Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia this podcast my website and My Weekly Newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen if you enjoyed
This podcast we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at the end of this episode. I'll explain what those benefits are or if you want to learn more now head over to Peter Atia m.com forward slash subscribe. Now without further delay. Here's today's episode. My guest. This week is Guy winch guys a psychologist and author a speaker and now recently a podcast host. I see his PhD in Clinical Psychology.
Ecology from NYU where he also did his postdoctoral work at the medical center. He's been in private practice in New York for nearly 30 years. And as we learned on this podcast, he shares office space with my therapist and that probably speaks to the state of mind. I'm in when I walk in for therapy and that I haven't noticed the names of anybody else on the wall. There guy has authored three books the squeaky wheel how to fix a broken heart and emotional first aid, we get into a pretty good discussion on two of these three. He's also the
The co-host of one of my favorite podcasts dear therapists which he hosts with Lori gottlob a previous guest on this podcast. He's given three fantastic TED talks and number of great Google Talks all of which I recommend highly I wanted to talk with guy after I had a chance to get to know Lori a little bit and obviously since their podcast came out which was late July. I've been pretty obsessed with it, and I think getting to familiarize myself with
Style with which guy and Lori work together. I realized he'd be just a fantastic guest in 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 more interestingly to The Listener what he's learned about the human conditions we get into a lot of things that he later acknowledged. He doesn't get asked a lot of during his frequent interviews. And so I'm grateful that we were able to have kind of that new ones discussion. I could have spoken with guy for many hours. But before I knew it we were nearly two hours into a discussion and
He was already in Israel, and it was getting late at night. So we're we did end though was I think a really interesting discussion around emotional health specifically vis-à-vis the challenges that many people have experienced through the pandemic and guy would actually say during our interview that he thinks it is the biggest sort of seismic shift that's probably impacted our ability to recognize the importance of psychological and emotional health. And so if you've found yourself interested in other episodes, we've done that have covered mental health emotional health
You're going to find this one very interesting and without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with guy which guy it's fantastic to be speaking with you here today. I almost feel like I know you because I have been listening to your podcast yours and Lori's podcast pretty religiously since it came out which I think was in about August. Is that right?
Correct, July 30th,
actually, okay and
I don't know. I like well, you can probably imagine the fondness I have for Lori that probably came across in the interview I did with her and so now by extension I see you too as left and right hand and I've really just enjoyed listening to you guys. I do have to ask you a quick question about this when you read the letter at the beginning of each episode actually before I do that explain to people the format of the podcast and then I'll ask my question. How do you guys set it up? Because you have a pretty specific format
right? Well
Is the advice columnist for the Atlantic and I write an advice column for Ted. So I initial concept was hey advice, but we wanted to do something different because number one we're both therapists, which is not always the case when it comes to advice and number two the thing that's always frustrated me about advice is that you can give the most brilliant advice but you never find out what happened. Sometimes people will write and tell you but even then it's very curated. So our format is such that we bring a letter each week we
By reading the letter to one another and we do a very brief case consultation like we would in a therapy office and that gives you a little bit of a fly on the wall in a therapy office perspective and then we immediately bring in the guest and we do a session with them and then after the session or the end of the session we jump into give them very actionable advice that they have to do within a week and then we give some predictions about what we think will happen and then we hear back from the guest.
And here what happened when they implemented the advice how they felt about it how it went what they took from it. And after that we give our closing thoughts as therapists to the situation. So it's a really complete and satisfying or not depending on the resolution Arc that you get and you get to find out what happens and that's what I really like about it. You get to find out how therapists think and you get to find out what happens after the session.
One question I have guy is it's usually you trading off sometimes you will bring the letter and read it to Lori. And sometimes it's the reverse and immediately upon doing that. The two of you have kind of a back and forth banter before you have the consultation with the client before they zoom in and that'll be three to five minutes I guess is about what it seems as I'm not actually timing it as I'm listening but that's about what it feels. Like are you guys doing that cold or is that
Did
we doing that entirely cold completely cold? The only thing we say to one another before practically every taping of that section is okay, but let's keep it short because you can't go on to love. So that is as warm as we go and I don't know what she's thinking about this letter. She doesn't know what I'm thinking about this let that we might be thinking different things. And when we agreed to do this podcast together, you know, I'll just say this one I met Lori once
In June of last year, that's the sum of our acquaintance before we started doing this. So it's not as if we've been working together for years on end, and I know how she thinks and she know she knows how I thinks she doesn't and I don't or I didn't now I do so with entirely cold and that's and the idea there was let's keep it organic. Let's keep it spontaneous because that would be more interesting than getting all our ducks in a row and then Sammy like the same person.
Well, you answered another question, which is kind of amazing to me, which is how do you have that pretty apparent chemistry without a long track record together. That's not as simple thing. Actually that could have
flopped that could have gone badly so many ways and I think what saves us is that I have tons of respect for Lori as a therapist and I think the same goes for her and what that means is if I see her leading indirection a and I
Go in Direction be I'm assuming Direction a is not going to be bad. So yes, let's explore a for a bit and then we'll get to be it is not happened. We've taped a whole season of 20 episodes. It has not happened that Lori went in a direction that I'm like. Oh my goodness. Why are we doing that? It's all valid because she's a very good therapist and I think she feels the same and so we indulge one another because we haven't come across something that's making us wins and kind of you know start to hit the panic button.
Well, let's back up a little bit and kind of talk about you and how you got here. You've written about spoken about the fact that you kind of wanted to be a therapist from day one. So just as the way that some little boys want to be firefighters or professional footballers or whatever you sort of wanted to be a therapist. When did you realize
that? I wasn't sure when I realize that but I think when one of the first articles that I was interviewed and came out in the Press, I got a message.
From I think was pre-internet. So it's a phone message actually found message with rotary phones in
a what are the things? Okay the
Cradle? Yeah, and and the person said and it was a high school friend and she said, oh my goodness. I remember you talking about wanting to be a psychologist when you were 14 years old now to any psychologist ding ding ding what's going on 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.
You grew up in Israel or you group in the United States? I
was born in England. Okay, and you know, I had some years there and then some years formative ones in
Israel. Okay, you have a twin brother. Is he an identical twin
or is an identical twin?
What other siblings do you have?
That's it. It's just us.
There's the two of you how close were you which sounds like a dumb question perhaps but I don't know. I've met twins who are not that close.
Yeah as if I we were always very very close. We were one of the lucky ones or
I guess I mean My Philosophy is if you can't get along with the person that's most like you in the world then you know, you have some work to do to figure out why you don't like yourself. Really. I mean, I think just because twins especially identical ones. This is your carbon copy practically. Did you love yourself? You should love them. We always did get along. We always had a very strong bond.
So did you finish High School in Israel or in the United
States in Israel? I came to the United States after my undergraduate degree with to sue
Suitcases and maybe a thousand bucks and hope
okay. So you went to NYU if I recall and the you did both your graduate degree and postdoctoral work there. Is that
right? Yeah. I did a master's and PhD at NYU and then I did a postdoc at NYU Medical
Center God and during that process. How did you refine your interest? So I assume at 14 when you're thinking I want to be a psychotherapist or I want to be a psychologist or I want to be some
Sort of therapist that helps people's minds and emotions. It becomes a lot more nuanced by the time you're writing your dissertation. So what was that Journey as you went from 14 year old to a high schooler to an undergraduate to a graduate student. How did you refine your objectives?
The good thing about an undergraduate degree in Psychology is that if you do it, right it gives you a lot of exposure to different areas of psychology because psychologists is a general term, but you can get a psychologist to runs.
Rats through mazes or you can be a psychologist that does Consulting for organizations. You can be a clinical psychologist and do therapy which is what I do. You can work with children Etc. That's just it's a college is very broad. So you do get the exposure and it was very clear to me from the beginning of my education because really before then I didn't have that exposure that I am thoroughly disinterested in severe Psychopathology. In other words, everyone that I was studying with were fascinated by schizophrenia for example and hallucinations.
I was in because people it was so wild to see and people fervently believing and delusions and having paranoia and all those things. It just never interested me. It did seem a little bit like a sideshow rather than and I felt I wanted to help regular people deal with regular life. That was always my interest and I don't know why or when I had that interest. I think my interest in Psychology all along was because I was looking at the adults around me probably at age 14 and going I'm not sure you guys are communicating very well.
Or had other notes probably for them and thought you know, I need to study this to understand this because I'm really interested in you know, Claire could see mistakes and I could see things and I just didn't have a framework with which to understand them or categorize them. And so the interest probably started there but it continued in that I was always interested in just working with regular people improving their quality of
life. Now when I think back to my undergraduate which was in engineering my girlfriend for
East half of my time in college was in the psychology department, but she overlapped with the business school and ultimately went on to do her PhD in organizational behavior, and she never stated this but my impression was that the the Superstar people in the psych department where the ones going off doing these other things and there was fewer people sticking around to do the how do I help regular people suffer less now?
Is that true? Was there something less sexy about wanting to do what you wanted to do.
I will tell you and if that go friends around she will confirm the sexiest thing. You can do with a PhD it's finish it and there is a point at which you just don't care about anything else except just finishing it and so really everyone is really oriented toward. How do I just get done that that aside?
Program at NYU for graduate school was just clinicals. It was just 10 people studying Clinical Psychology undergraduate. I split between psychology and film so I was in the film school and the feedback I got from the psychology department was oh you're good at this and the feedback I got from the film school is they love you in Psychology. So I took a
hit. How do you think about your undergraduate tour? Because I only took probably two courses in Psychology and
I remember thinking wow, there's a lot here. I mean, there are so many different schools of thinking there are so many great thinkers in this space and they're often at odds with each other. So it was less like physics which was where I spent much more of my time where Schrodinger is building on the guy before him and like in other words. There is a continuity of the science and a new discovery can upend an old one, but there's General agreement about
Out it, you know relativity built upon Newtonian mechanics and people could understand where the Newtonian laws broke down. I didn't feel that way in Psychology. I really felt like there were different camps. Does that sort of resonate Did you sort of experience that as you went through
it? Oh, yes. I mean, you can't not right. I mean you mentioned schroedinger because that's one of the few areas in physics, but there is uncertainty but psychology is all about uncertainty. We don't have that grasp of the human mind. We don't have that grasp.
