Secrets From the Therapist's Couch: How Boundaries Actually Work, How To Come To Peace With Your Parents, and Why It's Not Too Late To Change | Lori Gottlieb

26:55But we definitely want to help them see something. In my therapy that I write about in the book, I'm coming in because of a breakup. up. And I say something like, and half my life is over and I don't want to start over. And my therapist comes back to that statement and he says, I think you're grieving something bigger. And I do not like that at all. I'm like, no, that is not why I'm here. I'm here for this very discreet issue. But it was the reason that he was such a good therapist is that he just said it. When I got defensive about it, he backed off. He didn't say, no, I know this is what's happening.

27:36He just said, okay. But it sat with me and it sat with me for marinated for a while. And then I realized, wow, that is really what we are dealing with. So you want a therapist who's going to both kind of get you and help you feel comfortable, but also not so comfortable that you're not being challenged in any way. And if those two things are true, that seems like that would be a good experience for you. If you eat well, stay active and still wake up exhausted every morning, the missing piece may not be your effort. It could be your sleep. Sleep sets the stage for the rest of your day. It's the time when your body quietly goes to work to heal your mind and body, steady your mood and generally restore your energy so you can show up at work, home and throughout life rested and ready.

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30:58Some of them have already come up, but I have a list of some others that I want to run by you that I think would be really helpful for people to hear and then operationalize in their lives. The first is don't compare your suffering. What does that mean? So many of us do this strange thing with our emotional health where we think that if we aren't suffering as much as someone else, that whatever we're experiencing doesn't matter and we minimize it. So for example, if you fall down and you feel like you probably broke your wrist, you're going to go to the ER. You're not just going to walk around with your kind of wrist hanging off there.

31:40And you're not going to say, well, somebody else has stage for cancer or somebody else is in cardiac arrest right now. So I better just kind of walk around with this broken wrist for, you know, for the, you know, eight weeks or whatever it takes. And maybe it won't set right. And I'm going to be in pain. We don't do that. We go and we get it taken care of. But when it comes to our emotional health, we say, well, yeah, I'm feeling sad or, Or, you know, yeah, I have a lot of anxiety or I'm having trouble in this relationship, but it's not that bad because I have a roof over my head and food on the table and someone who loves me.

32:20I'm just going to power through this, right? Or I don't really deserve to have someone, you know, it's kind of indulgent is how people think. It's indulgent to kind of get help for something like that. And so what I say is there's no hierarchy of pain, that pain is pain and suffering is suffering. And when we start to compare on this hierarchy, it does nobody any good because we don't get to get help for what we need. And that affects not only us, but the people around us and also other people who are struggling with something get the message that they need to put their pain on a hierarchy, too.

32:57And so people get really upset when I say this, that there's no hierarchy of pain. They say, well, of course, there's a hierarchy of pain. And what I mean by this is that your pain matters. And just like if you have a broken wrist or you have stage four cancer or you have, you know, something that seems more severe, it doesn't matter if you have something that you want to get addressed, go get it addressed. I'm going to whip through these, although I may have follow ups for some of them. The difference between dwelling and feeling. Our feelings are very important. Our feelings are like a compass.

33:31They tell us what we need to pay attention to and what direction we need to go in. So if you're feeling sad, what is not working in your life? Are you feeling disconnected from other people? Is there a loss that you're dealing with? If you are feeling angry, are you feeling like someone is intruding on your boundaries? Are you feeling like you're being taken advantage of? Are you not being treated well? If you're feeling envy, which people don't like to feel, I think it's great when you feel envy because it tells you what you want. It tells you what you desire. It tells you, oh, I need to go in this direction.

34:10Instead of saying, oh, I feel shame for feeling envy, you can say, this is telling me that I need to do something in my life that will give me more of what feels fulfilling or meaningful to me. So all of that is useful. Dwelling is just sitting with the feeling and doing nothing with it and just kind of marinating in it without any intentionality around it. So instead of saying, I'm feeling sad, what does that mean? It's just, I'm feeling sad and there's nothing I can do about it and I'm hopeless and helpless. And there's nothing that can be done. We talk about help rejecting complainers. So help rejecting complainers are people who dwell.

34:48We all know them. We've probably all been them too. A help rejecting complainer is someone who they keep complaining about the same thing over and over and over. And when you say, well, have you thought about this? Or have you tried this? Or what do you think would help? Oh, nothing will help. This is just the situation. So it's almost as if they don't want to solve the problem that they get some satisfaction from just complaining. And so I think that that is what dwelling is. And a lot of people just want, going back to the validation, they just want validation, but they don't want to do anything about it.

