Soul Boom - Black Youth Suicide Is Up 50% & Nobody's Talking About It | Child Psychiatrist Dr. Alfiee

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

This episode contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text 988 in the U.S. for immediate support. SPONSORS!👇 🛒 Quince 👉 https://growtherapy.com/soulboom 🛒 Nutrafol (promo code: SOULBOOM) 👉 ⁠https://nutrafol.com ⁠ 🙏 Fetzer 👉 ⁠https://fetzer.org⁠ 🛒 ZocDoc 👉 ⁠https://zocdoc.com/soulboom Clinical psychologist Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble joins Rainn Wilson to unpack the youth mental health crisis and why loneliness, racism, social media, emotional exhaustion, and the unhealed pain of adults are leaving young people overwhelmed. They explore anxiety, belonging, self-awareness, inner-child healing, spiritual boundaries, and how young people can develop the tools to truly rise and thrive. MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soulboom.com/store⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for our newsletter! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soulboom.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW US! Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Executive Produced by: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kartik Chainani⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some? The future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion-dollar swings. The end of jobs? Or the end of human struggle? We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype.

While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Is emotional exhaustion being normalized? Yes. We are being asked to carry more, to overlook more. When we were kids, would they say suck it up? That's what we're being encouraged to do.

It doesn't matter how much stuff you have on your plate. Just get over it. Get over yourself. A young people today less resilient, or are they just facing challenges that previous generations didn't face? I wouldn't say that they're less resilient. They are facing different challenges.

It's like a deluge. They got all this stuff. What are they supposed to do with it? Like drinking from a firehouse. If you're an eighth grader and your friend has 70,000 followers, you might be more focused on how do I get 70,000 followers, rather than what's important to me, who am I? If you had the power to redesign one thing about how we raise children today,

what would that be? I don't know why that made me emotional. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. A quick shout out to our sponsors, Quince Zok Doc, Nutrafall, and Fetzer.

Links and promo codes on screen and in the description. Now enjoy the show. Dr. Alfie, welcome to Soul Boom. Thank you for having me. You have this wonderful question having to do with therapy, and it was, am I ready to feel something different? having people go into the therapeutic experience, maybe not knowing exactly what they're going to get out of it or what they want to get out of it, but knowing that they want something to be different. And by different, I don't mean different worse. I mean different better.

Different. I've learned something. Different. I have some new tools. Different. I have some new insights. And so for me, if you're coming into the therapeutic encounter and you're just there and you don't have an intent. for why you're there, I think it makes the therapeutic process that much more difficult.

So it really starts with, I'm big on self-awareness and self-reflection. So it really starts with, am I ready to feel something different? And some people aren't. They absolutely are not. And that's part of the problem. You know, there's this thing that a lot of young people say, or a lot of people say hurt people, hurt people. And the other thing that gives me a giggle is when I see mostly millennials and younger say, the reason I'm in therapy is because of the people in my life who won't go to therapy.

And so everybody's not ready for that. And therapy is not the end-all be-all. It's important, but that's not the only path to healing. And so I think it's important for us to be mindful if you're going to go through the trouble to find somebody, go through the trouble to pay for it, go through the trouble to deal with your insurance to try to get them to pay for it or some portion of it. We want you to get the benefit of it. And so you should be ready to go into that experience, just open to the possibilities of what might change for your life. You are at the front line of dealing with the mental health crisis, especially having to do with black and brown young men and women. Yes.

A population that's often overlooked as regards the mental health crisis. What do you need to tell me? What do you need to tell our audience about what's going on in that battleground? One thing I want people to know is we don't know nearly enough about what the unique experiences are around mental health as it comes to diverse young people. And when I talk about diverse rain, you know I mean in addition to them being young people of color, they also have other identities that are marginalized. So queer young people or young people with disabilities. And so they're all of those things. And I think I want us to understand that there's a lot more research, a lot more information,

a lot more insight we need to gain directly from young people. The other thing I want people to know is we're not saying that you have to develop a treatment for each single identity out there. We're saying that we want a rising tide to lift all the boats. They're not going to lift them all at the same time in the same way for the same duration, but we want all the boats to lift. And the way that we get there is by taking what we learn, the information, and developing interventions to help young people.

If you had the power to redesign one thing about how we raise children today, what would that be? I don't know why that made me emotional. Hey, everybody, make sure to click subscribe. It's right over here somewhere. Please, pretty please. It would help us at Soul Boom so much. Click subscribe. For parents and caregivers.

to work on themselves before they start trying to rear children. I would want parents and caregivers to approach the awesome responsibility of bringing a child into this world or adopting a child or rearing a child from maybe not a fully healed place, but from a more introspective and self-aware place. because to me, if we can do better as parents and caregivers and people who love young people, we, I think, can create support, like you said, walk beside alongside a different kind of young person. But I think too often we haven't done our work or enough of our work to be able to support children in many. of the ways that they need to be supported to allow them to be healthy children, healthy youth,

healthy teenagers, and healthy young adults or adults. So I think it starts with us. That's what I would want because I'm telling you, Rain, more often than not, when families would come into therapy with me, I'm thinking of a couple families when I was a Georgetown psychiatry professor and saw patients. The problem wasn't the key is. The problem was the parents and the caregivers, right? I'm thinking of one little girl who used to have like these, when I say, like, difficult meltdowns, this child was out of control.

