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"Fathers Day Special" Larry Wilson Shares Family Communication Story · How To Talk To Humans

• 0:00
  Larry Wilson: Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is how to talk to humans.
• 0:04
  Larry Wilson: This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills.
• 0:10
  Larry Wilson: Are you looking to get a better job?
• 0:12
  Larry Wilson: Are you looking to find a relationship?
• 0:14
  Larry Wilson: Are you trying to do things in your life that have fun for you and alluded you so far?
• 0:21
  Larry Wilson: I can show you so easily how to change that.
• 0:25
  Larry Wilson: Now, I can only do it with humans.
• 0:27
  Larry Wilson: If you're looking to deal with vampires and zombies and exports, this is not the show for you.
• 0:32
  Larry Wilson: But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned in 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world.
• 0:46
  Larry Wilson: And their secrets are unbelievable.
• 0:50
  Larry Wilson: What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success.
• 1:04
  Larry Wilson: This is going to be a very special Father's Day episode of this podcast.
• 1:11
  Larry Wilson: I don't think I speak very often about my father on this podcast.
• 1:17
  Larry Wilson: He's uh my parents are both no longer with us.
• 1:22
  Larry Wilson: Both of them lived long, long fruitful lives.
• 1:27
  Larry Wilson: And my father's a very unusual guy.
• 1:30
  Larry Wilson: My father was a very uh renowned, uh, esteemed, successful psychoanalyst.
• 1:39
  Larry Wilson: I as I'm telling you this, I feel like I must have related this information some other time during this podcast.
• 1:46
  Larry Wilson: I think he was very successful as a psychoanalyst because of certain limitations he had as a person.
• 1:57
  Larry Wilson: I had a lovely childhood growing up, but as with everything else in my life, I had nothing else to compare it to.
• 2:07
  Larry Wilson: So I didn't really know what uh fathers were supposed to be like.
• 2:13
  Larry Wilson: My father was very nice, but there was a funny feeling about him, like he couldn't quite connect.
• 2:21
  Larry Wilson: He he could pay attention to you and he could talk to you, but I think there was some problem with him, for whatever reason, with his ability to really connect with people, maybe emotionally, maybe that's what it is.
• 2:41
  Larry Wilson: And it's it's odd and it's paradoxical.
• 2:47
  Larry Wilson: My mother, of course, was the opposite.
• 2:50
  Larry Wilson: I'm sure that's what sort of drew them together.
• 2:53
  Larry Wilson: Everyone uh respected my father, but they loved my mother.
• 2:59
  Larry Wilson: So it's interesting that I'm sort of a melange of the two of them.
• 3:05
  Larry Wilson: In fact, I thought as this is a special Father's Day broadcast, uh, I'd tell you a little bit.
• 3:16
  Larry Wilson: I I hate for anyone to hear this and think I'm saying he was a terrible father.
• 3:22
  Larry Wilson: He wasn't a terrible father.
• 3:24
  Larry Wilson: It's just odd in some ways.
• 3:28
  Larry Wilson: And I realize that it may also have uh propelled me as I grew up in admiring people who were able to connect with other people and to see the power that they had in those skills.
• 3:49
  Larry Wilson: I I am not making an excuse for my father.
• 3:54
  Larry Wilson: I truly think it may have been the seed of why he was so successful, so respected, so highly regarded amongst people in the psychoanalytic community.
• 4:10
  Larry Wilson: I think it's because, and I'm just guessing, I mean, he never talked about his work, never talked about his patients.
• 4:20
  Larry Wilson: I grew up in Los Angeles, and so I simply assumed, I never discussed this with him, but I assumed that a number of his patients were probably famous people, people on television or movies or things like that, but he never ever, he was a highly, highly ethical guy.
• 4:44
  Larry Wilson: That's funny.
• 4:45
  Larry Wilson: I remember around the period of the Watergate break-in, and I I apologize if I have the timeline on this wrong.
• 4:55
  Larry Wilson: I can't remember if it's before the Watergate break-in or after when they uh evidence came out that I guess Watergate burglars, or I think they were referring to them colloquialistically as plumbers from the White House, had uh burgled the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, and had stolen the psychiatrist's handwritten notes about sessions with Ellsberg.
