The Peter Attia Drive - #172 - Esther Perel: The effects of trauma, the role of narratives in shaping our worldview, and why we need to accept uncomfortable emotions

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author who is an expert on modern relationships. In this episode, Esther describes how being a child of parents who narrowly survived the Holocaust shaped and influenced her perspectives and ultimately led to her to a career in therapy. She discusses how the generational differences in parenting, among other things, led to the rise of individualism with a focus on happiness and self-esteem to the detriment of our relationships and sense of community. Ultimately, the conversation focuses on the value of our relationships with others for one’s sense of wellbeing, ability to deal with past trauma, resilience, and even our lifespan. She uses real world case studies to emphasize the therapeutic value of creating healthy relationships with others and oneself, explaining how our relationships with others can be a mirror into our own maladaptive behaviors. Esther explains how our self-narratives, which are often shaped by past trauma, may negatively impact our relationships with others and our emotional health, and emphasizes the value in trying to change them when warranted.   We discuss: Esther’s background, adventures in hitchhiking, and how she ended up in the US [2:30]; The lasting effects of the Holocaust on Esther’s parents [8:45]; Grappling with a dark past and feeling alive again after trauma [16:45]; How Esther came to understand her parents in a new light [23:15]; Why Esther chose therapy as her career [30:00]; Using the concept of sexuality to understand society, culture, and people [40:00]; The significance of sexual revolutions, and the similarities of medical advancements and advancements in psychotherapy [50:15]; The impact of the rise of individualism and the focus on happiness and self-esteem [56:00]; Generational differences in parenting and changing role of fathers [1:09:15]; How our narratives affect our sense of wellbeing and relationships with others, and the challenge of changing them [1:17:15]; Generational effects of past trauma, and how relationship to others can be a mirror into your maladaptive behavior [1:30:30]; The role of willpower in one’s ability change their behavior and improve their relationships [1:40:00]; How your relationships impact longevity and the importance of being capable of sitting in uncomfortable emotions [1:43:45]; Esther’s definition of resilience and the dangers of believing everything you think or feel [1:50:00]; Questions about the human condition that Esther wants to explore [1:57:30]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/EstherPerel  Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content and health and wellness. Full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe.

Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Esther Perrell. Esther is a psychotherapist and New York Times best-selling author of the State of Affairs and Mating and Captivity. She's given two TED Talks which have been widely viewed. She's also the host of the popular podcast, where should we begin and how's work? The latter is a newer podcast. The former has, I think, is probably now in its fourth or fifth season. She's given a number of other really fantastic lectures that you can visit and will link to in the show notes, a couple of talks at South by Southwest that focus on relationships in

the workplace and such. I've wanted to talk with S. therefore quite some time now. And while she's known in most circles as an expert on human sexuality or radicism and things like that, I of course maybe have a bit of a broader aperture of her expertise and how it figures into relationships in general and have found this to be very interesting. And I wanted to have her on a podcast so that we could talk about things that go far beyond what she normally speaks about. And we do that. We start with her incredible upbringing and childhood, which is kind of a heroic story of her parents and how that shaped and influenced her. And then really go

from there into how she followed her passion, both in her education and ultimately her curiosity in her career and how it got her to where we are today. So I'll say no more about this episode other than I think it's going to be very interesting to anyone who's interested in relationships and that's basically your relationship with yourself and your relationship with anyone around you and hopefully that includes everybody who's listening to this. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Esther Perral. Yes, there. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. It's been a while. I wanted to sit down and have the discussion we're about to have. It's a pleasure. I detect a slight accent. Is that New Jersey? Oh, yes. Right across the river. Right, right, right.

How many languages do you speak? I speak nine languages. As someone who speaks 1.25 languages, it blows my mind and I'm sure we're going to get to how one learns nine languages. But you grew up in Belgium. I grew up in Belgium. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Linguistically or broader? Yeah, broader. You've spoken in the past about the impact that your parents' survival had on your upbringing. Maybe you could tell folks a little bit about that, because I assume not everybody is familiar with your story. So I grew up in Belgium. I was born in Leuven, which is one of the oldest university towns in Europe.

And then I grew up in Antwerp to two Polish parents who were both the sole survivors of their entire family, of the Nazi concentration camps. And they, by flukeke arrived to Belgium. They had a permit there for about three months and then they decided to stay and so they ended up being another five years illegal refugees in Belgium. I was educated in Antwerp, which was a Flemish city. So I did 12 years of schooling in Flemish, but we spoke also French and Yiddish and German and Polish in the house. And that just was the way it was. It's

the air that you breathe. Nobody made a big deal out of speaking all these languages and learning them. So that's the basics. When you finished your education, your high school education, what was the next step for you? Where did you go after that? The first thing I did after I finished high school was come to the United States to travel for almost two months and I ended up hitchhiking across the US and seeing the country in a way that I probably will never see it again. And then I went to study in Jerusalem.

I went to the Hebrew University. That's where I did my undergraduate. And then I started my graduate school there. And I came to Boston to Lesley College to finish the second year of my master's program and to start my training in family therapy at the Cambridge Family Institute and to work at Mass Mental Health, which was one of the Harvard Medical School hospitals.

