How to Break Relationship Patterns: Resolving Conflict and Communicating Your Needs

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. Rick and I have talked about relationships a lot over the years, and some of these conversations have stuck with me more than others. So we went back through the archive and pulled together the segments I think are most useful for navigating conflict, particularly repetitive conflicts. Maybe it's the same argument you've had a dozen times. Maybe you asked for something, then they nodded, but then nothing actually changed.

0:40Forrest Hanson: Or maybe you raised a real problem, and somehow the whole conversation ended up being about your tone. These are often the hardest moments in a relationship, so learning how to deal with them is pretty important. You'll hear from my dad, that's clinical psychologist Rick Hansen, and he's going to talk about what he saw again and again in his office during the decades that he spent working with couples and families. We'll get into Murray Bowen's idea of differentiation, what to do when somebody's complaint is right, but their delivery is a mess, the pursuer-distancer dynamic, resentment. And to close things out, you'll hear a conversation with my fiancé, associate therapist Elizabeth Ferreira, about fixing versus feeling and how the two of us manage that in our relationship.

1:24Forrest Hanson: So let's start with a question I asked Rick about his years as a therapist. When couples came into his office stuck in conflict, was there one thing that he kept wishing they would do a little bit differently? I hope you enjoyed the episode. When people came into your office, whether it was one person or a couple or a family, and they got into some conflict about whatever was going on in their relationship, Did you, as a clinician, ever have moments where you were like, man, if these two people or if this one person had just done fill-in-the-blank differently, they would have such a different result right now.

2:00Forrest Hanson: Was there like a consistent fill-in-the-blank that you found that they could have done differently?

2:06Dr. Rick Hanson: One is to get better regulated personally. That sometimes is the issue. You have one partner who's fairly calm and kind of even-keeled, and the other person who just gets either emotionally intense or super shut down, which is dysregulation either way. And that would be one. So people listening, thinking about this in a relationship can think about certain keys for themselves, right? So that's one. A second thing is, boy, it goes back to the thing I said about take care of your own side of the street. In other words, if either, and especially both of them, would just maximize delivering the goods to every reasonable extent, that would make a lot of difference.

2:53Dr. Rick Hanson: Because after two weeks of doing that, let's say, if the other person has not shifted, then the person who really has budged for two weeks and delivered the goods for two weeks is on a very strong position to really ask for what they need. So that's the thing I would see again and again. And I think at another level, people lose touch with the being behind the eyes in the other person. And I would say if there's one thing that could really be helpful is if both parties, both people, certainly one, ideally both, in any kind of relationship could slow it down and feel the suffering of the other person, the beingness of the other person, and just kind of start from there.

3:46Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, have that be in the space and to ground themselves in their goodwill for the other person. With that established, then you're actually in a much stronger position to be blunt and direct about what you personally need to change about that other person before you're going to open your heart to them again. Then there's another piece of it, which is I've seen people just get way over-invested. in what happens in the minds of others. Wow, yeah, I love this one. Yeah, you know, how do you think about me? What are your intentions toward me? Do you think I'm a good person? And all the rest of that.

4:25Forrest Hanson: Getting really sucked into the minutia of psychodrama can be a real pitfall in a relationship.

4:30Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, yeah, and there's this weird paradox. And it's been a growing space for me where you do two things, or two things are going on inside you with regard to another person, you're both rested in a goodwill toward them, not ill will. You wish them well. There's a kind of simple, basic compassion and kindness that sort of radiates out from you almost as a field through which others move. So it's not contingent on other people to be rested in a simple, basic, you know, goodwill, good-heartedness, open-heartedness. And as you rest in that space, you can feel increasingly independent of the storm swirling through the mind of another person.

5:22Dr. Rick Hanson: And more and more you start to, you realize kind of poignantly, you know, gosh, I wish you well, and I'm not making that happen inside you. I'm operating with integrity on my side of the street I'm not playing superior I'm not being righteous about it I really am sincerely and for all the good reasons inside myself no matter what you do I'm really taking care of things I'm really showing up I'm really being decent I'm getting off my positions quickly I'm recognizing what there is to correct and I'm implementing correction at a reasonable level going forward I'm doing these things And, you know, more and more, it's like, I really wish you well, but it's not my fault that you're feeling what you're feeling right now.

6:08Dr. Rick Hanson: or you know and the two to get the two go together because if you don't have that underlying stance of kindness fundamentally a kind of humanity toward that other person then the other side of it of boundaries of differentiation distancing from the mindstream of another person can feel very apathetic, unkind, cold, even narcissistic, self-absorbed because you're so disengaged from other people. It's the combination of the two that, wow, I have found this an incredible sweet spot.

6:46Forrest Hanson: Yeah. It feels like part of what you're alluding to here, at least to me or what this is making me think of, is just this balance between intimacy and autonomy that you've written about extensively in the past and we even talked about a bit in Resilient Together that just exists inside of all of our relationships. And it's really about just finding the sweet spot. And some relationships could use a little more intimacy and some relationships could use a little more autonomy. And different people have differing desires for intimacy and autonomy and figuring out where to land and kind of find the right spot between both the desires of the two people and then alongside that, what might be healthier for the relationship can be really tough for people because sometimes you have relationships between two people who both really desire a lot of intimacy, but what would be healthier for the relationship is cultivating a bit more autonomy, actually, like they're having an enmeshment issue with each other.

7:47Dr. Rick Hanson: That's right. And having said all that, then when the rubber does meet the road, I talk about speaking from the heart, trying a softer tone, That's a huge one. I've really had to learn that one too because I can easily slip into a certain exasperation or sharpness. I've really learned that tone really, really matters. You can say what you need to say, but in a simple and direct way. Another one is to not rain on the parade of other people. I find a lot of folks, I'm going to put it, the inner child, if you will, or just a really sweet part of ourselves bubbles up with a good idea, and then you bump into everybody else who's dumping on the parade.

8:31Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, they're doubting, they're skeptical, they're laughing at you, they don't think you could actually do it. You know, don't run on the parade. Or another one, like I talk about, is to admit fault and move on, right? Admit fault and move on. And then the part about say what you want, so much of what we're working toward here is being able to say what you want directly, without euphemisms. without needing to justify what you want. And I see a lot of people, they're in this middle zone in which they're basically sputtering. And it would serve them much better to either stay quiet and let it go or to assert themselves really clearly about it in a way that actually goes to some kind of resolution.

9:18Forrest Hanson: What do you think supports people in being assertive in that way? One, know what you want in concrete terms.

9:26Dr. Rick Hanson: What would it look like if you got what you wanted? A lot of times people say things very vaguely because they're afraid to really name what they really want.