• 5:28
  Larry Wilson: And I presume it was, you know, uh some kind of intel job.
• 5:33
  Larry Wilson: They were wanted to find out everything they could about him.
• 5:35
  Larry Wilson: When my father heard about this in his own very low-key, detached kind of way, I remember he was he was genuinely outraged.
• 5:50
  Larry Wilson: He wasn't unsophisticated.
• 5:53
  Larry Wilson: It's not like he couldn't conceive of people doing this, but to him, that was uh patient therapist relationship confidentiality was akin to, you know, priest penitent confidentiality, or maybe more so.
• 6:18
  Larry Wilson: Maybe it was supposed to be even more private than that.
• 6:22
  Larry Wilson: And my father never spoke, not a word, about any of the patients he had, any of the work that he did.
• 6:34
  Larry Wilson: And I remember, it's so funny, I remember this day, he very quietly, he wasn't the kind of guy to shout or yell or get all worked up.
• 6:44
  Larry Wilson: But I remember he was genuinely outraged by it.
• 6:48
  Larry Wilson: It it kind of blew his mind, like he thought everyone should understand this is a line you don't cross.
• 7:00
  Larry Wilson: You do not burgle a psychiatrist's office and steal the notes from sessions with a patient.
• 7:09
  Larry Wilson: You just you just don't do that.
• 7:12
  Larry Wilson: Uh even right now, as I'm telling you, I'm more exercised than he was.
• 7:19
  Larry Wilson: He didn't get loud, he didn't get worked up.
• 7:23
  Larry Wilson: I just remember him shaking his head in really in disbelief.
• 7:27
  Larry Wilson: How could someone violate the sanctity of patient therapist relationships?
• 7:36
  Larry Wilson: And so I it's funny when I think back on those things, I don't have any firsthand knowledge.
• 7:47
  Larry Wilson: Uh I take that back.
• 7:48
  Larry Wilson: I take that back.
• 7:50
  Larry Wilson: I have partial firsthand knowledge, but it's because a couple of times I would meet people in Los Angeles through uh business or uh one thing or another, and it would come out that they had been uh a patient of my father's at one time or another.
• 8:11
  Larry Wilson: And I never, you know, I was always just going to be diplomatic and say, oh, well, you know.
• 8:16
  Larry Wilson: But on more than one occasion, they were very emphatic that he had saved their life.
• 8:28
  Larry Wilson: And I remember growing up, I can't remember the first time I heard it maybe was when I was like ten years old.
• 8:39
  Larry Wilson: A guy came to our house during the holidays, I think, and he had a gift for my folks, and it was an odd gift.
• 8:50
  Larry Wilson: It was a decorative candle of some kind, and I mean it was very nice, but it was just a peculiar gift.
• 8:57
  Larry Wilson: And I would never have said anything, my father would never have said anything, but at some point he turned to me, I think he had dinner with us, and he he said, you know, your father is a great, great doctor.
• 9:11
  Larry Wilson: And I was like, Oh, really?
• 9:13
  Larry Wilson: He said, Yes, he saved my life.
• 9:17
  Larry Wilson: I thought, hmm.
• 9:18
  Larry Wilson: And that's all he said, didn't give me any more details about that.
• 9:20
  Larry Wilson: But years later, I had a couple of other experiences, and the most detailed and involved was with uh another psychiatrist who had been a patient of my father's.
• 9:37
  Larry Wilson: And I won't go into more of the details because I don't really have uh that permission to discuss that here.
• 9:45
  Larry Wilson: But she was enormously successful as a psychiatrist and did a lot of great things, except according to her, for those times when she would go into the closet at home and bang her head on the wall until it was bloody.
• 10:01
  Larry Wilson: Then she'd come out and wipe it off and go back to being perfect.
• 10:07
  Larry Wilson: Everything was fine.
• 10:08
  Larry Wilson: Except for those intermittent times, she wanted to kill herself.
• 10:12
  Larry Wilson: And uh she, according to her, uh I spoke to her, I met her several times.
• 10:20
  Larry Wilson: She thought my father walked on water.
