The Dr. Hyman Show - How Relationships Heal Inflammation, Trauma, and Your Nervous

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Relationships have the power to change lives in ways both visible and hidden. Deep, supportive bonds can quiet inflammation in the body, protect against disease, and anchor people through decades of triumphs and trials. Communities that come together—whether in small groups at a church or around a shared health goal—often achieve far more than individuals working alone, sometimes transforming their health on a massive scale. Lifelong friends celebrate each other’s victories without jealousy, weather hardship side by side, and dare to speak difficult truths even at the risk of the relationship. Yet, many remain in unfulfilling connections out of fear of loneliness, forgetting that genuine, vulnerable connection is not just emotionally nourishing—it is essential to human health and resilience. In this episode, I talk with Simon Sinek, Esther Perel, and Angelika Alana about how relationships are vital not just for emotional health, but for physical wellbeing and can be a great source of growth and healing. Simon is a spark that ignites passion and ideas. He envisions a world where people wake up inspired, feel safe, and end their day fulfilled. As an unshakeable optimist and trained ethnographer, Simon is fascinated by people and organizations that make a lasting impact. He has discovered remarkable patterns in how they think, act, and communicate, revealing how people perform at their best. Simon is widely known for his TED Talk on "WHY" and his viral video on millennials in the workplace. Through bestselling books like Start with WHY and his podcast A Bit of Optimism, he continues to inspire. Founder of The Optimism Company and Optimism Press, Simon shares innovative views on leadership, attracting international attention. He also works with the U.S. government, the RAND Corporation, and in 2021, founded The Curve to reform modern policing, advancing justice with dignity, equity, and fairness. Psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. Fluent in nine languages, she helms a therapy practice in New York City and serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world. Her celebrated TED Talks have garnered more than 30 million views and her bestselling books, Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, are global phenomena translated into nearly 30 languages. Esther is also an executive producer and host of the popular podcasts Where Should We Begin? and How’s Work? Her latest project is Where Should We Begin - A Game of Stories with Esther Perel. Angelika Alana is the founder and CEO of the Somatic Healing Institute. She has been featured in Vanity Fair, Well+Good, and Modern Luxury. She certifies coaches and facilitators in her transformational body-based healing method. She has traveled and studied extensively in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, and the UK, and is a massive foodie with her husband Patrick Drake, co-founder of Hello Fresh. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here: Simon Sinek on the Power of Relationships for Longevity How To Have Successful Relationships How To Move From Toxic Relationships And Sex To Healing Relationships And Sex

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show, when you're in a conflictual relationship, your physiology changes to a state of disease, cortisol goes up, your inflammatory cytokines go up, your microbiome can change a whole series of things happen in your body that make you more sick. Magnesium doesn't get the spotlight like vitamin D or omega-3s, but it should. It helps regulate mood, hormones, energy, sleep, and even blood sugar. And yet, Most of us are either deficient or barely scraping by thanks to stress, caffeine, processed food, and even depleted soil.

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Go to buyoptimizers.com slash hymen to get 10% off today. Your body will feel the difference in just a few days. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive, for live Q&A's exclusive content and direct connection.

For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at Dr.hyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of this podcast, add-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. If you're in a conflictual relationship with someone, your inflammatory genes are turned on, literally not just your emotions are inflamed, but your biology turns on the inflammation system.

Like fight or flight kind of stuff? Not fight or flight, just if you're like in a shitty relationship, or if you're fighting with someone or you have a conflict, you turn on inflammatory genes that then increase expression of cytokines that cause inflammation and that cause disease. and all chronic disease from depression, to heart disease to diabetes to obesity, Alzheimer's, all inflammatory diseases. Conversely, if you have a connected, loving relationship

with somebody, it turns on anti-inflammatory genes. And inflammation is the core of like everything. Yeah, and we, and it's studies with an entrainment, you know, where you have, where you, if you sit with someone and you have an authentic connection that you can put EEG and EKGs on, basically brainwaves and heart waves, you can see the heartbeat

of someone you're having a deep-connected relationship with in your brain waves. Wow. It's wild. So it's not just a feel-good thing on an emotional level. It's a physiological response that happens of being in connection. If you take animals and put them in, you know,

cages and separate animals and feed them exactly the same thing and have everything else the same, the one that's isolated versus the ones that are connected will shrivel and die and get, sick. Right. And so humans are the same way. And we've gotten, we've gotten in a situation where friendship and connection is sort of like. Okay. So why aren't doctors, why aren't doctors prescribing to spend more time with friends? I do. Like, like, doctor, I'm suffering from

X, Y, and Z. Yeah. Okay, I'd like you to try and get an extra hour of sleep, go to bed in a little earlier. I'd like you to stop eating before, you know, eat no, don't eat past 8 o'clock at night. And I want you to spend at least three hours a week with with a friend. How come that's not on a prescription? It should be. It should be. I mean, I prescribe it. In fact, I actually, based on this work that I did in Haiti,

I met a pastor after Rick Warren who wrote the Purvis Driven Life and had a church with 30,000 members. And I met him, he came to my office and we started talking and I said, hey, you know, Rick, tell me about your church because I'm a Jewish doctor from New York. I don't know much about evangelical Christian churches. Like, yeah, we've got 30,000 people. I'm like, wow. It's a lot of megachurch.

She's like, yeah, we got 5,000. groups that meet every week, small groups in the church to help each other live better lives. I'm like, oh, this is an omega church. This is thousands of mini churches. Yeah. And I had that, the light bulb moment. I'm like, well, I just come back from Haiti. I said, why don't we put a healthy living program into the groups and see what happens?

Yeah. He says, great idea because I was baptizing my church last week. And after about the 800th person, I'm like, man, we're a fat church and I'm fat and we got to do something about it. And so we put a program together through the small groups where people were just helping each other. There was no doctor, nutritionist, health coach, nobody. It was just a curriculum. We had a big rally, sort of a big event where we talked about, and Rick talked about the biblical rationale for why God wants us to be healthy. I gave a bunch of speeches and talked about

how, you know, God lives in you, why are you feeding him crap and things like that? I mean, you know, if Jesus came to dinner, what would you feed him? You know, a big mac fries and a Coke, and they got it. Ain't that the truth. If Jesus came to dinner, what would you feed it? Exactly. So they got it. I said, you know, if you feel like crap, how are you going to serve God? How are you going to serve each other? You've got to take care of your body. And so they got it.

