Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 453: An Ace Therapist Gives Dan A Run For His Money | Dr. Jacob Ham

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Sometimes part of healing trauma means learning how to be human. This episode is the last episode of our Mental Health Reboot series to mark Mental Health Awareness Month. Dr. Jacob Ham, who was introduced in Stephanie Foo’s episode earlier this week, helped Stephanie through her case of complex PTSD and discusses how to live with the hardest things that have happened to you. Dr. Ham is the Director of the Center for Child Trauma and Resilience and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He sees children, youth, adults, and families across the age range and for a variety of issues. In this episode we talk about: What Dr. Ham says may be the “most important thing he’s discovered” as a therapistWhy he shuts down his clients’ attempts to intellectualize their experiencesKairos versus kronos Why Dr. Ham says the Incredible Hulk is so important to himThe concept of mentalizationWhat it means to love exquisitelyAnd whether or not we have to learn to love ourselves before we can learn to love othersContent Warning: Explicit language.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jacob-ham-453See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, hello. Today's interviewee truly gave me a run for my money, not because he was trying to be a pain in the butt, at least I don't think so, but because he really resists giving overly simplified answers, and because as you will hear, he's in the habit of asking people questions about what is really behind their questions. Again, I really don't think this was him trying to be difficult. I think it's that he's trying to

model how to actually listen to other people, how to be attuned, or in other words, how to be a functioning human. Part of his job, as you will hear him admit, and these are my words, not his, is to teach his patients how to be human. And while most of us will never actually be patients of Dr. Jacob Haam, just listening to him, I believe, will help you do life better. We're going to talk about some fascinating stuff today with Dr. Ham, who is a legendary therapist, including what he says may be the most important thing

he has discovered as a therapist, why he shuts down his clients' attempts to intellectualize their experiences, Kairos versus Kronos, those may sound like Marvel characters, but they're actually Greek terms for our relationship to time. Speaking of Marvel, though, we are gonna talk to Dr. Ham about why he says the incredible Hulk is so important to him.

We'll also talk about the concept of mentalization, which is the ability to understand the mental states of the people around you and your own. And he'll explain why this is a skill that for many of his patients needs to be reawakened. We'll also touch on what it means to love exquisitely, that's his term, what he means by the word love, and whether or not we have to learn to love ourselves

before we can learn to love other people. Dr. Homm is the director of the Center for Child, Trauma and Resilience and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He treats children, young adults, adults, and families across the age range for a variety of issues. Today we're talking to Dr. Ham

but we talked a lot about him here on the pod on Monday. My guest on Monday, Stephanie Fu, talked about how Dr. Ham helped her through a case of complex PTSD, which she developed after some intense and prolonged child abuse and neglect. As I mentioned on Monday while we're using the word trauma in these episodes this week, a word which some of you will relate to intimately and others will not see yourselves in at all. This week's episodes are actually in the broadest sense about how to live with the hardest things that have ever happened to you. This, by the way, is the last episode of our month-long

mental health reboot series in which every week we paired mental health memoirists with expert scientists and researchers will get back to our more willy-nilly programming style come Monday. Heads up before we dive in here, there's some profanity in this episode. If you want to bleep diversion, you can head over to our website or over to the 10% happier app. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually

do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my

head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from my space? Listen to Baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Dr. Jacob Hum, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a real honor. It's a pleasure to have you on. I guess I'd be interested to start by hearing a little bit about you.

How did you get into this line of work? Why? When I was a kid, I used to tell my mom that I was going to go into a monastery. And I'm a Korean-born immigrant. My mother's a North Korean refugee and my father's from South Korea. And we came here when I was three years old. And you know, we're like your typical blue collar working class Korean family and I did well in school I got into an IPLIC school and then I would still say like mom I'm gonna join a monastery after college and she'd be like okay whatever and then I wonder I was like mom why don't you care like I'm your oldest son and you're spending a lot of money on my education

and then she said, this really weird story, that's entertaining. So I'm going to tell you that it's not because I believe it. When I was born in Korea, she said that this monk just walked into our home and was just wandering around the home and she said, can I help you with something? And he said, there's this weird ghostly, apparitional cloudy thing above your house. I'm trying to figure out what it is. And then he saw me and he said, oh, that's why. And then he said, what was your birth dream about him? Because Korean people have birth dreams about their children. And then she said, I was climbing a mountain

and it crumbled. And I start to fall. And the mountain collapsed into my belly. And I knew I was pregnant. And he said, oh, he's going to be a mountain of a man in some way, like a great said, oh, he's gonna be a mountain of a man in some way, like a great man, but he's gonna be of weak constitution. So give me some string and I'll pray for his health. So it wasn't a scam, he just wanted to string. And then a few days later, a nun came by

and it's the same thing happened. And they also said, don't ever tell him the story because it's gonna go to his head. And so she did tell me and it did kind of mess with me a little bit. But I've always had this sense of wanting to join the monastery to do something spiritual. And then I went to Brown.

I was a little just studies major. I double majored in psychology. And I just painted the rest of my time because at Brown, there's no core curriculum. And then I learned about the Bodhisattva. And I also met some fantastic therapists. And the whole point of the Bodhisattva is that they can reach enlightenment And I also met some fantastic therapists. And the whole point of the Bodhisattva is that they can

reach enlightenment and leave this world, but they turn around and see the suffering of other people and they turn around and help other people reach enlightenment. And so that was a higher moral calling than going to the monastery. And being a psychologist was a way to still have a doctor after my name so that I could be, you know, the ideal doctor, lawyer, son of an immigrant family.

And I thought that there were some really creative people in the field that I had met, some of my professors. And I thought I could be happy doing a life like that, where therapy becomes an art form. And so I could fulfill the creative part of me too. And so I feel like I'm a contemplative in disguise doing trauma work. And I do trauma work because trauma's the only diagnosis

in the DSM, the diagnostic statistical manual that actually acknowledges that most of our mental illness comes from suffering. And if you know the research about trauma, then you realize that so many of the disorders, the mental health disorders, are actually symptomatic of trauma. It's a more primal cause than some of the biological explanations for psychiatric disorders that we have. So it just became a convergence of all these interests. How do you define trauma? Well, became a convergence of all these interests. How do you define trauma?