35:26So we want to feel, that's really important. We want to use our feelings, but we don't want to just sit in them and say, there's nothing to be done and just get whatever, however it's serving us to get the validation of sitting in that place where we're dwelling. I think about this a lot, the social media of it all, because, you know, on the one hand, I think it's great that we are more open about our mental health issues. You know, I when I had my either famous or infamous panic attack on national television in 2004, you know, I had to lie to everybody because I couldn't admit I had a panic attack like that was not a done thing.

36:05And even 10 years later, when I wrote a book about it, you know, my mother and certain of my bosses were freaked out that I was going to admit that I had panic disorder and that I had, you know, abused recreational drugs. Because, again, this was still not a done thing. Now we're in an era where it very much is a done thing, and that's good in a way, but bad in that I find that on social media too often people are doing exactly what you just said. They're dwelling, they're trauma dumping, they're marinating in the problem and too infrequently talking about what can be done about it or what they've learned or adding the piece that is agentic.

36:51The other thing that I think we need to think about is when you're putting something out there, people will say, I'm being so vulnerable with you guys. Look, here I am. Here's a photo of me crying or a video of me crying. What I think is true vulnerability is if you can do that with the people in your lives where you actually have stakes. So being face to face and being vulnerable in that way with someone who matters to you in your actual life as opposed to online is so much more daring and courageous. And so I think it's kind of easy in a way to, you know, because what's going to happen on social media, everyone's going to say, you know, is going to give you a million likes.

37:37They're going to give you all this positive feedback. Whereas relationships are about the I-thou of the relationship, that there are two people in it. It's not just someone dumping all their stuff on another person. It's, I'm sharing this with you, and then how are you going to receive this? And how does the other person receive it? And then how do they come back to you? And how do you receive that? And how do you get some kind of emotional, like a neurological resetting from that co-regulation, we call it. So you're dysregulated, something is going on, you come to someone else and they might say, how can I be helpful right now?

38:19Right? We talk about help hug heard. You might ask, do you want me to brainstorm with you right now? Do you just want to hug right now? Do you just want to be heard right now? And it's so beautiful to have that interaction. It's not about likes on social media. It's not about, you know, sort of performative emotionality. It's about, and I'm not saying that their emotions aren't real that they're posting on social media. I'm just saying it's to strangers for the most part and it's to a big group as opposed to that one-on-one intimacy. So this interaction that you can have when you bring something like that to someone important in your life can be so much more healing than anything that you're going to put on social media.

39:02It can feel healing in the moment on social media, but I'm talking about sort of longer-term healing and deepening of those relationships outside. Your mention of co-regulation leads me to another of your expressions that I really like. We change in relation to others. Can you say more about that? So there's an idea that floats around out there, which is that you have to really work on yourself before you can be in relationship with others. And I think that that is not how humans work, that we are learning about ourselves so much by relating to others. So when people come into therapy and they tell me about an interaction that they had with someone else, that tells me a lot more than if they were just saying, I feel this way or I feel that way.

39:55It's like, let's look at what happened and how you felt while you were interacting with someone else. And sometimes it's about how are you feeling as you're interacting with me here in the room as a therapist, But a lot of times it's what was happening out there. And it's kind of like the difference between like my therapist used this analogy with me that it's like whether you're like shooting baskets while you're practicing or you're playing in a game. And so when you're working on yourself, it's like you're shooting baskets. You're like trying to perfect your technique. You're trying to kind of, you know, learn how to how to do the things that you need to do when you're in a game, but you're not in the game.

40:28And when you're in the game, you learn so much more. It's like, oh, this person ran this way. Oh, this person does defense like this. Oh, this is what happens when we do this play. So all this stuff happens that you don't learn by just shooting baskets against a backboard. And that's what I think people need to do more is they need to get in the game, but not just be in the game, but then learn from the game. So don't just keep playing games and then doing the same thing over and over. It's what can you learn from being in the game that you didn't know before the game? Like do the post-game analysis.