Like, mom took a video one time and showed me. I was just like, like, she just, like blind rage, right? And in that instance, mom stood there and yelled at the child, you better look. And I'm like, that child is not hearing anything that you're saying. You know what I'm saying? And so it's being able to help, and it's not the panacea, no. But for me, too often, I'm a parent and a caregiver too, too often we're not equipped to help them young people navigate the stuff that they need to navigate. We're not equipped, not always, not most of the time, sometimes, to understand how what we do directly impacts who they are and what they are.

they do as young people. So that's, for me, that's the thing that I would change. This modern concept of like, oh, these phones are, are killing our kids, you know, really, we've got to get these kids off their phones. There you go. Oh, my God, you know, they're just, my son is just addicted to his, to his games. Hold on one second. Exactly. You know, we've got these screens are ruining our kids' lives. Exactly. Exactly. We don't have always the self-awareness that we need to be able to impart the kind of wisdom we might like to share with you. I see that with families sitting down at dinner at a restaurant and the parents' parents on the phone. It's like, put your phones down. Look at your kid. And sometimes the kids are like looking at the parent. Like, can you talk to me? Like you can see they're like hungry for

parents. Yeah. The loneliness epidemic is something that Dr. Vivek Murthy kind of summed up. A lot of people have been thinking about it, writing about it for a long time. But he kind of posited it as something that was an epidemic in American culture before he left his post as Surgeon General. How does the loneliness epidemic specifically apply to young men and women of color? The loneliness epidemic, so one stat I saw that I think sort of crystallizes this is that the suicide ideation or completion rate of. among black youth has grown by 50% between, I think it was 2012 and 2024. To me, that is in part related to that whole idea of the loneliness epidemic.

And I'll tell you some other things that I think about the loneliness epidemic as it relates to young people of color. For somebody like Dr. Murphy, he is attending to all different kinds of people when he talks about the loneliness epidemic. He's not looking at a sample and just saying, oh, well, it's only these people, right? It includes all of us. So as I say this, I acknowledge his efforts to always ensure that we're all included. When you get beyond him, I don't think too many people are talking about how the loneliness epidemic impacts people across different identities. So I think about queer people of all races, all racial groups, who are often so isolated

because they're in communities in real life that don't value or accept them, right? So where do you find community? Social media, but that's online. So it's important, but that's not day to day with you in your community. I think about young people of color where, you know, like you said earlier, hot, we solve racism, right? And so some of our young people are being weird with that idea. Right. Well, why are you still talking about this stuff? What do you mean? We solved that. We had a black president. Like, get over yourself. Do you know what I mean? And so that drive, if they're experiencing racial discrimination and challenges around race, that contributes. to the loneliness epidemic because they're being told, this is not an issue. What are you complaining about? Be quiet. Look the other way. It's just not a big deal.

I also think I'm not knocking social media. It is important for creating connection. I feel like it really sort of shrunk the world. I've learned so much about different parts of the world just through watching. I watched a great video, Trevor Noah. I love him. He's amazing. It was a tourism video for, I was going to say, South America for South Africa.

And watching the videos, it was just like, Oh, oh, they have that there. They have that there. It was just really eye-opening, listening to him narrate it and talk about the cost of living and all that kind of stuff. But I think those are the good sides of social media. The downside is everybody thinks they're supposed to have this perfectly curated life. And I think particularly for young people, there's this idea that what I see my favorite celebrity or favorite influencer doing, if I haven't done that same thing by the time I'm their age, I failed. right? And so they shrink, right? So I'd rather just, I don't say anything. I'll just turn inward. I'll just try to

tough it out on my own. And I think it coupled with the pandemic, I think what it has done for some young people, it has prevented them from hitting developmental milestones that they would have hit in terms of socialization, being with other people because they weren't in school. Yeah. Right? So they didn't get that. I've seen that. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I feel like. Like that lack of socialization has made it exponentially more difficult for them to flex and stretch that muscle and build that muscle of how do you approach a person in real life to say, can we play together? On the playground.

You didn't go to the playground. You know, you're in middle school. How do you deal with middle school is the worst? I hated it when I was there. I hated it when I did internship when I was finished in school. I worked at a middle school. It's just, it's fraught. It's so hard.

But how do you navigate that if you didn't have to do it? Because you weren't physically in school. And then you jump, come out of the pandemic. Now you're in high school. You didn't develop those relationals interpersonal skills in middle school. So how are you going to have them in high school? So I think it's like a perfect storm like Dr. Murthy has said. But I think at the Accoma project, what we also find is that it has impacted our young people,

not only the way it impacts everybody, but there are also these unique experiences of what does it mean to be queer in a kid of color, What does it mean to have a disability and be of color? What does it mean to be of color and try to navigate interracial, cross-racial friendships? They've lost an opportunity for that. So what do they rely on, what they see on social media? And I tell people, yes, there are parts of social media that are very real. But there's also a lot of it that is not, right? And that discernment is important.

And I think the pandemic, which I think then relates to the loneliness epidemic, sort of exacerbates this idea of. of learning how to hit those developmental milestones or hitting those developmental milestones so you build a new muscle or stretch a muscle or strengthen a muscle. They've lost some of that. Are young people today less resilient

or are they just facing challenges that previous generations didn't face? I wouldn't say that they're less resilient. I think they lack a set of coping skills that I feel like we had. We're both Gen X, I believe. And they are facing different challenges. That doesn't mean they're harder challenges. They're just different challenges.