And they did this together in community. It was jogging for Jesus. And they all these incredible. It was incredible. And they lost together a quarter million pounds in the first year. And they did it together. And then I took that same model and I applied it at Cleveland Clinic where we created small groups where people helped each other.

And we did research on us and published it. There were three times better health outcomes on validated metrics. of health outcomes compared to one-on-one visits for the same condition with the same doctors. So the doctors in our clinic could see them in one-on-one or they support them in a group. The group was three times as good as seeing the doctor one-on-one in terms of help.

So why, but why aren't these things then being implemented across the medical fields? I'm trying. I'm trying. Why aren't we, why aren't we going to the doctor with our friends to dealing with similar issues? Why aren't we, like everything's so, siloed. Literally, it's in, it is essential. I mean, I think, you know, the models of support,

whether it's coaching, whether it's one-on-one coaching or support, whether it's group models, they have to be the thing that's going to change because we get healthy together or we get sick together. So the quote from Benjamin Franklin is, we must all hang together or surely we'll all hang separately. I mean, and I think that's kind of where we're at in society. That is kind of where we are, yeah. I'm very glad that we are talking about this because I have a lot of respect for your work. And the fact that you're validating all this friendship stuff that I'm doing

from a physician standpoint. Not a kumbaya, isn't it nice? There's so much science on this. We wrote a book about this work called the Daniel Plan after Daniel from the Bible who resist the king's temptation of rich food and was better for it. And we talked about the five Fs. You know, food, fitness, focus,

which is your mental fitness, faith and friends. Why aren't friends number one? Well, they were maybe in there somewhere. I don't know. I don't know the order, but it was like food, probably friends. But the whole point is friends are such a key part of our well-being, whether it's understanding the blue zones or how, whether it's AA or Weight Watchers, it's how we change.

I mean, AA, all of these things, weight watchers, they're all community-based things. 100%. And one of the problems we have in our society is community things, you know, bowling leagues don't exist anymore. You know, church attendance is down. Yeah. You know, and church attendance and faith

are not the same thing. You know, you can have faith and not go to church and you can go to church and not have faith that's right you know uh the church would rather that they they're overlapping but uh but but the idea of doing things in commune in community um this is why i love things like comican or burning man or whatever you're you know now you've never been to burning man i have been to burning you have yeah oh or or or uh sturgis is that what it's called yeah it's called the motorcycle thing yeah house angels like all of these things Like, and I don't care, like, politics aside, like, I don't care what it is, going to church, you know, doing things in community with people who have common interests.

And, you know, one of the questions I've getting since I've started talking about friendship, it's amazing how many people are coming up to me who are of all ages, of all income levels, who are saying to me, I don't know how to make friends. I struggle to make friends. Because we're afraid to be authentic. I mean, that's the hard part, right? Have you ever struggled to make friends? When I was a kid, I didn't have any. I was a weird kid. I just was in my head, read a lot of books.

It was a little weird and, you know, kind of a nerd. And I just didn't. And you had a lot of health issues when you were younger. Not really. They came later, right? When I was in my 30s. Okay, okay. And I was living in Toronto in the 70s.

It was a spiritual wasteland and I was, did not kind of relate to anybody. And it wasn't until I left and went to college and went to Cornell and I found other people who were like, oh, wow, you actually think like me and you read the same books, you do the same things. And at fact, I actually, my first real friend I met on the top of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies, we were backpacking and it was a week out in the middle of nowhere by myself. And he was a week out. And we crossed over on Badger Pass in Alberta, in Vanf National

park and we just had this kind of moment of connection and we both found out we're going to be at Cornell in the fall he was in I think of college I was at Cornell we climbed this mountain the first night called Bracquipod Mountain was like 11000 feet it was like this kind of kind of prototypical pointy top mountain we sat on the ridge and watched the sunset at 11 o'clock at night and then ran down the screen and we just had this extraordinary experience and we got back and we got together and you know we didn't know if we were going to be friends or not but we we became like brothers and still friends today he's my best friend yeah we 40 40 years later wow yeah 46 years later we do mountain bike trips all over we we're we're

we're very close and um you know we help each other and when one's down the other picks one up when i'm down he picks me up when he's down i pick him up and we've had this really sustained deep authentic intimate relationship yeah for 45 years that's amazing and we love each other we hug each other, we cry together, and we laugh together. And it, you know, it was a place where where I could say and be and do anything. And it was, it was a remarkable experience for me to actually feel seen and loved. It was like the first person who loved me who didn't actually have to love me like my parents. They didn't have to love you. They just had to love me. That was like, and that friendship for me has been like an anchor in my life. Throughout all the troubles and

tribulations and successes and diseases and, you know, his wife committed suicide. I went through three divorces. I got very sick. He's such an overachiever. Yeah, I know, right? The, the, I'm an expert of relationships now. I mean, what did WC. Field say quitting smoking is the easiest thing I've ever done. I've done it hundreds of times. That's right. Marriage is the easy thing I've ever done. I've done it four times. This one, I got it right, though. Here's something I discovered about close friendships, right? Which is we always talk about close friends as the person you would call

when you're in need, when you need help, the person you can cry with, the person, you know, the person when you're in pain. And I actually think that's true. That's a level of close friendship that you can call that person when in a time of struggle or need. But I think there's even a closer level of friendship

which is when you can call somebody when something amazing happened. And they're not jealous. And there's no jealousy. And you can call them and what you're doing is bragging, but not really. You just need to tell someone about this amazing thing that you accomplished or that was given to you or that you won or that, you know, whatever it is.

