0:13

Hello,

0:14

everyone.

0:16

Watching and listening on YouTube or

0:18

one of the associated podcasts. I'm here

0:20

today with doctor John Killoni.

0:24

He's the author of own your past, change

0:26

your future. We're gonna talk today

0:28

and I'm very happy to do this to talk to another

0:30

clinician about the

0:32

fact that you

0:34

live your life through a story that you see the

0:36

world through a story, what that story

0:38

might be like when things are going wrong,

0:40

how it might be approved, and also

0:42

to talk about identity

0:43

and its transformations in

0:46

the most practical, possible way. And

0:48

so there are specifics that

0:50

we can talk about, but that's a good place to start.

0:52

What are you so interested in

0:54

stories, John?

0:58

I I think it

1:00

I I reverse engineered my way into it.

1:02

It was learning the trauma

1:05

narrative that played out

1:07

in the human body ten,

1:09

fifteen, thirty years later after the

1:11

initial trauma. And so I've always

1:13

thought

1:14

stories were narrative.

1:15

Right? There's something I thought about I

1:17

did not understand that

1:19

my body was keeping the score to quote

1:22

vendor code. Right? That my body was revving

1:24

up and fighting battles that I didn't even know was happening.

1:26

And so we're looking at the long

1:28

term data, man, and people are having strokes

1:31

and cancer and heart attacks from childhood

1:34

experiences. and that made me step

1:36

back and go, whoa, there's there's these different

1:38

layers to these stories happening all over

1:40

the place. And it's not just narrative.

1:42

It's it's the entire ecosystem that

1:44

I call my body. Right? My human

1:46

experience. And then as I begin to pull

1:48

the thread on those, man, those

1:51

stories were born into and the

1:53

stories we were told have

1:55

such a formative shaping of

1:58

our life experience. And those

2:00

stories become the stories we tell ourselves, which,

2:02

as we all know, in mental health

2:04

professionals, that shapes everything. who

2:06

I think I am and what I think I'm capable or

2:08

not capable of or I'm the worst

2:10

thing to ever happen to me. Those stories are

2:13

highly limiting or they are

2:15

the jet fuel on and on

2:17

a well lived life. Right? So

2:19

if we can discuss those stories,

2:21

man, what a shape shifting opportunity

2:24

for us? Yeah.

2:24

Well, that idea about stories

2:27

in some sense being stored in the body

2:29

is kind of interesting. And so way

2:31

I conceptualize it is that

2:34

a

2:36

story manifests itself in a

2:39

in a personality, in a set of goals,

2:41

in a set of assumptions about the world, perceptions

2:43

about the world. And if you

2:46

have had terrible things happen

2:48

to you in the past, and that's

2:50

pretty much true of every of everyone, although

2:53

some people more than others, then then

2:56

your body computes the present

2:58

danger of the environment based

3:00

on how many things have happened to you that are

3:02

terrible in the past, that that aren't

3:04

resolved, and resolved would mean

3:07

that you had generated a solution for

3:09

them. And if you if

3:11

your psychophysiological system

3:14

assumes that all the danger that

3:16

you were subject to once is still

3:18

present in the environment, that

3:20

it's gonna set you on edge

3:22

as if you're walking in dangerous territory.

3:25

And the psychophysiological consequence

3:28

of that is that

3:29

you're

3:30

prepared for danger

3:33

and that does such things as

3:35

burn up excess resources because

3:37

you're much more reactive and

3:40

on point than you might otherwise be in an

3:42

anxiety prone manner. It also

3:44

suppresses a immunological function

3:46

because Your body isn't

3:48

that worried about long term immunological health

3:51

if you're confronting an emergency. And

3:54

so that you you talk

3:56

in your book about changing your past, owning

3:58

your past, and it's useful to

4:00

define that you're

4:02

likely to overcome a trauma,

4:05

let's say, and no longer, in

4:07

some sense, store it, psychophysiologically, if

4:10

you've generated a causal

4:12

story about the reason that the trauma

4:14

emerged and then reconfigured

4:16

the way that you're conducting your

4:18

life so that probability that a

4:20

similar thing will happen to you is reduced

4:22

to close to zero.

4:24

Right? It's not catharsis. Right. It's understanding.

4:27

Yeah.

4:28

The challenge there is I think

4:31

we've

4:32

following that thread all the way to our modern

4:35

psychological ethos, we've created a

4:37

world that is based in highly on blame.

4:40

And like somebody else is

4:42

responsible, and so I've gotta

4:44

continue to cut and cut and cut and I

4:46

reduced myself to a two

4:48

by two square with which I can exist. And

4:50

if you enter my square, then whether

4:52

it's ideologically or physically, then

4:54

suddenly you're affronting me. and

4:56

I think there's something about owning your past.

4:59

I look at it more in terms of, can

5:02

I think through what I

5:04

remember to happen have happened. And by the way, we

5:06

know that memory is a disastrous,

5:09

like, narrative storyteller. Right?

5:11

So I care less about what actually happened

5:13

and more I'm in my forties.

5:15

I'm telling myself this story that happened.

5:17

Can I tell that story? Can I relive that

5:19

story? And my body doesn't take off on me. Right?

5:22

It doesn't rush to solve the problem

5:24

for me because it knows I'm driving

5:26

now. Right? The

5:27

thing about memory is that it's not

5:29

there

5:30

to

5:32

provide an accurate objective

5:34

record of the past, which is in fact impossible

5:37

because past is so unbelievably

5:39

complex. It's more like a navigation

5:42

tool, which is I went

5:44

here, I fell into something

5:46

terrible and now I need to re

5:48

calibrate the navigation map

5:50

that I'm using so that I don't fall into

5:52

the same hole and one of the things

5:54

that people might want to know who are listening

5:56

is that if you have a memory that's

5:58

older than about eighteen

5:59

months and

6:01

it haunts you and

6:03

when it comes up involuntarily, it

6:05

produces a stress reaction. What

6:08

that means is that as far as your nervous

6:10

system is concerned. And so as far as your

6:12

body's concerned, that danger hasn't gone

6:14

away. And what's happening is

6:16

an unconscious alarm system that's

6:18

looking for pitfalls and holes is

6:20

warning you that the map

6:22

that you're using is incomplete in a

6:24

manner that might enable

6:27

you to fall into the same hole. And

6:30

so one of the things that people

6:32

can do that's very useful is

6:34

if you have memories like that that plague

6:37

you, is to bring them to

6:39

mind voluntarily instead

6:41

of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily,

6:44

and then to think through what

6:46

has changed and what might not have, but also

6:48

to come up with a plan so that

6:51

if a similar circumstance arose,

6:53

you'd be in a better position in one way or another

6:55

to deal with it. There's no other way of

6:57

getting the memory to go away. Like,

7:00

merely re contemplate it in the

7:02

same manner over and over won't do it.

7:04

And allowing it to plague you

7:06

unconsciously, it'll do that forever until

7:08

you solve it. It might show up in your dreams.

7:10

It'll show up in your found seize. It'll

7:12

trigger you so to speak when

7:14

you're talking to other people if they happen

7:16

to discuss a topic that's related

7:18

to it, And it's because the the

7:20

narrative is one of

7:22

failure and defeat. The event

7:24

was one of failure and defeat. And if

7:26

there isn't a map to allow

7:28

you to transcend that that's functional,

7:31

then the part of your brain that is concerned

7:33

with identifying danger is never

7:35

gonna let you go. Yeah.

7:37

And I I think culturally, we've

7:40

created a pathology of

7:42

discomfort. And as you

7:44

just outlined so eloquently, The

7:46

only way through this is to turn and face

7:48

and walk directly through it. Right? And if you continue

7:51

to run from the memories and

7:53

pathologize and and chase the behaviors. You

7:55

end up with our

7:57

overdiagnostic approach

7:59

to everything. Instead of turning and

8:01

facing these things, and letting your

8:03

body heal through relationships and

8:05

other things in your life. Man, we just

8:08

end up chasing your tail. And you called

8:10

it out. the more you run, the

8:12

more your body thinks it's winning, it's getting

8:14

away from this stuff. So it actually reinforces the

8:16

anxiety, it reinforces some of these

8:19

Like, psychological ailments, the further

8:22

you run from it, the only healing is through

8:24

it, and in the culture we've created for ourselves

8:26

says that uncomfortable, discomfort

8:28

is bad, and it's to be avoided at all

8:30

costs. And it's it's the

8:32

only path to healing.

8:34

If you run, then the

8:37

signal that the story you're

8:39

acting out is that the thing you're running from

8:41

is bigger than you and that you have

8:43

to hide. and that's just a

8:45

recipe for anxiety. Now it's

8:47

not necessarily that easy to turn

8:49

and face something, but you do

8:51

detail out a variety of strategies in

8:53

your books that might help people do

8:55

that. You can differentiate

8:57

the problem. Like, you might you might have

8:59

been traumatized at work, let's say,

9:01

or let's not use that sort of

9:03

jargon y, that jargon y phraseology.

9:05

You may be having tremendous

9:07

difficulties at work. You might be dealing with

9:09

people who are tyrannical at work

9:11

and find it very meaningless.

9:13

And so, and that's bothering you

9:15

constantly. It's disturbing your sleep, for

9:17

example, and it's haunting you and

9:19

you're you tend to try to push it out of

9:21

your mind when the thoughts come.

9:24

And partly, that's because the

9:26

thought of getting a new job is so

9:28

daunting that you can't face it. And one

9:30

of the ways of

9:32

we recalibrating

9:33

that is to break down

9:35

the problem into small and manageable steps.

9:37

And so, for example, one of the things that

9:39

you can do if you

9:42

might have to consider getting a

9:44

new job because you're unhappy and miserable

9:46

at work is open

9:48

up your resume or your CV

9:50

and look at it. Right? So

9:52

you might not be able to get a new job, but you might

9:54

be able to open up your resume and look at it.

9:57

And then having done that, you sort of

9:59

crack the surface, and then maybe you could

10:01

spend an hour a week for a

10:03

month updating it or ten

10:05

minutes a day or ten minutes every two

10:07

days, something like that. But part of the

10:09

trick is to take these larger

10:11

that are frightening enough so you wanna run away

10:13

from them. Decide that you're

10:15

going to face the

10:17

situation. you you you lay out, for

10:19

example, in your book, you ask people a lot of

10:21

different questions about what

10:23

they're thinking. And If

10:26

something is making you anxious and afraid

10:28

and miserable, it's very

10:30

useful to lay out, to write

10:32

out all the reasons it's making you

10:34

anxious and miserable. And to ask

10:36

yourself, what is it you're afraid of?

10:38

And then to develop a differentiated

10:40

plan for dealing with those,

10:42

So

10:42

let me you this. In your psychoanalytic

10:45

experience, can somebody can the

10:47

majority of people do this by themselves?

10:50

because I if I was to distill

10:52

down all of the pathologies

10:54

in modern civilization, I

10:56

keep coming back to a central

10:58

one central point, and that's

11:00

that we are desperately

11:03

and pathologically and spiritually

11:05

and frighteningly lonely. Yeah.

11:08

And I'm wondering if we we

11:10

can is it even

11:12

possible anymore to tell a twenty

11:14

one year old boy, twenty one year

11:16

old man? hey, you need to do this by

11:18

yourself or is the because I

11:20

I keep coming back to you. The first thing you do before you

11:22

start trying to solve your problems is get a tribe,

11:24

get a gang, get a couple of people in your

11:26

counter, get a mentor, somebody you can sit

11:28

with and in our we've

11:30

had to professionalize it with mental health

11:32

professionals, but get some people around

11:34

you to help be a

11:36

good reflective mirror for you? Because we just we're

11:38

we're loneliness ourselves to death, I feel like. Yeah.

11:40

Well, I I don't think that that

11:42

people can

11:43

generally do this alone. It's actually

11:46

very difficult. And I think people

11:48

can't do it alone in part because

11:50

people and I'm not being snide

11:52

about this. People aren't very good at thinking, and

11:54

they're not very good at negotiation. Well,

11:56

and when

11:56

we're when we're anxious, our brains

11:59

shut off rational thinking. Right?

12:01

It didn't want us wondering is that a nice bear?

12:03

Just wants us to get out of there. Well, that's

12:05

that's an that's an additional

12:07

problem. You know,

12:07

part of the reason that honesty

12:10

and speech is so important is

12:12

that there isn't any difference

12:14

between honesty and speech

12:16

and thinking So you said,

12:18

can people do this alone? And the answer to that

12:20

generally is no because

12:22

thought itself is

12:24

generally a biological process. So what you

12:26

and I are doing right now is thinking

12:28

things through. Now we're doing that with an

12:30

audience and foreign audience, but

12:32

you have some propositions and I have some

12:34

propositions and we're We're petting

12:36

them against each other and

12:39

cooperating at the same time and we're

12:41

allowing the discourse to modify

12:43

our implicit presuppositions So

12:45

we're allowing the discourse to modify our stories.