Well, the ones that I really care about in my work is actually moment to moment, terror and fear, and early childhood stuff. I'm, was a early mother-in-fint researcher. And the kind of trauma that gets often neglected in our society is actually the moment to moment neglect and abuse and fear children experience from a very early age.

Most people focus on the big tea traumas, the disasters, the car accidents, the physical abuse, but even if you think about children who have fostered care or violence, I always wonder about what their first two years of life were. That's where the roots of a lot of relational trauma get laid down. And that's what I feel like I can work through and help people with in the therapy that I practice. I guess the question that I hope this is inappropriate

that's coming to mind is if somebody's experiencing fear and terror on a moment-to-moment basis between zero and two at the hands of their parents or caregivers, I guess getting over it is not the right expression, but is that workable and how? Yeah, that's a huge question. I thought it would be a lecture in itself. I have seen it be worked through.

The key term that I haven't found a good layman's term for is reawakening the capacity for mentalization. Mindfulness actually is a very close overlap to mentalization. But the term literally just means knowing that the other person has a mind and knowing that I have a mind and being curious about what's happening in your mind, as well as being curious about what's happening in mind. So since the original wound for somebody who's been abused as a child is a relational wound. In other words, it's your relationships through no fault of your own are jacked up. Then these people carry this sort of inability to relate successfully into the rest of their lives.

Yeah, and I would add to it that what's really screwed up is that as a baby, the only way to deal with fear and terror is to run towards your caregivers. They're supposed to protect you. You scream out, hoping that they'll come to your rescue. But if they're the ones who are hurting you, then it puts you in a terrifying loop where you want to run from them. But at the same time, your body tells you to go find them. And then you spend the rest of your days trying to figure out a resolve that paradox. And so this is where children learn to mute their own feelings. They learn that they have to be the one to take care of other people, that their feelings aren't as important as the other person. Yeah, you start to lose touch with yourself. And your contention is that this is treatable. Yeah. It's a lifelong

process. But I've seen a lot of people get a lot better. And through many different ways, not just therapy in the way that I practice it. What was the word again, mentalization? Yeah. It strikes me that you don't have to have endured, I think, the term of art is ACEs, Adverse Childhood A.C.E.'s adverse childhood events. Correct. In order to have trouble with mentalization, empathy seems to be on the decline globally.

Exactly. I don't know if it's on the decline. What I've been seeing is that the whole world survived terrifying world wars in the 40s, 50s, or whatnot. And our generation is suffering the emotional ramification of that. Most of my patients are survivors of the Holocaust, survivors of World War I, two Chinese cultural evolution, Korean War, and slavery and all the other kinds

of horrible things that we do to each other. And what that does to the first generation is that it makes them focus only on physical survival and getting money, getting wealth like the tiger parent idea. And at the cost of emotional intelligence, emotional understanding, it's too dangerous to know what you're feeling and you don't have time for it. And then the next generation's once physical security and safety is secured, then they start to have the luxury of being able to complain about the fact that they're emotionally neglected. And then they want to work that through with their children. And so I think it takes generations for us to recover from the devastation of peace

global wars that we've experienced. I wonder whether it's all tied back to trauma or whether there aren't other aspects of modern life that drive us further into ourselves. I mean, I thought I've read, and we'll check this afterwards, I think I've read that empathy is on the decline. I know self-centeredness is on the rise. I've seen those data. So in a world where capitalism enforces a kind of individualism, where social media puts us in a position of building our own personal brand all the time, where polarization, political, or otherwise, encourages us to dehumanize people with whom we disagree. It seems like this capacity for mentalization understanding that other people have complex minds of their own is under assault, trauma or no trauma.

I absolutely agree with that. This is where I'm a bad podcast, yes, because I don't want to speak in generalizations about what's happening in the world, because I feel like I don't have a pulse on it necessarily because my whole day is sitting with one person in front of me in a quiet room, not having a pulse on what's happening in society. And the only thing that I can have an impact on is the person in front of me that society and other people deal with the larger social issues. This is where you and I are different because I'm always willing to apply and understand I know nothing about.

So, yeah, and here's another reason why I don't go there. With my patients, I find that it becomes a defense against interknowing. It's Freud's defense of intellectualization. And so I often whenever I hear it, I immediately like try to shut it down with my patients. People instead of looking at their stuff, start coming up with concepts and grand theories as a kind of defense.

Exactly. They're like, I'm lonely, but isn't everyone lonely? Isn't the world making this all lonely? What am I gonna do with that? So talk to me about your approach, given the population you're treating, how would you describe your approach and how did you come up with it?

Well, it's not anything new. I don't wanna somehow claim that it's my approach. I think I do it in a weird way. I do therapy in a weird way. I do therapy in a weird way, and I probably give more credit to classic psychodynamic, psychoanalytic theories and approaches, which are out of favor in this time of like cognitive behavioral therapy or like what they call third wave therapies. But I guess technically I would fit mostly in a modern relational approach. No one's going to know what that means.

But in the old days with Freud initially, in most psychodynamic psychotherapies, it's a one person therapy, meaning that if you're my patient and anything that happens, it's all your stuff. And if you find me deplorable or in some positive way, respectable, then it's because it's your stuff that's getting projected onto me. I'm neutral. I had no personhood in the room, but in a two-person psychology, we acknowledge that the experience is co-created. My stuff gets intermingled with your stuff, and then we co-create stuff. And the goal of this kind of therapy is just to wonder about what's happening between us

with as much like open curiosity as possible, which goes back to mindful practice again. It's like this compassionate curiosity about what is happening between us. And when you can really do that, there's really this poignant knowing and seeing of the other that happens. That does break through the lack of empathy and the silos that we are creating in our modern society. It becomes deeply moving actually to work. So it sounds like you're an active participant here not examining somebody's symptoms and pathologies from a clinical remove.

It's more complicated. I feel like I have like seven layers of processing happening while I'm doing therapy. There's still the clinical brain that's thinking what's happening inside of them, what's happening inside of me and what's happening between us. And there's another part of me that's just like feeling what's happening in my body, trying to wonder whether it'd be useful for me to like express that and be spontaneous. There's the red flag, my spider senses that are going off at the same time, trying to check that I'm not doing anything inappropriate or unethical or unprofessional. It's really quite like an exhausting thing to be doing it this way.

