The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 307. Childhood Trauma, Marriage, and Making Friends | Dr. John Delony

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueSXh Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. John Delony discuss the destitution of loneliness, the salvation in connection, how to strengthen ties through listening, and why you should stop ignoring your flaws. Dr. John Delony is a bestselling author, mental health expert, and host of The Dr. John Delony Show. This caller-driven show offers real people a chance to be heard as they struggle with relationship issues and mental health challenges. John gives practical advice on how to connect with people, how to take the next right step, and how to cut through the depression and anxiety that can feel so overwhelming. Delony has two PhDs and over two decades of experience in counseling, crisis response, and higher education. In 2020 Delony joined Ramsey Solutions, a powerhouse multi-media company that brings together top minds in topics such as finance, real estate, mental health, and overall well being. Through their platform they produce shows, lectures, events, documentaries, books, and more. —Links— For Dr. John Delony: The Dr. John Delony Show:https://link.chtbl.com/delony Own Your Past, Change Your Future:https://bit.ly/3V3egYS Redefining Anxiety:https://bit.ly/3ApOTZk Instagram:@johndelony on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/johndelony/  - Sponsors - Birch Gold: Text "JORDAN" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit Elysium Health: Save 25% off Matter monthly subscriptions with code JBP25: https://explorematter.com/Jordan Black Rifle Coffee: Get 10% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code JORDAN: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ Hallow: Try Hallow for 3 months FREE: https://hallow.com/jordan  — Chapters — (0:00) Coming Up(1:19) Intro(2:10) Story and the body(6:47) Memory, a flawed canon(10:04) Detailing anxiety(11:59) Loneliness(15:00) Sanity is distributed(17:16) The need for friendship(21:10) Ben Franklin, favors(23:10) The Corner Store technique(25:29) Teaching generosity(28:35) Your life is what you repeat, focus on that(30:41) Rebuilding a marriage(37:09) Having a daily shared image(45:05) Sex in marriage(50:00) What do you actually want?(55:08) Why you don’t know(1:00:49) High ordered goals(1:06:00) The greatest lost skill(1:07:11) The difference between listening and looking to solve a problem(1:16:10) Practical skills for listening(1:20:33) Categorizing the problems in your world(1:24:50) Seeking out your vulnerabilities(1:27:48) the importance of confession(1:31:40) Why labels are lackluster(1:34:42) The small scale scales exponentially(1:36:30) How we spread the movement // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.com/youtubesignupDonations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-lifeMaps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning // LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus

[♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in He's the author of, Own Your Past, Change Your Future. We're going to talk today, and I'm very happy to do this, to talk to another clinician, about the fact that you live your life through a story, that you see the world through a story, what that story might be like, when things are going wrong,

how it might be approved, and also to talk about identity and its transformations in the most practical possible way. And so, there are specifics that we can talk about, but that's a good place to start. What got you so interested in stories, John? I think it, I reverse engineered my way into it. It was learning the trauma narrative that played out in the human body 10 15 30 years later after the initial trauma. And so I've always thought stories were narrative right there's something I thought about I did not understand that my body was keeping the score to quote Vanderkohl right that my That my body was revving up and fighting battles that I didn't even know was happening. And so we were looking at the long term data, man, and people are having strokes and cancer and heart attacks from childhood experiences.

And that made me step back and go, whoa, there's these different layers to these stories happening all over the place. And it's not just narrative. It's the entire ecosystem that I call my body, right? My human experience. And then as I begin to pull the thread on those, man, those stories we're born into and the stories we were told have such a formative shaping of our life experience. And those stories become the stories we tell ourselves, which as we all know in mental health professionals, that shapes everything.

Who I think I am and what I think I'm capable or not capable of, or I'm the worst thing to ever happen to me. Those stories are highly limiting, or they are the jet fuel on a well-lived life, right? So, if we can discuss those stories, man, what a shapeshifting opportunity for us. Yeah, well, that idea about-shifting opportunity for us. Yeah, well, that idea about stories in some sense being stored in the body is kind of interesting. And so the way I conceptualize it is that a story manifests itself in a personality, in a set of goals, and a set of assumptions about the world, perceptions about the world. And if you have had terrible things happen to you in the past,

and that's pretty much true of everyone, although some people more than others, then your body computes the present danger of the environment based on how many things have happened to you that are terrible in the past that aren't resolved. And resolved would mean that you had generated a solution for them. And if you, if your psychophysiological system assumes that all the danger that you were subject to once is still present in the environment, then it's going to set you on edge as if you're

walking in dangerous territory. And the psychological consequence of that is that you're prepared for danger, and that does such things as burn-up excess resources, because you're much more reactive and on point than you might otherwise be, in an anxiety prone manner. It also suppresses immunological function because your body isn't that worried about long-term immunological health if you're confronting an emergency. So that you talk in your book about changing your past, owning your past,

and it's useful to define that. You're likely to overcome a trauma, let's say, and no longer, in some sense, store it psychophysiologically, if you've generated a causal story about the reason that the trauma emerged, and then reconfigured the way that you're conducting your life

so that the probability that a similar thing will happen to you is reduced to close to zero. Right, it's not catharsis. It's understanding. Yeah. The challenge there is I think we've following that thread all the way to our modern psychological ethos. We've created a world that is based entirely on blame. And like somebody else is responsible. And so I've got to continue to cut and cut and cut. And I reduce myself to a two by two square with which I can exist.

And if you enter my square, then whether it's ideologically or physically, then suddenly you're affronting me. And I think there's something about owning your past. I look at it more in terms of, can I think through what I remember to have happened? And by the way, we know that memory is a disastrous narrative storyteller. So I care less about what actually happened and more. I'm in my 40s.

I'm telling myself this story that happened. Can I tell that story? Can I really live that story? And my body doesn't take off on me. It doesn't rush to solve the problem for me because it knows I'm driving now, right? The thing about memory is that it's not there to provide an accurate objective record of the past, which is in fact impossible

because the past is so unbelievably complex. It's more like a navigation tool, which is I went here, I fell into something terrible, and now I need to recalibrate the navigation map that I'm using so that I don't fall into the same hole. And, you know, one of the things that people might want to know who are listening is that if you have a memory that's older than about 18 months, and it haunts you, and when it comes up involuntarily, it produces a stress reaction.

What that means is that as far as your nervous system is concerned, and so as far as your body is concerned, that danger hasn't gone away. And what's happening is an unconscious alarm system that's looking for pitfalls and holes is warning you that the map that you're using is incomplete in a manner that might might enable you to fall into the same hole. And so one of the things that people can do that's very useful is if you have memories like that that plague you is to bring them to mind voluntarily instead of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily. And then to think through what has changed and what might not have, but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose, you'd be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it.

There's no other way of getting the memory to go away, like merely recontemplating it in the same manner over and over won't do it. And allowing it to plague you unconsciously. It'll do that forever until you solve it. It might show up in your dreams. It'll show up in your fantasies. It'll trigger you, so to speak, when you're talking to other people if they happen to discuss a topic that's related to it. And it's because that the narrative is one of failure and defeat. that the narrative is one of failure and defeat. The event was one of failure and defeat, and if there isn't a map to allow you to transcend that, that's functional, then the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying

danger is never going to let you go. Yeah, and I think culturally we've created a pathology of discomfort, and as you just outlined, so eloquently, the only way through this is to turn and face it and walk directly through it, right? And if you continue to run from the memories and pathologize and chase the behaviors, you end up with our over-diagnostic approach to everything

instead of turning and facing these things and letting your body heal through relationships and other things in your life. Man, we just end up chasing your tail and you call it out. The more you run, the more your body thinks it's winning. It's getting away from this stuff, so it actually reinforces the anxiety. It reinforces some of these psychological ailments, the further you run from it. The only healing is through it. And in the culture we've created for ourselves says that uncomfortable discomfort is bad

and it's to be avoided at all costs. And it's the only path to healing. If you run, then the signal that the story you're acting out is that the thing you're running from is bigger than you and that you have to hide. And that's just a recipe for anxiety. Now it's not necessarily that easy to turn and face something, but you do detail out a variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that.

You can differentiate the problem. You might have been traumatized at work, let's say, or let's not use that sort of jargonny phraseology. You may be having tremendous difficulties at work, let's say, or let's not use that sort of jargonny phraseology. You may be having tremendous difficulties at work. You might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless. And that's bothering you constantly. It's disturbing your sleep, for example, and it's haunting you. And you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come. And partly, that's because the thought of getting a new job is so daunting that you can't face it.

And one of the ways of recalibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable steps. And so, for example, one of the things that you can do if you might have to consider getting a new job because you're unhappy and miserable at work is open up your resume or your CV and look at it. You might not be able to get a new job, but you might be able to open up your resume and look at it. Then having done that, you've sort of cracked the surface and then maybe you could spend an hour a week for a month updating it, or 10 minutes a day,

or 10 minutes every two days, something like that. But part of the trick is to take these larger monsters that are frightening enough so you want to run away from them, decide that you're going to face the situation. You lay out, for example, in your book, you ask people a lot of different questions about what they're thinking. And if something is making you anxious and afraid and miserable, it's very useful to lay out, to write out all the reasons it's making you anxious and miserable. And to ask yourself, what is it you're afraid of?