12:47

And thought itself

12:49

is internalized dialogue.

12:52

or try along if you're really sophisticated. Maybe you

12:54

can break yourself into three people internally

12:56

and have an argument, but it's

12:58

very very difficult for people

13:00

to develop our systematic

13:02

approach to thinking, and then

13:04

to counter that with another internalized

13:07

systematic approach to thinking,

13:09

and do all of that alone. Generally, what

13:11

happens in a healthy society as

13:13

you're pointing out is that we

13:15

have people around us to

13:18

whom we can express our concerns,

13:21

and then they react, and then

13:23

you react to that. And that's

13:25

thought And the

13:27

fact that we would even ask people to do that

13:29

alone is an indication as you

13:31

pointed out of how isolated and

13:33

loams some people have become. You

13:35

know, you said friends or people you can

13:38

tell good things to and people you can tell

13:40

bad things to and you have

13:42

friends because friends keep you

13:44

sane this one of the things I liked about

13:46

your book is this insistence that

13:49

sanity in some real sense is

13:51

distributed It's not something inside your

13:53

head. It's something that you find as a

13:55

consequence of being nested in a

13:57

sequence, in a hierarchical sequence

13:59

of proper

13:59

relationships. And

14:01

so if you could do it alone, man, you could do it

14:03

in solitary confinement.

14:06

And, you know, even antisocial criminals

14:08

hate solitary confinement. We're

14:10

so skeptical. It's it's it's

14:13

the way we punish

14:15

prisoners, right, is to to put

14:17

them in the hole. And we've just create a

14:19

society where that's where we choose to live.

14:21

Yeah. I I love the idea of

14:23

I like to think of it's it's

14:25

evenly distributed. We carry each other's

14:27

burdens in different seasons. And

14:29

that's the way through. There's just simply moments

14:31

when my wife gets sick or my dad

14:33

finds himself, my aging father's passing

14:35

away. that, right, that's the

14:37

old, you know, holding your arms

14:39

up in the desert narrative. Right? Like, it

14:41

we need other people to help us navigate

14:44

these. And how many I won't I won't

14:46

put my experiences into your marriage.

14:48

But the number of times over the two

14:50

decades I've been married, that I've been hanging out with

14:52

some friends that I trust, and I my wife

14:54

said this and this and my friends go,

14:56

man, she's right. You're an

14:58

idiot. Right? And so I need that

15:00

sort of iron sharpening iron,

15:02

right, to help me reframe something that

15:04

my body's taken off on. Yeah.

15:06

Well,

15:06

a good definition of sanity

15:08

in some real sense and

15:10

and I don't mean this in a

15:13

trivial or a coy way is that

15:15

you're saying if you can behave

15:17

well enough, that other

15:20

people can stand having you around

15:22

so that they can provide you with

15:24

corrective feedback. And if

15:26

you're sane enough so that other people

15:28

can stand having you around, They'll

15:30

reward you when you deserve to be

15:32

rewarded, and they'll punish you

15:34

when you deserve to be punished. And all

15:36

you need to do is pay really careful

15:39

attention to that feedback,

15:40

and you'll

15:41

be sane and

15:44

properly situated. Now, you know, that can

15:46

go wrong if the entire social

15:48

community takes a pathological turn,

15:50

and that makes things more complicated. And

15:52

that does happen from time to time. But

15:54

generally speaking, You have to

15:56

be surrounded by people, and so we could

15:58

walk through that. Very few

16:00

people can function effectively without an

16:02

intimate relationship.

16:04

is because you don't have anybody who's

16:06

monitoring you over the medium to long run if you

16:08

don't have an intimate relationship. And

16:10

so how can you how can you

16:12

organize yourself intelligibly

16:15

insanely without the medium

16:17

to long term orientation. You just

16:19

can't do it. And how can you tell if you're

16:21

being a civilized human being, if you're not bouncing your

16:24

behavior off someone really close

16:26

to you continually,

16:28

you you you can't. Right? You you

16:30

need the intimate relationship. You need the

16:32

family. Parents and siblings,

16:34

children for the same reason, and

16:36

you need friends. You talk a lot in your

16:38

book about friends. And you have some

16:40

good practical advice, I would

16:42

say, and and this would be something for us

16:44

usually to concentrate on. I would

16:46

say, as You talk about

16:48

how people can make friends because

16:50

people really don't know. And so

16:52

maybe you can share some of that with people who are

16:54

watching and listening. Yeah, I

16:55

think there's there's two tracks I wanna follow. And

16:58

one, we can circle back to.

17:00

This conversation we're happening,

17:02

we're having right now, evolutionarily is

17:04

I think we're running a fantastic

17:07

experiment because for all of the history

17:09

of mankind, Nobody

17:11

could sit in and listen to you and

17:13

I dialoguing this way unless they

17:15

were in physical proximity, which

17:17

that physical proximity is a form

17:19

of intimacy. We're all in the same room, sharing

17:21

the same meal, sharing the same fire. And

17:24

now we've created this bizarre

17:26

intimacy where people can drive to work

17:28

for two hours, you know, one way

17:30

and they can go on road trips.

17:33

But they're sitting by the fire with us.

17:35

Right? And so there's this this

17:37

intellectual intimacy that's happening, but I think

17:39

our bodies are hollering at us. When it

17:41

comes to making

17:43

friends, I spent a

17:45

a seasoned man. I was

17:47

two inches from my wife

17:50

And I was two thousand miles away

17:52

from her. And I shared a bed

17:54

with the woman that I loved, and I

17:56

was profoundly lonely. And I always thought lonely

17:59

was proximal. Right? You have nobody around

18:01

you. And so I think it's proximal

18:03

and it's emotional.

18:06

I've I've mastered the art of being alone. I'm an

18:08

introvert by nature, just a nerd. I

18:10

love to read my books. And so

18:12

I've I've mastered of being alone a

18:14

room. I can wave and smile and be

18:16

completely on my own

18:18

planet. And that has a physiological

18:20

and a spiritual cost to it.

18:22

And so What I had to stop doing

18:24

was beating myself up for

18:26

having a lack of character or

18:28

I'm a failure. No, I I

18:30

needed I needed to learn a new set of skills

18:32

in that skill set was making

18:34

friends. When you're a

18:36

child, when you're in middle school, when you're in high school,

18:38

when you're in university, everything

18:40

is geared towards community. You play

18:43

games together. You don't play games

18:45

together. It's all about doing things together. And then

18:47

you cross that graduation stage or you

18:49

get out of the army and the

18:51

world looks at you and says, it's now you

18:53

versus everybody. And so I think we just have to say, hey, I don't

18:55

have a skill set. So what do I gotta

18:57

do? I think we overthink it.

18:59

I think hospitality going

19:02

first, asking people over to your

19:04

house, to your events, to your

19:06

thing, and just go first, get

19:08

over yourself at it as you just gotta

19:10

quit smoking at some point. I just gotta make

19:12

friends at some point. I'm gonna go first. People are

19:14

gonna say no. They're going to challenge

19:16

you. You're gonna find out that nobody wants to

19:18

be around you. So you gotta go to the mirror

19:20

and ask yourself, what is it about me that

19:22

I'm projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with

19:24

me? It it really challenges. But,

19:26

man, just stop over pathologizing.

19:28

Let's just go be weird. Go go be weird

19:30

and be hospitable. Go first. Go first. Yeah.

19:32

Well, you know, you you said that you're an

19:34

introvert and thing about introverts is

19:36

they often have to learn consciously

19:38

how

19:38

to socialize. Right? Because extroverts --

19:41

That's right. Well, they're tilted so hard in that direction. It

19:43

just comes naturally to them. We could

19:45

walk through some of the initial stages in

19:48

forming relationships in very

19:50

behavioral manner because people might find that

19:52

useful. So Benjamin Franklin

19:55

said that one of the things you could do when you first

19:57

moved into a neighborhood was to ask

19:59

one of your immediate neighbors for a

20:01

very small favor.

20:03

Right?

20:04

And the

20:05

reason for that is because it gets the rest

20:08

reciprocal trade moving

20:10

in the proper direction.

20:12

So people like to be of service

20:14

to other people. And if you ask

20:16

someone to do you a very small favor, then

20:19

you put

20:20

yourself in their debt, and then

20:22

you can also reciprocates. So you allow

20:24

them to show themselves in their best light

20:27

because you allow them to easily

20:29

indicate that they're positive and

20:31

friendly and willing to do something for someone else. And they're very

20:33

happy about that if you get it right. And

20:35

then you're in their debt, so you can offer to

20:37

do them a favor. But

20:39

but we gotta be we have to be very

20:41

honest about how counter cultural that

20:43

is now. because overnight,

20:46

just with a snap of the finger,

20:49

We don't ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore,

20:51

man. We just get on Amazon Prime and it

20:53

shows up at our house or we don't ask a friend to

20:55

drive us to the airport anymore. We just click

20:57

a button on our cell phone and somebody comes and picks us up.

21:00

And overnight, I think we have

21:02

shifted this idea from

21:04

I'm gonna honor you and allow you

21:07

to be of service to me, which is a

21:09

gift. And I'm going to allow my

21:11

needs to be heard out out. I

21:13

need some sugar. I need an egg. I need a ride. I need you to

21:15

help me move. Right? The the worst

21:17

call. We've we've suddenly

21:19

become we we think we're

21:21

a burden. Doctor Peterson, we think

21:23

we are a burden to our friends and

21:25

neighbors. And burdensomeness,

21:28

perceived burdensomeness, The

21:30

idea that people are better off without me.

21:33

That's one of the pillars of suicidal

21:35

ideation, and we our

21:37

entire civilization has run

21:39

that way. we are we

21:41

consider ourselves a burden. And

21:43

so the very act of

21:46

asking a neighbor to help

21:48

with something is an act of defiance

21:50

in our current era. Go for it, man.

21:52

You wanna be crazy, and you wanna be

21:54

counter cultural, ask somebody to help you

21:56

with something. What a gift? Well,

21:58

you can

21:59

also do things. If you move to

22:01

a new neighborhood, for example,

22:03

you can can there'll be

22:05

a local cafe somewhere.

22:07

You can go there once a week for

22:10

like several months or twice a week at a

22:12

regular time, and you can

22:14

introduce yourself to the owner

22:16

and you can tell them that you've moved into the neighborhood and you

22:18

can introduce yourself to the waiters and the

22:20

waitresses and you can become a known

22:23

fixture there and you'll start to feel

22:25

comfortable there. And then you'll be able to

22:27

start to have conversations with people there. And you

22:29

can do the same thing with people at your

22:31

local store. You

22:33

have to and, you know, I had clients who didn't

22:35

even know how to introduce themselves properly,

22:37

which can be a real impediment

22:39

for people. So, you know, you

22:41

say to someone, well, you look them in

22:43

the eye because then you're watching

22:45

their face and then you can see

22:47

how they're reacting and

22:49

you're unconscious socialization

22:51

abilities will kick in if you attend to

22:53

the right queues. You say,

22:55

hello there, I'm Jordan Peterson.

22:58

I just moved into the neighborhood. I'm gonna

23:00

be dropping into your store pretty often. I

23:02

thought I'd introduce myself and then you stick

23:04

out your hand and you look at them.

23:06

and you make sure that you're paying attention to

23:09

them and not you and

23:11

you say what's your name and everyone

23:13

responds positively to that

23:16

they're and maybe if they don't, then

23:18

it's time to find a different corner

23:20

store. Right. You know? And then you try to

23:22

remember their name. But if you don't, you say,

23:24

you know, we met the other day, but I'm

23:26

terrible with names. I forgot your name. Could you tell

23:28

me again? And if you do that,

23:30

then, you know, that little corner

23:32

store, then it's not completely foreign

23:34

territory. And you're not alienated

23:36

from it. You're gonna start to feel comfortable. And

23:38

the same thing is true for this place you might

23:40

go every week. You have to establish

23:42

these routines of socialization

23:45

because otherwise you're in enemy territory,

23:47

at least unknown territory, and now it's

23:49

extremely hard on you physiologically.

23:51

because you don't know if you're surrounded by friends or

23:53

foe way. And

23:54

so it's the same way you can

23:57

imagine. You are proposing an act

23:59

of revolution by going

24:01

to a new environment and sticking out

24:03

your hand and saying, hi. My name is John.

24:05

What is your name? And actually listening to the

24:07

response. That is a revolutionary act.

