Life Uncut - Is your name wi-fi cause I'm feeling a connection - Talking connection and compatibility with Dr Ali Walker

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Joining us today is Dr Ali Walker. Ali is  a Human Connection Scientist with a PhD in group dynamics. She has spent a large part of her adult life wanting to understand more deeply why we seem to 'click' with certain people and 'clash' with others.It's likely you've heard of introversion and extraversion, but Ali's research goes a step further and helps us understand how we connect with certain people; it's through two frameworks she labels 'frequency' and 'intensity.' We were so interested in how this can be applied to our romantic relationships. friendships and even our workplace relationships. Do 'opposites' actually attract? Turns out no, and that would likely lead to a bad relationship. Ali unpacks exactly how alike we should be with our romantic partners! We also unpack the three different types of loneliness and how you can be surrounded by people but still feel lonely.You can get more of Dr Ali Walker's research and her new book "Click or Clash' here https://awalker.co/We also unpack the new doco by Brooke Shields called 'Pretty Baby' (on Disney plus) and the hypersexualisation of children in pop culture. Maybe things haven't changed as much as we think they should have.Join the Facebook group! Follow our Instagram and our Tiktok!Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because we love love! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Laura. And on today's episode, we're going to be unpacking the brand new documentary on Disney plus Pretty Baby. Now Pretty Baby is a documentary about Brooke Shields life but not just her life it's about the hyper sexualization she experienced as a child actor and a child model and it's truly

mind-blowing. It really is and I thought when I first watched this doco I was like this would never fly today but the thing that we're talking about in this episode is how prevalent sexualization of minors still is in pop culture. We're also talking to Dr. Ali Walker. Now Dr. Ali Walker is a human connection scientist. She is the author of Click and Clash. We talked to Dr. Ali about compatibility in relationships, not just romantic relationships, but all relationships. And why is it that we click with some people so deeply and so quickly and why we can feel as though we clash with others without really understanding why. But before we speak to Ali, we're going to unpack all your confessions. So let's get into it. It's that weird time of year

now where the hot cross buns are going to leave our shopping centers. What's next? Oh, I know what's next? It's Halloween. What's next? Christmas is next, Laura, then we all die. Then we all die? Fucking grim. I feel like life's going really fast. It's Halloween. That's what's going to happen. Although I'm going to hold onto it for dear life for a little bit longer. Okay. A couple of things I want to say here. I saw Maddie J's story about the hot cross bun, chocolate hot cross bun for sure. Not fruit hot cross buns, chocolate hot cross buns. So if you don't know what Britt's talking about, Matt made the world's dumbest skit, probably the dumbest piece of content he's ever made today about when you go to the shopping

center and you buy hot cross buns but you accidentally buy the wrong kind we had a moment over the weekend where we'd stocked up because even though we're adults we have no idea what days the shopping centers are closed and the grocery stores are closed over easter so we were like fuck fend for yourselves it's four days everything's shut and it's like the whole covid toilet paper gate again where you're like i better get all the hot cross buns just in case the shop's closed and i can't come back and get them oh yeah thursday last week we stockpiled We were like, the shops are closed for a week. We stockpiled all the toilet paper.

We stockpiled all the hot cross buns. And then we got home and realised we bought chocolate ones and it was truly devastating because that's just not our jam. It's not our vibe. Personally, I don't mind the chocolate hot cross bun. 30 seconds in the microwave, done. If there's no chocolate, I will have a raisin one, but that's as a backup to the chocolate.

What sort of animal is microwaving their hot cross buns? Oh, it's the bomb. And you know what Sherry, my sister, used to do? Now, she's a nutritionist, but she'll tell you this anyway. She used to go one step extra and put a chocolate egg in the hot cross bun and then put it in the microwave so that it extra melts through the hot cross bun and then she'd eat a double chocolate hot cross bun. Was this since becoming a nutritionist or prior to?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, fine. No, she's a great nutritionist in terms of like balance, live your best life. Easter is so different when you have two little children. Easter is all about Easter egg hunts. We did so many goddamn Easter egg hunts. my children think the Easter bunny comes for like five days straight it's Monday and the kids woke up this morning and they were like did the Easter bunny come last night walked down to the garden

and started looking under things and then were pissed at the Easter bunny that he didn't leave more eggs I mean very selfish of this money but doesn't the Easter bunny just come one day yes but I feel like things have morphed over time because back when we were kids the Easter bunny came one day and you did one Easter egg hunt but now it's like you go and do an Easter egg hunt at your friend's house or at your nan's house or your mum's house there's so many east egg hunts and that was my entire weekend but on top of that I don't know if you guys remember a couple of weeks ago I was telling you this is we share way too much with you but you know what you're in the inner sanctum so I'll keep on telling you I'm going to have a colonoscopy and that is happening

breaking news yeah hello everybody I'm having a colonoscopy after interviewing Kelly the other week I really took it seriously and I was like this needs to get fast-tracked totally I'm having it tomorrow which if you've ever had a colonoscopy before you would know and if you haven't I'll explain it to you you have to be on a white diet for 48 hours prior to the colonoscopy and then you've got to do this thing it's I think it's called like pico prep or something where basically you just shit yourself for an entire day yes accurate so I didn't really think about it when I booked this in and they take so long to book in with a specialist appointment I booked it in for the day after Easter so I have only been eating white food for the last two days everyone's been

having chocolate everyone's been eating like beautiful roast dinners and having this gorgeous family time and I sat there last night and ate bone broth rice and a piece of white fish and I felt really sorry for myself you know who'd be proud Gwyneth Paltrow she'd be proud of that bone broth for dinner for the collagen and some air I mean look it's very unfortunate timing to have to do the pico prep literally over the Easter weekend you have to drink like three cups of laxatives and then never leave your house that's pretty much where I'm at now Britt you are still in Scotland at the moment when it's just the two of you did you do Easter did you have any sort of like special moment where you bought each other an easter egg I did not do that I forgot hand on

heart okay I'm gonna say this right now I've actually had a fit to drink over the weekend so I've got a bit of a rusty throat but something has happened to me that has never happened really before but I am wildly obsessed with Ben what do you mean that has never happened before no you have definitely been obsessed with I'm very glad that you're obsessed with Ben it's cute it's adorable I'm all for it yay Brittany and Ben flag but I think you forget that you have been wildly obsessed with men in the past yeah no the thing i'm gonna say is it's not the obsessed part i'm wildly obsessed right now but what it's done to me is the new part i for the first time ever i hate to label it but i'm needy like i'm really needy and i'm not used to that ew i've created this

thing and i think he hates it where i say i made a rule in there you know you make rules in your own relationship but like not like you can't cheat my rule is like when i say magnet we have to go together like a magnet he has to give me a cuddle i have to like you know what i mean like when magnet it's so stupid anyway I say magnet but now I just walk around saying magnet all the time and I'm stuck to him like a rash and I've never experienced before I am needy I'm needy it's fucked it's so fucked and I need to get out of it but I also don't know if it's because I know I'm on a time limit like I know I'm only on two weeks at a time so I feel like I'm trying to get it all in it and you know get all my time but I don't know what's happening you probably know because

you've done this for 25 years. I have not been in a relationship for 25 years. We've been in a relationship for six years now, which is truly not that long considering how many children we've pumped out. No, but you know, when you're in that very first stages of a relationship where you start to do the little weird quirky things that like make your relationship unique, but also to other people, they're just weird. Oh, 100%. So like whenever Matt was angry, I used to hug him and squeeze him tight. And I'd be like, squeezing all the grumpies out, squish them all out. That would have made him so much more mad. So pathetic. And it makes everybody listening to this feel like I'm so embarrassed for you. But these are the things that we all do when we're in

new relationships. No, I don't think anyone's embarrassed. I think everyone has this one of these stupid little things and you don't even know how it happens. Like you don't even know how it comes up. If you are somebody who has like a completely weird that no one else would understand quirk that you do with your partner, send them in. I reckon we're going to get thousands. I want to hear it. And we can all use them to annoy our now long-term partners. Something that I saw over the weekend I watched this documentary on Disney it is called Pretty Baby and it's all about Brooke Shields and her I guess like her autobiography and the life that she lived when she was ridiculously uber famous when she was very very young Brit I got you to watch it because I

was in disbelief and if you haven't seen it yet this is absolutely my recommendation for this week go and watch Pretty Baby on Disney Plus not sponsored just fucking eye-opening like I was talked for those people before we get into this conversation because it's a fucking crazy conversation and it's for those that don't know who Brooke Shields is maybe our younger audience Brooke Shields she's 57 now but she since the age of like two years old has been in the media so her entire life but for us growing up she was the epitome of fame she was fame she was an amazing model she was an amazing actress she's a child actress she married the world number one tennis champion Andre Agassi like from age like 15 to 25 she was Hollywood so just so you understand in

