What’s The Problem With Therapy Speak? August Mailbag

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson. So, Dad, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm rocking. Ready to roll. We were doing a little preamble before we started recording that will probably never make it air for the betterment of both of us, I would say. But okay, today we're going to be opening up the mailbag and answering some questions from our listeners. We got great questions. Two of them in particular I found really fascinating, and they were about the different ways that consequences can come from mental healthy content spilling out of the therapy room and worming its way into everyday life.

0:49Forrest Hanson: And one of those big examples is therapy speak. So how do you feel about all of that, Dad?

0:54Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm way psyched. You and I are receiving a gift from people who took the time to be open and vulnerable and to craft a real question.

1:04Forrest Hanson: For sure.

1:04Dr. Rick Hanson: You're going to see the quality of our listeners, which is really inspiring. You know, the engagement, the intelligence, the focus. It's great. So thank you. I'm happy to receive the gift. I appreciate it.

1:17Forrest Hanson: I think that's a great framing for it, Dad. I really appreciate that. And you can just tell the care that kind of went into these questions to your point. So, okay, here's our first one, which actually made me laugh when I first read it. I thought it was genuinely funny. What do you guys think about the explosion of therapy speak? Terms like boundaries, gaslighting trauma, and narcissist are everywhere. Having been in therapy for a while, I've learned a lot of new concepts that have really helped me. But when therapy terms are used outside the office, it seems like it's mostly to pathologize people or avoid accountability.

1:50Forrest Hanson: I also feel like people justify a lot of bad behavior because they read something on Instagram that told them to protect their peace or whatever. Any advice on dealing with it or using these terms more thoughtfully? Dad, what do you think about this? I thought this was just a tremendous question.

2:06Dr. Rick Hanson: I've reflected about things related to this question an enormous amount. I'll offer just a couple of reflections and see what you think, and then we'll keep rolling. So one, I've often felt that if we lived like our ancestors did in small hunter-gatherer bands, there'd be no need for therapists. In that so much of the healing would occur sitting around the fire, talking with each other, embedded in a frame of social support. So that would be kind of part one. We've created this very specialized language and medicalized in many ways the human condition in ways that would not have been present in past generations.

2:42Dr. Rick Hanson: So just to contextualize it. The other side of it is that I think that as soon as you can use language to make a useful distinction, it's useful. And I'm dubious about, probably going back to my scruffy, hippie roots, my kind of libertarian rootedness, I'm just leery of a priest class or guilds who monopolize access to tools, to knowledge and tools.

3:15Forrest Hanson: And you're describing like therapists and mental health professionals in this way right now.

3:18Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, in a broad sense. And I'm not saying they do. I would just say that, and going to kind of Buddhist contemplative tradition. It could go that direction. The Buddha refused to do that, to create a priest class that held the information secret. And I'm with all that. And as soon as you read something about introjects, the internalization of aspects of people who've been important to you, that become a part of you, oh, that's interesting. As soon as you read a word like projection, oh, I never thought of that, but it helps you understand yourself better. So I'm kind of for access to distinctions and categories and descriptions and explanations of various psychodynamic processes that people have access to.

4:06Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm for that. I'm for that. Now, that said, obviously, how's it used? Is it used to relieve your own suffering and that of others? or is it used to privilege yourself, to put you one up with other people, to weaponize this information?

4:23Forrest Hanson: Right there with you. So part of this is about like, what are we talking about here? Like when we say therapy speak, what do we mean? And so for me, this is when these terms are used sort of imprecisely in a general way in the flow of normal conversation. Like you were saying, Dad. Another example of this might be somebody being like, oh, you know, my ex had undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. or you're having a conversation in a relationship, your partner says something to you like, oh, well, that's just your material coming up or something like that. Okay, so why is this a problem? What's the consequence of this?

4:57Forrest Hanson: What's the risk of it? What's the problem with that? And for me, the problem is that you've left the realm of this is just my opinion, man, and you've wandered into the realm of the science of psychology says that it's you, you're the problem. And so you're borrowing authority. This language is powerful because it's very, very authoritative. If you're talking to a therapist and they're using specific terminology with you, actually in my experience, and I'm not a therapist, but this is just me going to therapy, clinicians are often pretty mild in terms of their actual usage of this terminology with the person that they're working with.

5:36Forrest Hanson: In a funny kind of way, it's become more generalized and more broadened out in colloquial everyday speech than it is actually in the therapy room itself.

5:44Dr. Rick Hanson: Like you said, so much of this is about how's it used? I wonder if it's not pretty evident pretty fast what the smell is, you know, the sniff test. Like, what's the vibe here? How is someone really using this? Are they, you know, are they using it in an affirmative way? Like your friend is telling you something about their issue with another person and you go, wow, wow, it sure sounds like that other person is gaslighting you. Well, you're probably doing it in the service of someone. You can kind of tell that. On the other hand, I think you're totally right. I've seen people, including in my office, kind of weaponize therapeutic language, psychological language about other people.

6:25Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, they would rarely do it with me, thank goodness. But if you're talking about their ex, let's say, they might drop into it there. In your interactions with people, do they...

6:36Forrest Hanson: Does this happen often? I think that I'm a weird person to ask because I've got like, I live with three therapists. So like, yes, this kind of terminology comes up. But I do think that the popularization of this language, like I'll have conversations with people at dance conventions where they're throwing a lot of terminology around. And sometimes they're using that terminology pretty accurately. My experience though, is that a lot of the time it's fudged. And I think this kind of funny thing happens. One of the problems associated with therapy speak is this weird kind of inversion that almost happens with the language sometimes.

7:10Forrest Hanson: I think that triggers are a really good example of this. In actual therapeutic work, the goal of what you're trying to do related to a trigger is you're trying to improve somebody's awareness of different triggers that they might have. And then frankly, you're helping them learn how to face those triggers more effectively most of the time. In certain extreme circumstances, maybe you're understanding that the person needs to like swerve away from these triggers for a little while, or you want to be thoughtful about how intense the engagement with them is, okay. But our goal is to increase the real estate that you've got in your life.

