The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Your Pocket Therapist: Break Free from Old Patterns and Transform Your Life by Dr. Annie Zimmerman

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Your Pocket Therapist: Break Free from Old Patterns and Transform Your Life by Dr. Annie Zimmerman https://amzn.to/3GOIuK3 From psychotherapist and TikTok personality Dr. Annie Zimmerman comes a toolkit to transform yourself and your relationships, with advice on how to heal past trauma, build sustainable connections, and take ownership of your mental health. Every day, psychotherapist Dr. Annie Zimmerman meets clients in her private London practice who are struggling with their lives. They’re committed to achieving personal growth, making changes—but they’re struck at the question stage. They ask her: Why can’t I sleep? Why do I keep going back to a bad relationship? Why did I lose my temper? What is wrong with me? Here’s the thing: nothing is wrong with them. It’s just that they’re asking themselves the wrong questions. In Your Pocket Therapist, Dr. Zimmerman helps readers delve into their past to identify old, unhelpful patterns and teach them how to unlock the present. The book combines practical tools with anecdotes gleaned from the therapy room, distilling complex psychological concepts with her signature warmth and empathy. Her belief—galvanized by her hundreds of thousands of followers—is that if we learn to understand the roots of our suffering, we can bring about meaningful—and permanent—change in our lives. It comes down to learning how to ask the right questions. A brilliant, necessary toolkit for those who want to break free from past patterns and embrace a life of abundant self-awareness and connection, Your Pocket Therapist is an absolute must-read in the field of psychology.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Moses Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. When the Iron Lady sings, that makes it official.

Welcome to the big show. My family and friends, as always, The Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law, because she never liked you anyway, and she wanted her to marry Roger, your wife. There you go. That's what she told us on the show.

So tell her to quit sending me messages on Snapchat. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. So tell her to quit sending me messages on Snapchat. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show today. She is the author of the latest book that's coming out January 9th, 2024, called Your Pocket Therapist, Break Free from the Old Patterns and Transform Your Life by Dr. Annie Zimmerman. And in the meantime, be sure to subscribe to the show, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Tell them to join up on the show. You can go to goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, YouTube.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1 and the Tickety Talkity, and all those interesting places

on the internet. Annie Zimmerman, PhD, is a psychotherapist, writer, and academic. She began posting her life-changing insights from the therapy room on TikTok and Instagram as Your Pocket Therapist in 2021. She has amassed a large dedicated following who return to her content and advice on everything from attachment styles, inner child work, and making peace with your body. That's always good. Don't get us confused. Welcome to the show, Annie. How are you? Yeah, I'm really well, thank you. How are you? I am excellent. I am excellent. So welcome to the show. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, it's your underscore pocket underscore therapist on Instagram and on

TikTok. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's in your new book, Your Pocket Therapist. So it does what it says on the tin really the idea is that it's taking insights that people learn in therapy and then just saying them into like bite-sized easy to digest pocket tips and exercises but i come from psychoanalytic thinking which is like the deep complex processing all of the trauma kind of style so it's it's condensing quite complex and nuanced dynamics and information, but into really easy to understand practical tips. There's stories from therapy room and it's split up into two halves. One is about the self, so things like anxiety, depression, addiction, self-criticism, and then the relationships, which is what I talk about a lot online and it takes you through each stage of a relationship from dating to the relationship itself to breaking up and it explores how

psychological concepts and therapy can help you to understand yourself and improve these different aspects of your life Awesome sauce. So why did you feel people needed this sort of book? What was the what was the interest in it? And why did you say hey? We need to put a book out that helps you with these things? I think people, especially young people, are really wanting to understand themselves better and really wanting to change. I think on Instagram therapy, there's a whole movement of young people who are just really hungry for depth and craving this knowledge to really understand themselves, to understand what's happening in their relationships and the minefield of modern dating and I think but you know there's limits on social media to how much you can say you can't you can't really distill you can't you know talk about the entire aspect of relationship in 30 characters or in a 30 second video so I really wanted to make sure

that I took this depth and nuance and gave myself a way to talk about this in a kind of deep way where you can actually reflect and you can have stories and you can go off into different areas rather than just having to say everything in 30 seconds. So it's basically taking the pocketiness, but putting it into a book that's like easy to read, but still helps you to get that depth and teaching people really how to unlock this change in themselves by understanding their past and how their past is showing up in their present. There you go. And you've been really successful on TikTok. You've been really successful on Instagram.