And then to develop a differentiated plan for dealing with those. So, let me ask you this. In your psychoanalytic experience, can somebody, can the majority of people do this by themselves? Because if I was to distill down all of the pathologies in modern civilization, I keep coming back to a central, one central point, and that's that we are desperately and pathologically and spiritually and frighteningly lonely. Yeah. And I'm wondering if we can, is it even possible anymore to tell a 21-year-old boy,

a 21-year-old man, hey, you need to do this by yourself or is the, because I keep coming back to the first thing you do before you start trying to solve your problems is get a tribe, get a gang, get a couple of people in your town or get a tribe, get a gang, get a couple of people in your town or get a mentor. Somebody you can sit with, and we've had to professionalize it with mental health professionals, but get some people around you

to help be a good reflective mirror for you because we're just, we're loaning ourselves to death, I feel like. Yeah, well, I don't think that people can generally do this alone. It's actually very difficult. And I think people can't do it alone in part because people, and I'm not being snide about this, people aren't very good at thinking and they're not very good at negotiation.

Well, and when we're anxious, our brains shut off rational thinking, right? It doesn't want us wondering, is that a nice bear just wants us to get out of there? Well, that's an additional problem. You know, part of the reason that honesty and speech is so important is that there isn't any difference between honesty and speech and thinking. So you said can people do this alone? And the answer to that generally is no because thought itself generally is no because thought itself is generally a dialogical process. So what you and I are doing right now is thinking things through. Now we're doing that with an audience and for an audience,

but you have some propositions and I have some propositions and we're we're pitting them against each other and cooperating at the same time and we're allowing the discourse to modify our implicit presuppositions. So we're allowing the discourse to modify our stories. And thought itself is internalized dialogue, or tri-along if you're really sophisticated. Maybe you can break yourself into three people internally and have an argument, but it's very, very difficult for people to develop a systematic approach to thinking. And then to counter that with another internalized systematic approach to thinking, and then to counter that with another internalized systematic approach to thinking and do all of that alone. Generally,

what happens in a healthy society, as you're pointing out, is that we have people around us to whom we can express our concerns. Then they react, and then you react to that. And that's thought. And the fact that we would even ask people to do that alone is an indication, as you pointed out, of how isolated and loan some people have become. You know, you said friends or people, you can tell good things to and people you can tell bad things to. And you have friends because friends keep you sane.

And this is one of the things I liked about your book is this insistence that sanity in some real sense is distributed. It's not something inside your head. It's something that you find as a consequence of being nested in a sequence, in a hierarchical sequence of proper relationships. And so if you could do it alone, man, you could do it in solitary confinement. And even anti-social criminals hate solitary confinement. We're socially. It's the way we punish prisoners, right, is to put them in the hole. And we've just created a society where that's where we choose to live. Yeah, and I love the idea of, I like to think of

it's evenly distributed. We carry each other's burdens in different seasons. And that's the way through. There's just simply moments when my wife gets sick or my dad finds some, my aging father's passing away that, right? That's the old, you know, holding your arms up in the desert narrative, right? Like, we need other people to help us advocate these. And how many, I won't put my experiences into your marriage. But the number of times over the two decades I've been married that I've been hanging out with some friends that I trust, and I say, my wife said this and

this, and my friends go, man, she's right, you're an idiot, right? And so I need that sort of iron sharpening iron, right, to help me reframe something that my body's taken off on. Yeah, well, a good definition of sanity in some real sense, and I don't mean this in a trivial or a coy way, is that you're saying if you can behave well enough, that other people can stand having you around so that they can provide you with corrective feedback. And if you're sane enough so that other people can stand having you around, they'll reward you when you deserve to be rewarded and they'll punish you when you deserve to be punished.

And all you need to do is pay really careful attention to that feedback and you'll be sane and properly situated. Now, you know, that can go wrong if the entire social community takes a pathological turn and that makes things more complicated. And that does happen from time to time, but generally speaking, you have to be surrounded by people and so we can walk through that. Very few people can function effectively without an intimate relationship. That's because you don't have anybody who's monitoring you over the medium to long run if you don't have an intimate relationship.

And so how can you organize yourself intelligibly insanely without the medium to long term orientation? You just can't do it. And how can you tell if you're being a civilized human being if you're not bouncing your behavior off someone really close to you continually. You can't. You need the intimate relationship. You need the family, parents and siblings, children for the same reason and you need friends.

You talk a lot in your book about friends and you have some good practical advice I would say and this is be something for us. Usually the concentrate on I would say is And this is be something for us usefully to concentrate on, I would say, as you talk about how people can make friends because people really don't know. And so maybe I could share some of that with people who are watching and listening. Yeah, I think there's two tracks I wanna follow.

And one, we can circle back to this conversation we're happening at we're having right now. Evolutionarily is, I think we're running a fantastic experiment because for all of the history of mankind, nobody could sit in and listen to you and I dialoguing this way unless they were in physical proximity, which that physical proximity is a form of intimacy. We're all in the same room, sharing the same meal, sharing the same fire. And now we've created this bizarre intimacy

where people can drive to work for two hours, one way and they can go on road trips, but they're sitting by the fire with us, right? And so there's this intellectual intimacy that's happening, but I think our bodies are hollering at us. When it comes to making friends, I spent a seasoned man. I was two inches from my wife, and I was 2,000 miles away from her.

And I shared a bed with the woman that I loved, and I was profoundly lonely, and I always thought lonely was proximal, right? You have nobody around you. And so I think it's proximal and it's emotional. I've mastered the art of being alone. I'm an introvert by nature, just a nerd. I love to read my books. And so I've mastered the art of being alone in a crowded room. I can wave and smile and be completely on my own planet. And that has a physiological and a spiritual cost to it. And so

what I had to stop doing was beating myself up for having a lack of character or I'm a failure. No, I needed to learn a new set of skills and that skill set was making friends. When you're a child, when you're in middle school, when you're in high school, when you're in university, everything is geared towards community. You play games together, you don't play games together.

It's all about doing things together. And then you cross that graduation stage or you get out of the army and the world looks at you and says, it's now you versus everybody. And so I think we just have to say, hey, I don't have a skill set. So what do I got to do? I think we overthink it. I think hospitality, going first, asking people over to your house, to your events, to your thing, and just go first, get over yourself, look at it as you just got to quit

smoking at some point. I just got to make friends at some point. I'm going to go first. People are going to say no, they're going to challenge you. You're going to find out that nobody wants to be around you, so you got to go to the mirror and ask yourself, what is it about me that I'm projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with me?

It really challenges, but man, just stop over pathologizing. Let's just go be weird, go go be weird, and be hospitable, go first, go first. Yeah, well, you know, you said that you're an introvert, and the thing about introverts is they often have to learn consciously how to socialize, right? Because extroverts, well, they're tilted so hard in that direction, it just comes naturally to them. We could walk through some of the initial stages in forming relationships in a very behavioral manner because people might find that useful. So, Benjamin Franklin said that one of the things you could do when you first moved into a neighborhood was to ask one of your immediate neighbors for a very small favor. Right.

And the reason for that is because it gets the rest reciprocal trade moving in the proper direction. So, people like to be of service to other people and if you ask someone to do you a very small favor, then you put yourself in their debt and then you can also reciprocate. So you allow them to show themselves in their best light because you allow them to easily indicate that they're positive and friendly and willing to do something for someone else and they're very happy about that if you get it right. And then you're in their debt so you can offer to do them a favor.

But we have to be very honest about how counter-cultural that is now. Because overnight, just with a snap of the finger, we don't ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore, man. We just get on Amazon Prime and it shows up at our house, or we don't ask a friend to drive us to the airport anymore. We just click a button on our cell phone and somebody comes and picks us up. And overnight, I think we have shifted this idea from, I'm going to honor you and allow you to be of service to me, which is a gift. And overnight, I think we have shifted this idea from,

I'm gonna honor you and allow you to be of service to me, which is a gift, and I'm going to allow my needs to be heard, out loud, I need some sugar, I need an egg, I need a ride, I need you to help me move, right? The worst call, we've passed out, we've suddenly become, we think we're a burden. Dr. Peterson, we think we are a burden to our friends and neighbors and burdensomeness, perceived burdensomeness,

the idea that people are better off without me. That's one of the pillars of suicidal ideation and we our entire civilization has run that way. We consider ourselves a burden. And so the very act of asking a neighbor to help with something is an act of defiance in our current era. Go for it, man. You want to be crazy and you want to be counter-cultural,

ask somebody to help you with something. What a gift. Well, you can also do things if you move to a new neighborhood, for example. You can, there'll be a local cafe somewhere. do things if you move to a new neighborhood, for example, you can... There'll be a local cafe somewhere. You can go there once a week for like several months or twice a week at a regular time and you can introduce yourself to the owner and you can tell them that you've moved into the neighborhood and you

can introduce yourself to the waiters and the waitresses and you can become a known fixture there and you'll start to feel comfortable there and then you'll be able to start to have conversations with people there and you can become a known fixture there, and you'll start to feel comfortable there, and then you'll be able to start to have conversations with people there, and you can do the same thing with people at your local store. You have to, and I had clients who didn't even know how to introduce themselves properly, which can be a real impediment for people.

So you know, you say to someone, well, you look them in the eye because then you're watching their face, and then you can see you say to someone, well, you look them in the eye because then you're watching their face and then you can see how they're reacting and your unconscious socialization abilities will kick in if you attend to the right cues. You say, hello there, I'm Jordan Peterson. I just moved into the neighborhood. I'm going to be dropping into your store pretty often. I thought I'd introduce myself and then you stick out your hand and you look at them and you make sure that you're paying attention to them and not you and you say, what's your name? Everyone responds positively to that.