Of the brain, we don't have that grasp of emotions. We don't even have that grasp of Consciousness yet at all. And so we're very much in the infancy of understanding how we tick and how we operate. I mean, I'd love to be at the point where we have an operator manual for the human mind that we can all use to maximize our potential but we very very far from that. So you you approach a science like that with like I'll take what we you know, any certainty feels like an oasis because there's so much
uncertainty right? We don't have a unified.
Being set of theories or principles the way we do in physics and Mathematics and I guess that just speaks to how much more complicated humans are than the natural world around us. Well also how much
newer psychology is a science than physics or mathematics right physics mathematics have a couple of thousand years old will several thousand years on
psychology. Do you think that as you're going through your training your impressions of which camps you tend to be in as students is potentially influenced by
By the people who present the information to you and the Affinity that you have for hey, I the way that professor teaches that resonates with me or alternatively like an experience that you've had where that school of thinking actually fits with my personal experience. I guess what I'm trying to ask in a clumsy way is how do you think a young student / therapist creates the scaffolding that is going to become their mental model?
More importantly, how malleable is that over time?
I can tell you about my scaffolding and it's such a such an interesting question. I've never been asked that and I'm already enjoying this because really good that you get to ask me to think about things that I haven't thought about necessarily in that way. But here's my answer to that when you go somewhere and you're presented with 10 different religions that everyone who presents them. Each one is presented fervently my response to that was to be an agnostic my response to
To that was not with even any of them but to curate and say what their can I take what in that one. Can I take what aspect of this resonates with me and that's from the beginning was how I treated it and how I thought of it. These are all ideas from which I get to pick what seems right to me, but I don't need to endorse or Embrace fully any of them and I never did
you know, the highest compliment I can pay somebody in that scenario is to compare them to Bruce Lee, but that's effectively
Do you know what is referred to as Jeet Kune Do which is this the way of no way which was his sort of model of martial arts, which was every one of them offers things that are useful and every one of them has things which are useless. What if you could dissociate yourself from being a student of one exclusively and so he created this technique which actually the privilege of studying for two years and you study it one-on-one with one teacher. It was very very interesting. He spends three
months interviewing me to confirm. I'm worthy of learning this by the way. Oh, wow. Yeah, but it was beautiful and it was true to how it was presented which was it was never about being wed to one style. So that's that's an amazing kind of way that you described it did that ever puts you at odds with your colleagues who couldn't understand why you didn't fit in one
box? Yes. My program back in the day was pretty psychoanalytic. It was a very, New York.
Kind of thinking and so in that approach, for example, when the first patient I ever had because you have to start somewhere right Union that they don't know you're there your first but you do ask me where I'm from and my supervisor said if somebody asks you where you're from you can't tell them and I'm like, why can't I tell them said because it's you're introducing extraneous material. You should just 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 really hard time with that.
I said but if my accent were more obvious, then I wouldn't have to go through that charade and it just seems withholding and irrelevant because I don't know if they're there to spend their time discussing where I might be from. It just makes me the center of something that I don't think I should be the center of so I had issues with some of the techniques that I was presented with from the beginning but I was very fortunate because the professor's there are these the ones who interacted with will very open-minded. They didn't assume that you had to buy things Lock Stock and Barrel.
Errol but they assumed that you know, you get to wrestle with these things and meet your own conclusion. The students were sometimes a little bit more should I say devout but the professor's typically were more flexible.
You know, I remember I think it was even Lori wrote about it in her book and I'm sure many have commented to this effect because it seems like such an important finding that it it's probably been out there for some time which is the training of the therapist the
The credentials of the therapists all of these things probably don't matter as much as the Rapport that is built between the therapist and the client. Maybe I'm stating that slightly incorrectly. But what I took away from it was it's at least as important how much of a rapport the client and the therapist have is how you know, voluminous the knowledge is of the therapist is that is that an accurate statement?
It's very accurate. In fact my dissertation back in the day was about what are the aspects?
Of the therapist their experience their gender their age that might influence therapy outcome. But since then it's been very clear and the research is very very clear about it that the most active ingredient in therapy is that fit between the therapist and the patient and specifically a patient if you're going to therapy for the first time what you want to feel is that the person you're that stranger that you're spilling your guts out to
Gets you that the responding and saying things and asking questions that shows that they get it. We have a very clear. It's like a bull's-eye that's a bull's-eye gonna miss you either feel that person gets me or they don't either they don't allow to they don't a little bit. It doesn't matter the ding ding ding of gets me is very very specific. That's what you want to feel when you go to speak to a therapist. At least they get you now the work starts from there, but without that it's going to be a
slug.
Yeah, maybe it may be an easier way to say it I guess is it's a necessary but not necessarily sufficient criteria for great. Terapia. That's been my experience in my own journeys of therapy. And I think it comes the reason I asked the question. Of course, it comes back to your original point, which is if you sit down for the first time with a therapist who has an accent and you ask them where they're from and they Dodge the question it becomes awfully hard to feel you have some rapport with them when instead if you can spend two or three.
It's 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. It strikes me as a non therapist at least is an elegant way to at least try to capture some of that relationality.
Absolutely. I mean, I remember when I graduated and I started my practice and for the first time I could absolutely just do what I wanted and I went on vacation and one of my patients said to me, where are you going on vacation and I
I answered the question and I beamed not because of where I was going, but because I could just answer it and the middle I answered it all the Curiosity about it 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 as well. I remember being scolded for something when I was in my third or maybe 450 year of residency a young boy came in. This is a sad story, but
You understand the parallel. So a young boy was in a car that was T-boned. So he was in the passenger seat. It was hit on his side. Someone had run a red light and he was killed. It was just unbearably tragic. And so I was the senior resident that received him in the ER and tried in failure for 30 minutes to resuscitate him. And that meant I was the one that went and spoke to his mom after and explained what had happened and I don't think there's a harder scenario than telling a mom who just saw her son two hours earlier.
Are perfectly normal and healthy that now he's dead through that experience. I became close to the mom. I went to the funeral three days later and for years. I stayed in touch with her and would speak with her on the anniversary of her son's death and such. I really took a shit-kicking for that from one of the senior fellows when he found out. I went to the funeral. He said that is an absolute mistake. You had no business going to that funeral. You must draw.
Line between you and the patient's you cannot now and again, I don't I don't think he was saying this to be malicious. I think that was his way. I guess I never probed enough to understand what he was saying was he saying you have to 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 view was alone. I think probably a number of people would have thought I made a mistake by doing that again in Laurie's book. I think she talked very eloquently about going to her page.
Agents funeral now, 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 about it.
It was interesting because I've been in both experiences. I got in the lecture that I shouldn't go when I started out my practice, you know, how do you feel the practice when you're in New York City and there's for therapists for every resident roughly. It seems that way maybe not but so how do you distinguish yourself when you're you know young and just out of school and and so I would take
Going to cases that people didn't want and some of them tended to be kids with terminal illness. And so I've had that experience of being told by a not a supervisor that point because I was I graduated but by a senior colleague that I really should not go to the funeral and what they said was a you'll find yourself that the more time you spend in practice more funerals you'll have to attend and then some point will be a point where you just can't attend all of them because of the years you'll have met many people. You can't keep going to all the
Funerals don't think that meant I had to go to all the funerals but I then later on somebody died and they left me a letter that I got after they died and which they said I would like you to go to my funeral and speak at it. So now it's a lift because now fine I can go who knows who I am, but they want me to speak and their HIPAA laws so I actually can't see anything about anything and so I went and I was
That almost everyone who I was not from the Internet or anything. Just you know, I was the only one unfamiliar and it was oh it's a therapist this is there a pissed, you know, that's a fun room to go into and then when it was my turn to speak what I decided to do was to 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 that sessions were about and and and
and obviously I spoke about the the good part of it because he's a people at his funeral and I just spoke 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 at the time and it was it was it gave me so much closure it it was so meaningful to me. I'm assuming it was meaningful to the people. Who were there. I there was a lot that I got out of it. I remember it as a very important experience. I'm curious about whether you feel the same about fear.
We went to
I absolutely do. I just think it's a privilege to be in the position you're in or the position that I was once in we're obviously the most delicate situations of a person's life. You can sometimes be a part of and sometimes it's very unpleasant. I mean, I had another patient who I had connected with very closely. He developed a pulmonary embolism. We tried to resuscitate him and couldn't and he basically suffered a catastrophic neurologic injury. So he was now basically on life
support and he was brain-dead very young. He was my age. So, you know, I was in my probably early 30s at the time as was he and after a few days his family decided to withdraw support but his mom asked they said look we can't be here when you take the ventilator off, but we would like you to be the one that stays in the room with him because we know how much he liked you and we remember the first day. We walked in the hospital how much he just connected with you and he was so happy that
We're going to be part of his team. That's another one of those asks, which is boy ordinarily. I would not want to be in the room having to watch a person take these what are called chain Stokes breaths, which are you know, not real breaths, but look like real breaths as they're sort of gasping and dying but I also thought like that's the responsibility that comes with this and I think that that's a reasonable ask of the family.
Yeah. I'm sitting here thinking and this is why I didn't go into medicine because I don't know if
I could do well.
Well, I but I think what you did is harder. I mean I want to go back to something. You said a moment ago talk to me about the early part of your practice when you're taking children with terminal illnesses. I mean at that point you have to clients you have the child and you have the parents, right?