7:46Forrest Hanson: This is why people do things like exposure and response prevention therapy. But that's very different from how triggers are typically framed in the culture broadly, which is mostly about avoidance, right? And what we're trying to do actually is the opposite of that. We're trying to do hopefully gentiful, more graduated forms of exposure to make you a little bit more comfortable with that. Same thing kind of happened with boundaries. I had a natural lover, Tawab, on the podcast fairly recently, and she basically wrote her most recent book to really oversimplify and generalize about the fact that she thought that people basically took the work on boundaries, which she was a huge part of, and just kind of went crazy with it.

8:22Forrest Hanson: And we're using it as a way to essentially control other people. There's a really famous example of this. Jonah Hill, the actor, his text got publicized, I think, by his ex-girlfriend. And he was using this really intense boundary language to essentially try to control her inside of the relationship. And this is one of the moments, this was like three or four years ago, when questions about TherapySpeak really took off because it was just such a public example of somebody just really losing the plot on this whole thing. So I don't know if there's anything in there that you want to kind of comment on here, Dad.

8:52Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, what's in there is something that is really implicit, which is a view of what is human flourishing. There's a values-based view implicit in what you're saying, which I certainly agree with. I actually don't know what you mean.

9:07Forrest Hanson: Yeah, what do you mean, Dad?

9:09Dr. Rick Hanson: So when we think about someone who, let's say, what's the aim? What's the value? What's the frame of reference here for someone who uses trigger language to avoid being challenged as far as much as possible? In other words, I'm triggered over here. I have a problem over here. And I'm going to solve my problem by insisting that you change. for example. You're objecting to that. And implicit in that objection, which I share, is a view of, oh, interesting, that a full human being is one who can, within the range of their temperament, which will go to probably the next question we're going to get at, in ways that are consistent with their values, who basically is able to cope with a wide variety of normal range experiences and manage their reactions to them and in general be reasonably effective in coping to the extent that they can while fully acknowledging that there are all kinds of conditions that we can't cope with.

10:10Dr. Rick Hanson: We just have to bear. We just have to endure, get through, live with, you know, let's, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think that in American culture, it does relate to this question, And as some critics say, we have swung kind of collectively too far in the direction of coddling people, being overly attentive to their sensitivities and sensibilities.

10:37Forrest Hanson: I think that's mostly straw man, to be honest. Yeah. I mean, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is where you would imagine this would be happening, right, if it's happening anywhere in the country. And I wouldn't really say that I see an excess of coddling. If anything, I see an excess of my way or the highway in American culture. I think that you can see a lot of the consequences of that over the last 10, 20, 30 years, depending on how you want to kind of interpret that. There's also this idea that, again, maybe takes us back to the question a little bit. It's a philosophical idea. It's called epistemic injustice.

11:12Forrest Hanson: And it was something that I thought made sense to talk about here with regards to this. And it also speaks to your question here, Dad. This was introduced by somebody named Miranda Ficker. I hope I'm saying that correctly. She coined it in 1998. And it's when the ability of a group to produce knowledge or be the one who knows is questioned. And I thought this was a really fascinating idea. So the basic idea is that more socially privileged groups are given what's called an excess of credibility. And this means that they're treated as the authority not just on their own experiences, but the experiences of people who are different from them.

11:49Forrest Hanson: And then more oppressed groups exist in a credibility deficit, where they're generally regarded as kind of unqualified to speak on their own behalf. And there's a class dimension to this whole thing that I think also exists in therapy speak? Like who are the kinds of people who have access to therapy-ish language, this powerful set of words, right? Well, these are probably going to be people who can, hello, afford therapy for starters. But just in general, they're going to be like more educated, more wealthy, things like that, right? And I think that therapy speak is really double-edged with regards to this.

12:22Forrest Hanson: If you think about terms like PTSD, before we had the term PTSD, there was a whole group of people who did not have a way to refer to their experience and be taken seriously. Or even like the rise of terms like sexual assault in the 1970s. Like it gave a group of people language that they could use to describe their experience. And because that language was given credibility by the group, the absorption of the language validated those kinds of experiences. If you think about women talking about women's health issues with their doctors, right? This historic area where women are not taken very seriously, you see the same thing with minorities.

12:58Forrest Hanson: Minorities are often not taken very seriously when they go into the office and they say, hey, something hurts. Doctors historically have paid a lot more attention to you if you're a white guy who walks into the office and says, hey, doctor, something hurts. So there's this way in which the broadening of the language has really helped people speak to their own experience. And has that led to additional coddling of them? I don't know. Most of the time, the people saying that are the people who belong to those more historically empowered groups who are now having to share that power with people that they're not used to sharing it with.

13:35Forrest Hanson: And I wonder about that as part of the source of this critique. I hope that didn't get too wonky or inside baseball, but I just found it a really fascinating overlap with this question.

13:48Dr. Rick Hanson: I loved the topic, epistemic injustice. I thought, what a great way of looking at things. And it goes back to my kind of scruffy, unruly, rebellious streak, as you know, that doesn't like it when people claim a monopoly on anything.

14:06Forrest Hanson: Yeah, on terminology, on power, on whatever it is. Yeah, totally true. Yeah, totally. I suppose maybe to kind of answer your question more succinctly here, Dad, my hope would be that the broadening of these things gives people a way to speak to their own experiences and therefore hopefully feel more empowered about them. and therefore hopefully feel like they can do stuff to push that pie out and risk more experiences and broaden what's possible for them and all of that in a way where all of this psychology language doesn't just serve to make somebody seek a smaller and smaller and smaller experience because they're stacking up acronyms that describe them.

14:48Dr. Rick Hanson: What do you think about shorthand? Like I know people who will just introduce themselves to others when they have the shared understanding. Oh, I'm an INFTP. And I don't love it. Seven with a wing and six.

