, well, remember those 14 years, so it wasn't yeah, well, now you're a published author, so it was like it was the first time you knew it and when someone says oh What do you write?

I can actually point to something and say it's a thing here. The book was not well received in the United States and quite well internationally. That book sold in 12, I think, 15 countries and did pretty well in them. Which was fun. I was the first country in South Korea and my agent said, Oh, we just sold that book in South Korea and I said, Why a book about complaints? They said, Well, I'll send you the email and the email said, Oh, this is great. Koreans are. the biggest complainers and then we sold it in china and got the same email oh this is great the chinese are the biggest complainers and then the french were the biggest complainers the estonians two the surveys are the biggest complainers every territory that bought that book announced that are considered the most complainers as if it were some kind of title worth having, but my perspective is that it just struck a chord with people, it didn't work so well here mainly, I think, because the book is a mix of psychology and business and It's hard when it's not one thing or the other, I guess.

I think the book is pretty well written actually, but if you're looking for the psychology parts, you have to go through the customer service parts and if you're looking for the customer service parts then what about couples? I think it was a difficult book to market, but what happened was that it didn't do well. My agent told me to book it in January 2011. By March it was already clear. that is not taking off and my agent told me that if you want to sell another book you have to do it now and I, excuse me, the book just came out, she says yes, but it is not doing well and I can convince the publishers that Le It would do much better in paperback, but it's coming out in paperback in a year and if it doesn't do well, no one will be interested in the second book, so you have to sell one before it comes out in paperback.

It's like I'm still doing publicity for this one, can I take a break? ​​She says, "No, you can't, if you want to have another book," and again, 14 years taught me to take advantage of opportunities when we can, so I put everything into it. I put it aside and started working on a second book, now it was the first emotional day, emotional first aid, yeah, what was the motivation, how did you decide that was going to be the next one. I mean, it's an incredibly important topic and something I want to discuss with you. now, but how did you decide that was the next book?

I decided that I definitely wanted the next book to be just about psychology. I wanted it to be about emotional health and I wanted to really reflect the work I was doing with patients where I was at that point for quite a few years because I recovered from the dissertation by regularly reading research articles and trying to find ways to apply the findings in my practice. because research articles and psychology are not written for professionals, they are written. for other researchers, but actually they might have a lot of information that is very relevant to professionals, you just have to translate the research findings into an intervention, so I would do it when I felt it was necessary and I would try things with my patients and let them know. that this research exists and implies that it might be helpful, try it and if it was, I would recommend it to other people and over time I've picked out a lot of different little tricks, tips and techniques for people to deal with common emotional wounds. like failure, rejection, guilt, self-esteem, low self-esteem and things like that, and I always had this idea, it always pissed me off that you know medicine cabinets were such a thing, but there wasn't one for emotions, there wasn't a medicine cabinet. psychological, so I had this idea: I want to write a book that is, in essence, the psychological and emotional medicine cabinet that you should have in every home, so I started doing it.

We are going to contrast three types of

injuries

and I want to better understand why we struggle so much. emotional injury, so case one is a broken femur and let's make it really juicy and it's a spiral fracture that's open and you can literally see the femur sticking out of the thigh bone injury two or illness two diabetes type two I don't really see anything on the outside, but you know we have a blood test that can tell us you have lesion number three, rejection, no one sees it and what I think you mean is we are much less likely to recognize it, help me understand that spectrum and what it is . about us as a species that is quick to recognize case one as an injury, and frankly, even though we don't really see case two externally, we don't seem to have a hard time accepting type two diabetes as a disease that warrants treatment and is not can leave alone and yet for many people listening to this, the idea that being rejected or failing at something Warren's treatment is going to sound stupid and you're going to have to convince yourself, is it okay if I answer by the way? of a story please, okay then this is a true story.