And what are you seeing, you know, on these front lines with these marginalized communities? I imagine a lot of the studies have to do with a lot of like middle class white kids, you know, and a lot of the books and a lot of stuff coming out of the universities and whatnot. Yep. What are folks going through? A couple things. So I'll start by saying I saw that I'm always on this soapbox about we need really widely generalizable solutions. And I was looking at this article.

It was talking about perfectionism, this big professor, somewhere in Europe. I can't remember where he was he was from. And the takeaway was perfectionism is more of an issue than social media for our young people. I thought, okay, that's interesting. And then I looked at the data. And this is where I get to answer your question directly. The sample, it was a meta-analysis. So he took thousands of studies, put them all together and said, here's the findings.

70% of the sample in the studies were women. You know, already I was like, okay, so your study, your outcome relates to perfectionism primarily in women, 70% of the samples across all these studies. Then the other thing was, it was all college students. Right? So perfectionism is going to look a little different in the segment of the population that has the opportunity to go to college. Sure. Then for people who don't get to go to college, which is the vast majority of people, right? But that's something you had to find by sifting through the data.

Correct. He didn't lead with that. No. As a matter of fact, the reason I knew, and then the other thing was they didn't say anything, notice I'm not saying any names, they didn't say anything about racial, ethnic, cultural diversity. You have no idea who was in that sample, right? But I can assume who was in that sample. So what we try to do with the Accoma Project and what we've learned is things like over 60 to 70% of young people of diverse racial ethnic background.

experience severe to moderate depressive symptoms and experience severe to moderate anxious symptoms. Now, if you add in mild symptoms, all of those groups, you sort of push those numbers up to 80%. Right. So our sample was 8,621 kids, right, across six different racial ethnic groups. That's a lot of kids for us to be able to derive some information from. The other thing I've learned is TikTok is the most popular social media platform for that age group. I'm no surprise there. And our sample was 13 to 25 year olds.

We had young adults in there too. We also learned things like young people are dealing with racial trauma. That's not a question. When I was coming through training, nobody asked about that. Like, what is your experience and have you experienced racism and that kind of thing? Dr. Alfie, we solved racism. There you go. Did you hear that?

Obama. I know. Yeah, yeah. Racism was solved. We had Obama in and now we got Trump. We don't need any diversity. No, DEI? What is that mess?

Yeah. We don't need that mess. Yeah. And so, you know, about 20% of all the young people in our sample talked about having experiences with racial trauma. Right now, that's exposure. That's not chronic. I'm surprised it's that low.

I was surprised it was that low, too. And we found things like some of the biggest culprits. One of the stats that stood out to me was for multiracial, biracial young people. It doesn't matter what the combination is. It was family members. That was one of the top two sources of their trauma. And I immediately could think of the stories from working with patients. I remember I had a really close colleague who's biracial, she's black and white, who talked about having an uncle who would say racist stuff about black people, knowing that this niece had a black parent.

Do you know what I mean? So immediately, I knew. I've heard that a lot from mixed race friends. Yes. And I'm fascinated by that. I mean, it's heartbreaking, right? These are the people who's supposed to love you and treat you with respect and care. And that's who's causing trauma.

Those are the kinds of things we need to know so that we know how to develop interventions that account for the fullness of who our young people are. Right. And so that's some of the stuff that we see on the front line. Social media. We learned that from one of our sample subsections was Arab, Middle East or North African young people. And one of the things they talked about was more so than any other racial ethnic group. They were the ones who experienced the most racial, cultural harassment, harassment. That's what I was taught to say when I was in 10th grade English.

Mr. Langford, he said, you say harassment. God rest his soul. Harrison. So you can say harassment. Yeah. He said, you say harassment. So they were the group that was most likely to report being harassed online around their identities. Right?

So you think about young girls wearing hijabs. You think about people with brown skin or wearing the clothing that they wear. or seeing pictures of young people engaged in their ethnic cultural celebrations and being harassed. Or a young man with a beard that, you know, gets mocked. Or a Sikh young person with it, right? And people not even understanding what that means for a Sikh person to wear, the men to wear the head wrap that they wear. So those are the things. And I can be honest, that's not stuff I've seen other people talking about in the literature.

You don't see those kinds of conversations. You don't see that kind of data. So part of the innovation is I always think of. about that young person out there who's going to go to our website, look at the infographic and say, that's me. I'm included. Okay, even though it's not necessarily great stuff that we're talking about, I see myself reflected. And for me, that goes back to, I'm sure we'll get to that, but that goes back to my experiences as a kid and feeling like I was not represented anywhere. I'm Gen X. Definitely not on TV. You know what we had. You know what we had. We had different strokes, Webster. That's all we had.

You had how we had. So I want young people to have more than that. Well, I was an adult by the time Oprah came along, though, a young adult. A young adult. She was in the 90s in the... We're not old I am. Yeah. Well, we're like the same age, but you look way younger than me because you defy age and gravity.

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To me, that goes back to what we talked about earlier with my childhood. My parents gave me the freedom to be Alfie. Whoever Alfie was, go be that. Figure out who she is. What does she want? What does she like? That kind of thing. And so in therapy, I feel like that's what I'm taking with me into the conversation.