9:36Forrest Hanson: Yeah, and just to quickly jump in, I've totally had this thing that I've been wrestling with over the last six months to a year where there's been a lot of like, oh, I don't know if this is exactly the way that I want this thing to go, and I would just like it to be kind of different. and Elizabeth very understandably asks me, okay, well, what would that look like? What does the alternative actually look like for you? And I so struggle to give a coherent answer. Like I know that whatever it is, isn't it, but I don't know what it is and therefore I can't communicate it. Yeah. And figuring out what it is has been like a total process.

10:16Dr. Rick Hanson: A layer of that is to identify for yourself what's the experience you are seeking. Yeah. distinct from the form. And you did a brilliant job actually in the book Resilient to really emphasize this point because the form is up for grabs. And maybe the other person doesn't want to give you that form, but they're happy to find other forms, other ways to respond to you or to help you to have the experience you long for. And the experience is very intimate. People get vulnerable about this, what I really want, but at least inside yourself, know what the experience is that you're trying to get. That's the end through the means of the form of what other people say or do, right?

11:06Dr. Rick Hanson: So that another thing that really helps is to feel inside yourself a kind of worthiness or all rightness, even deservingness of whatever it is you want. That it's okay to want that. It's okay to put that on the table. Often there's a justice element where you're standing up for, in a sense, a kind of unfairness you're dealing with. You're dealing with people who are your roommates who just kind of leave their junk in the common area. And there's an injustice. They're externalizing the cost of managing their own stuff into the commons and dumping on other people. Or maybe people have done that with you emotionally, maybe in your history.

11:51Dr. Rick Hanson: So you're addressing an injustice, actually. So to feel it's okay. It's okay to bring this forward. Another is to actually know your words. What are the words you're going to use? And I, you know, wrote out things I wanted to say before an important conversation with my dad, for example, or with other people to really get to the keywords or phrases that I actually want to communicate that are unmistakable and undeniable, including ones that operationalize and define quite clearly what it is that I'm asking for here. But know what your words are. That's helpful. Another thing I've just seen a million times, I cannot tell you how often I saw it in my office, is that basically there's A and there's B.

12:38Dr. Rick Hanson: And sorry, I'm going to introduce another letter X. A wants X from B. Okay. So A then puts X on the table and B then talks about Y. Okay. What do you do then? You can go chase Y or you can get aggravated about the fact that B has named Y or you can reestablish X. and a term for this interactively is sometimes called topic control. So staying on topic, coming back again and again to your X is a really helpful thing. And then when you've got X centered in the table, are you actually getting to agreement with that other person? Because very often, A will put X on the table, B will grunt or nod or look out the window or, you know, talk about why or something else will happen.

13:36And A will stop there

13:39Dr. Rick Hanson: because they're already feeling nervous about being assertive and they're already feeling like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have brought this up. And they let it go. But the bottom line is that B never agreed to X. Not in any way that was real, that B really took on. And so one of the really useful things is when you have X on the table to slow it down so that you can really find out actually if B has agreed to it. And one version of that is to ask B to say back to you what they think they're agreeing to going forward. It's not that you're trying to pound them down like in a court of law, just at a human level.

14:19Dr. Rick Hanson: What's our shared understanding here? because the basis of healthy relationships is trust, and the basis of trust is reliability. So if you want to know, what can I count on you for? And I need to know if I cannot count on you for doing X because then I've got to judge accordingly. What am I going to do in this relationship, potentially resizing it? So get converging on a clarity of agreement. and so many issues boiled down to A did not state their X clearly. I'm not blaming A. I'm just being descriptive. There was no clear X on the table. It was really fuzzy. Can't we just be nice? What does that mean?

15:03Yeah, totally.

15:04Dr. Rick Hanson: What does that mean? Or I want you to love me better. What? You know, or could we maybe have some, you know, intimate time? Okay, but what does that actually mean? Right. How often, when, you know, of what kind, on the basis of what foundations, what do you actually mean? So there's no clear X on the table. It's really important to reestablish agreement because if B has ostensibly agreed to X and then starts drifting away from that.

15:36Forrest Hanson: Not doing that. Yeah. Yeah.

15:37Dr. Rick Hanson: That becomes the new normal if you don't address it. So for me, those are examples of really effective ways to move toward a good resolution with other people about an issue between you.

15:48Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I think that the whole topic of how do you communicate wants in clear ways and work toward an agreement with your partner is like, I don't know, 70 % of romantic relationships in a lot of ways. I mean, once you get past the basic foundations of, okay, we basically like each other, we basically love each other, and we more or less enjoy spending time together. Once you've checked those boxes, it really becomes about managing agreements and getting on the same page in these ways. And in order to do that, you have to be clear about what the heck you're talking about when you're talking about something.

16:25Forrest Hanson: One idea Rick kept circling back to there was the balance of holding real goodwill for somebody while also not getting sucked into their internal turmoil. This is a major focus of systems approaches to family therapy. Starting in the 1950s, the psychiatrist Murray Bowen developed what became known as family systems theory. The basic idea is that families and couples work like systems, where everyone's behavior is shaped by everyone else's. His central concept was differentiation. This is your ability to stay emotionally connected to the people you're close to, while still thinking your own thoughts and holding on to your own direction.

17:02Forrest Hanson: And in this next conversation, I walk through what differentiation looks like in practice, and then Rick and I talk about why changing yourself is the most reliable way to change a system. Bowen's big target here was differentiation. In other words, you are not the systems you belong to. You are yourself, your own, unique, independent, strong individual. And the way that he described differentiation was the ability to stay emotionally connected while maintaining your own thinking, values, and personal sense of direction, especially when important other people put different kinds of pressure on you.

17:42Forrest Hanson: You are being your own person inside of the relationship. And he thought that people's basic level of differentiation was essentially established by the family of origin, where they came from, and that it remained relatively stable unless a person did active, often difficult work to change it. To give some examples here, a well-differentiated person looks something like this. They've got strong and boundaried connections with other people. They enjoy relationships, but they also don't need others in that way. They're not acting overly responsible for other people or overly conflict-driven with them.

18:25Forrest Hanson: They can express their needs to others in different kinds of ways, particularly safe others. They've got a kind of strong and autonomous sense of self. They're secure in their identity, their beliefs, their values. They're not so easily affected by criticism or praise. They're not constantly approval-seeking. And they can hold on to some amount of independent thinking. They can have a flexibility to the way that they approach situations. A little bit more on the lower end of differentiation, somebody who is really pursuing a kind of ideal distance from other people, either very, very close or more far, they maybe feel like they can't hold their boundaries.

19:04Forrest Hanson: And so being intimate with others is very emotionally scary for them because they recognize that they're a low differentiation person. They tend to be more emotionally reactive. And they tend to have more of what Bowen called in a slightly judgmental way, a pseudo-self. The sense of self is malleable and will kind of change to please other people. And over time, our goal here is to kind of move toward more differentiation if we can. Now, there's a bit of a good news, bad news in all of this. The good news is that you still have agency. And the path to influencing the system that you're a part of is by actually focusing on yourself, your own behavior, your responses, your choices.