I'm sitting with a very high-ranking executive at a financial institution and I'm talking about emotions and the importance of emotions and he immediately shuts me up, waves his hand and says, yes. No? I don't believe in feelings and you know I do what most psychologists do when they are caught off guard. You know, you just repeat the statement in the form of a question. I said no, you don't believe. in the feelings and he said: uh, you know, I know people have them,but it's not like they're real, they shouldn't matter now. He said this in the first minutes of a couples therapy session with her wife sitting next to her, rubbing her. eyes with a tissue because he was having feelings, so it was an interesting moment to make that statement that he didn't believe in feelings when his wife cries next to him in the first minutes of a therapy session, but a lot people feel that way. and when he says you know they're not real, they're not unicorns or aliens, you have to have proof of sightings or something, in other words, but he didn't really believe that feelings mattered, so what I did was I turned to my wife and I told him: did you know that your husband doesn't believe in feelings? and she stopped crying and she looked at me and said no, but that explains a lot of things and I started laughing really hard because I thought it was so funny and I laughed so much that she started laughing and then she laughed so hard that he, he , he didn't start laughing, he actually seemed very irritated so I looked at him and said what you don't believe in laughter either and then he was literally about to get up and I said you look angry, he says, I'm angry, well , there is a feeling that you believe in, now let's talk about some of the others and how they might be impacting your marriage and sat down because I've already made it clear that you can't just cure.

If you believe in anger, there are other feelings that you should also believe in, but many people think that feelings are not worthy of attention and, to be honest with you, when we were at an earlier stage of our industrial social development, when in It was really about simply maintaining. living, you know, shelter, shelter, the hierarchy of needs, so to speak, your emotional well-being was very much at the bottom of that hierarchy, updating was at the bottom of that hierarchy.hierarchy, so we had to reach a certain level of industrialization, comfort, security and self-sufficiency as a society as individuals to be able to start considering higher order needs beyond safe shelter etc., food and that's when we started paying more attention to emotions.

It's a very recent development relatively speaking and if you go even today to certain war zones, no one will listen to podcasts about how to self-actualize and be your best self, they will watch podcasts about what to do and your women close their leg or you have type 2 diabetes and you don't have insulin, so that's going to be a bigger concern, but for most of the Western, industrialized world, we're probably at the point where we need to think about our emotional well-being. Being even because it has a huge impact on our physical well-being, our longevity and our health, so even if that is the priority just staying alive, we know that there are many emotional psychological conditions that can actually contribute to you dying much longer. faster than you could do it. otherwise that would suit you that way, but finally we are at a point where our emotional well-being, our happiness, our satisfaction with life is something that depends on our gender and then we are starting to pay more attention to it, but not It suits everyone.

The way I think, that's probably one of the most eloquent explanations both in terms of history and I also think that resorting to the hierarchy of needs is a great point that I hadn't considered and that could be argued from the domestication of crops. and won, we've had the only then, since then we've had the luxury of even thinking about stability with respect to food and infrastructure and that would have started the clock when you started having the luxury of thinking about this, while physical

injuries

we have We had to worry about our entire evolutionary history, and that industrial revolution was 11,000 years ago, it's just not that long and, you know, writing doesn't even last about five thousand years or whatever, in other words, yes, we are quite new and it is only very recently that we can attend to this, yes, I mean, even going a step further, language may only be 50,000 years old and yet clearly before language we still had than to worry about a physical injury, there is no animal that doesn't worry about a Physical Injuries I guess the only thing that would cause some concern is that I don't think we have another 50,000 years, 10,000 or 5,000 years to figure out how to deal with emotional injuries because we probably we will not survive.

It has been my conclusion as a person who has come to this from the point of view of the physical side, from the longevity side. I think it hasn't taken me my whole life, just half of it, to realize that if the emotional part doesn't work. At best, you'll still be physically fine and miserable, which seems to me to be the definition of torture, or at worst, you'll have all of that plus a deteriorating physical existence, so either way, if you're emotionally broken, I think We are facing a very difficult life, so how can we save 5000 years in the next 50 and how does your work and the work of people like you begin to change this way of thinking?

One of the reasons Laurie and I decided we want to do this podcast is because we sat there and talked about can we really show people doing this work and putting it on a podcast for people they know, so we have this episode about a heartbreaking episode about parental alienation, an episode about this and that, but within those episodes there are There are many ideas that we offer that have nothing to do with that and that are very transferable and in the reviews that we have in the letters that we receive is the point that people emphasize the most that wow, it has nothing to do with I and I learned a lot about myself anyway and I think we and I have said this before.

I think any mental health professional these days has to consider themselves an ambassador because there is so much ignorance we have about our emotions and emotions. states and how we operate and what matters and any professional needs to be able to talk about that and let people know and educate because we need that education a lot, one of the things I sometimes do in a session many times. Sessions that I do with foreign people find me, they want to do sessions obviously by zoom long before the pandemic and generally you have an hour, for example, and for me, if I have a free hour with you, I will go in. guns blazing from the beginning because we're going to do something and therefore the person's head will spin because I'm not holding back here, I'm not doing the right thing that I don't need to do.