I don't know if I did this before the show because we're broadcasting on Instagram for the first time today and it's kind of complicated. Did I ask for your dot coms before we went into the show? Yes, you did, yeah. Okay, great. We're juggling a few things here that are new. So do you find that the young people are, you mentioned that they're more interested in therapy than maybe older generations are.

Do you find that they're more interested in doing the work, healing their traumas and stuff, et cetera, as opposed to us older generations who are like, we're just like, suck it up. I don't know, put a band-aid on it and just keep going. And then we're 50, we kind of try and figure everything out. Yeah, definitely. I think people, you know, it's like the therapy generation in a way, I think people have been in the past really threatened by it, afraid of it, don't really see the benefit in it. But I think now that young people are engaging more with their mental health, there's less shame. some people are really wanting to grow and wanting to learn and they're understanding that you know even if they haven't had a massive trauma their childhood still impacted them and it can still help be helpful to understand and

unpick some of the past things they've been through because that's really what's happening in their relationships right now I think especially in romantic relationships people are like why is this happening why is this person behaving in this way? And they're looking for understanding and education. And I think that's really important that we have those kind of foundations rather than just guessing. I think that's great. Do you see a possibility that, you know, with the youth, you know, we've talked on the show at length and all the interviews we've had about childhood trauma, the impact it has in your life. A lot of people don't wake up and deal with their childhood trauma until, you know, their 40s or 50s.

There's kind of a point, I think, in the arc of human development in the brain that, you know, by 50, you start understanding, seeing things more and understanding things better than ever before, which is kind of, you know, too late. Cause you already, you know, you've done 30 years of wreckage of your life and adult life, destroying relationships and everything else. Divorces. Do you,

do you think that there's hope in, in changing that dynamic with the youth and everything that's going on right now from what you're seeing? Oh yeah, definitely. I think the earlier you can get yourself into therapy or a path of self-development, like the better. Because also in terms of like relationships, it's much better for you to, yeah,

find like a secure and healthy relationship to have a parent with, a child with, sorry, rather than kind of, I think in the past, people would just marry and not really make a decision and not really reflect. And then they get divorced later and it causes all kinds of problems. So i think that earlier we can like catch out our relationship dynamics and leave people who are not good for us and make different choices probably

the better for the the rest of the course of our life there you go maybe it'll make a better world because you know i think all of us boomers and gen x people who waited till they're older i'm not sure the boomers ever went to therapy. The only boomers I know went to therapy went and kind of bullshitted their way through it and basically played PR with the PR agent and just kept hiding stuff and just played a lot of shell games. I don't know if you find that in your things, but the ones I know, they didn't really do therapy the way you're supposed to do therapy.

They just went in, blathered out about, I suppose, how it's everybody else's fault. But I know Gen X, you know, we had this attitude. We're just kind of like, fuck it, put a bandaid on, I'm sure we'll be fine. And it seems like a lot of the conversations we have on the show are people in the Gen X crowd who are like, yeah, we should do therapy. Some people on Facebook and different places will ask the question. They're like, if you go back and talk to your teenage self, what would you tell yourself? And people are always surprised when I go, get into therapy.

That's my answer. But it shouldn't be a surprise. So I hope that this is a sign that maybe Gen Z will build a better world because it's the only sign I'm getting. Oh, anyway, so it's the only good sign I'm getting. Tell us about your upbringing and how you were raised and what got you into therapy and becoming a psychiatrist. So actually, I come from a family of therapists. So like every woman in my family is a therapist pretty much my grandma was one of the first people to study psychology in the uk

at university my mom's a psychoanalytic therapist my sister's training to be a therapist all of my aunts are therapists so i've grown up like in a cult of therapy which you can imagine it was like really predestined why would become but it just feels like such a meaningful and important thing but nothing else feels as important as helping people to change and helping people to like do that really deep work mm-hmm there you go it was it hard to grow up as a child amongst a bunch of therapists because you're always being psychoanalyzed all the time, maybe? I don't know.