40:59This is, I think, incredibly important in an individualistic and now increasingly isolated because of technology culture where we are really just focused on ourselves and self-improvement can it can become very myopic. I think a lot about something that one of your colleagues, Dr. Ingrid Clayton, I believe is her name, who was on this show once said, I believe it was her. She said something like wounding happens in relationships, but healing happens in relationships. And that's really stuck with me. Yes. We don't heal in isolation. We can go to therapy and learn more about ourselves, but we heal in relation to others.

41:47So I think it's important for people to think about how this individualistic ideal that we have right now, which is, you know, we have to really pay attention to ourselves and our needs and our wants, and we have to set boundaries all the time. I don't think people really even understand what a boundary is in a relational way. So a lot of times people think, well, if that person is upsetting me, I'm going to set a boundary. And if they don't respect my boundary, then I'm going to cut them off. I don't think you've learned much from that experience. What a boundary actually is, it's a request and it's a bid for connection.

42:26It's not about I'm pushing you away. It's about I'm bringing you closer. If I didn't care, I wouldn't bother to set the boundary. I would just leave, right? So a boundary is a bid for connection. And what I mean by that is, let's say that I'll use kind of a stereotypical example. Let's say that you get together with your mother and she always criticizes your appearance, right? You can say to your mom, well, you know, if you criticize my appearance, I'm never talking to you again, right? Or you can say what you're going to do. You can say if you criticize, and by the way, you give context. You say, hey, mom, I love spending time with you.

43:08But when you talk about my appearance, it makes it less fun and it makes me not want to spend time with you. So I'm asking you not to comment on my appearance unless you have something nice to say. And if not, and if not, it'll be more fun for us. And if you do mention things about my appearance that you don't like, I'm going to end the visit and let's try again next time. Now, the boundary is not incumbent on her to do what you are asking. It's what are you going to do? You just set a boundary with yourself, which is if my mom criticizes my appearance, I'm going to very kindly, not in anger, I'm not going to storm out.

43:45I'm going to just say, hey, mom, remember I said that it's less fun when you do that. So I'm going to end the visit today. I love you so much. Give her a kiss. I'll talk to you. We'll try another time. You do this 100 % of the time. What you do, you have to hold the boundary 100 % of the time. And if you do that, she's going to come to learn that either she continues to criticize you, in which case every visit ends early and she doesn't like that, or she's going to adjust her behavior because she wants to actually spend time with you. So it's not about this binary way of looking at the world like they do what I want or we cut off.

44:23It's can we say, here's where my limit is. Here's why. I really enjoy you. I want to be with you. That's the frame of a boundary. And let's see what the other person does. But more importantly, you hold your boundary. And then you have control over the situation without having to completely cut off the person. I'm not saying there aren't circumstances where people are dangerous and maybe there needs to be some kind of distance. But in the majority of cases that I see nowadays, people are very quick to cut people off or insist that people are not respecting their boundaries or, you know, they're not able to tolerate the normal friction of being in relationship with imperfect human beings.

45:11Yes. And our intolerance keeps going up because we're in a world where our technology has made friction in many ways a thing of the past. And same with human relationships. You know, we we're just you know, we can get anything we want with a swipe. And so then when we are in the messy world of interpersonal affairs, you know, we we just we don't have the we haven't been sufficiently inoculated. Yes. And I think, too, we see this where we have trouble accepting people for who they are. And we forget that people have to accept us for who we are, too. So it's not like we're the we're the consumers and we're shopping for a partner, a parent, and and and we have an idea of how they should be.

46:04We forget that, like, people are making compromises to be with us, too. We are not perfect. We have quirks. We have habits. We have ways of responding that are not ideal. And so I'm not saying tolerate bad behavior, but I am saying that sometimes we try to change things about another person instead of looking at all the wonderful things you're getting in that relationship, all the things you love about that relationship. It's like, but he doesn't empty the dishwasher, right? He doesn't respect my time. And I'm not saying he shouldn't empty the dishwasher because yes, but at the same time, there are like different things like, or he's not, he's not emotional enough, right?

46:45Like in this instance, he's not emotional enough and I need this. We expect one person to be everything. We expect them to know how to exactly mirror us and exactly validate us and exactly co-regulate with us. and also read our minds and know exactly what we want. And it just doesn't work that way. Somebody said, a friend of mine said, I realized that that is sometimes with this one thing about my husband because she's very happy in her marriage. She said, that's just the husband I have. And I thought that was exactly what people are missing is sometimes there are things about another person that are not gonna change, but there's so much good that you appreciate about the relationship, that why do you want to turn your camera lens on that one thing and just always focus on that instead of just shift the lens a little bit and look at all the other beautiful things that you're not looking at when you're focused on this one thing that you don't like?