19:50Forrest Hanson: I'm me over here. The bad news is that systems are really powerful. And when we move into a system, it exerts a lot of force on us whether we want it to or not. And it's difficult for any one individual person to change a system all on their own. The way we do this is by actually changing ourselves. When we shift our little puzzle piece, it puts pressure on all of the puzzle pieces around us. And so one of the things that you talk about over and over again, Dad, I've heard you talk about this so many times, is that an essential part of change is recognizing the pressure you will be under to not change.

20:27Forrest Hanson: That when you start changing, you are going to get blowback from other people about those changes. And so in order for the process to be successful, you need to be able to deal with that inside of yourself.

20:39Dr. Rick Hanson: You have, let's say, a mother who is a caregiver in her family system. And as the kids get older and also as she starts communicating increasingly with her partner, more and more she wants to step out of the role of being the solution to everybody's problems. And she just steps out of that role increasingly. She refuses, let's say, to do other people's dishes. It's not her job to figure out the family schedule. If other people can't figure out where they're supposed to be at a certain time, when it's plainly on the calendar on the refrigerator, it's not her job to go pick them up and solve that problem for them.

21:19Dr. Rick Hanson: Stuff like that. You know, normal range things done reasonably skillfully without much anger. Just clean, straightforward. Whoa, there's a lot of pushback often. You know, people want to, wait, what, what? You're not going to be the solution to all my problems? What, what? If I forget my lunch, you're not going to drive to school to bring me my lunch? You know, what, what? And there's the attempt to rewrite her back into that script. There can be a really great question for you. Whose movie am I in? Am I being written into some role that maintains your equilibrium? So you want to solve your inner problems by having me be a certain way?

22:00Right?

22:01Dr. Rick Hanson: And that's me being written into your movie. Or on the other hand, am I in my movie? And even to some extent, am I relating to you from my movie rather than maintaining and reinforcing the script that you're trying to write me into? I have found that metaphor really helpful.

22:22Forrest Hanson: So I want to kind of clear out a little bit and just ask you a deceptively simple question. what do you think helps people differentiate? What can people actually do if they want to develop more of that sense of differentiation?

22:35Dr. Rick Hanson: That's a profound question for us. Well, one thing is to really acknowledge the gravitational power of social approval and social scripting. It really affects us. Think about gender role socialization, expectations of other people, who they want you to be, it's powerful. So that's kind of step one, right? In other words, what are the forces that don't differentiate you, that kind of merge you into a role and limit your capacity to express yourself really, really freely? Second, this goes to the work you and I've done a lot around recognizing your fears of risking a dreaded experience. In other words, what are the dreaded experiences that you anticipate if you become one step more individuated?

23:31Dr. Rick Hanson: That's another related term to differentiation, as you know, from Jung and others. What might happen if you started listening more to the beat of your own drummer, if you started pursuing your own interests, if you stopped agreeing so much, if you stopped giving agreement so much to other people that you didn't actually agree with deep down inside yourself. Oh, what might happen? So mindful awareness of the forces that tend to push you into conformity. That's who we're talking about here, maintaining a kind of conformity and also being aware of your own inner fears. And then it can really help to do little things that break you out of the script that are within your power to do, and they differentiate you a little bit from other people.

24:20Dr. Rick Hanson: Like move your chair at dinner, you know, sit differently, eat something different, make a different kind of meal. You know, don't just nod in agreement when Uncle Bob starts, you know, ranting about immigrants or something. Just maybe just look at Uncle Bob. You know, you don't need to argue with him necessarily, but you don't give him agreement. Little things like that. And you're then expanding your window of tolerance for your own uniqueness. Those are really good things to do. I think another thing, which has been really helpful for me in a funny kind of way, is to start becoming more mindful of identification per se.

25:00Dr. Rick Hanson: What do you identify with? What kind of way of being, nationality, perspective, type, you know, smart, not so smart, you know, what do you identify with? And you start becoming more aware that identifying and identification is constructed. It's just constructed. And you start experiencing yourself more, as Walt Whitman put it, as multitudes, as, you know, IFS, I think, is very helpful here. Parts theory is really helpful here. You are a complexity. And as you start to air out your own identity and what you identify with and start having a sense of yourself more increasingly is made of many parts that are connected and are changing dynamically in relationship with the wider world and wider systems.

25:57Dr. Rick Hanson: So you see yourself more and more as sort of like an eddying in the streaming of reality. That experience, not just that idea, but that actual experience increasingly starts loosening you up, right? You don't feel so bound or fixed or fixated. And then you have more and more inner freedom and outer freedom as well.

26:17Forrest Hanson: I think those are great, Dad. Another one that I would toss in here is to appreciate how so much of the functions of these systems are driven by patterns. And therefore, the way that we disrupt the system, just as you were saying, is by disrupting the pattern. But the point of the pattern is to essentially avoid. It's to avoid confronting the actual, real, underlying material that is driving this pattern. The parents don't want to talk about their problems with each other. And they certainly don't want to do it in a way that is grounded and empathic, but also driven by change. They're not just having the same old argument they've had with each other a dozen times.

27:06Forrest Hanson: they're interacting with the problem in a different kind of way where one of them says to the other, hey, this just has to change in the future. Or the nature of our relationship is going to change. Or wow, this is a way that we are acting with our kid. And we just can't act that way with them anymore. Like we just can't do that. Maybe you do it with a therapist. Maybe you do it with a moderator of some kind. Who knows? Do what you got to do. But you're stepping out of the typical script, and you are having the bravery, frankly, to confront these issues in a more clear and direct way. Because so much of these systems is built around not doing that.

27:51Forrest Hanson: It's built around triangulation and diffusing anxiety by talking to your buddies about your problems with your spouse. Look, there's a place for that. Everybody does that. It's okay to some degree. But if that is your way of constantly defusing anxiety so that you never actually confront the underlying issue with, hello, the person who can really do something about it, that's something to really think about. And ask yourself, like, is that the way that I want this to go? Or am I ready to do something a little bit different? We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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31:58Forrest Hanson: One of the most difficult communication situations is when both people are kind of right. One person has a legitimate complaint but delivers it with a lot of heat. And then the other person responds to the heat instead of the complaint. The first person then says something like, wait, you didn't respond to my complaint. And then we're off to the races. In this next clip, I describe a common kind of argument, and Rick walks through how we can handle it a bit more effectively. So let's use person A, person B again. I'm going to call person A Alex and person B Blake for the sake of us not confusing A and B over and over again.