And then basically I never used my return ticket. And here I am. Let's go back to the hitchhiking trip. What made you decide to venture from Europe to the United States in the first place? And when you did so, did you have this plan of actually hitchhiking or was that something that developed once you arrived? I had hitchhiked before in Europe and in Israel since I was traveling at age 14. A major way that you traveled when you were curious and broke was to hitchhike.

So it was perfectly in fashion at that time to do so. And why do United States? Because it was the bicentennial. And there were cheap cargo flights that took you from Belgium to the US. Capital airlines was this first invention of old planes refurbished for people who didn't need much comfort. No, I had a Greyhound pass. I was with my boyfriend.

We had a Greyhound pass and we thought we would be traveling with Greyhound. But every time my finger went up, it went so well. And I got invited into the homes of every kind of person that lives in this country. And the kindness of strangers, really, like in ways that I probably would never have access to today. So it was the whole West Coast. It was Louisiana, Mississippi,

Alabama, and then the Northeast. So it turned out this way because of a whole adventure. We lost our wallet and our traveler checks, if you remember that concept. Everything, and we didn't have phones at the time, of course. So somebody found it, and this man came to pick us up at a downtown station in LA and he invited us to his house and from that moment on this trip to kind of

whole different personality for us. That was that. Seven weeks later I had really had an insider's look that innocence and curiosity and a good sense of street smartness which you need when you hitchhike of course Did that in part give you a little bit of an affection for American culture? And is that maybe part of the reason why you ultimately ended up setting up roots here? Actually, no I was fascinated before I came to study in Boston. I came for another trip I did another hitchhiking. I came for another trip.

I did another hitchhiking trip in Mexico for quite a few weeks. And then I went all the way from Merida to Miami to Quebec. So, and then I did a third trip where I spent the entire summer in New York City in the late 70s. So you can imagine it was a different city. No, I liked it. I was very curious, but I had no intention ever of coming to live in what we called at a time in America. And I came to study because I had the

opportunity to come to Cambridge and nobody in my family had gone to university like this. And I was the first and I had read Bach's and I thought Cambridge was a fascinating place to come and study and I should take this opportunity and I had no idea that I would stay. So I stayed in Cambridge for a couple of years and then I came to New York thinking I have to do the New York adventure for one year. And I came with my husband now who was a boyfriend then and I really didn't think I would stay. But I fell in love with New York.

That I knew. And it's always been very clear to me that it would be Manhattan or a Broad, that my real affection was for New York City. You could be air-knitting and every part of you in one place. And I had always looked for a place to integrate the multiple parts of me and this seemed to be the place where I could do so. No, I want to kind of go back to something you said at the outset, which is both your mother and your father were the soul survivors from their families, meaning their parents, their siblings, their aunts, uncles, everybody perished. Did I understand that correctly? Yes. My father came from a family of nine and he was the youngest. My mother came from a family of seven. Every single one of their siblings were married with seven to ten children.

And so each of them lost 200 people about. And they basically met on the day of liberation, on the roads, where people were looking for other people from the same area that could tell them if anybody else had survived. And that's kind of how they met up. Yeah, that was it. They were the only ones. Do you have a sense of what permitted them

to be the survivors? Do you attribute it to sheer luck? The odds seem almost unimaginable, given the circumstances of their periphery. So the war for them starts in 39, because they live on the German side of Poland. So this is a very long war, it's six years about. My mother spends the first year in the woods.

She's 18, she hides in the woods, which is really where she struffered the most. And she actually went by herself to a labor camp, a man's labor camp, because she had in her mind that if she can work in the kitchen or laundry, that somehow, at least she will wake up every morning in the same place. Whereas in the woods, she had no idea.

She couldn't take the dread anymore. She proceeds to go to nine different camps over the five years and my father went to 14 of them, including a stint in Siberia. When I would ask them, they were generally a series of three points. The first one was luck. Simply, sheer luck. I wasn't selected every morning when they chose a thousand people. Somehow, it didn't pick me. The second one was, we wanted to live. We wanted to live. We thought maybe somebody is waiting for us somewhere.

And we were going to live with dignity. So my mother describes, mending her socks, folding her clothes, doing basic things that maintain their sense of humanity. And for my father, my father, basically, in the last year and a half, created a cat of a black market in the kitchen, where he had more access to potatoes, potatoes and potato peels, and he managed to feed about 60 young people that I also vived thanks to that because it meant that they could go work and as long as you could work you had a chance of at least surviving including him fed the Germans the SS guards and I think feeling that he could help others gave him a sense of agency of mastery of

I can do something here so luck was a piece piece of it, it wasn't the only thing, but it always was mentioned. So when you were growing up, I assume that you had friends who were not from that background, and therefore they would have, quote unquote, normal things like grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, things that you did not have. Was that contrast stark for you as a young child? I grew up in a dual situation. We had a clothing store in a working class neighborhood. I lived above the store. I worked in this store. We were like the immigrant family on the block. My parents had accents, they didn't speak very well, it's lemmish. Like in any neighborhood where you have that store that is owned, but instead of

a food store, it was a clothing store. That's when I am born, but I come 12 years after my brother. So by then there is a store, then it didn't start like this, right? My father on occasion would kind of say, you know, he would put their hand on the shoulder of a client, of a customer, and just say, we went through some very bad things during the war, like, and I would think, how would they relate to any of this? Then there was the Jewish community that we were part of, where most of the people had numbers on their arms. So, the first question you ask at two years old is,

why don't I have a grandma or a grandpa? And then the second time is what is this number? And at the third time is why don't I have uncles and aunts? And it's not just because you see other children, it's because you read children's books. And in the children's book is a story of a family and it has a few generations. And we had none of that and we had about five pictures that show that they had managed to save a few pictures. So that said, there were these other people. The Jewish community that I grew up in was all Holocaust survivors. This was normative for me.