Maybe if they don't, then it's time to remember their name, but if you don't, you say, you know, we met the other day But I'm terrible with names. I forgot your name. Could you tell me again? And if you do that then, you know that little corner store Then it's not completely foreign territory and you're not alienated from it You're gonna start to feel comfortable and the same thing is true for this place. You might go every week You have to establish these routines of Socialization because otherwise you're an enemy territory at least unknown territory you might go every week, you have to establish these routines of socialization. Because otherwise you're an enemy territory, at least unknown territory. And that's extremely hard on you physiologically.

Because you don't know if you're surrounded by friends or fall, eh? And so it's the same with the neighbor. You are proposing an active revolution by going to a new environment and sticking out your hand and saying, hi, my name is John, what is your name, and actually listening to the response? That is a revolutionary act. That is a transformative. I take my son, he's 12,

and so I've started being highly intentional about our relationship, because I'm in the early stages of raising what is soon to be released in the wild, a grown man. And so we have breakfast every Tuesday at this establishment here in the States called Waffle House, it's just a chain diner. And one of the revolutionary acts I'm trying to teach him

is the act of radical generosity. And I, again, I struggle with sometimes basic, high my name is. And so the way I began doing this, the waffle house opened in our small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee, I started overtipping in a significant way because nobody wants to be working the 6 a.m. shift

on a Tuesday at a waffle house. And so I told my son, hey, we're gonna take care of these, these waitresses, they're awesome, they bring us coffee, they bring us coffee, they bring us juice, they're lovely. And within a few months, they know our order when we get there, they're smiling when we walk in and it has absolutely transitioned our social interaction.

Now I look forward to spending time with my son, but also hanging out with these great waitresses and asking about their cool tattoos, right? But it's just going first, it's just going first, going first, going first. Yeah, well, that emphasis on somewhat excess generosity in those situations is extremely useful, too, because it doesn't take that much to distinguish yourself on the attentional front from the run of the mill customer.

And you know, you only need, imagine this. You probably only need between 10 maybe under 10 places to go in your social community in order to be well situated. And so you said, is it every week you do this with your son? Yes sir. Okay so we could do some quick arithmetic around that. How long, how long in all does that whole event take? By the time we sit down and get him to school late every Tuesday, it's probably a grand total of 45 minutes. Okay, and what about travel time?

It's probably 20 minutes there. So it's about an hour and a half. Okay, so it's 90 minutes. It's 90 minutes. It's 90 minutes and that's once a week. Yes, sir. Okay, so then you figure you're awake for about 16 hours a day and of that awake time say 12 hours is useful for doing the sorts of things that you're doing with your son because you're going to spend four hours in just self-maintenance, right? So let's say 12 hours, 90 minutes is about approximately one tenth of that. We'll just use that as an approximation for easy mathematics. So you've

you've fixed 10% of one day and there's seven days and so that's basically 3% of your life you fixed by doing that and And that means you only have to fix 30 more things and you'd have fixed 100% of your life. Well, you know, you tell a story in your book about one of your friends who was talking about exercise and health and he said to you, change the things you do every day, the things that repeat. Those are your life. That's the routine around which your life is built. People very much overvalue special occasions and vacations and that sort of thing. And they don't pay nearly enough attention to the kind of thing you're doing with your son.

It's like that's once a week. You might be able to do that for years. It's 3% of your life. If you get that perfect, now you've got 3% taken care of and you can move to the next small piece and do the same thing. You do that with some friends and you do that with your wife, for example, a couple of times a week, for a couple of hours, a couple of hours sessions. You know,

one of the things I found in my practice was that this is useful for people who are trying to embark on an intimate relationship is you need, you need to talk to your wife about the domestic economy and the practicalities of your life together for about 90 minutes a week. And you need to date at least once a week for that length of time or maybe twice if you can manage that. And if you don't do that, you will become isolated and lonely and you'll develop a backlog of communication. And if you don't fix that, you'll end up divorced

and then you'll be fixing it for the rest of your life. Absolutely, absolutely. And whenever I had backlog of communication, I love that idea. As though I'm just putting rocks in a backpack, and eventually that backpack's going to wear me down if I don't have a regular practice of communication. And again, somehow, this became a moral or character logical issue.

I think it's the skills issue, man. I think taking some of the drama and smoke out of it and just saying, hey, I don't know how to, I don't know how to tell you, wife, I've never seen it done, I didn't see it, my house growing up, I've never seen it. I don't know how to do this, so I wanna practice once a week, let's go over our calendar,

let's go over our budget, like how are we gonna spend money this week? And let's practice, I'm gonna try to tell you what I need this week. About five years ago, my marriage was, I mean, we were hanging on by a spider's web, just hanging on. And so my wife and I realized, if we're going to hang on to this thing, we're going to have to rebuild it out of ash, right?

And I can't tell you, I'm a six foot, 295 pound, a lived in Texas my whole life, Texas male. What it took for me to look across the table and tell my wife, I just occasionally want you to tell me that you're proud of me. That was a hard thing for me to say, and I didn't even realize how desperately I've been searching for her approval

for the first 15 years we'd been married, and how much I kept going out on a limb and on a limb and on a limb, and I was taking her non-responsive rejection and I never put my needs out there. And I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it. And then she said, man, that would have been super helpful 15 years ago.

And now she makes it a regular practice of our marriage to say, hey, I see you and I appreciate what you're doing for our family. Kali, what a gift. And I didn't know that doing the dishes was a Ken to four play. Great. I will knock those dishes out all day long.

It's about practicing, saying your needs out loud. And then, man, get out of your head. The number of hours I've spent researching workout programs when I could have just gone to workout or researching how to tell your wife, instead of just telling her, what a waste of time. We have too much data, man. We have too much information.

We need to go do, go do, go act, go act. Well, you can have a preliminary conversation with your partner, let's say, and say something like, look, we need to tell each other what we need and want. And we're both too stupid to do that because we don't really know what we need and want. And we're both too stupid to do that because we don't really know what we want. And we have almost no practice at it. And worse, here's something about that that's really quite sad and frightening. It's like, you know, if one of the things you wanted to hear is that your wife was grateful to you for, let's say, providing properly for the family. So say proud of you. There's a part of

you that's quite insecure that wants that message and you're vulnerable on that point, hey. And so then if you share that vulnerability, the person with whom you're sharing it knows exactly where to stick you if they want. And so it's a real trust to do that. But the alternative is assuming that, and people do this all the time, they'll say things like, well, if you love me, you'd know what I wanted. It's like, well, first of all,

that's a pretty perfect love. And second, I'm not clear of buoyant, right? Well, right, well, you're not even smart enough to do that for yourself most of the time. You're not someone else. And so, you know, you can make an agreement with your partner and say, look, here's something I'd like to hear you say.

And here's the words I'd like to hear. Will you just say that? Another person might object and they'll say, well, that's, that sounds false if I do it or it won't be real because we're just practicing it and it's, it's artificial. And then you think, well, wait a second, we're going to be together for the next 10,000 days. And if it takes, yeah, or more. And if it takes 20 stupid practices to get it right, that's not so much stacked up over

10,000 days. You know, and it might be, with many marriages, I would say there's probably 10 things that each person wants to hear on a quasi-regular basis that would make the difference between the marriage succeeding and the marriage failing. But it means you have to sit down with your partner and say, look, we should decide jointly what we need and want and we should have enough courage to try to express ourselves stupidly in the attempt to get it. And then allow ourselves to make mistakes, you know, while we're practicing.

I love that. I find that we've become goal obsessed. And so if I want to do these things so that I can keep my marriage, I find that I end up way out on a limb, I find my chasing somewhere I don't want to go. I find it more valuable to say, I want to live a life that is not chasing happiness because that's just cocaine and cotton candy, but I want to chase the life of joy. And all of the data tells me a good marriage, a good connection with the Romantic intimate partner over a long period of time is the best bet I have in maximizing

joy. And so if I'm going to do that, that means I've got to be awkward. And by the way, if you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, do you see me? And do you think I'm beautiful? Do you want to join bodies with me? Surely you can say, hey, when I see dishes in the sink, it makes me feel like I am not being the romantic partner. I feel like I'm less of a wife because I've created this narrative in my head that this is what a perfect wife does

or a perfect husband does. Can you help with the dishes? Good gosh, you can do, you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, here I am, surely you can say, hey, can you help with the dishes. Good gosh. You can do, you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, here I am, surely you can say, hey, can you help with the dishes, right? And then we have to be stopping so looking for people coming at us.

What's that great saying? What have you go looking for in the world? You're sure to find. Start receiving those that feedback as an invitation, not as a, you've been screwing this up, right? Because my wife could have heard that, me saying, hey, I just want you to say you're proud of me every once in a while, as me, Thona Grenade, right? You're failing me because you're not doing these things.

She took it as, here's an invitation, here's a way you can love me better. And what a gift, man, what a gift. Yeah, well, you could get over ourselves, man. You can help people box those sorts of things in into by saying, look, let's make this discussion about the smallest thing possible, right? We're not, we're not opening up Pandora's box and assessing the validity of our entire marriage. We're going to try to get one small thing slightly better.

And we're going to assume that lots of things are going well. And so we're going to sit down for 90 minutes a week. Maybe that's not all at once. And we're going to share what's on our minds. And we're going to talk about what we would like to see happen and how we would respond positively to that. And we're not going to leap to the conclusion that that's a generic criticism of the whole marriage.

