Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Psychology Series 12: Dr Kelly Flanagan / Making Maintaining Friendships & Relationships

Transcript

Psychology Series 12: Dr Kelly Flanagan / Making Maintaining Friendships & Relationships · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:14
  OK, Doctor Kelly, we're live. How are you doing?
• 0:18
  Good. Ephraim, thank you for having
• 0:19
  me, man. It's great to be here.
• 0:20
  Good, good. I am so excited.
• 0:22
  I'm so happy to talk to you. I I saw something funny I think
• 0:25
  was in your website while I was doing some homework for this and
• 0:28
  that your your wife is also Doctor Kelly.
• 0:31
  My wife is also doctor Kelly. Yes, my dad, my dad is Ashley.
• 0:37
  My dad's name is Ashley. So we get mail all the time to
• 0:40
  misses and misses Ashley and Leora Hirschman, and they're
• 0:44
  like, well, let's you know that they're they're spammers or
• 0:47
  bots. You know, pre that well, here's
• 0:49
  some here's some here's a deep cut from my life as a male named
• 0:53
  Kelly. I will never forget getting home
• 0:57
  from it's either middle school or high school one day.
• 0:59
  And there's a big like welcome package sort of box in the mail
• 1:04
  for me at home, and it's from Teen magazine.
• 1:07
  And it says, Kelly, we know you, so we know it's time for you to.
• 1:11
  And it had basically female sanitary products for me.
• 1:17
  And I was like, I don't think you know me.
• 1:19
  As far as you think, you. Do so.
• 1:22
  Yeah. But I met a woman named Kelly in
• 1:26
  Graduate School. She wrote home to her mom, and
• 1:29
  she's like, I met this great guy, but his name's Kelly.
• 1:31
  So of course it could never work, but we've made it work now
• 1:34
  for almost 25 years. That's beautiful.
• 1:37
  That's, that's, that's inspirational.
• 1:38
  You know, if you could make that work, then you could go make
• 1:40
  your way through anything, I'm sure.
• 1:44
  So, so tell me a little bit about so, so tell me about
• 1:48
  yourself, because obviously on one hand you've got the
• 1:52
  psychology hat on, but you're obviously doing a lot of
• 1:55
  writing, a lot of travelling and a lot of education I would call
• 1:58
  it as well. And so and I think that it's a
• 2:02
  great intersection to be at because on one hand you'll get,
• 2:05
  you're helping people on the on the individual level.
• 2:08
  And then on the other hand, you kind of spread out these ideas
• 2:12
  onto a mass audience hopefully and have that same kind of
• 2:17
  impact, but on a little bit more of a broader generalized level.
• 2:20
  Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
• 2:22
  So in 2011, I had been an outpatient mental outpatient
• 2:28
  mental health therapist for probably at that point, about
• 2:31
  six years, you know, I was seeing about 30 clients a week.
• 2:39
  And a couple of things converged like right at the same time I
• 2:42
  had this, I had this one client who was really making incredible
• 2:46
  strides in his own personal growth and how he was showing up
• 2:48
  to his life and relationships. And he was an entrepreneur, so
• 2:51
  pretty ambitious. And one day he's like, it is a
• 2:54
  shame that you only get to help 30 people every week, you know?
• 2:58
  And it sort of hit me and I thought, yeah, huh, I wonder how
• 3:02
  I could help more people. And right around the same time,
• 3:04
  Blue Cross Blue Shield in Illinois with about 90 days
• 3:08
  notice, cut reimbursement rates to their providers by some like
• 3:11
  15 to 30%. And we're a young family barely
• 3:15
  making it. And I didn't have, our family
• 3:17
  didn't have the margin in our budget for that kind of hit.
• 3:20
  And it just sort of hit me like, oh man, this insurance company
• 3:23
  who I depend upon completely from my family's well-being
• 3:25
  doesn't really care about me. And so how could I start to
• 3:29
  generate more demand for my services so I could rely less on
• 3:34
  Blue Cross? And at the time, blogging was
• 3:36
  big. And I'd always had an interest
• 3:38
  in writing, but never really tapped into it.
• 3:41
  So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start blogging.
• 3:43
  I'll reach more people that way. Increased demand for my
• 3:46
  services. My 9th blog post went viral.
• 3:48
  It was called Marriages for Losers.
• 3:51
  Nice. Yeah.
• 3:52
  And we were sort of off to the races from there.
• 3:54
  And can I ask real quick? I'm sorry, just because I want
• 3:57
  to just elaborate. If anybody doesn't understand,
• 4:01
  there are therapists that take and don't take insurance.
• 4:05
  Can you explain what the rationale is typically from the
• 4:08
  from the therapist perspective? And I know because I know from
• 4:12
  the patient's perspective that everyone complaints that every
• 4:14
  good therapist either doesn't take insurance or is a fortune
• 4:17
  and like, and you know what to do.
• 4:20
  And so maybe that's something that you could, you know,
• 4:22
  describe or from your end at least, or from the other side.
• 4:25
  That's a great question. Was someone that no one's ever
• 4:28
  asked me. Yeah.
• 4:29
  So they're essentially, I mean, gosh, this is really pulling
• 4:39
  back the curtains. Let's just pull it back.
• 4:41
  When therapists start out, they, they start out with no clients,
• 4:47
  right? They have to build the
• 4:48
  clientele. Sure.
• 4:50
  And so most therapists right out of Graduate School will
• 4:53
  immediately enroll in these, in these insurance networks because
• 4:57
  those insurance networks bring referrals.
• 5:01
  I'm, I'm in an insurance network.
• 5:03
  When I went to my own therapy, right, I used my insurance.
• 5:05
  So I found someone in my network and kept the cost affordable for
• 5:09
  me because just like any medical care, usually paying like a
• 5:12
  deductible and and then some sort of copay.
• 5:17
  So keeps it affordable for the clients.
• 5:20
  And it is a natural referral source for for therapists.
• 5:25
  Yeah, exactly. Everyone, everyone wins at some
• 5:28
  point that if a therapist is good at what they do, their
• 5:32
  caseload gets full. And, and, and this is like, this
• 5:35
  is one of the, like the, the little secrets behind the scenes
• 5:38
  of the mental health industry is I tell, I tell people, if you're
• 5:41
  looking for a therapist, ask for one who's got like a three to
• 5:44
  six month wait list, right? It means they're good.
• 5:49
  And, and if they're, if they don't, it doesn't mean they're
• 5:51
  good. It probably means they're young.
• 5:53
  They're still filling a caseload and building a caseload.
• 5:55
  I was that guy once, right? And, and so, but at some point
• 5:59
  many therapists, they can't take on any more clients, right?
• 6:04
  And this is, this is one of the really like unfortunate things
• 6:10
  about the system is that reimbursement rates from third
• 6:13
  party payers to therapists haven't increased in the last 20
• 6:16
  years since I started doing it, right.
• 6:19
  So our cost of living increases 3% and most therapists, believe
• 6:24
  it or not, most therapists are making way less than your local
• 6:28
  plumber makes per hour. I believe that.
• 6:30
  And their rates aren't going up. And, and so a therapist gets
• 6:34
  full and then they have to ask the question like as the cost of
• 6:38
  living goes up, how am I going to scale my revenue a little bit
• 6:41
  if the insurance company has capped me?
• 6:43
  So they will gradually as demand for their services increases,
• 6:46
  they will start to meet with clients and they do, you know,
• 6:49
  sort of fee for service. It's called basically you pay me
• 6:53
  cash and I, I work with you. So that's, that's what you see
• 6:58
  as a, as a clinician progresses through their career, they'll
• 7:03
  start to transition to fewer insurance clients in order to
• 7:06
  keep up with the cost of living. The next step, which I took in
• 7:09
  2015 is to open up your own practice and start to employ
• 7:13
  your own therapist and to, to obviously increase your capacity
• 7:18
  to provide for your family in that way.
• 7:22
  And then what I did, I did that from 20/15/2022 and then
• 7:26
  ultimately accepted that managing a therapy practice is
• 7:29
  not my strong suit nor my passion.
• 7:31
  And, and I closed that down and I shifted into doing more
• 7:36
  writing, speaking online community online coaching, those
• 7:41
  sorts of things. So that's where I'm at today.
• 7:43
  Awesome, love it. OK, so that's a really, I think
• 7:46
  that's a really important description and just just a
• 7:51
  quick walkthrough because I think that again, people and I'm
• 7:56
  like this too, when we could talk about this for sure.
• 7:58
  There's they call this the what I call it when you when you have
• 8:04
  someone walking in the street, I'm sorry.
• 8:06
  And the, the pedestrian, the pedestrian, you know, where
• 8:11
  every time that I'm in the car and I'm crossing and someone's
• 8:13
  trying to cross the street, I forget what it's like to be the
• 8:16
  pedestrian. I'm always yelling at them.
• 8:17
  And then, and then like 5 minutes later, I'll be the
• 8:20
  pedestrian crossing the street And there's a guy that's, you
• 8:22
  know, trying to get through and I'm yelling at him, hey, I'm
• 8:24
  trying to walk over here. And, and I forget completely
• 8:27
  what it's like to be in the other person's shoes, even
• 8:29
  though I was in that situation just a couple of minutes ago.
• 8:31
  And I think a lot of people don't think about the fact that
• 8:34
  that, you know, therapists and, and psychologists have to make a
• 8:38
  living too. And that, you know, that a
• 8:40
  certain point, like you said, especially if the insurance
• 8:44
  reimbursements are going to be cut or not be raised at any
• 8:48
  point, there's going to be someone's going to have to
• 8:51
  someone's going to have to pay more somewhere.
• 8:53
  And everyone's got to live and everyone's got to eat.
• 8:56
  And so I think it's a good understanding and it's
• 8:58
  interesting. Like, I think, you know, PhD
• 9:02
  level clinical psychologist might like myself, Doctor Kelly,
• 9:05
  we, we sort of get lumped in with medical doctors and, and
• 9:09
  the assumption is that perhaps that we kind of sort of received
• 9:14
  the same reimbursement as medical doctors, but there's
• 9:16
  never really been medical and mental health parity anywhere in
• 9:20
  the world, let alone in the United States.
• 9:22
  And so, you know, I, I guess I always joke.
• 9:25
  I went to school for 20, two years to get my doctorate.
• 9:30
  That's, that's a lot of loans. I'm still paying them back or
• 9:34
  not. And and so you accrue all this
• 9:38
  debt, but you, you don't receive the reimbursement rate of a
• 9:42
  surgeon who's now doing surgery right out of medical school,
• 9:45
  right? You, you receive the
• 9:46
  reimbursement rate that is sort of set by the insurance company
• 9:51
  and far lower for mental health. So yeah, therapists and and
• 9:55
  psychologists are in a tricky sort of no man's land really
• 10:01
  when it comes to debt and and revenue.
• 10:03
  So, So yeah, a long way to say by by 2011, I was looking for
• 10:09
  ways to provide for my family differently.
• 10:13
  And I stumbled upon writing and blogging and then my daughter
• 10:17
  and I wound up on the Today show as a result of one of the no
• 10:19
  way. Yeah.
• 10:21
  Yeah. It was wild.
• 10:22
  I'm I'm you walk. You walk me through that, that
• 10:24
  sequence of what happened? Sure, sure.
• 10:26
  Yeah. So I published Marriages for
• 10:30
  Losers. And what did what what was that
• 10:32
  about? Other than it probably wasn't
• 10:34
  for losers, right? No.
• 10:36
  It, it was, it was I, I often say it went viral by the because
• 10:39
  of the title alone. But the idea was that, like, you
• 10:42
  know, when you're in a relationship and you hit that
• 10:45
  moment right, that triggering moment and your, your protective
• 10:49
  defenses kick in, you're now both competing to win basically.
• 10:54
  And, and that you, what we need to aspire to in marriage is 2
• 11:01
  people who are mutually, actually competing to lose, to
• 11:03
  serve, to sacrifice, to surrender, to let go of that
• 11:07
  protection mode and return to connection mode.
• 11:10
  And and so I, I, yeah. So I that, that, that really got
• 11:14
  some traction. And then I, I wrote a letter to
• 11:19
  my daughter and published it on my blog.
• 11:22
  And my colleagues, by the way, at this point were really
• 11:24
  starting to wonder if I'd lost my mind because as a therapist,
• 11:26
  you're not supposed to share private information anywhere,
• 11:28
  right? Let alone on a blog.
• 11:31
  Well, I wrote her a letter about how she's inherently worthy of
• 11:33
  interest. And when she's looking for a
• 11:34
  partner, her, you know, hopefully her goal is to find
• 11:37
  someone who knows she's worthy of interest.
• 11:40
  I'm getting a little emotional because just this morning I told
• 11:42
  my wife, like, I am as fascinated by you today as the
• 11:46
  day I met you. It's beautiful.
• 11:48
  I know I get distracted. I know I get busy, but you are
• 11:52
  enthralling to me. And so that's what I told my
• 11:53
  daughter. That one went viral.
• 11:56
  And then I wrote a second letter to her from the makeup aisle of
• 11:58
  a Target story about how her, her, her true beauty isn't in on
• 12:03
  the inside. It's inherent, it's enduring,
• 12:06
  it's eternal. And and to hopefully relieve
• 12:10
  some of the pressure as she entered, you know, her teen
• 12:14
  years to make it all about her outer beauty.
