How to Be a Better Human - Why love –and therapy– means going in a direction you don’t yet know (w/ Dr. Orna Guralnik)

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

In her critically acclaimed Showtime docuseries, Couples Therapy, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik thinks deeply about relationships, emotions, and connection. In this episode, Dr. Guralnik explains why she believes psychoanalysis helps us love better, dispels myths about the right time to go to therapy, and gives tips on how to unblock our relationship with the world around us. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I am fascinated by other people's relationships, specifically their marriages and their dating lives. It's mind-blowing to me that one of the most common and day-to-day building blocks of our society is also so completely opaque from the outside. Is that couple just like us or are they doing things completely differently? Are we normal or are we doing things completely wrong? I'm also fascinated by relationships because even in good ones, there's so much to think about and to work on. For example, I'm a big talker and I come from a family where we're always yapping away, interrupting each other, constantly laughing and chatting at the dinner table. And my wife and her family, they're much more reserved.

So it took me a long time, I'm talking years, before I could finally start to trust that if she was eating and not also talking, it wasn't because she was silently fuming at me. Even now, if we're in the car on a long drive and she's having a quiet moment, I sometimes have to check, you're just being quiet right now, right? You're not angry at me? And when she says yes, I'm like, okay, cool, fine, I will let you get back to that. There are these constant adjustments and negotiations that we have to make in relationships because every pairing is ultimately also bridging a cultural divide, even if it seems like you're coming from exactly the same background. No one's family and friends all interacted in exactly the same way.

So how does understanding those dynamics make us better humans? How do we relate to one another, whether it is professionally, platonically, or romantically? Today's guest, the psychologist Orna Goralnik, has spent her career trying to understand and untangle these systems. Orna's work has been featured in multiple seasons of the acclaimed Showtime documentary series Couples Therapy. Here's how she describes that show. What we're doing is we film a time-limited couples therapy. Every season we film with a few different couples. We follow the treatment from beginning to end of this time-limited therapy. The set is organized so

that the cameras are not actually in the room. They're kind of hidden. So the couples, even though they know they're being filmed and agreed to it, they basically we all kind of have the experience that we're sitting in a in a therapy office and going through a treatment together. We're going to dive deep with Orna into treatment, love and what it takes to make a relationship work. But first, we're going to take a quick break. Don't go anywhere. And we are back. Today, we're talking relationships, love, and couples counseling with Dr. Orna Goralnik. I'm Dr. Orna Goralnik.

I am a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, and I'm also the therapist on the docuseries Couples Therapy on Showtime. Does it feel representative to you of your non-filmed treatments? In certain essential ways, it's very representative. The work is the work. I mean, that's one of the things that startled me the first season that we started filming it, which was, wow, the work is just the work. It doesn't matter. Cameras are there. It's going to be edited. You'd think that it would completely morph everything. But then we start talking and the things that matter to people are just there because of the fact that it's documented.

The process is intensified and everything happens faster. What would have taken me in my regular process, in my regular practice, probably somewhere between like six to eight to sometimes 12 months can happen like in three to four months. There's a certain kind of intensity that comes with the feeling that, OK, it's now or never. We're on film. This is real. There's no we don't have like forever to keep this going. So in that sense, it's quite intensified. It's hard to avoid for me the feeling that obviously the couple who are sitting on the couch in front of you are in treatment.

But also we as the viewer are in some way in treatment with you as well, that we are getting to learn about how we can communicate better with our partners, to learn about the ways in which we self-sabotage or are blind to the obstacles that we're putting up to our own happiness and our relationship well-being. How much are you consciously thinking about like, this is the message that I want to get out to these millions of people? Because obviously you're treating more people than you could ever see in a career. Right. I think over time, I have become more aware of that. I think there's a part of me that increasingly feels more and more the way I feel when I teach. The longer I've been doing this, the more I've become aware of the fact that what we're doing, and I think the couples are aware of that too,

to some degree, maybe not consciously, that what we're doing is also in addition to the particular work that we're doing, couple and me, that we're also doing some act of service for the public. It's some kind of teaching or act of service of sharing a certain kind of process or vulnerability or knowledge. I think it's interesting to me from watching the show and reading your writing, you're in a field where people often come to you when they're in crisis, where their relationship is having a lot of conflict and they're trying to solve that. And yet, and correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to really believe in love and the power and importance of love. Love is kind of one of those things. It's like health.