47:42Again, and you said this, but just to emphasize it, sometimes we're putting the camera lens on something that truly is unacceptable. And we either have to get them to revise their their views or update their behavior or we need to get out. Absolutely. I'm not saying there aren't times that you need to, you know, that there are things that are happening in the relationship that are not something you want to continue. That makes sense. What I'm saying is I think a lot of times we're expecting people to live their lives in the way that we want them to live their lives and relate to us in the way that we demand, and I'm using that word demand instead of request.

48:22so you can request something, but sometimes we demand things. And sometimes there are things that are really hard for other people to do. And we forget that sometimes there are things about us that are really hard for us to change in ourselves. And the other person accepts that about us. Like they know that, you know what, there are all these strong things about my partner, but, and I love my partner so much, this thing irritates me, but I don't focus on it. And when you actually talk to people who have been married for, you know, 50 years and they talk about what they appreciate in their marriages, they're not always saying, oh, this person is perfect.

48:59They're saying, I just focused on the things that I love about this person and it made me happy. So again, I'm not talking about abusive behavior. I'm not talking about dangerous behavior. I'm not even talking about just personality differences that are not going to be good for the long term. But I think that we have these expectations in others and it's influenced by social media and sort of the world we live in where we expect other people to live the way we want. And that's not relational. Let me keep working down my list of your excellent sayings. Think like an editor. What's that about? I did a TED talk about this, about how we all have stories that we carry around with us.

49:49We have stories from childhood that are things like, I can't trust anybody, or I'm unlovable, or nothing will ever work out for me. Whatever your story is, you might not even be aware that you're carrying around that story. And so you see the world as you grow up through that lens without realizing it. So you say, well, I can't trust anyone. But what you're doing is you're picking untrustworthy people. Or you're picking trustworthy people. And then you are assuming that they're untrustworthy. And you make them so paranoid that they leave you, right? because you're acting in a way that is not sustainable in the relationship because you're always accusing them of something or you're always wondering if they're not being trustworthy.

50:33And at a certain point, you're creating your own abandonment by driving them away. And then you say, see, I couldn't trust that person. They said they loved me and then they left. Well, no, they were in love with you. And then this behavior kept going on and on and it was untenable and they couldn't be in a relationship like that because that's not really a relationship. That's like an interrogation. We have these stories and we don't even realize we're carrying them around. And also on top of that, we're all unreliable narrators. So when we are telling a story about maybe something that happened with another person, we're telling our version of the story.

51:10And I don't mean that we're telling a story that's untrue. I mean that we're telling just a limited part of the story. We don't know what the other person's story is or we make assumptions. They did this because. Here's an example. I had a client who said, I really like this guy. We've been dating for six months. And I think I should break up with him, though, because he always comes late when we're supposed to meet for dinner. And I feel like he just doesn't prioritize me. He knows that it matters to me that he's on time. And he doesn't prioritize me. And he doesn't care about me in this way.

51:47And I think that's a red flag. Well, it turns out her story, the true part of the story was, yeah, he comes late. That's true. The untrue part of the story where she's unreliable is she doesn't know why he was late. Why he was late, it turns out, when she finally talked to him about it, was he was so concerned about getting there on time that he would try to leave work early and he was getting in trouble at work. And so he was like trying to please his boss and trying to please her and getting sort of caught in the middle and he was embarrassed to tell her that he couldn't leave work, that he was embarrassed to say he didn't have high enough status in the company, that he could leave work.

52:26And so all this was going on, but she had no idea, right? So the story, there was like half a story, but it wasn't the whole story. And it was actually kind of a charming story when you heard his side of the story, that it was like, I care so much about her that I'm putting my job on the line here because I want to be there for her, but I also want her to respect me, right? So his story was, I don't know if a woman will respect me if I don't have high enough status. So he had his own story he was carrying around. And they weren't talking about the stories they were carrying around. So I think when it's interesting when I see couples and they'll tell me, they'll narrate the same event.

53:02And they have, you know, there's some overlap of what happened. And then there's very different versions of sort of what motivated the other person to act in the way that they acted. and so I think it's so important to when you are thinking about something in your life and you're telling a story can you write the story from the other person's point of view can you imagine what it is maybe you can ask them that's the best way but if you can't for whatever reason can you if you were telling me the story sometimes I'll say to somebody who comes in as an individual instead of as a couple I'll say okay that happened now tell me what your parent your partner your friend your sibling, if they were sitting here on my couch right now, how would they tell me the story?