And I like it. I want to be reactive in the seat of my pants feeling. I don't want to know what's going on. I don't want to have a script. I don't want to have a sense of what's going to happen. I'd rather be surprised at the moment. And then it becomes joyful and playful and exciting. First of all, I love getting the glimpse into your mind

as you're doing therapy that's fascinating. The thought that came up for me was that on top of being exciting and joyful and rewarding, it might also be a form of therapy for you too, because you're learning about yourself. Absolutely, it's undeniable. Yeah, I'm not perfect. I'm just another human being trying to like figure out how to live my life. And I don't claim otherwise. And I make mistakes. I fumble. My heart breaks. My heart aches. In therapy. I once told a man like, I can get

you as far as I've gotten. You know, It's this man who had a severe trauma history. And he was like, can you fix me, Doc? And I said, I can only take you as far as I've gotten myself and then you're gonna have to find someone else or you're gonna have to teach me something new too. And it becomes totally co-created. What's that roomy phrase we're all walking each other home?

Have you experienced trauma yourself? home. Have you experienced trauma yourself? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's intergenerational he passed down. I think my maternal grandfather died on a land mine escaping North Korea. Korea was under Japanese occupation for 50 years before the Korean War. My parents had very little to eat. My mother was in a refugee housing in Seoul. My father was a drill sergeant in Korea, which made him have a temper. And so his anger could be scary sometimes. My mother was depressed. So she disappeared on me. I remember moments when she would psychologically disappear on me as a little boy. I grew up in Texas in the 70s.

The KKK still marched. One of my earliest memories is that I was dry by racial slur against me when I was like four years old. I've witnessed gun violence between three and in Vietnamese gangs as a high school student. I have probably three or four aces if you're going back to that at first childhood event scale. So you're able to make the empathic leap quite naturally into the seat that your patients are occupying? We have to I think. Yeah, that's the only way to therapy right. Trauma is an act of violence against relational connection, against feeling human, against feeling like you deserve

to be loved and then loving is a good thing and it's a safe thing. And so I think that that has to be reawakened. And sometimes it happens through the therapy relationship with in constraint obviously, it has to be ethically done. But I feel like I have to feel things for my patients or else I'm doing something wrong or also I'm defending or I'm colluding with their avoidance

and defense. You know that polishing the mirror, metaphor and Buddhism, remember? Like from the woo way. I feel like I've taken that into my own practice where I polished the mirror of my heart so that it becomes a tool for resonating and harmonizing with the other person's heart. And it also becomes an invitation for their heart to start humming again, because trauma shuts it down.

Let me see it if I got it. And I'm drawing a little bit upon my conversation with Stephanie Fu, whose episode will have aired on Monday or two days before yours. And just to say to listeners, I encourage you to listen to it. You don't have to have listened to it in order to keep going with this. What I got from everything you've said and from talking to her, it's like you're kind of teaching people how to be human again, because there's something that shuts down when in your relational capacity, relationships being the most important currency of homo sapiens, and something that shuts down quite

understandably in a situation where the people are supposed to be caring for you or abusing you. And so you just, somebody's got to teach you how to do it. Your parents weren't there to teach you how to do it. And so that's something you can help people learn for themselves. Yeah, as soon as I heard that that my first reaction was to say that I teach them how to be both exquisitely human and all-to-human at the same time,

meaning like it's like us at our best when we are humming both with our heads and our hearts alive and resonating with other people. That's the exquisite part. And then the all-to-human part is whenever we have foibles and fumbles and we love ourselves despite those things. Yeah, so at our best, we're right there paying attention to what's happening right now, attuned to the other person and tuned to ourselves

at the same time. But we can't be at our best all the time. So when we screw up, which is inevitable, can we be okay enough with that? Yes, exactly. What are the tools you teach people? Because they can't be with you all the time in your office. They need to go out into the world and relate to other people. So I'll put on the table in part why I'm asking this question, which is,

I don't have any patients because I'm not a mental health professional. P-A-T-I-E-N-T-S. I don't have any P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E either, but in this case, I don't have any people in my care, but I have an audience that I care about. And so I always want to give them things that can help them do their lives better. And so that guides some of my questions to you. So just put that on the table that if you're trying to figure out why I'm saying whatever I'm saying, that's usually what's operating in my mind.

So having said that, I'm curious because I believe quite strongly having spoken to Stephanie, having had the life experiences I've had and having only spent the half hour review as far that what you're teaching is applicable to people who will never end up in your office and don't have ACEs or may not have experienced trauma. It's universal. That's really what I believe. And so I'd love to hear a little bit from you about what kind of skills do you teach? I, um, Bristol, let the word skills and tools and I think it's either because I haven't done the work of like being able to crystallize what I do, which is really hard for me to do. It's like asking what's the best move in chess.

There's so many answers to this and I only know the answer as I get to know the person. But there are some general things that I'm always trying to get at, which is like, are you a whole person? Is there like flow? Or are you compartmentalized? Are you blocked? Can you be poignant? I love that word, but it's hard to describe it. It's just like, can you move me? Can you move yourself? And for me, that represents an integration of head, heart, gut, body, spirit. And so I know where I'm trying to get people, but with each person, I don't know how they're going to need to get there. And in the room, I guess what I do is that I try to look for moments whenever I see disconnection, dissociation, or whatever. And I try to bring attention to that and to wonder what's going on in that. And so the only tool I really practice is this mindful curiosity, but it's not just mindfulness.

It's actually like loving curiosity. It has to be done with such like, oh, what's going on here? You have to love it like you're two-year-old. You can do no wrong and you just want to understand what's happening right now. And that's a really hard thing for people to do. I think there's so much judgment around that. A hard thing for people to do for themselves or for other people or for both. Both.

This compartmentalization, the lack of empathy that you're referring to, we definitely aren't empathetic with ourselves. We really mean to ourselves in harsh and judgmental and we announce parts of ourselves. This is partly why I liked Buddhism way better than Western religions because it wasn't about getting rid of the evil side. It's about seeing the whole self and accepting the good and bad. I'm going to ask you an unfairly broad question. It's going to put you back in the chess mode, unfortunately.