24:09

That is That's a transformative. I

24:11

take my son, he's twelve, and

24:13

so I've started being highly intentional

24:15

about our relationship because I'm

24:17

I'm in the early stages of of

24:20

raising what is soon to be released in

24:22

the wild, a grown man. And

24:24

so we have breakfast every Tuesday

24:26

at this establishment here in the states called Waffle

24:28

House. It's just a chain diner. And

24:31

one of the revolutionary acts I'm

24:33

trying to teach him is the act of

24:35

the

24:36

radical generosity.

24:40

And I I, again, I struggle with

24:42

sometimes basic high my

24:44

name is. And so the way

24:46

I began doing this, the Waffle

24:48

House opened in our small town outside of

24:50

Nashville, Tennessee, I

24:52

started over tipping in a in

24:54

a significant way because nobody

24:56

wants to be working the six AM shift on a

24:58

Tuesday at a waffle house. And so I told my

25:00

son, hey, we're gonna take care of

25:02

these these waitresses. They're awesome. They bring

25:04

us coffee. They bring us juice. They're they're

25:06

lovely. And within a

25:08

few months, they know our order when we

25:10

get there, they are smiling when we

25:12

walk in, and it has absolutely

25:14

transitioned our social

25:16

interaction. Now I look forward to spending time with

25:18

my son also hanging out with these great

25:20

waitresses and asking about their cool

25:22

tattoos. Right? But it's just going

25:24

first. It's just going first. Going first. Going first.

25:26

Yeah. Well, that emphasis on

25:28

somewhat excess

25:28

generosity in those situations is

25:31

extremely useful too because it

25:33

doesn't take that much to

25:35

distinguish yourself on

25:37

the attentional front from the

25:39

run of the mill customer. And

25:41

you know, you only need imagine this.

25:43

You probably only need

25:46

between ten maybe under ten

25:48

places to go in

25:50

your social community in order to

25:52

be well situated. And so

25:54

you said, Is it week with

25:56

your son? Yes, sir. k. So

25:58

we could do some quick

25:59

arithmetic around that. How long how

26:02

long in all does that whole event

26:05

take? We are by the

26:06

time we sit down and get him

26:08

to school late every Tuesday,

26:11

It's probably a grand total of forty five minutes. Okay.

26:13

And what about

26:14

travel time? It's

26:16

probably

26:16

twenty minutes there. So it's it's about an

26:19

hour and a half. Okay. So it's ninety

26:21

-- Full circle. -- it's ninety minutes and that's

26:23

once a week.

26:25

Yes, sir. Okay. So then you figure, you

26:27

wake for about

26:28

sixteen hours a day.

26:30

And of that wake time,

26:33

say twelve hours is useful for doing the sorts of

26:35

things that you're doing with your son because you're gonna

26:37

spend four hours in just self

26:40

maintenance. Right? So let's say twelve

26:42

hours, ninety minutes is

26:44

about approximately one tenth of that.

26:46

We'll just use that as an approximation

26:48

for easy mathematics. So

26:50

you've you've fixed

26:52

ten percent of one day,

26:55

and there's seven days. And so

26:57

that's basically three percent of your life. You

26:59

fixed by doing that. And that means you'd

27:01

only have to fix thirty more things and you'd

27:03

have fixed a hundred percent of your

27:06

life. Well, you know How

27:08

about you tell us story in your book about one of

27:10

your friends who was talking about exercise

27:12

and health and he said to

27:14

you, change the things you do

27:16

every day. The

27:18

things

27:18

that repeat. Those are

27:20

your life.

27:22

That's

27:22

the routine around which your life is built.

27:24

People very much overvalue

27:27

special occasions and vacations and that

27:29

sort of thing. And they don't pay nearly enough

27:31

attention to the kind of thing you're doing with

27:33

your son. It's like that's once a week. You might

27:35

be able to do that for years.

27:37

It's three percent of your life. If you

27:39

get that perfect, now

27:41

you've got three percent taken care of and you

27:43

can move to the next small piece and do the

27:45

same thing. You do that with some friends

27:47

and you you do that with your wife,

27:50

for example, couple of times a

27:52

week for a couple of hour sessions

27:54

couple of hour sessions. You know, one of

27:56

the things I found in my practice was that

27:58

is useful for people who are

28:01

trying to embark on an intimate relationship as

28:03

you need you need to

28:04

talk to your wife

28:06

about the domestic economy

28:09

and the practicalities of your life

28:11

together for about ninety minutes

28:13

a week. and

28:15

you need to date at

28:17

least once a week

28:19

for that length of time or or maybe twice

28:21

if you could manage that. And if you

28:23

don't do that, you will become isolated

28:25

and lonely and you'll develop a

28:27

backlog of communication. And if

28:29

you don't fix that, you'll end up

28:31

divorced and then you'll be fixing it for the rest of

28:33

your life. Absolutely.

28:35

Absolutely. And whenever, man,

28:38

backlog of communication, I

28:40

love that. I love that

28:42

idea as though I'm just putting rocks in a

28:44

backpack and eventually that backpack is

28:46

gonna wear me down. If I don't have a

28:48

regular practice of of

28:50

communication. And again, somehow,

28:52

this became a moral

28:54

or characterological issue.

28:56

I think it's skills issue, man. I think taking some of

28:58

the drama and smoke out of it and

29:00

just saying, hey, I don't know how to I don't know how

29:02

to tell you wife I've

29:05

never seen it done. I didn't see it in my house growing up.

29:07

I've never seen it. I don't know how to do

29:09

this. So I wanna practice once a

29:11

week. Let's go over our calendar. Let's go

29:13

over our budget. how are we gonna

29:15

spend money this week? And

29:18

let's practice. I'm gonna try to tell

29:20

you what I need this week.

29:22

about five years ago, my marriage was

29:25

I mean, we were hanging on by

29:27

a spider's web, just hanging on. And so my

29:29

wife and I realized, we we gotta if we're gonna hang

29:31

on to this thing, we're gonna have to rebuild

29:33

it out of ash. Right? And

29:36

I can't tell you, I'm a six foot two hundred

29:38

ninety five pound. I lived in Texas my

29:40

whole life. Texas male.

29:42

What it took for me to look across

29:44

the table and tell my wife? I

29:48

just occasionally want you to tell me that

29:50

you're proud of me. That was a hard thing for me to

29:52

say. And I didn't even realize how desperately

29:54

had been searching for her approval for the

29:57

first fifteen years we'd been

29:59

married. and how much I kept going out

30:01

on a limb and on a limb and on a limb. And

30:03

I was taking her nonresponses rejection,

30:05

and I never put my needs out there.

30:07

And I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it. And

30:10

then she said, man, that would have

30:12

been super helpful fifteen years ago.

30:14

And now she makes it

30:16

a regular she makes it a regular practice of our

30:18

marriage to say, hey, I see you

30:20

and I appreciate what you're doing for our family.

30:22

Kolly, what a gift? And I

30:24

didn't know that doing the dishes

30:26

was akin to foreplay. Great.

30:28

I will knock those dishes out all day

30:30

long. It's about practicing, saying your

30:32

needs out loud. And then,

30:34

man, get

30:34

out of your head, the number of hours I've

30:37

spent researching workout programs

30:39

when I could've just gone to workout or

30:41

researching how to tell your wife instead

30:43

of just telling her What a waste of

30:45

time? We have we have too much data, man. We

30:47

have too much information. We need to go do. Go do.

30:49

Go act. Go on. Well, you you can have

30:51

a preliminary conversation with

30:54

your partner let's say, and say

30:56

something like, look, we need to

30:58

tell each other what

31:00

we need and want. And

31:02

we're both too stupid to do

31:04

that because we don't remember what we

31:06

needed one. And we have almost no

31:09

practice at it. And worse, here's

31:11

something about that that's really quite

31:13

sad and frightening. It's

31:15

like, you know, if one of the things

31:17

you wanted to hear is that your wife

31:19

was grateful to you for, let's say,

31:21

providing properly for the family.

31:23

So say, proud of you. There's

31:25

a a part of you that's quite

31:27

insecure that wants that message

31:29

and you're vulnerable on that point. Hey. And

31:31

so then if you share that vulnerability,

31:35

the

31:35

person with whom

31:36

you're sharing it knows exactly where to

31:38

stick you if they want. And

31:40

so it's real trust to do

31:43

that. But the alternative is assuming that, and

31:45

people do this all the time, they'll say

31:47

things like, well, if you loved me, you'd know

31:49

what I wanted. It's

31:50

like, well, first of all,

31:52

That's

31:52

a pretty perfect love. And

31:55

second, I'm not clairvoyant. Right? Yeah.

31:57

Well, right. Well, you're not even smart enough to do

31:59

that for yourself.

31:59

Most of the time, you ask someone

32:02

else. So know, you can make an agreement with your partner and

32:04

say, look, here's

32:06

something I'd like to

32:08

hear

32:08

you say, And

32:10

here's the words I'd like to hear, will

32:12

you just say that? Another

32:14

person might object and they'll say, well, that's

32:17

That sounds false if I do it or it won't

32:19

be real because we're just

32:21

practicing it

32:21

and it's it's artificial. And

32:24

then you think, well, wait a

32:26

second. We're

32:27

gonna be together for the next

32:29

ten thousand

32:30

days.

32:32

And if it takes yeah.

32:35

Yeah. We're more And if it takes

32:38

twenty stupid practices

32:40

to

32:40

get it right,

32:42

that's not so much stacked

32:44

up over ten thousand days. You

32:46

know, and it might be many marriages, I would say,

32:48

there's probably ten things

32:50

that each person wants to hear

32:53

on a quasi regular basis

32:55

that would make the difference between the marriage

32:58

succeeding and the marriage failing. But it means

33:00

you have to sit down with your partner and

33:02

say, look, we should decide jointly what we

33:04

need in one and we should have enough

33:06

courage to try to express

33:08

ourselves stupidly in

33:10

the attempt to get it, and then

33:12

allow ourselves to make mistakes. You

33:14

know, while we're practicing. I

33:15

love

33:16

it. I find that

33:18

we've become goal obsessed

33:21

And so if I wanna do these things so that

33:23

I can keep my marriage,

33:25

I find that I end up way out

33:27

on a limb. I find out by chasing somewhere I

33:29

don't wanna go. I find

33:32

it more valuable to say, I wanna

33:34

live a life that is not

33:36

not chasing happiness because that's just cocaine and

33:38

cotton candy. But I wanna chase a life

33:40

of joy And all of the

33:42

data tells me a good

33:44

marriage, a good connection

33:46

with the romantic intimate partner over a

33:48

long period of time is

33:50

the best bet I have in

33:53

maximizing joy. And so if I'm gonna do that, that

33:55

means I've gotta be awkward. And by

33:57

the way, If you can stand in front of

33:59

somebody naked and say, do you see

34:01

me? And do you think I'm beautiful? Do

34:03

you wanna join bodies with

34:05

me? Surely, you can say,

34:07

hey. When I see dishes in the sink, it

34:09

makes me feel like I'm not being

34:11

the romantic partner. I feel like

34:13

I'm less of a wife. because I've

34:15

I've created this narrative on my head that this is what a perfect

34:17

wife does or a perfect husband does, can you help

34:20

with the dishes?

34:22

Good gosh. You can do You can stand

34:24

in front of somebody naked and say, here I am. Shirley, you can say, hey, can you help with the

34:26

dishes? Right? And then we have to be

34:29

stopped being so looking

34:32

for people coming at us. What's

34:34

that great saying? What have you been looking for in

34:37

the world? You're sure to find start

34:39

receiving those that feedback as an invitation, not as a you've

34:41

been screwing this up. Right? because my wife could

34:43

have heard that me saying, hey, I just want you to say

34:45

you're proud of me every once in

34:48

a while. as me throwing a grenade. Right? You're

34:50

failing me because you're not doing these things.

34:52

She took it as here's an invitation.

34:54

Here's a way you can love me -- Yeah. --

34:56

better. And what

34:58

a gift man. What a gift? Yeah.