53:44And you know what happens? They sit there for a second and they have to think about it. And then they say, well, my sister might say this. And now we get a very different version of the story. And it doesn't contradict her version. It's just, it amplifies it. It gives it more, fleshes it out. It gives it more nuance. And then she has more compassion for her sister. And now she thinks, okay, I understand now what might have happened. Maybe there's a different way that I can talk to my sister about this. And so that's thinking like an editor, thinking it through from another POV. So my background was I was a writer.

54:29I was a journalist and I wrote books long, and I worked in television and film. So I was a storyteller, basically, before I became a therapist. And I never thought that the two were related until I actually started training to become a therapist. And I realized every time I sat in the room with someone, that really what they were telling me was just a story. And I know as a writer that there are many ways to tell a story. Do you start here? Do you start with the inciting event? Who's the protagonist? Who are the heroes in the story? Who are the villains in the story? And what if we told the story from somebody else's point of view in the story and now who are the heroes and who are the villains?

55:08Now what is the plot? Now who is the protagonist? Now who is the antagonist? So now what is the conflict? Do we even agree what the conflict is? So I started looking at these stories that people would tell me in therapy through the lens of being an editor, which is, and being a storyteller, which is, what are we missing here? Can we tell the stories differently? And it was so helpful for people. And I found that in my own therapy too, that it was so helpful to kind of look at, can I question anything about the story that I'm telling? Can I expand on? Can I amplify? Can I revise? Can I edit? Because you never turn in a first draft.

55:46Your first draft is full of all kinds of, you know, this is a writer too, Dan. Your first draft is full of all kinds of things that need attention. So can we look at what our initial story is? It's just a first draft. And then can we go in and edit and edit and edit and edit until we get to something that is more authentic and truthful and helpful than the story we came in with? Insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget.

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57:25The instinct that a lot of us have is that we have this hope for a different childhood. We wanted a different childhood. We wanted something to be different. And so we're carrying that around. And the only way that you can have a better adulthood is to let go of the hope of having a better childhood. You will never get another childhood. And that involves a lot of grief work. So how do I grieve the fact that I did not have the childhood as opposed to carrying around that hope that I can somehow get it by choosing certain partners who will give me what my parents didn't give? Succeeding and being wildly successful and that will give me the validation that I never got as a child.

58:08There are all kinds of ways that we try to recreate what we didn't get, but they don't actually replace the fact that we didn't get it. Nothing will replace the fact that you didn't get the childhood that you hoped for. So a better way to look at that is I need to let go and grieve that so that now I can create the adulthood that I want. And that's a lot of what we do in therapy is helping people. And it's not blaming parents, by the way. It's another misconception about therapy is that we're sitting there blaming people's parents. I think most people's parents did the absolute best that they knew how to do given whatever childhood they had.

58:49And this is intergenerational. We talk about intergenerational trauma all the time. Intergenerational patterns get passed down through generations. A lot of people say, well, I will never do what my father or my mother did to me. And then they become parents and all of a sudden they're doing exactly what their father or mother did to them because they haven't processed it. You know, my colleague Terry Reel, he says, we marry our unfinished business. And I think that if you haven't processed that stuff from childhood, you do marry your unfinished business. We tend to not only parent in that way that our parents did, even though we said we would never do that, but we choose partners who will recreate the feelings that we had when we were children of what we, you know, the ways in which we were maybe disappointed by our parents.

59:39So, So, you know, it's interesting because we don't do this consciously. This is an unconscious process. It's like we see someone and we think that person's very much not like my parent. They're going to be so loving and warm and nurturing. And then we find out, oh, my gosh, they explode when they get angry or they drink too much. Or, you know, we didn't realize this. But unconsciously, our unconscious said to us, you look familiar, come closer. So why would people do this to themselves? They do it not because they're aware they're doing it. They do it because unconsciously they think, going back to the hope for a better childhood, they think, this time I can win.

1:00:16This time I'm going to be in the face of someone just like my parents, but I'm going to master it and I'm going to make them be different. And I'm going to get everything I want from them that I didn't get from my parents. This is completely outside of our awareness. And so in the book, I write about a young woman that I call Charlotte, and she keeps choosing all these men who disappoint her. And it's very clear that she's recreating different things from both her father and her mother, that kind of go away, I love you, go away, I love you, that kind of thing. And just a lot of, you know, she had a mother who was depressed.