So you can mindfully and compassionately slap my wrist if you want, but what can one do in order to be a whole person have flow, achieve, point, and see an integration? What can you do? One would be to start looking at yourself and seeing how well you can tolerate that. Like, not literally, but metaphorically, stand naked in front of a mirror and see what your reaction to that is. Are you repulsed? Do you move away from it?

Just observe it. And then if there is some repulsion and stuff, then try to wonder about that as well, put that in front of the mirror. It's very much like Parts work, like best represented in internal family systems. I know you had an interview with Dick Schwartz before, which I had listened to, and I loved that interview. I share that with all my colleagues.

I loved it because you actually put them to the ringer and you didn't just like go along with it. And you see Dick having to like go into his tool bag and try to come up with different ways to reach you. It kind of put it on the ground like you're gonna struggle with people with this stuff. Even Dix-Tort struggles with, trying to apply this stuff. Anyway, so it's a lot like looking at all your parts, observing what comes up, trying to look at that with love and kindness as well, know that each part has a role

and it's trying to love you the best way it can, even if it seems perverse in the way it does that. That's really hard, even that alone takes a lot of time. And it just becomes a muscle of awareness that you have to practice and a muscle of like cultivating love in the midst of the potential for fear and shame. Maybe that's the most important thing that I've discovered. I'm obsessed with this idea of suffering. Does it have a point? And what do you do with it? Suffering's a given in life, and our task in life is to learn to love in the midst of great suffering.

You've brought me to a point that I love when I get to this point in interviews, which is that I have 75 questions. I'm trying to line the planes up on the runway. Nice. So just note to listeners, I know he said a lot of interesting stuff there, and I promise you I'm going to do the best of my ability, loop back and get to all of it. So coming up, we'll do just that. We'll loop back and try to get at all of the stuff Dr. Homme just brought up, including what it is we're supposed to do with our suffering and what he means by the word love. We'll also talk about whether or not we have to love ourselves before we learn to love others, the difference between Kairos and Kronos, and why he likes talking about the incredible

Hulk. It's all coming up after this. Like the short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you.

But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you,

what would be on it? Follow Life is Short, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. So let me just go back to the beginning of the metaphor of standing naked in front of the mirror. There are a lot of ways to do this. You know, therapy is won if you've got a good therapist.

Another is meditation. What do you recommend for people who are willing, who are gutsy enough to actually do that thing? You're going back to the chest move question. I would say to sing into wherever your body's leaning you towards, there's so many different ways. Don't stress about it. The other thing that I would add, use the other person

as a mirror, find a loved one who's a great listener or become a great listener for the other. That'll help you become a great listener for yourself. Like you said, that therapy can be healing for the therapist, learn to be a good therapist for others. And that way you'll cultivate compassion for yourself too. And say, Oh, we're also human. So frail. And we have all these idiosyncrasies and feelings. It's okay. I can still love this person despite their feelings. This person being another person, this person being you. Yeah, it's all the same.

Where do you fall on this question of do you need to learn to love yourself before you can love other people? I think it's moment to moment. The answer depends on what the moment requires. It's a virtuous or vicious cycle. So again, I won't have an answer because I just need to see the person in front of me and see what they're struggling with. And then nudge them in the right direction. Oh, maybe the way that I would reframe the question then would be, is fear coming up in such a way that it's blocking your capacity to feel connected to the other person or to yourself. And that's another key idea that I think that trauma as a field has really helped teach me is that there are these two competing selves, the fear survival self, which is very ego protective and creates divisions in what's running rampant in our society right now, the other ring energy and the dehumanizing energy. And then there's the open-hearted, curious, complex,

and can tolerate ambiguity. It doesn't need a black and white answer. That's state of mind, which is harder to define. And it's like present moment. It's like chirost, versus cronos, as well. And so it's always the question of like, what state of mind am I in right now? That's a better question than what comes first, loving yourself or loving the other. Are you in an open state of mind? Because then when you're in that open state of mind, loving yourself and loving other become one and the same. Who are chiro's and cronos?

Greek terms for time. Chrono's being scheduled time that creates rushing and creates demands and then high-ros is existential time being with another person ideally. Hopefully we achieve this where you and I are we lose time and we're just like in our heads together and we're giving to know each other in a deep way. A word that you've used quite a bit has come up repeatedly in this conversation and it's on my list of things to ask you is love. What do you mean by love? Because the word is loaded. I talk about this a lot.

It's a loaded term and people can go right to, you know, Tom Cruise saying, you complete me in a rom-com. But you could also think about it in a broader, more capacious way, a more down-to-earth way. So what do you mean when you say love? I don't know. I appreciate your honesty. Now, let me try to walk back my fagness.

One, I love my boy so much. It spills out of my heart. It's a physical thing. I'm like oozing with oxytocin when I'm holding my boy. And then with some of myin whenever I'm holding my boy. And then with some of my patients, I feel similarly. And it's just like this, there's something divine about it. Spiritual, it's just like stunned and amazement at their beauty and their humaneness and

their foibles. And it's like a mix of experience. Sometimes it's just a resonance with another person and wishing them well, rooting them on. I don't know, it's just whenever I feel that my heart is somehow connected to theirs, maybe that's the best I can give you. I try not to use ideas. I know that it feels like my heart is pulsing. We have very different jobs, so I have no choice but to use ideas. So let me try one on you and see if your heart pulses with it. I kind of think of love as, you know, anything that fits within the human capacity to care. It can be romantic love, it can be the strings come in and a rom-com,

it can be parenting, your boy, your son, my son, but can also just be somebody I see on the street to fell down or anybody I see on the street anywhere. It can also just be my desire for Vladimir Putin, who I disagree with vehemently to be a happier person so he stops being such a jerk. Yeah, I like all those. The thing that came to mind when you were talking was a woman that I just met and she had a hard moment in a training that we are in. And I saw her a little girl using parts metaphors.

And I was so proud of her little girl for standing up for herself. And I just fell in love with her in that moment for how brave she was to like stand up for herself. And at the end of our training, I just started to hug her and then I just told her I loved her. And I had very complex feelings about her,

but you're right, it was that I cared about her as a human being. Do you ever have trouble mustering the love where you're having a bad day or you have a patient who's just annoying? Of course. Yes. Yeah, that's really telling, actually.