I'm literally sitting here thinking about different patients over the years, some of these young people, some of their parents. And I'm thinking about when I started with each of them, they came in with one idea of what they wanted. I was always thinking, what's underneath that. Do you know what I mean? Like you're saying this is the presenting issue. What they said was almost never the presenting issue. What's the story behind the story? Yeah.

Let's pull that out. Let's put it on the table. Let's have you look at it. And let's hopefully have that sort of give you some insight to move you toward just a few tools that you can use to help you become that best version of yourself. Shout out to Oprah because that's why I got that from the best version of yourself, live your best life. So that's what it is for me. How do I bring the story into the center, put the story in the middle of the table, help us unpack the story a little bit, find the story beneath what you're telling me you're coming here for and move forward for you. Usually there's a lot of shame with that story.

So it's hard to unpack. Easier said than done. 100%. But, you know, and some denial. 100%. And some confusion, because sometimes they don't even know why they feel the way that they feel. They just know they feel it. I'm thinking of one patient I had where the premise was it was a parent, so I won't even say to gender.

This parent came in saying the problem is the kid. And instantly, I knew they came in and they didn't even want. want to talk about necessarily, how do I put it, what the problem with the kid was. They wanted to talk about, well, how can I learn some tools to help my kid be better? As time went on, I learned that this parent was in an abusive relationship with their spouse. And the minute I heard that, I was, oh, that's the issue. It's not about this child. The issue is the abuse, but it wasn't communicated to me as my spouse is abusive.

it was telling stories about the relationship. And I was like, oh, that's an abusive relationship. So, you know, in therapy, you can't just say, you know you're being abused, right? I mean, that's not how we do it. But it was sort of helping that parent unpack that piece of it and understand that the reason you're here is you. The reason you is not about this child. If you get better, you can help your child get better, right? But if you get better, some of what you're telling me is going on with the child, that's going to go away.

Because the problem between the two of you is you haven't. heal this stuff between you and your partner. So for me, it's really about having the opportunity to have enough time to sit with people and being patient enough to allow the story to unfold. I can't push the story. So that's kind of how I'm going into it. What is the story? Right. It could take weeks, months. If you get that, you might never ever get there. Yeah. And that must be heartbreaking when you feel like, oh, we're all we're getting there. And then they're like, oh, I can't afford it. I can't pay. I got to move. I don't want to come anymore. I don't want to come. I don't want to cut.

It starts to get too much. Dangerous, vulnerable. There you go. The idea of being an African-American specifically, coming from the history of people who were enslaved in this country, dealing with, you know, the soul-crushing, right? Even after slavery of what happened to people during, like, reconstruction, through to Jim Crow, black codes, all that kind of stuff,

all the way up to now. that is our lived experience as African Americans, but that's not the totality of our lived experience. And so the idea is, for me, there must be a way for us to continue to walk through the oppression that happens around us without allowing it to be the oppression that consumes us or that becomes a core part of who we are.

I want, like, so I can be in it. That's how the pastor used to say it, but not of it. I'm in it, but it's not a part of who I am. It is not the totality of who I am. So it's like, it's an experience that I'm having, but I don't have to be a part of that experience. I don't have to allow that to guide everything that I do. I have to recognize it as a part of me, but it can't be the whole of who I am. Right.

So I'm in it in the moment, right? Like I can jump in it. But I can find ways to jump out of it too, where it's not consuming me. So when I heard that, I can be in it, but not of it. That spoke to me. Wow, that's awesome. You know, my AA sponsor has this quote that he says all the time, and he's like, what other people think of you is none of your business.

And what you think of other people is all of your business. Bingo. And it releases so much. It does. Like some people are going to not. like me. Some people are going to think I'm a dick. Some people are going to judge me. Some people are going to bring certain attitudes with you. They're going to bring like racist attitudes sometimes and some interactions. You just can't control that. No. Yeah. But it must be so hard for young people,

especially folks of color, to just all the outrage that's out there. I mean, they look online. They see examples of this. They read the news. They read about, you know, systemic police racism, etc. You can just get mired in the injustice, right? Correct. Correct. I think there's a difference between righteous indignation and indignation for the sake of indignation. Do you know what I mean? You can't just sit and stew in that stuff, but you have a responsibility to name what you see, right? But you also have a duty to not be consumed by what you see, right? And I think that the challenge is how do you find the balance? So what I try to teach young people is things like this happened a lot during the pandemic.

You have to curate your news. You have to curate your feed. It is not to say that you turn your head away from suffering. You need to know that suffering is there. But you also need a way to protect yourself so that you can be a force for good in the world. You can't be a force for good in the world if you're buried at the bottom of all this crap that is out there. And the other thing I try to tell young people, particularly young people with any marginalized identity, is you allow other people to control the narrative to control you in some ways when you stay stuck. Right.

I don't want you to stay stuck. I want you to have the opportunity to share your gifts with the world. But you got to find those gifts first. And you can't find those gifts if you sit and consume and doomscroll. Yeah. Right? It's there. But how can you create change?

If you're stuck in it, you've got to step out of it for a bit, look at it to the extent that you can tolerate it. And then you can make a decision about, okay, this is the part I want to tackle. This is something I've been working on a lot with my own anxiety issues is, and it's a big cornerstone of cognitive behavioral therapy, is to name the thing and to gain that kind of emotional literacy where it's like, oh, I'm having a feeling. There used to be whole decades in my life where a feeling would just come up. and overwhelm me. And I was like, speaking of surfing analogy, you're caught in a wave and you're just spinning. That's it.