This is partly also why people don't have these conversations, hey, especially when they have developed a backlog of communication. So my wife and I had a rule too, which was, well, we had a couple of rules that helped us along with this to not have the backlog. And one of the rules was, don't agree to anything that you don't agree to. Because the last thing, well, the last thing I wanted to hear five years down the road after we had embarked on a particular pathway was,

well, I didn't really wanna do that, but I just went along with it because I thought you wanted to. It's like, well, what now am I, what am I supposed to do about that now? That was five years ago and we talked about it and I didn't want you to agree because you thought it was easier to agree. I wanted a consensus. And so, and the corollary to that was,

if we're going to talk about something that needs to be addressed now and that will be fixed in the future, we don't get to drag up the past. Because that's another thing that happens, right? Is you start talking about things that are problematic, and one person or the other goes, well, you've always acted like this, you've always acted like this, and there's no chance in the future that you're ever going to change.

It's like, well, instantly you're in a fight because your whole character, past, present, and future has just been savaged when the conversation should be something like, our meal times might go 15% better if after you were done eating and we had all finished, you brought your dishes to the sink and rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher.

And here's what I'm willing to do in return for that. Well, I like to even take it one step further and personalize it because I find I react. When somebody says, you need, as soon as somebody points their finger at me, I just, I am fully limbic, man. I go fight or fight instantly. And so I tend to say, hey, here's a good example. I work at Ransy Solutions in Nashville

and have a history of helping people get out of debt, pay their financial debts off, and work together as a community and as a couple to pay their debts off. One of the most common questions we get is how do I get my partner on board? Like he wants to just buy a huge pickup truck and buy the biggest house and he's run the credit cards up.

And I keep coming to him with these numbers. And it's very short or it's not about numbers. And if you come at somebody like you need to sell your truck and you need to do this, well now you've started a war. There's a difference when you sit down and say, hey, I'm scared to death and I can't breathe because we are so indebted. There's something about saying it would really be a gift to me if when dinner was over, if you took and rents your plate

and just took six seconds to put it in the dishwasher, that'd be a gift to me. That's different than you need to take your dishes, right? And one of those puts me on the defensive, one of those is an invitation. And I've just decided, man, my life is too short to continue to do anything other than invitations except in very few moments.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that conversation about debt too is one of the ways that you cooperate and negotiate with your spouse and your friends, your family for that matter, is also to jointly develop something like a joint vision, you know, because you might be able to sit down with your wife and say, well, look, if we could have the dinner times that we really wanted, if they were optimal, like you've done with your son, let's say, what would that look like? Well, let's say a couple of kids, you think, well, do we all want to sit down together as a family? That's a, this has to be a question, right, to both of you. Yes. That you're actually imagining.

Do we all want to sit down? Okay, yes. Well, how often do we want to do that like seven nights a week? Is this something that's actually a crucial foundation for our family, or can we do it five nights a week and maybe do something different on Friday? And you think, well, do all those micro things have to be negotiated and the answer is,

those aren't micro things. You do that at a day. They're absolutely foundational. And then you wanna hear what the other person has to say, because if you don't, they're not gonna be fully on board, plus they might have a better idea than you. You never know.

It's like, so let's say we decide, well, we're gonna have dinner together at six o'clock, five nights a week, and we're going to let people forage one night a week, and maybe sit in front of the TV, and we're going to go out one night a week, something like that, and we'll try that for a while. And then the next question is, well, what would we like to serve? And who's going to cook and who's going to clean up? And, and if we wanted it to go as well, as it possibly could, We like to serve and who's going to cook and who's going to clean up.

And if we wanted it to go as well as it possibly could, how are we going to get the kids involved? And do we want to experiment with some new foods? And you know that meal time, if that's the evening meal, let's say that's 90 minutes, that's more than one tenth of your day. And so that's 10% of your life. That's literally 10% of your life. If you get the even better way. Yeah, but it's bigger, it's compound interest.

That grows over time. I think that 10%, you take care, it's like putting 15% of your income in retirement. It grows to infinitely more than 15% of your income over time. Yeah. So if you take care of that 10%, it's not just taking care of that 10%, suddenly if your marriage is in sync,

you're an infinitely better parent, infinitely better citizen, infinitely better worker, and it becomes a much, very recursive. The famed psychiatrist, William Glasser, he gave me, I love this analogy. He says that his famed line was, he could fix any marriage in two sessions. And he said, The famed line was he could fix any marriage in two sessions. And he said, we think in pictures, but we speak in words. And if couples can simply align their pictures, then you get a very clear path. So when my wife comes to me on a Monday and says, hey, this weekend, you and me, we're gonna go on the hottest date. And then she just walks away.

Monday night, I'm wondering where we're going. Tuesday night, I'm wondering what I'm wearing and for how long, right? By Wednesday and Thursday, I'm wondering who's going to keep the kids and I don't care because they're going to be fine and what hotel we're going to end up at. And then Saturday comes along and I show up in a suit and she shows up in her running shorts and a t-shirt. And I say, what are you doing? And she says, what are you doing? And I say, I thought we were going on a hot date, and she says, it's seven tacos for $10 down at Taco Hut. We're going on a hot date.

Hey, I love tacos, and I hope she loves the occasional rendezvous, but we both used the word date and we had very different pictures. Now, I'm upset, she's upset, and we just, so in my house, every single day of the week, every day I'm not on the road, we ask ourselves this question, hey, what's the picture of today look like? It's just become a vernacular in our home.

And so when she says, I need some space this evening, I need some time by myself, I tend to go, okay, cool, after dinner and after the kids, and after you're done riding, and I won't hassle you for the last eight minutes of the day. For her, she's thinking, the moment you walk in this house, I'm out and I might come back in a week, right? We just have to align our pictures and I'm cool either way and she's cool either way.

It's just managing those expectations and being so clear with one another. Yeah, well, that's exactly the process of defining a shared vision. And one of the things that's lovely about that is it makes you, you're not reactive then, so you're not the thing that's being chased by the monster or the dread. You're the thing that's actively conceptualizing the manner in which the future is going to shape itself. And what you have is the delightful opportunity to share a joint vision

that in principle would be better for both of you than anything you could do alone. Like you said that all the data shows that one of the best things you can do in your life to maximize your long-term health and increase your probability of at least some joy is to have a functional long-term intimate relationship. And so you have to attend to that. And a huge part of that is the development of these shared visions and it's really useful to To develop micro visions and so I know we just talked about what would you tell what would you tell clients back in the day When they would come to you and they'd have a three-year-old and they would have just had and they have an infant they have child number two and

they would say We're not having sex anymore They have an infant, they have child number two, and they would say, we're not having sex anymore. We have an intimacy, we become co-managers of our house. And your response as a clinical psychologist would be, you've got to schedule it. You've got to put it on the calendar, and then a response always is, I don't want to do that anymore.

What do you, what's the first response? What's the first great, that's a great question. Well, my first response is, well, how often do you want to have sex? And people hate that. People hate that question. And so they avoid it. And they say, well, you know,

we don't really want to be that calculating about. It's like, okay, right, whatever. We're going to parameterize this. Once a year, it's like, no, that's probably too little. Okay, 15 times a day. It's like, no, that's probably too little. Okay, 15 times a day. It's like, no, that's probably too much. Okay, so now we've got some parameters here. It's somewhere between once a year and 15 times a day.

Let's see if we can narrow that in. And this does make people uncomfortable, right? They don't want to specify their needs and wants. And I think it's part of the... What's the source of that discomfort? Where's that call from? I think they're embarrassed that they need anything. Right, so it's just fundamental shame.

Like it's that same exposure of nakedness. And then they're unwilling to share the information with their partner because it's revealing. And then they're afraid they're gonna be rebuffed. And they're afraid they're gonna get into a fight. And they're afraid they're going to get into a fight. They've got lots of reasons not to want to do it. But then that rolls back to those stories that have been haunting them since they were kids, right? Yeah, yeah.

And they don't want to have the difficult conversation up front. And so we might say, well, okay, let's be reasonable about this. It's going to be some number of times a week. You guys have jobs, you have kids, you're busy. You're not gonna have a hot date every night. You just don't have time for it. And so why don't we be reasonable about it? We can try, let's aim for something like twice a week.

It's like, can you think, or maybe we could start with once a week. Because zero, once is a lot more than zero. It's a lot more than zero. It's a lot more than zero. And so then you think, well, all right. And then they say something like, well, you know, we did all that dating when we were dating. And now we don't want to do that anymore.

It's like, okay, so what are you saying here exactly? You're saying that you don't want any more romance and you don't want any more hot sex. And you don't want to put any work into it. And it's just going to happen magically even though it's clearly not happening. That's your theory. And then let's run that theory out. Okay. So now you have new kids and that's going to be, it's going to be like that for a few years, maybe till they're 10 or 11, you're going to be occupied with your family. And so now you have a sexless marriage with no intimacy for a decade.

So what does that look like in like 2032 when you're in divorce court? Right. How is that? Or you're recovering from some addiction, right? Right, right. So of work or of alcohol or whatever it is because your body's got to meet that need somewhere. And if it can't get it, if it can't get it a true deep connection, it will come up with of alcohol or whatever it is because your body's got to meet that needs somewhere and if it can't get it, if it can't get it a true deep connection, it will come up with all

kind of cheap substitutes, right? Yeah, like in a fair. That's right. Yeah, so of course you don't want to do this because it requires difficult negotiation, but how would you like to have your marriage deteriorate into hell over a 10 year period? How does that sound as an alternative? It's like, well, that's not very good. It's like, okay, so which of these two things

are you more afraid of? And then when people really think that through, they think, oh yeah, well, maybe, I could take the risk of making what I want known. And then, okay, so now you specify it, well, a date, which night, how long? Are you gonna find a babysitter? You're gonna do this every week?