• 12:17
  Well, that one went really, really viral.
• 12:21
  And I was sitting in that metal, that outpatient mental health
• 12:23
  office. I remember on a Thursday
• 12:24
  afternoon and my office phone rang and I picked it up and it
• 12:30
  was the Today show, a producer at the Today show.
• 12:33
  And they said, hey, we are, we're basically planning a, a, a
• 12:38
  series on women's body image and we need a male voice.
• 12:42
  And we just read your letter to your daughter and we love for
• 12:44
  the two of you to come out to, to 30 Rock and be on the show.
• 12:48
  And so the whole family went out.
• 12:50
  This was in February of 2014. It was a really wild, fun,
• 12:56
  surreal sort of experience. And, and, and so we were on the
• 13:00
  show. We're actually on the show 2
• 13:01
  days in a row and and then as a result of that, so the owner of
• 13:07
  the mental health practice where I was working happened to be
• 13:10
  vacationing with a prolific author.
• 13:15
  And that author watched me on the Today show that day and
• 13:19
  said, you know what, I'm going to connect him to my agent.
• 13:21
  He's really got some good writing chops.
• 13:22
  And so I connected with my current agent who I work with to
• 13:26
  this day. And my first book, Lovable was
• 13:30
  published in in 2017. Nice.
• 13:34
  And, and lovable was, as I say, written to my kids to, to, to
• 13:42
  share with them the message of their inherent worthiness.
• 13:46
  But as I say in the book, also written to that little boy and
• 13:48
  me, you know, who needs we all got that little one in US who's
• 13:52
  still waiting to hear that, that good news.
• 13:53
  You know that you, you're lovable, you're worthy, you
• 13:55
  belong, you matter. So, so I think that book really
• 13:59
  resonated with a lot of people because we've all got a kid in
• 14:01
  US, you know, waiting on a love letter And and that book has
• 14:03
  become that love letter to a lot of people.
• 14:06
  Yeah, that's beautiful. That's really, really awesome.
• 14:09
  Oh, man, there's so many great places to go from here.
• 14:13
  First of all, thank you for, for really for sharing the, the
• 14:18
  details of that, because I think that I, I went to a wedding, I
• 14:23
  went to avoiding a friend of mine and I'm Orthodox Jewish and
• 14:27
  I had, and he had this rabbi at his wedding.
• 14:30
  And this rabbi is Yemenite actually.
• 14:33
  And so there's a whole Middle Eastern culture.
• 14:34
  It's very, very different. And one of the things that they
• 14:36
  do, which is really beautiful is they give you a lot of
• 14:40
  blessings, but like they heap them on.
• 14:42
  So like, you know, you should be happy and, and you should look
• 14:46
  at each other in 30 years, like it's the first day of your life.
• 14:48
  And this is the moment that your entire life is going to be
• 14:50
  building towards and like, and like you and your family and
• 14:53
  your kids and you guys should have kids.
• 14:54
  And the whole crowd is like cheering, like the whole time.
• 14:57
  And, and like, it's funny because a lot of times everyone
• 15:00
  knows that everyone wishes everyone all these things when
• 15:03
  they hear happy news like, but but there's something else that
• 15:06
  there's something else in our nature when we actually say
• 15:10
  those things out loud that just shakes and resonates and and
• 15:14
  internalizes itself, even if we know it already.
• 15:16
  To hear it again is really, really valuable.
• 15:19
  So, so like when you talk about these emotional experiences and
• 15:23
  the care that you have for if your wife or your kids or
• 15:26
  yourself even, you know, I think, I think that, you know,
• 15:29
  even though it's something that almost like quote UN quote
• 15:31
  doesn't need to be said, it absolutely needs to be fed
• 15:34
  because reinforceable, it needs to be reinforced, you know,
• 15:37
  couldn't agree more. I mean, my, my first, I
• 15:41
  originally named my blog Untangle and the idea was that
• 15:44
  just putting the words on yeah, stuff that's going on up here.
• 15:48
  I was putting it on the page helped sort of Untangle what was
• 15:51
  going on up there. My wife jokes like, man, no
• 15:54
  wonder you were miserable to be around before you started
• 15:56
  writing. All that stuff was jumbled up
• 15:58
  there. I mean, I've been writing daily
• 16:00
  now for, you know, 14 years. So yes, words have power.
• 16:05
  They they clarify things that are confusing inside when
• 16:08
  they're said aloud. They other people, they're a
• 16:15
  gift that we give to our people. Essentially, they're a gift that
• 16:18
  we give to our people when we actually say the thing.
• 16:20
  That's why I said it this morning when we were just, we
• 16:23
  were just exercising and I had that thought of like, man, I
• 16:26
  could, I'm just as enthralled by you as the day I met you.
• 16:30
  And I wish, I wish I didn't get so distracted and send you a
• 16:33
  different message sometimes, you know, but I said it to her and I
• 16:38
  think that means something to her.
• 16:39
  Even 2526 years later, after dedicating my whole life to her,
• 16:43
  it still feels good to hear, right.
• 16:45
  It's still, it's meaningful. It makes a difference.
• 16:47
  So I couldn't agree with you more, man.
• 16:48
  Words said. And and when you talk to people
• 16:50
  who are at the end of their lives, right, and you ask them
• 16:54
  what would you have done more of?
• 16:55
  One of the first things is they would have said all the things.
• 16:58
  Yeah. Just would have said all the
• 16:59
  things. So, yeah, it's, it's wonderful
• 17:01
  that in in some of our spiritual and religious traditions, we
• 17:04
  have rituals where we say the things.
• 17:07
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and again, I, I just showed
• 17:11
  my I, I, I imagine there's a bunch of ready, but I've just
• 17:14
  showed my high school students Dead Poets Society for the first
• 17:17
  time and so good. And what I, and one of the
• 17:21
  things I had to tell them was that there's such a thing, such
• 17:24
  a genre called dramas. And there's such a thing where I
• 17:28
  was like, and there's something I was like, and I want you to,
• 17:30
  to, to watch this and watch for this.
• 17:32
  I was like, a lot of times actors and actors will say what
• 17:39
  they have to say without saying anything.
• 17:41
  And you have to look at their face and read it and you have to
• 17:44
  be able to see that they want to say something and they're
• 17:47
  holding themselves back. And I was like, in those moments
• 17:51
  are moments that like the audience can almost always
• 17:54
  relate to and connect to because we've all had those times where
• 17:58
  we wish we'd said, you know, what we needed to say or what we
• 18:01
  wanted to say so badly. And we all recognize the weight
• 18:05
  and the inks that, that, that, that, that we carry when we miss
• 18:09
  those opportunities. And there are times, there are
• 18:11
  even times where I'll, you know, I'll be going to, we're
• 18:13
  sleeping. It's like 1:00 in the morning.
• 18:15
  I roll over and my wife says, oh, you're up.
• 18:17
  And like, and if I think to myself, yeah.
• 18:19
  And like, I think to myself, like, I should say, I love you.
• 18:22
  I'm just so tired. I'm like, you know, I just like,
• 18:23
  like, and like a moment and like, you freeze and it, it just
• 18:27
  lasts 1/2 a second. But it, you know, and it really,
• 18:31
  really sits with you. One of the one of the hacks that
• 18:35
  I recommend to couples is what what they discover when they
• 18:39
  really start to pay attention to that half of a second is that
• 18:42
  they have thoughts of gratitude all the time for their people.
• 18:46
  They have thoughts of affection. They have thoughts of thoughts
• 18:48
  of appreciation, but it passes in half of a second.
• 18:51
  And then you're back to, you know, I don't know, whatever
• 18:55
  your notification on your cell phone, just pay for, right?
• 18:58
  And I say you don't have to come up with more gratitude or
• 19:00
  appreciation. Just notice it when it shows up
• 19:03
  and always say it, right? Yeah.
• 19:05
  Like to to the one of the classic examples for me is I
• 19:08
  remember one night getting home like, you know, garbage night,
• 19:12
  right? And it's like I'm exhausted
• 19:14
  after a long day. I don't want to do the get the
• 19:15
  garbage out of the curb. And I pull in and my wife's
• 19:17
  already got the garbage out to the curb.
• 19:19
  Yeah, chances are like I felt enormous gratitude in that
• 19:23
  moment. But chances are, by the time I
• 19:24
  pull in the driveway, parked the car, I'm not gonna remember to
• 19:29
  say thank you. Greets you as soon as you walk
• 19:31
  into the house. You know, it's O it's over.
• 19:33
  So in that moment where you feel the gratitude and the affection
• 19:37
  and the tenderness, say it. Yeah.
• 19:39
  If you can't bring yourself to say it, pause even longer and
• 19:44
  ask yourself why. Yeah.
• 19:47
  Why do you think that would be for some people?
• 19:48
  Like, what is some common reservations that people have
• 19:52
  when it comes to? Is it a fear of vulnerability?
• 19:55
  Is it a fear of rejection a lot or even saying something that
• 19:58
  you feel you haven't said before?
• 20:01
  It's almost unfamiliar waters. Yeah, that's a great question.
• 20:05
  So a little bit of backs. I'm going to answer that
• 20:09
  question was just a little bit of back story, which is that
• 20:13
  five years ago, this past New Year's Eve, I was in bad shape.
• 20:19
  I had, you know. About five years previous to
• 20:23
  that, four years previous to that, I'd published Lovable.
• 20:26
  It's a book about how embracing our sense of worthiness and
• 20:31
  belonging. But I was having the trouble
• 20:34
  living into the truth of that right?
• 20:36
  Like I would hit these triggering moments in my life
• 20:39
  with my wife, with my kids and everywhere, and I would not live
• 20:44
  as if I could trust my worthiness.
• 20:46
  And 2020 had been a really tough year.
• 20:49
  I, in the midst of some triggering moments, ended up
• 20:53
  blowing up my business partnership with my best friend
• 20:56
  and the best friendship. COVID hit.
• 20:58
  We were all, you know, schooling from home and kids were
• 21:01
  becoming, I call them zombies, call them becoming zombies.
• 21:04
  And I was getting triggered left and right.
• 21:06
  And and there was a day Sunday afternoon in the middle of that
• 21:11
  where my wife had she'd convinced she'd finally like
• 21:13
  she'd had the leverage finally to convince me to put in an
• 21:15
  above ground pool. She's like all the pools are
• 21:17
  closing for the summer. We need that above ground pool
• 21:19
  finally. All right, So I get the pool
• 21:22
  installed and on a Sunday morning she goes out to fill up
• 21:24
  the pool and she hangs a hose over the side, a garden hose and
• 21:28
  puts a rock on top of it to anchor it there.
• 21:30
  But the rock, the rock wasn't heavy enough.
• 21:34
  And I go out like 4 hours later and the pool is bone dry.
• 21:38
  But our backyard is a lake, right?
• 21:40
  And I'm like, I got so triggered and so angry that I'm like, man,
• 21:46
  I'm going to say and do some things here that I need to not
• 21:48
  say and do. So what do I do?
• 21:50
  Well, I was like, OK, I'm just going to blow off all this steam
• 21:52
  on a bike ride. So I hop on my bike, angry,
• 21:56
  frustrated. I even remember pulling out of
• 21:58
  our subdivision going, you're not in the right mind to be on a
• 22:01
  bike. But I just ignored it.
• 22:03
  Literally about a minute and a half later, not paying
• 22:07
  attention, I almost hit a car. I pumped my brakes.
• 22:09
  I go over the handlebars and I break my left collarbone in two
• 22:12
  places on the right. Well, this thing, it doesn't, it
• 22:18
  doesn't heal properly. You know, they're called fibrous
• 22:22
  tissue, non union fractures. 2 breaks in my left collarbone
• 22:25
  that are basically like hinges now.
• 22:28
  So it was this really long and painful recovery because it
• 22:31
  didn't heal very well. So I get to New Year's Eve going
• 22:33
  into 2021 and I'm out of shape physically and I'm looking for
• 22:38
  fitness resolutions. And I come across this
• 22:39
  incredible quote by a guy named Michael Singer.
• 22:44
  And the quote is, don't let anything in life be important
• 22:47
  enough that you're willing to close your heart over it.
• 22:50
  And I thought, you know what? Most of the hardship that I've
• 22:54
  run into this year, most of the suffering isn't because of
• 22:57
  what's happening around me. It's because of what's happening
• 22:59
  within me. It's my heart closing to it, my
• 23:01
  resistance to it, my reaction to it.
• 23:04
  And I said, I'm going to make a New Year's resolution.
• 23:06
  And it's not going to be a fitness resolution.
• 23:08
  It's going to be this moment to moment.
• 23:11
  I will notice my heart closing and try to open it back up.
• 23:15
  That was my resolution going into 2021, and I quickly
• 23:19
  discovered how difficult that was.
• 23:22
  Now, five years later, I basically have developed a
• 23:31
  process for helping people to keep their hearts open in any
• 23:35
  moment, especially the key moments.
• 23:37
  And I've written a book about it.
• 23:38
  But to answer your specific question, why is it so hard to
• 23:42
  express that gratitude and that appreciation, you know, in that
• 23:46
  moment? It's because to do that, you
• 23:49
  have to open your heart up, right?
• 23:51
  For for that kind of tenderness to come out, your heart has to
• 23:54
  be open. But a heart that is open is
• 23:57
  momentarily unprotected, right? So that's what vulnerability is.