case you don't know who Brooke Shields is that was her well I feel like a lot of people would remember the movie that she did Blue Lagoon even if you don't know who Brooke Shields is you might have heard of Blue Lagoon well see I didn't watch it I never watched Blue Lagoon it was so fucking iconic like I remember watching it when I was about 15 years old so if you haven't seen it it's this real sounds cliche but like coming of age movie where she hits puberty and she discovers her like sexual desire and she starts to get those tingly feelings and wants to have sex with the boy now weirdly that boy actually is her cousin and they live on a deserted island but I remember watching it as like a 15 year old girl and being just entranced by one she was so beautiful and

stunning and perfect but just the fact that she was navigating what sexuality was on screen in front of us there was nothing else that existed like it you were just a horny teenager at home with your friends watching yes I was a horny teenager who was like that's what I'm feeling not that I want to have sex with my cousin because that's weird I also have okay I also have fanny flutters but the thing is watching it back now as like an adult and understanding her story and her background. It's so interesting to look at that movie with a very, very different lens. She was only 15 at the time of filming it. The boy who played the role of her cousin was 19 years old. So she'd never had sex. She was underage. She was being hyper-sexualized in this role

and being held up as like a sex icon and sex symbol when she was still a child and she was still trying to understand what all that meant for herself it completely changed the way that media treated her so she would sit and go to interviews say like the equivalent of like a Saturday night live for example and the male interviewers would say well it's gonna be hard for me to see you as a child after this when she was literally a child it was disgusting but she was also I mean just touched on what you said Brit in terms of her like immense stardom she was like the face and body of a huge Calvin Klein campaign which was like an overtly sexual campaign also when she was underage it was like she became the sex symbol of that era but the whole time she

wasn't even 18 years old well that's what this documentary is the underlying feature here is the whole premise the whole purpose she's created is to shine a light on the over sexualization of children in Hollywood the sexualization of her and the pushing and the control from her mum who was an alcoholic into fame now as an adult you look back at what we used to watch like Blue Lagoon you fucking loved it you were 15 you didn't understand what it was we look back now after listening to what she went through to make those movies for our entertainment and it makes me feel physically ill there's actually this great quote that I read when I was reading up on this and it was this sexualization is so embedded in our media that many times we may not even recognize it when

it comes out in front of us something like a pageant where young girls are dressed in suggestive costumes can start to impress that sexuality you don't have to look far into the media to discover rampant over sexualization of young people and I guess the big thing is with this Brit is I would never at that age and also I mean it was a reflection of my age have watched Blue Lagoon and seen it as being problematic and seen it as being something that the adults around Brooke who was only 15 at the time had dictated and I guess forced her into not forced because I know obviously she agreed to but when you are a child yourself and you're not understanding the complex concepts that you're performing they're the ones that are supposed to protect you but they're the ones that

are actually guiding you into being even more sexualized and I think when I was watching this with Matt I was like oh my god this would never happen today we were talking about it and I was like this doesn't exist today and then the more that we got talking about it the more that I think we realized the over sexualization of teenagers across say film clips across TikTok across social media it still exists it just doesn't exist as overtly and in the exact same way now there was one other thing that happened in this documentary when Brooke was talking about how she got into the industry basically and when the sexualization started she was 11 years old in her very first movie and she played a child prostitute so basically she was the child of a prostitute

who lived in like the early 1900s it's based on a true story actually but she was only 11 years old when she was playing the role of this character and her virginity was being sold to a older man some of the stuff that Brooke was having to say is like her scripted lines it's truly disgusting like talking about the heat coming out of her dress at 11 years old she wouldn't have even understood what she was saying and on top of that she had her very first kiss when I say her very first kiss on screen and also in real life because the girl was 11 with a 29 year old man I cannot believe that nobody in that room stood there and went this is not appropriate for a child but that happened and that went to air and it was a huge movie across the states and across europe well

that movie is pretty much what flung her into the spotlight more so than she already was because she was sort of people knew who she was but that was a movie that really put her on the grid put her on people's radar it's disgusting to watch like we just said it wouldn't happen now like euphoria is a really good example we're seeing teenagers doing sex drugs doing sex doing the sex they're doing the sex they're doing the drugs but they're 20 21 22 23 up to 25 they're 25 year olds playing those characters they're not going out and grabbing a 13 year old or a 14 year old and putting them on it's not the done thing anymore well i mean it's also still permeated all throughout our upbringings like think about our childhoods and like the icons that we looked up to and emulated

when we were in our teens i remember britney spears and i mean fucking everyone remembers britney spears but think about that film clip hit me baby one more time she's dressed in a school uniform she's in a school she's at the school corridors yeah she's at the school she's wearing a tiny little skirt she's wearing a tiny little blouse button-downed and I understand that she's obviously trying to all the people who created that concept are obviously trying to appeal to people her age but they're selling people her age which was you and me at that time sex they were selling us this sexualized version of a teenager and we fucking lapped it up and none of us thought that was weird at the time it was everywhere but you don't think it you sucked into

it because sex sells yeah and I think you don't think it because it truly is everywhere and when I was looking into this and the more examples of it that I thought in terms of like what's been happening in recent times so many of us would know like Billie Eilish for example and how she wears like the baggy oversized clothes now Billie Eilish is 21 I think now but she's always worn baggy oversized clothes and has made a real statement that it's because she doesn't want to be sexualized she wants people to focus on the music not on how she looks but back in 2019 there was a photo that circulated of her she was wearing a crop top it was taken at like a meet and greet backstage and not only was it circulated it went viral there were so many news articles around what

Billie Eilish looked like when she was wearing a crop top and how sexy she was but she was under age at the time and it's like at what point has it ever been appropriate to talk about 16 year olds or 15 year olds in this way but yet it still happens all the time kids are so exposed to it from so young in so many different ways that even just the other day I put on music and Marley was dancing in front of the tv she's three and a half and the little hip thrusts and the way in which she was dancing well you're like where did you see that and they have like they've absorbed it from somewhere whether it's been from watching something on social media or seeing something on YouTube, but they just absorb it and then it becomes normal. But there are kids all over the

world on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram where their accounts are being run by their parents, but they're making absolute bank off promoting their children. And now we talked about it recently. Is it unboxing a toy? That's okay. Is that okay? Is it that they're making their children do beauty pageants and dancing and that's how they're making their money? I don't know but there are kids out there with a ridiculous amount of followers who the fuck are these followers like are these older men are these predators who's following these accounts well we spoke about this the other week when France is changing the laws around social media and having children I guess like making an income from social media and it kind of was a real penny drop moment

watching this documentary because I was like this is the stuff we're going to be talking about in 10 years but about social media young children who have YouTube channels and TikToks and they're making a huge amount of money but there isn't a lot of safety and I guess legislation around it yet and at the time I kind of thought maybe what France is doing is going a bit hard but I guess after watching Brooke Shields doco and having a better understanding about not only how children are being sexualized through our popular culture but also how some parents aren't doing their job in protecting children like the big part of this doco was that her mum was her manager and her mum thought that it was a good idea and you know was using her as a way of making an income and was

pushing her into these sexualized roles because they were making a hell of a lot of money when she was 15 made me think that it's absolutely still happening in certain ways across social media across TikTok across Instagram and without it being as heavily regulated people can get away with it and I feel like in 10, 15, 20 years time when this generation of children who have grown up on social media are older and are able to tell their stories that's when we're going to fully understand the total impact of what that is having on young kids we both can't recommend it enough if you've got any time up your sleeve watch it two parts two and a bit hours and i think you'll be hooked from the moment it starts all right well let's move on to what we usually do is an

accidentally unfiltered but we had some absolutely cracker confessionals come in this week i was like wetting my pants laughing so we're going to we're going to rattle off some confessions can i just say that these are wildly inappropriate and like i love that you feel that this is a safe space and you can share the most inappropriate things that you've done this does not absolve you of your sins though you guys are all cooked and we're here for it oh no but keep them coming in and we don't condone these i'm going to start this from the start we don't condone these but it's also some of them are cooked but some of them are innocent and funny too i'll start you off with an innocent one i made a coffee for my friend at work but i accidentally used the off

milk when i got to making my own coffee so i switched the coffees and gave her the off one wouldn't you just throw it out start again coffees don't take that long just order one for four dollars don't give someone food poisoning well this just makes me think you should never ever leave anything around a co-worker i spat into a co-worker's water bottle because she pissed me off That is fucking rank. You cannot do that. Also, COVID. How should I COVID?