And if you were told anybody else, they'd be like, they'd think you were bragging. Yeah, yeah. But to that friend, they have unbridled joy with you and for you. And what I've learned is the number of people I would call with good news is actually smaller than the number of people I would call with bad news. That's interesting. But you can call me with good news. Oh, thank you.

celebrate you know what I mean yeah it's like to you know and and like a friend of mine called me recently about something amazing that happened in his life and and he was I was the first person he called and we and I I had no jealousy and I was I was like I was felling like a parent you know I was so proud of him for what he did and and you realize that that was actually more intimate yeah than being there in pain yeah yeah and so So I started making lists of who are the people I would call for the insanely good things. Yeah. And it's a smaller number.

Well, it is. It's important to take the inventory of your life and your friends. And if you don't have good friends, it's really important to cultivate them, to invest in them, find them. And there's ways to do that. I mean, there's ways to put yourself in environments and situations. And part of it's like who you are, right? For me, you know, I wear my heart in my sleep and I'm just who I am. Like when we met...

Oh, I remember. It was a weekend, and I just got through this very intense emotional process. I worked for a lot of this trauma that I had experienced as a kid, and I was just kind of like in this altered state, and then I met you. Oh, I remember. And I think that's why we became friends. You put it on your sleeve. Because I just shared authentically, and we just had this connection.

And it was, that's kind of what I'm talking about is in order to actually create friendship, You have to be open. You have to open your heart. I think people sometimes treat... And not be afraid of being judged. I think people sometimes treat friendships like bad food. Right? So...

I don't get that. But here's what I mean. Like, you know, I just had this conversation with a friend of mine just very recently. She's in a relationship. And she's... If she's afraid of being alone, she knows the relationship is imperfect. She knows that if she were in a different place in her life,

she wouldn't be with this person. But that partner fills a space for her for where she's at. She's more afraid of the loneliness than being in an imperfect relationship. Yeah, you're not. And I don't know how healthy that is. And she can rationalize it, like they go on adventures together and they laugh a lot together, which is all true. But then now as I'm talking to you, it kind of sounds like cake, which is, I know I shouldn't eat this. But it's so tasty and so chocolatey and just so good.

And I'll worry about it later. You know, what's another little piece? I'm just having a little piece of cake. And the goodness, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I enjoy the goodness so much that I can ignore the badness. Yeah. And we tolerate a lot. We tolerate a lot. And, you know, this is one of the downsides of human beings, which is we're incredibly adaptable people.

We're incredibly adaptable. So I did that for so many years in relationships. I was like, oh, it's good enough, for instance, all this bad stuff, I just rationalize away. Do you often feel tired, tense, or foggy? magnesium might be the missing link most people are low and standard supplements don't cut it magnesium breakthrough gives you all seven essential forms and one powerful formula better sleep less muscle tension mental clarity all with no laxative side effects try magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers at bioptimizers.com slash hymen for 15% off

You know, one of the things I'm talking, one of the things that I'm exploring in this friendship book is how to make friends, how to foster friendship. That's the thing I think most of us fall down on, how to navigate tension in friendships, and how to end friendships. How to recognize that I really like this chocolate cake, but I think I need to not be in friendship or in relationship with this chocolate cake. And maybe we'll just hang out now and then, you know, because I do have fun with you and I do like you,

but this is not healthy. At a certain dose. There's a certain dosage. And I've adopted wholeheartedly, by the way, just as a quick aside, you know, something you say regularly, which is treat sugar like a recreational drug. That's right.

That's right. I enjoy sugar, but I know to do it just occasionally. Right, sorry. You know, it's okay. I don't, I read once, and you can affirm whether this is correct or not, that when people stress about eating dessert,

the cortisol released from the stress about eating the cake is actually worse for you than the chocolate cake. It might be, yeah. So if you're going to have a little piece of chocolate, like you just enjoy it. Well, I did, you're right, so. I mean, the greatest pharmacy is the one between your ears. And it can actually kill you or it can heal you, literally.

I mean, that's how voodoo works. It's not like they just kind of like put a hex on you, you die. I mean, people actually happens. Yeah. So I think how we think about things matter. So if you want to eat a cookie, eat that cookie, and love the cookie. And just enjoy every bite. And treat it like a recreational drug.

Just have one, two at the most. You know one of my tricks, there is like a bowl of M&Ms. Yeah. If you take a handful of M&Ms and throw them in your mouth, that counts as one. That's one mouthful. And then you take another handful and put your mouth, that's two. But if I have one M&M, that's also one. And if I have another one, because you count mouthfuls, not M&M's.

Yeah. And so if you just go from handful to one or two, you're a draft. reduce the sugar is like. Anyway, but we digress. How, how, have you ever, I want to understand the health issues of staying in unhealthy friendships or unhealthy relationships where we know, where we know. And when we're in, in the, the dark parts of the night, we will admit to ourselves out loud, this is not a good relationship and I shouldn't be in this, but I fear the alone more than the thing that I'm in. Yeah. Talk, talk about the physiological impact of being in an unhealthy relationship.

Yeah, well, we touched on it before, but when you're in a conflictual relationship, your physiology changes to a state of disease, cortisol goes up, your inflammatory cytokines go up, your microbiome can change, I mean, a whole series of things happen in your body that make you more sick. And we see, we see this happening. see people who are in bad relationships just do poorly and get sick more often. And so I think the data is there. It's just really, the question is, how do we navigate a world where friendship is not of value? It just seems like the last thing on the totem pole. You know, and after work, after success, after social media, after whatever, where else we're doing, exercise, food, it's not

something we invest in. And it's a crisis. It's a crisis. It's a It's a severe crisis. I mean, I don't know, you probably saw the articles in New York Times about men and friendships and it was just, it was just so heartbreaking. And for me, it's, it's a bit of value I've had my whole life and I've intentionally invested in friendships. And when COVID happened, you know, we're all isolated. We're all alone.