And then I inquire about what is happening between us that this is happening. So you'll say I'm having trouble feeling warm through you right now? Sure, that's a tough one. Sometimes I have said things like that when I know that they can hear it in the way that I mean, where we've done enough work where we're just processing what's happening between us. But other people get deeply offended and walk on my office. So it's a really high-risk thing,

but I've been able to use things like that successfully. One of the very first ways that I learned this, there's another anecdote. There was a woman who had come in really late at night and she was talking and I yawned, and then she said, you did it again. I said, what did I do? And she said, you yawn, I go, I know. And then I said, I'm so bored. I said, what did I do? And she said, you know, I know.

And then I said, I'm so bored right now, which was a huge risk. And she said, me too. And then she started to cry. And then she said, you know what? I don't want to talk today. I don't want to say anything real. So I've been just talking around you,

hoping that you wouldn't notice. She was hearing up. And I said, I notice now. And I'm not bored now. You're finally here. And it became resonant again. I haven't done a lot of Zen training, but it reminds me a little bit of hearing stories

about Zen masters doing unconventional things to jar their students back into the spontaneity and freshness that is so valued in the Zen tradition. Yes, exactly. I don't know if you and Stephanie talked about this, but one of the most controversial things that she talks about in her book about are therapy is that I call her stupid.

And someone on Amazon, like remarked on how inappropriate that was, but that was a spontaneous thing that emerged between us. And part of me could be deeply troubled by how unprofessional an unethical that is, but that's not me looking in front of the mirror again, like in my nakedness and trying to love myself in that. And so I've been thinking a lot about where that comes from.

And part of it is that I would say those things when I saw her suffering and she was like getting lost in her suffering. And I call her remarks I'm never gonna find love or you know those kinds of things that people say in the scientific term it's like a depressive genetic thought so I would say you're being so stupid that's so stupid but what I was feeling was just like this compassion for her suffering and part of me I think was uncomfortable with how much I was like sending love to her in

that moment. I wanted to just hold her and just be like, oh, it's okay, it's okay. But I'm not allowed to. I'm figuring out how to deal with my own energy. And so I used this word that kind of divides us, but it's said with affection still, and she could tell so she didn't mind. And then even in the audio book version, she plays a part where I say stupid and she could tell so she didn't mind. And then even in the audio book version, she plays a part where I say stupid and she goes,

oh, that's twice today, I earned stupid today and I go, oops, did I say that out loud? I didn't even notice and we joking and it's a way for us to bond and come back into the moment instead of her being lost in her shit spot or whatever. I call it. Yeah, she called it the shit spot

or something like that, that's your term. Yeah. Well, it called it the shit spot or something like that, that's your term. Yeah. Well, it's my patient's term and it was so perfectly descriptive, just stuck. I was laughing, I hope not inappropriately, when you're relating the story of calling Stephanie stupid, not because I think she's stupid, there may be people in the audience who are upset

because I'm siding with you here, but the reason I was laughing is that that's the dynamic that's at play between me and my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who often uses unconventional techniques when I come to him with some big story of my own suffer. I remember one time I was telling him how writing is this big.

It's so hard to write books and my suffering is operatic and blah, blah, blah. And he said, this idea you have that you need to suffer to write is just you being stupid. What did that do to you when you heard that? I thought it was great. It joked me out of, you know, it's all about, as the Buddhist say, skillful means. You have to know who your student or in your case, the patient is. are they confident enough in your affection? I'm assuming here that that's the deal. Are they confident enough in

your affection so that they know that it's actually playful and meant to help you and jar you out of your story? And so I also come from a family where verbal abuse was our love language. For birthdays, we roasted each. And that was how we showed affection. And I use the term verbal abuse here in a jocular way. There was no real verbal abuse. So I guess Joseph into it's this gets that we will work well with me and does it. And I'm assuming that's what's going on with you. Exactly. Yeah. And what I would also add that if for any reason, it actually hurt her, then it becomes great fodder for growth and healing. Because then for her to feel safe enough to say like, hey, fuck you, I didn't like that

right then. And for me to be able to say like, oh, tell me more about that. Instead of like, well, you know, I meant it this way, you know, get defensive to just like be curious about this new thing that just emerged for some reason. But therapy takes on a life of its own. It becomes another joyful creative experience. Another thing you said earlier was to suffering have a point. And you said that you're still working on this question. But an answer that's come up in your head is that the point of suffering is to learn how to love in the midst of great suffering.

My recapitulating your point with some degree of accuracy. Yes. And that suffering is inevitable, like the first noble truth. I keep thinking about birth and pregnancy and how painful and life-threatening and terrible the process of creating another love-team and being is. And in the midst of this terrible pain that threatens life, something that we love so much comes from it. And so it's almost like God or the universe or whatever, stamped into our birth process, the point of life itself. And you can apply that to yourself. We suffer so much at our own hands.

And you can apply that to yourself. We suffer so much at our own hands. Can we use these moments of pain to learn how to have a modicum of warmth and vis-a-vis our own the difficult parts of our own personality and to see them as just characters that are trying to help us perhaps unskillfully. And that if you do that with love then then you births yourself to a higher level of development. And so I guess this brings this full circle to the question I asked early on, which is even for people with ACEs, even for people who were abused by the people who were supposed to take care of them, this personal development is still on offer.

You see it in your office. People can learn to live with the worst stuff that's ever happened to them. Yeah, I once said this really perverse thing that trauma becomes a gift, even though I would, I hate that I say that because I would never wish anyone to be traumatized, but it can actually become a propelling force for personal growth.

There is such a, like in the academic field, there's that term post-traumatic growth to actually name that that happens. So we're not for these horrible things that happen to you. You might not be in the therapist's office. You might not be on that meditation retreat. You might not be reading whatever book you were listening to this podcast. If it wasn't for your panic attack, you would not have changed your life and done something.

Well, however, this is meaningful for you. You made your life more meaningful because of your panic attack. Yes. And I think it's worth perhaps now getting at it, one of your key points, which is, and I think I'm quoting you back to you here as I look at my notes here, that it's not getting rid of trauma.