My boyfriend has never made me orgasm. Four years in and I don't know how to tell him. You can't tell him now. You're done. Yeah. I mean, if that was an ask on cart, what would we say? You can't tell him that you can't orgasm after four years of faking it. You're fucked.

No, we would say you have to, but also, fuck, you shot yourself in the foot. Four years? That's a really long lie. That's a long game. Okay. Okay. One day in Big W, I put a $5 sticker on a $50 dress. So I bought it for $5. That's stealing. That's theft.

I don't know the difference between skirting or just plain weeing during sex. I think I just wee. Squirting is a bit of wee and a bit of squirt. So like maybe you're just doing both or maybe you're not. Maybe you're just pissing and you're not actually squirting at all. I've got the worst one. I've been with my husband for 19 years, but I still love my ex. you don't really love your ex you don't i'm gonna tell you this i hope you're listening to this you do not love your ex you have created a fantasy obsession about your ex that's not real because he is not that person 19 years later and you have built it up in your mind to be something that it's absolutely not you do not love your ex also you're bored like yes you're bored you've been

with your husband for 19 years he's probably amazing but you're bored you've had the same thing day in and day out for 19 years oh my god and your ex is probably toxic as fuck stay away all right i'm attracted to a priest at my catholic church lol can't do that do not follow through on that i've been using my mother-in-law's credit card on my uber accounts for the past year she will know she knows she just hasn't told you of course she will know Oh, my God. Okay. This one is the worst one.

I've been having an affair with my good friend's husband for 1.5 years. The sex is wild. I just can't stop. You're going to hell. This one, I don't know who's wrong here. A one-night stand once made me squat in his backyard like a dog to wee because he didn't want his parents to know that I was there and their bedroom was next to the toilet.

Oh, let the girl take a piss. I can't believe I actually did it. could you imagine oh my god the things you did back then because you didn't want to pipe up like yes you've got to go take a dump outside after i've had sex with you because i don't want my parents to know i just had sex with you and you're like yes okay i'll just go dump behind the tree in your backyard sometimes in life we're so worried about offending or doing something wrong by the other person and this is one of those moments where you say do you know what i'm just gonna go and piss in the toilet and you can deal with your parents that's what this is

Don't be so nice, everyone. When I grocery shop from companies that are big, like Kohl's, I steal one item to counteract inflation. I love that she just takes that. That's also theft. But I love that she takes that into her own hands and she's like, well, we're not being paid more and inflation is going up, so I'm going to steal from Kohl's.

Yeah, maybe Kohl's is the enemy. Don't steal. I was going to say, is Kohl's the enemy or Woolworths? I don't know. But now that they've got the self-serve checkout thing and they've got less employees, I feel like they're part of the problem. Don't steal, guys. Don't steal.

Yeah, yeah, don't steal. Don't steal. All right, let's get into the chat with Dr. Ali Walker. But if you guys have any more accidentally unfiltered confessionals, just random stories, maybe it's an act of kindness, whatever you've got that you want to share with us, slide on into the DMs because we absolutely love hearing it and these confessionals were very messed up this week.

So enjoy. Today we are speaking with Dr. Ali Walker, who is a human connection scientist and mediator with a PhD in group dynamics. She's also the author of the brand new book, Click and Clash. Why do we naturally click with some people and feel as though we clash with others? Why do we feel like we radiate on the same frequency as some and then can feel completely alien to others? And what is it that we can do to bridge that gap when we feel worlds apart?

We've all asked the question before in our romantic relationships, whether we are compatible with someone, but we haven't really unpacked the ins and outs of compatibility before on the podcast and what it really means to be compatible with someone. Today, Dr. Ali Walker is here to talk us through why we click or clash with different people. And it's not just our romantic relationships. This is applicable to every relationship in your life, to your friendships, to your workplace relationships with your colleagues, every single one. Dr. Ali, welcome to Life Uncut.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Thanks for so much for coming in today. And you came in physically into the chaos. You have entered the lion's den. So thank you. It's exciting. Oh, Ali, you've literally seen the chaos for a second.

We had a bit of a chaotic morning. Poor Ali's been here for 25 minutes whilst we've been trying to set the studio up. I know, and we haven't even got the poor thing a coffee yet, but it's on the way. We kickstart every episode with Accidentally Unfiltered, your most embarrassing story, and I can see you're a little bit petrified. Do you have one? So I do. I think everyone has one. Anyway, so I'll get right into it. It was back in high school. I was a singer at high school. I love singing. And at my school, we did a music festival, and it's almost like an athletics carnival for music.

Are we in primary school or high school? High school. High school, okay. Except it's drawn out over a term or a term and a bit. So I was in the final year of school and you have all these tryouts and heats and the people who get to the final and win that final go to the town hall at Sydney and perform. I shouldn't laugh but it sounds so funny.

I'm getting real bring it on vibes. And thank goodness it wasn't at the town hall but it was in the the final of the senior vocals and it was my final chance to sing and maybe make it to the town hall all right so i performed singing a lot of times before and i'd had singing lessons and this was my time and i was singing i think it was dream a little dream of me oh big that's a big one to take on there's a moment where it goes the stars waiting but i linger on okay so you can tell it goes oh my god anyway so at the first high bit I had what I can only describe as a testy pop it did never happen to me before it has never happened to me since it just cracked and there

was there was a girl a friend of mine in the audience and she was sitting there and she's smiling along and she went like that when she she actually startled when I did that when I made You never made it to Town Hall, did you? You'd be shocked. But I did not win senior vocal. I was mortified because I'd practised so much and honestly it was just a freaking moment. And did everyone laugh?

But also you've got to remember that when you're a teenager or a kid, everything is intensified. Like everything is ten times worse. If you went and did a public speaking event now and you stumbled a word or your voice cracked, you wouldn't be putting it in the trauma box under the bed for the rest of your life. You'd be like, I'm all right.

I can deal with this. But when you're like 15. I'd probably laugh at the time and get everybody else to laugh with me. I'd probably say, how weird was that that I just did that? And I would then move on with my life. Let's get into it. Why y'all came here for. Let's shift archetypes out of the teenager to the adult.

Not only into the adult, into being a criminal lawyer for the DPP. Like that real took a turn, didn't it? Yeah. The testy pop really did one on her. Before, and we're going back to your career outside of university, what was it that made you want to get into criminal defense law and I guess what was then the pivot from that into wanting to do a PhD in human connection that was a real plot twist so I when I finished high school I was never interested in science or maths or anything like that I was

always humanities and English and history and legal studies and so it was just almost a natural next step I always thought I wanted to be a lawyer without knowing much about the day-to-day practice of it and as I got through the law degree I did a bit of corporate and I didn't want to do property and I did I want I loved people I love the emotion I love and then I got to the end and I thought well I realized there's only people law for me it's criminal or family and so I applied for this job at the director of public prosecution so I was actually a prosecutor not a defense lawyer which may have changed things if I was defensive so I started off and so 2007 2006 2007 culture and leadership weren't really cared about or thought about then. No one thought about well-being at

work or psychosocial hazards at work. It was just, you turn up for a job, you got the job and here you go. And so I ended up having some, I guess, intense reactions to the work I was doing. Being young and female, and this is relevant, being young and female has put on all the sexual assault and child sexual assault cases. And it was relevant because all of the victims were young and female and they didn't want to re-traumatise anyone. And it was so interesting because no one thought about traumatising anyone in the work space, of course, because the more important person in that scenario is the victim. And so they just said, oh, she's young and female, we'll put you on it, we'll put you on it. And I remember one day going into the office manager's

office and she was the one who allocated, I don't know if she did it, but she had something to do with allocating the cases and I remember on a Monday morning much like this morning going in and saying can you please put me on an aggravated robbery or a drugs case any assault anything and I thought that's a strange Monday morning at work when you when you're pleading for different sorts of cases so I guess that was the first indication that there was something happening in me and I started having symptoms in my body not anything extreme but just that I'd never had before that I couldn't explain I'd go to the doctor and have all my like blood tests taken no nothing's wrong with you, but I was just responding to this work in a way that wasn't great. And I also looked at

the people who were more experienced, the crown prosecutors, the people who, if I stayed in that role and I went well, I would become. And I thought, I don't know if I want to do that. It's a very harrowing workplace to be in. The process, the criminal process is quite, as you can imagine, quite intense. So I was absorbing all the emotions of everyone around me. I didn't have any training or supervision clinical supervision we know with psychologists and doctors they are trained to deal with complex trauma in criminal law you're dealing with complex trauma and no there is no training none it's actually quite amazing do you think it's something that people intuitively then lean into or it's like you learn to cope with it or do you think it's a certain type of personality that is