Who's gonna be responsible for what in relationship to this date? All these details have to be negotiated. And then we remember, you know, by the same logic that we've already employed. If this is two hours a week, then that's 15% of one day. That's another 5% of your life. and it's the intimate part of your life

And if you got that right my God you might be a much happier person and so that's another one of the only 25 things you have to take care of to set your life up But I mean you said why are people afraid to do this is they're They're afraid to show their vulnerability man. They don't trust their partner They don't know how to negotiate. They don't even know what they want themselves, you know like It's not that easy for someone to admit that they need any physical attention at all even though everyone obviously does You know because you're putting yourself on the line then and that is the definition of intimacy in some sense Absolutely, I I can't tell you, and I know you've experienced this too, whether it's a single mom

with three kids just trying to figure out what day it is, or it's a multi-multimillionaire who's got resources that far exceed anything I could imagine. I've rarely, rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate, what do you actually want? They cannot answer that question and they fill it with addictions, they fill it with hobbies, they fill it with dopamine chase. They fill it with so much stuff

and nobody can answer that question. What do you want? Because we just don't have a culture that has a shared vision of where we're headed. We have a culture of you're hurting and somebody else's fault. And let's start pointing fingers. And man, we've got to circle the wagons

on a shared vision moving forward. Because there's what do you want? No, that's not a question. Anybody asks, it's what do I don't want? And why am I feeling uncomfortable? It's because of them. It's because of him. Well, then if it's what you want? No, that's not a question. Anybody asks, it's what do I don't want? And why am I feeling uncomfortable because of them? It's because of him. Well, then if it's what you don't want, you're driven by negative emotion, eh? That's right.

If you're running from, not to. If you're driven by a vision, that's positive emotion because approaching something positive in a visionary manner generates positive emotion. If you're only fleeing from things you don't want, then you're constantly in a state of anxiety and depression. That's how it works because the emotion. Where did that go? Where did we lose a shared vision?

Why can't somebody put a flag in the ground and say, this is where we're headed? That seems to be gone. Yeah, well, that's a complicated question, you know? I mean, I would say that's the consequence in the most fundamental sense of the death of God in the most fundamental way. It's the death of a sense of higher order unity. Now it's also a very complicated question.

If you ask someone, what do you want? If you could ask your wife that, what do you want? You'll probably freeze her into immobility because it's really like asking how do you want all of your life to go? Please summarize. And one of the yeah, well, it's quite it's a lot, you know, and one of the ways that you can deal with that, which you undoubtedly know as a as someone who's conversant with cognitive behavioral techniques, you can ask people more micro questions too about what they want. So you might say, well, while we did that on the dating front already, right? We talked about that. We talked about how you might

think about how you want your meal times to go. We only talked about dinner time, but you could talk about breakfast and lunch as well. And then you could, and then there are other micro domains that are very crucial that you can also consider. It's like, that you can also consider. It's like, so you can ask yourself, well, if you could have the education you wanted, what would that look like? If you were on, if you had the job or career track that would motivate you, just hypothetically, what might that look like? Sketch out a bad plan. If you had some friends, well, first, do you want some friends?

And if so, how many? And if you had friends and the right number, how much time per week would you like to spend with them? And if you had some time outside of work and familial responsibilities, what might you like to do with your time that you would really like to do? And the thing about these questions is that they're real questions. You know, there's

this gospel statement that if you knock, the door will open and that if you ask, you will receive and if you search, you'll find, if you seek, you'll find. And people who are faithless in some sense think about as kind of a hallmark greeting card approach to the world. It's just, well, you just ask for things and they appear. It's like, no, that isn't what any of that means. It means nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it. And you won't aim for it unless you know what it is is and you won't know what it is unless you ask yourself. And then you might say, well, why don't you ask yourself? And the answer is, well, maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to, which is a crucial issue.

And then maybe you don't also trust yourself, you know, because you might think, well, if I let myself know what I wanted, given my bloody track record, I would do everything I could to screw it up. So I'll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don't fail at something that's truly important. And then I can always, I can always regale with myself with the idea that well, I didn't succeed, but I didn't really try. Had I really tried, I might have succeeded.

Whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try, you also set the preconditions for failure. So it's risky. But the alternative is, well, you don't know what you want. So it is a meditative practice. Like, okay, if I could have what I wanted, imagine the world was constituted so that the entire planet wouldn't explode and end

apocalypse if I got what I needed and wanted. Yeah, right. It's like, what would that be? You know, what kind of... Okay, so is this a cognitive... Well, I don't want to use jargon. Is this a thought exercise or is this a feeling exercise? Because here's what I'm seeing across the country.

I thought it would feel different when I finally got that associate vice president job. I thought I would feel a certain way when I got a car. I thought if I could just get that her to date me, I would feel a certain way. And people are realizing in rapid fashion, I thought if my politician won, I would suddenly feel a certain way.

Here's a great, I testified in a court case against somebody years ago. A former student of mine got into some significant, it's some really terrible things. And he got a long jail sentence. And the next morning I woke up and I read what the judge had written and in the sentencing. And I, the judge had written and in the sentencing and I, he, the judge

used some of my words and I remember feeling sick to my stomach and I called the mentor of mine, a psychology friend, professor of mine and asked, I said, man, I feel gross. And she said, John, nobody wins here. And I had this perception that I was going to feel a certain way when justice was done and the right thing happened. And I realized, man, I had thought this through cognitively, but I had not managed. How are you going to actually feel? Because nobody wins.

Somebody's life is ruined over here. Somebody's life is still ruined over here. I think we have to, I don't know. You're infinitely, you've got infinitely more wisdom than I do on this. But I find that the cognitive exercise is helpful, but it really is important to sit down and say, okay, how are you going to feel five days after you've got infinitely more wisdom than I do on this, but I find that the cognitive exercise is helpful, but it really is important to sit down and say, okay, how are you gonna feel five days after you've bought this car that you think you have to have?

Well, okay, so the first thing is, is that the probability that you'll be happy because you've accomplished something in any permanent sense is virtually zero. And the reason for that is, thank you for saying that. Well, the reason for that is that isn't what positive emotion is for.

Positive emotion is to indicate that you're making progress towards a valued goal. Yes. That's the driver, right? Not the finish line. Exactly. Well, that's actually pharmacologically separate, right? Because a satiation reward, which would be the accomplishment of something, calms you and stops that program

from running. So, for example, once you've become Vice President, if that was your goal, then the whole pursuing Vice President program comes to a halt. Now Now the problem with that is it leaves you without a goal, and it also leaves empty space, which you immediately have to fill. And so often people feel disquiet because now they don't know what to do, and they miss that rush because they're no longer pursuing something. And so it's very important to know that positive emotion is experienced in relationship to a valued goal. And then the question becomes, well, what's the most valuable goal to pursue? And that's really a metaphysical and a theological question. In terms of the mechanics of feeling, so imagine that you're negotiating the structure of a date with your wife, and you're developing a shared vision.

And so you say, well, on Wednesday nights, once a week, we're gonna go for dinner, and maybe you specify the restaurant, and you're gonna make the arrangements, and I'm gonna get dressed up, and then we're gonna go see a movie, and you're gonna pick the movie, and then we're gonna have a romantic interlude afterwards.

And we'll run that and see how it goes. And then what you want to do is you want to picture that. And you want to watch how your body reacts on the emotional level. And that's a bit of honesty, right? And you can see, well, if we went to this restaurant, I don't really like that restaurant. I think it's kind of expensive. I had a bad time with the waiters. I don't think I'd be happy there. Then you say those things to your partner. You say, well, I'm thinking this through. I'm imagining it. And here's the

objections that are coming up. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe I've got this wrong, but I'd like to hear your input because, you know, we want to get this right. Should we re-evaluate my feelings about the restaurant or should we think aboutevaluate my feelings about the restaurant or should we think about a different restaurant? And that should be a question because you don't know, maybe you're just stupid about the restaurant or you're cheap or you're afraid to go there because you don't have the right clothes. I mean, you don't know, right? But if you want to get your feelings in line, you develop the vision and then you apprehend the vision with your feelings. It's kind of what you do when you go to a movie and you fall into the fantasy of the character.

You embody all the emotions and you evaluate it that way. And so, and the other problem with that, more goal-directed approach that you described is, like, I think people should plan and they should develop a vision. You have to develop the vision and then be somewhat detached from it because it needs to be updated, right? And modified and hold it loosely. Yeah. Yeah, you hold it loosely.

Yeah, that's right. Because you're fallible. And maybe you can come up with a better plan, not every minute because you'll drive yourself mad that way, but, but now and then. Or I was obsessed as a young higher education professional with becoming a college president. Until I sat down at the senior leadership table and I realized, I don't want that life.

I don't want that life. I don't want 24, 7, 365, and the politics. I don't want it asking for money. I don't want that life, and I didn't have want that life and I didn't have a backup plan. I didn't know what to do. I was like, you nailed it. I was completely rudderless because I'd made the finish line, the goal, going all the way back full circle to how you open

the conversation. I think that becomes really important to lay out an identity and reverse engineer, who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? And the goals end up, you know, it's like the old days, um, when you went to grad school, a PhD was simply a, a, it was a high five on a journey of, of continued learning. I'm a continued going on this rabbit hole. And now it's become a destination and people walk out and announce themselves as educated because I've crossed this finish line.