Yes, and I was able to family therapy for that reason. I mean I my training in graduate school, I had published some research before as an undergraduate and that Exempted me for some research courses and graduate school and that was enabled me to double up on practical and to
Really study couples and family therapy from you one. And so usually you get to take that as a module at some point, but I had four years of intense practicum and seeing patients and the way we teach couples and family therapy has been one my mirrors, you know as opposed to coming in and saying this is what I said, this is what the patient said. Is that what the patient said or is that your recollection you don't know but when you're doing it and the team and the supervisor actually watching you and calling in with
Suggestions if they have them at cetera, it's a great way to study because you really you can't hide number one. So you learn more and so I did that and I had a lot of qualifications with that. And so that's part of why I got that gig as it were of working with these families because I could do family therapy as well as see the Parents full consultations individually and so it was a lot of that and when I started out it was Couples for example where the husband was deemed aggressive. And so if it was a female therapist, I felt uncomfortable. I was fine with it. Bring me the
Grace of husband's now they were not they were not aggressive. They were upset or you know, angry, you know, sometimes a little maybe with with other issues that triggered the anger, but they want violent people this not the ones I I worked with so I would take the cases that people would kind of foam off and the other trick that I learned was that stay in town in August when you're starting out especially in New York and then the note therapists in town and people will come to
you. What year did you begin your private practice?
actus
92
So I'm gonna run out of toes and fingers you're gonna run out of toes and fingers.
I love the idea of stay in town in August. I mean that is yeah New York is a ghost town. I guess. The only thing that could be better is go out to Long Island and August and then you'll be overrun.
Well not yeah, you can go to Martha's Vineyard. That's where all the therapist used to be. Apparently. I don't know. I know
why did you decide to go into private practice versus stay 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 was on a five-year visa. I had to complete I'm an immigrant essentially to the US. So I was in a Visa that allowed me to study and stay for five years, but I had to be done but then you're on a J-1. It wasn't a J1 and when I was done I was at out to stay for another 18 months for practical training, but if I wasn't done I would actually have to leave.
So the average of graduation in my program was eight years and I didn't have eight years. I had to do it all very very quickly, you know and is as soon as possible and so you do just that just impacted everything in terms of you know, just how I did things what I did the dissertation I did and I had a dissertation advisor who was difficult little difficult to work with and they were moments. I thought if I have to do this I'm not going
Finish just gave me so much to do and it was objectively an unusual amount of the study. She wanted me to do was way too big. So it was very it was very stressful and it took me literally I'm telling this it took me three to four years after graduating before I could walk into a Library without feeling a real surgeon anxiety.
That's interesting. How did you help yourself through that? I mean, did you have a therapist at this point that you could process that with
I did but a
I just stopped going to libraries for a while. I was really traumatized when I was really like I it's just truly anxiety like you heart starts racing when he woke in libraries don't usually do that to most people they usually considered boring rather than activating because when you everything you have and every investment you ever made talking about emotionally intellectually not financially might go down the tube if you don't finish and someone just is making it very difficult to finish it.
It was very difficult. And it's very difficult for many people many people are traumatized by the dissertation process. Academia is a very difficult place but nonetheless it took me some recovery time. The therapy was extremely useful at the time, but it was very useful to also be able to start my private practice. And at that point I was like I don't want to do research it was Associated. I have to have to go to libraries. I don't want to do that anymore. It just sound me on something that I've been very interested in. It's unfortunate.
Now. Why did you decide to stay?
In the United States versus for example returning to Israel or going to Europe where you could spend some time. You still had a fondness for New York.
I had to find a some milk for my first time. I visited New York the first time I visited New York. I said aloud to several people who remind me of it. I'm going to live here. I was captivated by New York. And so yes to me Neo was where it was at number one, but number two when you go through five years of school then you do a
Stock then you do a year and a half of practical training. All your contacts are there so I could start a private practice because I had enough contacts to do it. If I was going anywhere else, even if it were Israel, that's not where my professional contacts for. I would really have to start from scratch plus not to quote Frankie too much. But really if you can make it there, I would you want to make it anywhere.
I read once that you 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 went into practice right away with sort of endless rumination and an inability to turn it off when you went home. Can you can you tell me a little bit more about
that? Yeah. That was my thought talk. So that's probably what you saw it and it was about that. Exactly. It was that talk was actually about rumination. It was about that we experience work stress.
Most of it actually outside of work because when we're at work and working when you're absorbed in your work, you're not conscious about whether you're stressed you're just doing it. It's when you stop and you're driving home or in my case walking home or you're sitting at dinner or you're trying to fall asleep at night that all those worries and you know ruminations come and if you're not diligent about managing them and limiting them they can really take over.
We're going to do is actually really harmful psychological practice what I find interesting about it is that the assumption is that psychologists would welcome any kind of self-reflection like oh reflect a way. That's a great thing will know there's healthy and adaptive self-reflection and there's unhealthy and maladaptive self-reflection and it's very clear what's useful and what isn't if you're thinking about things in a way that's trying to gain Insight or understanding or meaning you're trying to problem-solve something you're trying to tackle it that's adaptive.
If you're just replaying the same upsetting memory or idea over and over again, if you just walking around your house in the evening muttering so much to do tomorrow. I have so much to do tomorrow. It's not useful you're stressing yourself out because when you do that actually activate your stress response, so you really stressing yourself out its associated with lack of sleep with eating unhealthy foods with irritability your checked out with your family, you know, it's bad in all kinds of ways, but it's not something we pay enough attention to so that talk was about you know,
Stress from work happens outside of work, so you need to control it because you're like your job much better if you're not burnt out.
So, how did you start coping with that? How did you begin to treat yourself? As you realize this thing was happening? And I guess I'll before I ask you a question. Let me start with another question, which is do you think that this rumination was the natural consequence of now being the final person in other words, you didn't have a superior or a supervisor the buck stopped with you. Do you think that was really the source of the
rumination? Absolutely because you know, I opened a private practice and suddenly the
Ability of that sits on you, you know, you're advising people and again half my practice has always been couples and families. It's those are very active lives. Sometimes intense situations, right? This couple has had an affair. This couple is dealing with this. This family is fighting about that individuals. Don't go nuts in a session usually by themselves, but a couple You Take Your Eye Off the ball for one second can go very wrong very quickly and people were coming to me with their
Kids with dying with their husbands so they were afraid of whether you know, like you responsible for helping and for having an impact and that is a huge responsibility and I think it just is a process of adapting to get used to that to the enormity of it and to the responsibility of it and that's what was and if you're conscientious which I tend to be then you ask yourself whether you're doing the best you ask yourself. Am I experienced enough to do this yet my qualified enough to do this yet. You seek help you try and do the best you can but it
And she inches it's stressful.
Yeah, and I imagine that again to your point about adaptive versus maladaptive a certain amount of stress is actually very adaptive right without it. You become so complacent but it's really an inverted U and at some point you go beyond it and it becomes quite maladaptive and it sounds like for you in the early years. You probably went a little too far on the rumination. Did you recognize it at the time or is this more of something you now see in
retrospect? Well part of the story I
I tell in the Ted talk I'll just have it because it's a quick one was the moment that made me realize it was it was Friday night. It was July. It was very very hot that was coming home from my office and I left lived in Manhattan. My office was there I was walking and I get into the elevator in my building but the neighbor who was a doctor in an ER and the elevator, you know Rose a couple of floors, then shuddered and stopped and the man who manages emergencies for a living started banging on the door and poking all about this going.
Is my nightmare this is my nightmare and instead of being compassionate which I would have been in any other circumstance. I found what came out of my mouth was and this is my night ma'am, which was funny to my ears at the time not so much to his and really horribly obnoxious and really unkind and classroom. And this is the neighbor. I'm going to see them again. It was just not wise but it was so unlike me and I felt so bad about it. The minute those words left my mouth. I literally said what is going on with me?
That's not me at all. And that's when I started realizing I am burnt out but I've only been in practice for you. How's that possible? And that's when I started thinking about well, how many hours am I working? And that's when I started realizing it's not the hours that I put in my office. It's the hours that I'm working in my head afterwards those don't stop and that's when I started realizing I need to get a handle
on it.
This is really an epidemic isn't it? I think this concept is probably not appreciated by I certainly don't think I've appreciated it as much until kind of recently and I think certainly in the era of non-stop Electronics. It's only harder to detach yourself from work. You're more Tethered to it. Even when you're not there. I mean look these days most of us are working from home, which is kind of nice, but also means you're kind of at work all the time.
I think that distinction is a really good one. Right which is burnout cannot just result from how much time you are at work. But how much time you're thinking about work when you're not at
work and that's the but you can control right? That's the part you have control over and the estimate by your point. The pandemic has been terrible for people in that way because it's not that your home all the time. It's that your boss is no you are so and you know, they know you are like why didn't you respond to the email? It's not like you were anywhere it's not like you had something to do is
This is the kind of subtext of a lot of that right? You weren't change you doing
for an hour an unable to
respond because you were her out. You won't have to the movies because most of them don't don't exist. You wanted a Broadway show you weren't doing anything important. Yeah, so it's been a real problem because it's difficult enough to send make a separation when you don't have that physical space don't close and you have to do it's ecologically but then when you keep getting bombarded with emails and requests and all those things and it's actually unless you create firm guard rails.
So if unless you have the discipline to really determine I finish at this hour then you're going to struggle with it.
What do you think are some of the antidotes to rumination? What would you say to you just give you big the case study, right? I have many patients that fit this description very successful man, or woman professionally, right? So by any external measure whatever the world could bestow upon them as a measure of success Financial
company building entrepreneurial Spirit you name it? They look like they've done it all and yet when they're home, they can't interact with their kids because they're constantly lost in thought or their spouse they struggle to sleep. They don't have a hard time falling asleep. But once they wake up, they can't go back to sleep. And that's usually somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. They tend to numb that behavior with maybe a little more alcohol than they should.