Pros and cons, I would say. I think on reflection, it's amazing because our family are really good at talking and really being open. But yeah, when you're a teenager, you don't want to be asking how you feel all the time. You have your mother asking you, what was your relationship with your mother all the time yeah anytime you've got an issue it's was there a couch in the home that you had to lay on oh yeah every day serious no every day okay all right we have some fun with that so this is a great book i you know i like i say people really need to sit down with their trauma sooner and quit sharing them damn it fix your your shit and do the work.

I like to use that term a lot, do the work. Because, you know, I'm 55 now and I'm still dating after all these years and single because I never got tired of being happy. And seeing the broken glass and people that are still just never resolve their traumas and i'm guilty of this too i didn't resolve my trauma until i was about 50 52 i think and so i'm guilty of it too but seeing just the the fallout and the wreckage and and people are still dealing with this and you're just like i'm just going to start handing out your book on first dates i think that's what i'm going to do are you sure if you want a second day i'm just going to start handing out your book on first dates. I think that's what I'm going to do. Are you sure?

If you want a second date, I'm not sure that's what I'm saying. Well, if I have to hand out your book on the first date, I probably don't want a second date. That's true. Which seems to have a lot already. But I think dating is such a minefield for people. And like having a place where you can reflect and think about what's coming up for you is so important, you because i think dating especially it breeds such insecurity and uncertainty you don't know how someone else feels like it's the place where we're most triggered in some circumstances because it's so unsure yeah one thing i found is narcissism don't care what other people feel that seems to work for

me so i just i just do me and if you like me great if you don't I it's not my problem the I try and be as likable as I can but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna kill myself what do you see is the number one problem maybe facing you know you you talked this tiktok generation what do you see the number one problem is for them or for most people when you consult is something that's happening a lot do you see that you know maybe the covid depression and trials and tribulations and the weirdness that went on with that whole thing life you know what do you see is the number one thing or the top thing i guess i honestly i think like living life online is probably it's it's so funny because i obviously post on social media and TikTok and everything, but I'm also pretty like anti-online just because I think it can lead to such loneliness, you know,

that there's such a lack of intimacy. And when you have a lack of community, of connection, and it's all coming from your phone, it means we put even more pressure on meeting the one and meeting that one person to give us all of our, you know, all of our social connection. I think that the more real interactions and community that you can have, actually, the less pressure you'll put on your romantic relationships, and the less like desperate you'll be to find someone or it will take a lot of pressure off the relationships that you are in if you have more people and not living your life through your phone, just scrolling, because it's so numbing isn't it you're like not present in your life if you're just scrolling we've had people on the show scientists that study the brain and they said one of one of the big

problems is is that makes social media and these 2d phones so destructive is we were designed to see things in 3d so we were designed that I would be sitting across from you and you would see my body language, my facial adjustments, how I move my hands and myself. And there's data that comes to that that sets off dopamine and different things in our aspect of our brain and understanding fight or flight, of of course is on a basic version but the interaction and the you know touch is another thing too it's the reason we shake hands there's

there's i don't know if it's a dopamine hit that we get when we touch i have to go back and watch the episode again but basically you know touching is really important hugging touching you know holding shaking hands the the physical aspect of it and what what they have surmised is that one of the problems is it's really breaking our brains our our brains that are very caveman haven't adapted to it and so we we really lose a lot of data and information that normally we get that helps our brains looking at someone in a three-day 3dD aspect in real life as opposed to seeing something on the thing. And that really mucks with us and our brains evidently and leaves out a lot of data that actually isn't helpful to developing the brain. And so I've heard things about that. Some people