It's like curiosity. It's something that if things are not getting in our way, it's a natural thing that flows out of us. We want to connect. We want to attach. We want to love. We want to transcend ourselves and care for others. I think we're just wired that way. And I think it brings out the best in us.

And life is just better when there's love. When we love, when we're loved, when we witness love, it's the good stuff of life. And I do generally, despite everything that we could say to the contrary, I do believe that love prevails. When you're first meeting a couple and they're in a spot where maybe they don't believe that love is about to prevail. How do you start thinking about the questions that you're going to ask that will get to the heart of the matter of what is really going on in their story? It depends on many things. It depends on, first of all, what is the therapist's school of thought. Generally, each therapist comes with a certain assumptions, theoretical assumptions about couplehood,

dynamics, what works, therapy, and then it depends on the particularities of each couple, the individuals and the couple dynamic that presents. And some of the processes trial and error. I might aim to, for example, work on a certain kind of dynamic, but if I don't get any traction, I realize, oh, wait a minute, we have to switch gears and work on childhood stuff or attachment issues or emotional regulation. It depends on some of it is trial and error and who the people are. There's a moment in the second season of Couples Therapy that I feel like is a really interesting one. I wanted to talk to you about one of the couples, Johnny and Matthew. He kind of says like, now that you recognize the problem, it's so easy. I'm paraphrasing, but he says like, why don't you

just change? You step in and say, well, actually, I'm of the belief that until you understand the deeper story and where you've learned these roles that you actually can't change. That's not just as simple as just doing it differently. It seems like that's kind of not the pop culture understanding of change, right? We tend to think like, just do it differently. Why don't you just do it? And you seem to really believe in that moment that you have to get at the deeper root issues before you even have the power to change, even if you're aware that what you're doing is not serving you. Yeah, that is, yeah, that's exactly right, that you're connecting

it to the theoretical background. But you have to sometimes be really in the thick of it and have a new experience when you're in the thick of your stuff to change. And that takes trust and risk and time. And you got to kind of allow yourself to get in there, whether it's with your partner or in the presence of a therapist or when you're in analysis, you got to likealyst, we're motivated by many things that we're not aware of. We have our conscious mind, which is, you know, like the tip of the iceberg, and then we have so many things underlying our conscious minds that motivate us, and all we can do is kind of glimpse at all these like little derivatives of that vast unconscious and try to get clues as to what's going on underneath. And that again, takes time and courage and trust. It's not something it's not like a 10 list of 10 things you can do to make things better.

Yeah, I love your pushback on that, first of all, especially because that that is kind of the framework that we often use on a show like this, right? It is kind of like our episode titles are literally how to do something. And yet I'm a huge fan of people pushing back on that and complicating that. And I myself am very skeptical of it most of the time. So I love the idea that it's more complicated and that you can't reduce it to that. I love the idea that it's more complicated and that you can't reduce it to that. And yet also, there are these actionable things that individuals can do.

Do you think that it's just that you can't make a universal or that they can't kind of be so easily boiled down into a simple list? It's not. You can make universals. There are certain things that are always true. You know, it's always true, for example example that all of us need to do better listening that's a universal truth and you will solve a lot of problems if you listen better and you regulate your emotional response but we can know all of that and then in real time it all flies out the window. So it's not that there aren't universal truths that will make everything better, but in real time, people are in the grip of whether it's their trauma history or whether it's their inner world that colors the way they see reality and the grip of that inner movie that's going on all the time. reality and the grip of that inner movie that's going on all the time, it's not amenable to just these statements like, oh, you should listen better. A person can know they should listen