It's replacing fear and trauma with love and understanding and openness. So you're not trying to fix, quote unquote, anything. Yeah, that's right. I don't have words. It's more of this, I just saw an image of like, expansiveness and openness. Maybe sometimes if I have a word suit, it's like to carry your trauma with grace, whatever that means. As you talked about openness before, that just brings me back to the Kairos Chronos thing. And now I'm going to ask one of these questions that mildly annoy you, because I find it so compelling this idea that, you know, there's two modes

we have. One would be open and playful and curious and the other is, you know, all of MIG-DILA flight, fight, freeze, fixed, you know, like not open. So here's the annoying part. Give it all of your experience and I know everybody's in different situations at different moments and its chess, et cetera, et cetera. But what are some possible ways we might explore to boost our chiro's quotient and reduce that of cronos? My answer is gonna be repeating myself. And actually, I wanna use you as an example

because throughout this interview you have been exemplifying this mentalizing mindful state because you said I'm going to annoy you a little bit but it's my job and when you say it's my job it's because you're having in mind your audience and you're saying like nom at the exciting part because I have 75 questions. That's a mentalizing of your own self in registering where you are. So you're doing this incredibly complex thing when I said, like I have like seven layers of process happening. You as well, I can tell that you're tending to everyone,

me, you and your audience at the same time. And that's an incredibly difficult thing to do. And my guess is that you must have cultivated that somehow. It's not easy, but that would be it. I would want everyone to keep cultivating that capacity. How'd you do it? Well, I've been, I'm old, 50, so I've been doing journalism. We're the same age. Okay, so we're both old, but you look great. Yeah, I've been to journalists since I was 22, and so I that, and then, you know, 12 years of meditation and lots of therapy. And so it's work. And I will say it's not uncommon for me to walk out of this little studio in a closet

and the bedroom I share of my wife and be in a pretty foul mood because I'm burning somebody calories doing this work that I don't often have a lot of bandwidth left when I leave. Maybe that being a little unfair. Many times I walk out totally invigorated, but it does take a lot of energy. I can't do it all the time. Yeah, it's our best selves, but then we get hangry and sleep deprived and irritable, and we just flow in and out of that. Why do you talk about the Hulk?

I'm a child psychologist technically, and so I need to figure out ways to describe things in a way that's digestible for my patients and for the young ones. But I was really struck by the fact that he is the perfect metaphor for our survival brain. The Hulk was an abused child. Abused by his father, saw his father kill his mother. So Hulk is actually just survival brain on gamma radiation.

And the reason why it's such a great metaphor is because when we are in survival brain, our capacity for complex thinking disappears, our capacity for language, especially for men disappears, which is exactly what happens to Hulk. He only sees threat or safety. Are you going to trust or no trust? And he can't use words to explain himself. And the other thing that is incredibly important to know, especially if you're working with kids with trauma,

is that if you try to discipline the Hulk, if you tell the Hulk, if you throw another tank, you're gonna get a timeout, the Hulk's gonna get really mad and experience that as a threat, and it's gonna make him even bigger and stronger and rage even harder. So, I'm really combating our old ways of using forceful energy to get kids to act right. That's a huge trigger for me because I was one of those

kids who was always acting out and getting detentions, like multiple detentions in a row because I wouldn't stop raging. And the only thing you can do is to give Hulk time to calm down. And then the last thing that's so important is that banner hates being the Hulk. Like once he's calm, he looks at all the devastation he's wreaked and he's, he just hates what he's done. And all people with trauma hate themselves. They hate themselves for not having stopped violence

from happening to them. And they hate themselves for all the ways that from happening to them, and they hate themselves for all the ways that they try to cope with the trauma that they experienced, the drug addiction, and the acting out, and avoidance of all the impact on their lives. So self-loading is a key experience for people with trauma. And the Hulk is not a bad guy, the Hulk is one of our favorite superheroes. Kids love him. So it reinforces the idea that you have to start to learn to respect and admire the Hulk because he's served an important function in your life. For a long time, he's kept you safe. He's gotten you this far. So don't make the Hulk's violence with violence

because when you shoot the Hulk, he only gets stronger and angrier. And you, I think, are saying this in relationship to our own inner Hulk and the Hulk's of other people. Absolutely. Yeah. So with children, for example, my son's seven, he doesn't actually throw that many tepotentzers, but when he does, a time out is better than a huge punishment right there in the moment.

And a time out done with the right energy. Sun, you're really upset. I think it's important for us both to calm down. Because my favorite story was that an eight-year-old boy used to tell his dad, dad, you're hulking out, you need to calm down. And so it levels the playing field. We all have hulks in us. And so you might say to your son,

I'm starting to get dysregulated. I'm getting really upset. I think I need to take a step back and calm down. Do you need to take a step back and calm down? Or you might say to him, it looks like you're too upset. Why don't you take a break and we'll revisit this when you're calmer. It really helps you to track whether or not he's Hulk because you can't reason with Hulk or

he's like banner. I was talking right before this interview with my executive coach, Jerry Kalonos. I've actually been on the show a couple of times and he likes talking about the Hulk as well. And he was using without naming the internal family systems model, this model, the Dick Schwartz idea of naming the various characters that are competing for salience in your mind at any given moment. And he was saying, well, think of the Hulk, your capacity for anger, as being part of the Avengers, the Avengers, Thor and Iron Man Captain America, they're all working to shave down the Hulk's various tendencies, and they're working in unison. It's not always perfect, but there is a way to put the Hulk in context. You mean to be able to channel his energy for good and not for rampant destruction?

Yeah, and to note that there are other parts of you that might be able to calm down the Hulk when he's raging and perhaps not taking you in the right direction. And the way that I would do that is to first honor the Hulk, say, you're up because you think I need you. And I know you love me so much that you're willing to destroy the whole world for me. And then you would be saying, I have other ideas for how we can get this done. I have other strategies. Are you okay with that? Can we let Iron Man try first?

You have to make sure that he feels empowered and in a collaborative relationship with you. And that's why I'm slightly disagreeing with the notion of just trying to keep them contained, because it has a little bit of an adversarial relationship to it. Yes. Jerry, I'm sorry, I'm probably mangling what he meant, but I took from it that, you know, the other Avengers, they love the Hulk. They're really happy to have him on their team, but, you know, they're all working in

Unison to bring out the best in each other. Yeah. And to achieve a single, that helps to know what you're trying to accomplish. I wish you had your podcast on video because people can't read your face. It really helps. What are you reading right now? There's a lot of playfulness and kindness coming out of it. You're still trying to do your work, but you're, yeah, it's not all hard.