32:34Forrest Hanson: So Alex says something like, you're just such an unreliable person. This is the third time this week you said you were going to be there on time and you just keep on being late. If you can't get this right, how can I trust you with the really important stuff in life? Okay, that's a communication. There's some maybe meaningful, useful content in there. Maybe Alex is right about the number of times the person has been late. But the process has got a lot of emotional topspin. There's some framing of it as a kind of almost moral fault in the other person. Maybe the communication wasn't as clean as it could have been.

33:08Forrest Hanson: And then Blake, person B, defends themselves from the complaint by deflecting or focusing on the unskillful process, right? They say something like, wow, I just feel so attacked by you all the time. Or I can't believe that you used that tone of voice with me again. I kept on telling you to not use that tone of voice with me. And so here we have a situation where both of the people are right. The content is real and the process was unskillful, but nothing really gets addressed because they're sort of speaking past each other. For starters, have you seen this come up either in the office or in your own life?

33:41Forrest Hanson: And then what do you do about it?

33:43Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, I've seen it a million times and I've been Alex and I've been Blake. Yeah, I've been on both sides of that one for sure. Yeah. Well, a couple of things here right off the top. I'm reminded of that fantastic quote, I believe from Maya Angelou. that people will forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel, for better or worse. And I'm also thinking about the really important point in that great classic book, You Just Don't Understand, from Deborah Tannen, and I forget her co-author, sorry, in which they point out as linguists, in very practical ways, that a communication has three parts.

34:26Dr. Rick Hanson: There's the overt content, there's the emotional tone and there's the implicit statement about the status or the nature of the relationship in terms of standing or power. And sometimes the emotional tone is just completely neutral. There's just pure information. Well, that's the emotional tone then. The thing is, we're normally much more affected by the emotional tone and also the implicit statement about the nature of the relationship than we are by the explicit content itself. What's the takeaway from that? The takeaway from that is to, first of all, be really attentive and mindful of the topspin you add, the emotional tone you're adding, and the implicit communication about who's one up and who's one down.

35:13Dr. Rick Hanson: And really consider, do you want to add that emotional tone? There's a place for being angry, being really hurt, being really reproachful. Okay, do you want to add that. Be deliberate about it. And similarly, do you really want to add some kind of communication that's about you dominating the other person? Maybe you do. Maybe you need to claim authority here. So that's point one. Pay attention to doing it yourself. The second thing is that I think it's really important to give people room to breathe. This partly goes to what things mean and also what people want and their temperament, because there's normal diversity in what things mean to different people and what they want and what their temperaments are.

35:52So for example, I think it's okay

35:54Dr. Rick Hanson: that interactions may well start a little heated. You know, person A, Alex, didn't say it with perfect tone. All right. But you know, it's not where interactions start that counts the most. It's where they end, that much research shows has the greatest effect. And so I think there's a place for giving the other person some room to breathe if they came in kind of hot and heavy to be able to sort out how they said it from what they said it and then eventually work your way back to how they said it with a request for, you know, could you say it a little differently next time? Because I do want to hear you.

36:35Dr. Rick Hanson: I do want to give you what you want as best I can. And it's going to be a lot easier for me to do that if you don't come in with guns blazing.

36:43Forrest Hanson: I've bumped into problems on both sides of this inside of my own life, you know, as I think that almost everybody has. And one of the things that's been helpful for me is doing what I can to try to separate these two parts of the communication out into two different buckets that we try to address separately rather than together. Because when we're trying to address everything together, then it's really easy for me as either Alex or as Blake here to take the part of the argument or take the part of the conversation that is most beneficial to my viewpoint, right? As Blake, it's really easy to focus on the tone.

37:19Forrest Hanson: As Alex, it's really easy to focus on the content because that's the part of it where I'm right. But if we separate them out into two separate buckets or we do what we can to disentangle them, and you can have a process conversation with people about this, even live real time, you can do it. You can have a moment as Blake in this equation where you say something along the lines of, okay, I want to be really responsive to what you're saying to me. I want to show up in the ways that you want me to show up. I want to be here on time. I really apologize for the ways that I haven't done that in the past.

37:50Forrest Hanson: And also, you know, when you're communicating it to me in that way, it's really, really tough for me to get the message because I'm all caught up in the messenger. And so you can kind of do that sort of live process if you're in a relationship where that's possible for you, whether it's with a friend or a significant other or whatever else. and sometimes you're not in a relationship where that's possible. But I think that the ability to resolve conflicts like this effectively is such a huge indicator of whether or not you're in a situation that's like long-term going to be good for you.

38:19Dr. Rick Hanson: Right on. That's great. Now, I'm thinking about some practical tips here. Yeah. First, so there's the transmitter and the receiver.

38:28Forrest Hanson: Yeah.

38:29Dr. Rick Hanson: And so if you're in the position of being Alex here, where you're coming in, you have a communication to make. And let's suppose that you're pissed off about it. You've just kind of had it. And maybe your own experience here is turbocharged by your own history. Maybe as a kid, you were left waiting a lot. My parents who promised that they would do something with you or that they would show up on time, maybe even kind of catastrophically, like, oh, gee, mom forgot to pick me up because maybe she thought dad was going to pick me up. And there I was standing at the bus stop in the rain for an hour.

39:07Dr. Rick Hanson: Maybe that's a turbocharger. Okay. So here you are, revved up. You got something to say. First, distinguish between your intent and your impact. Your intent could be really good. But pragmatically, kapow, that other person is going to be on the receiving end of your full head of steam. And one thing that's been actually helpful for me to realize is that even though my intent is good when I'm talking with people, and I don't think of myself as particularly powerful because I still carry with me that sense of being kind of a shy, nerdy, unpopular, quiet, subordinate kind of kid, the truth is I have a lot of impact, in part due to the privilege I carry and also just I can definitely get intense, as you well know.

39:56Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm so sorry about it, Forrest. Anyway, the takeaway here is to realize, you know, you're going to have an impact on this person. What impact do you really, really want to have for their sake and for your sake? Which then goes to my second tip, which is if you come in guns blazing, that gives the other person an easy out that they don't have to deal with what you're saying. Because they can just rattle on about how you said it the wrong way. And that diverts attention from what you really want them to face. So those two tips I find really helpful for me. along with the notion that there's a video camera in the corner of the room that's recording what I'm doing.

40:34Dr. Rick Hanson: And it'll be played at your wedding if you ever have one, you know, but also maybe my memorial service.

40:41Forrest Hanson: I think it's probable. I think it's probable. I think we're wandering in that direction, but that's a conversation for a different podcast episode. I think that, so one of the things you're making me think of here, Dad, is how, I don't know if this is a little too like meta or left field, but it's really good to separate out what your actual goals are from what you're communicating to another person. And to ask yourself really honestly, is my goal to be righteous and affronted and wronged? Or is my goal to solve this problem? Because sometimes a goal is to feel righteous and affronted and wronged.

41:17Forrest Hanson: I have absolutely entered arguments where like my goal in that argument was to like be righteous and feel righteous.