better, but when they're burning inside with some feeling of injustice or some grudge that they're holding or whatever, they don't want to listen better. It's out the window. They're just in the grip of things. Obviously, many people know you from your work on couples therapy, but also you have a ton of academic research. And in your papers, you've written several very accessible papers to the layperson. One of the big themes of the ones that I read was the idea that not only are we beholden to these internal forces that we may not even be aware of, but we're also beholden to these huge external historical forces. Right. You. Yes. You write about being in treatment with a woman whose grandparents were in the Nazi party. And you write about the ways in which you as a Jewish person with Israeli heritage

and she are acting out some of those historical patterns. And you've also talked about that with your patients of color, where there's the ideas of colonialism and the history of racism. Those are inherently in the room and can't be avoided. I think that's a different idea, again, than many people have of therapy, right? That it's not just about me and my own problems, but it's also these societal forces. Psychoanalysts generally do tend to focus more on individual personal history, which, you know, anything that has to do with like a person's childhood, things that happen to them throughout their lives that affect the way they think now. And then all of this that is supposedly resides in the unconscious and influences how people perceive things and respond. But traditionally, analysts

were less clued into these gigantic influences that big history, systemic issues, issues that have to do with like, you know, it could be even like, a person can be motivated by grudges between, I can imagine in the future, like a couple, like two generations down, like a Russian and Ukrainian being in a relationship and not even aware of the fact that what's happening nowadays is going to affect two generations down and how they perceive like certain fights they're going to have about like how to load the dishwasher might be traced all the way back to what's happening now between like the invasion of ukraine you know relationships are many political systems right people constantly have to negotiate negotiate different needs different interests different histories And these kind of big historical,

systemic, racial class backgrounds very much influence how they think of negotiating difference. It seems to me like there's been a real increased awareness of and openness to in the past couple years, systemic thinking when it comes to politics and when it comes to culture, right? The idea that like what I do as an individual, it's not that it's not important, but that I can't stop climate change by recycling three more cardboard boxes. The idea that like me trying to be confronting of biases and racism and those kinds of issues, that's important, but there's also this systemic racism piece. I think people are so much more open to those ideas now. But something that at least I don't hear as much about that you seem to be a real proponent of is the idea that

our emotional and our mental well-being is also systemic, that we're not individuals in that sense either, or not individuals alone. Absolutely, yes. Just to free associate and piggyback on what you just said, I think I've noticed like during the pandemic and in response to like the immense impact that the BLM movement had, like the Black Lives Matter had, I've noticed a real difference in how people in relationships talk to each other. It doesn't have to be, they don't need to be talking about race at all. But I mean, it could be like a white on white or black on black couple, it doesn't matter. But there's a very different kind of discourse that is possible now, between people, where they

check their privilege, right? They check the subject position from which they're speaking. They don't just take things for granted, but they pause for a second and think, wait, where am I located in the bigger system? And who am I talking to? And what are the power implications? Or what am I taking for granted? And what are ways that I'm not able to listen because of my particular background? How am I blind or deaf to certain things that the other person is experiencing? All of that has made, in a way, my work as a therapist a lot easier. That alone is fascinating to me, that idea that those changes have made your work easier. Yeah. And that people are more willing to acknowledge

like, oh, I come from a place where what I am doing affects the people around. What would you say it was like before? I think people just spoke from within their position without without feeling like they need to check it. They need to double look at where they're speaking from. about like how these things affect our entire system not only our I don't know negotiation skills but like our emotional lives of course just to give you an example just from from daily practice you know one of the things that couples talk about a lot is money right sort of at one of the arenas that people find their differences and it's also just so concrete that it's a great place to negotiate. And people's entire emotional world about money, of course, is deeply shaped by their class situation, race situation, the intersection of it, gender politics,

all of these like giant systemic issues affect their experience of money the experience of do i have the capacity to support myself is there a safety net or not for me all of these questions will affect the immediate emotional response they have when they see their partner's credit card bill and when they try to negotiate what should spend on? It's interesting because we've had a few experts in the past on money issues who are talking kind of about the nuts and bolts of budgeting and that sort of stuff. But every one of them across the board has said some version of money is not really just about money. It's about values. It's about priorities. It's about what you care about and what you're afraid of.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Dr. Orna Goralnik. Today, we're talking with Dr. Orna Goralnik. Orna is the therapist in Showtime's docuseries, Couples Therapy, which follows real couples going through treatment with her. The show is revealing. It's vulnerable. It's often quite astonishingly intimate. But it's never played for shock or for drama. It's very much real psychoanalytic treatment. It seems like a lot of what you're teaching people who watch the show is also to destigmatize the world of therapy or maybe to bring people in so that it's not just wealthy white people on the show. It's not just heterosexual couples.