What I just described is like sometimes that's me. Sometimes that's my bait. Like maybe I think we all fit in this description right to we can all put pieces of us in this description. How do you start helping that person?
So the first thing that doesn't has to realize is that this is not going to happen. Naturally. It's not that you can say to yourself. Yes. I know I'm working too much. I'm going to I'm going to do better that doesn't work because the intentionality will be good for day or two and then it will fade. You can't direct yourself to not think about something you can.
To redirect your thoughts to think about something else and that will work to the extent that the other thing that you're thinking about is requires concentration and is absorbing. If you're trying to drown out work Thoughts by watching television, you won't get through the first commercial with knowing anything about what's happening in that show because your mind will drift immediately the same with reading and fortunately so it has to be something active where you're actually engaging your head and and and doing something that requires concentration. That's one thing. So if you really caught in a loop
Distracting Yourself by doing something that requires concentration whether it's a Memory task a puzzle of what have you the research is two to three minutes of a distracting task that requires concentration should be enough to make that initial urge or the craving to ruminate go away. The other thing people have to understand is that feels very satisfying to ruminate because it feels like you're doing something important here is something that's troubling me. I am thinking about it. What?
Possibly could be wrong with that. Well, you're not thinking about it. You're just replaying it. You're just obsessing you're in an emotional hamster wheel and just spinning your wheels. You're not trying to figure anything out. So the second key is take whatever it is. That's troubling you it's usually one or two things people tend to ruminate on a day or one in the morning about the same thing that's troubling them. Whatever that is pose it as a problem to be solved because when you pose it as a problem to be solved, let's say the really combination of hype so much work to do or when we're going
Do this it may pose that is a problem. It's a scheduling problem. It's Wendy my schedule. I'm going to have time to deal with this. What can I move to make that time and if you actually think about it in that way and you put it in your schedule move things around to do so the stress you'll feel about it will ease and the urge to ruminate will ease with it. The other thing you can do and think this is the most important is these guardrails you need and it's not just about that one night. It's about at what point can your family
or you if you like without one rely on 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 should do is if you decide that's eight o'clock at night or seven o'clock at night or 9 o'clock, like whatever it is, then that's the time you let everyone know and then you have to create rituals of transition which make you feel like you're no longer at work. So you have to change your clothes out of work clothes and you have to put on some music and change the lighting and if you have kids you have to get
The ten-year-old mode or the four-year-old mode or the four-year-old shouldn't be able to do. But anyway, you know what I'm saying, you know, you really have to kind of worried. If you have a spouse you have to get into romantic mode. You have to get into 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 curate dinner, you really have to purposefully Mark out territory to have a life and if you don't you
won't
How often do you collaborate with psychiatrists where they incorporate also pharmacotherapy that can help with that, you know medications that can help with sleep by easing some of these circuits, you know things like trazodone or Thorazine things like that where you can sort of start to short-circuit it a little bit and it becomes kind of a creative with that process that you
described. I woke with psychiatrists all the time my first
Not be to refer terminal would not be to refer someone to a psychiatrist when they're ruminating in this way simply because there are so many things they need to try. I give a few examples I can give you for more examples of techniques and things you can do to eliminations that will work. So it's if there's one of those things that you can do without meds you showed if it's difficult to do without meds. I'm actually for meds and I work with psychiatrist all the time, but this thing specifically it will be more effective to change the Habit that
It's you up to ruminate rather than just medicate the rumination away because the Habit is setting you up to do it so much.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. It's more durable, of course and it's a lot harder. I mean that's the reality of it it to have the durability of the response comes at a price which is you have to work harder upfront. It's much more difficult to change the habits as you described them to take a pill one of the things for me from a ritual perspective that I have found to be so helpful you touched on it briefly is the ritual of
Playing with kids. So if you're lucky enough to have kids which doesn't always feel lucky sometimes playing with them in a truly engaged way. So that means at least for my two youngest that's on the floor like they're not in the fitting room. Yeah, you have to
be on the get on the
floor. Yeah, you have to be on the floor and you have to be doing exactly what they're doing. You can't be half doing it. That is a real entity.
Note to sort of rumination and that negative Loop, but it's also not easy to do initially. It turns out to be a bit of a shock to your system because we I think lose this ability to play pretty quickly. It fades from us, you know, by the time we're adults we've sort of lost. We don't know what that means anymore. So it's actually a beautiful thing. I don't know. I'm sure there are other ways to capture that if you don't have children, but that for me at least that's been a very powerful tool in the tool
box. Let me tell you how to
Capture that if you don't have children, the many aspects of everyone's identity, you're not just a professional you an individual. You're an amateur tennis player, perhaps you're an amateur cook perhaps you have this hobby or a sports fan perhaps you can access any one of those aspects of your identity and bring it forth in that moment because when you're screaming at the television because your team is doing something really wouldn't like them to do. You're not thinking about work. You're just thinking about just
Get the ball down that you know, like, you know, that's that's where your your mind is. So you can access that. You know, you sign up for a race and go train and then the question is, can you improve your time? Can you put in the miles you need to put in or if you're an artist then go into the studio because that's where you'll create best or Creator Studio like atmosphere. So the many aspects of our identity that we can access that actually get short shrift when we're too preoccupied with work and we will suffer from not accessing these parts of
So instead of meaningful order to the extent that they're meaningful to us that they're you know, they make us feel like us and they make us feel important. We do need to give them stage time and by doing so it's a good way to you know, two birds with one stone in a sense of give that stage time access that part of your creativity or personality whatever it is and at the same time with you're doing one thing there's not room in there for the
other. So how long did it take you to undergo this transformation at the
Sort of beginning of your career.
Well, actually it's a long story. So I'll just give you a very some highlights of it because I went through an exploration. It didn't take me long to limit the hours and to limit the rumination but what it brought up for me was okay here. I am a year or two now into my private practice. I have been full steam ahead since my undergraduate days undergraduate and graduate degree than postdoc. The practice hadn't stopped.
To consider how I feel about what I'm doing.
And when I did at those times in addition to limiting ruminations, I realized I cannot do psychology 50 60 hours a week. It's 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 would be that iteration took me through some unusual perhaps stations.
There was a point where I was in conversation with the head of Behavioral Science at Nasa because I wanted to be an astronaut I'm not saying that was a wise tangent on my part because actually I did not become an astronaut but I was curious then I decided to maybe I should enroll in this space University again astronaut dreams. Then I realized you know, there's not a lot of Behavioral Science going on in space. That's not maybe the best place plus I heard about this idea of floaters, which is you know, the problem with bathrooms in space that you end up with.
Sorry, so that tell me of these small things sometimes make a difference. And so I ended up realizing that I wanted to write and at that point I decided to limit the hours of the week and of the day in which I see patients and create space for writing 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 that for 14 years. I didn't publish a word. I didn't get paid a penny that might hold within it some hints about my skill set at the time as a writer now to be clear. I was writing screenplays at that time. I went back to I had a rapprochement with film and I was writing screenplays a couple of them did get options. So I wasn't completely on a Fool's errand.
You know, there's the luck of the draw. I was in New York wasn't in Hollywood and it was in 2008 that this one screenplay got optioned for a second time and started looked like it was it might happen and I got my hopes up and it was working with this company and then the financial collapse happened and that went by the wayside and that was when I was like, oh my goodness. It's been 14 years and then an agent I need who had new already said to me.
Like I've been telling you just write psychology and I didn't want to write psychology, right the whole writing thing was to not do psychology and then I'll tell us very briefly just because it's so stupid but it's like how
life don't tell it briefly. Just how it I love the
story. I went to Best Buy to buy earphones and I tried to get the attention of someone there to help me and three people walked by and didn't help me and so I got annoyed and I left the store and as I'm leaving the store there's a big picture of the manager like I'm talking about
Like a 4-foot picture of the manager smiling and saying how is our customer service email me and let me know so I emailed them and let them know and the surprising thing was that I got a email back the next morning saying I'm so sorry that happened. Here's my personal phone number. Let me know when you're coming by. I will make sure someone helps you in whatever you need.
And that email made me think wow, if I would have gone to a customer service hotline or stood in a customer service line that would have taken forever. It really made me think that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and that gave me an idea. I'm like, huh? What's the psychology behind that and I started doing a search to see what books have been written about the psychology of complaining and there weren't any and a week later. I saw that agent at Christmas party, and I said now I had this idea for a
Lucky because he goes finally. What is it? I said, I'm not even sure it's a book it just an idea and it's about the psychology of complaining and I would call it the squeaky wheel and she looked at me she goes I can sell that I'm like that. There's not a bad to sell, you know, and she said I'm telling you do the research write a proposal. I can sell it and it sold at auction.
So let's talk a little bit about the book. I've watched your Google talk. I think from back in 2011 where you you presented this. I love the story by the way of when you walk into the bookstore ready to sign your copies will let you tell that but where did your research take you? How did you how did you begin to sort of uncover what was known and and more importantly, you know, what the what the downside of complaining was because that to me is what you take away from that talk right is right. There's a real there's a hidden cost of complaining.
Incorrectly right?
Well at that point I was cured from my anxiety related libraries. I could enter Library without having a panic attack which was super useful when you're researching a book. So back to the library is I went and I started looking the research but most of the research was actually in the customer service domain and when couples therapy domain but very little bit about our individual psychology, but from
I started interviewing people. I started thinking a lot about it. And the thing that came up over and over again was that complaining is a form of expressing empowerment to the extent that we're trying to get a result. But the research was for example that 95% of people who have a customer service complaint with the product don't voice it even though they're very upset why because they feel and they fear that it will be too.