1:00:51And then when her mother wasn't depressed, she was a great mom. But when she was depressed, it was very confusing for Charlotte. And she had a father who would kind of go away and come back and go away and come back. So those were the kinds of men she chose. And then she'd go out on dates with people who seemed like they were reliable and responsible. And also she was, you know, they were attractive and they were interesting. But she would just say, no chemistry. I don't know why. I don't know why I have no chemistry. Right. Unconsciously, she wasn't going to be able to, you know, recreate the childhood with those stable men.

1:01:22So she wasn't drawn to them. And it wasn't until we worked through some of this stuff in therapy with her that it started to change where she was still drawn in certain ways to the unreliable men, but she was now drawn to the reliable men more. And so she might have an initial kind of jolt when she'd encounter an unreliable man, but then the reliable men became very attractive to her and it ended up changing who she ended up with and how her life went. So I think it's really important for us to think about, you know, how do we grieve what we didn't have instead of carrying it around and trying to create something that we can never have.

1:02:01We can never go back and do it again. Let me ask a question about attitudes that we have toward parents. And this question, I'll apologize in advance because it may be just too much of a local concern, too specific to me. I do represent a phenotype. I tended to really idealize my parents and I didn't have some story consciously that I was trying to heal my childhood. I thought I had a great childhood and I still kind largely I think I have a less overly rosy view of my parents than I did for a long time. But I'm just checking with you. Like, is that is that common? Am I an outlier here? No, you're not an outlier at all.

1:02:48I think when people either idealize or devalue that they're missing something in the middle. Our parents are just humans. And again, they grew in certain soil and that soil formed who they were and they either figured stuff out as they got older or they didn't. And if they didn't, we're going to grow up in maybe similar soil. So I think that when we demonize or idealize our parents, and by the way, there are situations in which parents were truly, truly damaging in really severe ways, but it wasn't because they were evil. And I'm not excusing them or condoning their behavior at all, so I want to make that clear, but I'm saying there's a context in which that behavior happened.

1:03:37And it's extremely unfortunate that the child then had to endure that childhood. So there's no excuse for it, but there's an explanation for it. So I think that when people say, oh, my parents were perfect, that's great that you got a lot from your parents. That's fantastic. And probably they had their own issues too, but we're not looking for that. We're not trying to look for problems. We're not interviewing for pain in therapy. We're trying to say, look at the person in front of me sitting on the couch. How do they move through the world? Where's the gap between what they say they want and how they behave?

1:04:17Where does that come from? How can they understand it better? We're not blaming parents. We're saying this might help you understand why you're stuck. This might help you understand why you have panic attacks. This might help you understand why you're having trouble in relationships in this kind of pattern that we've seen three times now, right? So it's not your parents were bad parents or your parents were perfect parents. It was your parent, you grew up in whatever environment you did. We're just looking at how that informs what's happening now for you so that you can understand it better. And then separate from the soil in which you grew up, we are born with a certain temperament that's genetic.

1:04:58So there's genetics and there's environment and how do they interact? And it's complicated. So I think that people, you know, when we talk about our parents, I'll often say to people, the easiest way that I can get to what was the essence of their relationship with their parents is I'll say, give me three adjectives that describe your mom. Give me three adjectives that describe your dad. Don't think about it. What are the three things that come right to mind? And what they say is so informative. It's unfiltered. It's just they're sort of, you know, visceral. This is how I think about my parent.

1:05:34And it just helps us not to blame the parents. It just helps us to say, OK, these were the first three things that you thought of. Let's see how they are informing the way you move through the world today. Let me go back to your argument that I think is very well supported by the data that we all have these stories that we carry around about ourselves. I want to get your thoughts on like how we can arrive at a degree of peace with these stories and not be so owned by them. Mine, which I really was only fully aware of, you know, as of a couple of years ago was and I had a kind of ambient awareness of this story, but really it crystallized for me in recent years.

1:06:19Um, my story was that I was a bad person, just like inherently selfish, incurably selfish. And I don't think I actually articulated that to anybody until like 2018 was the first time I had sort of had the courage to like say those words aloud. Um, and if I think about like what implanted that story, I love my mother. We had, we have, we had and have a great relationship in my view, but she had a, she's very funny and she has a kind of cutting sense of humor. And a running joke, starting when I was very little, was that I was vain and a kind of no good Nick. I remember, I have this very early memory of my parents getting us ready for a photo shoot on the front lawn.