This is certainly a stereotype that I had in my head about couples counseling is that it's not people who are kind of elongating the end and that they come in and it's already too late. And certainly you have people on where you come to the conclusion that like, let's wind this down in a way that is healthy and productive. But many of the people make transformative breakthroughs. So it seems like that is one of the big messages that people take away or you're hoping people will take away. Absolutely.

Both that this way of working and thinking is for everyone. It should not be only for the well and rich, and not only for white and upper class. So wanting to make it more accessible and available. Beyond that, to in a way underscore the fact that we're all similar. Class, skin color, history, I mean, all of these things, of course, they shape everything. But at the bottom of it, in the heart of it, we're similar. We can completely relate to, I assume people can completely relate to every couple on the show. People often say to us that, oh, in the beginning, they couldn't stand this person, or they thought that person was totally wrong. And then they spent enough time with the couple. And then they're like, oh, actually,

that's me. I also think one of the radical parts to me of the show is how much you are yourself vulnerable and are willing to show the ways in which you don't know the answers in which you struggle. I mean, many episodes feature you going to your peer group or to your mentor and saying, Many episodes feature you going to your peer group or to your mentor and saying, I don't know, I'm stuck. How do I fix this? Which that feels very radical because you're in a position of power and you're giving up the power. And that's not something we see very often. So I'm glad you're saying that and seeing that. First of all, that is the psychoanalytic in its heart.

That is the psychoanalytic method, which is that we're always leaning into the part of the psyche that we don't know you know what you know is useless it's it's already over it's done what you know i mean what you want is to go into the direction that you don't yet know and if i had to if there's one message if i had to like boil down like a central message that both psychoanalytic work and couples work teaches it is you know open up a kind of negative space within yourself where you don't know so that you can actually learn something new about the other person and if you don't go to the places that you don't know, you're not going to actually hear anyone other than yourself. You know, in addition to this podcast, I'm a comedian.

And one of the most common things that people say when they find out that you're a comedian, right, is tell me a joke or some version of, oh, I could never do that. That's so scary to be up on stage. I'm guessing that the couples counselor version of that is some version of like, you must hear the wildest stories. But then also, well, I'm glad that my partner and I don't need that. So what do you say to couples who may avoid therapy because they feel like going would be an admission that their relationship is somehow failing or that it's not for them, it's for other people. What do you tell people who have that resistance to it? I don't say anything, honestly. They're not there.

They're not ready. They're scared. I'm okay. And I don't think anything. I'm just like, you're not curious to go to your edge. You want to stay where you are. Okay, that's where you live. Sorry, I'm just curious when you're just about what you said about comedians, like, what do you think about as

a comedian? What do you think about what I said about the going towards the not knowing? Yeah. I mean, cause I assume you have to do that all the time, right? I think that one of the biggest things that people have as a misconception is people will often try to, as almost as a compliment to say like, well, I'm sure that you never bomb on stage. And I always say to them, well, if you're not bombing, you're a terrible comedian. The whole point is you have to try things that are new and different and won't work. And you have to be conscious of where you do that. I don't try and do that when I'm auditioning for something.

But if you're not failing, if you're not going past the bounds of what you can do and what you know will work, then your jokes just get worse and worse and worse because they're the same jokes, but they're more and more tired and old. So it's the same. You're looking for the same space. Yeah. Fundamentally, it's true of most humans that if you want to create something new and different, you have to push past the comfortable and you have to go into the zone where you are

making mistakes and failing and it's not always working. So it is interesting though, because like you said, I mean, you said like, if people don't want to do that, they're comfortable. That's fine. They don't have to do that. I mean, certainly I would never encourage someone who doesn't want to be a comedian to be a comedian. Even if you do want to be a comedian, we already have too many. We don't need more. But if you don't want to, definitely don't do it. And yet maybe this is just me responding to the piece of like dominant society right now that says like everyone should be in therapy therapy is almost like a check box

that people should do but i do feel like there's something different about examining yourself and your relationships than creating art like if you don't create art okay maybe that's not right for you but if you don't examine your relationships sometimes I feel like real harm can come from that, from you not being ready to do it. True, true. Because you live among other people and you might have a family and yeah, we affect each other.