• 10:23
  Larry Wilson: She had nothing but the highest praise.
• 10:27
  Larry Wilson: And what was so interesting from the little bit she told me, uh she experienced some horrific childhood trauma.
• 10:35
  Larry Wilson: And as this began to be unspooled in treatment with my father, she said that my father would say, said my father's comment when he would hear about some of these horrific things was, how unfortunate.
• 10:54
  Larry Wilson: Now you might think, oh God, that's not very empathetic, you know.
• 11:00
  Larry Wilson: That's that's not very compassionate.
• 11:04
  Larry Wilson: But of course, that wasn't his job.
• 11:07
  Larry Wilson: He wasn't being paid to be compassionate.
• 11:11
  Larry Wilson: His job was to help them learn to process what experiences they'd had that were affecting their lives in a negative way.
• 11:22
  Larry Wilson: And I think in, well, I'm making a broad sweeping generalization.
• 11:27
  Larry Wilson: I could be completely wrong here, but I would think that a lot of it had to do with childhood trauma.
• 11:32
  Larry Wilson: I'm just painting that in a broad brush stroke.
• 11:36
  Larry Wilson: But she was so impressed by that, uh, in a positive way.
• 11:42
  Larry Wilson: In other words, she did not think that was a negative feature of my father lacking empathy or an emotional reaction, which was why she felt so comfortable to relay this information and discuss these most deeply held secrets and fears and uh traumatic events, because it was so clear that my father's uh inability to connect with people in that way made him extremely effective.
• 12:26
  Larry Wilson: So I thought Father's Day is as good a time as any to paint that image.
• 12:34
  Larry Wilson: And also, I'll share something else with you.
• 12:38
  Larry Wilson: I remember one time some SmartyPants character sometime who wanted to show me, I have a feeling this is when I was in my late teens, early twenties, wanted to show me how sophisticated he was.
• 12:51
  Larry Wilson: He said, So what kind of a psychoanalyst is your father, Freudian or Jungian?
• 12:59
  Larry Wilson: And I really didn't know enough about it at the time.
• 13:01
  Larry Wilson: I said, I don't really know.
• 13:03
  Larry Wilson: And so then I asked my father about it later.
• 13:06
  Larry Wilson: And my father said, Oh, that's kind of old-fashioned, thinking you have to be either Freudian or Jungian.
• 13:15
  Larry Wilson: He said, I'm really Cohattian.
• 13:19
  Larry Wilson: Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about.
• 13:23
  Larry Wilson: He said, Yeah, he said, I'm sort of a big believer in this guy, Heinz Cohutt, who was a psychoanalyst, who promulgated the ideas that a lot of mental illness or neurosis stemmed from lack of self-esteem, and that people who had a sense of self-worth and had self-esteem were less likely to have that emotional trauma or difficulty.
• 14:04
  Larry Wilson: And I thought that was so interesting.
• 14:06
  Larry Wilson: And I remember I began this episode telling you my father never spoke about this.
• 14:13
  Larry Wilson: Now I can think of one time he did briefly.
• 14:17
  Larry Wilson: But it wasn't really about his practice, it wasn't how he treated people, it wasn't about any of his patients.
• 14:26
  Larry Wilson: He just said, and this should maybe tell you what year it was.
• 14:30
  Larry Wilson: Now I can't remember.
• 14:31
  Larry Wilson: It was whatever year the film Saturday Night Fever was released.
• 14:36
  Larry Wilson: Because I remember my father, and well, now I realize that may be inaccurate, because I'm sure my father didn't go to the movie theater to see Saturday Night Fever.
• 14:46
  Larry Wilson: It must have been on cable television, must have been, you know, playing on HBO or something like that.
• 14:53
  Larry Wilson: Because somehow my father had seen it, to my surprise.
• 14:58
  Larry Wilson: And as always, he saw the most unusual things through his peculiar viewpoint.
• 15:07
  Larry Wilson: He would see stuff that would really surprise and amaze you.
• 15:11
  Larry Wilson: And he said, you know, there's a really great example in that film of what I'm talking about.
• 15:20
  Larry Wilson: And I said, What scene could you possibly be referring to?