Difficult and too time-consuming and to aggravating to do that instead and this is the part that's fun. They will tell 12 to 16 people on average about that incident spending way more time getting aggravated each time all over again and getting zero result and that fascinated me. I'm like wow complaining psychology is really broken. We just don't you know, it used to be a transactional tool and now
oh, it's just a venting thing that we do and the problem is that when you tell 16 people about how you were wronged and you don't do anything about it. You're going to feel like a victim you're going to feel powerless because that's the story you're telling here's a story of my getting aggravating not being able to do anything about it is the subject of the story of telling whether you realize that or
not because it really reinforces it right. I mean, it would be it's one thing to not complain to The Entity who could write the wrong and if it stopped
There that could be problematic enough but to then go and tell the story to 16 people who are not empowered to fix it. I mean boy that really myelinate I'm using the term myelination loosely but that almost you know, Milan eights excessively a whole new set of Pathways that create a narrative. That's probably quite unbearable.
Right? Yes, and I love that way that phrase that we should be using it from here. But yes it does and especially when you think about how many complaints we have.
On a daily basis, it's not one. So that's one thing the other thing is when you work with people in Psychotherapy and individual Psychotherapy and they bring up issues with a sibling with a sister with a brother with a friend with a mother with the partner whatever it is and you ask the most obvious question was and did you discuss that with them the alarming amount of times in which you hear no and the stupefying amount of times in which they look at you. Like, why would I discuss it with them?
That's just going to cause an argument to not stupid. It's really powerful when you think about it, like people absolutely convinced that to voice something that's really important for them. Meaningful for them is an impossibility now, they're right. They're right because the vast majority of people Express complaints. So poorly it actually does get the wrong result. It actually does cause the argument it actually does piss off the customer service.
It turns out that when strangers scream at you on the phone and curse at you and threaten you you're not necessarily move to try and help them as best. You can
wear it. Just let me confirm that so all kidding aside. Do you get the sense that this is a process that has changed over time. So let's take a very extreme example, what did complaining look like when we were hunter-gatherers. Obviously, we don't have data, but can we rely on?
A on any insight to say when we walked around and tribes of 18, if you know Johnny was supposed to go out and get dinner that night and didn't and the tribe doesn't get to eat. Do we have any sense of how that was handled? And then what has been that Evolution to where we are today. So how did we get to the point where we're at today? We're 19 out of 20 people won't voice the complaint to The Entity that can address.
But we'll go and spend an average of 12 to 16 times a day, you know lamenting it to the wrong people. Like I want to understand that transformation through our history and as much as 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 took as a hunter gatherer of offending your tribe mates.
It's was severe because the implications were that if you go to ostracized from the tribe, you aren't going to make it. So to really piss off your fellow tribe mates was something he probably did very judiciously, so I don't know how that was expressed at the time. I can go back a hundred fifty years to the origin of the term the squeaky wheel. It came from a poem by a guy called Josh Billings was a humorist the days of March.
In and the poem was something like whatever I know if I get it but it's something about I hate to be a kicker and I always longed for peace. But the wheel that does the squeaking is the one that gets the grease. It's something like that the issue. There is the word kicker the word kicker was the very insulting word Associated people who complained too much in other words as a society at that time hundred fifty years ago complaining was frowned upon and because it was it was used mostly transactionally if they black
Smith didn't put the whole show on correctly. You'll go and say, you know, my horse is limping. But if you're host was only limping slightly, you might not because he didn't want to be a kicker. So it was frowned upon back then and now it's now you're going to become a reality TV star if you complain enough for review, you know voice something on social media in other words the idea today, and I think it's it's really developed because culturally complainers the squeaky wheel did I'm not sure thing.
Grease, but they got attention and sometimes the attention was better for them than the grease and you know, the grease is supposed to quiet the wheel and they weren't looking to be quieted the looking to actually get a megaphone and be loud a lot of people and culturally they were rewarded in that way. Number one. Number two. We are expectations have grown over the industrialization of society such that we would never you know complain about discomfort, but when we were sharing for people
To a bed and going to the Outhouse to go to the bathroom in the snow. But today, you know, if there's anything slightly wrong with something we're going to make because we our expectations are so high and complaining in general gets triggered when there's a big gap between expectation and reality and because expectations have risen the Gap is risen and complaints get triggered and then they get reinforced by culture and Society
how much General discontent do you think can be?
Beat it to what? You just said this gap between expectation and reality. I mean do you like what percent of he is probably to in an unanswerable question, but just directionally, I how much human suffering psychological suffering comes down to that single
Delta a lot. Right? 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 that, you know, you could see your neighbor did was all about right. I mean keeping up with the Joneses with keeping up with the people next door because
Cause you could see what car they had but now you don't have to be next or you can see that that person you grew up with a lives very far away. Now they have this car when they have this house and they wife looks like that, you know, in other words social media has and because it's so curated right? It's a highly curated. Best of in most cases set very poor expectations, very wrong expectations for what we should expect out of life and how much work we should be expected to put in to get so that's not helped.
Do you think that people say of your generation who didn't grow up with social media and now as adults experience social media have one set of potential downsides from that from what you just described but say a 10 year old today who's never known a world without social media by the time they're your age is going to be in a different situation. How would you compare the experiences of Someone Like You versus the person who's going to be you some years from now who's never known any other way and I guess what?
Trying to get at is if there's a harm to someone as an adult today. Will it be greater to someone who's didn't have some sort of a grounding 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 internet social media apps all of those things are the convenience of them because I remember that before social media actually had to call people to see what was going on with them or right?
To them and post it in a mailbox and now I just need to look at my phone and so that convenience of being able to keep in touch with so many people at a distance, you know and see what's going on with them and enjoy the pictures here and they just knowing what's happening or you know reach out if I see something not great is happening. It's very very convenient, but for someone who grew up with it, it's not about convenience. It's about image curation. It's about comparison. It's about how everyone
Else has more followers than I do. Why does he get more followers or why did you know it's just a varied its looked upon very very differently. It's looked upon as a as a way to measure your worth rather than as a way to get something done
you've talked about and I want to talk about it with you. You've talked extensively about the impact of failure on our emotional health a lot of what you just described can be viewed as a failure right by definition.
If you're willing to compare yourself to a broad enough array, you're a failure. I mean, there's always someone who is smarter better-looking richer more popular. There is no metric by which I couldn't in 30 seconds come up with 10 people who are better than me. So what is the antidote to that misery that comes from comparison
possible? It's a true misery and the issue. Is that for example
Up with a lot of successful people. They don't think of themselves as failures. It's more painful. They just don't think of themselves as successful because they've only made 20 million and then looking at the person who made 50 and there's something extraordinarily tragic about someone who went from nothing to 20 million dollars in doesn't think of it as a success, right? I mean, that's just unfortunate that you would spend so much effort.
To get somewhere and have zero appreciation for the fact that you're there I work with somebody once who try to climb Everest and only made it to base camp and I was like, oh my goodness you made it to base camp and they were like, but it didn't get to the top of Everest. I'm like again, he made it to base camp. In other words that's actually impressive. It's not it's not that simple. It's not that easy and if you keep looking up, you will never ever be satisfied you will never ever
Be happy and one of the things I say to my patients all the time is if you just pause and celebrate these stations along the way it doesn't mean you're done this idea that I only celebrate when I reach the top of the Heap that doesn't have a top is such a bad life plan because you will never be satisfied. You will always feel envious. You will always feel insufficient even though you
I've done so much how unfortunate.
And it is very difficult to get people to look down all look sideways rather than keep
looking up.
Was it ever difficult for you to find empathy within yourself for patients of yours who by any objective metric were enormous successes, but who couldn't appreciate it. For example, when that person comes in and says I started with nothing. I'm worth a hundred million dollars, but I don't feel like a success because you know, my peers are all worth five times. That one could take a very jaded view and say
I mean shut up. Like I I can't even relate to what you're complaining about. I'd give anything to have a fraction of what you have but I don't sense that in you like I sense are genuine empathy for that person is actually suffering as odd as that might sound to someone on the outside. It was that it was that natural for you to be able to have that empathy and to be able to communicate what you just
said. Yes. It was natural to me. The job of a therapist is I see it right? I'm not saying it'll but as I see it is my primary job.
Is to see the world through that person's eyes to really understand their experience and if they're saying to me, I am ridiculously successful financially, but I don't feel like a success my job is not to react to that as I would if I'm hearing it from stranger. My job is to really try and understand why what's going on? Why can't they allow them self this what happened in the childhood that put them on this path of just keep bear.
Rolling forward and don't pause to celebrate anything because if you dare Take Your Eye Off the goal or your foot off the pedal you will come to a shuddering Halt and never get going again is usually some kind of fear there. It's very old that fear. It's obviously not something from their adult lives. But once I find that once you really understand someone until you really see the world through their eyes to things happen number one you have compassion for them.
Number two for me again. Personally you like them because when you really get someone there's a fondness that gets triggered at least for me and one of my disgust is sometimes with people and they look at me like I don't understand these terms for me customer service as a therapist is very important and customer service. What does that mean? It means that because I have those feelings. It's important for me that when I go to see you in my waiting room or these days when
I sharpen my zoom. I'm genuinely happy to see you you're going to see that in my face. And I think there's something very powerful about that for people who come to see you and you look like you're genuinely happy to see them that you're genuinely interested and how they've been and what's going on and that you generally compassionate for the things that are not going well for them and to me that's a natural outcome of the using empathy to
Understanding to be able to do your job.