15:01Forrest Hanson: Personally, I don't love it.

15:02Dr. Rick Hanson: And you know, I'm on the cusp, believer Scorpio, a lot of Scorpio rising.

15:08Forrest Hanson: What do you? I think it's very reductive. And I would hope that people would think about themselves more broadly than that. I think that that's part of what I'm kind of saying here is that I think that when diagnosed and I'm just shooting from the hip here. I'm not a clinician, take it with a grain of salt. I think that when diagnostic labels become somebody's whole personality, that's not good for that person most of the time. Because again, they've built this very constrained vision of who they are. But there's a push-pull there. Diagnostic labels also allow people to have access to services.

15:39Forrest Hanson: And they also help people, like you're saying, give that kind of shorthand. You know, I'm a this kind of person, so maybe that'll help you interact with me better. So I can see the pluses on both sides. I'm an arguer for possibility and potential when I can be. And so that's kind of where I lean, I would say. How about you? How do you think about it? It's complicated.

16:00Dr. Rick Hanson: On the one hand -

16:00Forrest Hanson: Maybe we should have just answered the question that way. It's complicated. Yeah, right. Yeah, on the one hand, it's a shorthand. So for myself, I'll just say it like this.

16:09Dr. Rick Hanson: I learned about the Enneagram, which is, for me, one of the really best, most accurate, models of personality, which on a good day might account for maybe 50 % of who a person is. For example, that said, when I realized, oh, wow, I'm actually a seven on the Enneagram in a way that fits for me, it explained a lot of stuff. It was sort of like - Oh, for sure. All these disparate - Yeah. Totally agree. Couldn't agree more strongly. Images were floating around in the forest, and I went, well, walks like and sounds like and And quacks like, holy moly, I'm a duck.

16:47Forrest Hanson: When Elizabeth got her ADHD diagnosis, it was game-changing for her. It was game-changing for her.

16:55Dr. Rick Hanson: Totally. I wish I had realized. I told the people who said it. You know, if I had realized this five years ago, it would have saved me three years of grief, basically. Yeah. If not more. Yeah. Totally. So on the one hand, there's something about, and that's one reason why I love the language of psychoanalysis. Because in a way, you don't even need to know, how can I put it? Whether it fits you, it's just a great exploration. You know, the terminology, it kind of opens up things. So on the one hand. On the other hand, I get very restive about, as you put it, the reductionism of the therapy lingo and to realize, wow, I am so much more than a seven on the Enneagram.

17:35Forrest Hanson: I am so much more than somebody who has ADHD. I'm so much more than somebody who's fill in the blank. I'm so much more than the child of alcoholics.

17:42Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm so much more than, you know, probably one of the 10 genes for OCD or whatever, you know. I think you got at least two of them back. Hey, I'll take it. I'll take it. Most high-performing people do.

17:54Forrest Hanson: I've got at least two of the genes for anxiety. So whatever, we're trading off over you. Anyway, see, I cope with my anxiety through OCD. Just think, it could help you. We'd love that for you. Yeah, it could help. Honestly, maybe it could. Jeez. All right, I don't know. Are there any kind of closing thoughts you want to give here for this question? We are whole.

18:12Dr. Rick Hanson: We are big, big. We are magnificent. And we should quote the paragraph from Robert Heinlein about a human being should be able to. And he just fills in about 85 things. And he finishes, specialization is for insects.

18:27Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I love that quote. I love that quote. And I think that in all of this, my summation of it is it's a question of power, I think, at the end of the day, which gets back to the epistemic injustice thing. Like, are you using this as a power tool or are you using it as a way to communicate? And I think that that's just a key distinction in everything that we're talking about here. Are you using it as a tool for self-understanding? Or are you using it as a form of avoidance? You know, are you like, what are you using this as? And I think that like sometimes we do both. You know, I have used words both as tools for self-understanding and absolutely as forms of avoidance.

19:10Forrest Hanson: That's great. We'll be back to the show in just a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors. I've had a complicated relationship with my skin for as long as I can remember. I had a lot of acne growing up, and I still struggle with some self-consciousness about it. Now that I've started to get a little older, some age-related skin concerns are also starting to creep in for me. And that's why both Elizabeth and I really appreciate our sponsor, OneSkin. As we age, some skin cells stop working the way they should. Researchers call them zombie cells, and they're behind a lot of the fine lines and dullness that build up for somebody over time.

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22:00Forrest Hanson: 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 spelled 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.

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23:30Forrest Hanson: Friends have fallen away over the years, and I haven't worked to replace them. I feel lonely occasionally, but even just going somewhere where there are other people, like a coffee shop, is usually enough to fix that. I talk to my family regularly. I go to art classes in the gym. My life feels healthy and normal. I'm mostly quite happy, but I'm constantly coming across content about how connection is essential, how we're social animals, and my social conditioning even tells me that it's kind of pathetic that I don't have any friends and that I should really start looking for a romantic partner.

24:00Forrest Hanson: I can't point to any major trauma or rejection or life experience that has made me this way. I really just have no desire for friends. But I know that we don't always want what's best for us, So how can I be sure that I'm not just avoiding some aspect of growth that is very difficult for me? I thought this was a fantastic question. I really loved this one.

24:24Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm with this person in that I have balked at a fair amount of push in the broad self-help mental health space that really emphasizes the primacy of relationships. And you'll see people who just say declaratively, all trauma is cured in relationship. Well, first of all, it's just factually not true. Second, a lot of trauma doesn't involve relationships with other people. It's something happened, you know, a car accident, an event, got an illness, you know, just different kinds of things. So I think that people really vary on a range. I think some people are very, very extroverted. they themselves really rely on relationships and they write from and teach and practice from their own particular psychology and then universalize it to other people.