• 24:02
  Vulnerability is opening my heart to express affection with
• 24:07
  no guarantee of safety about what comes back in, right.
• 24:12
  And so, yeah, it's very, very, very vulnerable.
• 24:15
  I have a spiritual director myself.
• 24:19
  And I was telling him that as I'm, as I, as I progress on this
• 24:24
  open hearted journey, I'm starting to realize how
• 24:26
  vulnerable Joy is. And he's like, yeah, he said,
• 24:30
  yeah, Kelly, most people think anxiety is the most vulnerable
• 24:33
  emotion. A few people think, you know,
• 24:35
  realize sadness is more vulnerable than anxiety.
• 24:38
  Very few people realize joy is the most vulnerable emotion of
• 24:41
  all because when you are feeling joy, your heart is wide open and
• 24:46
  anything can come in and devastate you at that point,
• 24:49
  right. And so, so increasingly my
• 24:54
  practice of moment to moment, I'm you know, I will, I will try
• 24:57
  to add most of my heart closing and try to open it back up.
• 25:00
  Is, is the, the capacity, the promise of getting to live life
• 25:07
  joyfully while learning how to handle the disappointments when
• 25:11
  they happen and staying open hearted through the
• 25:15
  disappointments and through the hurtful things.
• 25:18
  And it's just a really powerful practice and, and so, but all of
• 25:21
  that to say, yes, it is really hard to say, boy, I'm really
• 25:24
  thankful you took the the trash cans out because you've opened
• 25:28
  your heart. And now if she says, well, I
• 25:30
  wish you would have done me a favor, but, you know, picking,
• 25:33
  picking up the, the kitchen after you ate this morning, it's
• 25:37
  like, oh, I, I didn't have my protections up, you know, and
• 25:41
  now your heart wants to close really hard to keep you safe.
• 25:43
  And now you got to figure out how to stay open to that as
• 25:45
  well. So it's a it's a vulnerable
• 25:48
  moment, Right, Right. Yeah.
• 25:51
  Makes sense. I, I try to teach my students
• 25:53
  about some of these ideas. And you know, we find literary
• 25:57
  themes that that that endorse them and kind of back them up.
• 26:02
  And one thing that I think I want to talk to you about a
• 26:05
  bunch of things, including your newest book, but there's a
• 26:10
  couple of things along the way. And I'm sure that you could
• 26:13
  actually, I'm sure connect them to the book.
• 26:14
  But number one is, and you and I talked about this on the phone
• 26:18
  while we were talking, people today are more isolated, I feel,
• 26:23
  than they've been in a very long time.
• 26:26
  And yeah, you see these videos even for example, on social
• 26:29
  media of like what a high school gym looked like or high school
• 26:32
  hallways looked like in the 90s and then what a high school
• 26:34
  hallway looks like now. And we're isolated.
• 26:40
  We grew up. We're growing up without a lot
• 26:42
  of the face to face social interactions that I think are
• 26:46
  required in order to really learn and to really understand
• 26:51
  how to navigate the nuances and complexities of relationships.
• 26:55
  And we learned that starting a young age with, you know, and
• 26:59
  like I'm dealing with this with my three-year old son now, whom
• 27:02
  he's just learning how to speak back to me.
• 27:04
  So I'm like, like, don't hurt mommy.
• 27:06
  And then he looks at me and goes don't hurt.
• 27:08
  True. Why?
• 27:08
  I'm like, I'm not going to hurt you, dude.
• 27:11
  But like, you know, like he like he's learning how to how to how
• 27:15
  to read, how to read how to, he's learning a whole new
• 27:17
  library of potential responses. That's really important.
• 27:22
  And I think that we're losing that.
• 27:23
  So a lot of times people, aside from learning how to maintain a
• 27:28
  healthy relationship, people don't even know how to how to
• 27:30
  begin them, how to start having them and how to how to meet
• 27:33
  people and stuff like that. So I'm wondering if you can kind
• 27:36
  of maybe dive in at least based on your experiences into what
• 27:40
  you know, what advice you kind of give people to get started
• 27:42
  with friendships, relationships, anything.
• 27:45
  Yeah, absolutely. A year ago, maybe this week, I
• 27:51
  was inducted into my high school athletic Hall of Fame for a
• 27:55
  couple pretty good years on the golf team back in the in the
• 27:58
  night, back in the 1900s, as my kids like to say.
• 28:03
  And I was asked to to say a few words.
• 28:08
  And what I found myself saying is like, you know, when when
• 28:12
  parents send a kid to high school, they're, they're hoping
• 28:14
  for some basics, you know, get some decent grades, don't drink
• 28:19
  and drive, don't get pregnant, you know, find some good
• 28:22
  friends. That kind of the yardstick's
• 28:23
  pretty low. Yeah, it is.
• 28:25
  It really is. Like, just don't devastate
• 28:27
  things here, right? For what I said was, though, for
• 28:32
  a high schooler entering that first day of high school,
• 28:34
  there's literally just one thought beating like a drum beat
• 28:37
  in their head, which is where will I belong?
• 28:39
  Where will I belong? Where will I belong?
• 28:42
  Right. And, and, and why the reason I
• 28:44
  said that is that, you know, athletic teams, for instance,
• 28:48
  provide this sort of instant sense of belonging.
• 28:51
  Theoretically the, the choir provides a sense of belonging.
• 28:55
  So those are some shortcuts. But every, every young person
• 29:00
  who's, you know, in those teenage years and entering high
• 29:02
  school, that is their core project.
• 29:04
  They don't care so much about like parents care about grades.
• 29:08
  I care about finding somebody that I belong to right as a kid.
• 29:12
  And, and the reality is that I think our capacity to find
• 29:19
  belonging is directly correlated to our ability to sit in the
• 29:26
  discomfort between belongings, right?
• 29:29
  Like that uncertain space where I don't know if I belong.
• 29:36
  Am I willing to endure the fundamental discomfort of being
• 29:40
  in that space? And if I am, that will allow me
• 29:43
  to stay out there in a world, in the world in a way and show up
• 29:47
  to the world in a way that allows me to start to make those
• 29:50
  connections. And we can all sort of relate
• 29:52
  you, most of us can have at least one example of that.
• 29:54
  You know, it's that that first day of kindergarten where
• 29:57
  somebody comes over, you know, to you on the swing and says,
• 30:00
  hey, do you want to play catch? You're like, oh, I found just
• 30:03
  one person, right, to belong to. And, and, and the tricky thing
• 30:09
  is as a young person, like when we back in the 1900s, right, we
• 30:13
  knew, I mean, it is a fundamental human imperative
• 30:17
  baked into our DNA to go find belonging.
• 30:20
  And if we wanted to go find belonging, we were, for the most
• 30:23
  part, going to have to endure the discomfort.
• 30:25
  We don't have to show up in the world, right, in the analog
• 30:27
  world, not in the digital world. And we were going to have to go
• 30:31
  through that. And in doing that, you develop
• 30:33
  the capacity to be in the yak so you can get to the good stuff,
• 30:36
  right? Young people these days have an
• 30:41
  alternative that feels in many ways a lot easier at first.
• 30:47
  It is. It's a lot easier at first.
• 30:51
  The the choices are endless online.
• 30:55
  The interactions are you can select for interactions that you
• 31:02
  want to have that make you feel good.
• 31:04
  You don't have to stay in the ones that don't make you feel
• 31:06
  great right away. And so you don't really
• 31:09
  cultivate that muscle of, of learning how to stay in the
• 31:12
  uncertainty of of not belonging yet.
• 31:16
  The problem is, and there's that we now have now 10 years ago, we
• 31:20
  didn't have this, but we now have data that shows that none
• 31:23
  of that online stuff feels like real, real, real belonging,
• 31:26
  despite what Mark Zuckerberg says, despite, despite what they
• 31:30
  will try to sell you. And that's why, like, it's it's
• 31:35
  I have a friend who says you can never get enough of what?
• 31:38
  Of what? Almost works, Right.
• 31:39
  Yeah. That is such a great line.
• 31:42
  Right. Like, yeah.
• 31:43
  Wow. You think, well, if I get 100
• 31:46
  hearts on this Instagram post, then I will feel like I belong.
• 31:50
  And you probably do for about a minute.
• 31:54
  And then. And then you're wondering, why
• 31:56
  did Susie die? You know, like, it doesn't.
• 31:59
  Yeah, It doesn't. Yeah.
• 32:00
  Never gets there, never get there.
• 32:03
  I, I, I, I'm sorry, I, I, I grew up.
• 32:06
  This just resonates so strongly with me because I was, I grew up
• 32:11
  with one as one of the first generations of.
• 32:13
  So I was born in 95, right? So I got my, I got my Facebook
• 32:17
  account when I was going into, I think 10th grade or 11th grade.
• 32:22
  And I have such visceral memories and such vivid memories
• 32:28
  of days of emotional roller coasters because of a new
• 32:34
  profile picture that I posted. And I'm waiting to see the
• 32:37
  collection of likes and comments and who liked and and who didn't
• 32:42
  like and going through and checking compulsively, you know,
• 32:46
  and and and I and there and there were a couple of moments
• 32:51
  of real breakdowns, even though it's and it's crazy because I
• 32:54
  did have a very otherwise healthy connected, you know,
• 33:00
  like really in all, in all other ways in excellent life.
• 33:03
  And it just shows how powerful this this, this experience is.
• 33:08
  Absolutely. I mean, imagine if you got a new
• 33:11
  haircut, right? I mean, I can't anymore.
• 33:14
  It's those days are passing. It actually had a really thick
• 33:17
  out of hair. Imagine you got a.
• 33:19
  New haircut and you walked into the high school hallway for the
• 33:22
  first time. And as you walked down the high
• 33:23
  the hallway, it was just you're Bing as people looked at you.
• 33:27
  Yeah, You're like, oh, my gosh, this.
• 33:31
  Yeah, this is amazing. People really like my haircut.
• 33:34
  But then you get like Sally, who you really were hoping likes
• 33:39
  your haircut, she just sort of looks at you and looks away and
• 33:41
  ignores you completely. You know, you're like, on this
• 33:43
  emotional roller coaster. And none of it's relational.
• 33:48
  You go back, you go back to the 1900s archaic time and you walk
• 33:52
  into the hallway with a new haircut and you just have to
• 33:54
  exist in not really knowing how people are reacting or how
• 33:58
  they're thinking about it. You have to learn how to go
• 34:04
  deeper with a few people so you can actually get reactions that
• 34:09
  you trust rather than sort of instantaneous transient sort of
• 34:14
  right, right. You know, like impressions, I
• 34:16
  guess. And and so it's an entirely
• 34:21
  different emotional and relational skill set that you're
• 34:24
  learning with your new haircut than with a new profile picture,
• 34:28
  right? And yeah, we're just not getting
• 34:30
  many reps at it anymore. So in a practical sense, right,
• 34:35
  You got an average 2122 year old graduating college and she moves
• 34:41
  to this girl. This girl moves to a new city,
• 34:43
  NY, Idaho, Chicago, whatever it is to for for a new job and no
• 34:48
  idea how to find new people. Now in today's world, especially
• 34:53
  A, you have the option of potentially working remote and
• 34:55
  being in your apartment anyway and basically just being
• 34:58
  isolated unless you want to go for a walk, in which case you're
• 35:01
  still probably not communicating with people with your headphones
• 35:04
  and your and your phone. B, you're in a new place, right?
• 35:09
  Presumably. And how you're going to meet
• 35:11
  people. And, and, and I can't imagine,
• 35:14
  you know, and one of the things, and I've talked about this
• 35:17
  before a little bit while, like in the while it was happening,
• 35:20
  but unfortunately with all, there were a couple of terrible
• 35:23
  shootings that happened this year, school shootings and mass
• 35:26
  shootings that were just absolute mental health
• 35:29
  catastrophes. And you read these letters that
• 35:33
  the shooters leave behind and you're like, I can't imagine
• 35:37
  what you must have been living like in that head for how many
• 35:41
  years until until it culminates in something like this.
• 35:44
  And you just can't help but wonder, what if these people
• 35:48
  learned how to sit in a coffee shop and say hello to someone
• 35:52
  that was sitting next to them and then talk to someone?
• 35:54
  Or how, how to go to a brewery and to grab and like grab a
• 35:57
  beer, grab a Guinness with someone and just be like, and
• 36:00
  like you sit at the I've done this so many times where I go by
• 36:02
  myself to a brewery or a pub or a cigar shop and I'm feeling
• 36:06
  alone. I feel isolated.
• 36:08
  I'm feeling by myself and I'm in a new place.
• 36:10
  I've done this. I've started over in Seattle and
• 36:12
  college. I've started at different high
• 36:14
  schools and camps and I moved to Florida without knowing anyone.
• 36:17
  And I all I do is I pop down and I have a beer and I wait for
• 36:21
  someone that's sitting that's sit next to me and I just say,
• 36:23
  what's going on? What are you drinking?
• 36:24
  You know, how's it going? How are you today?
• 36:26
  And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
• 36:28
  But I've made great friends like that throughout the years.
• 36:31
  I've made awesome communities. And, and then like what you've
• 36:34
  said, a four to find that confidence in myself that hey, I
• 36:39
  can go anywhere now. And I could, and I could go to
• 36:41
  Louisiana and I could go to Mexico and I could go to Texas
• 36:45
  and I can, I could just pop down and I'll find and, you know, and
• 36:47
  if, if one spot isn't my crowd, I'll go to another spot until I
• 36:50
  find my crowd. You know, it's a yeah, you've
• 36:53
  you've developed the, the trust and the confidence that I can, I
• 36:57
  can sort of find home wherever I wherever I go.