1:07:07They had me and my brother in like onesies and they were combing our hair. And my mother kept joking to my dad about how I kept looking in the mirror. So that was one little thing. And I was kind of a bad student and hung out with bad kids and had a little weed business, you know, in eighth and ninth grade. And they used to call my friends the brain trust, sarcastically. And so that and my parents have just long joked about me being kind of a difficult kid. And then certain behaviors in my life, I don't know, consciously or subconsciously, I was like, fuck it. If I'm a bad person, I might as well, like, you know, really go for it.

1:07:44Embrace it. Yeah. And so anyway, I say all that, perhaps I said too much, but how do we arrive at some degree of peace with it, some clarity, and then not be owned by it? So the stories that our parents tell us about ourselves say more about the storyteller, meaning our parents, than about us. You see this with siblings a lot, where in adulthood, a lot of siblings say, you know, they don't get along, and it's because, well, she was the pretty one. She was the smart one. This was the responsible one. This was the lazy one, right? And it's like, who told you that? Well, the adults. The adults labeled the kids.

1:08:22You tell people who they are, and then they start to take on that identity. Just like you, when you thought that you were the bad kid, you thought, well, screw it. I'll just be the bad kid. That's what happens. And so we come into adulthood and then we have the freedom now to say, is that true? Am I the lazy one? Or did I just not like taking physics, right? Was I a creative person? And that's where I put all my energy and I wasn't lazy. I was very motivated to do the things that I liked to do and the things that I liked less, I just didn't put a lot of energy into. Is this person difficult or is this person someone who is a truth teller and really felt like it was important to be authentic?

1:09:13Is this person too sensitive? We get a lot of that. Or was this person somebody who was able to feel her feelings in a family that denied all of their own feelings, even though they were extremely obvious, right? Like the parents who wouldn't talk to each other because they were so angry. Well, they were furious, but they didn't show their anger in that way. And maybe this person, when she got mad, she got mad, right? So there are all these labels that become our story of who we are. And we get to, going back to the editing, we get to edit that story. And I like to say, what evidence do you have?

1:09:52Where is the evidence? Let's talk about that. And they'll say, well, I really did do that. Or I really was lazy because it's like, really was that what the label was or was that something else? And if you start to believe your story, as many children do, like this is who I am, all the adults say this is who I am, so it must be who I am. It's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy in childhood that we start to act in ways that give us a cohesive identity. Like, well, I guess if I'm the creative one or I'm the smart one, let's say someone says she's the smart one and she's like three, what do you know who's smart, right?

1:10:27She's the smart one. And there's lots of different ways, by the way, to measure intelligence. So what does that mean? It doesn't really mean much anyway, because people are intelligent in lots of different ways. There's emotional intelligence. There's kind of academic intelligence. There's all kinds of intelligence, creative intelligence. That person who is told you're the smart one, that person feels like they can never get anything less than an A on anything because they will feel so much shame about themselves because it says, oh, they were all wrong about me. I'm not smart. Look what happened on this test.

1:11:01Look what happened in this class. I'm not smart. So they go through school with this sense of perfectionism and I can never fail. What failing is to them is not being perfect. And they grow up to be these incredible perfectionists who are very risk averse. They're very unaware of what they actually are interested in or passionate about because they always take the safe route that they know they will succeed in. So a lot of what happens with these stories is we get to revise them as adults. And I think that is the beauty of therapy is we get to revise those stories. Again, it doesn't have to happen in therapy.

1:11:37You can do this all different ways. But I actually have a workbook about this, which is all about how do you rewrite your story and how do you edit your story and examine it? And, you know, there are lots of very, the whole book is these concrete exercises. And so you can use things like that. You can listen to podcasts, you can self-reflect. But I really want people to think about, you know, what is the evidence for this? And what was me kind of trying to fit into this story that was given to me, but that I did not ask for? One thing that's been helpful for me, and I'll say this, and we'll see what you think of it, is, you know, I'm very influenced by Buddhism.