better suited to that job and you look at it now and go that was not my personality type that was could function in that workplace it's so interesting you ask that because this is a really live question for me. I think it's a bit of all of what you said. I think some people who go into that role have a particular type of personality, which ended up, and I'm not trying to segue here, but that ended up being the basis for this book, Click or Clash. My reaction was overly intense because I've worked out I am an intense connector. Some people aren't as intense, their mid-intensity or low-intensity, so their reaction to the courtroom is very, very different. I'd have people in the courtroom next to me, a police officer, and someone, I remember there

was an offender screaming screaming at everyone I'm going to do this to you and I'm going to get you and I'm stiff and petrified and this police officer leans into me sitting next to me and he says I think he's talking to you and starts laughing I made a joke because he was able to just sort of laugh it off and that was his low intensity reaction to a high intensity situation so I remember one day calling my then boyfriend now husband and he's a chef and I said to him I was almost in tears because I'd just come out of this victim meeting and we'd been hearing her story. And I said, I'm just, I don't know if this is, I'm okay in this job. I don't know if this is right for me. And I'm really upset. And I just heard this horrible story. And this is all this

job is, this horrible story. And I remember saying at the end, what are you doing? And he said, peeling potatoes. And I didn't want to peel potatoes, but I wanted to feel like that about my job. I wanted to just feel really arm's length. You know, I like what I do, but I'm not crying every day. I'd be sitting in meetings and passing tissues to the person telling their story. and saying to my willing myself not to cry not to cry so I don't know to your question I don't know if if it's a personality type if someone is more resilient because they may have been exposed to that sort of trauma in the past they may have had a family member who worked in that setting they may have had a family member who's a police officer they may have grown up just hearing about those

stories and being conditioned to that it's I think there's there's a lot of complex factors anyway so your original question was how did you end up going from that to PhD so I ended up talking to my mum about it. It was a gradual process of thinking. It was almost like putting your hand in the fire in slow motion. That's how that job felt. And then going as your hand is in the fire and feeling the burn. And I remember saying to my mum, I don't know what to do. I've studied for so long, years, six years. You're on the conveyor belt. How do you get off? And I felt shame because I almost felt like a failure. You've studied for so long, you idiot. And now, and it almost felt like going off this well-worn path, this conveyor belt through uncharted path with a machete. That's

how it felt to leave that job. And I had no idea what I was doing. And all I knew was that I was fascinated by human behavior. I wanted to change the system because I looked at that system and I thought, this is just re-traumatizing every single person involved in this system. And this needs to change. It can't be a punishment system. It needs to be a therapeutic system. And people who commit crimes, they're not okay in the beginning. So there was all of this. I knew I wanted to go back and understand more. So I went back and I ended up doing a PhD in group dynamics. So all of those experiences, the love of human behavior, the fascination for complex emotion and trauma, and the experience in the courtroom led me to then go back and do that PhD. And I also studied

coaching and became a qualified coach at the time because, you know, do I go back and study psychology and start all over again? That felt like an insurmountable task to start back at the beginning, but I kind of tried to gather all of these experiences into a bucket and make sense of them. For someone who has studied and has spent such a long time putting together, not only studying how humans interact with each other, but also putting together a kind of chart system for how we can categorize ourselves. Do you think we in general as people are quite bad at understanding how humans connect and understanding how other people show up in the world? Absolutely. Myself included and i think it's because we are not formally taught to understand people we're not

given any education in it it's all supposedly intuitive yeah it's like you can learn maths and everyone gets the same information there but hey even though you're gonna have to have multiple relationships with so many people go figure that shit out for yourself and fuck it up plenty of times i think yeah like trigonometry who even needs to do that i do also think we're being taught a lot at the moment and this comes in the form of instagram quotes it comes in the form of you know the self-help of like you be unapologetically you and sometimes being unapologetically you is rude not that it's rude but it doesn't open up to understanding how other people show up in the world and to maybe leaning into a way that makes them feel comfortable I'd love to understand from

you a little bit Ali in terms of the research that you've done and the model that you've put together can you speak us sort of through I know you have so many different types of how people connect but just a bit of an overview and also what is high frequency low frequency these terminology that you use in your model so I ended up identifying two elements two key elements of our relationships and how we connect with other people and those two key elements are frequency or how much is the first and intensity or what type so they're the two parts frequency and intensity now frequency is really easy people would be familiar with the ideas of introversion and extroversion, it's correlated to that. So if you're an extroverted person, you're going to be

a high frequency connector. If you're an introverted person, you're going to be a low frequency connector. Now some people are what I call mid frequency connectors, so right in the middle, and you are an ambivert, which means that you're dictated by social context. So you might kind of feel like life's a bit of a pinball machine where you go from being bored to being overwhelmed. So you've got high, mid and low frequency. If you're really low frequency, you're probably happy to live on your own. You prefer the company of animals maybe to the company of people. It's about where you feel most like yourself and most at home. So high frequency people will feel most like themselves in the company of other people. And it can be certain types of people,

not just anyone, but that's frequency. So is that, do you get that? That's pretty obvious to most people. Intensity is new. So this is a new element that I identified in researching group dynamics. Intensity is about what type of human connection you prefer to experience with other people and how you bond with others. And this is the real key here because we talk a lot about extroverts and introverts, but we don't talk a lot about, well, when you are together with people, how do you like that to feel and how do you like that to be? So high intensity people primarily connect through talking and through emotional sharing

conversations and animated ideas and they feel a lot. And so when they're around other people, they engage in what I call affective empathy. Affective empathy is I feel your feelings. I'm experiencing how you're feeling. And that's a high intensity connector. Low intensity connectors are people who want to be around other people, but where there's no pressure to talk. So let's go for a kayak or let's go surfing.

Let's go for a bike ride. Let's go to a movie. Let's go see a show. Let's play cards. But there's no pressure on that high intensity interaction. Now, some people might be listening and thinking, well, hold on, it depends on the day. I might like both.

And they are mid-intensity connectors. So mid-intensity connectors have great range and they can probably do dinner and a movie. You know, when I was younger, I'm such high-intensity connector that when I'd be asked out on a date to go to a movie, I'd be thinking, we don't even know each other yet. Why do you want to go to a movie? And then we can't talk and get to know each other.

Yeah, a movie's for when you really, really, really know someone already. Of course, I would say yes, because I wanted to go out with them. but I never understood why I thought that was an odd choice. And I think it's because people like, cause it's low intensity. There's no pressure. The pressure is off on the connection if you're in a low intensity scenario. So I think of intensity as being a little bit like curtains and you probably didn't think I was going to say that, but if you think of high intensity connection as being like a sheer curtain, so a lot comes through and a lot you can see through that curtain. The heart is on their sleeve and share a lot. And low intensity

connection, the further you're going down on the continuum, you're getting towards blockout curtains where they take a long time to open up, a long time to trust. Do you think that over time we can change our frequency and our intensity? Because listening to you say that, I've always thought that I was high, like tornado, hurricane, high, high, high, high, high. But everything you just said, I'm like, I'm actually quite low, low, low, low, which is unusual because we talk for a living and we're always here, you know, when we're on, we're on. But I think I used to be a hurricane. So do you think it's normal for people to change through the seasons? Absolutely. And I think of this as, so there's a difference between a life indicator and a type indicator. Now,

a type indicator is something that will stay with you for the rest of your days. So this is who you are. Now, a life indicator reflects where you are in your life at that point. So this absolutely can change and my research has shown that particularly as we age our frequency declines and I think everyone can relate to that compare how much you wanted to go out when you're a child or a teenager to how often you go out now or how your energy just declines over time you just think I'm drained by different things and I put my energy into different things so when my friends like organize a dinner and they're like let's meet at eight o'clock I'm like p.m you want to meet at 8 p.m like to me that's so late i want to have already gone out for dinner and be home by 8 p.m

yeah but that happened to me yesterday yeah and i'm like what do you mean 8 p.m surely they've got that's all they've got this only booking oh i don't think i can make it yeah i'm organizing something with my that's what i mean though this friday night and they're saying oh how about 7 30 and i realized 7 30 wow okay okay right seven okay you're gonna be a big one big call i've got saturday sport with the kids in the morning i'm gonna be trying you just shift over your life and i think that's why i like this because you can take this at a different point in your life and get but we don't change as much as we think we do right i'd also love to this is gonna sound creepy i'd love to profile you when you think you're low compared to other people

you couldn't do this job unless you had capacity for high frequency and high intensity yeah i have the capacity but the capacity is small and also because you do the work that you do i would say that what we tend to do if you think about it almost like connection credits so if you're doing a podcast like this that's going to take a lot let's say we've got 100 credits a day and doing a podcast like this is going to take up a lot of your credits because you have to be on and like really going for that discrete period of time you're then going to have less when you leave and you're going to have to compensate after doing a podcast like this. And I think the same because of the work that I do.