You don't know which way is up. That's right. As opposed to kind of like there's a powerful wave. It's like, oh, that's anxiety. Oh, that's fear. Oh, that's dread. Oh, that's guilt. Oh, that's shame.

And in naming it, as long as you don't name it in order to gain control over it. Right. But in the naming, you do gain a certain separation from it that allows you to deal with it. These are new tools for me, and I just turn 60. Yeah. Like, come on.

We are very close in age. Yes. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. It is you need a language for what you're experiencing, right? Because the language, like you said, not only does it give you the separation, that's important.

You understand that that thing is happening to you. You are not doing that thing. You can't control when that anxiety is going to hit. You don't have any control over that. It happens, right? There's a genetic component, you know. Something might trigger it. That's it.

There's a behavioral component. That you might notice or you might have no idea. Correct. And for a little kid or, you know, a teenager, how would they know? Do I mean, even with all the language that we have now, everybody knows about generalized anxiety disorder and phobias. You know what I mean? They know all this stuff. But I don't necessarily know that everybody knows how to apply that to their own situation.

So you have the language. Do you know how to use the language? Do you know how to apply that language to you? So for me, the book. is really about what's the easy way to have a conversation that's not threatening and that invites, right? I'm all about welcoming. I was the kid growing up. I don't think people would dispute this. Who, if there was a new kid in the cafeteria, I might not sit with them, but I walk by and say hi, right? I just want you to know I see you, like somebody sees you. Or, you know, I was the peacemaker. I would try to be the peacemaker. But I think what we try to do in the book is I try to give you a way to

enter into that conversation about anxiety. So, for example, ride the roller coaster. I might talk about that wave, right? That's the analogy that I used to say, look, it is kind of like a roller coaster. It's going to happen. You're going to have this buildup of anxiety because of a trigger. You need to learn what your triggers are, right? Build up of anxiety. Then it's going to hit a peak. You probably feel like you're freaking out. And then it's going to subside. But you've got to know that that's kind of how anxiety, one of the ways anxiety shows up. And if you know that, now you can start to pay attention because you have the separation. So you can see what is my trigger. You can recognize. Like, I don't know about you, but for me, I know when I'm starting to feel anxious because it sits

right here. I can feel like a knot sort of form like right here, almost like a lump that's going travel up through my throat and get stuck in my throat. But when I noticed that starting to like, then I know I can do something. I can go meditate. I can go practice deep breathing. I can go have weights in my house. I can go pick up my weight so I can sit on my meditation mat and ground myself, right? But if you don't ever take a step back to observe what you're feeling or observe what you're experiencing,

it's really hard to figure out what the right tools are to address that thing. So that's part of what I try to do in the book. Welcome you into the conversation through a story. then talk about here's some key things you need to understand. Here are signs and symptoms of this particular illness. Then how do you apply that to yourself? Then if you come from a special population, how might that look slightly different?

Remember, rise and ties lifting all those boats. So I want to touch the yacht, just like I'm touching the tugboat, just like I'm touching the kayak, and give all of them an opportunity to have some tools that might resonate with them. And I want you to know, especially, that whenever it says occupation and I'm filling out a form,

I fill out tugboat captain. I don't know why. I just, I've always put tugboat captain under occupation. So all across America, there's listings of Rain Wilson tugboat captain. This episode is brought to you by Fetzer. You know, there's this tendency in modern life to believe that every problem has a material solution. More technology, more productivity, more money, more apps reminding you to breathe while you ignore the fact that your soul feels like a raisin. But the folks at the folks at that you're not that you feel like a raisin.

The Fetzer Institute believes something deeper. They believe that behind humanity's biggest challenges are spiritual ones. Loneliness, division, disconnection, our inability to see each other, the planet, or even ourselves, as sacred. And they're asking a really beautiful question. What if shared flourishing begins with the sacred? Fetzer supports stories, communities, and spiritual solutions from people around the world who are healing division, caring for the Earth, and creating deeper human connection through

faith, spirituality, and reverence for love itself. Not dogma, not forcing one belief system, just the radical idea that, hey, maybe the soul matters. Honestly, that's a conversation we care deeply about here at Soul Boom. You can explore their spiritual solutions library and learn more at fetzer.org. That's fetezzer.org. Thanks, Fetzer. This episode is sponsored by Zoc Doc. Phone anxiety can turn one five-minute call into a six-week, one-man play called, I'll do it tomorrow. I have played the lead and said play, and critics called it exhausting. ZockDoc lets you search and compare high quality in-network doctors.

You can see actual appointment openings and click to book instantly. Appointments usually happen within 24 to 72 hours, sometimes even the same day. Also, Zock Doc is free to use. Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zockdoc. Head to Zockdoch.com slash Soul Boom to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's ZOC, do, doc.com slash soul boom. Curtain call.

The critics are relieved. Standing ovation. I'm Richard Roper. This is the movie of your life. about it. Every one of us gets top billing in our own movie, but no great story happens alone. Life comes with an ensemble cast. On this show, we're going to explore that connection between life and the movies we love. Now, often, I'll be joined by people who have amazing stories, and we'll talk about the films that shape who they are. Other times, we're going to go on deep dive, maybe the best

movies for the holidays, unforgettable performances, to paying tribute to the great actors of our time. We also want to hear from you. What's the movie of your life? The one film that you'd watch again, if you could only watch one movie one last time. It's the movie of your life podcast. Michael Singer, who's a great spiritual writer and thinker. He says spiritual awakening begins when a person realizes they are the witness of the mind rather than the mind itself. And that's what we get to do is in recognizing, oh, I'm having a thought loop. I'm having a thought spiral.