That now we'll get to that in week 10. All now, so I have enough experience at this point to be able to fill in a lot of gaps. I don't need to listen much before I can figure out where the problem is and where. The problem is and what people find really interesting is that, well, wait, how can you express what I feel better than when you just met me? And this is what saddens me. It's something we should all be able to do. What we would do if we were better educated about how psychology and feelings work because there are many things we don't know, but there are many things we do know, for example, that rejection hurts even if the person who rejected you is someone you absolutely despise. and that you would never want. to ever be associated with, but if you got rejected, it will hurt now, if you don't know that we are programmed to respond that way, you will have a lot of other ideas about what kind of loser you are or know why.

Is this painful? Why do we know our basics and do we have some basics about our emotional responses? Understanding that if something happened to you and you feel that way, anyone else it happened to will feel the same way, they may not show it, they may not show it. They may not confess it and they may not feel it to that extent, but they will feel it. Our emotional DNA is global. It's universal. It has evolved. We are all very, very similar in our emotional responses. In our experiences. Our answers may differ, but our experience is the same, there are so many things we can teach, there are so many things we can report and there are so many things that, if we did, we would feel unifying as humans, it would make us feel more connected to each other. because we are all the same under the skin. you said something there that really resonated, it's a little tangential but I think it's worth mentioning and I think you'll agree, but if not, please tell me.

I remember at one point I was saying something to one of my therapists. Her name is Esther. Perel, I'm sure not, Esther, they're both in New York, if I may, Peter Esther and I have shared offices for 27 years, we've been office mates for 27 years, I don't think he knew that, okay, yeah , Yes Yes. I've been to your office in person many times so no one bills me, you know where I am so I was in your waiting room and then I wasn't. It's surprising that I didn't realize that, so Esther said something to me one time when I was explaining a thought pattern I was having and I was explaining it to her as if I were the only person in civilization who's probably had this thing from the 10 billion people or whatever number of people have lived to date, Peter.

Tia is the first one who has had this thought pattern and when I start to explain it to her she finishes the thought for me and I said how do you know that and she said Peter, I hate to tell you this and I'm not saying this to minimize you as a person but this is not something very strange. Your mind when poisoned is surprisingly unoriginal. Many people have the exact same poisonous thoughts as you and unfortunately there is a very common set of beliefs that are maladaptive that people like you have and I have heard them all and it is basically what you just said is the pattern recognition that allows people like you, esther and lori to be so good at what you do and it actually comforted me a lot. by that right i mean she told it to me in a way that was like hey i don't want you to not feel special because everyone wants to be special but at the same time peter please realize that you're actually not that special and and that's good news in this situation, you are not alone, yes, you are not alone, and it should be comforting, because and the annoying thing is that, on the one hand, you are not alone, on the other hand, because you probably hadn't expressed it . that to many people before a therapist like many others don't, that's why you didn't know it was common because people don't talk about it and that's why again I think it's the therapists' duty to be ambassadors. somehow because even if it's a dinner table discussion and please, of course, I'm not trying to say go into a therapist room and start taking over your monologues about your work, please don't do that, but if you have an opportunity to point out a generality to point out research to say yes, this is how it works this is a truism this is something that is always the case then do it because you can educate people we can collaborate with this we can really let people know that you know I mean, I have the podcast, I write books, I give a lot of talks, I do consulting.

I am trying in these years of my practice to spread the word because I feel a certain sense of mission because when you do it is a little disturbing. that we know so little that people know so little and for you that is a moment of understanding and therapy where for Esther you could complete the thought and you probably could have completed it even before you told us that you could complete it if it is so clear to her. It should be clear to everyone but we just don't have any platform through which we can disseminate that information, it should be high schools obviously because that's when we have captive people and that's where we should be teaching life in school, not just any information esoteric that people want. they soon forget when they graduate, we don't, it's unfortunate, but that's where it should happen.