I love what you said earlier and I actually want to go back to an even come up with some of the kind 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 Simply acknowledge something done as being successful and certainly what you said resonates with me. I suspected also with resonate with anybody who's going to be honest with themselves there is
Is a fear that if I stop and acknowledge this I will lose it. I'll give you even the most trivial example people who listen to the podcast know how much I love archery and race car driving and so I'm driving my simulator almost every day and you know, you take a new car onto a new racetrack. You'll start to set goals. Like I want to achieve this. I want to break a minute and 14 seconds on this circuit in this car.
And it could take me months to achieve it invariably guy whenever I finally achieve my goal the happiness lasts for maybe 13 milliseconds and then I immediately think well how much faster can I go? It's almost like I'm afraid to just say wow Peter. That was amazing. Look at that. You literally it took you six months to shave two seconds, which is a big deal right two seconds off a minute. You know me.
62 a minute 14 is a big deal. But what you know, what are we afraid of like what what are we afraid of losing and why and and instead wouldn't it be I like the way you said it which is how about doing both? How about saying that's a wonderful achievement Peter. You should be really proud of yourself. And yes by all means try to take more time off but not at the expense of appreciating what's going on. 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 mending a relationship like, you know things that actually matter in life.
So, okay. So we'll trade secrets fine. I'll tell you here's one of the things I do that many avenues that you can take but here's one of them what I would do and it's difficult might be a little difficult to do with the race car example, just because it's a short timeframe, but if you take someone who's been working on something for a long time frame, well the person who just
The made the first million dollars or whatever it is, May the first exit. What have you is I will take them to a visualization exercise. Now the key map visualization exercises is the detail the more detail the visualization the more you'll connect to it emotionally. And so you actually you're not just quickly thinking about you're actually in a therapy session you're going to spend time really painting the picture. So I want to take you back to when this was a dream.
mmmmmm, I hope
Where were you let's find a time where you were thinking about this. Where were you? What was the weather? Like what were you wearing who you with? How are you feeling back then? What was the context for you? What did this mean to you that idea of one day, you know, and if you can really help connect people to what it felt like at the point where they were just dreaming of it thinking of it wishing for it and hoping but truly not knowing if they will ever have it.
And then you have them insert into that visualization that present selves that comes to give the news to their past selves about the success and you have them really visualize and imagine that entire conversation. How do you say it? How do you reveal and what does that younger version of yourself? Think when you're a bit old? Yes. It's not just a dream you do achieve it. How would they react? How amazing would they feel how excited?
what they feel so that's one way that you can really try and connect someone by giving them the perspective of the person who hasn't achieved yet them at a younger age and looking at the achievement from that point rather than the point of the person who will day before was close to achieving a now they just did so what
so that sounds an unbelievable amount like EMDR and Trauma work where you take the adult version of you and you go back to the
the the child version who's been traumatized and you experientially go back and and almost sort of try to help them in rescue them. I mean, it's pretty profound exercise. You just
described it is very profound and it's and it's very very moving for that. Man me truly. Those are the moments that I remember very strongly in certain treatments of when the person really connected and you could see on their face that they were experiencing it from that perspective rather than the present one, but it does have to be about trauma right? We don't you know, I'm not necessarily.
As opposed to MDR
not so no, that's my choice. Yeah, just
to an earlier perspective
and you're right because from any 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 useful as a lot of the times these people who don't want to celebrate have people around them. Who do and what I would sometimes say is that and I'll say this because it's going to sound silly but it does work.
But I'll say you know, if you don't I'll go and have a celebration for you do it for them. They want to celebrate you indulge them. And the thing is that they might start out thinking that they're indulging them but they will get swept up most likely in that moment when they're actually out celebrating that thing that they did really didn't want to but their family or friends really thought was important to they get caught up in it and they can connect to it at some point. So actually sometimes from the outside in Works to just start celebrating you'll connect at some point to what it is.
celebrating
So, how is your book received? Which one the first one? Sorry. Yeah going back to 2008. So the squeaky wheel book and and how much of a niche did that scratch for? You vis-à-vis you are now you're an author. It's a new part of an identity. Right?
Well remember those 14 years, right? So it was
a yeah. Well now you're a published author, right? So do like your name is on the
deed. But the first time you know when somebody says oh, what do you write? I can actually point to something and say
It's a thing here. It is. The book was received not well in the states and rather well internationally that book sold in 12, I think to 15 countries and did rather well in them. What was funny to me was the first country was South Korea and my agent said, oh, we just sold that book in South Korea and I said, why would a book about complaining they said well, I'll send you the email and the email said oh, this is great.
Eight Koreans are the biggest complainers.
And then we sold it in China and we got the same email. Oh, this is great Chinese at the biggest complainers. And then the French were the biggest complainers the estonians to the polls our biggest complainers every territory that bought that book announce that they consider themselves the biggest complainers as if it was some kind of title worthy of having but my perspective is that it just touched a nerve with people. It didn't do that. Well here primarily I think
Because the book is a mixture of psychology and business and it's difficult when it's not quite one thing or the other would be my guess. I think the book is quite well written actually, but if you're looking for the psychology Parts, you have to get through the customer service parts and it be looking for the customer service parts then what's this thing going on about couples? So I think was difficult book to Market. But what happened was because it didn't do well. My agent said to me book came out in January of 2011 by March.
It was clear that it's not taking off and my agent said to me if you want to sell another book you have to do it now and I'm like, excuse me. The book just came out she goes, yes, but it's not doing well and I can convince editors that it would do much better in paperback. It's going to come out in a year and paperback and if it doesn't do well no one's going to be interested in the second book. So you have to sell one before that one comes out in paperback. I'm like, I'm still doing publicity for this one. Like can I take a break? She goes? No, you can't if you want to have another book and
And 14 years taught me that let's take the opportunities when we can so I put everything aside and started working on a second
book. That was that the emotional first
day of the first aid. Okay.
What was the motivation? How did you decide that that was going to be the next? I mean, it's an unbelievably important topic and something I want to discuss with you now, but how did you decide that? That was the next book?
I decided that I definitely wanted the next book to be just full on psychology. I wanted it to be about emotional health and I wanted to do really reflect the work.
I was doing with patients in which I was at that point, you know for quite a few years of that point because I have recovered from the dissertation regularly reading research articles and trying to find ways to apply findings in my practice because research articles in Psychology, not written for practitioners that written for other researchers, but they might actually have a lot of information that's very relevant to practitioners. You just have to translate the research finding into an intervention. So I would do that when I found it necessary and I would try things out with my patients and let them know there's this research and
Implies that this might be useful try it out and if it was I would recommend it to other people and over the time had curated a lot of different little tricks and tips and techniques for people to manage common emotional wounds like failure which action Guild self-esteem low self-esteem and such and I always had this idea would always piss me off that, you know medicine cabinets were such a thing, but there was none for emotion that was not a psychological medicine cabinet. And so I had this idea like I
to write a book that's in essence the psychological emotional medicine cabinet you should have in every home and so I started doing
that what's contrast three types of injuries and I want to better understand why it is we struggle so much with emotional injury, so case one 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 femurs sticking out of the thigh bone injury.
To or illness to type 2 diabetes really see anything from the outside but you know, we have a blood test that can tell us you have injury number three rejection.
Nobody sees it and the point I think you make is we're far less likely to even acknowledge. It helped me understand that spectrum and what it is about us as a species that is very quick to acknowledge case one as an injury and frankly despite the fact that we don't really see case to externally we don't seem to have a hard time accepting type 2 diabetes as an illness that warrants treatment and can't be left alone.
And yet for many people listening to this the idea that being rejected or failing at something or ins treatment is going to sound stupid and you're going to have to do some convincing.
Is it okay if I own so by way of a story, please? Okay. So this is a true story. I'm sitting with a very very senior executive in a financial institution.
And I'm talking about emotions and the importance of emotions and he immediately shuts me down waves his hand and says, yeah, I don't I don't believe in feelings.
And you know, I do what most psychologists do in that quote of God, you know, you just repeat the statement in the form of a question. I said you don't you don't believe in feelings.
And he said yeah, you know, I know people have them but it's not as if they're real. They shouldn't matter now. He said this in the first few minutes of a couples therapy session with his wife sitting next to him dabbing her eyes with a tissue because she was having feelings. So it was an interesting time to make that statement that didn't believe in feelings when his wife is crying beside him in the first few minutes, but that be session that so many people feel that way.
And when he says, you know, they're not real. It's not unicorns or aliens that you have to have proof of sightings or something in other words, but he really didn't think feelings mattered. And so what I did is I turn to the wife and I said, did you know your husband doesn't believe in feelings?
And she stopped crying. She looked at me and she said this no but it explains a lot and I started laughing really hard because I thought was really funny and I laugh so hard that she started laughing and then she loves so hard that he did not start laughing. He actually looked really irritated. So I looked at him and I said what you don't believe in laughter either.
And then he was literally about to get up and I said you look angry because I am angry Michael. There's one feeling you believe in now. Let's talk about some of the others and how they might be impacting your marriage and he sat down because I've made the point you can just curate if you believe in Anger. There are the feelings you have to believe in as well. But many people think that feelings are not worthy of attention and to be honest with you when we were earlier on in our
Element societally industrially when it really was about just keep alive, you know roof shelter, the hierarchy of needs as it were your emotional well-being was very much at the bottom of that hierarchy actualization was at the bottom of that hierarchy and so we had to reach a certain level of industrialization and comfort and safety and self-sufficiency as a society as individuals to be able to start looking at higher order needs Beyond safety shelter Etc food.