have kind of started thinking, and I think I'm on the same thing that social media and these phones might be the most destructive thing that's ever happened to the human race and well initially there was this whole you know we had this fantasy of oh it's going to be utopia everyone's going to hold hands now all the nations are going to come together and people people are going to win now and it seems to you know as with every pandora's box we're finding out there's an ugliness to it and a darkness to it that might not be worth the upside absolutely but but i also think that so many people feel like they're getting connection through their phones and that without their phones they would be really isolated and lonely and it's it's become such a

crutch because the society is now set up in a way that we need our friends to talk to people so they they they're the thing that's ruined community but then we also rely on them for connection i think about this in terms of online dating you know like we most people feel that they need apps in order to meet somebody and that they will never meet someone and never ask someone out or you know even meeting somebody new so they they like phones have ruined that because people don't ask people out anymore and people don't leave their homes anymore so we need our phones in order to date both yeah taking it away and we were so reliant on it which is an unhealthy relationship yeah but meanwhile that dating is failing if you if you

understand the the data on what dating apps i, these people don't design these dating apps to actually meet people and build relationships. They design them to keep you on a hamster wheel. And you're right. Sadly, the phone has made it to a point where we have to rely on these things. It's almost a trap. It used to be that when I wanted to meet somebody, get a phone number, engage in dating, I had to go to a club or I had to go outdoors. Even now, I still cold approach in public. But I was raised in a generation that can do that, that can have dating game to cold approach.

These people nowadays, we see the rise of these simps and these crippled boys that don't know how to be men, that don't know how to ask a girl out, they don't know how to approach. And then we're seeing marriage collapse, birth rates collapse, and everything else. So it's kind of interesting, the door we've opened. And I think it probably creates more psychological damage and challenges that people need your book all the more and people need help more and more.

Yeah, definitely with online dating, you know, people need your book all the more and people need help more and more. Well, yeah, definitely with online dating, it also creates this fallacy that, that there's unlimited people out there. So people have become much more, you know, they just throw away, people are disposable because it's like,

Oh, I just find another one. So I think it means that we don't treat people as nicely because we think, okay, well I just, you know, or you, you end up dumping someone for no real reason but just because you know oh what if someone better is out there and that thought what if someone better is out there actually stops us from working at a really perfectly good relationship and accepting that you might be with someone and

also find parts of them annoying or you know everyone is flawed so we look for this like perfect person online dating makes us think that that actually exists yeah it it and you're right it you know we think that there's you know there's there's so much numbers but then it kind of becomes choice overload where you have so many different dms being sent to you and so much different stuff you're like oh well i can you know i don't have to make a choice i've got all this thing and then one of the big problems i've been seeing in the dating field is people who are addicted to the attention and the validation and going through the money field the dating field there's there's some there's some people that they're not really interested in meeting anybody, dating, or having a relationship.

They're just running a dating profile just for validation and attention and do what I call simp herding, where they're just getting a bunch of simps to feed them messages night and day. I call it the great husband replacement. And basically, they're just living off that, which is like a minefield for those of us in dating who would actually like to really meet somebody. It's the way it's gamified, I think. It's think it's oh i want to get as many likes as possible likes i can get how much really you just need one right if you're in a monogamous relationship you're looking for one person not for everybody to like you and what some people have started talking about is these

people are so addicted to the dopamine hits of those likes and of the attention of so many men they can't settle down with one man and it breaks the ability to pair bond and so it's interesting what's going on with social media so i'm glad you're out there helping people on tiktok and and instagram try and navigate this minefield i really i really feel for these generations because you or i probably grew up in a world without cell phones so we grew up in a normal world where you know we interacted with each other as human beings we dated as human beings you know now it's just it's just such a mess and you see a lot of you see it a lot in what's going on with young men and how they're

tuning out they're checking out there's more women going to college now than there are men men just aren't interested in it i think men are turned off biologically by a lot of different things that are going on i mean men don't want to date somebody who who has you know posted on their social media they're doing a they're doing a hot girl summer and they're racking up triple digit body counts it's i hear a lot of young men in our gaming and and in our gaming groups complain about it they're just like what the hell you know it's it's they just see what's going on they're they're just checking out they're not marrying they're not creating families and when you see what's going on in japan and china now has a has a declining population. Japan has had one for years. It's the end of an empire.