Do you think the tide is turning? You know you've been in practice for almost 30 years when you think about where we will be in 10 years. Now compared to where we were as a society 10 years ago, specifically in regards to how seriously we take emotional injuries, what does the byproduct look like? The most important event in that sense, the event that moved the dial more than anything else, by far, is the pandemic by far because there are very, very few people who are not affected and I don't mean disease, I mean the stress, anxiety, pain, loss, loneliness, tension, the breakup of a relationship, fear, depression, very few remain intact and I know that not only because that is how we are and that is how it is. how we respond, but because I've been getting calls and talking to entities that would never have contacted me before because they would have said, well, this is not something I can force my employees to listen to and now, all of a sudden, it's a need, now, to Suddenly, I need the people who work for me to know how to deal with this or that or how to understand this and that and all kinds of very specific organizations that would have really been at the base of everything.

My list of who would ever call me is something that everyone is veryaware and wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe about this in April in which I said this pandemic will leave a legacy of mental health crises. It will take years to address it and we should start thinking about it right now because as therapists we cannot address people's needs when we are not enough. Therapy is not a practical solution for everyone we need to start working with online. massive interventions that can be implemented psychologically and emotionally because we're going to have masses of people with trauma, what about all these nurses and doctors on the front lines who are really traumatized?

I call, I give a talk to 7,000 nurses at Duke Nursing System in May, I think that's how it went and one of the questions I had was it was very simple, but this nurse just stayed with me and she was very emotional and said, What do I do? When am I risking my life? and my family's life every day and then I go on social media and my best friends, my own immediate family are out there, they're not wearing masks, they're not socially distancing, every picture is a stab in my back, what do I do ? with those feelings and that's what we're going to have after this is across an entire country of nurses and doctors and physician assistants and all of them healthcare workers, frontline workers who are really traumatized, what do we have to help them?

Nothing nothing. and we will need it and not just them, what do we have for the children, the teenagers who are dying to want to socialize because that is what life is about and prevent it from doing it for the parents who do not have a break because they are learning this from a distance and These people are going through an extremely difficult time emotionally and although most people are physically and emotionally unharmed, everyone is a little damaged now, so the only thing that was done, although yes, we do not have interventions, I can continue. I'll talk about that for a while, but I have to get off the soapbox.

What I really mean is that people are really paying attention to it now, they are more receptive, they are more interested in it now and I think they will listen more now, how can the work that you do better than the work that Lori does? How can it be scaled? Because every time I meet with a therapist they don't have room for more patients, it's just too hard to get in to see them. I'm a big therapist and I know sometimes people say, "Look, I can do a one-time consult, but I can't take a new person as a regular consult." and so how do you scale this since it's not a widget?

You can't just tell the factory to make more, it takes years to like it, even if right now, you know, thousands of people were listening to this when they were college students. students and I felt like they knew this is an incredible calling instead of knowing go and do x I'm going to go and do this, I mean we're still a decade away from those people being on the front lines so what do we do? between now and then the answer is not to make more therapists that is not the answer because it is simply not practical the answer is there are all kinds of studies underway on online interventions for things like loneliness or anxiety there are all kinds of protocols and they're just being used as regular research, but they're not, you know this vaccine effort would be a global vaccine effort if a fraction of those resources were allocated to finding useful interventions that can actually be brought online and that anyone can do in the privacy of your home in your own time it will be as effective as individual therapy it will not be effective and really useful for many people yes not everyone needs therapy we have nothing and we have therapy or we read an article or we read in a book, there's a lot of things in between that we can do that can be really implemented and scaled at a massive level and then once you do it in one place, you just translate it and you know you always have to adapt things to the culture, but that It should not be such a heavy effort and it can be really popularized in the sense that people can find these resources to at least sort out, at least do some first aid, emotional first aid, the book that I wrote, it's a book that I don't come with it and yet The book is very well done, it's in 27 languages ​​and people write to me all the time saying, Oh, I keep coming back to it as needed and it's very useful because it's that medicine cabinet and if you can do it in a book, you can do it.

Even much better with interactive online tools with applications that you know and with whatever you need to use, but if the efforts were for that, you can scale and you can really do things that could be really useful to people on a large scale. "Don't do that with medicine because a femur has to be fixed individually. You can't look at something online and do it yourself, but some of this you can do when it comes to psychology and emotional health, one of the things you need." If you have written and spoken about it, I can speak from personal experience and initially I would have never believed it was the use of affirmations.