And in September 2020, my wife and I split up. I had just had back surgery. I was alone. It was COVID. And what did I do? I sent an email to my closest men friends. six other men who I you know men's work with men retreats with done medicine journeys with and I said hey guys like can we start a little zoom once a week for an hour maybe and they're like

how about we do two hours every you know and we've been going for it's plus four years now and it's it's remarkable to have this container and what's been interesting to watch is that even though these these were all my close friends for 40 years, 30 years, that the depth of our friendship has gotten more profound, the more vulnerable we've gotten. The more we open our hearts, the more we share our fears, the more we share our successes,

the more we share, whatever is going on in our life doesn't matter. There's always something with one of us. And it's, to me, it's like an anchor. And most of us don't have that. And in Okinawa, one of the Blue Zones, there has a thing called a Moai, which is when you are born,

you're stuck together with like three or four other kids, babies, and that's your basically group for your life. Amazing. Yeah, and you're there throughout everything. You didn't even pick the friends. I mean, this happens with like the Marine Corps, or any boot camp for that matter. You know, these become lifelong friendships

because you go through hardship together. Or in the Israeli Army, one of the reasons they're historically, been very successful is when you go through boot camp, that's your unit for the rest of your military career. Yeah. Is the, you don't get split up. Yeah. And they, but, so what I think's really

interesting is these, these friend groups aren't chosen. They're kind of like arranged marriages. Like, you're just thrown together by zip code or by, you know, in the case of babies, like, oh, you're born on the same day, you're friends. Yeah, exactly. Right? And I think what's really interesting about that, which is, you know, sometimes

just, like, I think sometimes we over, analyze, you know, who should be a friend. Am I, am I, is that right? Well, I mean, listen, we have, we have to, maybe I disagree with myself as I'm saying the words. I mean, it depends on the situation. When you're, if you go through shit with somebody,

even if you don't, you don't have all the same background, you can get close, right? Yeah. And I mean, I was in Haiti. I was thrown together. Yeah, yeah, because we know that shared hardship produces cortisol. I mean, shared hardship produces oxytocin. Yeah.

So when you go through shared hardship with someone, it creates a bond of, yeah, it creates bonds. So, but, but, but now that I think about it, I'm going to go back on what I said. which is I also know friendships and have had friendships where time is the only bump where we really don't that's not enough

we like we used to grow together but now you know it's sort of grown apart and you know we have fun I guess you know sometimes being a friend is actually calling people out in other words when you see like if you're growing. But I think we stay in friendships unnecessarily

simply because oh but we've been friends for 30 years like so what? so what if it's no longer it's like you wouldn't stay in a marriage that is it is dysfunctional just because you've been married that's right and yet we seem to have a different standard for like nobody says when you say you know I've been married to my wife for 25 years but you know we've struggled for a lot of years and quite frankly I think we've just decided mutually you know it's amicable but we've decided to call it quits nobody says I think you should

stay in the marriage you've been married for 25 years like I think you I think you should try and go another 25 but nobody says that But part of the friendship. But we say that in friendship. You're like, how can you end the friendship? You've been friends for 25 years. Well, you can. But I'm saying people, it's a different standard.

Time becomes the only bond. It's true. But sometimes when you drift apart or some people change, like if you're changing and you're growing or I was changing and your friend isn't and you see this sort of hard. What happening? You've one or two choices. You can either go, okay, well, we're just moving apart. It was a nice while it lasted.

Or you can actually kind of go in for kind of a surgical spiritual surgery. And sometimes it's painful. But I've done this with friends where I've seen them be in bad relationships or being a job they didn't like or doing things that were contracting their life and becoming smaller when they were expansive open beings

when I knew them earlier. And I had a choice where I was going to just kind of let this happen or was I going to go in for a surgery? And was I going to do a spiritual surgery on this person? And some of those people are open to it, something they're not. But I had to drug them.

Literally, I had to give MDMA, I had to like literally spend hours acid and basically get him to really see how his life is a little extreme contracted. And he needed that, you know, like, and he needed to kind of break the cycle of his pattern of thinking. And now, you know, he's lost 40 pounds. He's out of the relationship. He's free. He's got out of his job. He's, you know, kind of time of his life. He's exploring his own development.

He's growing. He's let go of his fears around money. this and that. I mean, it's amazing that's the transformation, but it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't leaned in as a friend. I have a friend who sat down with me to give me some life advice. Yeah. And the conversation started like this. I need to tell you something and you need to hear this. And I need you to know that you're not going to like what I have to tell you. But I love you. He didn't say that. He said, you're not going to like what I have to tell you. And I recognize that you may be so angry with me for telling you this, that you might.

in the friendship with me. And I want you to know that I'm willing to risk our friendship to tell you this because you need to hear it. Wow. And how did that land for you? I mean, he picked the right person because I'm like, yeah, I mean, you're not going to lose the friendship but bang, you know, game on, right?

And he gave me something that was very hard to hear that I needed to be said and I love him even more for risking the whole friendship out of love. Like he was willing to throw away the friendship because he cared about me so much to tell me this. And that is, that's a high bar. I mean, I think that speaks to,

I think what's, what, you know, he's a remarkable friend's, in my mind. What defines friendship is the ability to be authentically who you are and to be authentic and transparent with your friend. Just like your friend was, right? I mean, he gave me the whole preamble. Yeah.

And that's, that's a, that's a very scary thing for people to actually let down their guard. right to be open and to risk and and it's fearful but but that's what creates real friendships yeah I think so that's what creates real friendships another friend of mine is struggling um yeah I'm like I'm so attuned to friends these days another friend of mine is struggling with one of her friends and she asked herself if I was in a marriage and my marriage or just a romantic relationship a long-term romantic relationship and the relationship was struggling we wouldn't just break up we would we would get help we would seek therapy couples

couples counseling. Yeah. And so she went to her friend and said, this attention has been going over too long. We're going to go to therapy together. Friends therapy. Yeah. And again, why do we instinctively understand

that if a marriage or a relationship is struggling, that we expect people to at least try, to at least try the couples therapy before you call the whole thing quits, before you call the whole thing quits. And yet we don't do that with friendships. When we have tension with friendships,

we're quicker to end the friendship. or sit in weird tension or avoid the person, then to go to the therapy with the person to try and work through the struggles. We may still end up. But let's at least put in the effort to rescue this friendship that we claim we care about. I love the idea of friendship counseling.