25:19Dr. Rick Hanson: Not so good. So I'm kind of with this person. And at the end of the day, it goes back to what we were kind of nudging around earlier. What are the standards or values or descriptions of an optimal human life, a worthy the human life, a good enough human life broadly. And I think, well, this person's happy, they say. I'm not hearing about work, so I kind of wonder about occupational functioning. Is that good for them? But if you're functional at work and you're happy, then I would have a bit of a question, which is, since lovingness is a major factor of physical health and longevity and happiness broadly, even if this person is not particularly interested in or they don't value or need a lot of receiving of care and interest from others, I would just wonder about, you know, maybe the possibility, lightly said, of the value add, maybe, of being deliberately kind and compassionate and benevolent and encouraging on very short cycle times, you know, for five seconds in a row.

26:33Dr. Rick Hanson: with other people. I would wonder about this for that person.

26:36Forrest Hanson: I think the fact that they're asking this question at all is probably a sign that they're not in the worst shape here. If you were somebody who was a chronic avoidant socially, you probably wouldn't be asking this question in this kind of way. You would have just kind of bought into your avoidance. So the fact that you're interrogating it, really, really good sign. Flip sign of the coin, sometimes the avoidant person doesn't feel that much anxiety about intimacy because their social distancing is working really well. They're not in situations that would be anxiety provoking, so they don't interpret themselves as having anxieties about connection.

27:09Forrest Hanson: So maybe that's something to flag here. When you are in more social environments, do you start to feel what you could describe as anxiety kind of boiling up in you? Or are you really good to go? In which case, hey, all good. I think I'm pretty much right there with you, dad, where if you're living a happy and functional life, okay, you know, great, good for you, fantastic. We don't have to buy into those kinds of narratives. There is a functional question here, though, that I think is worth flagging, which is that you're fine right now, but are you still going to be fine when you're 72? Now, to grossly oversimplify, the historic purpose of living in community was so we don't die when things get really rough.

27:49Forrest Hanson: You know, So do you have anyone around you that you're playing a non-agent with to some extent? Do you have hobbies or social groups or something where it doesn't have to be like a really close intimate friendship, but there would be a person you could call when things got rough and they would pick up the phone who's outside of your immediate family group. So that's the one piece of this that I would flag is like, hey, yeah, this is just like a good thing to develop if we want to live a good, complete life. Even if we don't really have so much of a feel for it, there could be a lot of other motivations to develop that resource.

28:27Dr. Rick Hanson: I think that's great. Yeah. By the way, a pet is sometimes really a nice thing. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. And for some reason, I don't know, I just want to, I would, again, if this were this person, I would say, so this is your one wild and precious life, quoting Mary Oliver. Forrest says you're going to die someday, I guess. I do say that. You're right, Dad.

28:57Forrest Hanson: We are all going to die someday.

28:59Dr. Rick Hanson: And if you had a year to live, roughly, and you were looking back on your life, what will you then be really glad that you had done in your life? And when you look back, will you be just kind of fine with the very thin social networks you have? Or when you look back, would you think, you know, there was some kind of developmental challenge or some higher aspiration that I just kind of swerved away from? on any given day, it was easier to just swerve away from it. So I would wonder about that.

29:34Forrest Hanson: The one other flag that I'll throw up here as a possibility is just this phrase, fallen away. You know, my friendships have fallen away. There's a phrase that really speaks to me sometimes with different kinds of choices, which we might bump into in the very last question that we get as well. And it's this phrase, sliding versus deciding. So this is normally used in romantic contexts where you see a couple just kind of slide from one landmark milestone to another without ever really making like the active choice. This is the person I really want to be with for the rest of my life. And those sliding couples historically tend to do less well.

30:16Forrest Hanson: They tend to divorce at a higher rate. They tend to have higher rates of marital problems, that kind of stuff. so much in the same way, was this just kind of a slide with your loss of friendships over time, and now it feels like a lot of work to get them back in the mix? Or are you really deciding, this is the kind of life that I want to lead? And I think either of those could be totally fine. I would just encourage you to be an active chooser one way or the other. Anything else you want to throw in at the end here, Dad, or are you good?

30:43Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, this little bell has been ringing inside me throughout this whole question. And I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that going back to what we were talking about earlier about values for a life well-lived, what are we kind of not so much prescribing, but describing in our two cents here as, all right, these are aspirational values for how to be in this life. Well, I have an aspirational value that I think it's beneficial for people, particularly in the general process of healing, growing, and awakening. We imagine that as kind of a sequence. And with people being able to give more attention to growing and awakening after they've gotten some healing under their belt, et cetera.

31:29Dr. Rick Hanson: So in that context, I think it's valuable for people to feel one with everything, to feel rested in a very highly relational field in which they feel and they recognize, they feel what they know, that they are being lived by everything. I think that's a good thing. I value that. And so for this particular person, I would say, I don't think it's necessary to experience that in a way that really privileges human beings as co-creators in that field, but the broad experience of relatedness of profound interbeing, as Tekton Han put it, I think that's a good experience and a good trade to develop. So maybe hunt for that.

32:17Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And I'll just throw that in the mix. And it does not mean that you need to go to cocktail parties.

32:22Forrest Hanson: So let's go to the third one here, which is very Rick topical. I'm mostly going to just hand this one off to you.

32:28Dr. Rick Hanson: And someday it may be yours.

32:29Forrest Hanson: Oh, it's been mine in a lot of ways. But this is like classic couples counseling stuff, which you did for years and years and years, my partner and I are trying to move away from scorekeeping around childcare and household responsibilities. We built an accounting system for household tasks and childcare. Whoever does more in a given period of time gets compensated. It works for getting stuff done, but it's also eroded my sense that I intrinsically deserve support. And even though I can always ask for and receive help, I feel less gratitude when it's part of a transaction. we've accidentally made it impossible to get brownie points.

33:09Forrest Hanson: We both want a new system, but neither of us grew up with a healthy model of how to divide labor. So when we try to move away from strict hour-by-hour accounting, fear creeps in that we're doing more or less than our fair share, and yep, that's eventually what happens. It's not like one person is slacking, it's just so easy for things to get out of whack. Any suggestions on how to relax the rigid counting while still being able to see that things are equitable or equitable enough. All right, dad, what do you think about this? Super deep question.