• 37:00
  Yeah, and, and and it it's so hard to believe that that's
• 37:03
  true, but it is true. Like there is, there is home
• 37:05
  waiting for you wherever, wherever you go, if you're
• 37:09
  willing to fully show up and find it, you know, in lovable in
• 37:12
  the belonging section. I say we don't build belonging.
• 37:15
  We find it. We we have the courage to fully
• 37:17
  show up authentically as who we are.
• 37:19
  And then we look around and see who's like, oh, I celebrate
• 37:22
  that. I'm with you, you know, but so
• 37:24
  often we show up so fortified, as, you know, a word you've
• 37:28
  used. We show up so hidden and
• 37:30
  protected that it's almost impossible for us to find our
• 37:34
  people because who, who could possibly know us, right?
• 37:38
  And so to have that courage to show up authentically and just
• 37:41
  trust that I'll find some home here somewhere, you know, is
• 37:45
  again, there's there's a space of uncertainty and self doubt
• 37:49
  that you have to navigate to to get to that point.
• 37:51
  And it's it's going to be really hard, hard to get there.
• 37:57
  Yeah, I was talking, I, I have a friend of mine and I don't want
• 38:01
  to give a lot of detail in case anyone knows him.
• 38:03
  So, you know, but I had a friend that was having a lot of what
• 38:08
  years on and off with the girl and, and both of them, I knew
• 38:12
  both of them and I liked both of them a lot.
• 38:14
  I really, really did. And they were both obviously not
• 38:17
  very good for one another. And we've all had that friend.
• 38:22
  I know, I know. And this felt this feels real.
• 38:24
  This felt really like 1 like a real life, like what do you call
• 38:29
  it a sitcom? You know, it just it didn't, it
• 38:31
  felt too, too crazy to be true. But everyone has those and one
• 38:36
  and you know, and they were in one of their fight breakups,
• 38:39
  whatever you want to call it. And I was talking to both and
• 38:41
  both them said the same thing to me, which was because we just
• 38:44
  hung out like a day earlier and they told me that they'd broken
• 38:47
  up again. And they both said, I know that
• 38:51
  there's something better out there.
• 38:53
  I just don't know how to be with by by myself long enough to be
• 38:57
  able to get there. That's what that's the when I
• 39:00
  said the phrase we have to learn how to exist between belongings.
• 39:03
  That means we people have to learn how to be comfortable.
• 39:06
  That's it with themselves. Yes, being alone and, and, and
• 39:11
  it's and we're this is daunting stuff like, you know, to
• 39:15
  acknowledge how challenging that is for a human being.
• 39:20
  Loneliness is one of the most painful experiences.
• 39:23
  There was a time in our lives when we were very young when
• 39:25
  loneliness was an existential threat.
• 39:27
  Like if we're alone where, you know, humans are odd mammals,
• 39:32
  we're we're dependent upon other creatures for 1820 years for our
• 39:36
  survival. And so there's years where being
• 39:39
  feeling lonely was an existential threat.
• 39:42
  Yeah. But at any point in life,
• 39:43
  feeling lonely is really painful.
• 39:45
  And so to learn how to be in that lonely feeling between
• 39:48
  belongings and. And this is where I think you
• 39:51
  see, if I'm feeling lonely, I go to the the device and the online
• 39:59
  sort of interactions. You want a mummy?
• 40:01
  It's a Band-Aid. Yeah.
• 40:02
  It takes it away like for for for a moment.
• 40:07
  But you never get to learn how to endure the loneliness so that
• 40:11
  you can make an actual transition between belongings,
• 40:15
  to your point. So yeah, I think that's really
• 40:18
  hard. Now, one thing I would say is to
• 40:22
  your point, like 22 year old moves to a new city, a lot of
• 40:26
  our natural sort of habitats for connecting have been taken away.
• 40:31
  You're probably going to find people through your online
• 40:34
  platforms and your device. But think of them, think of that
• 40:37
  as a doorway, not a destination, right?
• 40:41
  It's not a destination, it's the doorway.
• 40:43
  You met somebody. Now when you get together with
• 40:45
  them, put your phones in your pockets, be in the room with
• 40:49
  them, not in the doorway. There will be the temptation
• 40:53
  that when you get together with these people now and you start
• 40:55
  to feel a little bit of that, like, I'm not sure if this is
• 40:57
  right. I'm not sure if I'm belonging.
• 40:58
  You're going to want to get your device out and get back in a
• 41:00
  doorway and start to look for a different door.
• 41:03
  You know, you know, just stay here.
• 41:05
  Endure that. If it doesn't go well, chalk it
• 41:08
  up to a repetition at learning how to be present to your
• 41:11
  discomfort. And that will strengthen you for
• 41:13
  your next your next opportunity. But yeah, use the devices as
• 41:17
  doorways, just not destinations. Yeah, that's, that's a great
• 41:20
  advice. I, what do you, what would you
• 41:22
  tell someone or what advice would you give someone to learn
• 41:26
  how to tolerate or to or the most productive way to be alone
• 41:33
  or to be lonely? Meaning, for example, I'm just
• 41:35
  to clarify because you know, I, I, I definitely I, I, I think
• 41:40
  loneliness is the feeling of not being able to have someone
• 41:44
  relate to what you're sharing or what you're feeling or what
• 41:47
  you're experiencing. You know, it's not necessarily
• 41:49
  about being with someone. That's why being lonely in a
• 41:52
  full room. It's great, but it's so it's, it
• 41:54
  hits so hard because it is true. If you feel like you have no,
• 41:58
  like no one there relates to anything about you.
• 42:00
  That's right, you're finished, you know, So what do you, how do
• 42:04
  you get comfortable with yourself and what would you
• 42:06
  recommend for people to try doing?
• 42:07
  Oh man, such a good question. I mean, I would start with
• 42:11
  saying that for me, having my work, my work increasingly is
• 42:18
  about helping people to be present to their sense of
• 42:21
  loneliness so they don't have to escape it into other things.
• 42:26
  And in talking to hundreds, maybe thousands of people about
• 42:29
  this, I would say that the loneliness has three pillars.
• 42:33
  Feeling unseen, misunderstood and unsupported.
• 42:39
  OK, so like if you feel like someone truly sees you, like
• 42:44
  they're actually paying attention, they're interested,
• 42:46
  and then you feel like they really get you, they understand
• 42:50
  you, and then they want to actively be a support to to who
• 42:54
  you are. You feel very much unlonely like
• 42:57
  if all three of those check boxes are checked, right?
• 43:00
  But if any of them remains unchecked, you're going, you're
• 43:04
  going to feel a sense of loneliness.
• 43:08
  And the, the first thing we do, this is the irony of it when we
• 43:14
  feel lonely is we shift into protection mode instead of
• 43:19
  connection mode, right? Which in the moment feels a
• 43:23
  little safer, right? We start to, we feel lonely, so
• 43:27
  we start to hide who we really are, or we start to get
• 43:30
  aggressive, or we start to try to manipulate or control the
• 43:33
  situation to feel better. But you're in protection mode
• 43:36
  now and that feels momentarily better in the long run, it
• 43:40
  guarantees you'll end up more lonely, right?
• 43:43
  So the challenge is to befriend one's loneliness so that you can
• 43:47
  stay in connect, connection mode even when you're feeling lonely
• 43:50
  as an exquisitely difficult thing to do.
• 43:53
  But as we develop the capacity to do that, it's actually the
• 43:56
  doorway out of our loneliness because we, we've, we've stayed
• 43:59
  in connection mode, we've kept our hearts open.
• 44:01
  We've left ourselves available to connection when it presents
• 44:04
  itself. Yeah.
• 44:06
  And you know, it's and this was probably a great transition into
• 44:09
  the whole relationship. Maintenance and and preventative
• 44:12
  maintenance, you call it. But but it's the medical
• 44:17
  equipment salesman and me coming out.
• 44:19
  But, but I, I've, you know, I have a lot of friends and OK,
• 44:26
  this also comes from the experience of being in the
• 44:28
  Orthodox Jewish world where there is a lot of pressure to
• 44:30
  get married at a relatively young age, which I actually
• 44:33
  think is probably a good thing for the most part, obviously,
• 44:36
  with exceptions. My, that's my take.
• 44:39
  But one thing that I have noticed for a lot of people
• 44:43
  going as they grow up and we know that we're living in a
• 44:47
  society where adolescence is constantly being stretched a
• 44:50
  little further and a little further feels year by year.
• 44:55
  One thing that I've noticed is that I have friends that look
• 44:58
  for relationships as A, to try to resolve their loneliness.
• 45:03
  And they think that by getting married or they think by being,
• 45:06
  you know, by moving in with someone that now they're not
• 45:08
  going to be lonely anymore. And, and I, I too had, you know,
• 45:12
  I too used to have these thoughts, these thoughts until I
• 45:15
  was in a long term relationship in college and, and I, and I'd
• 45:18
  still experienced bouts of loneliness and I'll call my mom
• 45:20
  and be like, what the heck is going on?
• 45:22
  I'm with my girlfriend all day and, and I, and I still feel
• 45:25
  like this and like, you know, I have no idea what's happening.
• 45:27
  So and, and then and she said, you know, and so we know that
• 45:31
  being in a relationship does not necessarily mean that you are
• 45:36
  doing the connecting and doing the opening up and the sharing.
• 45:39
  Like you said that we needed that we need to do.
• 45:40
  So what maybe you could elaborate a little bit on this?
• 45:43
  Man, that's a fantastic observation.
• 45:46
  I will tell the couples that I work with that the number one
• 45:50
  reason to get married is because and and you may not even have
• 45:56
  known what to call it at the point where you met your spouse,
• 45:59
  but you were already wrestling with that human experience of
• 46:03
  loneliness in your life and being with when you were with
• 46:05
  them, that loneliness seemed to evaporate.
• 46:09
  Like it just seemed to be fixed, right.
• 46:11
  Whatever that thing on in there was that you didn't know what to
• 46:13
  call it, it was loneliness and it went away.
• 46:15
  So you're like, let's do life together.
• 46:18
  I never have to experience that thing again.
• 46:20
  You made me feel great. Let's do it.
• 46:23
  But the loneliness didn't disappear.
• 46:26
  It just sort of descended, you know, a little deeper.
• 46:30
  And so it eventually reemerges in the relationship.
• 46:33
  And there's factors that cause it to reemerge.
• 46:34
  Some, some people we marry are not as good at being connected
• 46:38
  children. How about this?
• 46:40
  Turns out when we had three kids and my wife started to give all
• 46:43
  of her wonderful attention to them, or a lot of it, I started
• 46:46
  to feel more lonely again, right, because it was still in
• 46:49
  there ready to be experienced. And so you're, you're just
• 46:52
  nailing it that what happens then is when our loneliness
• 46:56
  resurfaces in the relationship, we immediately begin to blame
• 46:59
  our partner for causing it. That's the wild thing for
• 47:02
  causing it. You're making me lonely.
• 47:06
  When in fact, for maybe the last 3-4 or five, I don't know, 10
• 47:10
  years, they were actually easing your loneliness and then they're
• 47:12
  just not easing it as well right now.
• 47:14
  So how can you take ownership for your experience of
• 47:16
  loneliness, that it predated your partner and that it is now
• 47:21
  your experience to learn how to be with, not theirs to absolve
• 47:24
  you of right. And, and so one of the ways that
• 47:27
  I, I often say this to couples is a lot of times what we do is
• 47:31
  we hold out our loneliness to our partner.
• 47:33
  Like, please take this away from me.
• 47:35
  And what we need to do is hold up our loneliness to our partner
• 47:38
  and just say, Hey, I just want you to know about my loneliness.
• 47:42
  As I'm getting to know it better and learning to be with it, I
• 47:44
  want you to know about it too. When two partners can say, yeah,
• 47:48
  we love each other, we know we're going to be together
• 47:50
  forever. We're creating an amazing family
• 47:54
  and yet we're still both a little lonely.
• 47:56
  It's like, oh, there you go now, now you're in your humanity
• 48:00
  right now you're not asking the other person to take this part
• 48:04
  of your humanity away. You're learning to actually.
• 48:06
  And this is the irony when you, when you can say I'm lonely and
• 48:09
  the person's like me too. Now you actually feel a little
• 48:12
  more connected because you've been open hearted and vulnerable
• 48:14
  about your loneliness, right? So the loneliness, the solution
• 48:18
  to the loneliness is not to have it taken away, but to be
• 48:21
  courageous enough to share it. Yes, they're sharing a drink.
• 48:24
  They call loneliness. But it's better than drinking
• 48:26
  alone. Yay, there you go.
• 48:29
  And the reason why I would even say such a cheesy line is
• 48:32
  because I know that most people that are below the age of 30
• 48:36
  probably don't know that, don't know those lyrics.
• 48:39
  But that's if you have not heard, if you do not know those
• 48:42
  lyrics, don't stop listening now.
• 48:45
  But when this episode is over, immediately go search Piano Man
• 48:48
  by Billy Joel. Yeah, he's got some.
• 48:51
  He's got some incredibly emotionally.