It used to be that when people came to couples therapy, they came actually for their children. They didn't come to couples therapy. They came and slowly we would identify that there was something maybe in the relationship that also was interacting with the challenges that the child was having. Couples therapy really became a discipline of its own

in the center that it is today when the expectations around intimate relationships began to rise. The more we expect from the couple and the more we need couples therapy to help us with those expectations. When the couple was not the central unit, of the family but because the family was more important than the couple and people stay together

for the family yeah today not the children and not the family it really will keep people together they may keep them a few more years but ultimately what keeps people together is the quality of the relationship between the two people yeah right so therefore couples therapy becomes a much more sought after practice. I don't just do communication. I was thinking, and I was editing another podcast session. And it's an incredible session. It's the first session of season five that I'm producing now. And they come in and he says, you know, we are both people who like things to be done, who like to do things our way. And I say, that's okay. That's interesting. But what is, what I'm hearing also is that you are two people who like other people to do things your way.

Yeah. That's what they meant, right? So then I ask, you know, on what, how did you learn, you know, to say yes and how did you learn to say no? And he begins to tell me a whole story of how basically his father would continuously belittle him. lecture to him, be contemptuous. You know, we would start with a conversation, son, and then what followed was often, you know, berating him for all the things that he wasn't doing right

and living up to expectations. And she grows up with a drug-addicted mother, a father who commits suicide, and she is the adult in the house from that little one and raises her two children. They say to me at one point, we fight about everything, we don't communicate. And I say, I don't think you fight about everything at all.

Actually, I think you're fighting about the same thing all the time. The moment he experiences you as saying to him, you're incompetent. You're not doing it well. You're not doing it right. He is in that original wound of him, of his. And the moment he says, you're not going to tell me what to do. You know, I'm doing it. I'm out of here.

And he goes for a break. you think I'm once again all alone with all the responsibilities and the four children on my shoulders and I will always be alone and I will never have anybody by my side and you fight about that original wound that's what every argument is actually about the same story over and over you know and that was so illuminating for them that it wasn't about the chore chart that she had made and it wasn't about the kids and it wasn't about his parents it was about you you know, I don't want to be inadequate and I don't want to be alone. Those were the themes that each one was really, and then we started to work.

So that becomes different than just communicating. How do you say things nicer? Yeah, yeah. How do you get people to kind of move past those really primordial conditionings of childhood? That's the $64,000 question. Yes. I think the most important thing. is that you teach people two things,

or when I say teach, it means you help them see two things. You help them separate the past from the present. The fact that this brings back vividly, the experience of back then doesn't mean that it is actually what used to happen back then. The past and the present sometimes feel like they come together into one, but they are not. And the second thing is that you then say, at seven, you were helpless.

At seven, you couldn't respond. At seven, you couldn't just leave the house and say, this is dangerous for me to be here. You, you know, whereas now you are an adult and you have choices. So, and then you go and you basically help them, first of all, through the body to separate the from the present. In this moment, I get that tension. Like, I want to start fighting. Like, this man was a master of defiance, you know, but he got all his confidence through defiance, which means that it was pseudo-confident. And when she would actually say, go ahead and do things, I'm with you, I support you, then he would start to talk about all his doubts. He was always sure

only when he was in opposition. When he was in a fight and he knew what he wanted. But when he had somebody who was actually loving and giving, then he didn't know what to do with himself. And you go through the body and you track the feeling because a feeling is also embodied, you know, then you articulate the experience. And then you know what I really did with them? I really had a lot of fun. They had a lot of fun. I said, lay down, flat on the floor.

And then I said, now continue the argument. Do you know that you can't fight when you're lying flat? Yeah. Or if you take your clothes off, I think that's another thing I've heard from couples. Everybody take their clothes off. It's hard to have a fight. You know, it's like we are meant to fight in straight up position like balance, you know. So then it opened up a completely different. And it went from the fighting to the aspect behind the fighting, which is often the fear of loss, which is often, will you leave me, which will you be there for me, et cetera.

And then you go deeper, deeper, deeper. And that takes some time. That's so beautiful. You know, Esther, you've been at the front seat of literally probably hundreds, if not thousands of relationships and ways that most people don't ever have insight into by simply the virtue of your job, just like I've seen so many people who've been sick. You've seen so many people who've had relationship challenges. So in that perspective, looking back after decades of doing this, you know, what do you define

as the success of relationships day-to-day? Like, what are the keys to a successful relationship? And one of the things that really destroy relationships. Yeah. I will start with what destroys. And I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes. I will really refer to the work of John Gottman and John and Julie Gottman here on what destroys them.

You know, they have a wonderful way of kind of separating between the masters and the disasters. And they talk about the four horses of apocalypse. Yeah. And basically, what will kill relationships is chronic criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and the killer of them all is contempt. Because contempt, and this we know also in large-scale traumas, is contempt is the dehumanizing. Contempt is whatever you feel or think is irrelevant and doesn't matter.

You don't even reach me. So that, those, those four horses of apocalypse, I think, kind of summarize things well and once you have a lot of things, defensiveness. Criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling basically shutting down, right? Shutting people out. Yes, yes. We rolled off and contempt, which is basically, you know, shame is on the, shame is one side and contempt, shame is contempt for oneself and contempt for the other.

It goes in both directions. I think when I once wanted to write a paper, I wanted to write a paper about what are creative couples. Because we talk about lasting couples, we talk about stable couples, but we rarely talk about what is creative couples or what you may include in successful couples. And what was fascinating is what you said before. The majority of people, when I said,

do you know couples who have a spark, couples who inspire you? And people would on occasion come up with one, maybe two, often none. It was really scary to them. Because if I said, can you come up with entrepreneurs, with artists, with writers, with intellectuals. People have lists of people that inspire them. But here is everybody wanting to be in a relationship. And not many people can think about, yeah, I like that. I want to do this.

I never wrote the paper because what people ended up saying seemed rather banal to me, as in that's, I know that. But then I've been sitting on this thing for years thinking, actually, maybe it's not that known. But what they said was this, and that was very interesting. This is not in order. One is admiration. Admiration for your partner. It's not respect.