35:00

Well, you can get over ourselves, man. You can help people box those sorts of things

35:02

into by saying, look, Let's

35:05

make

35:05

this discussion about the smallest

35:08

thing possible. Right? We're

35:10

not we're not opening up

35:12

Pandora's

35:12

box and assessing the validity of our

35:14

entire marriage. We're gonna try to get one

35:17

small thing slightly better. And we're

35:19

gonna assume that lots of things

35:21

are going well. And so We're

35:23

gonna sit down for ninety minutes a week,

35:25

maybe that's not all at once. And

35:27

we're gonna share what's on our minds

35:29

and we're gonna talk about what we

35:31

would like to see happen and how we

35:34

would respond positively to

35:36

that. And we're not gonna leap to the conclusion

35:38

that that's a generic criticism of the

35:40

whole marriage. This is partly

35:42

conversations, hey, especially when they

35:44

have developed a backlog

35:46

of communication. So

35:48

my wife and I had a rule too, which was, well, we had

35:50

a couple of rules that helped us along with this

35:52

to to not have the backlog. And

35:54

one of the rules was of

35:56

the rules was Don't agree

35:59

to anything that you don't agree to. Because the

36:01

last thing well,

36:03

the last thing I

36:05

wanted to hear five

36:07

years down the road after we had

36:09

embarked on a particular pathway

36:12

was, well, I didn't really wanna do

36:14

that, but I just went along with it because I

36:16

thought you wanted to. It's

36:17

like, well, what now am I what am I supposed

36:19

to do both now? You know, that

36:22

was five years ago and we talked

36:24

about it and I

36:25

didn't want you to agree because you thought it

36:27

was easier to

36:27

agree. I wanted

36:28

a consensus. You know, and

36:30

so and the corollary to

36:31

that was If

36:34

we're going to talk about something that needs to be addressed now and that will

36:36

be fixed in the future, we don't

36:38

get to drag up the past. because

36:41

that's

36:41

another thing that happens. Right? As you start talking

36:43

about things that are problematic and one

36:46

person or the other goes,

36:48

well, you've You always act like this. You've always acted like this, and

36:50

there's no chance in the future that you're ever

36:52

going to change. It's

36:54

like, well,

36:54

like well instantly you're in

36:56

a fight because your whole character

36:58

past, present, and future, has just been

37:00

savage. When when the conversation

37:02

should be something like,

37:05

the Our meal

37:06

times might go fifteen percent

37:08

better if after you were

37:10

done eating and you and

37:13

we'd all finished You brought your dishes to the sink and

37:15

rinse them off and put them in the

37:18

dishwasher. And here's what I'm willing to do in

37:20

return for that. Well,

37:22

I

37:22

what i liked it like to I like to

37:25

even take it one step further it because I

37:27

find I react. When somebody says

37:29

you need as soon as somebody points

37:31

their finger at me, I

37:33

I just I am fully limerick, man.

37:35

I go I go fight or flight

37:38

instantly. And so I I

37:40

tend to say,

37:41

hey, Here's good example. I work here at

37:43

Ramsey Solutions in Nashville

37:46

and have a history of helping people get out

37:48

of debt, pay their financial

37:50

debts off. and work

37:52

together as a community and as a couple to pay the

37:54

debts off. One of the most common

37:56

questions we get is how do I get my

37:58

partner on board? like, he wants to just buy a huge pickup truck and buy

37:59

the biggest house and he's run the credit cards

38:02

up. And I keep coming to him with

38:04

these numbers.

38:06

and it's it's very short or it's not about numbers. And if you come at somebody

38:08

like you need to sell your truck and you need to do

38:10

this, well now you've started a war,

38:14

There's a difference when you sit down and say, hey, I'm scared to

38:16

death and I can't breathe because

38:19

we are so indebted. There's

38:21

something about saying it would really be a

38:23

gift to me if when dinner was over, if

38:25

you took and rinsed your plate and just took

38:27

six seconds to put it in the dishwasher, that'd be

38:29

a gift to me. that's different

38:32

than you need to take your dishes out. Right? And

38:34

one of those puts me on the defensive, one of those

38:36

is an invitation. And I've just

38:38

decided, man, my life is too short. to continue

38:40

to do anything other

38:42

than invitations except in very few

38:44

moments. Howard

38:46

Bauchner: Yeah.

38:46

Yeah.

38:47

Well, that conversation about debt too is one of the ways

38:49

that you cooperate

38:50

and negotiate with your spouse

38:52

and your friends, your family for

38:56

that matter, is also to jointly develop something

38:58

like a joint vision.

39:00

You know? Because you might be able to sit down with

39:02

your wife and say, well, look,

39:05

If we

39:05

could have the dinner times that we

39:07

really wanted, if they were

39:09

optimal like you've done with your

39:11

son, let's say, what

39:12

would that look like?

39:14

Well, let's say you have a couple of kids, you think, well, do all

39:16

want to sit down together as a family? That's

39:18

a this has to be a question,

39:20

right, to both of you. Yes.

39:22

that you're actually imagining. Do we all wanna sit

39:25

down? Okay. Yes. Well, how often? Do

39:27

we wanna do that like

39:30

seven nights a week? Is this something that's actually a crucial

39:32

foundation for our family? Or can

39:34

we do it five nights a week and

39:36

maybe do something different on Friday?

39:39

And you think, well, all those micro things have to be

39:42

negotiated? And the answer is, those aren't

39:44

micro things. You do that

39:46

in a day. They're

39:48

absolutely foundational. And and then you

39:50

wanna hear what the other person has to say

39:52

because if you don't, they're not

39:54

gonna be fully on board, plus they

39:56

might have a better idea than you. You

39:58

never know. So let's

39:59

say we decide, well, we're gonna have

40:02

dinner together

40:03

at

40:04

six o'clock six o'clock.

40:06

five

40:06

nights a week and we're gonna let people forage one night a

40:08

week and maybe sit in front of the TV

40:10

and we're gonna go out one night

40:14

a week. something like that. And we'll try that for a while. And then the

40:16

next question is, well,

40:18

what would we like to serve? And

40:21

who's going to cook and who's going to clean up

40:24

and and if we wanted

40:25

it to go as well as it possibly could, how

40:27

are we going to get the kids

40:30

involved? And Do we want to experiment with some new foods? And, you

40:32

know, that meal time if that's the

40:34

evening meal, let's say that's

40:36

ninety minutes,

40:37

That's more than one tenth of your

40:40

day. And so that's

40:41

ten percent of your life. That's

40:43

literally ten percent of your life.

40:45

If you get the Yeah. But it's it's bigger. It's

40:47

compound interest. That grows over time. I

40:49

think that ten per you take care it's like

40:51

it's like putting fifteen percent of your income

40:54

in retirement. it grows

40:56

to infinitely more than fifteen percent of your

40:58

income over time. Yeah. Right. So if you take care of that

41:00

ten percent, it's not just taking care of that

41:02

ten percent. Suddenly, if your marriage is in sync, you're infinitely better

41:04

parent. Right. Infinitely better

41:06

citizen, infinitely better worker, and it

41:08

becomes a much

41:10

very recursive The famed

41:12

psychiatrist William Glasser, he gave

41:14

me I love his analogy. He

41:18

says that he could he his famed line was he could fix

41:20

any marriage in two sessions. And

41:22

he said, we think in

41:24

pictures, but we speak

41:26

in words. And if

41:28

couples can simply align their

41:30

pictures -- Yeah. -- then you get a very

41:32

clear path. So when my wife comes to me on a

41:34

Monday and says, hey, This weekend,

41:36

you and me, we're gonna

41:38

go on the hottest date,

41:40

and then she just walks away. Monday

41:42

night, I'm I'm wondering where we're going. Tuesday night, I'm wondering what

41:44

I'm wearing and for how long right by

41:47

Wednesday and Thursday, I'm wondering who's

41:49

gonna keep the kids and I don't care because they're gonna be fine and what

41:51

hotel we're gonna end up at. And then Saturday

41:54

comes along and she I show up in a suit and

41:56

she shows up

41:58

in running shorts and a t shirt.

42:00

And I say, what are you doing? What And she says, what

42:02

are you doing? And I say, I thought we're going on a hot

42:04

date, and

42:06

she says, It's

42:06

seven seven tacos for ten dollars done at taco hut. We're

42:09

going on a hot date. Hey,

42:11

I love tacos. And

42:14

I

42:14

hope she loves the occasional rendezvous, but we

42:16

both used the word date and we had very different

42:18

pictures. Now I'm upset, she's upset,

42:21

and we just So in our in my house, every

42:23

single day of the week, every day I'm not on the

42:25

road, we

42:26

ask ourselves this question, hey, what's

42:28

the picture of today look like?

42:30

It's just become a vernacular in her home. And so she I need some space this

42:33

evening, I need some time by myself, I

42:35

I tend to go Okay.

42:38

Cool. After dinner and after the kids and after you're

42:40

done riding and I won't hassle you for the

42:42

last eight minutes of the day. For her, she's thinking

42:44

the moment you walk in this house

42:47

I'm out and I might come back in a week. Right?

42:49

We just have to align our pictures and I'm cool either

42:51

way and she's cool either way. It's just

42:54

managing those expectations and being so

42:56

clear with one another. Yeah. Well,

42:58

that's exactly the process of

43:00

defining a shared vision. And

43:02

one of the

43:02

things that's lovely about that is it

43:06

makes you You're not reactive then, so you're not

43:08

the thing that's being chased by the

43:10

monster or the dread. You're the thing

43:12

that's actively conceptualizing

43:14

the manner in which the future is going to shape

43:16

itself. And what you have is

43:19

the delightful opportunity to share a joint vision that

43:21

in principle would be better for both of

43:24

you than anything you could do alone. Like you

43:26

said that all

43:28

the data shows that one of the best

43:30

things you can do in your life to maximize your long term health

43:32

and increase your probability of

43:34

at least some joy is

43:37

to have a functional long term

43:39

intimate relationship. And so you have to

43:41

attend to that. And a huge part of that

43:43

is the development of these

43:45

shared visions. And It's really useful to to

43:48

develop

43:48

micro visions. And so, I know

43:50

we just talk What

43:51

would you tell what would you tell clients back

43:53

in the day? when

43:55

they would come to you and they'd have a three year old and they

43:58

would have just had and they have an infant, they

44:00

have child number two. And

44:02

they

44:02

and they would say would

44:04

say, we're

44:05

not having sex anymore. We have like an intimacy. We become co managers

44:07

of our house. And your response as

44:09

a clinical psychologist would

44:12

be, you've got to schedule it. You got to put it on the calendar. And the response

44:14

always is, I don't want to do that anymore.

44:16

And what do you what do you What's the follow-up? Great.

44:18

That's a great question. Well, my first

44:22

response is Well, how often do

44:23

you want to have sex? And

44:26

people hate that people hate

44:28

that question. And so they

44:30

avoid it. they

44:32

say, well, you know, we don't really wanna be that calculating

44:34

about it. It's like, okay, right,

44:36

whatever. We're gonna parameterize

44:38

this. Once a year,

44:41

So I know that's probably too little.

44:44

Okay. Fifteen times a

44:46

day. So I know that's probably too

44:48

much. Okay. So now we got some

44:50

parameters here. It's somewhere

44:52

between once a year and fifteen times a

44:54

day. Let's see if we can narrow

44:56

that in. And this does make people

44:58

uncomfortable. Right? They don't

45:00

wanna specify their needs and wants. And I think it's What's this what's the

45:02

source of that discomfort? What it where's that

45:04

problem? I think they're embarrassed that they

45:06

need anything.

45:08

like, so it's just a fundamental shame. Like, it's same exposure

45:11

of nakedness. And then

45:13

they're they're unwilling to

45:15

share the information with their partner

45:18

because it's revealing.

45:20

And then they're afraid they're gonna be rebuffed.

45:24

and they're afraid they're gonna get into a fight. They've got lots

45:26

of reasons not to wanna do it. But

45:28

then that rolls back

45:29

to those stories that

45:31

happen haunting them since they were kids. Right? Yeah.

45:33

Yeah. And and they don't wanna have the

45:35

difficult conversation upfront. And so we

45:37

might say, well, Okay,

45:39

let's let's be reasonable about this. It's gonna

45:41

be some number of times a week. You

45:44

guys have jobs. You have

45:46

kids. You're busy. You're not gonna have a

45:48

hot date every night. You just don't have time

45:50

for it. And so why don't we be

45:52

reasonable about it? We could try, let's aim

45:54

for something like twice

45:56

a week. It's like, can you think?

45:57

Or maybe we could start with once a

45:59

week. Because zero once is a

46:01

lot more than zero. It's a

46:03

lot more than zero. And so

46:05

then you think, well, alright. And then they

46:07

say something like, well, you know, we

46:09

did all that dating when

46:10

we were dating and And

46:13

now we don't wanna do that anymore. It's like,

46:15

okay. So what are you saying here

46:17

exactly? You're

46:18

saying that you don't want any more

46:20

romance and you don't want any

46:22

more heart sex. And you

46:24

don't wanna put any work into it, and

46:26

it's just gonna happen magically even

46:28

though it's clearly not happening. That's

46:32

that's your theory. And then let's let's

46:34

run that theory out. Okay. So now you

46:36

have new kids and that's

46:38

gonna be It's gonna be like that

46:40

for a few years. Maybe till they're

46:42

ten or eleven, you're gonna be

46:44

occupied with your family. And so now you have a

46:46

sexless marriage with no intimacy

46:48

for a decade. So what

46:49

does that look like in, like, two thousand

46:51

and thirty two when you're in

46:53

divorce court?