Dude, and that's when we started paying attention more to emotions. It's a very recent development relatively speaking and if you go even today to certain War zones, no one's going to be listening to podcasts about how to self-actualize and be the best you they're going to look at podcasts about what to do when your femurs jutting out of your leg or you have type 2 diabetes and no incident. So that's going to be a bigger concern fair enough, but for most of the industrializing Western World, probably we are
The point where we need to think about our emotional well-being even because it has a huge impact on our physical well-being and our longevity and health. So even if that's the priority just staying alive, we know that many emotional psychological conditions that can actually contribute to you dying much more quickly than you might have otherwise so that would behoove you in that way. But we are finally at the point where our emotional well-being or happiness and life satisfaction is something that's on our agenda and then we starting to pay more attention to it but not everyone is
By the way, I think guy that is probably one of the most eloquent explanations both in terms of the story. But also I think drawing on the hierarchy of needs is a great point. I hadn't considered which is you could argue since the domestication of crop and cattle we've had the only then only since then have we had the luxury of even thinking about stability with respect to food and infrastructure and that would have started the clock on when having the luxury of thinking about this began whereas physical
Jury, we've had our entire evolutionary history to worry
about right and that Industrial Revolution was 11,000 years ago. It's just not that long and and you know, like writings on even around 5,000 years or whatever in other words. Yes, we're pretty new and and it's only very recently that we can attend to
this. Yeah. I mean even go one step further language might only be 50,000 years old and yet clearly prior to language. We still had to concern ourselves with a physical injury. There's no animal that isn't concerned with a physical injury.
I guess the one thing that would draw some concern is I don't think we have another 50,000 years or 10,000 years or 5000 years to figure out how to deal with emotional injury because we probably won't survive it that's been my conclusion as a person who has come to this from the lens of the physical side, right the longevity side of things. I think it hasn't taken me my whole life only half of it to figure out that if the emotional piece is not working at best you will.
Continue to do okay physically and just be miserable which strikes me as the definition of torture or at worst. You'll have all of that plus an impaired physical existence. So either way if you're emotionally broken, I think you're in for a very difficult life. So how do we shave five thousand years off the next 50 and how does your work and the work of people like you start to change this mindset
one of the reasons?
and I decided we want to do this podcast is because we sent there and spoke about how if we can really show people by doing this work and putting it out in a podcast that people who you know, so we have this episode about heartbreak and episode about parental alienation episode about this and that but within those episodes there are a lot of insights that we're offering that are nothing to do with it and then a very
It's portable and in the reviews that we have in the letters that we get. It's the point that people emphasize the most that while it's nothing to do with me and I learned so much about myself regardless and I think we and I've said this before I think any mental health professional these days has to think of themselves as an ambassador because there is such ignorance that we have about our emotional and psychological States.
and how we operate and what matters and any professional needs to be able to talk about that and to let people know and to educate because we are so in need of that education one of the things I sometimes do in a session a lot of the sessions that I do from people who have fallen defined me they want to do sessions obviously by a zoom way before the pandemic and usually have an hour say and for me if I have one of our with you
I'm going to come in guns blazing right in the beginning because we're going to get something done. And so it's going to be a little head spinning for the person because I'm not holding back here. I'm not doing the well, I don't need to do that. Now. We'll get to that in week 10. Mmm. Oh now, so I am this point experienced enough that I can fill in a lot of gaps. I don't need to hear a lot before I can figure out where the problem is and where the issue is.
And what people find really interesting is that we'll wait. How are you able to articulate what I'm feeling better than I can when you just met me and this is the thing that makes me sad. It's something we should all be able to do if we were better educated in how psychology and feelings work because there's a lot we don't know but there's a ton we do we know for example that rejection hurts even if the person who rejected you is someone you absolutely despise.
And would never want to be associated with ever but if they rejected you is going to sting now. If you don't know that we are wired to respond. That way you're gonna have a lot of other ideas about what kind of loser you are or you know, like why is this hurting why knowing Basics and we have some Basics about our emotional responses understanding that if something happened to you and you feel this way about it anyone else that happened to is going to feel similarly they
Might not show it. They might not display it. They might not confess it and they might not feel it to that extent but feel it. They will unemotional DNA is global its Universal. It's evolved were all very very similar in our emotional responses in our experiences. Our responses might differ but our experience is the same so there's so much we can teach there's so much we can inform and there's so much that if we did would feel unifying as
It would make us feel more connected to one another because we're also the same Under the Skin
you said something there that really resonated. It's a bit tangential, but I think it's worth mentioning and I think you'll agree. But if not, please please tell me I remember at one point. I was saying something to one of my therapist her name is Esther perel you I'm sure know Esther you both in New
York. If I may be the S2 and I have shared offices for 27 years. We have an office mates for 20 seconds.
I don't think I knew that okay. Yeah. Yeah,
if you've been to her office in
person I have many times so know where that Bell you know, where the iso I've been in your waiting room than I do. That's amazing that I didn't realize that so as you said something to me once when I was explaining to her a thought pattern I was having and I was explaining it to her as though I was the only person in Civilization that has probably ever had this so of the 10 billion people or whatever number of people who have lived to date.
Peter Tia is the first one that has ever had this pattern of thought and as 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 isn't a very uncommon thing your mind when it's poisoned is staggeringly unoriginal lots of people.
Have the exact same poisonous sets of thoughts that you do and unfortunately, there's a very common set of beliefs that are maladaptive that people like you have and I've heard every one of them and it's basically what you just said, it's the pattern recognition that allows people like you and Esther and Lori to be so good at what you do and I actually took great comfort in that right. I mean, she said it to me in a way that was like hey, I don't want you to knock.
You're special because everyone wants to be special but at the same time Peter, please realize like you're actually not that special and and that's good news in this situation. You're not alone. Yes,
you'll note alone and it should be comforting right because and the upsetting thing is you're not alone on the one hand on the other hand because you probably hadn't expressed that to many people before other than 2 or therapist has many others haven't that's why you didn't know that it was
Has common because people don't talk about it. And that's again why I believe that it's the duty of therapists to be ambassadors in some way because even if it's a dinner table discussion by please by all means I'm not trying to say walk into a room therapists and start taking over with your droning on about your book. Please don't do that. But if you have an opportunity to point to a generality 2.2 research to say yeah, this is how this works. This is a truism. This is something that's
Always the case then do so because you can educate people we can crowdsource this. We can really let people know, 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 really get the word out because I do feel a certain sense of mission because when you do it's kind of upsetting
That we know so little in the people know so little known for you. That's a moment of insight and therapy where the Esther she could complete the thought and you could probably have completed it even before she told her she could complete it if it's that clear to her. It should be clear to everyone but we just don't have any platforms by which we can disseminate that information. It should be high schools obviously because that's when we have people captive and that's we should be teaching life in school not whatever is that Eric information people will soon forget when they graduate.
We don't it's unfortunate. But that's what it should happen.
Do you think the tide is changing? You know, you've been in practice for nearly 30 years when you think about where we're going to be 10 years from now versus where we were as a society 10 years ago specifically with respect to the seriousness with which we take emotional injury. What does the derivative look like
the most important event in that regard the event that move?
The dial more than anything else by far is the pandemic by far?
Because there are very very few people untouched and I don't mean by illness. I mean by stress by anxiety by grief by loss by loneliness by tension by relationship rupture by fear by depression very few are left untouched and I know that not just because that's how we are and that's how we respond. But because I have been getting calls and talking with entities.
Who would never have contacted me before because they would have been like well, this is just not something I can saddle my employees with listening to and now suddenly it's a necessity now suddenly, I need the people who work for me to know how to deal with this or with that or how to understand this and that and all kinds of very specific kinds of organizations who truly would have been at the bottom of my list of who would ever call me have called. It is something everyone is very much aware of and I wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe.
Out this in April and which I said this pandemic is going to leave a legacy of Mental Health crisis that is going to be years to address and we should start thinking about it right now because we cannot as therapists address the needs of people with are not enough of us therapy is not a practical solution for everyone. We need to start working on online Mass interventions that can be deployed psychologically and emotionally because we're going to have man
Is of people with trauma? What about all these nurses and doctors in the front line who are truly traumatized I give a course I give a talk to seven thousand nurses in the Duke nursing system in May. I think it was and one of the questions I had was it was a very simple one, but it was just it stayed with me this nurse that she was very emotional. She said, what do I do when I am risking my life and my family's life every day.
Day, and then I go on social media and my own best friends my own immediate family members are out there. They're not wearing masks. They're not social distancing every image 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 all over a whole Cadre of nurses and doctors and Physicians assistants and all of it healthcare workers Frontline workers who are truly traumatized. What do we have in place to help them? Nothing nothing and we'll need it and not just them. What do we have for the kids the adolescence been dying to like socialize because that's what life is about and prevented from doing that for the
So don't have a break because their remote learning this and this what people are going through extremely hard time emotionally and while most people are unscathed physically emotionally. Everyone is a little bit damaged now. So the one thing it's done though. Yeah, we don't have interventions. I can go on about that for a while. But I've gotta get off the soapbox. What I really mean to say is that people actually paying attention to it. Now, they are more receptive to it. Now, they're more interested in now and I think they will listen more now.
How can
Can the work that you do bester does that Lori does how can it be scaled? Because every time I meet a therapist, they don't have room for more patients. There's just very difficult to get in to see a great therapist. And I know sometimes people will say look I can do a one-off consultation, but I can't take a new person on as a regular and so how do you how do you scale this given that it's not a widget right? You can't just tell the facts.
To make more it takes years to like even if at this moment guy, you know thousands of people were listening to this as undergraduate students and felt you know what this is an amazing calling rather than you know, 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 make more therapists. That's not the answer because
It's just not practical. The answer is they are already all kinds of studies going on about online interventions for things like loneliness or anxiety. They're all kinds of protocols and they are just being used in like regular research, but they're not, you know, this this vaccine effort. That was a global vaccine effort. If a fraction of those resources were allocated to finding useful interventions that true
You can be put online and anyone can do in the privacy of their home in their own time. Will it be as effective as one-on-one therapy? No, will it be effective and actually helpful to a lot of people? Yes, not everyone needs therapy. We have nothing and we have therapy or read an article or read a book. There's a lot in the middle that we can do that can be deployed in scaled really on a mass level and then once you do it in one place you just translate it and you know, you have to adapt things for cultural ways.