I'm having a rumination. in recognizing, oh, I'm having a feeling. You are the watcher of the mind. That's right. You're accompanying your mind. You're accompanying your feelings, but you are not your thoughts and feelings. That's right.

And just in that little bit of separation, there's a lot of healing that can begin and a kind of a spiritual path can begin. And in fact, that's one of the cores of Buddhism itself is understanding the nature of suffering and how it's, to things, but also two feelings and thoughts that make us so miserable. Yes.

To me, what I hear, I just keep coming back to the same thing, self-awareness, right? It is the idea that there are things that are sort of in your control and there are things that are, excuse me, out of your control. And that it is important to not only bear witness to suffering in the world, but it's important to bear witness to your own suffering. You have to pay attention to what are the things that are causing suffering for you. But you can't do that again when you're in it. Do you know what I mean? Or you can't do that when your life is your of it, right? If your whole life is bad.

We need you to be in it because if you're in it, you can be out of it. Do you know what I mean? That doesn't mean it's healed. That doesn't mean it's fixed. But that means what you said. You can take a step back and you can observe and you can begin to understand. But I'm going to be honest, Rain, I think what trips most of us up, one is fear. If I take a step back and observe it, might I find something that I don't like?

Might I find something that I'm not ready to handle? Might I find something that I need to change and I'm not ready to change it? Right. And so I think that challenge around really getting to a place of finding that self-awareness, beginning to find that self-awareness is what trips a lot of people up, which is, like I said, when they come to therapy in my past and my experience, sometimes they're not coming for self-awareness. They're coming so you can say, do this, this, and this.

Like, here's a magic pill. It's done. But it never works like that. You have got to unpack something. They want to be fixed rather than accompanied. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.

And when you're accompanied, you get to kind of fix yourself and have a much deeper realization. That's right. And lasting, right? It can last. You talk about any attempt on the part of psychologists to define the concept of spirituality, will have a lot of challenges. But then you talk about the appropriate genesis

contained in the root word for spirit. So what does spirituality mean to you? How is it addressing young people? And it is a difficult word. It's a fraught word. To some religious people, spirituality is, we don't talk about that. We're religion and we're specifically this religion.

And to some people it can mean a very nebulous kind of area. fairy kind of thing that's not maybe not particularly helpful but what does spirit mean to you and how can spirituality be a part of rising and thriving? I feel like there may be two parts. There's sort of spirit as it relates to who are you at your core, right? What is your essence? To me, that is spirit for us as individuals. I think as it turns into something external. It is what is your relationship to whatever that higher power is, right? Because I don't feel like there's one definition of what the higher power is. I feel like there is an entity that my spirituality being a Catholic, like I said, I'm a super progressive Catholic. I do believe that there's something to the idea

of a divine power. I do believe that. And different people are going to define that divine power differently. And that's okay. But I think that that divine power is benevolent. I think that divine power is omniscient. I think that divine power is omnipresent. And I think that we have an opportunity through spirituality to build a connection to that divine power, however we define that divine power. And what does that do for us? I think it grounds us. I think it. I think it. It connects us to something bigger than ourselves. To me, that's the single most important thing. I was reading The Secret, a little bit of the secret this morning.

And one of the things I saw in there was this idea, you talked about this. I think you talked about this when you did the YouTube taping with the Baha'i community in D.C. That there is, somebody did. There's a universality to what it means to be human. And for me, part of that universality is that we each have something divine within us and that we are all connected to each other, whether we choose to embrace that or not. Because we all come from a divine, even for people who are atheist or agnostic who don't believe, I believe that we're... Or Nazis or KKK members, people that, you know... It's in them. Now, I'm not going to sit down the table and try to convince them, but it is in them, too.

And the choices that we make are either going to bring us closer to our humanity with each other, right? Unlike people who do KKK and all that kind of stuff, unlike those folks who I feel like move further away from their spirit. But the things, the choices that we make in life are either going to bring us closer to that humanity, that shared humanity, that shared divinity, if you will, in all of us, or they're going to pull us. further apart. But this is why I think these spiritual conversations are so important because in a divided America where we won't even listen to someone who we vaguely disagree with. We'll try and shout them down or tune them out or just say no, I'm not even going to address you because you believe XYZ and I find that abhorrent that a shared universal commonality, which is that divine spark that's in all of us, even in the most horrific, grotesque human beings walking the planet.

Right. You know, we've all got a little spark of the divine in there. That's right. That's right. But they have to be willing to find that spark for us to be in community. Do you know what I mean? Like, we can't be in community if you're approaching it from the perspective of I have that divine spark, but I don't know what you got.