33:41Dr. Rick Hanson: My entry into this a lot was when you came along. Because prior to that, your mom and I could just live in sort of our own bubbles. And we loosely divided responsibilities. You know, a little bit along gender lines, fairly typical. I did more yard work. She maybe did more laundry. But then you came along and wrecked everything. And we had to suddenly - That's what I do, baby. That's what I'm here for. Oh, my goodness. And we had to get it together.

34:06Forrest Hanson: I am the bathwater and the baby.

34:08Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, yeah, totally. And then meanwhile, I was getting really interested in depleted mother syndrome and the basis for our first book, Mother Nurture, which we've revised and are republishing, actually.

34:20Forrest Hanson: I was just about to promo it for you there, Dad. I'm glad you did it yourself. Do you know, what's the pup date for that, by the way?

34:26Dr. Rick Hanson: August 25th, 2026, Happy Healthy Mom. Definitely updated. All the research behind it is updated. Everything's really solid in it. So in the relationship territory, I learned that in the average American family, certainly 20 years ago, and I'm not sure it's a lot better today, in a heterosexual couple with a child, the woman on average is on task about 20 hours a week more than our partner is. And it's probably better than it used to be in terms of gender split. But husbands today typically are doing more childcare and housework than their own fathers did. And research also shows that kind of generally, generalizations here, many exceptions, dads are doing less than they think they're doing and more than their wives think they're doing.

35:13Dr. Rick Hanson: So this is a hot topic. And inequities, actual and perceived, totally eat away in a relationship. We're talking here about sharing the load fairly. Now, there are other issues when kids come along, like parenting from the same page and preserving an intimate friendship, as well as taking good care of the individual well-being of each of the people. The more that you are indeed parenting from the same page, the more that you're supporting and protecting your intimate friendship, and the more that individual well-being is being supported, the easier it is to resolve equity issues. Okay? Let's just now focus on equity issues.

35:57Dr. Rick Hanson: There are three kinds of equity issues. There's the task load in terms of time on task. Then there's the stress load, because some tasks are more stressful than others. And then there's the third category, sort of the executive load, where you're thinking about things or you just feel burdened by things. So it's in that context then that you step back and you want to get at, okay, what's sustainable here? And what do we want to do? Now, what I'm hearing here is that these people have really nailed one of the things that I think is helpful for people, which is to be pretty solid on the facts, to recognize what the facts are.

36:39Dr. Rick Hanson: But they've gotten sort of trapped by this bookkeeping system they've got, and they're trying to break free of it. So now that you have a pretty good idea of what the facts are, what are your fundamental values? Can you talk with each other in a really heartfelt way that starts with appreciating what the other person is doing? And I'm going to use a phrase, step out of your mind's integrity system into your being's integrity system. You know, the mind is keeping score. And in terms of appropriate forms of equity tracked over a timescale of a month or so, it ought to roughly even out. I think that's appropriate.

37:24Dr. Rick Hanson: I also think that sometimes one person just has more capability than the other, and they're okay with that because they're interested in the greater good. They're not operating on kind of an arithmetic of time. Like maybe one person just doesn't need as much sleep as the other person does. And they're fine with getting up early with the kids. They like that. And they don't need payback about other things later on. They're just happy to throw that into the max. Finishing here too. So shifting out of the mind's accounting system into more what is in your heart? What do you really value and appreciate in the other person?

38:04Dr. Rick Hanson: What are some ways that feel good to you to create a basic household schedule that you more or less kind to keep that'll give you a kind of a framework? And fundamentally, to the longing of this person, how can you shift into a generosity model rather than a scarcity model, right? What's in your heart for each of you to want to give into the family rather than be really, really nitpicking about what is taken from you.

38:37Forrest Hanson: I think that was great. For me, the piece of this that is complicated is that I think that tracking is good in a lot of cases because tracking helps you figure out what's true. And we need to live in a shared understanding of what's true, particularly when childcare comes along for all the reasons that you're describing here, Dad. but that tracking can also become kind of a cudgel or a power move or a source of argument and so then that's when the shared frame aspect of it that i think that you're really highlighting here gets really important are we interacting with this from a just kind of fundamental stance that i want to do you know 60 of the work and i'm really happy to do 60 of the work and if both people are really trying to do 60 to 70 % of the work you'll probably end up okay

39:34Dr. Rick Hanson: excellent

39:35Forrest Hanson: that kind of a frame am I trying to give more than 50 % is a good one to be at because most people tend to just kind of underestimate their contribution in a bunch of different ways sometimes people overestimate their contribution in a bunch of different ways and if you just kind of shoot for the high end a lot of this will come out in the wash particularly if you have a fundamental frame with the other person where it's about love and communication and all of that good stuff. The tricky part of this is resentment, which is, for me, fundamentally a communication issue. When you move away from an accountability system, like the one that this person is describing, you have to add more communication.

40:12Forrest Hanson: Because the accountability system or the tracking system kind of does the communication work for you, right? You don't have to open up about how, I feel like I've been doing more than my fair share for the past couple of weeks now, and it's really been kind of eating at me, and I don't know how to communicate that to you in a way that doesn't come across like I'm trying to attack you or I'm trying to make you wrong. That's a much more difficult thing to do than to point at a spreadsheet and say, you know, hey, here are the numbers, right? And so there's a place for the spreadsheet, but I also think there's a place for the vulnerable communication about how you feel here.

40:49Forrest Hanson: I'm also just kind of curious for this person, why are they so concerned about this question of fairness inside of the relationship in a context where both people are trying to do their best and both people are mostly even contributors? There's not a suggestion in the question that one person is more of an over-contributor than the other. Why is there such a focus on fairness? And I'd be curious about that if I were talking to this couple.