46:54

Right. Right. How's that work? You're recovering

46:56

from some addiction. Right. Right. So

46:58

you of of work or of alcohol

47:00

or whatever it is because your body's gotta

47:03

it's got to meet that need somewhere. And

47:05

if it can't get it If it

47:07

can't get it a true deep connection, it come up with all kind of cheap substitutes. Right?

47:09

Yeah. Like an affair.

47:12

That's right.

47:13

Yeah. So so, of course, you don't wanna do

47:15

this because it requires difficult negotiation,

47:18

but how would you like to have your marriage

47:20

deteriorate into hell over a ten

47:22

year period? How does that sound

47:24

as an alternative? It's like, well, that's not very

47:26

good. It's like, okay. So which of these two

47:28

things are you more

47:30

afraid of? And then the when people

47:32

really think that through, they think, oh, yeah. Well, maybe, you know, I could take the risk

47:34

of making what I want known.

47:38

And

47:39

then okay. So now you specify it. Well, a date.

47:41

Which night? How long? How are you gonna

47:43

find

47:43

a babysitter? Are you gonna do

47:45

this every week? who's gonna

47:47

be responsible for what in relationship

47:50

to this date? All these details have to be

47:52

negotiated. And then we remember, you

47:54

know, by the same logic that we've

47:56

already employed, if this is

47:58

two hours a week, then

47:59

that's fifteen

48:01

percent of one day, that's another five

48:04

percent of your life, and it's intimate part of

48:06

your life. And if you got that right, my

48:08

God, you might be a much happier

48:10

person. And so that's another

48:12

one of the only twenty five things

48:14

you have take care of to

48:16

set your life up. But I mean, you

48:16

said why are people afraid to do this? Is

48:20

there

48:21

They're

48:22

afraid to show their vulnerability, man. They don't trust their partner. They

48:25

don't know how to negotiate. They don't even

48:27

know what they want themselves. You

48:30

know, like, It's not that easy for someone to admit that

48:32

they need any physical attention at all,

48:34

even though everyone

48:36

obviously does. because you're putting

48:38

yourself on the line then. And that is the

48:40

definition of intimacy in some

48:42

sense. Abs

48:44

Absolutely. I I can't

48:47

tell you and I know you've experienced this too whether it's

48:49

a whether it's a single mom with three

48:51

kids just trying to figure out

48:54

what day it is, or it's a

48:56

multi, multi millionaire who's

48:58

got resources that far exceed anything

49:00

I could imagine. I've

49:02

I've rarely rarely set

49:04

down across from somebody

49:06

and had them be able to

49:08

articulate what do you

49:10

actually want? they

49:12

cannot answer that question and they fill

49:14

it with addictions, they fill it

49:16

with hobbies, they fill it

49:18

with dopamine chase. They fill it with so

49:20

much stuff and nobody can

49:22

answer that question. What do

49:24

you want? Because I we

49:26

just don't have a culture that has a

49:28

shared vision of where we're headed. We

49:30

have a culture of you're hurting in somebody else's fault. And let's

49:32

let's start pointing fingers. And, man, we've

49:36

got to circle the wagons on a shared

49:38

vision moving forward. Yeah. Because there's what what do you want? Nope. That's not a question anybody

49:40

asks. It's what I don't want.

49:44

And why am I feeling just uncomfortable? Well, them. It's because of them. It's because

49:46

of them. Well, then if it's what you don't want,

49:48

you're driven by negative emotion.

49:51

If you're if you're running by not too.

49:53

If you're driven

49:54

by a vision, that's positive

49:56

emotion because approaching something positive

49:59

in a visionary manner generates positive

50:02

emotion. If you're only fleeing from things

50:04

you don't want, then you're constantly in a state

50:06

of anxiety

50:08

and depression. That's how it works because Where did that where did

50:10

that go? Where did we lose the

50:12

shared

50:12

vision? Why why can't somebody put a flag in the

50:14

ground and say, this is where we're headed?

50:16

That seems to be a complicated

50:18

question. You

50:19

know? I mean, I would say

50:21

that's the consequence in the most

50:23

fundamental sense of of

50:26

of the death of god in

50:28

the most fundamental way. It's the death

50:30

of it's the death of a sense

50:32

of higher order unity. Now

50:34

it's also a very complicated question. If you ask someone, what do

50:36

you want? If you could ask your wife that,

50:38

what do you want? You'll probably freeze

50:41

her into

50:41

a mobility because

50:44

It's really

50:44

like asking, how do you want all

50:46

of your

50:47

life to go? Please summarize. And

50:50

one of them Yeah.

50:52

Well, it's course, it's a lot,

50:54

you know. And one of the ways that you can deal with that, which you undoubtedly

50:56

know as or as someone who's

50:58

conversant with cognitive behavioral

51:02

techniques is You can ask people more micro questions too about what

51:04

they want. So you might say,

51:06

well, while we did that on the dating

51:07

front already, right? We talked about that. We talked

51:09

about how you

51:12

might think about how you want your meal times to go. We only talked about

51:14

dinner time, but you could talk about breakfast

51:16

and lunch as well. And then

51:19

you could And that there are

51:21

other micro domains that are very crucial that you

51:23

can also consider. It's like, so you

51:25

can ask yourself, Well,

51:27

if you

51:27

could have the education you

51:30

wanted, what would that look

51:32

like? If you

51:32

were on if you had the job

51:34

or career track that would

51:37

motivate you just hypothetically, what might

51:39

that look like? Sketch out

51:41

a bad plan.

51:43

If

51:44

you had some friends, do well, first, do you want

51:46

some friends? And if so, how many? And and if

51:49

you had friends and the right

51:52

number, How much time per

51:54

week would you like to spend with them? And

51:56

if you had some time outside of

51:59

work and

51:59

familial responsibilities, What

52:01

might you like to do with your time

52:03

that you would really like to do? And

52:05

the thing about these questions

52:07

is that they're They're

52:08

real questions. You know, there's this gospel statement that if

52:11

you knock the door will open and

52:13

that if you ask you will receive

52:15

and if you search you'll

52:17

find. If you seek, you'll find.

52:19

And people who are faithless in

52:21

some sense think about it as kind of a

52:23

hallmark greeting card approach to

52:26

the world. It's just Well, you just ask for things and they appear.

52:28

It's like, no.

52:30

That isn't what any

52:31

of that means. any about needs

52:33

it means It means Nothing

52:35

that you want will manifest itself unless

52:37

you aim for it. And you won't aim

52:39

for it unless you

52:40

know what it is. and

52:43

you won't know what it is unless you ask yourself.

52:45

And then you might say, well, why don't you

52:47

ask yourself? And the answer is, well,

52:50

maybe no one ever explained to you that you

52:52

needed to which is a

52:54

crucial issue. And then maybe you don't

52:56

also trust yourself. You

52:57

know, because you might think, well, if I

53:00

let myself know what

53:02

I wanted, Given my bloody track record, I would do

53:04

everything I could to screw it up. So I'll just

53:06

keep myself opaque to

53:08

myself so that

53:10

I don't fail at

53:12

something that's truly important. And then I can

53:14

always I can always

53:16

regale with myself with the idea

53:18

that, well, I

53:20

didn't succeed but I didn't really try. Had I really tried, I might have

53:22

succeeded. Whereas if you let yourself

53:24

know what you want and then you

53:26

try, you also set the preconditions

53:28

for failure. So

53:30

it's risk. Right? But the alternative is, well, you

53:32

don't know what you want. So

53:34

it is a meditative practice. Like, okay,

53:36

if I could have what I wanted,

53:39

Imagine the world was

53:42

constituted so that the entire planet

53:44

wouldn't explode in an apocalypse if I got

53:46

what I needed

53:48

and wanted. Yeah. Right? It's like, what would

53:50

that be? You know, what

53:52

time? Okay. So

53:52

is this is this is this

53:55

a cognitive well, I

53:57

don't wanna use jargon. Is this a thought exercise

53:59

or is this a feeling exercise?

54:01

because here's what I'm seeing

54:03

across the country. I

54:07

thought it would feel different when I finally got that associate vice president

54:09

job. Yeah. I thought I would feel a certain way

54:11

when I got a car. I thought if I could just get

54:13

to her to date me,

54:16

I would feel a certain way and

54:18

people are realizing in rapid

54:20

fashion. I thought if my

54:22

politician won, I would suddenly feel a

54:24

certain way here's a great III

54:26

testified in a court case against somebody years

54:29

ago, a former student of

54:32

mine got into some significant

54:34

did some really terrible things. And he

54:36

got a long jail sentence. And the next

54:38

morning, I woke up and I read what

54:41

the judge had written and in the

54:43

sentencing and I he

54:45

the judge used some

54:47

of my words and I remember feeling

54:49

sick to my stomach and I called the mentor of a psychology friend professor of

54:52

mine, and asked her, I said, man, I

54:54

feel gross And

54:56

she said John, nobody wins here. And I had

54:58

this perception that I was gonna feel a certain

55:01

way when justice was done and

55:03

the right thing happened. And

55:05

I realized, man, I had thought this through

55:07

cognitively, but I had not managed how are

55:09

you gonna actually feel? because nobody wins.

55:12

Somebody's life has ruined over here. Somebody's life has still

55:14

ruined over here. I think

55:16

we have to I I don't know. Let me You're

55:18

you're infinitely You've

55:20

got infinitely more wisdom than I do on

55:22

this, but I find that the cognitive exercise

55:24

is helpful but it really is important to sit down and say,

55:27

okay, how are you gonna feel five days after

55:29

you've bought this car that you think you

55:31

have to have? Well, okay. So

55:32

the first thing is is that

55:35

The

55:35

probability that you'll be

55:38

happy because

55:38

you've accomplished something in

55:40

any

55:41

permanent sense is

55:44

virtually zero. And

55:44

Yes. Thank you for saying that. Well, the reason for that is that isn't

55:47

what positive emotion is for.

55:50

Positive

55:51

emotion is to indicate that

55:53

you're making progress towards a valued goal. Yes.

55:56

Now that's the driver. Right? Not

55:57

not the finish line. Exactly. Well,

55:59

and

55:59

that's actually pharmacologically

56:02

separate. Right? Because a satiation reward,

56:04

which

56:04

would be the accomplishment of

56:07

something, calms you and

56:10

stops that program from running.

56:12

So for example, once you've become

56:14

vice president, if that was your

56:16

goal, then

56:18

the whole Pursuing

56:19

vice president program

56:22

comes to a halt. Now

56:23

the problem with that is it leaves you

56:25

without a goal. And it

56:27

also leaves empty

56:30

space, which you immediately have to fill.

56:32

And so often people

56:34

feel disquiet because

56:34

now they don't know what to do and they miss that rush because

56:37

they're no longer pursuing something.

56:40

And so

56:40

and so It's very important

56:42

to know that positive emotion is

56:44

experienced in relationship to a value value

56:46

goal. And then the question becomes, well,

56:48

what's the most valuable goal to pursue?

56:51

And that's really a metaphysical and a

56:53

theological question. In

56:54

terms of the mechanics of

56:57

feeling, so imagine

57:00

that you're negotiating the structure of a date

57:02

with

57:02

your wife and you're developing a shared vision.

57:04

And so you say, well,

57:06

say well on

57:07

Wednesday nights, Once a

57:10

week, we're gonna go for

57:12

dinner and maybe you specify the

57:14

restaurant and you're gonna make the arrangements and I'm

57:16

gonna get dressed up and then we're gonna go see

57:18

a movie and you're gonna pick the

57:20

movie and and then we're

57:21

gonna have a romantic

57:23

interlude afterwards. And we'll we'll run that

57:25

and see it goes. And then do is you wanna picture that

57:28

and you wanna watch how your body

57:29

reacts on the

57:32

emotional level.

57:34

And and that's a that's a bit of anisees. Right? And and you

57:36

can see, well, if we went to this restaurant,

57:38

oh, I don't really like that restaurant. I

57:41

think it's kind of expensive. I

57:43

had a bad time with waiters. I don't think I'd be happy there.

57:45

Then you say those things to your

57:48

partner, you say, well, I'm thinking this through.

57:50

I'm imagining

57:52

it. and here's the objections that are coming up. Maybe

57:54

they're wrong. Maybe I've got this wrong,

57:56

but I'd like to hear your input because, you

57:58

know, we wanna get this right.

