How To Add Real Value To Your Relationships | Dr. Ramani Durvasula EP 820

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11What are my values? What do I stand for? What do you mean, what do I stand for? I can't afford gas. And I understand that. I'm surviving. You are surviving, but there are certain things that you're willing to really, really fight for and be, and that you actually do need. For some people, for example, spirituality may really matter. You cannot minimize that. And if a person for whom spirituality matters enters into a relationship for someone who doesn't, it's not an indictment of either of them. But that may not be a language they can use with each other, which might leave both of them frustrated.

0:46There's some things that you're not going to fully map on to someone else. Someone may say, I'm very comfortable with your spiritual world. I'm simply not going to participate in it. And then that will work. And they'll say, I can see how joyful it makes you. But what the struggle here, though, the main sort of pushback I'm going to have on your list is your list is predicated on two healthy people. In the absence of empathy, your whole system goes away. Right. Without that, this doesn't work. Compassion and empathy. Yeah. And I think that there is, you know, I think that a lot of people right now in the world are engaging in pseudo healing.

1:18And I think it's just narcissistic navel gazing and they're actually not really healing. What does that mean? I think it's that they're they're they're doing whatever they're doing. Like, I meditate 75 times a day, and I do mindfulness this, and I ayahuasca that, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And they do all of that, but they're still really going through the world in a rather monstrous, entitled, dismissive, contemptuous way. Like, look at my recovery. I'm so recovery-ish. It's like a spiritual bypass. Exactly. It's a spiritual bypass. And that gives me pause. So you can't even just say, oh, they're doing all this work on themselves.

1:50I don't care how much work they're doing on themselves. How are they showing up? Watch their behavior. year. One of the interesting things for me, I was fortunate because I had no spots in my practice, and I've completely downsized it and mostly ended most of it. But back in the day, I'd say, you don't show up. You lose your slot, and you're not in this practice. And I'm like, well, I don't want to lose my slot, right? They don't like that. So they'd show up. But the fact is, is that when they'd show up, they would sometimes say, like, I would say, gosh, that thing you just told me, you said to your wife, like, how did she feel?

2:20And how do you No, no. They'd be like, I didn't really think about it. I'm like, let's think about it, shall we? And that's something called mentalization. When you have someone reflect on what they think, how they think someone feels, how they think their behavior is affecting someone. Like, put yourself in that head space. I said, how do you think your wife felt when you did X or Y? Oh, yeah, I guess that wasn't cool. Okay. So what might you want someone to do for you in that circumstance, right? Get them to do it. That's good. and they would sometimes say like yeah you're right that wasn't so they weren't like punching me in the face they were just kind of like okay that wasn't cool would they keep making the same mistakes yes me repeatedly saying what do you think she thought or sometimes I'd even say like that's not cool and I would often say how would you feel if your wife saw the text that you sent I do remember working with a series of people to the end of their their relationships and a couple of them said, more than a few said, you're telling me I've got to listen to her and I have to care about her feelings.

3:24And you're also telling me I have to do this with this other woman I'm having sex with who thinks I'm going to have a relationship with her. Please. And like that. Okay. So you know what? I remember one of my more successful, you know, some of the more successful cases, they come back and say, I divorced the wife and I dumped the mistress. Like if this is, if I don't want to be causing this much harm, they weren't sadistic, you know, but, and after the therapy, they're like, okay, if that, if this is never going going to change. It's very clear. I want to do what I want to do. And I thought that was a win.

3:53They're like, I'm not changing. They were even aware they weren't going to change. Like, I'm not listening to her nonsense. And I don't like looking at her. I don't think she's attractive anymore. It's like, yikes. It's a win for her and for them. It's a win for the other people have been released. Now, most folks, most narcissistic folks or people with these personalities don't stay in therapy. They're not great candidates for therapy. And my guess is to your point about these people who all slide backwards. There ain't enough ayahuasca in the world to turn these people around. I can tell you that right now.

4:25There's not enough MDMA. There's nothing. I think everyone's looking for the empathy pill, right? It's not how it works. Any of the protocols that are showing any efficacy around things like PTSD and everything have to be done in a managed circumstance. And to your point, I remember once meeting a guy swearing by whatever psychedelic they're swearing by. This is it. I mean, he was just a jerk, just a jerk and cold and abrupt. But yet he had the audacity to say, I am so empathic now. You know, like, okay, that's not, that's not how it's usually done. But I didn't, I was not, I had no skin in this game.

5:02I was just sort of watching this conversation happen. He was talking to a group of people, but he was just a jerk for the full two days I had to spend in his presence and yet was extolling how much growth he had had. And so I don't know what that meant to him. And maybe people in his life thought there was progress. You know, remember, I mean, if you're starting from negative 10, even getting up to zero is growth. So there is that too. But it's really tough because I do think, there was an interesting article in the New York Times actually, does being in therapy make me a good person? And is that what the point of therapy is, to make someone a good person?

5:39and what really is a good person. So it really raised a lot of philosophical issues. Yeah. It's subjective to a point, but I don't think it is. I think one thing we do know when we look at personality, in general, I do think we do believe that compassion and respect make for a good person, but we also live in a world where people like that are viewed as suckers. If you're compassionate, sweet, and respectful, those are not masculine. He's looking as a weak man that you can take advantage of. Versus the guy who is like a corporate raider, who has a ton of money, who drives the fast car, is somehow viewed as strong.

6:14That's, I mean, this is, and it's right now that that's right there, the paradox of what masculinity is in our modern age. Until we can make compassion sexy, we're in trouble. The number of men, for example, who've been sexually abused, we don't talk about it. One in six. Yeah, exactly. And for women, there's actually, at least in therapy, I'm talking about the safe space. But I'm telling you, for clients I've worked with, I remember some of them saying, I have something to talk to. Can we do this session by phone? I don't want to look at your face. It's so shameful. You know, it's so shameful.

6:42And when I taught abnormal psychology at the university level, and I was teaching about adverse childhood experiences like child abuse, child sexual abuse, what I did notice was that some of the male students were really shifting uncomfortably in their seats. And I would slow down. I'm like, listen, if we can take this topic slow. It felt like the women in the class were actually had processed that a little bit more on the macro, like overall, than the male students in the class. So I think that to hold space, to be able to feel safe with talking about their insecurities, their vulnerabilities, their feelings, to show tears.

7:18I mean, there is nothing more beautiful when a person's able to cry because they're feeling a genuine emotion. and I think of how we pathologize men for doing that. We do, we literally pathologize. It'll be the cold open on Saturday Night Live. They'll make jokes about it. There'll be memes about it. It horrifies me. So why would a man ever be vulnerable if he thinks he's going to be turned into a big joke? He would be made fun of, yeah. You know, the shaming of emotion and anger being the only acceptable emotion. So men use that. They turn it into like the Swiss army knife of emotion. I'm sad, I'm going to be angry.

7:52I'm vulnerable, I'm going to be angry. Angry, angry, angry, right? It's just like the one-stop shop kind of thing. To me, anger is an incredibly acceptable, healthy emotion. But it's meant to be a whole drawer full of stuff, not just one emotion you use for everything. And that's the challenge, is that men do have emotion. Anger. And it's sort of switching that up, societally not pathologizing that, and women holding space for that.

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9:23Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

9:38Thank you.