It's different. Admiration always implies a level of idealization. I look up to you. I admire you for who you are as a person, as a human being. More than just in your role as a partner, as a parent. So that was one, big one. Two, the relationship is basically a foundation with wings. Meaning there's a solid anchor of trust,

and that solid anchor of trust interacts with the ability to take risks in life and in the relationship and to be playful. It's what I often have looked at the combination between or the integration between our need for security and safety and predictability and reliability and our need for change and novelty and exploration and discovery. These two fundamental human needs. I think that the best relationships have nice, balance between what is togetherness and what is separateness. They have, people have their own

lives. But before I even continue, I think the best thing to say is this, there is no one size fits all. It's all, yeah, yeah. I can't tell you one, it's like you with health. It's not like you have a sense in hell that it's an interaction of different parts. Of course. But if it is more of this or more of that, you know, some couples have vent diagrams that are completely overlapping. They do everything together. They spend all their time together. And it works beautifully. And some other very creative and successful couples are much more differentiated. And actually, they have a strong core, but with big individual lives, you know, separate. So there is no one size fits all. I really would love that to be actually my opening line to your question. Before I even say, what makes for success?

people who feel free in a relationship that makes for success. For sure, people who feel oppressed or under surveillance or who have to constantly lie or hide or not say what they bought or what is, you know, that kind of stuff, those are major differences that I would add to the Gottman list. It's a degree of autonomy matched with a deep sense of belonging. These two together is a beautiful dance. It's beautiful, but I think there's some really practical ways that you talk about

for people to achieve whatever it is their best relationship is, right? Boundaries, routines, rituals. You know, what are the kinds of things that you help people establish within the relationship to build that foundation, that structure? Because it's not something that we know automatically. It's not something we actually are taught. How do you help people build those structures in those relationships that help him get to that.

So it's very interesting. This couple that I was mentioning before where he kind of walled himself off with no needs because he was all alone and there was nobody who could help him anyway and she is like permeated by all these voices. I thought that I had done a rather limited session with them. I really thought, I didn't really reach them.

I didn't really go underneath the noise, et cetera. And then I get a letter to this. that you never know you never know about how much some of the tiny things that I did that I thought were almost slightly you know they were not basically I would say it's one thing to say how about you tell Esther about this versus shutting your partner up and talking for them of course you want to to bring something up but you also want to let you them tell their own story. How about when you have a problem or a question about sex or about children, you don't first go to your mother and grandmother, but you also go first to your

partner. And you set a boundary with all the people from your family so that you can create a more sacred space with your partner. The boundary is not always inside the relationship. It's between the relationship and the outside world. How about you are able to make a request that isn't a protest? So say what you need rather than what the other person is or is not doing. Just make a request and stick to that. And adding up these things, basically, they write to me three weeks later and say there's been a fundamental shift. We haven't had a single fight.

I was able to no longer go and talk to my mother about everything. He feels much more open to me because I'm much less critical with him. And I appreciate his openness. And that makes me more fond of him. And that makes him more as sexual with me and more expressive of his desire for me. And it becomes the opposite of the escalation in the negative direction is now kind of escalating. Yeah. The going up in the positive direction.

That's the work. Yeah, it's so powerful. So powerful. One of the things that you've learned after decades of working with couples and relationships that are sort of nuggets of wisdom that you would lead people with about, that could help them with relationships that they may be struggling with. You know, what are the things that people should anchor to? And of course, there's your book, Maybe In Captivity and the State of Affairs and your podcasts and all that, which is great. People should dive into that in your TED talks. But I wonder if you could kind of distill down, you know, what you really learned.

The first thing I would say, and I think I have really, really learned it from, you know, the millions of people that listen to where should we begin is that you're not alone. These days, on the one hand, we have unprecedented expectations of our couple's lives, but at the same time, we are also in a machine of fake news on social media, so people curate and posture and filter, and you kind of don't know. where is the truth. You know, when people lived in the village, you heard the fights of the neighbors, and you heard the frolics of the neighbors. Now your best friends can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming. Nobody tells you the truth about what goes on in the couple's relationships. And yet, and then you're left thinking, these are alone. They're doing great and we are alone with our problems. And so I think really, where should we begin, showed me that when you listen deeply to the stories of others, you see yourself in front of

your own mirror and you don't feel as alone and you get the tools for the conversations that you want to have. I think that's the first thing. I really realize that this is a unit that doesn't talk. Friends talk to friends. Couples often talk to nobody about what's really going on. They may be struggling with infidelity. They may be struggling with infertility. They may be struggling with bipolarity and mental health issues. They may be struggling with unresolved grief. They may be struggling with economic hardships, with unemployment, with addictions, and they won't talk about it to anybody because they have to present themselves a certain way. And it breaks my heart sometimes to see how alone people are with some of

these major, major challenges. So that's the first thing I've really learned is to make sure that that's part of the game too, is to give people a tool. to make hard conversations less difficult. The second thing that I have really learned is this couple that I was describing where I thought, oh, my God, this is, you know, they really came in to say, we need you to tell us, are we broken?

Are we beyond repair? And I thought, at the end of the session, I thought, I don't know where this is going. And I have been so many times surprised by people where I think there's not much left here. And then when you change one thing, like this woman, she stopped trying to change him, and she went ahead and took responsibility for her contribution,

and she changed a few things about her own behavior. And it just unleashed a cascade of changes for the better. And that is a real important piece. Sometimes it looks like everything is interconnected, and it's like an impossible heap of nuisance. And yet if you make one shift, it has the power because systems are interdependent parts to activate everything else.

That's the second thing that is very important. The third thing is that there is a big difference between what you feel inside and how what you experience inside affects the people around you. You may be depressed and feel weak and hopeless and helpless and anadonic. But when you are in relationship with those who love you, you often wield all the power. Because you activate everybody around you to try to make you feel better, to give you advice, to try to lift you up. And in the end, they feel defeated and deflated like you.