58:01

should we reevaluate my feelings

58:04

about the restaurant, or should we think about a different

58:06

restaurant? And that should be a question

58:08

because you don't know. Maybe

58:10

you're just stupid about the restaurant or you're cheap or you're

58:12

afraid to go there because you don't have

58:14

the right clothes. I mean, you don't know.

58:16

Right? But

58:18

If you wanna get your feelings in line, you develop the vision

58:20

and then you you you

58:22

apprehend the vision with your feelings,

58:25

It's kind of what you do when you go to a movie and you fall

58:27

into the fantasy of the character. You know,

58:29

you embody all the emotions and you evaluate

58:31

it that way.

58:34

And so And and

58:35

the other problem with that

58:38

more goal directed approach that you

58:40

described is, like, I think

58:41

people should plan and they

58:43

should develop a vision You

58:44

have to develop the vision and then be detached from it

58:46

because it needs to be updated,

58:49

right, and modified. and hold

58:51

it loosely. Yeah. Yeah. You hold it loosely.

58:54

Yeah. That's right. Because you're fallible and maybe

58:56

you can come up with a better plan, not

58:58

every minute because you'll drive yourself

59:00

mad that way, but but now a

59:02

man. Or IIII was

59:04

obsessed as a young higher education

59:06

professional with becoming a college

59:08

president until

59:10

I sat

59:10

down at the senior leadership table I realized, I I

59:13

don't want

59:13

that life. I don't want I don't

59:15

want

59:15

that that life. I don't want

59:18

twenty 473 sixty five in the politics.

59:20

I don't want it asking for money. I don't want that

59:22

life and I didn't have I didn't

59:24

have a backup plan. I didn't know what to do. I was

59:26

rut like, you nailed it. I was completely

59:28

rudderless because I'd made

59:30

the finish line, the

59:32

the goal. going all the way back full circle to

59:35

her, the how how you open the

59:37

conversation, I think that becomes really important

59:39

to lay out an identity

59:41

and reverse engineer who do I want to be? Who do I

59:43

want to become? And the goals end up. You know,

59:45

it's like the old days when

59:48

you went to grad school, a PhD

59:50

was simply

59:52

a a it was a a high five on a journey

59:54

of of continued learning. I'm

59:56

gonna continue going on this rabbit hole.

59:59

and now it's become a destination and people walk

1:00:01

out and announce themselves as educated

1:00:03

because I've I've crossed this

1:00:05

finish line just because you get across a you run a marathon or walk a

1:00:07

marathon. It doesn't mean you're fit. Right? It doesn't mean you're healthy.

1:00:09

What well, we and we

1:00:12

talked about the

1:00:13

necessity of goals. And

1:00:15

so there's higher order goals.

1:00:18

And and you

1:00:18

need the higher order goals because they

1:00:21

integrate

1:00:21

you. And A goal

1:00:22

of becoming a college president is a higher order goal

1:00:25

than no goal at all and just sitting

1:00:27

in your bed and eating Cheetos.

1:00:30

Right?

1:00:30

So it's better plan than no plan at all,

1:00:32

but but then this is where then

1:00:35

it is were things become

1:00:37

profound in serious. And I would say

1:00:39

even in in a religious sense because

1:00:42

what's religious is about

1:00:42

what's profound in serious in

1:00:45

some sense by definition. So

1:00:47

you might say, well, who should I be? And you might

1:00:49

think, well, I should be the college president. I should

1:00:51

have this car. I should have this house. Those are

1:00:53

all very particularized versions

1:00:55

of yourself. And the problem

1:00:57

with them is is that

1:00:59

their concrete and final

1:01:01

actualities and

1:01:04

not processes. And

1:01:04

so here's a good vision. That's a high order vision. And I

1:01:06

think it's the vision that our whole culture

1:01:09

is founded on. I should

1:01:11

be the person who

1:01:14

genuinely confront the

1:01:16

problems and challenges

1:01:18

that confront me in my

1:01:20

life. So

1:01:21

that's that's a that's an attitude of active and voluntary

1:01:23

engagement. Right? I'm gonna give you an

1:01:25

identity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that's an

1:01:27

that's an identity of

1:01:30

process as well. It's like I'm gonna be someone who doesn't shy away

1:01:32

from the challenges of life. Okay? And

1:01:34

then I'm a guy who confronts it. Yeah. Right. Right.

1:01:36

And so that's Saint George and the Dragon,

1:01:40

and that's That's a precondition for therapeutic transformation. Because

1:01:42

in order for you to

1:01:44

improve, you have to

1:01:46

identify

1:01:46

the problem, the dragon,

1:01:49

and you have to be willing to face

1:01:51

it voluntarily. And so you say to yourself,

1:01:53

I'm going to do what I can to

1:01:55

develop the courage to confront the problems in

1:01:57

my life voluntarily. That's who I want to be.

1:01:59

And then another element

1:02:01

of that is,

1:02:04

Well,

1:02:04

I can't do that without telling the truth. I

1:02:06

have to be willing to see what's in front

1:02:08

of me and I have to be

1:02:10

willing to admit to myself what

1:02:13

I think in and I have to be willing to communicate that.

1:02:15

And so you could say, well, that makes you that makes

1:02:18

your goal something like, to think about

1:02:20

it architecturally, you talked about union

1:02:22

approaches earlier,

1:02:24

is that that makes you into a truth telling hero.

1:02:26

And then maybe underneath that, it's

1:02:28

like, well, could I become college president?

1:02:31

Could I successful in my business? Could I be successful in my

1:02:33

marriage? It's like, that's all well and good. And those

1:02:36

are more concretized goals. But

1:02:38

the highest order goal has to be

1:02:40

something like an

1:02:42

approach rather than a final

1:02:44

state. Right? because you might say, oh, I

1:02:46

won't be the only approach never

1:02:48

ends. That's

1:02:50

right. Well, And you can say to yourself, I

1:02:52

want to be the guy

1:02:52

who listens to my wife. Yeah. Okay. So you're never

1:02:55

gonna you're never gonna finalize that. Right? Because

1:02:57

you're doing that all the

1:03:00

time. And that's also really useful because you don't

1:03:02

hit the

1:03:03

target and then

1:03:05

and then find yourself

1:03:07

left with nothing. because you can do

1:03:09

that every day. I wanna be the guy who listens to my kids. I wanna be the guy

1:03:12

who pays attention to my friends. And

1:03:14

I wanna be the guy

1:03:16

who speaks my

1:03:18

mind carefully and judiciously.

1:03:20

It's like you

1:03:20

can bring that anywhere, man. And you're

1:03:22

you're and

1:03:23

you're talking you're talking

1:03:25

about the difference there, that approach. Let's let's

1:03:27

use your example. I'm a I wanna be a

1:03:29

guy who's a good steward of my wife. I wanna

1:03:31

be that's that's That's my

1:03:33

identity. And that means I'm gonna have to backfill it

1:03:35

with some goals. We're gonna meet once a week, and

1:03:37

I'm not gonna try to fix her like she's a

1:03:39

car engine. I'm not gonna try to

1:03:41

solve her problems with her as though she's infantile.

1:03:44

I'm gonna just listen and I'm gonna commit

1:03:46

to being quiet. And so when she says I'm

1:03:48

really struggling with my boss at work, I'm not

1:03:50

gonna jump in with you know, you should

1:03:52

probably tell him, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna

1:03:54

listen. Right? But listen,

1:03:56

over time, I begin

1:03:57

I really look forward

1:03:59

to

1:03:59

learning more about my wife and what

1:04:02

she's experiencing in this season, and it's

1:04:04

different than last season. It's gonna

1:04:06

be different. in the new season. I think it was Esteepero who

1:04:08

said, if most adults

1:04:10

have four or five great loves in their

1:04:12

lifetime and if you work really really

1:04:14

hard, it's with

1:04:16

the same person. And you become part of

1:04:18

their journey. And now I can't

1:04:20

wait to hear about

1:04:22

what my wife's been reading, who

1:04:24

she's becoming, and can

1:04:26

best be a be a partner to her

1:04:28

in this new season, whatever it is. It's

1:04:30

not constantly trying to get back to remember

1:04:32

how much fun we have and we

1:04:35

are dating man, what a waste of a life? Let's

1:04:37

go this way. Right? Let's move forward.

1:04:39

I think, tell me if I'm if I'm

1:04:41

on the right track here.

1:04:43

That idea of owning,

1:04:46

acknowledging reality, I didn't

1:04:48

mean to, but I'm looking in the mirror

1:04:50

and I've gained a hundred pounds. I

1:04:52

didn't mean to. It wasn't my intention, but

1:04:54

now I've spent fifteen years in a

1:04:56

middle manager job and I hate my

1:05:00

life. I hate going to work every day. I think we do not

1:05:02

have the skill set for one of the

1:05:04

most important psychological functions that

1:05:06

we just we just extract we

1:05:10

just just took it out of life.

1:05:12

Right? And I think it's it's Ernest Becker's work and Yolam's work.

1:05:14

I think we don't have

1:05:17

any sort of ability

1:05:20

to grieve privately or as

1:05:22

a group, we've lost a skill set of grief,

1:05:24

and so we can't acknowledge

1:05:27

reality because we don't know what to do when we

1:05:29

look in the mirror and say, I didn't measure up

1:05:31

to who I wanted to be. I didn't

1:05:33

mean to yell at my kid and I did. I

1:05:35

didn't mean to get another dessert and I

1:05:37

did, we can't deal with that grief. And so we blow by

1:05:39

it and say, you keep putting desserts

1:05:41

in front of me. Or if you had just picked up

1:05:43

your trikes six

1:05:46

year old, I wouldn't have yelled

1:05:48

at you. We just outsource our dysfunction everywhere because we can't

1:05:50

sit in that gap between what

1:05:52

we wanted in our reality. Alright. So

1:05:56

a couple of things

1:05:57

there. You talked about finding yourself

1:06:00

on the

1:06:00

adventure of transformation with your

1:06:04

wife. Now,

1:06:04

often men feel

1:06:07

compelled, obligated to

1:06:09

obligated

1:06:10

who generate

1:06:11

a solution to the problems that

1:06:13

their wives bring them. And

1:06:16

it is the case because women feel more

1:06:18

negative emotion that they are

1:06:20

more likely to bring up problems.

1:06:22

That's why seventy percent of

1:06:24

divorces, by the way, are initiated by women. It's

1:06:26

because they feel more negative

1:06:28

emotions. So if the relationship is shaky, they're going to

1:06:30

suffer for it more

1:06:32

first. And they probably feel more

1:06:34

negative emotion because they're

1:06:36

more sensitive because they have to

1:06:38

take care of infants. And

1:06:39

so anyways, we can put that aside.

1:06:42

Now, it might

1:06:44

be that you should help your wife solve her

1:06:46

problems. And maybe she's coming

1:06:47

to you for that. But one thing

1:06:49

you need to

1:06:52

understand and you might understand this as a diagnostician is,

1:06:54

well, do you know what the hell her problem is?

1:06:56

And the answer is, well,

1:06:58

probably not because she doesn't even know.

1:07:01

So why does she wanna sit down and tell

1:07:03

you about her problems? And the answer

1:07:05

is because she wants to find out what her

1:07:07

bloody problems are. And so

1:07:10

you see this very often in therapy, you know,

1:07:12

and Carl Rogers made a lot of

1:07:14

this. He said, you know, if you just listen to people,

1:07:16

they'll often solve most of their

1:07:18

problems themselves. So somebody comes in and they say, well, I'm really

1:07:20

upset. And you

1:07:22

say,

1:07:22

well, what's

1:07:23

on your mind?

1:07:26

Now, What's so interesting about that is often the people who are therapy

1:07:28

have absolutely no one

1:07:30

to tell their problems to.

1:07:33

You know, like that,

1:07:33

I I think I think the the Nigerian

1:07:36

magic though was listening and

1:07:38

he brought that other that other

1:07:40

side of the equation that we we we

1:07:42

leave out. he listened

1:07:44

and he genuinely did his best

1:07:46

to love the person in front of him. Yeah.

1:07:48

Well, although, okay. It's not it's not sitting

1:07:50

judgment of that person. So my wife says, hey, I'm

1:07:53

going through this. I I instantly go, well, you know you

1:07:55

should. Instead of sitting back and going, I

1:07:57

love this person, tell me, let's connect,

1:07:59

not let's

1:07:59

solve. Right? Yeah. So so

1:08:02

you you'd hope that your mindset and

1:08:04

this would be part of establishing that high

1:08:06

order goal is imagine you would

1:08:08

like your wife and you to have a

1:08:10

good life. And so

1:08:12

when you're listening to her, that's uppermost in

1:08:14

your mind. We are trying to have a good life here. Okay? So

1:08:16

what's your problem? Well, if

1:08:18

you're listening to someone therapeutically, they're

1:08:21

going to scatter shot the problem. They're gonna say, well, it might

1:08:23

be this and it might be this and it might be this

1:08:25

and it might have something to do with the past and

1:08:27

it might be this and it's It's

1:08:30

quite a mess as they try to

1:08:32

calibrate the real problem. And you have

1:08:35

to listen to all of that. And

1:08:37

what you'll find is that the person

1:08:39

will spent with most of those hypotheses themselves as soon

1:08:41

as they utter them. They'll

1:08:43

think, well,

1:08:44

here's my problem.