Just because you get across a, you run a marathon or walk a marathon, doesn't mean you're fit, right? Doesn't mean you're healthy. Well, we talked about the necessity of goals and so there's higher order goals and you need the higher order goals because they integrate you. And a goal of becoming a college president is a higher order goal than no goal at all and just sitting in your bed and eating Cheetos, right? It's a better plan than no plan at all, but and this is where things become profound and serious,

and I would say even in a religious sense, because what's religious is about what's profound and serious in some sense by definition. So you might say, well, who should I be? And you might think, even in a religious sense, because what's religious is about what's profound and serious in some sense by definition. So you might say, well, who should I be? And you might think, well, I should be the college president, I should have this car, I should have this house. Those are all very particularized versions of yourself. And the problem with them is, is that they're concrete and final actualities and not processes.

And so here's a good vision, that's a high order vision. And I think it's the vision that our whole culture is founded on. I should be the person who genuinely confronts the problems and challenges that confront me in my life. So that's an attitude of active and voluntary engagement, right? I'm going to do my identity. That's an identity of process as well. It's like I'm going to be someone who doesn't shy away from the challenges of life.

Yes. I'm a guy who confronts it. Right, right. And so that's St. George and the dragon. And that's a precondition for therapeutic transformation, because in order for you to improve, you have to identify the problem, the dragon, and you have to be willing to face it voluntarily. And so you say to yourself,

I'm going to do what I can to develop the courage to confront the problems in my life voluntarily. That's who I want to be. And then another element of that is, I can't do that without telling the truth. I have to be willing to see what's in front of me, and I have to be willing to admit to myself what I think and feel, and I have to be willing to communicate that. And so you could say, well, that makes you, that makes your goal something like to think about it archetyply. You talked about

Jungian approaches earlier, is that that makes you into a truth-telling hero. And then maybe underneath that, it's like, well, could I become college president? Could I be successful in my business? Could I be successful in my marriage? It's like, that's all well and good. And those are more concretized goals. But the highest order goal has to be something like an approach

rather than a final state, right? Because you might say, well, I want to be the approach never ends. That's right. Well, and you can say to yourself, I want to be the guy who listens to my wife. Yeah. Okay, so you're never going to, you're never going to finalize that, right? Because you're doing that all the time. And that's also really useful because you don't hit the target and then find yourself left with nothing. Because you can do that every day. I want to be the guy who listens to my kids. I want to be the guy who pays attention to my friends.

And I want to be the guy who speaks my mind carefully and judiciously. It's like you can bring that anywhere, man. And you're talking about the difference there, that approach, let's use your example. I wanna be a guy who's a good steward of my wife. I wanna be, that's my identity. And that means I'm gonna have to backfill it with some goals. We're gonna meet once a week,

and I'm not gonna try to fix her like she's a car engine. I'm not gonna try to solve her problems with her as though she's infantile. I'm gonna just listen, and I'm gonna commit to being quiet. And so when she says, I'm not going to try to solve her problems with her as though she's infantile. I'm going to just listen and I'm going to commit to being quiet. And so when she says, I'm really struggling with my boss at work, I'm not going to jump in with, well, you know, you should probably tell him, I'm just going to listen, right? But listen, over time, I really look forward to learning more about my wife and what she's experiencing in this season. And it's different than last season.

It's going to be different in the new season. I think it was Esther Peral who said, if most adults have four or five great loves in their lifetime and if you work really, really hard, it's with the same person. And you become part of their journey. And now I can't wait to hear about what my wife's been reading, who she's becoming, and how I can best be a partner to her in this new season, whatever it is. It's not constantly trying to get back to remember how much fun we have, and we are dating. Man, what a waste of a life.

Let's go this way, right? Let's move forward. I think, tell me if I'm on the right track here. That idea of owning, acknowledging reality, I didn't mean to, but I'm looking in the mirror and I've gained a hundred pounds. I didn't mean to, it wasn't my intention, but now I've spent 15 years in a middle manager job

and I hate my life, I hate going to work every day. I think we do not have the skill set for one of the most important psychological functions that we just extract. We just just took it out of life, right? And I think it's Ernest Becker's work and Yolum's work. I think we don't have any sort of ability to grieve privately or as a group. We've a skill set of grief and so we can't acknowledge reality because we don't know what to do when we look in the mirror and say I didn't measure up to who I wanted to be I didn't mean to yell at my kid and I did I didn't mean to get another dessert and I did We can't deal with that grief and so we blow by it and say you keep putting desserts in in front of me, or if you had just picked up your trike six-year-old, I wouldn't have yelled at you.

We just outsource our dysfunction everywhere because we can't sit in that gap between what we wanted and our reality. All right, so a couple of things there. You talked about finding yourself on the adventure of transformation with your wife. Now, often men feel compelled, obligated to generate a solution to the problems that their wives bring them.

And it is the case because women feel more negative emotion, that they are more likely to bring up problems. That's why 70% of divorces, by the way, are initiated by women. It's because they feel more negative emotions. So if the relationship is shaky, they're going to suffer for it more first. And they probably feel more negative emotion because they're more sensitive because they have to take care of infants. And so anyways, we can put that aside. Now, it might be that you should help your wife solve her problems.

And maybe she's coming to you for that. But one thing you need to understand, and you might understand this as a diagnostician, is, well, do you know what the hell her problem is? And the answer is, well, probably not, because she doesn't even know. So why does she want to sit down and tell you about her problems? And the answer is because she wants to find out what her bloody problems are. And so you see this

very often in therapy, you know, and Carl Rogers made a lot of this. He said, you know, if you just listen to people, they'll often solve most of their problems themselves. So someone comes in and they say, well, I'm really upset. And you say, well, what's on your mind? Now, what's so interesting about that is often the people who are in therapy have absolutely no one to tell their problems to. You know, like that. I think the Rosary and Magic, though,

was listening and he brought that other side of the equation that we leave out. He listened and he genuinely did his best to love the person in front of him. Yeah, well, okay, so well. And not sit in judgment of that person. So my wife says, hey, I'm going through this. I instantly go, well, you know you should,

instead of sitting back and going, I love this person, tell me, let's connect, not let's solve, right? Yeah, so you'd hope that your mindset, and this would be part of establishing that higher order goal, is imagine you would like your wife and you'd have a good life. And so when you're listening to her, that's uppermost in your mind. We're trying to have a good life here, okay? So what's your problem? Well, if you're listening to someone therapeutically, they're going to scatter shot the problem.

They're going to say, well, it might be this, and it might be this, and it might be this, and it might have something to do with the past, and it might be this, and it's quite a mess as they try to calibrate the real problem. And you have to listen to all of that, and what you'll find is that the person will dispense with most of those hypotheses themselves as soon as they utter them. They'll think, well, here's as they utter them, they'll think, well, here's my problem. No, that's not exactly right.

So now that's off the table and they'll say, well, it might be this and here's some reasons for thinking that, but no, it's probably not that. So what you'll find is the problem space will clear. Now, Rogers also pointed out, and this is very useful, is that one of the things you can do when you're listening, apart from asking questions, which might be, well, I don't quite understand what you meant by that, or you said something 10 minutes ago, and it seems to contradict what you just said now, which are just helpful questions. The other thing you can do is summarize.

And you could say, well, I've been listening for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and it seems to me that this is what you said is that right and that people really like that for for two reasons say is one is you compact all that searching into the gist and that's a gift you can give someone and then also if you hit the target if you say yeah that's exactly what I meant then they know full well that you've really been listening. And so if you're a man and you're listening to this and you wanna know how to deal with your wife when she's presenting you with problems, the first thing is, is step back a bit and say, look, she probably has to go through the whole problem set

and try not to take that personally. Just listen and you can summarize and you can ask questions, but mostly you want to find out, well, what the hell's the problem here? Now, you might want to leap to a solution for a bunch of reasons. One is, well, to show that you have a solution, two is to show your smarter than your wife, which is very bad idea.

The third is to shut her up so that you don't have to sit there and listen, and that's also a really bad idea because you can't shut anybody up about an actual problem. That just doesn't work because it's an actual problem. It's not going to go away. Or if she's coming to you to connect and she's not looking for your solution, she just wants to connect. And this is the tool set that she has when you shut her up.

You're giving a much more existential, I don't value you, right? I don't want to connect with you. And that's a much bigger, I think that's a much more existential, I don't value you, right? I don't want to connect with you. And that's a much bigger, I think that's a much more crisis or your relationships in a mass at that point. Yeah, well, yes, exactly. Well, and you'll find, too, with this 90 minutes a week that you have to listen to each other is that, in some sense, you need that amount of time to clear the air,

because you can imagine that as you move through life, little dragons make themselves manifest all the time, because things change. The car needs maintenance. There's a problem with the kid. There's something wrong with the bathroom sink. We don't have quite enough money in the checking account. You know, there's 100 little negling demons that pop up constantly. And it's very difficult to establish the preconditions for joyful intimacy when there's a nest of microdragons swarming all over the house. And you have to talk those through in order to keep them small and to make them go away. And if you do that with some degree of programmatic regularity, then you do have the possibility

that you'll get beyond the mere sharing of problems. Then you can have some fun, then you can play. Yes, but I think two things. One, a helpful tip for the listeners here. There's been fantastic in my marriage is when my wife sits down and begins to talk. I'll often stop at the very beginning and say, are you asking me for a solution,

or are you looking to just tell me, are you looking to connect? And that is often frames the conversation in a way that I know where I, what she's asking from me. And it seems very unromantic at first, but man, on the back end, it saves, so it's just like putting sex on the calendar, right? It just a couple of seconds of awkward changes the trajectory of your entire week and month.