41:25Dr. Rick Hanson: And even, if I could add, to perpetuate the conflict as a mode of attaching while distancing. Oh, I like that.

41:34Forrest Hanson: Could you expand that a little bit for a second, attaching while distancing?

41:37Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, sorry to interrupt you there. But what I mean is, in addition to just the reward value of righteousness, and it's very useful to appreciate that righteousness produces all kinds of rewards, including biochemicals in the brain, such as ramping yourself up, it can feel good, all of that, totally. Yeah, and anger is the one emotion, the one so-called negative emotion that has releases of dopamine and norepinephrine with it, which feel rewarding. In addition to that, consider the function that conflict serves and the ways in which people attach through bickering or attach through quarreling. Because it's a way of being in relationship while simultaneously distancing from the other person.

42:22Dr. Rick Hanson: and finding that optimal distance in which, yeah, you're still connected aversively, but it's still a connection. Be really careful about that.

42:32Forrest Hanson: That's really interesting. No, I think that that's a great point. And also the seeking of soothing can be associated with that, where you want the person to come to you as a soother. And so it's a bid for connection in that kind of way, which is sort of funny to think about an argument as a bid for connection, but I think that can definitely show up. people.

42:52Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I think that's very well said. And the word here, a word here I think is useful is reproach. That's what you're talking there. Coming in with a sense of a grievance, a sense of reproach, you've been wounded, and in it is a kind of beseeching. But instead of simply asking for soothing directly, or comfort directly, or love directly, which is really quite vulnerable, by leading with the complaint, it reduces that sense of vulnerability and puts a claim in effect on the other person, especially if you doubt that other people will come through for you unless you put that claim upon them through that reproachful complaint.

43:38Dr. Rick Hanson: And all this is often quite centered in attachment styles in early childhood. Can I add one more? This was super interesting.

43:45Forrest Hanson: Please go ahead.

43:46Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. Oh, different thing. Well, now let's suppose you're on the receiving end. You're Blake and Alex is coming in hot and heavy, guns blazing. Yeah, a lot of topspun. What do you do? Yeah. One thing you can do that's just pragmatically helpful is build up the inner strengths that we talked about in the book Resilient. And a large fraction of my new book, Making Great Relationships, is about that. How do you build up your own inner strength? So in the metaphor, you feel like a deeply rooted tree that can allow the hot wind of the other person's intensity to blow through you. And then after the storm passes a bit, you can decide what to do and to what extent you want to focus on the content or to what extent you want to focus on their process, their tone, the way they did it.

44:33Dr. Rick Hanson: So rooting yourself in that way is in your best interest because then it gives you options. And then second, if you address the content of the other person, especially first, it pragmatically puts you on a much stronger footing to then get to how they said it. Because you've handled their content undeniably, you've gone to the maximum reasonable extent you can respond to it. And then you're in a really strong position to focus on and to get after how they actually said it and how they don't need to say it next time.

45:09Forrest Hanson: in that last clip rick used the image of a deeply rooted tree being steady enough that somebody else's intensity can blow through you without totally knocking you over and that kind of steadiness matters a lot in one of the most common patterns couples get stuck in one person wants more closeness the other wants more space and the harder one pushes the further the other pulls away therapists call this the pursuer distancer dynamic in this next section we talk about a technique from therapy called joining with the defense. Instead of trying to break through somebody's walls, you get on the same side as the part of them that put those walls up in the first place.

45:48Forrest Hanson: Hope you enjoy it. And so I wonder about a situation, again, very common. This is more of a romantic situation. It might come up in friendships too, where one person wants more closeness and the other person wants more distance. Particularly, there might be a sense from the person who wants more closeness that the person who wants more distance is uncomfortable with emotional closeness. And, you know, understandably, they want that from their partner. And so they've made various bits for it. But when they've made these various bits for it, it just hasn't gone very well. And I'm wondering about how you've approached situations in general like that.

46:25Forrest Hanson: And I think that this is an example, particularly where joining with the defense could be really useful for people. So I'm wondering if you can give an example of that.

46:32Dr. Rick Hanson: It's a great example, and it's really common classically in relationships or these two movements, joining and separation, right? Closeness and distance. And they can often create a circular dynamic in which you can have the pursuer and the distancer. And the more the pursuer pursues, the more the distancer distances. The more the distancer distances, the more the pursuer or pursuers. There you are. So one thing I can imagine is the person who, you know, is wishing for something different from their partner would, as you say, join with the defense. They themselves might just start self-disclosing about how they're uncomfortable with certain feelings and tend to push them away.

47:19Dr. Rick Hanson: And in effect, without being too on the nose about it, But in effect, they're starting to model a way to relate to our kind of soft, murky interior for their partner. And they're demonstrating a flexible, nuanced, skillful, healthy way of relating to it all. That includes also not being ashamed of this and normalizing. that, of course, we push away scary feelings until we get really used to them. You're right. So you could model it. You could do that. A second thing is you could frame something in a very kind of heart-to-heart way, like along the lines of, because I value you, because I'm really interested in all of who you are, and I really care about you and I care about the soft, vulnerable parts of you.

48:22I really like feeling in contact with them.

48:26Dr. Rick Hanson: I like having a sense of closeness with you as a result. So it's because I care about you that I'm really interested in getting to know all of you, including what lies beneath the surface. I think it also lasts, it really helps to reassure people that you're not going to mount a frontal attack on their defenses. You're happy for things to happen at their own pace. You're not going to rip the scab off the wound. You're not going to strip them of their armor. It's okay. You're going to go slowly.

49:02Forrest Hanson: You understand. What do you think about all that? I think it's great. The last bit definitely gets to this idea of joining with the defense, which is a technique often used in therapy where the clinician will kind of go out of their way to get on the same team with the client and particularly the parts of client system that are resistant to change. So like you were saying, rather than like mounting this frontal attack, shaking them, why won't you love me, et cetera, et cetera, there's more of this feeling of, hey, I understand why you would want to avoid these kinds of interactions. They can be fraught.

49:36Forrest Hanson: They can be uncomfortable. I get that like that's really okay I want to make sure that as our relationship deepens or changes or we get to know each other better that you always feel really comfortable and you always feel very sturdy inside of yourself and you don't feel like I'm trying to overwhelm you emotionally like that's very important to me and I want to highlight how that's very important to me that you don't feel emotionally overwhelmed ever by an interaction that we're having Back to the show after a quick break.

50:35Forrest Hanson: what constant news exposure does to the people who are reporting it. Lise also speaks with Sherry Turkle, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and they look at the psychological costs of an always-on media world. Other episodes this season cover caregiving, parenting in the age of social media, starting therapy in your 40s, finding love again after losing a spouse, and a variety of other important topics. Every story is different, but they share a common thread, support, community, and the hope that a turning point might be closer than it seems. Check out Season 6 of Turning Points, Navigating Mental Health, a podcast from Tufts Health Plan in collaboration with Boston Globe Media.