1:08:47

No. That's

1:08:47

not exactly right. And so now that's off the table. And

1:08:49

they'll say, well, it might be this. And here's

1:08:51

some reasons for thinking that,

1:08:53

but no, it's probably not that. And So what you'll

1:08:55

find is the problem space will clear. Now, Rogers also

1:08:57

pointed out and this is very useful

1:08:59

is that one of the

1:09:01

things you can do when you're listening apart from asking

1:09:03

questions, which might be, well, I don't quite understand what

1:09:06

you meant by that or you said something

1:09:08

ten minutes ago and it seems

1:09:10

to contradict what you just said

1:09:12

now. which

1:09:13

are just helpful questions. The other thing you can do is summarize. And you

1:09:15

could say, well, I've been listening for ten minutes

1:09:17

or fifteen minutes and it

1:09:19

seems to me or fifty minutes and it

1:09:21

seems to me that this is what you said,

1:09:23

is that right? And that people really like

1:09:26

that for for two reasons, say,

1:09:28

is one is

1:09:30

you compact all that

1:09:32

searching into the gist. And that's a gift

1:09:34

you can give someone. And then also if you hit the target,

1:09:36

if you say, yeah,

1:09:38

that's exactly what I meant.

1:09:41

then they know full well that you've really been listening. And so if you can

1:09:43

if you're a man and you're listening

1:09:45

to this and you

1:09:48

wanna know how to

1:09:50

deal with your wife when she's presenting you with problems. The first thing is, is step back a bit and she probably

1:09:52

has to go through the whole problem

1:09:54

set and try not to take that personally.

1:09:59

Just listen

1:09:59

and and and you can summarize and

1:10:01

you can ask questions, but mostly you want to

1:10:03

find out, well, what

1:10:05

the hell is the problem here? Now, you might

1:10:07

wanna leap leap to a solution for for a

1:10:09

bunch of reasons. One is or to show

1:10:12

that you

1:10:14

have a solution, Two is to show you're smarter than your

1:10:16

wife, which is a very bad idea. The third

1:10:18

is to shut her up so that you don't

1:10:20

have to sit there and listen.

1:10:22

That's also a really bad idea because

1:10:24

You can't shut anybody up about an actual

1:10:26

problem. Right. That just doesn't work because it's an actual problem.

1:10:28

It's

1:10:28

not gonna go away. Or if if

1:10:30

she's coming to you to connect, and

1:10:34

she's not looking for your solution. She just wants

1:10:36

to connect. And this is the tool set that she has.

1:10:38

When you shut her up, you're giving a much more existential

1:10:42

I

1:10:42

don't value you. Right? I don't wanna

1:10:44

connect with you. And that's a

1:10:46

much bigger I think that's

1:10:48

a much more crisis or your relationships in

1:10:50

a mess at that point? Yeah. Well, that yes. Exactly. Well, and you'll find too with this ninety minutes a

1:10:53

week that you have to listen to

1:10:55

each other is that In

1:10:59

some sense,

1:10:59

you need that amount of time to clear the

1:11:01

air because you can imagine that as you

1:11:03

move through life, little dragons make

1:11:05

themselves manifest all the time

1:11:07

because things change. The car needs

1:11:09

maintenance. There's a problem with the kid. There's something wrong with the bathroom sink.

1:11:11

We don't have quite enough

1:11:14

money in the checking account.

1:11:17

you know, there's a hundred

1:11:19

little niggling demons that pop up constantly and it's very difficult to

1:11:24

establish the Preconditions

1:11:25

for joyful intimacy when there's a

1:11:27

nest of microdragons swarming all

1:11:29

over the house and

1:11:31

you have to

1:11:35

talk those

1:11:35

through in order to keep them small and to make them

1:11:37

go away. And if you do that with some

1:11:39

degree of programmatic regularity,

1:11:43

then You do have the possibility that you'll get beyond the mere

1:11:45

sharing of problems. Then you can have

1:11:47

some fun, then you

1:11:50

can play. Yes.

1:11:51

But I think two things.

1:11:53

One, here a helpful tip

1:11:55

for the listeners here

1:11:58

has been fantastic in my marriage is when my wife

1:12:00

sits down and begins to talk. I'll often

1:12:02

stop at the very beginning and say,

1:12:05

are you asking me for a solution Or

1:12:07

are you looking to just tell me? Are you looking to

1:12:09

connect? And that is often frames

1:12:11

the conversation in a

1:12:13

way that I know where I what what she's asking

1:12:15

from me. And it seems very unromantic

1:12:18

at first, but, man, on the

1:12:21

back end, it save. So it's it's just like putting sex on

1:12:23

the calendar. Right? It just a couple

1:12:26

of seconds of awkward changes the

1:12:28

trajectory of your entire week

1:12:30

and month. I also think that men

1:12:32

have rightly or wrongly.

1:12:34

We found ourselves,

1:12:36

we don't understand

1:12:39

our relational value. And so we

1:12:41

think our value can only be found in offering a solution to

1:12:43

something. And there's a

1:12:48

deeper intimacy, there's a deeper connection. My

1:12:50

wife values me simply because I

1:12:52

am her husband. Yes, I help provide,

1:12:54

and yes, I've I, you know, can

1:12:57

do all these other things. There's

1:12:59

utility myself more than giving

1:13:04

a person less with less

1:13:06

power or less smarts than me an answer. Sometimes the greatest gift I can give is

1:13:08

simply my presence. Right? And we

1:13:10

have to get underneath that discomfort of

1:13:15

I I'm out of

1:13:15

my depths here. I don't know what to do other than

1:13:17

just listen and I feel useless. I feel like I've

1:13:19

I've lost utility.

1:13:21

Yeah. Well, the the I think the problem with that

1:13:24

formulation is the idea of

1:13:26

just listening. It's really

1:13:27

hard to

1:13:29

listen. And there's almost I like that. I like that.

1:13:32

Well, there's almost nothing you can do that's

1:13:34

more transformative to that for than that.

1:13:37

And the

1:13:38

reason for that is that just listening opportunity

1:13:40

to just think.

1:13:42

And so then you might

1:13:44

say, well, what are they doing when they're

1:13:46

thinking? And here's what they're doing is

1:13:49

They're asking themselves questions and looking for a revelation. They're trying

1:13:51

to sort through information that they can

1:13:53

determine the best

1:13:56

pathway forward. and

1:13:58

they're trying to

1:13:59

update and develop their vision for

1:14:02

their life. And

1:14:02

you do that in abstraction,

1:14:05

to test out the possibilities before you implement them. And

1:14:07

so if you give people space to think, which is

1:14:09

exactly what you're doing

1:14:11

when you're listening, Then

1:14:14

they try out different versions of

1:14:16

themselves so they can experiment with

1:14:18

finding the best fit. And so

1:14:20

there's nothing just about listening.

1:14:22

It's I

1:14:23

think apart from speaking

1:14:25

accurately and carefully and

1:14:27

truthfully, there isn't anything more

1:14:29

difficult that you can do

1:14:31

than to listen. And one of the things I

1:14:34

loved about being a therapist and it's been very useful to me in my post therapy

1:14:37

career as well

1:14:40

is that If

1:14:40

you actually listen to people,

1:14:42

they will tell you everything. And then they're so interesting, you can hardly stand

1:14:44

interesting you can hardly stand them

1:14:46

them. So

1:14:49

give me and by proxy

1:14:51

the listener, give a twenty

1:14:53

two to twenty seven

1:14:56

year old

1:14:57

man trying to make his way in

1:14:59

the world. What is one or two or three things? I

1:15:01

guess, I'm turning the interviewer around on you now. What's a

1:15:04

couple of practical

1:15:07

skills that I can do to

1:15:09

lean into listening, to practice

1:15:12

listening, and stop trying to rush

1:15:14

to a solution, try to get out

1:15:16

of conversation because I'm uncomfortable. I don't have the skill set.

1:15:18

I never saw my dad do it. My granddad never did it. They just they just barked

1:15:21

orders and watched

1:15:23

the game. I'm trying to do something that

1:15:25

is infinitely more difficult than just flipping channels

1:15:27

and yelling at the Packers game. What what's

1:15:30

a couple of things I can practice? Well,

1:15:32

I would say first

1:15:34

is have some faith

1:15:35

in your own reactions,

1:15:37

reactions not

1:15:40

as solutions to the problem

1:15:42

but as points of inquiry. So for example, when we're talking,

1:15:45

when we're talking

1:15:47

Questions arise in the theater of

1:15:47

my imagination. And topics pop

1:15:50

up and I'm

1:15:51

willing to put

1:15:53

them on the table. And the reason

1:15:55

they they pop up is because I'm attending

1:15:57

to what you say and that's

1:15:59

generating some thoughts in my

1:16:02

mind and one of

1:16:02

the great things you can do with people is ask

1:16:05

them questions. I mean, there

1:16:06

is

1:16:06

nothing and this goes back

1:16:09

to the the issue of say making

1:16:11

friends or establishing relationships, there's nothing that people want more be attended to. That's why

1:16:13

advertisers spend so much money trying

1:16:15

to garner attention. why

1:16:19

social media companies spend so much money garnering people's attention.

1:16:22

Attention is the fundamental

1:16:24

currency. And so

1:16:25

people

1:16:26

love to be attended

1:16:28

to. And so you dispense with the

1:16:30

idea that you're just listening is you're watching the other person and you're listening. And then you're

1:16:33

attending to yourself

1:16:36

and watch and listening because you'll

1:16:38

see that as you focus on the conversation and don't worry about what you're

1:16:40

gonna say next

1:16:43

or how you appear, which

1:16:45

makes you self conscious and miserable and awkward instantly. You

1:16:47

pay attention to the conversation, and then you

1:16:49

watch what happens inside

1:16:52

in this question comes up

1:16:54

and you say, well, I have this question.

1:16:56

And you don't evaluate the question. If, you know, not if

1:16:58

you're deeply engaged in the conversation, you just lay it out.

1:17:02

and you you pull you draw the person out and you

1:17:05

see, well, I don't quite understand what

1:17:07

you said there or it seems

1:17:09

to me that this is a different way

1:17:11

of looking at it. What do you think of that? The questions have to be honest. But if you you pay focused attention,

1:17:17

and you ask genuine

1:17:19

questions, you've got like ninety percent of social skill nailed. like ninety

1:17:21

percent of social skill nail

1:17:24

and

1:17:24

you get below you get below I

1:17:26

love what you said about the little dragons. I might I might steal that down the road. You

1:17:30

get beneath the

1:17:32

hey,

1:17:32

did you see what was

1:17:34

on the news today? Or, hey, we're overdrawn on our checking account. You get

1:17:39

beneath those things to the real statement

1:17:41

which is I'm scared or I feel lonely or I miss

1:17:44

you. Right? The

1:17:47

truly intimate connections if

1:17:49

you'll just if you'll yeah.

1:17:52

If you'll just wait into the uncomfortable waters of discourse.

1:17:54

Well, I and I think

1:17:55

the way to fortify yourself in

1:17:58

relationship to that. I mean,

1:17:59

I've been embroiled in a lot

1:18:02

of conflict. And I

1:18:03

really don't like conflict.

1:18:05

And I think the reason that I've been embroiled in so much

1:18:07

is because I won't delay it. Like, if there's an issue at hand, I want to address it right

1:18:09

now. And the reason for that isn't that

1:18:11

I enjoy it. In

1:18:15

fact, I don't enjoy it at but what I really don't

1:18:18

enjoy is prolonged conflict that

1:18:20

never

1:18:20

goes anywhere

1:18:22

and that never ends. And so, conflict conflict amplified.

1:18:24

Right? Exactly just it just

1:18:26

grows on you. Exactly that. And

1:18:29

and that's one of

1:18:31

the oldest stories that People have

1:18:33

been telling each other forever is that

1:18:35

ignored things grow in the darkness

1:18:39

out side the city until they become monstrous and break down

1:18:41

the walls. And so you think

1:18:43

while I'm afraid

1:18:44

of having I'm afraid of

1:18:46

listening, I'm afraid of hearing the problems,

1:18:49

And

1:18:49

that's fair enough. It's no wonder

1:18:51

you're

1:18:51

afraid, but you're nowhere near afraid enough of not doing that because that's

1:18:55

a bloody catastrophe. That'll be

1:18:57

a bomb that'll go off in ten years and blow up your

1:18:59

marriage. You'll find out that your wife had an affair because, well, for her own reasons and because you

1:19:01

didn't pay any attention to her

1:19:03

for, like, fifteen years. And

1:19:06

then you think, well, I was afraid to

1:19:08

pay attention and, yeah, fair enough.