It's very high intense burst, high intensity bursts of energy. And so then the rest of the day might be, even my sister said to me recently in social events now, you know, at family things, I used to give speeches all the time. I go, I get up and go, sure, I'll speak. And now no one asked you, Ali. No, but I will. My sister did say to me recently, she said, you are more withdrawn now.

not withdrawn is a strong word, but you are quieter now at social events because of what you do for a job. In terms of identifying. So if you, I mean, I think most of us can kind of listen to that and have an understanding of who we are, but is there a clear example, if you're going to meet someone, is there an easy identifier that might make you go, you are low intensity, you are high intensity. So there's some really easy ways to read someone else's behavior and understand what kind of connector they are and if you can read their connection type you can then know what belonging looks like for them and then you can offer it to them and if belonging is our greatest psychological need and you can offer it to someone your base

it's almost the equivalent of walking up to someone and saying here have a piece of chocolate cake it's just gonna make them happy so if you want to make people happy here's the first way to do it which is to offer them belonging so to read someone's connection type frequency is really easy. Now, because I know you were talking, I could ask you if you were designing a perfect weekend for yourself, no geographical or financial limit, would you want to be around other people for more than 50% of the time? God, no. Half the time? Does it depend on the people though? Because I think you choose, you choose. Oh yeah. I would go away with a partner, but I wouldn't want to be around anyone else more than 50% of the time. No, the partner is included

because some people will say alone more than 50% of the time. I'd probably say 50%. So you'd want to be around him 50% of the time. Yeah. So then you're a mid-frequency connector. 50 to 70, 50 to 70 because he listens. Once I asked this in a workshop and a guy puts up his hand, he goes, do I have to be with my family?

So mostly you can't go up to a stranger and say, so if you're designing a perfect weekend, would you want to be alone for more? And what percent of your time was that? It's going to sound weird. So what you're looking for for frequency is how often someone talks and how fast they talk. So if somebody meets you for the first time and they're just straight in there and they're chatting, no matter what they're talking about,

you can think to yourself, and I can do this really quickly now, high, mid or low frequency. Do you want me to do low frequency? Yeah, give us an example of what this sounds like. It'll sound like I'm sedated. But okay, so here's me doing low frequency. so there's there's more pauses in in speech when someone's low frequency you would feel like they are really thinking about what they're saying

I can't do it for long it just feels too uncomfortable yeah very considered yes and someone's energy they're not focusing too much on the conversation because their habitat is when they're on their own. So for them, the conversation is a lot of energy. Somebody who's high frequency, like it's really, it's loud, it's fast. It's almost, it's exciting to be talking to them and not to say like everyone's variable, right? And it's all relative and it depends on who you're with. It's very contextual, but we do have these comfort zones of connections. That's the first one, that's frequency. So you're looking at how fast someone speaks and how much they speak to work out frequency. Intensity is interesting. And this took me a long time to identify.

And this comes from our body language. You can read someone's intensity through the level of their hand gestures as they're talking in a comfortable conversation. I thought that was just because we're a Greek and Italian background, Laura, so we would talk like this. So some people will say that, that it's cultural, but people who are high frequency, if you imagine that the middle of intensity is almost like the middle of our body. So it's our waist. If your hands are above your waist, a lot of the time when you're in animated conversation, you're a high intensity connector. So you're communicating to other people that you like to connect through talking. Now, if someone's mid intensity, so above the waist,

body language is what we call the truth zone of body language. So between the waist and the shoulders, if our hands are here, this is the truth zone. Above the shoulders is the passion zone so there's a lot of cultures that are communicating like this below the waist they're lying no no no so someone's like i was at home alone i swear you're like gotcha cheater no it's about they can so i guess the truth zone because you know when you're trying to persuade people and your hands are here believe me you know it's impassioned when your hands are up here below the waist is the casual zone of body language so you can have mid-intensity connectors whose hands are down here and you might, they might even dart up here for a second and then

they come back or one's down here and one's up here. So in my workshops, it's fascinating because I get people to just stand up and have a chat with the person next to them. Can you tell when someone's lying? Like I know you're not a human lie detector, but because you're so in depth in behavior from people and responses, do you feel like there are very generic cues to when someone's lying? Like an eye dart or, you know, like not. I think you're looking for, so when you're looking to detect lying or someone who's not telling the truth, you're looking for a deviation or a movement away from baseline behaviors. So to take me for an example, I can't remember the last time I told a lie, not a big one anyway. No one you'll tell on here. So you'd be looking and saying,

okay, well, Ali's normally high frequency. She talks a lot and talks quite quickly and her hands to hear. So if I was saying something that wasn't true, it might be that I, if I normally make eye contact with you, that I stopped making eye contact. But there are some people who rarely make eye contact. And so it doesn't mean that they're lying just because they do. I don't think it's useful to talk about a bullet point list. You're looking for someone moving away from their typical behaviors because they're trying to deceive. So they're not going to engage in how they normally speak. They're going to do something different. Just going back to this conversation about high intensity or low intensity individuals. When we talk about this in terms of like a

workplace, not so much in a romantic relationship, but in a workplace environment, are there certain careers that people who are high intensity are attracted to and people who are low intensity are attracted to? So if you are extreme high intensity, for example, it gives you above average expression and courage and audacity. So I would say that both of you are high intensity and you are willing to share things that most people would be embarrassed to share in a public way but that makes you how dare you how very I mean also fair true yeah but but that gives you above average courage and fearlessness in expression that people enjoy because they can live through you so you become channels right so most people who are around the middle of intensity who don't

want to share unfiltered stuff about their embarrassing past. They want to access people who are willing to do that. Do you see what I'm saying? So it's a gift. It's not about saying, oh, I'm not in the middle. But then if you're low frequency and really high intensity, above average empathy. If you're low frequency and low intensity, above average self-sufficiency. These are the people who would be explorers who can go to Mars because they don't need people as much as other people do. Or if you're somebody who's high frequency, but extreme low intensity. I know I'm saying a lot of terminology here, but above average grit. So these are the people who can probably go to war and deal with those sorts of extreme

environments that most people go, oh, I couldn't do that. So it's not about right or wrong or good or bad types. It's actually about identifying your type, your comfort zone, because it's like your skin. This is how I explain it. If you're highly intense, it's almost like having really fair skin. So when you go out into the sun, you are affected by that world. So when I go into a courtroom, if I'm a high intensity person, it's almost like going out into the sun with no protection. You burn too quickly. You burn really quickly. Whereas if someone's low intensity, they've just got maybe thicker skin and they can go out into the sun and it doesn't affect them as much, but then they don't have that sensitivity and they don't, you know, there's all these

different gifts that come from just finding out your type why do you think it's so important I mean in terms of we've spoken so much in the past about things like being an introvert or an extrovert we've spoken about knowing your attachment style or knowing your love language like there's a million different types of communication styles yeah there's a million different types of tests you can do to figure out who you are I mean we've all also done those tests when you've gone for a new employment to kind of put you into a category of what type of person you are but why do you think it's so important for people to understand their connection type and why do you think this is such a missed category that hasn't been explored so and thank you for asking that because

i didn't want to create a new thing because i almost found it a little bit embarrassing in a way because there's so many quizzes out there and some people might say oh yeah i know that like what type of dog should you buy based on who you are do you like to run or not do you want to be a sloth at home and so they're all of we grew up doing those quizzes in magazines all the time And also trying to put ourselves into different categories to better understand ourselves, I guess. Yes, and this one was different. And the reason I designed it is because I realised all these tests

we're doing tell us about who we are, whereas this one has a different focus and it's more about the social environment that helps you thrive. And that's why this is different. That's why I wanted to create it because I did see a huge gap. So what I want people to take from this is not, oh, that's who I am, full stop. it's actually, okay, so here's my optimal connection environment. Here's my optimal social environment. So how can I design my life in a way that supports me? So the gifts that you both have, if you were in an introverted, low intensity life where you were doing quite nonverbal

tasks all day, every day, I would expect you to really languish. I would expect you to be very unhappy because you're not living according to your connection environment. And equally, if you have someone doing a podcast like this and they're low frequency and low intensity, they would be sweating. They'd be petrified. Their mouth would be dry. Like they would have, they'd take days to recover from something like this. So I want people to use this and then say, okay, so this is the sort of environment I need. And so you asked a question about workplaces. And now post COVID, we have this huge opportunity to design workplaces in a flexible way. Not all can be. And some people I speak to work in jails and they sort of say, well, yeah, how do I do