You're not laboring in a hard way. Do you know what I mean? I appreciate that. I think we are going to start releasing the video eventually. Nice. Not for that, Reenath. Not because I'm trying to present myself as some master who you get to see at work, because mostly the camera will not be on me, but I appreciate what you're saying. I'll tell you what's going on for me, usually that I'm trying to simultaneously think about

where we could go next while also listen closely enough. I'm sure this is what you do in therapy. I do less of what you have to do. So you have a harder job because I don't have to direct where it goes next. I can just follow. But then the hard part comes whenever I want to say something that's risky. Right. You use a phrase in describing your, I'm going to be careful with this word, you didn't like me describing you as having an approach, but your style, let's say, you use the phrase the nurturance of being known.

Can you unpack that? I think that the primary injury of trauma is that you're not seen, you yourself don't matter. And so part of what I'm trying to give people is a sense that they matter a moment to moment. I don't know, it's why I need to say more. I'll say more, but it's me quoting you back to you. The place a therapist wants to get to

is the place where there's no need to say anything else for the therapist. It's just holding, hugging the patient with your gaze, just compassion and love silence. Yeah, that's good. I like that. I think that when we're at our best, we don't need to be therapists to provide that to other people. Absolutely not. I want to get out of the therapy office. I feel like I'm in my generative years in our 50s where I've learned enough that it's time for me to start sharing what I've learned and what I've learned about therapy is just about learning how to love exquisitely.

Coming up, I'm going to ask Dr. Homme what he means by love exquisitely, the words he just used, and we'll also talk about whether the word trauma is being overused these days as some people allege. We'll also circle back to his thesis about the profound importance of what he calls compassionate curiosity after this. What do you mean by that? Love exquisitely. What do you mean by that? To hold another person in their fullness,

to really see them and to know them, to not judge them. It's that empathy thing again. I can hear listeners saying, how do I do that? I find myself in conversations and I'm itching to look at my phone or commit a homicide or whatever.

Great, okay, so looking at your phone, then I would say something is happening in the interaction that feels deplorable that you want to move away from. So what is that thing that you're trying to move away from? And then try to understand why you need to move away from. So what is that thing that you're trying to move away from? And then try to understand why you need to move away from that. Is it because it's a part of you that you haven't learned to accept yet? Or it's just something that you find reprehensible.

And then what do you do with that? Do you love this person enough to say, like, I really don't like that you're doing this? Sometimes there's this conflict in us that I want to say what you're doing is not good for you, but I want to respect your own autonomy. And so instead I just have to like check out and look at my phone. And I would say take the risk of leading with love or trying to like a manifest love with good intention. And some people forget that if they know where you're coming from. And

then if you're experiencing homicidal rage, then I find that to be an incredibly loving thing to experience sometimes because the stories that you hear that trauma therapists are outrageous. And sometimes the only proper response is to say like, that is horrible. Like I'm so pissed that this happened to you. And that becomes an expression of love and honoring and acknowledging and putting the right emotion to the event. I know you don't like skills and tactics and all that stuff, but you actually just kind of gave us one which is take risks. I'd probably know a lot of skills and tools, but I just find that whenever people start listing them, they come out empty and sterile. And so I'd rather people discover like the way that you heard my story and then you said,

Oh, it's like taking risk. Then you packaged it for yourself in a way that it stuck for you. The thing about risk is it's scary. And at three o'clock on a Tuesday, I may not feel like taking a risk in a conversation with my wife. And then you slow down again and look at all the parts and say, okay, why am I not interested in doing this right now? And then you have to, depending on what your answer is, I wouldn't know what to say next. Yeah. Again, like you've just given me the beginning of the mid game in chess,

and I don't know where to go next. Right. Yes, I have, you don't know enough of where the board stands. Exactly. But it activates my curiosity about like, let's break down what's happening and allow yourself to be curious about what this process is. Instead of being like, I'm a horrible husband, I should be better or whatever. Just like, oh, interesting. There's probably a good reason why I feel this way.

Right. Yeah, so it's back to the Uber strategy, non-strategy, chiro's approach of just open this warmth, curiosity, compassionate curiosity. Yeah, that's the banner we want to march behind. Depending where you are on the chessboard at a given moment, there are maybe lots of strategies you can employ, but if you keep that flag in mind, you're marching in the right direction. Exactly. Keep it simple.

Keep it goal-directed. Is there anything I should have asked but failed to ask? Hmm. I'm running through your needs and the needs of your audience. I don't know. Why did you just ask that right now? When we're getting toward the end of our time, I usually like to ask people that question because it opens people up to say, Oh, yeah, I really wanted to talk

about this and you haven't given me a chance to. Yeah, yeah, I see. I didn't have an agenda, so I don't think I have any lingering things that I wanted to say. I'm really curious about what I'm not this landed for you and how you received it. It absolutely landed. I mean, you said this a million times and it was only now that I was able to restate it. I think with some clarity that the goal that you have is to help us help yourself and all of us get into this chiro's mode to realize that he's a mode that's accessible and do our best to find ourselves in that mode. And yes, there may be tools and tactics and skills, et cetera, et cetera. But that seems to be the most important point. That's what landed for me.

I hope that's what you meant to have land. Yeah. And the responses that I have are like in the IFS model, Dick Shor talks about being self-energy. And you know that whenever you have these four C's, I forget. But I discovered those four C's as well, like calm, connected, curious, compassionate, and all that survival stuff seems to be more a aggressive, avoidant, ass-holy, maybe a similar a. A positive, yeah, acquiring, accumulating, achieving.

We do have a few more minutes, so I'll try something. I know DJ mentioned that he mentioned to you, DJ for the listeners is an ace producer on this show, DJ Kashmir. And he, DJ and I have noted of late, there's been a kind of mini spate of articles in the New Yorker, and there are times about trauma as a word. And interesting people raising the question of whether we've had sort of linguistic creep here where the word is being used perhaps too often, as somebody said, if everything is trauma is anything. He mentioned DJ did that, he mentioned this to you

and you didn't really take the bait on it, but here I go, take it a risk and asking you now whether you have any thoughts on this line of argument. And before I answer the question, which I will, I would love for you to know why you're taking this risk. Yes, I know why. Why curiosity? Just curiosity. Well, okay. For sure, curiosity. But I, this is maybe good, maybe bad, maybe both. Maybe I shouldn't be speaking in such dichotomous terms anyway. But I have a real allergy to boilerplate language, jargon. Yeah, me too. Because I'm not a mental health professional.