51:20Forrest Hanson: Available wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Huel. Out of every sponsor we have ever had on the show, I think that Huel is the one that Elizabeth and I have used the most. It's always been tough for elizabeth to eat enough protein and she's been trying to build some muscle recently and well we're both busy during the day it often feels easier to just grab something rather than taking the time to make something that's actually healthy but what if you could do both huel that's spelt h-u e-l has solved that problem for us their black edition powder is a complete meal you have instead of food not a shake on top of food the powder has 40 grams of protein 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors, and it mixes with water or milk in about 30 seconds.

52:08Forrest Hanson: It starts at less than$3 per meal, and when you need to really run out the door, their ready-to-drink bottle is the grab-and-go version. It has 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, and under$5 a meal. This is a limited-time offer. Make healthy eating simple. Get Huel today with my exclusive offer of 15 % off online with my code being well at H U E L.com slash being well new customers only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show. Now back to the show. A lot of what we've talked about so far comes back to speaking up, saying what you want clearly in a way that the other person can actually hear.

52:53Forrest Hanson: And when we don't do that, we tend to end up with a lot of resentment. Resentment usually combines two things, a sense that you've been wronged and a sense that you can't really do anything about it. I've got a lot of personal experience with resentment. And in this clip, I share a simple format for bringing up something that's difficult to talk about. Rick then talks a bit about why it helps so much to turn complaints about the past into requests for the future. Resentment is really based on the combo of two things. First, perceived injustice. Somebody externalized their costs onto me.

53:26Dr. Rick Hanson: They did me dirt. Did me wrong.

53:28Forrest Hanson: They did me dirty, yeah. The second piece of it is perceived inability to do anything about it. I think this is a huge piece of resentment. That's very interesting. There's the perception, yeah, that not just that we can't right. Yeah, helplessness. Not just that we can't right those wrongs, but that we can't even tell the other person a lot of the time. We lack the power to even communicate this because of the way that the social structure of things is set up, the way that our household is set up, whatever it is. Now, sometimes those concerns, again, I want to be clear, are really legitimate, really real.

54:02Forrest Hanson: Power differences inside of a relationship, inside of a country like the United States, a lot of power differences between groups of people, historical grievances, that kind of stuff. But a lot of the time, a lot of the time, this prison is not as stable as people think that it is. The bars of this cage are at least partially constructed by our own psychology. There's a lot of evidence that your friend, your family, your roommate, your parents, your romantic partner, whoever, would respond in a pretty sane way to whatever you express to them. Like the ask that you make of them, trying to create more equity inside of the relationship.

54:38But you don't do it because you've had past painful experiences around expressing yourself, right?

54:44Forrest Hanson: So like that could be sort of a more normal range example of how we might create our own cage here. And again, speaking personally, it's been a big issue for me. I got really pissed about a lot of stuff that if I had just said something about it to somebody else, it probably would have rectified a lot of my problem. I really think that communication and expression is the number one antidote to resentment. for starters because it gives other people at least the opportunity to you know make amends in some kind of a way even if they do it really imperfectly or unskillfully but also almost more importantly again the basis of resentment is I can't do anything about this I am stuck I am trapped so anything that moves you into self-expression into making the interior more the exterior is a good thing here, is going to help out.

55:36Forrest Hanson: Really helpful format for people in terms of communication, context, impact, ask. That's great. You're adapting what, nonviolent communication in some ways? Yeah, I'm doing a little pivot on nonviolent communication here. So I like to start when I'm talking to somebody like you, you know, my parent, my loving parent, or my loving partner, or my whatever, you know, somebody you got to, my friend, somebody you got a basis of a relationship with. You could also do this and sometimes in work environments, but modify it a little bit. My tendency is this. And honestly, even being a little vulnerable about my tendency, my tendency is I got, as you've sometimes joked about, Dad, and this is not actually how this works, but whatever, it's a joke.

56:19Forrest Hanson: I've got three of the genes for OCD. I don't have all 12 of them or whatever it is, but I got three of them. My tendency is this OCD-ishness. So when this thing happened, fill in the blank, I felt fill in the blank. I have a tendency toward feeling like you don't really care about me very much. So when you left your shoes out in the middle of the room, I felt really bad. I started telling myself a lot of stories about whatever, about how you didn't care about me. What I would love in the future is if fill in the blank. Explicit ask. So the point is in this exact formula, you might not be the kind of person who talks this way and you don't want other people to feel like you're therapizing them.

57:00Forrest Hanson: The point is that you are taking the other person who is over there, and over there we know is scary. Over there, the brain goes, that's the enemy. And you are taking them into the circle of your experience. You are saying, hey, I'm including you. And then we're focusing on from now on. That's the secret sauce of it. They're being included. Now we're going from now on. We're not fixating on the past. We're not doing that yet. Just from now on. then from there if that goes well there can sometimes be the place in the future to talk more about the past to go hey you know there is a legacy here of moments of this kind of a thing and do we want to make some kind of a restitution around that inside of the relationship but just that format if you're able to get to it can really clear the decks with people what do you think

57:50Dr. Rick Hanson: I applaud that for a couple of applause thumbs up in terms of the how of this Yeah, yeah. Hopefully not to get too deep into that. No, please.

58:00Forrest Hanson: Just a detail. I think people love deep in the weed how, by the way, Dad. So you can go to town here.

58:06Dr. Rick Hanson: Okay, okay. So there you are, let's say. You're an over-functioner, and your initials are FH, but I'm not wondering who we're talking about here. Could be anybody. Could be anybody.

58:18Forrest Hanson: Could be anybody. Could be Frank Harrison. Yeah, Frank Harrison.

58:22Dr. Rick Hanson: That's it, that's it. And going forward here. So moving from favors to agreements, you know, it's really helpful to move from complaints about the past to requests about the future. Yeah. Because people argue about the past. And so if you're going to do this, I find it really quite helpful to not do what people typically do, in which they bring up the past about all the favors they've done the other person. or even if it's said in a very polite way, sort of a long suffering, you probably didn't realize this, but the fundamental framing is I'm the giver, you're the taker. That tends to be pretty explosive if you're the person who, hey, I just thought you were being nice to me.

59:07Dr. Rick Hanson: I didn't ask you to always take me to the place. You were just so cool about this, yeah. Yeah, I was just like really grateful to you. I thought you were wonderful and now you're giving me a hard time. Like you're claiming I'm some kind of taker, ripoff artist, freeloader, bad person. So maybe there's some legitimacy there. I don't know. But just from a skills standpoint, it's actually really helpful to just go to the pure agreement for the future. Just start there. Just saying, without saying anything about the past, like a roommate situation, saying, you know, I'd love to create some kind of house rules here so we're all really comfortable with each other about how we're going to operate going forward in terms of just standards for maybe everybody will agree to get all their stuff out of the common space by the time they go to bed.