So power doesn't always come from the top down. often comes from the bottom up from places that are not nearly that obvious. I think we really don't understand enough the complex interplay of power dynamics

in relationships. If you want to change the other, change yourself. And maybe the last thing I would say is beyond most issues that people argue about, there generally are three themes. Control

and power, care and closeness, and respect and recognition. Whose priorities matter? Who has the power here? Can I trust you? Do you have my back? Yeah. And do you value me? Yeah.

Those are huge. These are the three major themes that many, many couples basically struggle about. But it comes in the forms of talks about sex and money and family. and in roles and but that's not the issue it's not the issue it's the emotional crucible in which those issues play off how do we know if we're in a toxic relationship versus a healing relationship well step one is you're in projection you're not aware of your own integrated pain your partner's pain and you're blaming one another essentially and trying to have that person meet your needs and refusing to meet your own needs which is a big one i want you to say all the things yeah yeah yeah

Yeah. Well, I think that's the first fallacy relationship that our partner's job is to meet our needs. That is not their job. Ding, ding, ding. That's our job. Yes. Yes. And that points to, which is very useful information. So when we see that in ourselves, we don't have to shame ourselves. We can look at that and go, okay, so for example, me, I had this unmet need in my childhood. So my greatest unmet need from my perspective as a child was that I just needed a safe and stable place. Before I did this healing work, I was running around looking for a man to give me a safe and stable place, but refusing to give it to myself. Yes. And that was my inner 10-year-old running my love life and sex life. And most of us who haven't done any relational healing work have a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 7-year-old running our love life and our sex life.

Yep, which is I didn't get this need met and I'm going to find someone who reminds me of the person who didn't meet the need. and I'm going to play out my unfinished business with my parents with them and hope that they meet the need even though I'm refusing to meet it myself. So yes, step one, owning your needs, which by the way actually makes it easier for other people to meet your needs. That's the kind of like mind-bending part of that. When you come to someone and you're not saying, I need you to do this or else and you say, you know, I recognize it's my responsibility to create a safe and stable place for me and I will always be the one to do that for myself. And if I, you know, I will always come back

to at least aiming to do that for myself. I know it's my responsibility. But can you help me different energy, right? And so moving into a healing relationship is taking ownership of your own work. And then who are the people in your life, whether it's romantic partners, friends, family members, who empower you to do your own work? They can't do it for you, but they can love, support, encourage and empower you to do your own personal development work to, as the cliche, become a better person through them loving

you, supporting you, and you doing your own work. A toxic relationship is one in which you feel consistently disempowered from doing your healing work. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I found a new framework that's really helped me in my current relationship, which has really been extraordinary. And that is, there's me, there's her, there's us, and then there's this third entity, which is the stuff that we bring into the relationship, you know, the traumas, the triggers, the fears that aren't really who we truly are, but are things that we've brought in. And instead of being obstacles, there are opportunities to actually together, hold them outside of the container of the relationship and look at them and be curious about them

and explore them without judgment, without fear or without having to have a certain outcome, but just in an honest, clear, and curious way, go, hmm, gee, this is coming up for me. And instead of me going, oh, that means you don't like me or that means blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, okay, this is interesting. where is that from what's that about you know how am i showing up that's creating that or where is that a place where we can learn about what's driving us and how do we become free from it it's a very different framework you know because i often see people sort of in relation dug in you know i'm not meeting you're not meeting my needs you're not meeting my needs

it's like it's like i'm not going to do what you want me to do until you do what i want to do and it's like this crazy weird dynamic that this doesn't get anywhere and it's it's like It's like if you look at love as a container for creating your own spiritual evolution, then it becomes a very different perspective on how to actually be in the relationship. It's not about them fixing you or you fixing them. It's about being curious together about how to evolve together and individually. And what you just described so beautifully is what we touched on earlier, which is this idea of undifferentiating, unblending from your reaction,

but still looking at it and sharing about it. Curiously, one of my good friends, Sadi Simone, is an amazing Buddhist teacher. And he says, the quality of your curiosity is the quality of your liberation. And I love that. It's what you're saying. Can I create enough space to look at what I'm feeling, not disassociate from it, not disconnect, not shove it down, no, have it leak outsideways. but can I just have enough space so we can be curious about what's here

and learn how to grow from it and shift from when I win you lose or vice versa this win-lose power struggle, yep, into how do we compassionately and creatively get both of our needs met? Takes creativity. Yeah, or how do we actually realize that our happiness isn't really about the other person meeting our needs, but us becoming whole human beings and meeting each other as two whole human beings in the context of love. It's something we don't really have a model for. I certainly did not have that model for me. As a boy, it certainly isn't modeled in our culture. It's certainly

modeling books and movies and TV. And so we're kind of flying blind a little bit. And what's really exciting is that there's sort of this emerging consciousness around love and sexuality and redefine what love is that kind of is exploring a totally way of thinking about it. I read a book called All About Love by Bell Hooks, who's recently died, a woman who was really insightful talking about the nature of love. And it kind of was great because it kind of taught me that a lot of the ideas, the concepts, the beliefs, the conditioning, the norms are kind of fabricated. And what would love look like if we kind of shed those? And we ask ourselves, you know, what do we want?

How do we create a different way of being with someone? And to use all those opportunities, whether there are triggers or things that cause us to kind of have some physical sensation or body, of fear or disconnect as a gift, as an opportunity to look at ourselves and to look at what's happening and to be able to transmute that into a really different way of relating to somebody. Yes, yes. And we need skills. It's about upskilling, right? I didn't know about conscious communication, right? I didn't know about regulating my nervous system. I didn't know about being hijacked by my emotions, my reactions and my triggers or how to get space from that. Like that's my aim is to upskill my clients, right? Not just the static healing work, but also to give them and upskill them in relationships, in sex. Like, what are the skills we actually need to succeed? Because, and also this healing relationship, it's not about perfect. but you do want as you're as you're sharing what is the vision and intention for your relationship it might look totally different is it that you want to spiritually evolve together is it that you want to create a safe space to do your own healing such that your relationship

becomes a healing presence for your kids for your family for your community like what is the intention of even being with one another like why are you together so that when you forget because lord knows you will hopefully one of you can remain in your mature adult and can help to empower the other to remember why we're here to remember, what is the style of communication we've agreed on. We don't use name calling. We don't use raise voices.