So it's interesting to me to see how this is going to turn out because it almost seems like we're devolving as a society. Well, you're helping on TikTok. I'm not sure there's other parts of TikTok that are helping. Yeah, I wonder why men are stepping out. I don't know if it's because women are having a hot girl summer i mean i'm sure i think being a man's very quite complicated these days there's a lot of yeah there's a lot of confusion about where their place is about you know what it is to be

a man and provide is changing um and also there's a lot of addictions to gaming and to social media and to staying inside yeah and i wonder if there's also a kind of fear of rejection of going out there and asking people out and all of those things coming into play. There's some of that too. You're right. The participation trophy generation started with that, where they're not equipped to handle rejection. They're not equipped to handle, you know,

most of these incels that you see that just i they just boggle my mind when i meet these incel men and there's even fem cells too but you meet these incel men and you're just like so why do you hate women and why are you not interested in women they're really cool they're really great things trust me i've seen a few and and they're just like well i met a girl and i liked her i told i liked her and she said she didn't like me and now i hate women you're like you seriously gave up after the first no like i probably have a hundred plus no's under my if woman says hey i'm not interested hey cool great i i just i'm one step closer to meeting

the one that i like that likes me you know that's the way it, not everybody likes everybody. It's welcome to the universe. It's all good. You know, you just found out that you're one step closer, you know, you just eliminated that one more person that the fish in the sea and okay, next, who's up next. But these guys that just give up, it's, it's just bad. I guess it must feel, yeah, it must feel protective in some way to be like well i don't care they get to take out all of their anger and everything but it's not yeah it's not actually helping them is it to keep

themselves away from what they really want there you go well we kind of went down the dating rabbit hole what what other parts of your book that you want to tease out to people that maybe we haven't discussed on the show i think really like the main kind of theme of the book is how processes and therapy involve looking at your childhood and so many people are thinking about that now but also kind of resistant because they're like okay well i haven't had like massive trauma what does that mean i shouldn't do therapy but i guess the message of the book is like everyone is impacted by their childhood and if you want to change and grow in your present you have to go back to the past and unpick it and understand how you became who you

were and process things and gain that awareness in order to change so this is true for anxiety depression addiction these are all different chapters of my book um you know self-criticism self-sabotage and in relationships so, I think thinking about that childhood piece is really important. Yeah. And there's a lot of trauma going on that people are going through nowadays. I think, you know, I think just COVID. I always joked about after COVID, we all kind of need a government-assigned psychotherapist. Yeah.

Just after COVID and all the depression that happened during that. Yeah, because it's funny. It's like what happens in trauma and childhood. It's like this terrible thing happens, and then everyone just moves on and no one talks about it. And the child is left alone. What was that? And it's unprocessed.

And the same is with COVID. It just happened, and now we're all kind of moved on. But a lot of people are still feeling the effects of it and haven't actually worked it through. There you go. And we just need all the help we can get. So that's why ordering up your book and getting it is important. As we go out, give us your final pitch out to the audience in the book to order up the book wherever fine books are sold.

Yeah. So this book really is just for anyone who's interested in changing and doing the work on themselves, for themselves and for their relationships. And if you're in therapy, if you're thinking about therapy, this book can guide you along that process and really help you to transform. There you go. You can find that on Amazon. It's out January 9th in the US. And yeah, I'll be posting about it on my social media as well.

So you can follow me there at Your Pocket Therapist. There you go. Thank you very much, Dr. Annie Zimmerman for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It was great talking to you. Thank you very much, Dr. Annie Zimmerman, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It was great talking to you. Thank you. Order up, folks.

Your pocket therapist. Break free from old patterns and transform your life. It's almost holiday season. If you're watching this 10 years from now on our YouTube channel, like people do, don't write me. It comes out January 9th, 2024. So guess what? You know how those Christmas dinners are always interesting to have? Order up a whole mess of copies of the book and give away for the holidays there you go that way you can have a

better one next year thanks to all at us for tuning in go to goodreads.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas christmas one the tiktokity and all those places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time