41:15Dr. Rick Hanson: The gender here is unstated. Did you get any clues about gender? I'm not sure.

41:22Forrest Hanson: I would have to go back to the original question, which I'm, yeah.

41:26Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, certainly statistically, it's most likely that they both grew up in relatively conventional homes with a father and a mother. And the father did very little in the category of housework and childcare. And so they both grew up with that model. So the way it's framed here is that each of them is equally concerned about the other, but very often, actually, in terms of the task load, the stress load, and the executive load, the playing field, if you will, tends to tilt in favor of fathers on average. Another aspect of this, though, is that sometimes there's an issue around earning money. And one of the people in the couple is working really hard to earn money.

42:11And the other person is not really working very hard to earn money.

42:17Dr. Rick Hanson: And so that's another. It's not really named here. The only name, child care and household, is responsibilities. But there are income responsibilities in families, too. Where, again, you're really looking there at level of effort. And I guess deep down, we, going all the way back to our rodent ancestors, are very attentive to freeloaders. Sure. When it starts to smell like, wow, I'm sweating bullets over here. And you're just kind of fill in the blank, talking to your friends or watching TV. And that's a common phenomenon. People form resentments. And so then you want to, you kind of, and it's hard to talk about too, because issues of shame come up when your partner's looking at you and going, wow, you know, where's your heart in this?

43:12Dr. Rick Hanson: Where's your integrity? You take your role at work really seriously. You would never want to be thought of as a slacker at work. You would never want people noticing that you're just kind of being carried along by the team, and yet you're okay with that in our family. So it's, yeah, it's juicy. For sure.

43:31Forrest Hanson: We always have to make assumptions when we're listening to these questions, right? Because all the information isn't always there. My assumption with this question is that both of these people are positively motivated and doing their best from an effort standpoint. And that makes me think that there's a bit of a communication issue here, maybe. Maybe they aren't so good at naming to each other when they feel like it's getting out of whack or when they see the resentment building up earlier in the process. Maybe they let things get a little too far before they do that. But that real question, how to relax the rigid counting, like what would support the ability to do that?

44:08Forrest Hanson: And I think that it's this feeling of being on the same team, which I've been coming back to a lot personally and just in conversations I've been having with people, where we often start to feel like we are in our own little rowboat and our partner is in their rowboat. And we're sure maybe we're rowing in the same direction, kind of, but we're in different rowboats. And so I think the question is, what helps you feel like you're actually in the same rowboat together and on that sense of team with each other? And does that then open up the ability to have a conversation where like, hey, I feel like I'm rowing pretty hard over here and I think that you're rowing a little less and what do you think about that?

44:48Forrest Hanson: And are both people sort of motivated from that stance of team? We are both trying to land this plane. We're both trying to help the kid. We're both trying to do the dishes. We're both trying to make this work. How do we do that? How do we operate from team? And I think that relationships that don't end up working out are typically ones where there's not that sense of team.

45:05Dr. Rick Hanson: Fantastic. Excellent.

45:07Forrest Hanson: Back to the show after a quick break. 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 while 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 spelled 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.

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46:32Forrest Hanson: Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf.

46:47Dr. Rick Hanson: Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

47:01Forrest Hanson: Now, back to the show. And got one more question if you got a little time for it here, Dad. I am 27. I have a bachelor's in anthropology and geography. And after working in the field for a couple of years, I realized the job options around me weren't what I wanted. Since then, I've started exploring therapy as a career, something this podcast played a role in. Ah, how cool. It interests me intellectually, and I think I genuinely enjoy the work. But it's been so difficult for me to fully commit to the switch because it feels like I've wasted my bachelor's degree that I worked so hard on, and part of me feels foolish for doing so.

47:40Forrest Hanson: Your episodes on caring and goal setting helped me reconnect with some deeper values, but my rational brain is really stuck here. Do I stick with what I studied or commit to a path that will take serious time, money, and effort? It feels like there's no clear right answer, and this is really frustrating for me. I'm trying so hard to use everything I've learned to make a decision, but I end up just not choosing at all, which is so much worse than just choosing one thing or the other. All right, Dad, what do you think about this?

48:14Dr. Rick Hanson: I think this person is very wise and would make a wonderful anthropologist as well as a wonderful therapist. And I'm thinking also of the proverb, it's never too late to stop going in the wrong direction. Right. If you're digging a hole in the wrong direction, stop digging, in other words. And so I look here at 27, that's really young.

48:43Forrest Hanson: You've got a long runway here. Yeah. And also, your background in anthropology and geography, it'll serve you when you start exploring a lot of diversity of minds, many different kinds of minds.

48:57Dr. Rick Hanson: And we're really shaped by our own history in terms of culture, that aspect of anthropology, and also really shaped by biological evolution and sociobiology, that aspect of anthropology. So it serves you well. Also, how many people really use their college degree? I mean, I did a degree in institutional structures that I invented at UCLA, which I was allowed to do back in the day. And I don't know. I never use that. Do you use your, what, political science?

49:31Forrest Hanson: My interdisciplinary studies degree, because Berkeley did not have a political communications major, and I was trying to make one up. I mean, peripherally at best, I would say. Peripherally at best.

49:44Dr. Rick Hanson: Very little. You've been out of college around 15 years-ish.

49:46Forrest Hanson: Yeah.

49:47Dr. Rick Hanson: So, you know.

49:48Forrest Hanson: Hardly at all.

49:49Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. So there's that whole part. What is it that makes us want to double down on our sunk costs?

49:59Forrest Hanson: Yeah, this is a sunk cost question. 100%. I think that this is a sunk cost question, and it's a bit of an acceptance question. There's a story that you've told me a hundred times. You've also told it on the show, I think, at least once or twice. And you were talking to a friend, I think it was before I came along, question mark?

50:17Dr. Rick Hanson: No, you were long, but you were a young whippersamper.