You have nothing. Do you know what I mean? You have less than nothing. So I love the idea of if we have a mild disagreement, yeah, we can sit and talk. But if the disagreement starts with, like, you think I have no right to be on this planet, do you know what I mean? We can't have no conversation there because that's not, we're not approaching it from the same thing. Now, if you're willing to go do a little bit of work and to at least try to approach me as a fellow fully realized human being,

maybe I can sit and try to have a conversation with you, right? Because think about it like this. As a mental health provider, I can't stop someone from. seeking me out for care, right? And if they sit down with me and the first conversation I start hearing this wild stuff about, I don't know, pick a group, right? And it's all negative and it's all horrible and it's all really bad stuff. Then we got to have a conversation about in this space, in order for you to be here, there's a way we have to be able to communicate with each other. And I can't communicate with you if every other word out of your mouth is some slur about somebody. That doesn't mean I think you are

the absolute scum of the earth. That means I'm setting, I'm big believer in boundaries, I'm setting a boundary that says, I will not be in community with you if you can't at least approach me as a fellow human being. And that's a little different than

we have different beliefs. I'm screaming at you. I don't want to hear nothing you have to say. You know, sometimes, not always, I'm not always this magnanimous and generous, but sometimes I need to be able to set some boundaries with a person who has those kind of beliefs to allow us to be in community.

I'm not going to be in community with anybody because I'm not going to damage my spirit. Do you know what I mean? Like I feel like we have a charge to carry our spirit in a way where we honor it. And to me, that's part of what I feel like I'm taught by spirituality. I've been divinely gifted. There's this great saying, I know they stayed in other places. I learned it from the black church, like the Protestant black church. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, right?

And then in some Christian traditions, they talk about not casting your pearls before swine. Why would I take this and all the work that I've done to get this to this place and just put it anywhere? I wouldn't. So I want to make sure that any environment I'm in, I teach this to young people too. You want environments, they're not always going to nurture you, but at best they should be neutral. Do you know what I mean? They shouldn't be tearing you down as soon as you step into the place. Sure.

So that's kind of how I like to try to approach this constant. of spirituality because you're right. We are all in my belief system. We're all divinely created. But does that mean we all lean into the divinity that is within a, uh-uh? A lot of us don't. Certainly not. Certainly not. And what's tricky, I think, is, you know, one of Jesus's most revolutionary concepts among dozens that he brought to the planet was love thine enemies. You know, the charge to love your enemies. But, Loving your enemy doesn't necessarily mean sitting across the table from them or having to listen to them or having to spend time or being in a toxic situation with them. But there is something that has to happen in here where there is a forgiveness and a love for people, even people we find abhorrent.

Yes. Easier said than done. Yes. Tucker Carlson, I love you, buddy, from a safe distance. Right. Right, right, like real from afar, because some of that stuff you don't say it. And so it's for me it's we can be in community if and when you decide that you want to approach me and people like me and people, you said awful things about from a place of I recognize that some of that stuff I did probably wasn't right. Do you know what I mean?

I recognize that some of that stuff I did could be interpreted as hurtful to other people. Do you know what I mean? And until you can do that, I can love you from afar. And what I always say is I'm going to love you with the love that Jesus Christ charges me to have for my fellow man. That's all I got for you right now. So I'm going to love you because you got to be over there because I'm not subjected myself to that. And that's what I say to myself all the time. When somebody's nasty, I'm like, ooh, child, I love you with the love that Jesus says I'm supposed to have fellow humans.

That's all I got. That's all I got for you. I like that. I love that. of that. If AI is getting smarter every year, what human quality becomes the most valuable in the face of AI? Authenticity and genuineness. Those are the things that are valuable in the face of AI because AI can't give you that. How do you express those things? Self-awareness. You can't be authentic if you don't know who you are. Right? And that's going to evolve and change over

time, but you have a duty first to at least understand who that person is. If you know who that person is, that lends itself to you being authentic in your interactions with other. Because remember, like I say in the book, love inside, authenticity, I know who I am, I have self-awareness, can lend itself to love outside. I am able to comfortably share parts of who I am with other people. What's the difference between fitting in and belonging? Ooh, what a wonderful question. I think this is easy. Fitting in is you change and mold yourself to that setting. That's fitting in. I'm just going to do what everybody else does. Belonging is I don't change anything about who I am and I'm still welcomed and accepted in that environment. That's the difference. What's one habit that we can all cultivate that builds kind of resilient, strong mental health?

Oh, what a great question. Same thing is self-awareness. We can all work on building some level of self-awareness. How can we become more self-aware? We can become more self-aware by slowing down, by taking a little bit of time periodically. I won't say every day because that sets people up for failure. But we can take a little bit of time periodically to actually be quiet and reflect. Think about what experience. have I had lately? What have I been carrying lately? Take that sort of out of here, out of here, put it on the table and really look at it because you might not get that self-awareness from doing it once. But if you do it over time, as a practice, you can look back and begin to understand the patterns. And the patterns then help inform your conceptualization of who you are, what you like, what you don't like, and how you deal with things in your life. And to me, those then become the building blocks

for the resilience that you might want to develop, but also for knowing yourself enough to understand what do I need to better take care of my mental health. A lot of psychologists are viewing contemporary mental health crisis as also being a crisis of meaning, a crisis of purpose. What do you think?

I think there's some value to that. I think that part of it is young people today are so overly saturated with so much information coming from so many different places prior to having been taught or given the opportunity to develop the coping skills to digest all that information. Right. And so it's like a deluge. They got all this stuff. What are they supposed to do with it? Like drinking from a firehouse. There you go.