But that should not be that heavy lift and it can be really popularized in the sense that people can find these resources to at least triage at least do some first aid emotional. First. Aid the book I wrote It's a book. I don't come with it and yet that book is done really. Well. It's in 27 languages and people write to me all the time saying oh I keep dipping back into it as needed and it's very useful because it is that medicine cabinet and if you can do it in a book you can do it even
Much better with interactive online tools with apps with you know, a are with whatever you need to use. But if the efforts were going to that you can scale and you can actually do things that are could be really really helpful for people on a mass scale. You can't do that with medicine because a FEMA has to be set a broken femur individually. You can't look at an online thing and do it yourself, but some of this you can when it comes to psychology and emotional
health
One of the things you've written and spoken about that I can speak to from personal experience and initially I would have never believed it is the use of affirmations. I was challenged at one point to come up with an affirmation for every year. I've been alive. So I'm 47 and that meant I had to come up with 47 affirmations and my experience with it, which I think you will understand because of the way you've spoken about it is and this was during a very intensive therapy this
Three weeks of residential care, right? So this was 10 hours of therapy a day for the first two and a half weeks. I couldn't come up with two. I just refuse to write anything down and I wasn't pushed too because I think the therapist understood I had to come up with these on my own I had to believe them.
And then I had an enormous breakthrough at the very end of that experience and in one sitting wrote them all out and the important part here is believe them. All right talk a little bit about the importance of believing in affirmation that you come up with versus going to an affirmation website and downloading some
posters. So positive affirmations are defined as those typical sayings that you get on
Magnets and the bottom of calendars. I am going to be a great success. I am beautiful and worthy of great love Etc that kind of thing what the research shows and and by the way, these are a multi multi-million dollar industry these positive affirmations what the research shows is that there is a very specific group that benefits from them and a very specific group that is harmed by them. The people are harmed by them are people with low self-esteem.
The very people these affirmations Target, why are they harmed by them? Because when you're feeling very unbeautiful or very unsuccessful looking in the mirror and telling yourself that you're going to be a great success this when you feel like a massive failure is not going to register as believable and because it's going to register so unbelievable. It's going to remind you that in fact, you feel like a failure.
Same with saying you're gonna find great love when your immediate experience has been that you're not so who they do help is people with high self-esteem because doesn't contradict their internal beliefs, which is horribly ironic right the thing. It's supposed to help the people are supposed to help get harmed the people who don't need it can benefit from it. But there's a way to change affirmations into useful and the way you do that is as you said you individualize them so that they sound
Believable to you. So don't say I'm going to be a great success. You can say to yourself. I'm going to persevere until I succeed. That's believable. Don't say I'm worthy of great love. Oh, I'm beautiful and I'm worthy of great. Love say I have amazing eyes and an amazing personality and I'm gonna keep putting myself out there until I find the person who appreciates them individualize the affirmation so that
it sounds believable to you and yet is hopeful and optimistic and sets a goal. That's the key to making them useful and those versions don't usually come on refrigerator magnets because they're too long. They don't fit.
That's exactly right. I mean it took a couple pages to write them all out and I went through a phase of my sort of recovery / Journey where every single day I would take five minutes out and I pegged it to getting
Rest in the morning so that it would never be missed. So I had a ritual that said when you're getting dressed your and also stand in the mirror and you're going to read these and not too quickly. You're going to read them and sort of reflect on what they mean and truthfully guy there were days. It was hard to read them there were days. I didn't fully believe them when I was, you know, having a bad day. You know, when one of your affirmations is I am a good father and you just yelled at your kid over something that you shouldn't have yelled at them for it actually becomes a little hard to read.
That but it also reinforces that you are a good father who just made a mistake and that's that's okay too and you get to read it again tomorrow and come through it with a different light. But you know when I heard you speak about that which again I think was in one of your other Google Talks, I found it to be an amazingly insightful view of something that I felt a little hokey about having done but personally found very valuable. And again, if you told me a year earlier Peter, you're going to find this valuable I would have said there's zero chance. I'll find that.
Because what you would have Associated was Stuart Smalley right looking the mirror and Saturday Night Live and doing it or some kind of trite thing that to you sounds trite because it is to you doesn't sound personal because it's not so yeah, you were thinking of that version but that's the whole point. You can individualize and I would even say to you that on the day that you just yell at your kid before you're about to say I am a good father adapt it and that day don't say I am a good father. You can say I am trying to be a good father.
And I am learning from my mistakes say you can always always tweak it so that it has the same sentiment but it matches the reality that you're living in that moment.
That's a fantastic point. Do you think that there's something to be said by the way for the fact that as a writer it makes you a better therapist. I mean II sort of obviously there's a enormous selection bias because we're more familiar with people who are out there doing other things.
Was besides their clinical practice and often it's their writing and speaking that brings them to our attention. I mean, I sought out Esther years ago, but in part it was because of her work, right and that's how I sought her out. But that said do you think that for example like you and Lori when you're doing your podcast are able to do what you do because of the discipline that writing has brought to your thought process.
It's an interesting question. I'll answer it two ways. One thing that's very important to me. I'm sure to Lori and I know it's important to Aster is language because you know, sometimes a lot of people would say to me. Oh, I'm really empathetic. I'm an empath some people say but I don't like the word but still say it anyway, I'm an impact and I'm like, what does that mean? Like, I really know how people are feeling. I'm like, how do I know you do in other words if you aren't able to express it in
English that truly captures it I have no idea if that's what you know or not. It's one thing thinking that you know how someone feels but it's another big able to articulate it very clearly and very accurately and so language is a very important tool for therapists because for example, our emotional language is very limited tends to be its primary colors were angry with sad were upset. There's no new ones, but there's tons of nuance in language. We have dozens of words for certain levels or
Kinds of upset and I try and choose mine very very carefully because I want to make the point that you're not just angry. You're also quite frustrated and you're also quite resentful and in that way you feel a bit of Rage 2 and you can start teasing out the nuances and when I start going through that with someone in that concept, they'll get it'll be a year. That's true. That's true. That's just would never be how they would have described it. They would just be like, I'm annoyed, you know, but it no. No, it's very nuanced. You're also a little bit relieved because you've been waiting to be introduced.
Deven Danielle at that person. It's very complex or emotional experience, except we tend to think of it in just like one thing which is not so language actually is very important tool for therapist because when you're describing emotions, which you do you really want to be able to do so, but the other way it's very important for a writer is that I and I know Esther I know Lori a lot of most therapist. I know use narrative psychology to a degree in anything that we do
Do because when somebody comes to me for a first session, that's not a 1-up. So what my duty is in. The first session is you will tell me your story and then I will tell it back to you at the end of the session or Midway at some point. I will tell your story back to you and it will be a different story and in my version of the story why you feel the way you do or why you're stuck in the way you do will become abundantly clear and what you need to do in basic rough terms.
Become clear because in your version of the story you're stuck in my version of the story. You're not and I cannot explain why but that means that I have to be able to describe your narrative take the data points that you presented to me Shuffle the order look at some of them from a different perspective and tell a different story The Simple example, I always use just to illustrate. This is if you're a survivor of a horrible plane crash and you lost a limb in that
Crash, what is the story you have about that? Are you a horribly unfortunate person who became disabled in a plane crash or are you the luckiest person alive? Because you're the only one who walked away albeit, maybe hopped which is to say those different perspectives are going to make you recover in a very different way feel very differently about yourself and very feel very differently about the life you go forward to live. It'll be much more adaptive to think of yourself.
Well as a very fortunate Survivor rather than have the self-pity called think, you know, you've been horribly horribly victimized and we have choice in the stories. We tell ourselves. We don't have choice about the facts. We have choice about our organization our perspective and a 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 bring up such a great point. And as I think about it, you know, I can think of examples of people who don't write.
You know or haven't published books but yet have this I have a friend his name is Jim. Cachaça. Who's an amazing psychologist now, he's a colleague of mine a friend of mine. Not a therapist of mine. But any time I've sat down with him to have dinner. Unfortunately, I just suck up all of his time because I end up, you know, it's always a one-sided discussion, but he's just so giving and I come away from these discussions appreciating what you've said, which is Jim's ability to articulate things.
Things is unbelievable. And I could go in 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 is the sine qua. Non of a great therapist is that ability to say you showed me an onion? I showed you there were actually 12 layers to it. Right?
I do think it's a very important aspect that you have to be able to master it.
Point
guy I could continue this discussion with you for hours, but we've been at it for quite a while. I guess I want to conclude by just letting the listeners know that if they haven't already done so they really need to listen to the podcast you do with Lori. I absolutely love it. There's one episode in particular. I'm just going to make a make a shot for for people to start with. It's the one called Molly's father's suicide. I found that to be a very I don't know why I just I just wanted to hug Molly two pieces like I wanted.
To jump through my phone and just grab that woman in squeezer till
tomorrow Peter. Can I tell you how I have to restrain myself? I am I said this to my to my brother I said I am so dying to see how she's doing. I want to email her. I want to call her. I want to give her a hug and we've gotten those responses. We forward it down a lot of emails and texts of people going like, oh, please it hugs the Molly please and hugs to Molly. I haven't done that because I'm expecting her privacy and her and her distance, but
Oh my goodness you feel for this woman?
Yeah, so I would say folks that haven't heard the podcast start with that one and that'll give you a sense of the kind of work. You guys are doing guy. Thank you very
much Peter. Thank you very much. It's been so interesting. You've asked me things I've never been asked and I've been doing interviews for many many many years and when you get me to start thinking about things I'm going on. Oh nothing. I appreciate that so much. So thank you very
much. It's been a pleasure and I'm sure this won't be the last
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