• 48:56
  I do, you know, Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you're a
• 48:58
  huge Billy Joel fan. I, I, I was growing up.
• 49:01
  I still am. I've been to probably over a
• 49:03
  dozen of his shows in the garden because I grew up in in Rockland
• 49:07
  and growing up I went and then when I was single, living in the
• 49:11
  city, it would be my date barometer as to like what the
• 49:15
  girl would be like. I'd take her to a Billie Joel
• 49:17
  concert to test out what you know, what kind of time she
• 49:20
  would have and see whether it's the best litmus test ever
• 49:23
  because it's a win for you either way.
• 49:25
  Exactly. If it's a bad day, had a great
• 49:27
  concert and if it's a great day and it's a double grade day,
• 49:32
  summer Highland Falls was one of my it was one of my favorite
• 49:35
  high school songs and it was it capture.
• 49:39
  He does such a good job in capturing the human experience
• 49:41
  of loneliness and manic, you know, ups and downs and, and I
• 49:47
  think that, and I think it's the other thing that I man, we look
• 49:53
  for, we look for answers instead instead of realizing that life's
• 50:00
  a project, you know, like we're almost like looking for like a
• 50:04
  state, like we're looking to reach a state of like, OK,
• 50:06
  when's everything going to be done?
• 50:08
  And then you're like, I don't think it's ever going to be
• 50:10
  done. So the question really isn't
• 50:13
  when am I done Right now? It's, you know, what am I doing
• 50:16
  to I, I, I like to think of things more like a sculpture
• 50:19
  where you kind of chip away a day at a time and then you start
• 50:21
  to see the picture that you're coming to.
• 50:23
  And I think that we need some of more, some more of that long
• 50:28
  term patience with ourselves and with our spouses and with our
• 50:31
  families to say, I'm pissed off at as all hell at you right now.
• 50:36
  And like at this moment, I can't stand you.
• 50:40
  But this is just this is just a sentence and a paragraph and a
• 50:43
  chapter in the book. That's our lives.
• 50:45
  And so you need to take a step back, you know, yes, you know, I
• 50:49
  so I'm launching this book and I somewhere late last summer.
• 50:55
  Let's plug it. What's the name of the book?
• 50:58
  The book is the road. The road less triggered.
• 51:00
  Thank you. Yes, conflict into connection.
• 51:03
  With a single choice. And, you know, we were early and
• 51:06
  starting to launch it late summer and all my neurosis were
• 51:11
  showing up, you know, like, Oh my, Oh my gosh, I'm, I've messed
• 51:14
  this up. I'm going to mess this up, you
• 51:15
  know, And I got on a call with my spiritual director again, and
• 51:19
  I'll never forget what he said. He's got these lines every once
• 51:21
  in a while that just stick with me.
• 51:22
  This one was Paul Kelly. He said you might this book
• 51:29
  launch might be a smashing success or you might mess it up
• 51:32
  royally, but all you will have done is created the next
• 51:36
  conditions for your spiritual growth.
• 51:39
  Beautiful, right? Like in my head to your.
• 51:41
  Point from I was like, well, if it's a success, I've reached
• 51:44
  some sort of finish line and now I'm now it's sort of Oh yeah,
• 51:46
  great. I just get to like, I don't know
• 51:48
  what drink Pina coladas by the pool the rest of my life.
• 51:50
  I don't know what I, I don't know what I think that's going
• 51:52
  to be, but I'm, I'm, I'm tantalized by it.
• 51:54
  And if I mess it up, then I've got work to do.
• 51:56
  And he's like, no, like even success presents its own
• 51:59
  challenges for spiritual growth. And then he said sometime later,
• 52:03
  because this is, this is something I need hammered home.
• 52:05
  Like you said, you are not here to be finished.
• 52:09
  You're here to be formed. Nice, excellent.
• 52:12
  Don't don't get caught thinking you're going to get to a finish
• 52:15
  line. You will be formed until the day
• 52:17
  you die. And that's what we're here for.
• 52:20
  And so I'm trying to surrender to that one, one meeting at a
• 52:22
  time with him. Can I ask if you don't mind,
• 52:26
  just because you brought it up a couple of times, the value of
• 52:30
  having a spiritual leader as opposed to there's a therapist
• 52:33
  or a psychologist or something, unless he serves as both or what
• 52:36
  do you think? Like what would you recommend
• 52:38
  that for everyone? What do you what's your
• 52:40
  thoughts? That's another good question.
• 52:42
  I've never gotten. So I'd say like, you know,
• 52:47
  therapist, coach. Spiritual Director.
• 52:52
  They all share a lot in common, right?
• 52:55
  If they're doing their job well, they're sort of dipping their
• 52:58
  toes in sort of the strengths of each of those disciplines.
• 53:04
  I think the difference with the spiritual director is the at
• 53:10
  least. In my spiritual director,
• 53:14
  there's a. Trust that he is.
• 53:21
  Holding. Space for divine wisdom to
• 53:27
  present itself in that space. Like he's not trying to get you
• 53:31
  to a certain place. He doesn't have cognitive
• 53:35
  restructuring he wants to do today.
• 53:37
  He doesn't have a goal that you is going to hold you accountable
• 53:39
  to. He's going to say, let's hold
• 53:42
  space and let's see how God shows up.
• 53:44
  And that's going to be a surprise to both of us today.
• 53:46
  And good spiritual directors are really good at holding that
• 53:49
  space. And a lot of it just comes from
• 53:50
  their trust and their faith that, that God's always present
• 53:53
  and always trying to speak to us through our human experiences.
• 53:56
  So yeah, he just, he does a fabulous job.
• 53:59
  And then, but then every once in a while he'll sort of summarize
• 54:01
  what's being said or what's happening or what's being
• 54:03
  experienced. It doesn't sound as good.
• 54:06
  He'll, he'll summarize it. And it's like, like you said, he
• 54:09
  puts it into words and that makes it more powerful.
• 54:11
  And so he has a, he has a really a gift for summarizing complex
• 54:16
  experiences and meaningful words for me.
• 54:18
  So, but but yeah, I just, I mean, for what it's worth, I
• 54:24
  didn't go looking for a spiritual director.
• 54:25
  I knew I needed to see a therapist, didn't know where to
• 54:29
  look. And I was on the, I was on the
• 54:31
  phone with him one day as a friend, Ish.
• 54:34
  And he was talking to me about, you know, the work he was doing
• 54:37
  in spiritual direction. And I just sort of and something
• 54:40
  happened on that call where he held space for me better than
• 54:42
  anyone else had. And I was like, I'll just try
• 54:45
  this experiment. Like I'll, I'll be your direct D
• 54:48
  for a while. And, you know, here we are a few
• 54:50
  years later and it's it's once a month and it's it's just what I
• 54:53
  need. That's awesome.
• 54:55
  That's really, really great. Yeah.
• 54:56
  I think you put that you put that really, really well.
• 55:00
  And I think another way to maybe unless and see if I understand
• 55:05
  this correctly, when you're kind of talking about a spiritual
• 55:09
  sense or the sense of God or sense of right and wrong, it
• 55:12
  almost reframes. Everything into a.
• 55:16
  Much. More you, you, you like we get
• 55:18
  caught up in the subjectivity of our own perceptions and lives.
• 55:21
  And this moves us to a little bit more of an objective playing
• 55:24
  field where we kind of trace ourselves and reorient and map
• 55:28
  ourselves where we are and recalibrate according to this
• 55:32
  big objective. As opposed to just how I feel
• 55:34
  about where I am in my life in my head.
• 55:38
  You know, it's a great way to say it like, and I think at
• 55:42
  least in this, you know, spiritual direction that I'm
• 55:44
  doing like. Most of us human beings are
• 55:49
  caught in a. Situation where we've decided
• 55:51
  what things are acceptable to think and feel and do and we let
• 55:55
  ourselves be aware of those and everything else we push out into
• 55:58
  our unawareness right or what Carl Jung called our shadow and
• 56:03
  and increasingly like I'm aware that the the spiritual.
• 56:09
  Journey. The, the emotional journey, the
• 56:14
  you know, the relational journey, the life journey is
• 56:16
  about learning to integrate more and more of what you've rejected
• 56:20
  about yourself and about life and pushed into your shadow to
• 56:23
  become aware of it and start to integrate it with who you are.
• 56:26
  And you can only do that in spaces where you feel really
• 56:28
  safe and loved, right? A space where someone you know,
• 56:34
  will not reject you for the things you've already rejected
• 56:37
  about yourself and therefore don't pay attention to.
• 56:40
  And so as that space is held and you feel that permission to call
• 56:44
  those things forward, you're actually healing, you're
• 56:47
  holding, you know, you're growing more, more beautifully
• 56:50
  human. I, I'll never one of those
• 56:52
  people in my life is honestly my literary agent.
• 56:55
  Oh, yeah, I'll never. She's she's, she's, she's also
• 57:00
  an equine assisted therapist. So she has that capacity for
• 57:03
  holding space and she was challenging me on something.
• 57:07
  She's like, your answers aren't making sense.
• 57:08
  And she was just sort of poking me and I fell safe enough with
• 57:10
  her and I was like, I just burst out.
• 57:12
  I go, wait, you know what it is? It's just that I, I think I'm
• 57:16
  selfish and like this is the thing I had pushed into my
• 57:20
  shadows that I'm selfish. I'm a selfish person, right?
• 57:23
  And, and, and just to be able to bring that out of the shadow and
• 57:26
  say it out loud to somebody. I think I'm a selfish person,
• 57:30
  right? And I was in a, I was in a
• 57:35
  session at the conference where we were at the next day and I
• 57:42
  had this experience again of feeling like cared for by God's
• 57:48
  presence and, and just hearing that, Kelly, hey, you know, your
• 57:52
  selfishness, it didn't start out as selfishness.
• 57:54
  It started out as having to raise yourself right and, and,
• 57:58
  and, and so some grace came in around that thing I had rejected
• 58:01
  about myself and the fuck the fabulous thing about this, I
• 58:04
  just the way this played out. So it was like a week later and
• 58:10
  I was in the bathroom back home from the conference and I got
• 58:14
  out of the shower and there the towels had all been taken to the
• 58:16
  laundry and there were no towels on the rack.
• 58:18
  So I went over to the linen closet.
• 58:19
  I got a towel for myself and dried off and I put it on and I
• 58:23
  was walking out of the bathroom and I went, I didn't put a towel
• 58:26
  on my wife's hook. That was selfish.
• 58:29
  And it dawned on me. This is what she's been talking
• 58:31
  about for years. But I've I've always resisted
• 58:33
  it, defended myself, protected myself.
• 58:35
  I reject my own selfishness. So I have to reject her when she
• 58:38
  points it out, right? And I was just like, oh man,
• 58:41
  like I went and got her a towel. I put it on her hook.
• 58:44
  I texted her, I said, hey, guess what I just did.
• 58:47
  I got a towel and I didn't get you one.
• 58:49
  Sorry. That was selfish And and that's
• 58:54
  how that's how we heal that's how we grow is beginning to
• 58:58
  accept those things so we can own them and begin to show up
• 59:01
  differently and safe loving spaces help us to to do that
• 59:05
  self acceptance. Yeah, I think that I.
• 59:11
  I I don't. Think that I don't.
• 59:13
  I don't think that we give ourselves enough leeway.
• 59:18
  Generally. We're much harder on ourselves
• 59:19
  than anyone else's. And a lot of times when we don't
• 59:23
  communicate, it ends up snowballing and spiraling into
• 59:27
  something far worse than if you had had the I don't want to call
• 59:33
  it guts because it's not guts. It's it's, there's another word
• 59:36
  for it, but the will. I don't want to use that word
• 59:40
  either, you know, but like the perhaps the tenacity to express
• 59:43
  yourself and to make yourself vulnerable and say, hey, I'm
• 59:47
  having a hard time with this. You know, I find that I drinking
• 59:50
  a little bit more than I would have liked.
• 59:51
  I find that I'm not exercising as much I would have liked.
• 59:54
  I'm spending too much time in social media and I feel myself,
• 59:57
  I feel myself slipping into something and it's OK and like.
• 1:00:01
  And I, I suffer from this a lot too.
• 1:00:03
  I, I do this all the time. And because I think that there's
• 1:00:05
  a certain yardstick that I'm supposed to be holding myself to
• 1:00:09
  in a certain level of accountability.
• 1:00:10
  I'm not supposed to be the husband and the father that
• 1:00:13
  spends so much time scrolling. I'm not supposed to be the dad
• 1:00:15
  that smokes too much. I'm not supposed to do whatever
• 1:00:17
  it is. And yet here I am.
• 1:00:19
  And if and then if I keep that, I keep that locked up, like what
• 1:00:23
  you say rejected about myself or but if I kind of catch it and
• 1:00:27
  communicate it, it ends up that ends up a curing loneliness,
• 1:00:31
  like what you or at least starting the road down curing it
• 1:00:34
  and B it becomes almost like a group project or a group effort
• 1:00:38
  that that you know that you have that support for that makes all
• 1:00:41
  the difference in the world. Well, I always say like the
• 1:00:44
  three like if you want to look for semantic red flags that your
• 1:00:47
  shame is operating, it's I'm not something enough should is
• 1:00:55
  usually a a sign of shame and supposed to or not supposed to.