1:19:10

But now look where you are.

1:19:13

You're you're in hell. and and that's just

1:19:15

not an improvement. And so How

1:19:17

do

1:19:17

you know in our current ecosystem,

1:19:20

how do you know

1:19:22

when to wade through My little brother sent me something the other

1:19:24

day that was, like, in two thousand, Y2K

1:19:26

was gonna kill us all. In two thousand

1:19:29

one, I don't remember what it was. Like, swine flu

1:19:31

was gonna kill us all on two thousand three. There's just

1:19:33

this litany of. We rally around this

1:19:35

the next end thing that's

1:19:37

gonna happen. And then we've

1:19:40

reached this this fatigue. Right? And we like,

1:19:42

there's true cancers out there that are coming for us that we're

1:19:44

just like, I don't have the

1:19:46

energy anymore. I'm moving over about my

1:19:49

I've been really trying to think that through. And so here's

1:19:51

some guidelines that I've sort of developed

1:19:54

over the last few

1:19:56

months. So,

1:19:58

you know, there's there's

1:19:59

problems of various size out there in

1:20:02

the world. And the largest problems are

1:20:05

the apocalyptic problems that you just

1:20:07

described. Right? And it isn't even obvious which of those apocalyptic

1:20:09

problems are real, but we could

1:20:11

say, well, there's always

1:20:14

the possibility that large scale systems will

1:20:16

come to a precipitous collapse. And we have to live with that.

1:20:18

That's true in our own lives. We could die at

1:20:21

any moment. So could

1:20:23

the people we love Like,

1:20:24

our our cultures can

1:20:26

fall apart. The apocalyptic terror is always beckoning as a possibility.

1:20:28

there's always beckoning as a possibility

1:20:31

Okay. Now the question is, is that your problem? Now the answer

1:20:33

is, you do anything about it. Right.

1:20:36

The answer is your own

1:20:38

nervous system will tell you that.

1:20:41

Because imagine that you're imagine you're facing a

1:20:43

problem that's so big that it paralyzes you and

1:20:45

it turns you into

1:20:48

a tyrant. k?

1:20:50

That's too big a problem for

1:20:52

you. Obviously. And what you

1:20:55

have to do is you

1:20:57

have to scale back the

1:20:59

problem Until you find a dragon that's a size

1:21:01

that you're willing to contend with, that

1:21:03

you'll actually contend with. And

1:21:05

so, you know, maybe

1:21:07

you shouldn't be addressing

1:21:08

the large scale political problems of the world because

1:21:10

your own house is a bloody catastrophe. And you

1:21:13

watch the news

1:21:16

and it paralyzes you and turns you into a

1:21:18

ranting tyrant, and that means you're not

1:21:19

the man for that job. You have to

1:21:21

scale back and maybe if you

1:21:23

scale back and practice straightening

1:21:25

things up at the local level, which are which isn't trivial or easy. You get better and

1:21:28

better at it, and then

1:21:30

you could face larger and larger

1:21:34

astrophes and and and practically

1:21:36

and productively. Right? Instead of

1:21:38

virtue

1:21:38

signaling and going astray, You

1:21:41

know, you do this in therapy

1:21:43

is if someone is having a hard time

1:21:43

making friends, you break that down into

1:21:45

microsteps. And one thing you

1:21:47

might have to do as

1:21:50

we discussed is you might have to teach the person to introduce themselves.

1:21:53

You know, and their problem is I don't

1:21:55

have any friends. It's like,

1:21:57

no, no, your problem is You don't know how to shake hands

1:21:59

and look

1:21:59

someone in the eye. Right? And

1:22:02

then you might say, well,

1:22:03

can you do that? And they might say, well,

1:22:05

I'm afraid to shake hands. It's like, well, can you look

1:22:08

at me? Can

1:22:09

you stretch out your hand? You know, can you touch my hand?

1:22:11

I mean, this might sound trivial, but

1:22:13

lots of people are paralyzed

1:22:15

with social anxiety. And

1:22:18

they have no idea how the shale sands. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There and

1:22:21

then that just stops them cold. Right? because if

1:22:23

you can introduce yourself, how

1:22:25

the hell are you gonna make friends? That's right.

1:22:27

Well, it's it's being when our bodies take

1:22:29

off on us. I love how you said

1:22:31

that, man, because our

1:22:33

nervous system tells the truth generally. Can I listen to

1:22:35

my body and just instead of rushing to the diagnostic and

1:22:38

rushing to Google or rushing to WebMD

1:22:40

trying to can I just ask my

1:22:42

like, what's my body trying to protect me

1:22:44

from? Like,

1:22:45

what? Whoa. I just

1:22:46

walked into a room full of people and my heart rate just went up to two hundred beats per

1:22:48

minute. And I can't my

1:22:51

hands are getting sweaty. What

1:22:55

are you trying to protect me from? These are my people. These are my friends. This is

1:22:57

my this is a wedding I got invited

1:22:59

to. Oh, okay. I

1:23:01

I used to not be safe in this situation. I'm safe now.

1:23:03

I'm okay now. And I can think that through that gap

1:23:06

between instead of racing over to the bar

1:23:08

to grab a drink

1:23:10

to quiet that alarm system, or to race

1:23:12

over to the snack table and get a piece of cake, which is

1:23:14

what I go to quite the alarm system. I'm a good southern Christian, so I like to eat

1:23:17

my feelings. Like, I I instead

1:23:19

of those issues, I can

1:23:21

just be really curious, and I'm not gonna go to war with my body and try to shut the alarms off.

1:23:23

I'm just gonna listen to him and say, hey, what's it

1:23:26

trying to tell me? Right? Well, you you

1:23:28

talked about thinking

1:23:30

in images before. So here's a very

1:23:33

useful thing the psychoanalysts learn to

1:23:35

do. So imagine you

1:23:37

do go to

1:23:38

a social occasion and you

1:23:40

find as you enter the hall,

1:23:42

you you're getting nervous and sweaty.

1:23:44

Now

1:23:45

if you watch This

1:23:46

is why Carl Jung, for example, believed that

1:23:48

we lived through a dream. We lived

1:23:51

life through a dream. So

1:23:53

and that's a story. And so what you'll

1:23:55

see is that if you if you feel

1:23:57

that nervousness and you attend

1:23:59

to

1:23:59

it, a little

1:24:01

drama will run-in your

1:24:03

head in images. you know, and it'll be something

1:24:05

like, well, I'm gonna go in here and no one's gonna talk to me and this will happen in pictures

1:24:07

like the little movie. No

1:24:11

one's gonna talk me and I'm gonna end up in the

1:24:13

corner and I'm gonna be bored and I'm gonna be sweaty and hot and it's gonna be real uncomfortable

1:24:15

and it's just like

1:24:18

this other time when I went to this social occasion and

1:24:21

this terrible thing happened and the

1:24:23

whole drama will play out

1:24:25

in your head. And then

1:24:26

you know, you think, oh, that's the problem. And then,

1:24:29

well, then

1:24:29

maybe you have someone to talk

1:24:32

to

1:24:33

about that about

1:24:36

that fantasy. or maybe because now you have

1:24:38

the fantasy in front of you and you looked at it, you can think, well, wait a minute. As

1:24:40

you said, wait a minute. Wait a

1:24:42

second. It isn't like that other situation.

1:24:46

My friends are here. I can go talk to John.

1:24:48

I know him real well. We'll just have

1:24:50

a conversation. I can go sit

1:24:53

at a table and and

1:24:54

with one of my friends and

1:24:56

spend most of the time there. It

1:24:58

can be

1:24:58

with my wife. But

1:25:00

that what'll happen is we

1:25:03

get nervous And that fantasy will make itself manifest, but you don't

1:25:05

wanna face it, and that's when you

1:25:07

rush to a premature solution.

1:25:10

You shut it off. Right.

1:25:12

Yeah. So what what you're

1:25:14

doing there is you're failing to allow the anxiety ridden

1:25:17

fantasy to

1:25:19

make itself manifest. And you you

1:25:21

do that because you don't wanna know where you're vulnerable. Right? And no wonder, like who the hell wants

1:25:24

to know where they're vulnerable? But

1:25:25

the answer to that is, well, someone who

1:25:27

wants to fix it.

1:25:31

because you're not gonna I

1:25:31

do. Yeah. I do. Absolutely. Right. And now

1:25:34

and now I've come to I love

1:25:37

looking for those vulnerabilities. I love a

1:25:39

good community, and I love the discourse. I love my friends who

1:25:41

will point them out and say, hey,

1:25:43

here's a blind spot, which is why, again, and circling

1:25:45

back, that's why we have to have other people in

1:25:48

our life. Now,

1:25:50

if done with the in the

1:25:52

right spirit, I love I love That's that's

1:25:54

the whole scientific process. Right? Rejecting the not like

1:25:58

I wasn't wrong. Right? Like, the whole idea is let's be

1:26:00

a little bit less wrong. Right? So I think there's

1:26:03

Yeah. That's right. That's the whole idea. That's

1:26:05

humility man is to be a

1:26:07

little bit less wrong And Jesus,

1:26:09

that's not true. And what a deal? But what

1:26:11

a what a fun way to

1:26:11

live? It's such an easier way to

1:26:13

live than I have

1:26:15

to be right. That's a that

1:26:18

is an exhausting grip on your life. It's a choking grip on your life instead of, I wanna

1:26:20

be a little bit less wrong, and

1:26:22

I begin to seek out places where

1:26:26

I might be wrong. That's just taking it up late and trying to

1:26:28

sharpen it as finally as possible. Well, what are the

1:26:30

one way to live? Well, the

1:26:33

old the purpose of confession

1:26:35

classically was exactly

1:26:36

that. Yeah.

1:26:37

So the idea

1:26:39

was, well, I'm gonna review my

1:26:41

week, which doesn't seem like such

1:26:43

a bad idea. Why?

1:26:45

Well, I'm gonna think about things that I did that didn't work

1:26:47

out so well and see if

1:26:50

I can specify what they

1:26:52

were and

1:26:54

see if I can figure out how to replace them with something

1:26:56

better, at least with the intent to

1:26:59

do better. And that confessional that

1:27:01

confessional in some sense, which was supposed to be redemptive, and that led to forgiveness at

1:27:03

least in principle, was very

1:27:06

much the same thing

1:27:08

as

1:27:08

very much the same thing as

1:27:11

discussing in genuine dialogue

1:27:12

the problems of your life. It's

1:27:14

like, well, here, I seem to

1:27:16

have gone sideways here. I seem

1:27:18

to have gone sideways here this week.

1:27:21

How do I know that? Well, my conscience is calling me out

1:27:23

on it, and there were some negative consequences. And I feel that this is the

1:27:25

mistake I made, and I'd rather not

1:27:27

make that mistake And

1:27:31

as you said, if that's handled, as if

1:27:33

the goal is to

1:27:35

stop making those mistakes

1:27:38

hopefully incrementally across time,

1:27:40

then the evidence of the

1:27:42

mistake can be an invitation to positive transformation. And that would be the

1:27:44

encouraging element of humility. Right? It's

1:27:46

like, well,

1:27:47

why? How do we have? But

1:27:51

you have to do

1:27:51

it in community, I think. I think, like,

1:27:53

it went from this ancient religious

1:27:56

practice of confession, which

1:27:58

I think you have to look back thousands

1:28:00

of years and say, this

1:28:02

practice this practice continued to roll

1:28:05

on evolutionarily and culturally because it had

1:28:07

a a deep value. And then it was, I

1:28:09

don't say, coop, it was absorbed by

1:28:11

the mental health community

1:28:13

to sit down across from somebody And I

1:28:15

I find great great value in journaling, writing

1:28:18

things down, getting them out of

1:28:20

my body and

1:28:22

onto paper, but I think we've

1:28:24

gotten very isolated with our journaling and

1:28:26

are writing it down, and we've become I'm

1:28:29

having this confession with

1:28:32

myself now. and there's value to that,

1:28:34

but I think the true value is having confession in front of somebody else because this will force ourselves to

1:28:36

say, do you see me

1:28:38

and do you still love me?

1:28:41

Well, still, if you fully

1:28:43

know me, that it's the most difficult part of to

1:28:44

observe