I'm not a meditation guru. I'm just a journalist, right? A storyteller. And if I can add any value, it's to talk about things in the freshest possible way. I love that. Me too. And so I hear trauma all the time. There are many words I hear all the self-love, love, I know, vulnerability,

whatever, all these words that are incredibly important, but through repetition they become wrote and maybe empty and cliche. And so I'm curious whether trauma is in danger of falling into that category. And suddenly we are in complete agreement. And I'm remembering the phrase take risk as your tool. It's the same thing. Like if it's said first, then it's empty and it's tried. Just like trauma can become tried. But what we want is for people to feel the impact of the discovery of these ideas again and again.

Even if they know it, it feels so good to be like, oh my God, yes, it's always this answer. Isn't that fun? It's always this. The question about whether trauma is becoming trite. My answer is just like, huh, I wonder who's using it wrong. I wonder who's tired of it. Why are they tired of it?

And I can come up with a few ways in which people can use trauma to justify their behaviors or there's ways that they can wear it as a badge or people who are sick of it because they can tell that it's moving away from authenticity where it becomes a barrier, it becomes another mask in a way. I'd be curious about when a person feels that way and why they feel both, why they're using it as a weapon or as a tool to build walls and to distract or when they want to just like push it away.

I think it's all because it's somehow compromising true authentic poignancy and the human connection. So the problem wouldn't be with trauma as a word. It might be if people are using the word to create walls. Yeah, to not be real. Yeah. And that I would agree with that would be a problem. To be clear, I don't have a view on this. I just think it's interesting. I'm not taking sides here if there are even sides. It's just more an interesting question that, yeah, I've noticed the word does get used a lot more and more

But I'm not like upset about that Yeah, and I I know that it's been a good thing for the world to realize that trauma's rampant and Best sold Vander Cokes book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for many years now and it's helping people Understand their hurt more and to wonder about themselves It's a useful framework to increase self-exploration and understanding of other people. Yes, Bessel van der Koot is the author of a book called The Body Keeps the Score. And yes, he is very much helped improve public understanding of trauma. And I think the question that sometimes gets asked in return is, you know, where do we draw the line between trauma and just regular adversity?

And it's an interesting question because what is regular adversity? And how is it received by the person who's going through it? It seems very potentially complex. See, for me, the way that I would reframe that curiosity would be like, when do you need to make a division? Right. Who needs to make a division? Right. Who needs to make a division? Right.

I guess the division might become important because there are, I'm just theorizing here, and I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this. But there are people like Stephanie, where Stephanie Foo, where we can, I think, largely agree that what she endured was something that I think most people would be comfortable saying, yeah, that's trauma.

I mean, her parents abandoned her. There was all kinds of abuse from a very, very young age. But are there other people using the word trauma where, well, I don't know if everybody would agree that that's so adverse? First of all, there is actually an Amazon reviewer who said she's just being whiny. Not everyone agrees that what she's experienced was trauma. Wow. Okay. Maybe all reasonable people, but who's deciding what's reasonable.

And again, for me, when I heard that, I was like, what have you been through my dear person? What can you not face yourself? Why do you have such a strong reaction to this story? through my dear person, what can you not face yourself? Why do you have such a strong reaction to this story? Interesting. And then I'd forgot the rest of it. Why the line needs to be made. Well, only that it would somehow have deleterious

negative effects for people with quote unquote real trauma. If everything's trauma, then are you in somehow diminishing the power and importance and validity of people who have, quote unquote, real trauma? I would agree that the act of diminishing another person's experience can be harmful. But on the other hand, there are people who traumatize their experience, and they use it in a relational moment to solicit empathy or outrage, but it's an avoidant thing. So again, like I don't have a general answer because I'm really curious about how it's being used in the moment and I try to figure that out.

And there are some patients that are mine who will cry and feel this dramatic and feels like a solicitation of outrage instead of like a real in your pain and suffering experience. I guess where I'm taking this is that this question about trauma creep is checkers and real life is chess. Yeah. And the question of trying to figure out what it is is is survival brain, is cronos. It's the divisive black and white thinking. One of my favorite Naruto poems, I can't quote it because it's all about like

the ocean and ask me why different things in the ocean do things. And it ends with the images of him waking up and he's naked, caught in the wind, in a net, in the wind or something like that. And what it does to me is that it creates this experience of like open surrender, like being hurled into the universe naked, but enjoying the mystery, the complexity of that wonder and amazement. And that's where I want us to land. And in that love each other and see that each person's perspective adds radiance to this whole complexity of our experience. I get cheesy and wax weird. Sorry. People, people are like, do you really talk like this in real life? No. I've had this has been a pleasure.

So I'm loving all your parts from this side of the Zoom go. Thank you. You're just well. I can feel you. Yeah. You're having fun. If people, I suspect there will be not a few people who

will hear this and maybe want to learn more about you, how can they do so? I have a blog that I rarely update. You can subscribe to a newsletter there. I am inundated with calls for therapy, and I have at least a 40-person wait list, which would take like five to seven years to get through. So I'm not accessible.

And I find that to be painful and That's why I want to do podcasts or something. I am trying my best to be discoverable But it's gonna take a while just to say one place where you are discoverable is Stephanie's book So we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well as your blog and Just to say finally, thank you. It's such a pleasure to meet you and you did a great job with this. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you again to Jacob Haam. That was great. One quick note before I let you go here, a note about an opportunity to get involved in an exciting new TPH project. We're looking for listeners and 10% happier app users who are interested in answering some questions about the challenges and benefits of their experiences with mindfulness and meditation. Participants may appear in a 10% happier course or challenge in the future. All levels of experience are welcome. If you might be interested, contact us at casting at 10% dot com. That's casting at 10% dot com.

Thanks as well to the folks who work so hard on this show Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, Samuel Johns, and Jen Poient. We also, I should say, get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation from Diana Winston on self-criticism, self-judgment and unworthiness. I suspect these are resonant themes and for those of you for whom those themes do not resonate, I would like to borrow your mind permanently. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short

survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.