• 1:00:59
  These are these are all ways that it's gotten baked into our
• 1:01:02
  our mental sort of ruts. We're we're basically saying I
• 1:01:06
  am acceptable only if only if I do that thing I should or I'm
• 1:01:11
  supposed to. I think stipulation on your, on
• 1:01:13
  yourself, conditional, conditional love and shame is
• 1:01:19
  fueled by hiding. My novel is The Unhiding of
• 1:01:23
  Elijah Campbell. It's about a man overcoming
• 1:01:25
  shame because shame is just sort of exacerbated by the hiding
• 1:01:29
  attempt to to solve it by hiding it.
• 1:01:32
  And as soon as you open up share, express, shine some light
• 1:01:38
  on that thing you're ashamed of, you'll notice that it actually
• 1:01:40
  dissipates almost immediately. Now, the next day, you might
• 1:01:44
  have a vulnerability hangover as yourself protections kick back
• 1:01:47
  in going, Oh my gosh, I can't believe you said that or did
• 1:01:49
  that or shared that. But in the moment, you'll feel
• 1:01:52
  your shame go away completely. And assuming you, you know,
• 1:01:56
  share it with somebody who doesn't shame you for it, which
• 1:01:59
  can happen. But I was going to say it, yes.
• 1:02:02
  Why is vulnerability not, you know, thoughtless vulnerability
• 1:02:05
  wise vulnerability, share it with somebody who can be trusted
• 1:02:08
  with it. Your shame drops.
• 1:02:10
  You'll get a little bit of a hangover the next day.
• 1:02:11
  But repetitions of this are how we sort of bring ourselves out
• 1:02:15
  of the shadow. And can I ask now, I think this
• 1:02:18
  is equally, if not more important, how to be a good
• 1:02:21
  supporter of someone that is coming to you like that, right?
• 1:02:24
  Meaning that we're all focused on solving our own problems.
• 1:02:27
  On the other hand, if my, if my wife is talking to me and then
• 1:02:30
  she says something she's insecure about, oh, you're,
• 1:02:33
  it'll be OK. And then I just never bring it
• 1:02:35
  up again or I never, you know, I never, I never ask.
• 1:02:37
  How do you feel about that? Or are we working on this?
• 1:02:40
  What, what do you, what do you recommend for that?
• 1:02:44
  It's a great question because you're picking up on something
• 1:02:48
  very subtle there that a lot of people won't pick up on that are
• 1:02:52
  quick encouragement is often our own way of saying, I don't know
• 1:02:57
  that I want to sit with this. And that subtly sends the other
• 1:03:01
  person the opposite message, which is even though my word
• 1:03:05
  said, oh, it's fine. My body language and my, my pace
• 1:03:10
  and everything, my energy communicated, I don't that
• 1:03:13
  that's not something I want to be with, right.
• 1:03:17
  And so, yeah, I mean, one of the one of the things my first
• 1:03:21
  therapist did, which was so good, he was just whenever I'd
• 1:03:24
  say something like that, he'd go, yeah, of course, of course
• 1:03:27
  you do. Like, of course is the best
• 1:03:29
  phrase. Like I remember he asked me one
• 1:03:32
  day, he goes, Kelly, do you think you're arrogant?
• 1:03:36
  And I was like I said, I do, I think I'm arrogant.
• 1:03:41
  And he said, I think you are too, about as much as the rest
• 1:03:44
  of us, Right. Which is just like, Oh yeah,
• 1:03:48
  we're all arrogant a little bit. You know, this isn't about sort
• 1:03:51
  of like a removing that part of our humanity.
• 1:03:54
  So like, yeah, of course. Yeah, you are.
• 1:03:56
  Me too. Yep, me too is a good one.
• 1:04:00
  Curiosity is there. You know anything more you want
• 1:04:03
  to tell me? I'm here for you.
• 1:04:06
  What can I do for you? Just anything that communicates.
• 1:04:09
  I don't need to rush through this and I'm not afraid of it.
• 1:04:14
  And I and I don't love you less because of it.
• 1:04:16
  I mean, those three things. I'm here, I'm not afraid and I
• 1:04:18
  love you. And that can be a really
• 1:04:21
  powerful space that you create for the other person to show up
• 1:04:25
  a little bit more bravely. And what about for like a
• 1:04:28
  friendship? Because again, you know, going
• 1:04:29
  back to people that have a hard time just in general with
• 1:04:31
  relationships, some people don't know how to be good friends.
• 1:04:33
  And I, I've noticed myself a big flaw in my being ability to be a
• 1:04:38
  friend is I'm up, I've been working on this for years, but
• 1:04:41
  I'm a bad listener. I'm a really bad listener.
• 1:04:44
  And I get so excited about what other people are saying that I
• 1:04:47
  want to just jump in and, you know, just talk on it, you know,
• 1:04:49
  and I, it's a problem. It's it, it makes it hard to,
• 1:04:53
  to, it makes it hard to be a good friend and to let people
• 1:04:55
  finish their thoughts. And I often end up trying to
• 1:04:57
  finish their thoughts for them. And then when I'm wrong, it
• 1:05:00
  makes they feel, Hey, this guy doesn't get me, you know?
• 1:05:05
  And so a lot of times, the listening is actually one of the
• 1:05:07
  hardest things in a friendship. Yes.
• 1:05:12
  First of all, like, you just demonstrated what we're talking
• 1:05:16
  about in a really beautiful way, right?
• 1:05:19
  Like the fact that I'm not a very good listener at times.
• 1:05:22
  I get eager and I sort of override somebody and then they
• 1:05:26
  don't feel seen or heard. Like, that's something that you
• 1:05:30
  could push into your shadow and be ashamed of and therefore
• 1:05:33
  ignore and never attend to. But here you are.
• 1:05:36
  You brought it out of the shadow.
• 1:05:38
  You're, you're aware of it. And so as soon as you're aware
• 1:05:41
  of it, it's something you can work with and, and you can
• 1:05:44
  continue to work on and improve upon.
• 1:05:46
  So I commend you for your willingness to be aware of it
• 1:05:50
  and to, to not be ashamed of it, to share it here.
• 1:05:54
  A couple of things that to to go back to that idea of loneliness.
• 1:06:00
  Friendship is also about loneliness, so right?
• 1:06:02
  So am I helping my friend feel seen, understood and supported?
• 1:06:08
  Those 3 pillars again, number one.
• 1:06:12
  And then #2 easier said than done.
• 1:06:16
  And so sometimes having practical tools can really help
• 1:06:19
  with that. And one of the, one of the main
• 1:06:21
  tools I, I ask every couple to use that I work with, It's the
• 1:06:28
  only actual intervention in all of the decades of marital
• 1:06:32
  therapy research that's really been shown consistently to
• 1:06:36
  effectively improve communication.
• 1:06:38
  It's called the speaker listener technique.
• 1:06:40
  And that sounds a little dry, but basically what it does is it
• 1:06:43
  clarifies that there's one speaker and 1 listener at all
• 1:06:45
  times. And the listener's job is to put
• 1:06:48
  aside all of their reactions and thoughts and ideas and to make
• 1:06:53
  sure that they don't take the speaker rollback until they
• 1:06:55
  fully understood what the other person is saying.
• 1:06:57
  They don't have to agree with it, right?
• 1:06:59
  It's not seen, agreed with and, and supported.
• 1:07:02
  It's seen, understood and supported.
• 1:07:06
  And so you, the listener engages in an active process of
• 1:07:09
  paraphrasing back what they've heard to make sure that they
• 1:07:12
  really get it before they, they move forward.
• 1:07:16
  And that little just sort of pause button on the conversation
• 1:07:20
  for, for a listener just OK, what I hear you saying.
• 1:07:24
  So what I'm hearing you saying is this goes a long way.
• 1:07:30
  Toward. Establishing really connected
• 1:07:33
  friendship because the other person really feels understood
• 1:07:35
  and it sets a pause on you so that you can you'll get your
• 1:07:38
  chance and now you can jump in with your reactions and thoughts
• 1:07:43
  to it, but it helps you to sort of hold that space in a more
• 1:07:45
  intentional way. Awesome.
• 1:07:47
  Yeah. And that's a really, really
• 1:07:49
  important. I think that like, on one hand,
• 1:07:51
  it's a great tool to use in a, in a, you know, therapeutic
• 1:07:54
  setting. On the other hand, it's a great
• 1:07:56
  tool to use in general. You talk about anything.
• 1:08:00
  And especially in such a polarized world, this is such a,
• 1:08:03
  this is such great advice because if you're talking to
• 1:08:05
  someone about politics, you're talking to someone about
• 1:08:08
  business, you're talking to someone about current events or
• 1:08:10
  what's going on in the news. And you and you talk to them
• 1:08:12
  about. And I've had this fun experience
• 1:08:16
  where I've been talking to people, but there's so many hot
• 1:08:19
  topic issues going on. And I tend to be left-leaning of
• 1:08:23
  my right leaning friends and right leaning of my left-leaning
• 1:08:27
  friends. So I, I, and one of the things I
• 1:08:30
  feel, yeah, yeah. And you know, and it's, it's,
• 1:08:33
  and I tend to judge be pretty pretty much almost exclusively
• 1:08:37
  anti authoritarian, But that's, that's just because of my
• 1:08:41
  personal experience. I already know that that's just
• 1:08:43
  my my stick. But one thing that I've been
• 1:08:46
  doing is I've been asking my friends, well, what do you think
• 1:08:49
  of this event? Or what do you think happened or
• 1:08:52
  what, what's your take on what happened?
• 1:08:54
  And then I'll hear their understanding of the event.
• 1:08:57
  And then I'll decide how to continue the conversation from
• 1:09:00
  there because I'll say we would have gone into a straight fight
• 1:09:06
  if I'd just gone with the presumption that you understood
• 1:09:09
  the story the same way that I had.
• 1:09:10
  So what do you think of that? I think that that's what
• 1:09:13
  happened. It was good because of this, and
• 1:09:14
  it was bad because of that. Or I think it was only good
• 1:09:16
  because this or only bad because of that.
• 1:09:17
  Like, OK. And sometimes I'll, sometimes
• 1:09:19
  I'll hear it. I'm like, I am at such a
• 1:09:22
  different page that I'm not even going to, I'm not even going to,
• 1:09:24
  you know, argue about this. Like I'll just, OK, that's where
• 1:09:27
  they are. And then there's sometimes
• 1:09:28
  they'll like, oh, so you mean to say that and they'll say, yeah.
• 1:09:31
  And I'm like, oh, OK, yeah, I hear that too.
• 1:09:33
  You know, And that really, really helps so much because.
• 1:09:35
  And that's why I have friends on both sides of the spectrum
• 1:09:37
  because it's so easy to do that. And once everyone's heard, they
• 1:09:41
  feel like they're heard and they feel like they can now share
• 1:09:43
  with you and relate to you. So good, man.
• 1:09:45
  I I had, I was working with a couple once and they came to the
• 1:09:52
  hour fighting about where they were going to put ATV in their
• 1:09:56
  home. And so I was holding space
• 1:10:00
  listening to them go back and forth and like, I heard, thought
• 1:10:03
  I heard something. I go.
• 1:10:06
  Can you paraphrase what he just said?
• 1:10:09
  And what it turned out was that he was saying, I want to put the
• 1:10:14
  TV in the living room and I and he I had her actually like
• 1:10:19
  paraphrase what he meant, it turned out he meant the family
• 1:10:22
  room. She was thought he they were
• 1:10:25
  referring to the room by different names, basically.
• 1:10:28
  And she was like. Oh, you want to?
• 1:10:30
  Put it in the family room. Sure, that's fine.
• 1:10:33
  Yeah, To your point, like as soon as there is an assumption
• 1:10:37
  that we understand each other when we're talking about very
• 1:10:41
  different things, the conversation will ultimately go
• 1:10:44
  off the rails. I remember my wife once I was
• 1:10:47
  consulting with her about a clinical situation where someone
• 1:10:51
  had told me that they were sad. And I just, I'll never forget
• 1:10:54
  this moment. She was, What did they mean by
• 1:10:56
  sad? I was like.
• 1:11:00
  I mean sad, you know? She's like, she's like, no, I
• 1:11:04
  don't. She's a child psychologist and
• 1:11:06
  sadness shows up very differently for kids in
• 1:11:08
  different ways. So I went back into my next
• 1:11:10
  session and thinking for me, sad meant, you know, sort of going
• 1:11:15
  through life and feeling a little bit more retreated into
• 1:11:19
  oneself and, and maybe feeling a little more tender.
• 1:11:23
  And this person had an entire when she said sad, she meant
• 1:11:26
  something totally different. So can we slow down enough that
• 1:11:30
  part of us that thinks I'm here to prove my point, win an
• 1:11:34
  argument or even just debate something?
• 1:11:36
  Can we slow down long enough to, to to confirm that we actually
• 1:11:40
  understand where the other person's coming from, what their
• 1:11:42
  reality is, what they're, you know, how they define their
• 1:11:45
  words even. So I think that's, I think
• 1:11:48
  that's a huge point you've made there in terms of connection.
• 1:11:51
  Yeah, thank you. Well, I, I, I would just, you
• 1:11:54
  know, try my best over here, you know, and that that's what all
• 1:11:57
  of us are trying to do. And I'm just trying to see what
• 1:12:00
  works. And I've spent, you've brought
• 1:12:02
  up pop culture references. So now it now it's fair game.