And so it becomes difficult, I think, in that kind of setting or environment or, I don't know, society to even dig through it enough to figure out what is my purpose, right? Because think about things like I don't have a problem with them, but things like NIL deals, right? Name, image, and likeness. So if you're an eighth grader and your friend has 70,000 followers, you might be more focused on how do I get 70,000 followers so I can get a lemonade deal. You know what I mean? Or whatever it is and make a bunch of money by the time I'm 19.

Rather than what's important to me, who am I? What do I want to do in the world? Right? So, rigid X. When we were younger, people would say, well, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I don't know if they ask you that anymore. Do you know what I mean? So where's the opportunity to start to develop this idea of who you are at your core and what do you want to do with your life and what do you want to contribute to the world? So I think there's some truth to that.

Is emotional exhaustion being normalized? Yes. We are being asked to carry more, to overlook more, to, you know, when we were kids, would they say suck it up? I feel like that's what we're being encouraged to do. Just suck it up. It doesn't matter how much stuff you have on your plate. Just get over it. You're not the only person struggling.

There's other people out there who have it worse. Get over yourself. So how do you get out of? a cycle of being in an emotionally exhausted place. For me, it is taking a beat, taking just a moment to step back. And then, to me, what's the most important part of stepping back is seeing what it feels like in your body physically

to take a step back. Because when you take a moment, I think most often what will happen is you will see how your body feels when you're not spinning and running versus how your body feels when you just give yourself 30 seconds to be still and breathe. And maybe take a moment without a screen in front of you. 100% without a screen. And if you have the screen in front of you, use the screen to help you meditate or to reflect. That's what the screen is for.

Put some nature sounds on. Do you know what I mean? There's something like that. Insight timer or something. Yeah. I'm so glad you said it. I love Insight timer. It's my favorite.

Yeah. It's interesting. This therapist I'm working with right now also wants me to be more physically demonstrative with and to myself. Yes. So it's the somatic work of like picture Little Rain who's hurting, lost, overwhelmed. And you're holding him and literally take him. and literally take your arms like this. You can tap yourself like this,

which helps with a bilateral mind. And in those beats to kind of, and this is a really new thing for me. What's happening with you? It's so sweet. Little rain. I'm just thinking about Little Rain. Yeah.

What about Little Alfie? I feel like I do that so much. Little Alfie. I feel like my empathy and my compassion For Little Alfie? For Little Alfie, I feel like I've been working on that a long time, right? I have forgiven people in my life, like my peers, who I feel like have hurt me. I have just worked really hard at trying to help Little Alfie know that she is seen, she is heard, and she is valued.

And that's part of why I wrote that book. That book is for Little Alfie. But to get to the process of writing it. Yeah. It was all about, see, Lil Alfie, we are right, we are right. I got you. You know, like Little Alfie, I got you. And so to hear you say, Little Rain, knowing where you are just in how you show up in the world, what you've done with your life, what you've done with your career, and to know that there's a little rain in there that still could benefit from that healing and that holding and that love, that's what's making me like, oh, so that's what it is.

I just, I don't know, my heart is just, I have a heart for the underdog. I have a heart for people who struggle. I just, I've always had that. So I just think about Lorraine. I'm like, oh, I want to hug Little Rain. Little Rain, it's okay. Yeah. That's beautiful.

Little Rain thanks you. Yeah. Yeah. Just going alongside that as well, we've got a swimming pool. I always hated swimming, but I never allowed the visceral sense. d'ensorial connection to moving through the water to be part of my experience. So now I'm like, I try and wake up, not look at my phone and like I'm in my underwear, hopefully no one's around, and I can just jump in the pool and do, you know, just 15 minutes,

but to feel like the water moving around me and to move my body and just to allow the grace, the beauty, the sensation of the water, the sky, and to allow a kind of a visceral experience of swimming and being held by the water, I know this sounds like really hippie-dippy. No, it doesn't. That's been really important for me over the last several months.

I'm so jealous. I'm a water sign. I'm a Pisces. So is my wife. Really? When's your birthday? March 14th. Her's is March 12.

Okay, sis, I see you, girl. Pisces queen? There you go. Pisces queen. Take your crown, sis, take your crown. I did a reading once and a woman said, I believe in another life long ago, you were the person on the boat and you would take people from one part of the area all the way across the water to the other part, like almost like a ferry. I was the fairy captain. You talk about captain on the fairy captain.

And that's always stuck with me. And I feel like that's true. It's like helping people get from point A to point B only in this lifetime, it is around their mental health and coming back to themselves. So the idea of water, anytime I'm super duper stressed out, there are a lot of streams and, I don't know, water areas where I'm from on a lot of the hiking trails. And when I'm really stressed out, my brain is like, go sit by the water. And I go to the water and I listen to the babbling brook and it just heals me. So the idea of the water, like you're saying, and just being able to feel the water, that's like heaven to me. That's the best place on earth is being in the water.

Dr. Alfie, one question we ask every guest on the show is the definition of the word soul. We're soul boom. I say the word soul. What does that bring up for you on the deepest level? Our essence and the core of who we are, stripped of all the phenotype, stripped of anything that's ever happened to you, stripped of any life experience. For me, the soul is the spark, the core, the essence of who you are. To me, that's the soul. Beautiful. Thank you. Amen. I agree. Dr. Alfie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me,

Rain. And the great work of Dr. Alfie, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Soul Boom is also on Spotify video. If you've got Spotify premium, you can enjoy it free, of Spotify ads. If you don't, you'll get even less ads if you hit subscribe to Soul Boom. Also, enjoy on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, or wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.