59:59Cool.

1:00:00Dr. Rick Hanson: Leave your stuff out during the day. Cool. But clear it out by the time we go to bed. Can we all kind of maybe agree to that going forward? And then people will understand, whoa, he's talking about me. Whoa. Oh, you know, and then maybe they bring it up and they, sometimes people actually really try to disrupt your attempt to pin them down to an agreement about the future that will remove your very understandable complaints about the past. And then the trick again is to keep focusing people on the future. Try not to argue about the past, focus on the future. That's a little bit of a practical skill point.

1:00:39Dr. Rick Hanson: It's so tempting to get into the past, especially if they start lying about what a terrible roommate they've been. Whoa. No, no, no. Going to focus on the future. Take the high road. Book the win and move on.

1:00:53Forrest Hanson: Everything so far has been about conflict and relationships in general. But to close the episode, I wanted to be a bit more personal. This last clip is from a conversation with my fiance, associate therapist Elizabeth. We talked about two tendencies people bring into relationships. There is fixing, the more logical, rational impulse to solve the problem. And then there's feeling, the impulse to empathize and connect with what the other person is really going through. Most of us lean one way. As you're about to hear, and probably already know if you listen to the podcast much, I'm more of a fixer.

1:01:26Forrest Hanson: Elizabeth and I talk about how that played out between us, why problem-solving doesn't land when somebody is overwhelmed, and what helps the more logical, rational people like me get comfortable in more emotional territory. Our relationship story from a problem-solving perspective, like how did we go from where we were to where we got to inside of our relationship, is really a story of two things happening at the same time. It's a story of me getting that things got better for me when I hung out an empathic relationship with you for a longer period of time. Before I tried to fix a problem. Yeah.

1:02:04Forrest Hanson: This required me to be able to do two things at the same time. It required me to trust that you would eventually be open to moving into problem solving. And it required me to be able to regulate my own emotions that came up when I saw you in distress. And this is a big thing that people don't always talk about with fixing, where fixing is often an attempt to solve something that's called emotional contagion. So when I see you feeling bad, I don't want you to feel bad anymore because I am sensitive boys club. You know, there is that feeling center that's inside of me and that, by the way, is inside of most, if not all men.

1:02:41Forrest Hanson: And when I see you in distress, a really easy way to move you out of distress is to provide the solution to your problem. So all of a sudden, I don't have to feel bad anymore if you stop feeling bad. But there are a lot of practical reasons that somebody might not be able to move into problem solving immediately. For starters, they want that sense of team. They don't want to feel like they're doing it on their own. There's a lot of advice in life that is so easy when we give it to somebody else. And we so struggle to apply it to ourselves. Even me as a captain problem solver. Am I always applying all of my great solutions to other people to my own life?

1:03:17Forrest Hanson: No. No. I'm not sitting on the mountaintop with all of this stuff. you know what I mean? We're all human. It's really okay. But that's a project. So on the one hand, I had to do all of that. I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but you're part of the process. But what I've seen in you is you've become much more proactive and much more solutions oriented and open to solutions as time has gone on. I don't know if that was something that you actively worked on or if it just kind of happened as other stuff was going on. Before we met, I was still living in an environment where all my survival strategies had to be there.

1:04:00And I think what occurred in the beginning stages of our relationship was the unraveling of this sort of false identity that I had constructed in order to protect myself. and that was an incredibly vulnerable and frankly chaotic moment. And looking back now as someone who's training to be a trauma therapist, it's very clear to me, oh, I was triggered a lot. Meaning the part of my brain that could fire to actually get to problem solving was not really online at the time. so I would be coming to you with what appeared to be kind of out of left field emotional material but the real kind of ask was I I'm not at a place where I can problem solve yet because I've never even been taught how to regulate this I either totally cut it off and pretend it's not there or I am showing you what happens when I don't do that and it is completely overwhelming and chaotic.

1:05:12And I think to, you know, we both really showed up in ways that helped move through that. And a part of that was, and I know this as someone who works with trauma, is that if I'm sitting with someone who's actively triggered in session, no amount of problem solving is going to move that person into a place where they can actually hear what I'm saying. There is a distress that is happening to where the body is in a fight or flight state.

1:05:49Forrest Hanson: Yeah, your brain's not working that way. It's not working that way. So that attunement is necessary because now we're entering co-regulation. The experience is able to come down and now I'm able to move back into that problem solving space. And so over time to sort of say this back to you, what I saw is that you became more internally regulated. Yeah. In a way that let you move into that more rapidly. Yeah. It needed you needed less and less fuel to be able to make that transition. But like everybody, you still need some fuel. If I'm problem solving in a work environment, the most logical, rational, not empathic, entombment environment you can imagine, what do I still want to hear from my manager?

1:06:46Forrest Hanson: That they're not going to fire me if I get this wrong. There's some basic level of emotional, relational stuff that helps every logical, rational communication go as good as possible, right? That's why we talk about emotional fluency inside of the workplace or being able to create psychological safety in work environments, things like that. So this is important everywhere. And there are people who are going to have more of a natural inclination one direction or the other. They're going to find it easier to do one or the other. But over time, the hope is that it becomes easier and easier for you to access the whole game board.

1:07:23Forrest Hanson: And I think that one of the things that helps people with that is just this kind of thing thousand foot view of the whole thing, appreciating both of these as important aspects of the whole process and appreciating your nature and temperament. My nature and temperament was to have a lot of game with logical, rational, to be very uncomfortable with that emotional intimacy, because that was where a lot of my pain was. I had to go into that material in order to process that. And that was not fun for me initially. Yeah. And to add, you know, like if the story from my family system was weakness is bad, meaning vulnerability is bad.

1:08:02It was incredibly difficult for me to move into a space that I had not practiced a ton. But it was even more distressing to show you my distress and how difficult certain things were for me to do in that space.

1:08:18Forrest Hanson: I wonder if that's a piece of it. We actually haven't talked about this before. But I wonder about that showing incompetence, for lack of a better way of putting it, inside of a relationship as being a big point of vulnerability for people. Like if I go into that more relational place with you, that's a place where I'm uncomfortable, yes, but it's also one where maybe I don't have as much practice. Also, frankly, most guys have a lot of wounding experiences around showing vulnerability. they were really punished for doing it a lot of guys receive messages these days around being more emotionally vulnerable and responsive with their partners and so they say okay and they try it and it really does not go well maybe because there's a lack of skills or they don't know how to communicate that maybe it's something i think we're going to talk about in a bit this idea of in order for somebody to kind of fall apart like that well the other person needs to be able to hold the container at least a little bit.