I also think that men have rightly or wrongly, we found ourselves, we don't understand our relational value, and so we think our value can only be found in offering a solution to something. And there's a deeper intimacy, there's a deeper connection. My wife values me simply because I am her husband. Yes, I help provide and yes, I can do all these other things, there's utility there. But I have to see myself as having more value than giving a person less with less power or less smarts than me an answer. Sometimes the greatest gift I can give her is simply my presence, right? And we have to get underneath that discomfort of, I'm out of my depths here. I don't know what to do other than just listen and I feel useless. I feel like

I've lost utility. Yeah, well, I think the problem with that formulation is the idea of just listening. It's really hard to listen. And there's almost nothing. Well, I like that. Well, there's almost nothing you can do that's more transformative to that than that. And the reason for that is that just listening

gives the other person an opportunity to just think. And so then you might say, well, what are they doing when they're thinking? And here's what they're doing is, they're asking themselves questions and looking for a revelation. They're trying to sort through information so that they can determine the best pathway forward.

And they're trying to update and develop their vision for their life. And you do that in abstraction to test out the possibilities before you implement them. And so if you give people space to think, which is exactly what you're doing when you're listening, then they try out different versions of themselves so they can experiment with finding the best fit.

And so there's nothing just about listening. It's, I think, apart from speaking accurately and carefully and truthfully, there isn't anything more difficult that you can do than to listen. And one of the things I loved about being a therapist, and it's been very useful to me in my post-therapy career as well, is that if you actually listen to people, they will tell you everything. And then they're so interesting, you can hardly stand them. So give me and by proxy the listener, give a 22 to 27-year-old man trying to make his way in the world.

What is one or two or three things? I guess I'm turning the interview around on you now. What's a couple of practical skills that I can do to lean into listening, to practice listening and stop trying to rush to a solution, try to get out of a conversation because I'm uncomfortable. I don't have the skillset.

I never saw my dad do it. My granddad never did it. They just barked orders and watched the game. I'm trying to do something that is infinitely more difficult than just flipping channels in Yale and at the Packers game. What's a couple of things I can practice? Well, I would say first is have some faith in your own reactions, not as solutions to the problem

but as points of inquiry. So for example, when we're talking, questions arise in the theater of my imagination, and topics pop up, and I'm willing to put them on the table. And the reason they pop up is because I'm attending to what you say, and that's generating some thoughts in my mind, and one of the great things you can do with people is ask them questions. I mean, there is nothing, and this goes back to the issue of, say, making friends or establishing relationships. There's nothing that people want more than to be attended to.

That's why advertisers spend so much money trying to garner attention. That's why social media companies spend so much money garnering people's attention. Attention is the fundamental currency. And so people love to be attended to. And so you dispense with the idea that you're just listening is you're watching the other person and you're listening.

And then you're attending to yourself and watching and listening because you'll see that as you focus on the conversation and don't worry about what you're going to say next or how you appear, which makes you self-conscious and miserable and awkward instantly, you pay attention to the conversation and then you watch what happens inside and this question comes up and you say, well, I have this question and you don't evaluate the question. You know, not if you're deeply engaged in the conversation, you just lay it out and you pull, you draw the person out. And you see, well, I don't quite understand what you said there.

Or it seems to me that this is a different way of looking at it. What do you think of that? The questions have to be honest. But if you pay focused attention and you ask genuine questions, you've got like 90% of social skill nailed. And you get below, I love what you said about the little dragons. I might steal that down the road.

You get beneath the, hey, did you see what was on the news today? Or, hey, we're overdrawn on our checking account. You get beneath those things to the real statement, which is, I'm scared. Or I feel lonely, or I miss you, right? The truly intimate connections, if you'll just, if you'll, yeah, if you'll just wait into the uncomfortable waters of discourse.

Well, and I think the way to fortify yourself in relationship to that, I mean, I've been embroiled in a lot of conflict, and I really don't like conflict, and I think the reason that I've been embroiled in a lot of conflict, and I really don't like conflict. And I think the reason that I've been embroiled in so much is because I won't delay it. Like, if there's an issue at hand, I want to address it right now.

And the reason for that isn't that I enjoy it. In fact, I don't enjoy it at all, but what I really don't enjoy is prolonged conflict that never goes anywhere and that never ends. And so, Myflik delayed is conflict amplifying, right? That never ends. And so, conflict delayed is conflict amplified, right? Exactly. It just grows on you. Exactly that. And that's one of the oldest stories that people have been telling each other forever is that ignored things grow in the darkness outside the city until they become monstrous

and break down the walls. And so you think, well, I'm afraid of having, I'm afraid of listening, I'm afraid of hearing the problems. And that's fair enough, it's no wonder you're afraid, but you're nowhere near afraid enough of not doing that because that's a bloody catastrophe. That'll be a bomb that'll go off in 10 years and blow up your marriage. You'll find out that your wife had an affair because, well, for her own reasons and because you didn't pay any attention to her for like 15 years. And then you think, well, I was afraid to pay attention and, yeah, fair enough, but now

look where you are. You're in hell. And that's just not an improvement. And so how do you know in our current ecosystem, how do you know when to wade through my little brother sent me something the other day that was like in 2000, why 2k was going to kill us all in 2001? I don't remember what it was like. Swine flu is going to kill us all in 2003. There's just this litany of we rally around this the next end thing that's going to happen. And then we've reached

this fatigue, right? And we like, there's true cancers out there that are coming for us that we're just like, do I don't have the energy anymore? I'm moving on about my day. I've been really trying to think that through. And so here's some guidelines that I've sort of developed over the last few months. So you know, there's problems of various size

out there in the world. And the largest problems are the apocalyptic problems that you just described Right and it isn't even obvious which of those apocalyptic problems are real But we could say well, there's always the possibility that large scale systems will come to a precipitous collapse And we have to live with that. That's true in our own lives We could die at any moment. So could the people we we love, like, our cultures can fall apart. The apocalyptic terror is always beckoning as a possibility. Okay, now, the question is, is that your problem? Now, the answer... You do anything about it, right? The answer is your own nervous system will tell you that,

because imagine that you're, imagine you're facing a problem that's so big that it paralyzes you and it turns you into a tyrant. Okay, that's too big a problem for you. Obviously, and what you have to do is you have to scale back the problem until you find a dragon that's a size that you're willing to contend with, that you'll actually contend with. And so, you know, maybe you shouldn't be addressing the large-scale political problems of the world, because your own house is a bloody catastrophe. And you watch the news, and it paralyzes you, and turns you into a ranting tyrant. And that means you're not the man for that job.

You have to scale back. And maybe if you scale back, then practice straightening things up at the local level, which isn't trivial or easy, you get better and better at it, and then you could face larger and larger catastrophes, and practically and productively, right, instead of virtue signaling and going astray. You know, you do this in therapy is if someone is having a hard time making friends, you break that down into micro steps. And one thing you might have to do, as we discussed, is you might have to teach the person to introduce themselves. You know, and their problem is, I don't have any friends. It's like, no, no, your problem is you don't

know how to shake hands and look someone in the eye. Right? And then you might say, well, can you do that? And they might say, well, I'm afraid to shake hands. It someone in the eye. Right? And then you might say, well, can you do that? And they might say, well, I'm afraid to shake hands. It's like, well, can you look at me? Can you stretch out your hand? You know, can you touch my hand? I mean, this might sound trivial, but lots of people are paralyzed with social anxiety. And they have no idea how to shake hands. Yeah, yeah, there. And that just stops them cold, right? Because if you can't introduce yourself, how the hell are you gonna make friends? That's right.

Well, it's being when our bodies take off on us. I love how you said that, man, because our nervous system tells the truth generally. Can I listen to my body and just instead of rushing to the diagnostic and rushing to Google or rushing to WebMD trying to, can I ask myself, what's my body trying to protect me from? Like what, whoa, I just walked into a room full of people

and my heart rate just went up to 200 beads per minute and I can't, my hands are getting sweaty. What are you trying to protect me from? These are my people, these are my friends. This is a wedding I got invited to. Oh, okay, I used to not be safe in this situation. I'm safe now, I'm okay now. And I can think that through that gap between, instead of racing over to the bar to grab a drink

to quiet that alarm system, or to race over to the snack table and get a piece of cake, which is what I go to quiet the alarm system. I'm a good Southern Christian, so I like to eat my feelings. Like, instead of those issues, I can just be really curious, and I'm not going to go to war with my body and try to shut the alarms off. I can just be really curious and I'm not gonna go to war with my body and try to shut the alarms off. I'm just gonna listen to him and say, hey, what's the trying to tell me right now? Well, you talked about thinking and images before.

So here's a very useful thing the psychoanalysts learned to do. So imagine you do go to a social location and you find as you enter the hall, you're getting nervous and sweaty. Now if you watch, this is why Carl Jung, for example, believed that we lived through a dream. We lived life through a dream.

So, and that's a story. And so what you'll see is that if you, if you feel that nervousness and you attend to it, a little drama will run in your head in images. You know, and it'll be something like, well, I'm going to go in here and no one's going to talk to me. And this will happen in pictures like a little movie. No one's going to talk to me and I'm going to end up in the corner and I'm going to be bored and I'm going to be sweaty and hot and it's going to be real uncomfortable.

And it's just like this other time when I went to this social occasion and this terrible thing happened and the whole drama will play out in your head. And then you know, you think, oh, that's the problem. And then, well, then maybe you have someone to talk to about that fantasy. Or maybe because now you have the fantasy in front of you and you looked at it, you can think, well, wait a minute. As you said, wait a minute, wait a second.