50:20Forrest Hanson: Very, very young. You were talking about how hard it was going to be to become a doctor. Oh, it's going to be so hard. It's going to take so long. It's going to cost so much money. And I'm not going to be a doctor until I'm fill in the blank, whatever it was for you. I think it was like 40 years old, something like that. It seemed ancient at the time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It still seems ancient to me and I'm 38 because I am ancient. That's not because I think people who are 40 are ancient. That's because I think I am ancient. I want to clarify. And your friend just kind of turned to you and said, well, are you planning on being 40?

50:51Forrest Hanson: Totally.

50:52Dr. Rick Hanson: And then he asked me, how do you want it to be? Yeah. If you're going to be 40. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah.

50:58Forrest Hanson: And I think that that, for me, has been so helpful so many times in terms of like, well, are you planning on being 30? 35, 40? Do you want to be a therapist or do you want to be an anthropologist when you're 35? And if you want to be an anthropologist, great. Be an anthropologist. And if you want to be a therapist, pain and suffering is incoming, baby, but you can do it. And you can pay the bills and you can go to the school and you can do the training and you can pass the test and you can become a therapist. It's going to be a haul, but you'll get there. And then you'll wake up when you're 35 and you'll be a therapist.

51:32Forrest Hanson: And that'll be really cool.

51:33Dr. Rick Hanson: That's really good. here's a thought experiment for this person. And it's a good thought experiment, actually, I'm realizing for anyone. Okay. The thought experiment is what if hypothetically you took a pill, the green pill, and it made you amnesic for your entire history, but you're still your person. You're still who you are, but you no longer know anything about your personal history. You don't know what you majored in in college. You don't know what you studied, you don't know what you invested in, you don't know. So at this point, you are looking forward to your future without any reference to your past.

52:17Dr. Rick Hanson: And your choices about your future are in no way implicated or shaped or contingent on your past at all, whatsoever. So at this point in time, now, knowing what you know about your interests, your talents, the economics, different careers, would you choose at age 27 to embark on a training process that'll probably give you a clinical license, master's level or PhD level, you know, master's level, you know, three to ish, four max years from now. You know, in other words, do you plan on being 31? How do you want it to be? Would you choose that? What would you choose? I think that's a really clean way to look at it.

53:05Dr. Rick Hanson: It's a cool thought experiment.

53:06Forrest Hanson: Yeah, because here you are. And I get that it's uncomfortable to give up your undergrad, all the training, all the work you've done to this point in that kind of way. First point, you already made a tad. You're not really giving it up. You still know that stuff. It's still going to be included as a part of who you are and a part of the work that you do. I just used epistemic injustice in the podcast episode that we're doing right now. I learned that probably a decade ago or something when I was doing polycom work. And these are ideas that will be just as influential when you're working with people.

53:41Forrest Hanson: But what kind of work do you want to do on a day-to-day basis? Do you want to do the day-to-day work of being an anthropologist? Or do you want to do the day-to-day work of being a therapist? Because that's going to be what shapes your life, is that labor day in and day out. How do you want it to be?

53:54Dr. Rick Hanson: I think this is an awesome thought experiment the more I play with it. If you just woke up. Yeah, boom. And you're like, whoa, here I am. And it grounds you in don't know mind, beginner's mind. Talk about beginner's mind. And you're looking forward to the rest of your life.

54:09Forrest Hanson: What do you want to do? Ooh, I've got another fun one. I hate to cut you off, but it came to me in a dream. It just came to me right now. All right, here's what you do. You imagine your life at 50, and you did not choose to become a therapist. so you followed your current career path there you are you're 50 years old you're doing the work that you project out that maybe you would be doing you close your eyes you wake up you're 27 do you want it or do you not want it? you were thinking all the thoughts you were having at 50 you were like I wish I could go back in time and be 27 again and make a different choice and then you wake up and here you are, you're 27

54:52Dr. Rick Hanson: did i just reinvent the wheel there dad no it's fantastic and um it's scary in a way in a good way like to just stop totally yeah stop stopping your tracks one one way or another you'd stop in your tracks and you go all right limited runway you know when you're 27 the runway is fairly limited but 27 77 87 maybe you got 60 years of runway you know what's the life expectancy of a 27 year old let's say, okay, how do you want it to be? And then you get to be my age, maybe you run away, I'm kind of going for another 20, you know, kind of going for it. What matters? What matters? I think so often we're trapped by our past.

55:36Dr. Rick Hanson: That's what we're really talking about here. How we get the tentacles reaching into the present from the past, keep dragging us back in, like in the Godfather movies. They keep dragging me back in. Wow, what happens if you just cut loose from those tentacles? You're not bound by them anymore. Who do you want to be? How do you want it to be?

56:03Forrest Hanson: Awesome stuff. Well, I think we did a pretty good job with this one, Dad. How are you feeling about it?

56:09Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm visualizing the Kraken. Just big tentacles reaching up out of the sea, dragging us back. And, you know, there's the closing lines, right, in The Great Gatsby, something about being carried back in time as we be forward in the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something's impalting imagery.

56:29Forrest Hanson: Something carried into the past. I'll try to look it up. Maybe I'll share it in the outro. Yeah. No, it's so real. It's so real. And one of the episodes that I want to do in the near future, and you don't actually know this, Dad, you had a line not too long ago on the podcast where you talked about becoming a secure base for yourself when we were talking about insecure attachment and i've just been kind of chewing on that line ever since you said it and i want to do an episode on it like what's it like to become a secure base for yourself and as part of the prep for that i've been really thinking about this kind of like how the past influences the present thing and so i think that's going to be a major theme of what we end up talking about sign me up good one i'm looking forward to it okay Okay, well, that's it for today's episode.

57:14Forrest Hanson: Dad, thanks so much for doing this with me. I really love this one. Big hugs. Yay.