• 1:12:05
  Have you seen the movie Arrival? You know what Jimmy Adams I
• 1:12:09
  think is your name? I have.
• 1:12:11
  It's the it's the alien movie, right?
• 1:12:12
  The alien movie. I am so afraid to watch alien
• 1:12:16
  movies because I'm so convinced that the aliens are real.
• 1:12:21
  No, I don't want to do anything to my they're permanently
• 1:12:24
  damaging to my mental state. I got good news.
• 1:12:28
  I got good news for you. So that that movie, when you see
• 1:12:30
  like the way it's reviewed, like it's got like a 3 1/2 star
• 1:12:33
  average, it's because either either review it as a 5 or like
• 1:12:36
  A1 and A2, right? Gotcha.
• 1:12:38
  And, and the reason for that is if you go to it expecting it to
• 1:12:40
  be an alien movie, you're totally disappointed because
• 1:12:43
  what it is, is that Amy Adams plays a linguist who she's sort
• 1:12:47
  of brought in by the, you know, the US military to just to try
• 1:12:51
  to learn how to communicate with these these foreigners
• 1:12:54
  basically, and. So the.
• 1:12:55
  Movie is a study of the nuance of communication and how I love
• 1:13:00
  that how many assumptions we make.
• 1:13:02
  She's like when we need to know what they what they mean when
• 1:13:06
  they say we do they even think of themselves collectively?
• 1:13:09
  Are they just referring to the two people I'm talking to or the
• 1:13:11
  entire race? Or do you know like and?
• 1:13:13
  It you. Would from a communication
• 1:13:16
  connection perspective, it is a masterpiece.
• 1:13:18
  You would love it. I'm going to check it out.
• 1:13:20
  I'm definitely going to check it out.
• 1:13:21
  Did you, did you watch Pluribus or did you start it?
• 1:13:24
  Yes, on Apple. What What what do you think of
• 1:13:26
  that? My wife and daughter and I got
• 1:13:28
  hooked on that. Yeah.
• 1:13:29
  You got hooked. You're into it.
• 1:13:31
  Yeah, we're into it. So the criticisms are some of
• 1:13:36
  them are valid. It's a slow moving show in in
• 1:13:40
  our in our fast. I like that genre, though.
• 1:13:43
  There's a lot of good slow moving shows out recently, you
• 1:13:46
  know. Well, there's so much happening
• 1:13:47
  in the slowness. That's right.
• 1:13:50
  And to be able to see that. Oh yeah.
• 1:13:52
  I, I absolutely. We thought that was brilliant.
• 1:13:54
  We're we can't wait for season 2 to come out.
• 1:13:56
  Yeah, yeah. OK.
• 1:13:58
  I want to, I want to, I want to go more into your book with the
• 1:14:01
  last, with the last 20 minutes that we have The Road last
• 1:14:05
  Triggered, which is a very relatable title.
• 1:14:08
  You got, it seems like you have a knack for titles because, and,
• 1:14:11
  and that's a really good thing because everything in life, I've
• 1:14:13
  realized is just sales and all about how you're going to sell
• 1:14:16
  yourself. And so with these great titles
• 1:14:18
  like Marriages for Losers or The Road Last Triggered, you know
• 1:14:22
  that you're you're you're really speaking to something that is
• 1:14:26
  really in the zeitgeist. So.
• 1:14:27
  So can you tell me about the process of writing this,
• 1:14:30
  researching? How'd you, how'd you, how'd you,
• 1:14:33
  how'd you go about dealing with this book?
• 1:14:35
  Yeah, good question. So first of all, I'll say that I
• 1:14:41
  wrote the entire book, almost all the way to the final draft
• 1:14:44
  under a different title. The title was open hearted, but
• 1:14:51
  in the process of writing it. So there was a very iterative
• 1:14:54
  process. I was working with my literary
• 1:14:58
  agent, who's also great editorial resource, my wife, my
• 1:15:02
  own experience. I was presenting it chapter by
• 1:15:05
  chapter to my online tribe, the less triggered tribe on Sub
• 1:15:09
  Stack. We were meeting once a month and
• 1:15:11
  digging into the ideas. I was going on the road and and
• 1:15:15
  speaking. It's just hard to do when you
• 1:15:16
  know something's not totally locked in, but to just see
• 1:15:19
  what's hitting and what's not. And what I discovered in that
• 1:15:23
  process is for me, five years into practicing open
• 1:15:28
  heartedness, I understand what it is and the strength of it and
• 1:15:33
  the benefits and the payouts of it, the the level of connection
• 1:15:36
  that's possible when you're showing up open heartedly.
• 1:15:39
  Most people when they hear open hearted, they hear I'm going to
• 1:15:41
  have to be a doormat. You can't have any boundaries.
• 1:15:44
  I'm going to have to say whatever is on my mind.
• 1:15:47
  And so one of the first things I say to people now is an open
• 1:15:51
  heart doesn't make your boundaries weaker.
• 1:15:52
  It makes your boundaries wiser, OK, It doesn't make you a weaker
• 1:15:56
  person. It makes you a wiser person.
• 1:15:58
  But it was clear to me in in that process that putting open
• 1:16:03
  hearted on the cover was a non starter because it's, it's, it's
• 1:16:07
  so misconceived by people, right?
• 1:16:09
  It would have been the opposite of marriages for losers.
• 1:16:13
  It would have been too, it would have been too good.
• 1:16:15
  You know, it would have just been too on the nose and, and,
• 1:16:18
  and the reality is what I've discovered over the last five
• 1:16:21
  years is that open heartedness is the solution for our
• 1:16:25
  triggered moments. And that's what we really need
• 1:16:28
  help with. I don't think anyone's walking
• 1:16:29
  around going. I've got to figure out how to be
• 1:16:31
  more open hearted. We got it.
• 1:16:32
  We're walking around going. It happened again, like we were
• 1:16:35
  having a good day. And then they said that thing
• 1:16:39
  and I could feel myself tighten up in my chest or I couldn't,
• 1:16:42
  which is probably the problem. I didn't even notice it.
• 1:16:44
  And then they were like, whoa, what?
• 1:16:46
  Why are you getting all hurt about that?
• 1:16:48
  And then we're off to the races, right?
• 1:16:50
  Or you're in your car with your kid and you're like, I got 30
• 1:16:54
  minutes in the car with my teenager, right?
• 1:16:56
  And then they just say something that just sets you off and all
• 1:16:59
  of a sudden you're lecturing about how they need to
• 1:17:00
  appreciate things more, right? And like that moment that
• 1:17:04
  repeats itself over and over again where you get triggered in
• 1:17:07
  your relationship and you, you sort of revert into the same old
• 1:17:11
  problematic pattern that's going to keep you stuck in the same
• 1:17:14
  old level of, of disconnect and conflict.
• 1:17:18
  That's that's what I'm passionate about helping people
• 1:17:21
  with now cultivating the capacity to stay open hearted in
• 1:17:25
  that moment is the most powerful solution you will ever encounter
• 1:17:29
  in your life. But it's not it's not
• 1:17:33
  necessarily what we're thinking about every day.
• 1:17:35
  So we went with the road less triggered.
• 1:17:36
  I love the title. The Road Less Travelled was one
• 1:17:39
  of my favorite books as I was being formed as a psychologist,
• 1:17:43
  written by a Christian therapist.
• 1:17:46
  And so to, to, to name a book in, in the, in that vein is in a
• 1:17:51
  way, sort of an honor to, to, to follow on Scott Peck's heels.
• 1:17:58
  From 2021 till about. 2023 I realized that I couldn't.
• 1:18:06
  I looked into the spiritual every spiritual tradition I
• 1:18:09
  could find, all the scientific traditions, I couldn't find any.
• 1:18:12
  My, my New Year's resolution was moment to moment and notice my
• 1:18:15
  heart closing and try to open it back up.
• 1:18:17
  But I couldn't find any tradition, faith, scientific,
• 1:18:21
  poetic that that laid out how to do that, how to actually catch
• 1:18:26
  your heart closing. When you're catching your heart
• 1:18:28
  closing is something just happened and now you're flipping
• 1:18:31
  from connection mode into protection mode.
• 1:18:33
  And what you want most is connection in this moment, but
• 1:18:36
  you're about to show up protectively and make that
• 1:18:37
  impossible, right? And so I realized I was going to
• 1:18:42
  have to develop the curriculum for open heartedness.
• 1:18:44
  I was going to have to develop the method for staying together
• 1:18:49
  rather than the trigger. That's what I, so that's what I
• 1:18:50
  did for, for several years and, and feel tested it with clients
• 1:18:53
  and, and in our community. And I'm really proud of of we
• 1:18:57
  call it the peaceful pivot process in the book.
• 1:19:00
  It's a three-part process. First getting calm, then
• 1:19:05
  getting. Free of the.
• 1:19:07
  Emotional patterns in you that are underpinning your triggered
• 1:19:09
  moments. And then getting connected, we
• 1:19:12
  usually reverse that. We're like, oh, this doesn't
• 1:19:15
  feel good. So I'm going to try to connect
• 1:19:16
  with you so that you'll do something different to make me
• 1:19:19
  feel better in here. And this process turns that on
• 1:19:22
  its head and it's you take responsibility for your own self
• 1:19:24
  regulation, disrupting your defensive patterns, getting your
• 1:19:27
  body calm, your nervous system regulated, and now you can start
• 1:19:31
  to take more ownership for how you're showing up and actually
• 1:19:34
  get connected open heartedly. So I'm really excited about the
• 1:19:37
  process. I'm, I've experienced the
• 1:19:40
  changes in my own life over the last five years and, and to
• 1:19:43
  watch the my online community start to practice this.
• 1:19:47
  And we just had our monthly meeting in January.
• 1:19:48
  They came back after the holidays and we celebrated the
• 1:19:51
  wins. Like I was able to stay open
• 1:19:53
  hearted in this moment where I usually get triggered and I
• 1:19:55
  close and guess what happened. And it is always better.
• 1:20:01
  It is always better. Early on in the book, I talk
• 1:20:04
  about the difference between pain and suffering.
• 1:20:06
  What happens in the triggered moment is you're starting to
• 1:20:08
  feel a little bit of pain about something, right?
• 1:20:12
  But pain is inevitable. That's gonna happen in human
• 1:20:14
  relationships. Suffering is everything we
• 1:20:16
  create. After that, when we shut down,
• 1:20:18
  get triggered, close our hearts and go into protection mode.
• 1:20:21
  And so we want to alleviate the suffering that comes from that.
• 1:20:24
  Learn how to stay, stay present in that, in that, in that pain
• 1:20:27
  point, and show up to it with your wisest, most connective
• 1:20:31
  self. So that's what this book is
• 1:20:32
  trying to help people do. Yeah, that sounds awesome.
• 1:20:35
  It sounds. Really, really great.
• 1:20:37
  And I imagine there's a there's an amazing book in Jewish
• 1:20:40
  literature and it's called The Path of the Righteous.
• 1:20:46
  We had hundreds of years ago by an Italian rabbi.
• 1:20:49
  And he's actually still has a synagogue that's still active in
• 1:20:52
  Venice, which is really cool years later.
• 1:20:55
  It's really fascinating. And one of the things that he
• 1:20:58
  talks that he says in this introduction to this awesome
• 1:21:00
  book, it goes through different personality traits to work on in
• 1:21:04
  order to, you know, kind of emulate or imitate God that are
• 1:21:07
  similar to what God says that people should strive for as far
• 1:21:10
  as enhance consciousness. And because everything I'm going
• 1:21:13
  to tell you, there's nothing you haven't already heard.
• 1:21:16
  But think if you do not constantly reinforce are going
• 1:21:20
  to slip into the back of your head.
• 1:21:22
  And and he goes, I am not here to teach you anything new.
• 1:21:26
  I'm not here to tell you, you know, there's nothing new under
• 1:21:29
  the sun, you know, and you you know this and I know this, but
• 1:21:33
  it has to be looked at again. It has to be reviewed.
• 1:21:37
  It has to be repeated. And so I think that, and I've
• 1:21:40
  known for myself, for example, that there's a great book by a
• 1:21:45
  guy, by a researcher or Professor Ethan Cross, I
• 1:21:48
  believe, called Chatter. Oh yeah, I read Chatter, Yeah.
• 1:21:52
  And one of the things I talk about is voices in your head and
• 1:21:54
  how they can be manipulated. And one of the ways that you
• 1:21:57
  reinforce it is by on a regular basis saying, you know, say you
• 1:22:02
  can even say it verbally. And I'll do this when I'm
• 1:22:04
  jogging and I'm not in the mood. I'll say this is a breeze.
• 1:22:07
  This is a breeze. I got this.
• 1:22:08
  I've run this before and, and, and, and, and then it gets
• 1:22:12
  reinforced. And so a lot of times the trains
• 1:22:15
  of thought or the, or the behavior modifications or the
• 1:22:18
  thought modifications that we're trying to establish are
• 1:22:22
  enormously strengthened by just by just reviewing it.
• 1:22:26
  And we know that. Yeah.
• 1:22:28
  How effective that is. Yeah.
• 1:22:29
  He, he mentioned somewhere in that book the data that shows
• 1:22:32
  that when you speak to yourself in the third person, it
• 1:22:34
  immediately creates emotional regulation.
• 1:22:37
  That's interesting. Isn't that interesting?