It isn't like that other situation. My friends are here. I can go talk to John. I know him real well. We'll just have a conversation. I can go sit at a table and, and with one of my friends and spend most of the time there, I can be with my wife. But that, what'll happen is we get nervous and that fantasy will make itself manifest, but you don't want to face it, and that's when you rush to a premature solution. You shut it off. Yeah, so what you're doing there is

you're failing to allow the anxiety-ridden fantasy to make itself manifest. And you do that because you don't want to know where you're vulnerable, right? And no wonder, like, who don't want to know where you're vulnerable, right? And no wonder, like who the hell wants to know where they're vulnerable? But the answer to that is, well, someone who wants to fix it. Because you cannot. I do. Yeah, I do. Absolutely. Right. And now I've come to, I love looking for those vulnerabilities. I love a good community. And I love the discourse. I love my friends who will point them out

and say, Hey, here's a blind spot, which is why I get in circle. And love my friends who will point them out and say, hey, here's a blind spot, which is why again, circle back, it's why we have to have other people in our life. Now, if done with the in the right spirit, I love, I love that's the whole scientific process, right? Rejecting the note like, I wasn't wrong, right? Like the whole idea is, let's be a little bit less wrong, right? So I think there's something. Yeah, that's right. That's the whole idea. That's humility, man, is's be a little bit less wrong, right? So I think there's some people. Yeah, that's right, that's the whole idea. That's humility, man, is to be a little bit less wrong. And Jesus, that's what it, and what a deal.

But what a, what a fun way to live. It's such an easier way to live than I have to be right. That's a, that is an exhausting grip on your life. It's a choking grip on your life instead of I want to be a little bit less wrong. And I begin to seek out places where I might be wrong. That's just taking the blade and trying to sharpen it as finely as possible.

What a fun way to live. Well, the old, the purpose of confession classically was exactly that. So the idea was, well, I'm gonna review my week, which doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Why? Well, I'm going to think about things that I did that didn't work out so well and see if I can specify what they were and see if I can figure out how to replace them with

something better, at least with the intent to do better. And that confessional, you know, that confessional in some sense, which was supposed to be redemptive, and that led to forgiveness, at least in principle, was very much the same thing as discussing in genuine dialogue the problems of your life. It's like, well, here, I seem to have gone sideways here. I seem to have gone sideways here this week. How do I know that? Well, my conscience is calling me out on it, and there were some negative consequences. And I feel that this is the mistake I made, and I'd rather

not make that mistake. And as you said, if that's handled, as if the goal is to stop making those mistakes, hopefully incrementally across time, then the evidence of the mistake can be an invitation to positive transformation. And that would be the encouraging element of humility, right? It's like, well, why humbly have you? But you have to do it in community, I think. I think it went from this ancient religious practice of confession, which I think you have to look back thousands of years and say, this practice continued to roll on evolutionarily

and culturally because it had a deep value. And then it was, I don't say co-opt, it was absorbed by the mental health community to sit down and cross from somebody. And I find great, great value in journaling, writing things down, getting them out of my body and onto paper. But I think we've gotten very isolated with our journaling and our writing it down. And we've become, I'm having this confession with myself now. And there's value to that.

But I think the true value is having confession in front of somebody else. Because then before us ourselves to say, do you see me and do you still love me? Well, it's also the case that you still love me, will you still be here if you fully know me? Well, it's the most difficult part of yourself to observe is the place where you're most blind, obviously. And so you can journal and you can concentrate on yourself, but that still might produce a situation where your blind blindness spots stay blind. And also, it limits your ability to problem solve creatively because you only draw on your own resources. One of the wonderful things about a marriage that's functional

is that both of you have two brains to work out whatever problem happens to arise. And part of the reason that marriage is difficult is because life is difficult, and you have to jointly confront the actual problems of life, which is what makes marriage different than dating, for example, or different than an affair, which is a wish fulfillment fantasy in some sense

of all the intimacy with none of the problems, a very terrible thing to do to your partner who is then laden with only the problems. But it's very useful to have two brains because each person is quite different and the probability that the person you're communicating with will have a different take on both the problem and the solution is extremely high. And so this is particularly true if you're in a solipsistic crisis in relationship to your mental health. For example, if you're depressed, it's very hard to lift yourself out of that alone.

Because some of that dwelling on your issues actually facilitates the depression. And the same thing happens with anxiety. So now that we're here, you're a trained and practiced clinical psychologist. I'm a trained, I'm a lowly trained counselor, which for the non-academics, there's a definite hierarchy there. Have we over pathologized culture or our individuals? I feel like we have become a slavish adherence

to diagnostics into labeling. And when I look at, when I look at expectation theories that people live into the labels that they're given or the expectations that are put before them, I've got some high concern, but I also don't want to be dismissive, right? So help me with that, because I feel like everybody, man, it's so easy. You just go get a diagnostic and go get a label and that becomes you.

And then I end up sitting with somebody and they say, well, I can't take this job because I was diagnosed with ADHD or I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. And my impulse is, hey, that's a context, not an excuse. It is a way, a way that you see and experience the world and people experience you, and you still got to get up and go to work. How are we going to manage that, right? But I don't want to be dismissive.

Well, look, I think part of the problem is is that it's a practical problem in some sense because the diagnostic labeling process is necessary for such things as insurance claims. Right. And so, so the lexicon... But is that where we are, man? Of course it is. And the lexicon... That's heartbreaking, man. Well, and there's some utility in it, you know, if you're having panic attacks and you're

afraid to go out of your house and I tell you, you have agro phobia and many other people have it, sometimes that's a real relief because you're not the only crazy person of that type in the to go out of your house and I tell you you have agro-phobia and many other people have it. Sometimes that's a real relief because you're not the only crazy person of that type in the world and there's some pathway to treatment. But I was trained fundamentally as a behaviorist and the behaviorists aren't that, what would you call it, impressed with diagnostic labels. And the reason for that is that they tend to break down problems into actionable units. It's like, well, I'm depressed. It's like, well, okay, fair enough.

But what's wrong with your life and your mood in the micro details? And how could we address that programmatically? And I think the problem with diagnosis is that it's really easy to confuse diagnosis with cause, right? Well, I'm miserable. Why? Well, because I'm depressed. Now, well, maybe you have a biochemical problem, but absent that, depression isn't a black box with homogenous contents. There's specific reasons that you're miserable and unhappy and what we need to do is to break down those reasons, differentiate them, down to the level of detail where you can start to experiment with addressing them. And so if the diagnostic enterprise interferes with that,

then it's counterproductive. And that happens very frequently. Yeah, I remember the first time one of my students was hospitalized for major depression and the suicidal ideation. I was taking a back that the first couple of days after they had gotten sleep and were fed, the protocol was your job is to get up and go take a shower and then you can go back to bed. We're going to take these tiny steps towards, right? That's, you know, my friend Dave Ramsey, it's, okay, we're going to get a thousand dollars, sell whatever you got, sell your famous guitar, sell your, we're going to get a thousand dollars in a savings account first and you're going to

breathe for the first time and then we're going to pay off your debt and then we're go right It's these tiny baby steps towards And again, I think we've been sold a bill of goods that mental health is I just got to get all the thought right thoughts in the right order And I there's something I think we just swiped off wholesale the behavior's approach I just don't see that working out man. I think we have have to often act our way into a different way of thinking and experiencing the world. Well, the other thing, too, that people should take heart in consequence of is that as you pointed out earlier, when we were talking about the cascading effects, let's say, of sorting

out how you have dinner with your family. There's multiplying effects. Well, it might be very disheartening to see at what small scale you have to begin improvements. Right? But the truth of the matter is, is that that tends to scale exponentially. Is once you start making improvements, the improvements feed back upon themselves. And so even if you have to start out small, it doesn't take very long before you're on

the upward trajectory, and it's not linear. You can fail precipitously, right? But you can also succeed precipitously. Once you get the ball rolling, positive things tend to aggregate together, and you can make a lot of progress, even if you start from a pretty damn dismal place. So how do we get that extraordinary insight into the public lexicon? How does that become a way of operating?

Because all of us are staring, we're running around, staring at our own belly buttons, waiting to not fall off that precipitous decline. And we are missing the opportunity for this accelerating post-traumatic growth, right? We've been through hard things. Okay, that's the whole book, man. Well, that's what we're now. What do we do next? That's the answer to your question. Well, how do we bring that into the public domain? Well,

you wrote a book. Well, and that's the... Well, and that's the... Having this conversation, and so... And that is how you do it and and you try to communicate The utility of what would you call it humble courageous incremental movement forward and honest communication social community all the things that we discussed today and I Should also point out that we are out of time for the YouTube interview. Is there anything else that you want to bring to the attention of the people who are watching and listening before we

close? No, I just want to say I'm grateful for your hospitality. It's been a gift. I appreciate you. Well, thank you. And thank you for your book. And I would say to people who are watching and listening, Dr. Delonies book is a very straightforward take on practical solutions that you can implement to start incrementally improving your life. And that is the right way to to progress. One brick at a time, you build a solid wall, one brick at a time, and it can happen a lot faster than you think. And so I think the book fills a necessary niche. And I like the manner in which you interwoven your description of story and identity

and the broader social community and the issue of incremental improvement. And so I'd encourage people to watch and listening to take a look. Yeah, yeah, and it was real good talking to you. For those of you who are watching and listening to take a look. Yeah, yeah, and it was Real good talking to you for those of you who are watching and listening I'm gonna talk to Dr. Deloney for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform and the daily wire plus Makes these professionally produced YouTube Conversations possible and so thank you to them for that and if you're interested in hearing a little bit more about

Dr. Deloney's biography and about what's made him successful in his career and his marriage, then head on over to the Daily Wire Plus platform and tune in. And otherwise, hopefully we'll see all of you again on my YouTube channel. And thank you very much for your time and attention. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.