flexible working or working from home if I'm a corrective services officer? Obviously not every workplace can do this, but if you do work from home now, you can start to design your week in a way that supports your connection. What's really interesting is we're seeing this mid-frequency, mid-intensity way of connecting because most people live there where people go, let's just come into the office about half the time or three days a week and then work from home the rest of the time. And we'll have some collaboration time and some, it's really, you can see that the world is designed for the people in the middle. Ali, I'd love to talk about romantic relationships because it's a big part of what we talk about here at Life Uncut. What is your take on this

idea of opposites attract? Because we hear this term all the time, opposites attract, but then we hear people say, oh, but you don't want someone to opposite because you'll clash. You want someone to have some similarities with you. Then you have people say, I have mommy and daddy issues. I'm attracted to someone that's like my dad or like my mom in terms of personality and is that a connection so what is your whole overarching idea on opposites attract how many similarities do we need to have with someone in a romantic relationship for it to be a successful relationship and why do we have daddy issues I'm not joking that one off okay so what I found through the course of the research was really interesting. We look for friends who mirror our connection type

and we look for partners, romantic partners, who balance us out or enhance us in some way. Now, that's where opposites attract is not actually totally true because an opposite in my language would be someone completely on the other side of the model to you. So for example, if you're high frequency and high intensity, your opposite would be low frequency and low intensity and those don't work. Yeah. Which I was going to say, I could obviously be friends with someone, but couldn't have a relationship with someone who was low intensity and introverted and needed to be alone because so many of my needs would go unmet. So what we do is we go out into the world and we're looking for, if you think of a romantic relationship as being like a

three-legged race, you want someone who can be on the other side to you and running alongside you able enough to meet your needs. I am picturing this. This is such a funny analogy. It makes sense. Yeah. So they're alongside you. Okay. So whereas friendships are more like a mirror. So you're sitting and you're looking for self and it's not, it doesn't make it an egotistical exercise that you go out into the world and find people like you. You are saying to this other person in front of you, this friend, you are my greatest key to self-discovery. you can help me be more of me, be the best version of me. You're helping me be better, right? So that's what friends do. But a romantic partner, in a really primal way,

whether you want to have children with that person or not, you are looking at this romantic partner emotionally and saying, if we were to become one, you would make me better. So we might have a perception that we need smoothing out. We have a rough edge that needs a bit of smoothing out. So you might find someone who has a smooth edge in that place. You're looking for almost the other side of the puzzle piece. And that's why people say, you complete me. And so in a way that's correct because you're a sort of puzzle piece with some jagged edges and then you find the other bit that just makes that hole.

You're looking for a hole. So I'll give you an example. In my life, my friends are all mid to high frequency and high intensity like me. So when we get together, it's a lot of animated talking and excited. going off on tangents. Whereas my husband is a shapeshifter. He's right at the center, mid-frequency, mid-intensity. And I think of our relationship almost as like I'm the kite out in the wind and he's this amazing anchor guiding the kite. Here comes the wind and I'm just going to pull it in or let it go. And so I would describe him in ways like he centers me or

he grounds me. And I think everybody, depending on your needs and connection, will be looking for someone else who makes you feel like a better version of yourself do you think that this is where people can come unstuck in relationships in terms of in the way that we communicate so for example if you are mismatched in your pairing in terms of how you show up in your connections if you are somebody who is a high frequency and you have sought out a relationship with someone who's low frequency feeling like you don't speak to me you don't talk to me and not understanding that maybe they just don't do that at all. It's not just not with you.

It's that they don't have the capacity or the ability to tap into that side of themselves in the same way that someone who may be high frequency can, and they may enjoy that connection in a different way. Absolutely. And so many of the conversations that I have with people are around that. But I think it's so important to say, and I'm really excited to say it here in this context, that we've been conditioned to think that all of our connection needs should be met by one romantic partner. And my research shows that if you think of connection as being

like a piece or a pie with eight pieces, your romantic partner is one piece of that pie, one piece. And we ask them and we're raised with all the movies that we've watched and the books that we've read and the fairy tales, we're conditioned to almost think that they are seven pieces of our pie and that we're the final piece with our family and friends and all that. But we have an entire pie of connection and belonging that we need to experience. And so when people say to me that they don't talk to me or they're too low frequency for me, my first response is, number one, we can't take anyone else's connection type personally ever.

Because their connection type is developed pretty much before the age of 10. So if they're behaving as an adult in a certain way, it has very little to do with you. but yes, we do produce reactions with other people. Some people might make us feel comfortable, at ease, natural. Some people might make us feel a little bit more uncomfortable, but if someone's not talking to you, they probably don't talk to anyone else either. It's not that they're sharing, you know, and someone might say, oh yeah, but I can see them with their friends. Well, maybe their friends are low intensity and they don't feel like they've got the spotlight on them, for example. So if you're in a relationship with someone who has really different connection needs

to you. A, don't take it personally. B, be curious about it rather than upset about it. And try to find ways to meet in the middle. But also it's about thinking about how can you meet your needs in other ways. So as I said before, my husband's a shapeshifter. I meet my insane high intensity needs through conversations like this, through writing the book that I wrote, through my friendships, through my relationships with my parents and my sisters and my brothers. there are so many sources of connection and I almost feel like we're there at a door with a key that doesn't work without just going to another door where that key absolutely works and why doesn't my key work at this door we often speak about how much pressure we put on our

partners to be literally everything in our life and that a big part of some conflict in a relationship is because we do expect them to be too much but you just spoke about your husband at the start of your book, you spoke about your husband and your first date. I mean, you talk about the fact that maybe you might clash at the beginning or have some, you know, you think your connection's not there and then it can come later in time. How often do you think that is? And how important do you think that is to go off that first initial feeling? Can things change? So what's really interesting about first impressions research is that we're generally correct in our intuitive response to someone but the explanations and stories we give are generally incorrect what do

you mean okay so you know when you meet someone we might have what we think of as being a negative reaction or like that person aggravated me or that reaction is true with the first impression you know how you might think to yourself oh that person's funny or that person gives me an uncomfortable feeling the story we might then tell after that isn't necessarily right because we're filling in the blanks and that's what our brain does when we don't have all the pieces of the of the puzzle yeah we need to give ourselves a story we need to give ourselves a solution to it yeah so what i'd say is trust the feeling but don't initially or automatically make up a story about why that is and then believe that story just just be curious about it because sometimes we might say for

example have a competitive reaction with someone and ultimately they can become a friend but it's just because they just sparked something in you or stimulated in something you might not like that feeling initially, but it's not necessarily going to have a bad ending. Well, it's definitely something we get asked a lot. We've been in this situation, but it's when you have a first date with someone or you meet someone for the first one or two times and you say, they seemed amazing on paper, but I don't think the connection was there. I'm a big believer that it can develop and it can develop into something amazing. I don't think it has to be fireworks on the first date or the first meeting. Would you tell someone that said, I went on a first date. I just didn't feel

like it was overwhelmingly great, didn't feel the fireworks, would you tell them to push on to a second and third date because it could develop or would you say, no, chemistry's not there, out? This is a hard one because I'm almost not going to take my own advice. So with my husband, we went on a date and it was like trying to light a wet match. The conversation was, except I was so attracted to him.

You're like, let me just bang it and then we'll get rid of it. I do not care if you can't speak because you'll be good for other things. But he couldn't – I had this really weird – I wasn't even thinking it was sexual but obviously it was – but I was like sensual. I was like, I want to be under his jumper. I was thinking to myself, what are you even talking about? We have literally never had anyone say that before. You know the feeling like if you saw a log – if you were cold

and you saw a log fire over in a corner of the room and you just wanted to be near it? You wanted to just be as close as you could. Yeah, but he was annoying me at the same time. Like a moth, a moth to a flame. every relationship is 50 50 every single relationship so in my 50 i went into this first date trying to be impressive and i was trying to say things that i thought he might be impressed by i'm funny yes yes all of that crap and then at one point he ordered a tomato

dish at the very beginning and he's a chef he was being a gentleman he said would you like to try someone and i said no thanks i don't like roma tomatoes because i thought he would think oh great we're like kindred spirits because she knows roma tomatoes there's a variety of tomato I was trying to be sophisticated. You nerd burger, Ellie. And then he goes, you'll be okay then because these are cherry tomatoes. And so I was like humiliated. I was so embarrassed.