57:25Forrest Hanson: Really enjoyed answering questions from our listeners with Rick. We got some fantastic questions from people. The first question was about therapy speak. We took quite a while with this one because it was a really interesting question. So what is therapy speak? Therapy speak is when people use clinical terminology or terminology from like the world of psychology in general in a kind of imprecise or superficial way. So why is therapy speak something that we should be aware of or be careful with? Well, it's because you're borrowing authority when you use it. When we use more colloquial language to describe something, it's just me talking.

58:01Forrest Hanson: You know, it's just forest. But when I start talking using various acronyms or using clinical terminology or any of that kind of stuff, well, I'm basically saying the science of psychology says this thing is true. It's no longer just me talking. This is some kind of overt statement about the world or about the way that people are. And I try to really call out on the podcast pretty frequently that I'm not a therapist. I'm not a clinician. So I try to use that terminology pretty carefully. and with a lot of nodding in the direction of research or what somebody else said about it or that kind of a thing, in part because I want to be really careful about the misuse of these terms.

58:42Forrest Hanson: And as we talked about therapy speak, we kind of separated it into two buckets. There was one bucket, which is just people misusing this kind of terminology, is that problematic? And the second bucket is when people deliberately use therapeutic terminology as a kind of power play. And one of the problems with the colloquialization of these terms is that it's really easy for stuff to get left out. So we use triggers as an example where in more of a therapeutic context with something like exposure and response prevention, triggers are something that we're made aware of and we want to be very careful about and we want to be very conscious of and all of that good stuff.

59:19Forrest Hanson: But the goal of the treatment over time is to actually make you more comfortable with the thing that activates you. It's not to identify what that thing is so you can never encounter it again in your life. And generally speaking, therapy is trying to argue for possibility. It's trying to look at somebody and say, okay, how can we make your life the biggest and best and most complete version of what it is? And as we talk about all the time on the show, some of it is about knowing that I'm the kind of person who isn't great at fill in the blank or who really doesn't like this other thing over there.

59:53Forrest Hanson: So I'm not going to go out of my way to seek it out. And that can be great. The second question was about this to some extent. But the flip side of this is that therapy language and the broadening of this terminology can help us with something that's called epistemic injustice, which I talked about at some length. And the idea is that we want to give people the tools to talk about their experiences. And particularly, we want to give those tools to groups of people who historically have not had those tools. So when we come up with a phrase like post-traumatic stress disorder, it becomes easier for a group of people to speak to their experience.

1:00:23Forrest Hanson: When we come up with a phrase like premenstrual dysphoric disorder or PMDD, it becomes easier for a group of people to speak to their experience. As Rick talked about a lot, this terminology can also give people a way of understanding themselves, a way of communicating themselves more clearly to other people. I think that all of that is great. The problems come when we're either really misunderstanding and simplifying things, or when we're using therapy language as a kind of power play with somebody else. Second question was somebody who was a naturally introverted person who had received a lot of messaging about the importance of social connection and went, okay, am I really actually an introverted person or am I just avoiding a difficult experience?

1:01:04Forrest Hanson: And the first thing that we emphasized was that everybody's going to be a little different here, and it's really okay to just be an introverted person who isn't that interested in developing deep friendships. The kind of flags that we raised about this whole thing were in a couple of areas. First, Rick really mentioned the importance of having the sources of connection in your life in general, even if that's not with other people. If you feel connected to your pet, if you feel connected to some kind of a practice you engage in regularly, if you feel connected to other things out there in the world, if it feels really good for you to be in a group of people every once in a while for, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes, doesn't have to be a long period of time.

1:01:41Forrest Hanson: That can be enough for you to kind of refill that battery. A few other things we mentioned. Are there things that maybe you're avoiding here? Is it that you don't feel anxious because you're not in situations anymore that would provoke anxiety? So you go, oh, I don't have social anxiety. It's like, well, maybe, or maybe you're just not putting yourself into those kinds of situations. So that could be a possibility for this person. Another question is, did they just kind of slide into this, or did they really choose this as the way that they wanted to live their life? And then the final question I would raise is, how is this all going to turn out, not right now, but when you're 50 or 60 or 70 years old?

1:02:16Forrest Hanson: Are you going to look back on this and go, wow, I really wish I had to develop some more meaningful friendships in my life? And the point there is that there are a lot of different reasons that you could want to develop friendships that aren't just because, you know, I really want to feel connected to a group of other people. Third question was about scorekeeping inside of a relationship. I thought that Rick gave some really good advice here. He talked a lot about the context of this kind of scorekeeping, regular gender imbalances that exist inside of a relationship, particularly when it comes to housework and childcare.

1:02:48Forrest Hanson: These are thankfully getting a little bit better, but they are still unbalanced. And we ended up landing in a place where the emphasis was really on teamwork and communication and feeling like we are rowing in the same direction with each other. And if you're motivated from that stance, you're probably going to be able to even a lot of this out. Our final question was somebody who had a bachelor's in anthropology, but was looking into becoming a therapist, but was really struggling to make that choice and to really decide on it and make that career transition, essentially because of feelings of sunk cost, like, wow, this therapy thing, it's going to be expensive.

1:03:21Forrest Hanson: It's going to take a long time. Man, do I really want to give up all the training I've done to this point? And I thought the best answer to this question was really Rick's story of, are you planning on being 40? Okay, well then, how do you want it to be? Are you planning on being 35? Well, okay, do you want to be a therapist or not? Because you're going to wake up one day, hopefully, and be 35. How do you want it to be? It's going to take time. It's going to take effort. You're going to have to work at it. But you're going to look back on this moment, more likely than not, and go, wow, I'm really glad that I made that choice.

1:03:51Forrest Hanson: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time talking with Rick. A couple of quick reminders. We have a Patreon page, patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. You can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you listen to your shows. We are probably there. If you do find us on one of those platforms and you want to help us out, you can leave a rating and a positive review. We really appreciate it. You can also tell a friend about the show. That's the best way that we have to reach new people. So until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.

1:04:40Forrest Hanson: and edges perfectly caramelized? Sweetgreen's 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 Sweetgreen app.