1:09:16Forrest Hanson: So if you're bidding for more emotional openness from your partner, you need to be able to have the stability inside of yourself to hold that greater degree of vulnerability, right? Somebody needs to be the person who's kind of like doing that job inside of the relationship. And that kind of an inversion can be very destabilizing for people just because they're not used to it and they don't have practice with it. I think socially, we are really uncomfortable with our emotions. I think we're really uncomfortable being witnessed in our vulnerability and we're really uncomfortable naming things that are painful.

1:09:59I know.

1:09:59Forrest Hanson: Maybe we could talk a little bit here toward the end about what helps people do that, what helps people move into that more emotional relational space. Well, I think this is kind of your territory a bit more. Because what we're really kind of focusing on more is that more logical kind of perspective. And so I'm wondering, what have you seen as you've been sitting with people that even in just between the relationship between you and them, that kind of helps the warm, fuzzy Mr. Rogers kind of come into the space? I think that a lot of people who lead more this logical, rational way really do not like how painful their emotions are.

1:10:40Forrest Hanson: They do not like it. They don't want to feel that way. They don't want to feel that imperiled by somebody else. And so when you start to tread in that territory, it just feels bad. There's a lot of individual work for people who are that way around emptying their own bucket. The bucket of tears, the bucket of things that they wish that they had done, the feelings that they pushed down over time, and experiencing out. Because a lot of what's happening when you move into emotional relating with somebody else is your own material is being activated. So if they're talking about this feeling of insecurity or vulnerability, or I don't know how to do this thing, if you talk about that to me, what do I do in that moment as a social mammal?

1:11:30Forrest Hanson: I think about my own experience with those things. I remember that time when I couldn't do that or didn't know that thing or whatever it was. That's really painful. We don't want to do that. So you have to do your own emotional processing work. I think a lot of this starts with various forms of exposure and various forms of emotional processing where you start to get more comfortable touching that stuff. 90 seconds, dude. 90 seconds. 90 seconds of hanging out in, hey, I get it. Learning some simple language. Are you looking for solutions or are you looking for empathy? Mm-hmm. Yep. Sometimes I don't want solutions and I'm the solutions guy.

1:12:13Forrest Hanson: Sometimes I want you to be like, yeah, Forrest, you're doing great. Yep. It's okay, buddy. Yep. We all want to be able to do all of it. Mm-hmm.

1:12:28Forrest Hanson: I really enjoyed putting this episode together, and I really appreciate everyone on our small team who helped me out. And going back through these conversations, I was struck by how much of it comes back to a pretty small handful of ideas, even though these episodes were recorded years apart from each other. We started with what Rick saw again and again in his office. Get better regulated yourself. Take care of your own side of the street, and deliver the goods to the other person as much as you can, because that puts you in a much stronger position to ask for what you need. And then that paradox you described.

1:13:00Forrest Hanson: You're resting in a kind of real goodwill toward the other person while also staying a bit independent of them. Either one on its own can go a bit sideways. Goodwill without boundaries can become enmeshment, and boundaries without goodwill can come across as pretty cold and distant. Then Rick got really practical about being assertive. Know what you want in concrete terms. know the experience you're looking for, and separate it out from the specific form you wanted to take, because the other person might not give you that exact form, but they might be happy to find a slightly different one. Then slow down long enough to find out whether they actually agreed to it.

1:13:37Forrest Hanson: Trust is built on reliability, and you can't rely on an agreement that never really happened. From there, we went to Murray-Bowen and differentiation, the ability to stay emotionally connected while keeping your own thinking, values, and direction, especially when the people around you are kind of pushing on you a little bit. The good news is that you have agency because changing yourself is the most reliable way to change a system. The bad news is that the systems push back. When you start changing, expect some pressure. And Rick's question for those moments has really stuck with me, and that's whose movie am I in?

1:14:10Forrest Hanson: Then we met my characters, Alex and Blake. Alex has a real complaint, but delivers it with a lot of emotional topspin. and Blake responds to the topspin instead of the complaint. Both of them are right, both of them are wrong. Well, now what do we do? It helps to split the two parts of the communication apart, what was said and how it was said. And then we get to deal with those parts separately. Regardless of which side you're on, be honest with yourself about whether your goal is to solve the problem or to feel more righteous. Next was the pursuer and the distancer and the idea of joining with the defense.

1:14:45Forrest Hanson: If you want more closeness from somebody who pulls away from it, a frontal assault on their defenses is usually just going to make them pull away more. What tends to help is modeling a more open relationship with your own uncomfortable feelings, framing your interest in them as care because it is, and reassuring them that you'll go at their pace. Then resentment, which I think of as a combination of perceived injustice and perceived helplessness. Sometimes that helplessness is real. There are genuine power differences in relationships and certainly out in the world, but a lot of the time, the bars of our cage are at least partially built by our own history.

1:15:23Forrest Hanson: And the other person would respond pretty reasonably if we actually were able to say something to them, which is why I think that expression is a great antidote to resentment. And when it comes to expressing ourselves, the format I like is context, impact, ask. Here's my tendency. Here's how this landed on me, here's what I would love from now on. And it pairs really well with Rick's point about moving from complaints about the past to requests about the future, and from favors to agreements. And finally, the last clip was about my conversation with Elizabeth on fixing and feeling. Fixing is often an attempt to solve emotional contagion.

1:16:01Forrest Hanson: If I make you stop feeling bad, I also get to stop feeling bad. Things got a lot better for us when I became more willing to hang out in empathy before trying to go to problem solving. And also, things got a lot better as she felt more regulated, and she became more open to problem solving over time. If there's a single thread that goes across all of these clips, all of these conversations, it's that good relationships often ask us to do two things that feel like they can pull us in opposite directions. First, stay open to the other person, and then second, stay yourself. Care about what's happening inside of them without making it your job to manage it.

1:16:41Forrest Hanson: Lead with warmth and still be clear about what you want. It is hard to do two different things at once, right? It's hard for anybody to do that. And I want to be really clear, I still struggle with all of this. None of us have perfectly figured out how to do relationships. And if anybody tells you that they have, well, they are probably trying to sell you something. And I'd view it with a good deal of skepticism. But I think that this general kind of middle path philosophy, me and you together, as Terry Real likes to say, you know, focusing on us, or as I've been saying a lot recently with people, the idea of getting on the same team.

1:17:15Forrest Hanson: If there's a key to relationships, I think that's probably it. If you've made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, I would really appreciate it if you took a moment to do that. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, basically wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also support the show on Patreon at patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And I'm also writing a bit more on Substack these days too. So until next time, thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.

1:17:57Dr. Rick Hanson: Brussels clean up nicely at Sweetgreen.

1:17:59Forrest Hanson: maple glazed roasted and edges perfectly caramelized sweet greens fall harvest is back on the menu and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured you know what to do order on the sweet green app