I was like 25. Anyway, so then I thought, well, I didn't impress him by talking about food. I'm just going to go and talk about things I know about. I'm going to talk about group dynamics and collective content. It was Sunday night and he'd just opened a restaurant. He was exhausted, right? So read the room. Totally.

Anyway, so at one point I'm talking and he just does the unthinkable for a first date and looks down at his watch for about three seconds and this was before Apple Watches. So he wasn't reading a message. It was an analogue watch. He was just staring at the time. He's like, how much longer do I have to endure this tomato talk? Yes, worse than tomato talk.

I think he could have handled that. The connection talk. This podcast. How long is she going to go on for? This TED Talk. I didn't know I signed up to a TED Talk. You're like, thank you for coming. So embarrassing.

And so then I said, because I was humiliated twice, tomato humiliation and then looking at his watch humiliation. So I said, is there a problem? And then he said, look, I really want to talk about this. It's a lie. He didn't want to talk about it. I really want to have this conversation with you but I'm really tired. Can we talk about something light and easy?

So it wasn't that there weren't sparks. So you asked a question about what would you say to someone. I would say tell me exactly what happened because if you were annoyed at them and you were like they were getting under your skin but you still wanted to be inside their jumper, I'd say go on a second date after that. If it was just awkward but there was a clear chemistry between you, pursue that.

But if you're sitting there going, oh, my gosh, this guy. Like I wanted to impress him. Yeah. I wanted him to think I was great. I was trying really hard. If I was with someone and I didn't feel it and I was going, oh, this is really awkward and I don't want to be anywhere near his jumper, I wouldn't go on a second date.

But what I would say to people, you need the like, like the grunt. You're just like, I want to be around this person. I need to get onto that jumper. Yes. I absolutely think you have to have that. Well, it just takes it back to balance what you said at the start, doesn't it? But maybe that's a high intensity thing to say as well. Maybe I'm just projecting all my stuff.

Like maybe someone's sitting there going, I don't have that, but I love my partner. A hundred percent. I think that that is. And I mean, I know a lot of people who are in long-term, very happy relationships and that sex drive is very, very low or that like want to be physically intimate is low. And I think that that's something that we can do. We can project like how we show up in our relationships and think that that's what's normal and that everybody else's relationship should be similar in order to be healthy. Yeah. What I did want to talk about, because you raised it earlier and I realized I

completely missed the other side of what I was going to say. You're talking about romantic relationships and opposites attract. And some people go into relationships for a lot of different reasons. When you have a healthy relationship, that's what I described before, you know, the puzzle pieces and someone enhances you. What about those ones where they become toxic? And I think that's a lot of people's experience. And it was absolutely my experience until I met my husband. And what's happening there is that if your friends are a mirror of your self-discovery and you're unfolding and you can see yourself in them, toxic relationships are almost a mirror, like, you know, those mirrors that are a bit skewed you know when you go to a like the crazy funhouse ones where you

look 10 times yeah they're wobbly yeah they're hard to focus on so some relationships become a mirror of our trauma and so you see someone and you're drawn to them initially because you think oh I've got this thing that I want to work through and heal and you look like you could really expose that for me why do you think people and I ask this because both of us have been in toxic relationships in the past. Why do you think people are attracted to that? Why do you think we're attracted to things that we may have experienced already? And then we almost like repeat that same patterned behavior into toxic relationships. Because trauma is almost frozen or imprinted in our experience, in our psyche. And we're almost stuck at that age where it happened.

And unless we process or find a way to process it, it's hard to move on from it. It can almost feel like it's just stuck there. So we get attracted to someone who can help us re-experience the same type of trauma because that's almost a way of unfreezing the original trauma. So it's a healthy thing. That's why I think we just need to see relationships much more about our evolution and our self-discovery rather than do they like me? Do they love me? It's your trying to process thing it's almost like you go into your heart your psyche and think what do I want to heal it's so interesting you say that because I think I look back on my personal relationships and I know like I had the same it was over and over again the same type of relationship but I don't

think I had the understanding nor had I done the self-work to realize that that's what I was doing and I think that's the problem when people get into patterned toxic relationships unless you know that there's a reason why you're choosing that person you think you're being drawn to them by chemistry or they're your soulmate or there's some sort of undying thing that makes you keep on repeating that behavior. And I guess without the self-awareness, you can't do the healing. Absolutely. And in the book, I talk about some questions that we can ask to work out whether something is a healthy or a toxic connection in that. So we can have intimate cliques and intimate clashes and intimate clashes are the ones that feel unsafe. You know, if you're driving a

car and the road starts feeling, oh, this doesn't feel stable. So we absolutely need to be aware of how safe, how psychologically safe we feel in a relationship. And that's why I say to people, really encourage to make some kind of a list, which sounds strange, but how do you want to feel in a relationship? Not necessarily who are you looking for, but how would you like to feel in a dynamic with someone and so what's really interesting is that with my husband if I was to have written a list how do I want to feel it's absolutely how I feel with him it feels open it feels safe he's kind he's caring all of those things that are more important he's funny than when I was 25 and I'm looking for someone who's this and this and this but it's funny it does

change because mine now I would have been the same I'm 35 now and mine was different I wanted to feel safe and trust like I didn't want the anxiety I didn't want to wonder what they were doing all the time because I feel like that was what my past relationships were whereas my 20s it was all about like feeling that sexiness and sparks chemistry almost like a trauma like Laura said because you get used to wanting to be on this high where you're fighting all the time and if you don't have that fighting then what do you have like that's an addiction as well an addiction to the drama of a relationship because that emotional cycle is absolutely a high so we can be drawn to people because it is a little bit unsafe. And you can feel like, oh, here's the cycle of our

relationship. We're going, oh, we come down. Ali, you speak a lot in the book about loneliness and there being three types of loneliness and how this connects into understanding connection. Can you give us a little overview of what that is and why I guess it's so important to understand connection to be able to understand loneliness? So I was fascinated by this when I read the research because I never knew that you could compartmentalize different experiences of loneliness. Like a lot of other people, I just thought loneliness was when you're on your own and you didn't want to be. So loneliness is actually just a gap between what you are experiencing and what you want to be experiencing in that moment. So the three types of loneliness, the first one

is intimate partner loneliness. And that explains why someone can love their life and have lots of friends and family, but still feel that loneliness for a companion. That's intimate part in a loneliness. And the second type is relational loneliness. And that's what you might feel if you don't have a trusted group of friends or you might not be seeing them. I felt relational loneliness just because I don't see my friends enough at different times in my life because we're doing different things. Some of us had young children while other people were still at work and it was hard to meet up. And then collective loneliness is when you don't feel like you're part of a community or a work team or something larger than yourself. And so we have these three

buckets, if you like, of loneliness. So I'll give you an example. When I had my first baby, I was at home with him a lot, as you are, and I felt really lonely and I didn't know what... I was with this child 24 hours a day and I had my mom and I had my husband and I had some really good friends and I'd see my neighbors and I'd go to the park, but I totally lost collective belonging. Collective belonging is just feeling like you're out there and you're living your life. And I wasn't seeing lots of the groups of friends that I'd seen before. So my world really shrunk in that time. And so I didn't realize why I was so lonely. But now that I understand the three types of loneliness, I know exactly why. I feel like that's something that so many mothers would

understand and have felt. Also, I think being lonely isn't just dependent on being around people like you could be surrounded by people and still feel incredibly lonely you could have friendship groups and feel lonely and I love the way you describe it as being like that gap between where you are and where you want to be because I think so many people can identify with that and I haven't heard it described like that before either but it makes a lot of sense you could feel like you have so many amazing things in your life but if you have this goal of what you want to be doing or you want who you want to be with or how you want to be feeling and you're not quite there then yeah you can have this feeling of I sort of feel like I am on my own because I'm I'm not

living my my truth or my dream it's a really interesting concept because I think everyone in life experiences loneliness at a different time but I think a lot of people mistake it and I think that's a really important point you just made absolutely and some of the most in the research it's documented some of the most profound experiences of loneliness are intimate partner loneliness where you're in a relationship with someone they might be sitting on the couch and you're thinking you're supposed to be this person my soulmate my other heart and you're not and I don't feel a connection with you and that's a profound experience of loneliness and equally some people love being on their own.

So most of the groups that I speak to, I say put up your hand if you love being on your own, pretty much three-quarters of the room will put up their hand. So how do we deal with loneliness when we can't, for example, in that situation where you might not or even if it's someone who wants to be in a relationship but they haven't found that person yet, how do we deal or how can we cope with that type of loneliness?

So the first thing I want to say to everyone is for the first time in history, human connection is not handed to us on a platter. If you think about how we have evolved through our civilization, we used to live in tribes. We used to then live in villages where you knew every other person in that town or in that village. You probably had a marriage arranged for you. You probably had friends that were just there. They were your friends because they were the ones who were there.