At one point I was challenged to find one affirmation for every year I have been alive. I'm 47 years old and that means I had to come up with 47 affirmations and my experience with them, which I think you'll understand from the way you've talked about it and this was during very intensive therapy, it was three weeks of residential care, so It was 10 hours of therapy a day for the first two and a half weeks. I couldn't find two, I just refused to write anything down and they didn't push me because I think the therapist understood that I had to come up with them on my own I had to believe them and then I had a huge breakthrough at the end of that experience and in one go I wrote them all down. and the important part here is to believe them right, talk a little bit about the importance of believing the affirmations that come to your mind versus going to an affirmations website and downloading some posters, so positive affirmations are defined as those typical sayings that They appear on refrigerator magnets and at the bottom of calendars.

I'm going to be a great success. I'm beautiful and worthy of great love, etc., that's the kind of thing that research shows, and by the way, this is a multi-billion dollar industry. What research shows in these positive statements is that there is a very specific group that benefits from them. and a very specific group that is harmed by them, the people who are harmed by them are people with low self-esteem, the same people that these statements are directed at, why are they harmed by them, because when you feel very ugly or very unsuccessful by looking in the Mirror and telling yourself that you are going to be a great success when you feel that a great failure is not going to register as credible and because it is going to register as incredible it is going to remind you that, in fact , you feel like a failure. by saying that you are going to find great love when your immediate experience has been that you are not, so the ones they help are people with high self-esteem because it does not contradict their internal beliefs, which is terribly ironic, right?

It's supposed to help people It's supposed to help people who don't need it They can benefit from it, but there is a way to make affirmations useful and the way you do that is, like you said, individualize them so that They sound credible. to you so don't say that I am going to have great success you can tell yourself that I am going to persevere until I succeed that is credible don't say that I am worthy of great love oh I am beautiful and I am worthy of great love, I say that I have incredible eyes and an incredible personality and I am going to keep working hard until I find the person who appreciates them.

Individualize the statement so that it seems credible to you and yet you have hope and optimism. sets a goal which is the key to making them useful and those versions usually don't come on refrigerator magnets because they are too long and don't fit, that's exactly right, I mean it took me a couple of pages to write them all and I went through a phase of my kind of recovery journey where every day I would take five minutes and tie it to getting dressed in the morning so I would never miss it, so I had a ritual that said when you're getting dressed you'll also stand in front of the mirror and you will read them and not very quickly you will read them and reflect on what they mean and honestly, there were days when it was difficult to read them there.

There were days when I didn't quite believe them when I was, you know, having a bad day, you know, when one of your statements is that I'm a good parent and you just yelled at your kid for something that you shouldn't have yelled at them for. It actually gets a little hard to read that, but it also reinforces that you're a good parent who just made a mistake and that's okay too and you can re-read it tomorrow and approach it in a different light, but you know when I heard you talk about that, which again I think was in one of your other Google talks.

I found it an incredibly insightful insight into something that I felt a bit silly for doing but that I personally found very valuable and again if only you had told me. A year ahead, Peter, you're going to find this valuable. I would have said there's no chance I would find it valuable, because what you would have associated with uh Stuart Smalley, just looking in the mirror and Saturday Night Live and doing it or some guy. of something trite that to you sounds trite because to you it doesn't sound personal because it isn't, yes, you were thinking of that version, but that's the point, you can individualize it and I would even tell you that the day you just yell at your child before If you are about to say I am a good father, adapt it and that day do not say that I am a good father you can say that I am trying to be a good father and I am learning from my mistakes di You can always modify it so that it has the same feeling but that matches the reality you are living at that moment.

That's a fantastic point. Do you think there's something to be said for certain about the fact that, as a writer? it makes you a better therapist, I mean, obviously there's a huge selection bias because we're more familiar with people who do other things besides their clinical practice and often it's their writings and speeches that get our attention, I mean . I sought out Esther years ago, but part of it was because of her work and that's how I sought her out, but with that being said, do you think that, for example, like you and Laurie, when you're doing your podcast, you can do what you do?

Because of the discipline that writing has brought to your thought process, it's an interesting question. I will answer it in two ways. One thing that's very important to me, I'm sure it's to Laurie and I know it's important to Esther is language, because sometimes you know a lot of people will tell me oh, I'm really empathetic, I'm empathetic, some people say I don't like it. the word, but they'll say it anyway, I'm empathetic and I like what Does that mean I really know how people feel? I wonder: how do I know you feel it? In other words, if you are not able to express it in a language that really captures it.