Yes, agree. Although a world without art would also be a pretty miserable world. Of course. Maybe if it's okay, I'm curious to hear from you personally. You were born in the United States and then you spent your early life here and then you moved to Israel and you lived in a society that had a very big shift from kind of an

individualistic society to a much more collectivist society. And now you're back. And I wonder how having to make sense of these different ways of organizing the world and different ways of organizing human relationships have played into your work and your interest in this kind of work. I think over the years I've come to think of that as probably one of the defining historical elements of my life that kind of shaped the way I experience the world, these kind of shifts between cultures. I think one way that it informs my couples work is that it's not that difficult for me to understand different perspectives and to understand why some of these differences don't necessarily work and to try to think how to kind of figure that out, like what would it take? Or another way to say it is I never quite completely trust one particular perspective. Even if someone is

like deeply embedded in the way they see things and can give all the rationale for why the way they see the world and their ideology and their feelings and all of that is like totally true and makes so much sense. I'm always a little like, eh, but you can see it another way too. Because I've had to go through that. So, and you know, some of my patients actually find that maddening. It's not always pleasant. So that it's shaped my interest in the less clear boundary between individual and collective forces. This is kind of a completely different thing, but I'm also because of the very important Israeli influence. I'm very much kind of a communal, collective team kind of person. I like doing things with other people. I mean, one of the great things about working on this

show is that I'm working with this like unbelievably wonderful team. Just every day brings me so much joy and interest. When you watch back episodes of the show, what are you most struck by? Ah, okay. There's one thing that always happens when I watch, which it just, there's, it feels to me like they cook up some kind of magic. I don't understand how they do what they do, where, you know, there's the world out there and then there's the way we, inside our mind, we think about the world, and we have our little storylines that we follow, and each of us is

always narrating something about what's going on. And when I see what they've done, it never feels to me like it's coming from outside. It always feels to me like, oh my God, they somehow clicked into my unconscious and they saw things the way I saw them. How did they do that? It's like they visited my dream. That's a great feeling. It's amazing. It's completely shocking.

And it has to do with, I mean, we talk a lot. I talk a lot with the team all the time about the material, like with the directors, the editors, there's all the time, endless conversations about what's going on. And they just listen incredibly well. And somehow we've developed this kind of hive mind. So that's the most striking to me. And then the other thing that I love in watching the material is how much the camera and the way they edit, how much they love the couples. I don't know if you feel that way, but there's so much love towards the subjects and respect and so much interest in their humanity. It's never kind of a sneering or

cynical take on the subjects. It's always like trying to go inside them and hold them with dignity. There's a real generosity to the show. It occurs to me that there are many people on the show, and I imagine in your practice outside of the show as well, who are coming with very different racial or cultural backgrounds into the relationship. Can you talk about some of the complications that arise in relationships where both partners don't

have the shared sociopolitical, cultural, historical factors in their lives? Yeah, sure. First of all, I have to say that to some degree, I think it's always there. If you drill, there's always some kind of difference, even if the couples seem like, you know, they're like made of the same cloth. At some point, you'll discover that on some level, there's some kind of difference that makes for interesting dynamics. But to the more obvious differences, you know, the most obvious is when there's an interracial couple that come to certain aspects of relationship with different expectations or different predictions about outcome or class. I mean, it's hard to separate, you know, race and class. to for example the issue of like finances or just a sense of security in the future people with