I love you, but I won't allow that. That's not within our framework. We have different skills, we have a different intention, and learning how to repair after rupture, because even if you have all the best intentions, me and my husband have, we still, I still act like a petulant child sometimes and I think, oh wow, still got work to do.

but I have the skills now to repair. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, a lot of us, it's almost like, you know, we wouldn't imagine getting in a car where, you know, everything was unpredictable, where the car was for right, which were left, the brakes was time on, the gas would go forward, you know, it would flip around and backwards.

I mean, we wouldn't, we'd be terrified. But that's exactly how we navigate emotionally in relationships. It's like some crazy person driving the car. Right. And blaming the other person in the passenger seat for, you know, how it's driving. Exactly. And so learning how to kind of get a hold of a control, a control switch is on our amygdala, which is our ancient, we call it our fight or flight response. But in medicine, we learned they were the four F's, the feeding, which is our baby around food, fighter flight and reproduction. That was the fourth. I thought you were going to say fawn, fight, freeze, flight, fawn. But no, I like that.

The fourth F, yes, very important. And so our behavior really is often triggered by these ancient survival mechanisms that aren't really serving us anymore. And I'm sort of curious about a lot of these ancient techniques around, you know, embodied sexuality. And there's more and more talk about it. There's more courses that people can take. You know, there's things that actually help people discover that. And I'm super curious about it and exploring it myself.

And I think that, you know, it's sort of almost criminal that we don't have a cultural narrative of how to get through these challenging aspects of love, relationship, and sexuality. And that's why your work is so important. Sort of gives people a roadmap, you know, to figure things out, which really we don't have a language for. we don't have a framework for and yet and yet it exists i mean it's it's been there throughout you know historical cultures you know whether it's tantra or other you know ways of thinking about love relationship uh healing the mind perception buddhism all of it you know i think a friend of mine susan paver wrote the foreign noble truths of love you know it's like it's all about how do we how do we

get out of this sort of projection of our of our conditioning our trauma our lineages and bring that into relationship and actually start to heal that. That's really what seems like the work that we have to do because right now we're in such a divisive society. There's so much conflict, you know, not just in relationship, in love relationships, in family relationships, but in society as a whole. I mean, it's just sort of staggering to me the amount of conflict. I mean, there always was, I guess, throughout history, but it just seems to be ramped up and

polarized more than I've ever known. America didn't seem to be two Americas before. And now it seems to be completely two Americas, which is so tragic. Yeah. I mean, Ken Wilbur, who I mentioned earlier, describes expansion of consciousness as the ability to expand what we're aware of and care for. So to both be aware of and caring of. And I think that for me, that looks like and what I see people learn how to do through

the somatic healing work is hold more complexity with care, that I can make a stake. I can hurt myself or someone else and I can still be a good human being. I'm still worthy of love. I'm still, I can have a really period of low of depression and be overcome with sadness and I'm still valuable. I still have value. There's this complexity, this ability to hold more with more care. And I think if we each were able to do that on an individual level, we'd be able to hold more complex human beings in front of us that people can say something. you don't like and still be worthy of love and belonging. People can have a different opinion to you and still be worthy of your time and connection, you know? Yeah, that's so true. I mean,

I deal with all sorts of people as a doctor. I can't choose who comes in my office. I can't choose what they believe, what their religious beliefs are, their political beliefs. And at the end of the day, everybody's a human being. And that's where I start. And, you know, I remember one day in my office had a Muslim, a Christian, a rabbi, I had a top Republican, the top Democrat. It was like the United Nations of Medicine or something. And I was like, you know what, this is all so crazy. We're all just struggling with the same things. We all care about the same things.

We all want to be happy. We all want our families to be good. We all want to live in a better world. I mean, you know, we all have different views of how to get there for sure. But I think that our common humanity has been. in forgotten. And that just really breaks my heart. And it seems to me that your work is really about getting connected to your own humanity and your own center of the universe where you're actually an embodied human that's looked at yourself carefully. That's heal the things that need

to be healed. That's learned how to love yourself and others in a more integrated way. It's the most important work we have to do. I remember reading a quote. I can't remember the exact one from Dalai Lama, but essentially it's like we want to heal the world, we have to start with ourselves. And I think it may seem like a narcissistic pursuit, but it really isn't. If we don't take care of ourselves, we can't be there in the world to show up for others. And I think that's what it's all about. Yeah, and the body doesn't discriminate. Your body, whatever mistakes you make, your body's just striving.

Even when we're sick, the body's always striving to try and deal with the toxins and stress and everything to try and create homeostasis. It's like our body doesn't discriminate. And what's so beautiful about the body is it's always right here right now. Your body is never anywhere else, but right here right now. And that's what I really love about this powerful path of body-based healing. And I think that when we get in touch with our body, we do become more present. And when we're connected to our body, I believe we're connected to the gift of getting to be alive of you, this moment, this body, this life, exactly as it is right now. And that's, for me, has been the most profound pathway or gateway into better sex and

liberation and truly allowing myself to be seen by my husband, which I found excruciatingly vulnerable, right? I knew how to do the fourth F, but did I know how to make love, how to be seen? No, that took me learning and developing and better relationships, learning how to love my darkness and still say wow okay that was not kind or i lost my temper there and i'm still worthy of love and belonging to take responsibility for and then that allows me to do it with other people i look okay wow that person lost their temper that didn't feel good okay they're still worthy can we repair so it's like all of this work internally that does bleed outward and that is really

tangible that's what i love about the body too is you have an experience of it it's not just ideology It's not just concept. You feel it in your own way, through your own lens, whether it's spiritual or religious or secular, and then you have that experience and no one or nothing can take it from me. Do you have a question about my favorite books, supplements, or recipes? Then sign up for my free Marks Picks newsletter

at Dr.heimann.com slash markspicks, where I'll share all of this information with you and so much more. You'll get emails from me every Friday with recommendations on things that have helped me on my health journey, and I hope they can help you too. Thank you so much again for tuning in. you next week on the Dr. Hyman Show. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman.

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