• 15:24
  Larry Wilson: And he said, Well, there's a scene when the John Travolta character comes back to his family's house for dinner or something, and he has a younger brother, and the younger brother wants to show him a drawing that he's done of some kind.
• 15:41
  Larry Wilson: And he said, when the Travolta character looks at the drawing, he goes, Oh, that's fantastic.
• 15:48
  Larry Wilson: He goes, This is so great, and he's talking with him.
• 15:51
  Larry Wilson: And he said, whether it just happened naturally with the actress, or whether the director crafted this or the actor, he said, the younger actor playing his younger brother seemed so filled with pleasure at being admired for something he's done, and clearly seems so proud and so pleased with the praise he's receiving from someone he respects and looks up to.
• 16:23
  Larry Wilson: And I thought that's a great example.
• 16:28
  Larry Wilson: It's a great demonstration, as opposed to what eventually became very fashionable, which was this, I think, very pseudo-scientific idea of, oh, self-esteem can be instilled in everyone just by saying, yeah, you're great.
• 16:48
  Larry Wilson: Oh, why am I great?
• 16:50
  Larry Wilson: No reason, you're just great.
• 16:52
  Larry Wilson: Well, that doesn't have the same benefits for your mental health.
• 16:59
  Larry Wilson: But if you do something that you've invested your time and energy in, and that you have a feeling about, and someone you respect sees it and is able to communicate, how astonishing that I always come back to this.
• 17:22
  Larry Wilson: If you are able to connect with someone and communicate that idea, do you see it's never about the specifics?
• 17:38
  Larry Wilson: It's never about, oh, I'm an art professor, and so when I say this, it carries more weight.
• 17:47
  Larry Wilson: It's not what it's about.
• 17:49
  Larry Wilson: It's never about you being able to quantify or you being able to insist or show certain awards or acclamations you've had.
• 18:01
  Larry Wilson: It's not about that.
• 18:02
  Larry Wilson: It's about making an authentic connection with someone and then communicating your appreciation of something they've done.
• 18:18
  Larry Wilson: It could be a song they sing, it could be a picture they've drawn, it could be a meal they've cooked, it could be, it could be the way they've addressed themselves, you know, and all of this, of course, is you know, it's a wide, wide uh range of ages and things that are age appropriate, age specific.
• 18:45
  Larry Wilson: But when somebody else feels that you really see them, that may be more powerful than anything else you can do in your day.
• 18:59
  Larry Wilson: Doesn't mean you have to do it, but it means if you want to, for example, have better relationships with people in your family or friends, this is one way to achieve that.
• 19:13
  Larry Wilson: And it's just in how you communicate.
• 19:17
  Larry Wilson: It doesn't mean blowing smoke up their ass, it doesn't mean exaggerating or lying or idle flattery.
• 19:29
  Larry Wilson: It means genuinely seeing something they've done or they are working on or they're involved with or that's important to them.
• 19:39
  Larry Wilson: Maybe they want to tell you about an idea they have about something, listening to them and then responding in a way that makes it absolutely clear you really see them, has a profound and Lasting effect on your relationship and especially on the recipient's mental health.
• 20:08
  Larry Wilson: And I wish my father were alive today.
• 20:12
  Larry Wilson: I'd be so interested to hear his reaction to this podcast.
• 20:17
  Larry Wilson: I don't know if he'd agree with me.
• 20:19
  Larry Wilson: I don't know if he'd disagree.
• 20:20
  Larry Wilson: I don't know if he'd be amused.
• 20:22
  Larry Wilson: I don't know if he'd be confused.
• 20:25
  Larry Wilson: It's an important lesson also to remember that you should be using your communication skills to communicate with people while they're still here.
• 20:39
  Larry Wilson: This has been Larry Wilson.
• 20:41
  Larry Wilson: I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful.
• 20:48
  Larry Wilson: If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com.
• 20:53
  Larry Wilson: There's a ton of stuff there.
• 20:55
  Larry Wilson: In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human.
• 21:01
  Larry Wilson: Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one.
• 21:10
  Larry Wilson: I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey.
• 21:16
  Larry Wilson: And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.