• 1:22:39
  Like, yeah. And it's, it's a little bit that
• 1:22:41
  idea that as soon as you start to speak to yourself in the
• 1:22:43
  third person, you're now no longer in the nervous system
• 1:22:46
  response. You're up in your awareness
• 1:22:47
  speaking to your nervous system, Right.
• 1:22:50
  And so as soon as you can get out of that response, all of a
• 1:22:52
  sudden you're holding some safety for yourself in a way.
• 1:22:56
  And I actually, I, there were a couple of paragraphs where I
• 1:22:59
  cited that book in, in the 6th chapter of the road Less
• 1:23:01
  Trigger. They, they didn't make the final
• 1:23:03
  cut. But, but that specifically,
• 1:23:06
  yeah, but specifically that idea of, of you are going to be OK,
• 1:23:12
  right. OK.
• 1:23:14
  As soon as I say you are going to be OK, it's like I'm speaking
• 1:23:17
  to the nervous part of me, the triggered part of me, but I'm
• 1:23:20
  speaking from the untriggered part of me.
• 1:23:22
  So all of a sudden I have a little bit more objectivity.
• 1:23:24
  So I think that's really powerful.
• 1:23:27
  Yeah, to your point. Old things rearranged.
• 1:23:36
  Into more effective sequences can become a powerful new thing
• 1:23:41
  and and that is that is what I'm trying to do with this book.
• 1:23:45
  We just got our first, like, official Goodread review from an
• 1:23:48
  early reader. Congratulations.
• 1:23:50
  Thank you. It was so gratifying because she
• 1:23:52
  said it's very exciting. It's very exciting.
• 1:23:54
  It's the first one, you know, out in the wild.
• 1:23:56
  And it was so gratifying because she said he takes an incredibly
• 1:24:00
  complicated moment that feels so overwhelming to most of us, and
• 1:24:04
  he simplifies it down in a way that is so easy to see your way
• 1:24:08
  through. I'll give you an example.
• 1:24:09
  The first step of the process is, I call it sensing your
• 1:24:12
  conflict coming. It's using an underutilized 6th
• 1:24:16
  power that we all have, sixth sense that we all have.
• 1:24:19
  It's a superpower. It's utilizing that sixth sense
• 1:24:23
  to give yourself 80% more warning that you're about to be
• 1:24:25
  triggered. And, and the idea is learning to
• 1:24:30
  tune into your particular bodily signals when you're about to be
• 1:24:34
  triggered and your heart's about to close.
• 1:24:36
  There's data that shows that if you wait to see what's happening
• 1:24:40
  out here or how you're thinking or how you're behaving, the
• 1:24:44
  cat's already out of the bag. You're already off to the.
• 1:24:46
  Races, conflicts already going, your body will give you an 80%
• 1:24:50
  earlier warning that that's about to happen.
• 1:24:53
  And in that 80% more space, you realize that you actually have a
• 1:24:58
  choice. I can let my heart close, I can
• 1:25:01
  choose conflict and I can let this thing go off the rails, or
• 1:25:04
  I can choose to keep my heart open and I can choose connection
• 1:25:07
  and stay present in this moment. And so right out of the gate,
• 1:25:10
  this is not a wait, can you give me, can you give me AI?
• 1:25:14
  Just I want to, I want to highlight that as strong as I
• 1:25:17
  can. Give me an actual example for a
• 1:25:19
  case in point, just for anyone listening to able to convert it
• 1:25:22
  into like a real life scenario. Yeah, happened to me last night.
• 1:25:25
  One of my early earliest bodily warning signs that my heart is
• 1:25:29
  closing is just a sense of urgency in my chest.
• 1:25:33
  That's the best way I can describe it.
• 1:25:34
  It's not anxiety yet, it's maybe not even stress.
• 1:25:38
  It's just this quickening, like, right, Something big is at stake
• 1:25:42
  here and I need to go faster to get it done.
• 1:25:45
  That feeling is the feeling of me.
• 1:25:48
  Being triggered with. My wife 6 hours from now because
• 1:25:51
  if I don't attend to that feeling regulated.
• 1:25:56
  By the time. I show up to dinner and I'm
• 1:25:57
  moving it, you know? So yesterday I caught myself
• 1:26:01
  around this time in the morning yesterday and I went, whoa,
• 1:26:05
  everything's moving really fast in here.
• 1:26:07
  Like if you continue to accelerate sort of mentally and
• 1:26:12
  neurologically at this pace, the rest of the day, it's going to
• 1:26:14
  take almost nothing at dinner. Someone's going to say
• 1:26:17
  something. You're going to feel yourself,
• 1:26:18
  feel yourself triggered. And so I know that for me,
• 1:26:21
  urgency is, is part of my fingerprint of, of a heart about
• 1:26:24
  to close. What I will tell people is that
• 1:26:27
  you will almost always sense it in your body, somewhere between
• 1:26:30
  your waist and your temples. Like basically no one has ever
• 1:26:33
  said my heart closed and my toes cramped.
• 1:26:35
  Like, that's just not where you feel that thing happening in the
• 1:26:38
  body, you know, So it's like the churning in the stomach, thick
• 1:26:42
  feeling in your sternum, like right under your rib cage.
• 1:26:45
  It's that it's, I often say like emergency doors slamming shut in
• 1:26:49
  my chest, lump in the throat, tightness in the shoulders,
• 1:26:52
  clenching jaw, thriving temples. You know, waste of temples is
• 1:26:55
  where you will get your earliest warning sign that you're
• 1:27:00
  starting to feel unsafe. And something could could sort
• 1:27:04
  of flip that switch from connection mode to connection
• 1:27:07
  protection mode any moment. Yeah, I know for myself.
• 1:27:11
  And maybe please tell me if I'm giving a correct example or
• 1:27:14
  understanding this correctly. I know that with my son, I try
• 1:27:18
  very, very hard to be patient and very hard to not get angry.
• 1:27:22
  I, I don't mind speaking in an angry voice to emphasize a
• 1:27:26
  point, but the feeling of getting angry and losing control
• 1:27:30
  over my control is, is something I really try to work very hard
• 1:27:34
  not to. And so if my kid is, and one
• 1:27:36
  thing that really gets me very, very upset very quickly is
• 1:27:40
  unreasonable screaming, which is a terrible trigger to have for
• 1:27:44
  having two kids under the age of three.
• 1:27:47
  We can all relate to it. So my kid is happy and he's
• 1:27:51
  watching and he's watching TV and he has a snack in his hand.
• 1:27:53
  And then he just starts screaming, you know, he just
• 1:27:56
  starts crying uncontrollably. And I feel a huge and I feel
• 1:28:00
  this a rush. I feel a rush going straight up,
• 1:28:03
  like up my chest. I feel like going up my gut into
• 1:28:06
  my chest and, and I just want to rush over and, and just make him
• 1:28:10
  stop and just to shut him up, right.
• 1:28:12
  And, and I and I recognize that rush now.
• 1:28:15
  And, and, and I and I say to myself, the second I feel that
• 1:28:18
  rush, I say I, I, I, I, I force a breath.
• 1:28:22
  I force a breath and and I say and I and I, I force a pause and
• 1:28:26
  say whatever you're about to do, you can act angry, don't be
• 1:28:30
  angry, whatever you and I think that to myself.
• 1:28:32
  It's a thought that goes through my head.
• 1:28:34
  You could speak angry. Don't be angry.
• 1:28:37
  And so good. I just want to and I want to.
• 1:28:40
  Make sure is that. Is that the kind of moment that
• 1:28:42
  you're trying to explain that you're trying to capture?
• 1:28:44
  Yes, it is. And and that it's such a great
• 1:28:47
  example for a few reasons. Number one, it's with your kids.
• 1:28:50
  The principles in this book are applicable to spouses, kids,
• 1:28:55
  siblings, stranger on the road, you know, clerk at the store,
• 1:28:59
  anywhere, anywhere that you can be triggered.
• 1:29:01
  So #1 #2 I loved your distinction between anger in
• 1:29:05
  control and anger out of control, Right?
• 1:29:08
  I often said it with my kids when they were younger.
• 1:29:10
  Do you want me to wake you up? That was like me saying like,
• 1:29:12
  I'll raise my voice. I would prefer not to.
• 1:29:14
  I was in control. Triggered is I'm, I'm acting
• 1:29:18
  angry and it's it doesn't feel like it was my choice.
• 1:29:21
  I feel like it feels to me, yeah, it's a reaction.
• 1:29:24
  So I often say a reaction is a failure of self regulation.
• 1:29:29
  A response is the fruit of self regulation, Right.
• 1:29:32
  And So what you just illustrated is literally the first three
• 1:29:36
  steps in that first part of the process, sensing your conflict
• 1:29:39
  coming, using your body. You feel the whooshing upward of
• 1:29:42
  that so fast too. It's so fast, so crazy.
• 1:29:46
  You, you disrupted what I'd call your defensive response, which
• 1:29:50
  in the book we talk about the nine core defensive reactions
• 1:29:52
  when your nervous system triggers and you just one that
• 1:29:56
  is tempting to use with kids is dominating going to control the
• 1:30:00
  situation. To make this.
• 1:30:01
  Feeling in here? Go away.
• 1:30:03
  Yeah. And that again, that's the
• 1:30:05
  that's the temptation is I'm going to try to control what's
• 1:30:07
  happening out here to make it feel better in here.
• 1:30:10
  I often say to people like we had our our furnace went out
• 1:30:14
  this summer during a heat wave in Northern Illinois.
• 1:30:17
  And and if if I approach that furnace the way that we approach
• 1:30:22
  most of our relationships, what I would have done the rest of
• 1:30:24
  the week is figure out how I could make it cooler outside so
• 1:30:28
  the house would stay cooler. Yeah.
• 1:30:30
  Like your people are the weather, their behavior, their
• 1:30:33
  thoughts, their feelings, it's the weather.
• 1:30:35
  But we spend so much time trying to control them.
• 1:30:37
  So it's such a great example. Awesome.
• 1:30:40
  Just go to the Control Board and and get it cooled down in here.
• 1:30:43
  Fix the fix the Control Board and then you won't have to worry
• 1:30:46
  about the weather outside. So you did it.
• 1:30:48
  You sensed your conflict coming. You disrupted your
• 1:30:51
  defensiveness. That's step #2 you didn't try to
• 1:30:53
  dominate him to make it feel better in here.
• 1:30:55
  And they took responsibility for your own self regulation,
• 1:30:57
  cultivating calmness before connectedness.
• 1:30:59
  As we say, you took that breath to get your nervous system
• 1:31:02
  neutral again. You just went right.
• 1:31:05
  You just took yourself right through the process.
• 1:31:07
  All you got to do is you do that the rest of my life around me.
• 1:31:12
  Well, what you have to do is you have to do it every time you're
• 1:31:15
  triggered. Like that has to be the starting
• 1:31:18
  point because what's happening is that, and this makes sense
• 1:31:21
  with a crying kid, right? Your nervous system is wired for
• 1:31:25
  alarm when a kid cries, right? It's it's wired to.
• 1:31:31
  Assume that. If they cry like that, they're
• 1:31:34
  in mortal danger and you need to react.
• 1:31:37
  Now you're sitting in your living room so you know it's not
• 1:31:39
  true, which is why you called it unreasonably crying.
• 1:31:41
  And and that's fine, but your reaction to them is now to treat
• 1:31:46
  them like the danger and that's not going to work.
• 1:31:49
  So every time it happens, we have to take ourselves through
• 1:31:52
  that sequence, make sure we're calm before we start trying to
• 1:31:55
  connect, regulate before you relate.
• 1:31:58
  I love it. It's awesome.
• 1:31:59
  Doctor Kennedy, where can people find you or your post or your
• 1:32:03
  information? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:04
  Well, right now, road less triggered.com.
• 1:32:08
  Awesome. I put the I put the captions in
• 1:32:10
  the I put that in the show, not caption.
• 1:32:12
  Awesome. That's where you can go to find
• 1:32:14
  out more about the book. You can order the book there and
• 1:32:17
  then you can enter your order number on that page and and
• 1:32:20
  that'll get you access to $348 in pre-order bonuses.
• 1:32:24
  That'll be good through the release.
• 1:32:26
  Those bonuses include you get to download the 1st chapter right
• 1:32:30
  away and I'm telling you like it'll be like putting on a new
• 1:32:32
  lens, you'll see the world differently.
• 1:32:34
  By the end of the first chapter you get a 90 minute master
• 1:32:37
  class. I recorded with the guy who said
• 1:32:40
  you can never get enough of what almost works.
• 1:32:42
  Nice. The guy recorded the 90 minute
• 1:32:45
  master class with him, so you can go through the whole process
• 1:32:47
  right away instead of having to wait for the book.
• 1:32:50
  And then if you want, you can certainly join our launch team.
• 1:32:53
  And it also grants you 6 months free membership to the less
• 1:32:56
  triggered tribe on Substack where we get together once a
• 1:32:59
  month to talk about these ideas and grow together.
• 1:33:02
  So lots of good bonuses there. I would love to have you join
• 1:33:04
  us. Awesome.
• 1:33:06
  All right, Doctor Kelly, thanks so much for the time.
• 1:33:08
  It's so nice speaking. It's so nice getting to know you
• 1:33:09
  a little bit. Great conversation.
• 1:33:11
  Hope to be in touch. Take care, man.
• 1:33:13
  I'll be back. Bye.