The first advice I want to give to people is don't be ashamed because there's so much shame wrapped up in loneliness. It's a need. It's our greatest psychological need to connect with other people. Now, it's also a need of ours to drink water. If you are thirsty, do you think to yourself, it's because no one loves me. It's because I'm not good enough. It's because I deserve this. I deserve this thirst. We don't do that to ourselves. We go and get a drink of water. But when we're lonely, we get there and then we layer on the shame. Oh, it's because I'm unlovable it's because I'm never going to meet anyone I'm just be really proactive about it just like if you wanted to get a job you know we all just accept we've got to go out and work for

it you've got to work really hard sometimes it's not going to be comfortable that's how I am with relationships and connections so now that I know the science I think it's built my resilience around connection because it's almost like you know swimming in the ocean you know you're gonna get dumped like sometimes you're gonna put yourself out there but sometimes it's going to be magic. And do you still want to go for a swim? Absolutely. Yes. And so now if I meet people, even new friends and you think, ah, yeah, this is a really quick, no, it's not. Okay. Let's keep going. Keep going. Keep going next. And, and not in a, like a tractor way, but just, just not taking anything personally. And it is so liberating. So I just want to say to people, understand your

connection type. Don't be ashamed. If you ever feel lonely, see it as a signal, a great helpful signal. Someone said to me on the radio in an interview for the book, they said, what do you say to all the people out there though, who feel lonely? Great. Like that's great to identify the feeling. Now, you know what you're feeling. What are you going to do about it? Let's get really proactive about this rather than, and I'm not saying anyone's feeling sorry for themselves, but I think our society tends to almost say, well, it's your fault. You must've done something wrong at some point. No, no. The world we live in now is set up for individualization. It's not set up for collective. Most people haven't done much to be proactive about connection. They just

met someone here or I was in high school or I met someone at work. So we're typically quite lazy when it comes to human connection. I'm just saying, just exercise that muscle a little bit more, just like your financial security. The people who are happiest in their 80s, every single one of them, and this comes from a study from Harvard, the longest running study of adult developments running since 1938. Every single person who's thriving in their 80s attributes that thriving to the quality of their social relationships. So if we know that, then you need to go after your social relationships with as much vigor as you go after your financial security and your career and all your exercise goals, all of those things. We better book a dinner in girls.

I love that because I think it is so easy, especially as we go through different seasons of life to move away from our friendships or to abandon our friendships because it's too hard to make time for them. And also because we do prioritize this individualization. We do prioritize financial gains. We prioritize, you know, social gains, but in various different ways now as well, but not in terms of having those core friendship groups. And it's not until you don't have them that you reflect back on 10 years prior where you go, God, I had so many friends and now I don't have anything. And we know that as time goes on, we lose friends as we age. And I guess like it's the proactiveness that keeps that around you. And what's your metric for success in life?

That's what I want to ask people because my metric used to be achievement. My metric now is the quality of my relationships because the science tells me that that's what's going to enhance every aspect of my life. So that's my priority now. Every single one of my relationships, my husband, my children, some people have relationship goals, you know, to spend this much time and schedule in this one-on-one time with this child, not just random family time. So have goals for your relationship. Like this is all really new and it feels uncomfortable, but if you do structure your life with your relationships as your priority, I can guarantee you that you will be happier. All right, guys, you know that we never finish our episode without

our suck and our sweet, our highlight and our low light of each and every week. Miss Scotland. Miss Scotland. What's your low light? My suck. I got shamed. I got publicly shamed this week in Scotland by a lot of Ben's friends, a lot of strangers, a lot of the public. Publicly shamed? What did you get taken out on the street and mocked? Like what happened? I was publicly shamed because I put sauce on my pie. That is not a done thing here in Scotland apparently. No one puts ketchup or sauce on their pie. They think it's weird. They don't put sauce on anything and I was publicly shamed. That's my

suck when you say publicly shamed how public and how shamed well like strangers in it was at the soccer match at the football match there are pies there which is amazing it's like the best part of the match besides ben but the best part of my shoes pies so i was putting the sauce on the pie and then i was rubbing it in with my finger like a little grub because you know how like aussies he squirt your ketchup on your sauce on and then you rub it in with your finger all right it's not just me i know i'm disgusting with the pie i lift the lid off it and squirt the sauce inside and then eat the filling and then eat the outside well that was a lot of the feedback no a lot of the feedback was people were on my side because i put a poll i ended up putting a poll up so no so lots

of strangers right was saying like what are you doing why are you putting ketchup on it was a bit of a funny thing and then we got into this heated discussion anyway the scottish media over here wrote an article on it they wrote an article on the fact that i put sauce on my pies so i was publicly shamed anyway just in case anyone wants to know i did do a poll on sauce and pies 97% of people said they put the sauce on their pie so I'm not a weirdo I'm not on my own and then a big percentage of that actually said Laura that they take the lid off and then they put the sauce on like you and then they put the lid back on but I'm just like it just goes straight on the top for me I don't put the lid back on I eat the lid then I eat the content then I eat the base that's weird

I eat it like a three-course meal but you do that with your pizza too everything you deconstruct everything yeah it's weird isn't it I don't know why I do it even Tim Tams I eat the chocolate off the outside then I eat one top piece and then I eat one bottom piece I eat everything in like layers you think you're trying to make it last longer no I think I'm just a bit special and that's okay well my sweet was I went to like a little lodge in the Scottish on a lake and we had like a little spa day we had an infinity pool it's still cold here but you know when you get to go into a warm outdoor pool but it's cold it's really nice so I just had a really nice night away with Ben. We don't get much time together, to be honest, because he has to work every single

day. So when he gets a day off, we try and like jam pack every single thing that you could possibly do into 24 hours. So that was my suite. Can I just ask, when are you coming back from doing bougie bitch things over in Scotland? What day are you home? Well, to be honest, it's not that bougie. I'm on my own for like six days. Then he gets a day off and we do one thing on one day. So it probably looks a lot more bougie than it is. Trust me, it's not. I'm back next week. What day? We can talk about this after. Yeah, I feel like we can talk about it. I think I'm back on saturday all right my suck for the week is doing colon prep oh yeah that's pretty shit it's not exciting it's literal shit literal literally shit so that's my suck for the week colon prep

also actually i have two sucks so marley did this beautiful dance routine yesterday it was gorgeous she's really into performing now and then she leapt off the concrete wall and she leapt straight into another wall with her nose so she has two black eyes and I thought she had broken her nose but she didn't but she literally stopped herself with her face so that was my afternoon yesterday so is she all right I genuinely thought she'd broken her nose she's fine but I was like oh we're going to hospital now resilient little things aren't they noses fix themselves what are they gonna do but now the poor thing she was so beside herself for the rest of the day so So Easter was very emotional.

And what was your sweet? My sweet for the week is that we got in. Do you know how we do the mama necklace for Mother's Day? Yes, I do. Yes. You don't know and you don't care because, I mean, you can get one for Delilah. You could get one for you and Delilah.

A mama necklace for Delilah. I think it's cute. I think I'll wait. We have one that has like a little thing transcribed and it has my life began with you and you could have that for Delilah and give it to her. Oh, my God. That's so funny.

Okay, give me one. Okay, so my sweet for the week is like this is a collection. We do this like Mother's Day collection. It's something that we've worked on for ages for Tony May and it arrived last week. And I was very worried it was not going to arrive in time for Mother's Day. So trust me, that was a real moment of relief, put it that way. Has that been selling like hotcakes?

No, it hasn't come out yet. It comes out on Thursday. Oh, okay. Everyone, swipe up. Swipe up. Hashtag Tony May. Get on board. Tony May Jewelry.

Get up for your mamas. So I'm hoping to have an update. And your dogs. Yeah, all the dog mums. I'm hoping to have an update next week too. I'm having my psychic reading with my new best friend next door, the psychic. I'm having that tomorrow. So very nervous but excited.

So I'm going to keep you guys posted. I've had a lot of messages wanting for updates on Instagram. So here it is. Yeah. Now I want to know, can they come on and give me a psychic reading too? I can ask him. No one cares. None of the listeners care, but I want to know for myself.

Anyway, guys, that is it from us. If you love the episode, jump onto Apple Podcasts and leave a review and also go join the Facebook group, do all the things. Join Life Uncut discussion group, which is Facebook. You can go and join us on Instagram, which is Life Uncut Podcast. We also have a TikTok that is also Life Uncut Podcast. Everything is Life Uncut. You'll be able to find us.

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