different class slash race heritage have a very different sense of projection into the future whether it's oh if the money runs out are we going to be on the street are we going to be homeless versus it's going to be okay, there's going to be a safety network. So the level of anxiety about the future could be very different. And that can influence how people negotiate, like one person might feel like, oh my god, we're in the red, we're in like a crisis, and the other person might feel like it's okay. Why are you freaking out? And meet there? Anger, what's an okay way to express anger? You know, I've repeatedly heard, for example, and this is kind of a classic, but gender stereotypes, men who have trouble finding ways to even think about their own dependency

needs or their own certain kinds of vulnerability and having to like twist themselves into all sorts of pretzels because society and the way they've been indoctrinated into masculinity doesn't allow them to just say, hey, I'm feeling lonely. Can you give me a hug? You know? I'm curious how you think about changing your own narratives and what do you do when you recognize that you have a story that you're telling yourself about your relationship? What do you do when you recognize that you have a story that you're telling yourself about your relationship? I've been through over the years. I mean, look, I'm old and I've been through several analyses.

And each analyst that I've worked with has changed my way of thinking about narrative. So I've been through many. The way I've moved cultures, I've moved analysts, and I've moved schools of thought, and also, you know, have become parent to two different children. So I've changed many, many narratives. So in that sense, it makes it a little easier nowadays, when I notice myself getting caught in a particular story, especially if it's a story that's like, bugging me, like, oh, my partner isn't doing this, that or the other, or one of my kids, blah, blah, blah. Just the narratives, you know, when you get stuck in a

narrative, it tends to have a certain kind of flavor. It starts to like bug you, something about the repetitive nature of it. And at this point, I already know, oh, okay, I'm in one of those. And I have a few different methods of kind of trying to deconstruct it. You know, often I will go into like, okay, how is this like some kind of revisit or repetition of some kind of childhood narrative? Or is this narrative often nowadays, it's less about that. And it's more like, okay, how is this narrative serving to help me avoid the thing that's really hard for me to do? That's one of the main ones I go to. Oh, how is this narrative actually convenient for me to avoid something that's actually difficult for me? Can we discuss the idea of goals in therapy and how you measure progress?

Is there a point when you feel like a couple is done or a person is done? How do you judge that? Yeah, sure. It's different between couples and individuals. Very different. But with couples, first of all, usually the work with couples is so much shorter than with individuals, but with couples, when they, when the kind of intensity and toxicity of their conflict goes down and it feels like, you know, a working relationship in the sense, I mean, my goal is not to free, liberate people from conflict.

I mean, conflict is part of life, but if a couple figures out a way to work through difference without going into like unnecessarily triggering toxic feelings, then my work is done. I mean, they don't need me. feelings, then my work is done. I mean, they don't need me. Or if I feel like whatever I'm saying is, if I'm just running out of new things to say, if I'm saying the same thing over and over, and either it's, they already know it, or I'm not making a dent, which also sometimes sadly happens, then it's time to move on. If I'm running out of things to say, it sort of means the therapy is over. I have several friends who are therapists,

and one of my favorite questions for them, because it just seems like this has to happen a lot, is that how often does someone walk in the room and you know the thing they have to realize, and you're like, please, just say this one sentence and it'll get there and it'll be done, and it's like months, and then they say it and you're get there and it'll be done. And it's like months. And then they say it and you're like, finally, we're there. And I know that's obviously that's a huge reductive vision of it, but it does feel like. It happens. It does happen.

Like people can walk in and, you know, you know, I know, I know if I said it right now, it's going to mean nothing to them, but eventually they're going to get it and they're going to be fine. Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate you making the time. Same here, Chris. Really, absolute pleasure.

It's just like, I love the questions. I love the way you're thinking about things. You went to the things that matter to me personally. So thank you. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you to today's guest, Dr. Orna Goralnik. Her show, Couples Therapy, is on Showtime. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter

and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Anna Phelan, Whitney Pennington Rogers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who are all being filmed for an acclaimed Verite documentary series called Team Podcasting. Every episode of this show is professionally fact-checked, and this episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Erica Yoon, who are both experts in healthy and direct communication. On the PRX side, diving deep into the far recesses of both my psyche and their own are Morgan Flannery, Rosalind Tortosilias, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. We'll be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there.

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