I have no idea if that's what you know or not. It is one thing to think that you know how someone feels, but another is to be able to articulate it very clearly and precisely, so language is a very important tool for therapists because, for example, our emotional language is very limited and tends to be their primary colors. We are angry, we are sad, we are angry, there is no nuance, but there are tons of nuance in language, we have dozens of words for certain levels or types of discomfort and I try to choose mine very carefully because I want to make it clear that you Not only you're angry, you're also quite frustrated and resentful, and that way you also feel a little bit of rage and you can start to figure out the nuances and when I start going through that with someone in that context, they will understand, yes, that's true, That's true, that would never be how they would have described it, they would just say I'm upset, you know, but no, no, it has a lot of nuances.

You're also a little relieved because I've been waiting to vent and yell at that person. Our emotional experience is very complex, except that we tend to think of it as one thing that it is not. Language is actually a very important tool for a therapist because when you're describing emotions you have to do, you really want to be able to do it, but the other way is very important for a writer is that I and I know Esther, I know Lori, many of you know most therapists I know use narrative psychology to some extent. in everything we do because when someone comes to me for a first session it's not a one-time thing, so my duty in a first session is for you to tell me your story and then I'll tell it to you at the end. session or halfway through, at some point I will tell you your story and it will be a different story and in my version of the story why you feel the way you feel or why you are stuck in the way you feel. you feel will become very clear and what you need to do in basic, rough terms will also become clear because in your version of the story you are stuck in my version of the story you are not and I can explain why, but that means I have to be able to describe your narrative take the data points you presented to me mix the order look at some of themfrom a different perspective and tell a different story the simple example that I always use just to illustrate this is if you are a survivor of a horrible plane crash and you lost a limb in that plane crash what is the story you have about that?

Are you a terribly unlucky person who was disabled in a plane crash or are you the luckiest person in the world because you are the only one who left? although maybe skipped, I mean, those different perspectives will make you recover in a very different way, feel very different about yourself, and feel very different about the life you will live; It will be much more adaptable to think about yourself. as a very lucky survivor instead of having the self-pity of thinking you know you've been horribly victimized and we have choices in the stories we tell ourselves we don't have choices about the facts we have choices about our organization our perspective and the narrative we create around them and as a therapist you have to be able to create and present a different narrative and writing is certainly helpful you raise such an important point and when I think about it you know I can think of examples of people. who don't write, know or haven't published books, but still have this.

I have a friend, his name is Jim Kochalka, who is an amazing psychologist, he is now a colleague of mine, a friend of mine, not a therapist of mine, but whenever I have sat down with him at dinner, unfortunately, I take up all his time because I end up, you know, it's always a one-sided discussion, but he's very generous and I come away from these discussions appreciating what you've said, which is Jim's. The ability to articulate things is incredible and I could start with a narrative that says I'm upset about x and come out of that discussion with 12 more layers of complexity to that onion, so maybe that's the synchronicity of a great therapist.

To say you showed me an onion, I showed you that it actually had 12 layers. I think it is a very important aspect that you should be able to master at some point. I could continue this discussion with you for hours, but we've been at this for quite a while, I guess I want to conclude by just letting listeners know that if they haven't already, they really need to listen to the podcast you do with Lori. I love it, there is one. episode in particular, I'm just going to shout out to get people started, it's the one that um calls Molly's father's suicide, um, I found that to be very, I don't know why, I just wanted to hug Molly. in pieces like I want to jump through my phone and grab that woman and squeeze her until tomorrow, Peter, can I tell you?

How do I have to hold back, I told my brother this, I told him I'm dying to see how he is, I want send her an email, I want to call her, I want to give her a hug and now we have them. answers we have forwarded a lot of emails and texts from people saying oh please send hugs to Molly please and hugs to Molly. I haven't done that because I respect her privacy and her distance, but oh my God, you feel it. this woman, yeah, so I would say people who haven't listened to the podcast start with that one and that will give you an idea that you know the kind of work that you're doing, boy, thank you very much, Peter, thank you very much, it's been Very interesting, you've asked me things I've never been asked before and I've been doing interviews for many, many years, and when you get me to start thinking about things and saying oh no, I really appreciate it, thank you very much.

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