1:12:15There's this assertion that one of the wellsprings of human suffering is that we have what the Buddhists call wrong view. And wrong view is really just believing that there is some core, permanent, immutable, unchangeable sense of yourself. Immutable, unchangeable, fixed in the pejorative, and then we behave accordingly. But in seeing through that for myself, seeing that, of course, I'm constantly changing. I can change. I am change because everything's changing all the time has really kind of opened things up for me. And so when the story arises in my head, I see, well, that's just a thought, which, by the way, is going to change and be replaced by another thought in the next nanosecond.

1:13:12So does that any of what I'm saying make sense to you? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that ties into this idea that we forget that we are the authors of our story, that we let everybody else write our story for us when we're young. And then we grow up and we forget that we get to write it so we can turn the page and say when people think, oh, I can't change or it's too late to change. I always want to question that with them. Why do you think you can't change? Why do you think that things will never change, that you don't have any agency over your own life? um my my therapist um at one point i read about this where i was feeling this way like a very trapped about what was going on in my life and he said you know you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars desperately trying to get out but on the right and the left it's open no bars so the question is why do so many of us sit there shaking the bars when we can walk around the bars.

1:14:14And part of it is because with freedom comes responsibility. We are responsible for our lives. If we walk around those bars, we are the authors of our story to mix a bunch of metaphors here. We are responsible for our lives. And that can be scary. We might think, well, who am I to know how to run my own life? Who gave me that power? And I think it can be scary at first, but I think it's also incredibly liberating when you realize you don't have to do it all at once. It's like one sentence at a time. Rewrite your story. Write one sentence. That's all you need. And when one sentence follows another sentence, follows another sentence.

1:14:51And it's a way of exploring something on the page, too, when you're rewriting your story. It's like you don't know what the story is yet. It doesn't matter. You're just exploring. Just put it all out there. It's been such a pleasure to have you on. And I regret that I haven't done so sooner. And I hope this is the first of many. Let me just finish with two questions that I often ask at the end of interviews. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't? I would say one thing that I think I want to just call out as we're talking about vulnerability and connection is the ways in which I see men and women come to therapy, because I think that a lot of men feel like they can't talk about their emotional lives.

1:15:40and I see this when men come in and they'll say something like, you know, I've never told anyone this before and they literally mean that. They could have a great marriage, great friends, great family. They have never told anyone before and it's not even some deep dark secret, but to them it feels very vulnerable and it's not that men aren't deep. They are equally deep as women. It's that they've been socialized in this way. When we talk about the story, the story of being male is you don't talk about your Felix, right? And women will come in and they'll say, you know, I've never told anyone this before, except for my mother, my sister, my best friend.

1:16:19So they've told maybe one, two, three people. And I saw that as someone raising, you know, I have a son and I would see him, you know, when he was like maybe two years old and he'd fall down in the playground. And, you know, if he fell down, what would the adults do? They'd say like, get up, shake it off. And if like a little girl fell down, they'd be like, oh, honey, come here, let me give you a hug. And so it's just, I think we need to think about that in our relationships, whether it's our partners or our brothers or our siblings or our fathers or sons. How do we receive male vulnerability?

1:16:59When I see couples and I'll see often it'll be like a woman saying to her husband, you know, I just don't feel like we're connecting. I really want you to open up to me. I want to feel closer to you. And then he does and he opens up and let's say he starts tearing up a little bit or maybe he even starts crying. Inevitably, I get some version of her looking at me like a deer in headlights as if I really want him to be open with me. That's what I asked for and I will feel closer to him because of it, but I also don't feel safe when he's crying in front of me. So I think we just want to think about that in terms of the stories that we tell ourselves.

1:17:41What is the story we're telling ourselves about vulnerability and gender and who's allowed to have feelings and going back to the hierarchy of pain, who's allowed to feel pain at what level and how do we rank that depending on who's the person suffering? Just something to think about as we're all trying to connect more. The final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book slash books, your podcasts slash podcasts, your New York Times? Just plug everything, please. The book that I was talking about today was called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. And it follows the lives of four of my therapy patients.

1:18:21And I'm the fifth patient in the book is I go to therapy. And I hope that everybody sees themselves in each of these people. I write the Ask the Therapist Advice column for the New York Times. And there's a TED talk that I have on how changing your story can change your life, which we talked about a lot today. There's a 16 minute version of it. And there's a workbook about how you can change your story if you want really sort of a concrete program to go through to kind of edit your story. And I have two podcasts. One is called Dear Therapists and one is called Since You Asked. Such a pleasure to talk to you.

1:18:59Thank you so much. Oh, such a pleasure. Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com.

1:19:33On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.

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