This was a very refugee community that you only know refugees, but then in the store where these other people. You've spoken a little bit about it. I find it to be kind of amazing how your parents' survival changed their outlook on life and how that impacted your outlook on life. Say a little bit about that. There's zest for life, if you will. One of the things my dad always used to say is, we came from harsh circumstances. We were used to the bitter cold. I used to carry bags of cement on my back. We were much better prepared than those

who came from Greece or the Mediterranean or urban environments. There was something about being from peasant stock, basically, that prepared them for hardship. The interesting thing is why does this story stay with me out of a thousand others that he has told me? They talked a lot. So today, this is not really what you ask, but it's often when I get asked a question like this and I start to answer it, I realize a thousand questions that I didn't get to ask. That I just took the story as it was told like a Swiss cheese with all the holes in it

and never kind of said, but how did you go from here to there? It's just like we went and she mended her socks. How did you do that? Where did you find the needle? Where did you find all these very granular details that I have no real answer to. But I think what I got was a few different things. The first thing I got which actually really came back very strongly during the pandemic this year was the notion that everything can disappear in a split second. Don't ever think that what you have is there to stay and is yours.

On the one hand, it prepares you for catastrophes, for disasters, for change, and on the other end, you can never fully, fully settle. You never fully calm, because you don't know that the ground you sit on could not at any moment open up. That's I think probably the most important thing is that sense of impermanence, the sense of loss, the mass of loss, the collective loss of not just people but life, community, legacies, generations of stuff. I think I have a real sense of what that is. I plumb into mine when I need to reach in other people's experience of loss like that. But also, and red, I mean, that goes with that. And then on the other side, yes, this enormous zest for life. I mean, they were not just there to work and rebuild. My parents were real bon vivant. I mean, they loved life. They really enjoyed

party to sing to dance. And that in my work and in my personal life, it in my work around trauma and around pain and suffering, I have a reference for how one comes back from there. How one loves again, celebrates again, parties again, in a way that is not just them, but to be the ones that I knew the best. And these things have very much influenced me in my thinking and in my outlook on the world. There's lots of other things. If on the one hand, it's entirely remarkable that your parents survive the ordeal that

they were placed in, it seems equally remarkable that they weren't permanently scarred by it. If we've talked about some of the factors that may have contributed to their ability to survive what they did for six years, what do you contribute to their ability to come out the backside and experience everything you just said, which is because I have to imagine that there are many people who survived concentration camps, but they were never the same again. They were never able to form meaningful relationships. The PTSD of the experience effectively left them dead, even though they were still breathing. I'm guessing your parents didn't have access to MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD and world-class psychotherapists.

No, but they had access to something else. See, my mother in the 50s went to the big professor at the university in Lurven, and basically, he kind of said to her, what you experienced, what can't just come back from, and there is no medication or treatment for this kind of stuff. And she had nightmares, and she had massive eruptions sometimes. She'd go and check the door a few times in the night at that time and stuff. We didn't call it PTSD. We just call it survivor syndrome actually was the name at the time. But she had access to what today I called a spa. My mother did talasotherapy, mud therapy, walking on wet grass.

All the things that today are part of the wellness treatments that are all traditional things that were done in the bath of Eastern Europe, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, in Poland. And she went every year for a month to the spa, where she was doing bath and water and mud and big jets of frozen water. The stuff that you do when you go from hot to cold, this was like traditional medicine. So that's the stuff she did to calm her nerves, which was called at a time

you had nerve issues, nervousness. The other thing, because I have said, it is a thing I wrote in mating and captivity that followed me around afterwards, where I said, I was interested in that very question. What made some people want to live. What feeds the life, what is this antidote to death or deadness? And I remember describing my observation between those who did not die and those who came back to life, those who could never trust and those who reconnected again, etc. I think what really, and this is very relevant for today, what my parents had was a strong sense of community. relevant for today. What my parents had was a strong sense of community. So all these people come out of the camps and first they go to DP camps, to temporary camps, and the amount of babies that were conceived there, because all these

people wanted to have children to know as a way of proving they are alive, that they are human, that they can still procreate. And that in itself is such an act of healing. You rebuild, you didn't destroy it all, you didn't sever all connection. There will be a future, there will be more of us. That's the first thing. Then this community comes together and they have gatherings for the survivors of town, such and such, for the survivors of camps such and such. They plant trees, they celebrate, they tell stories,

they fundamentally understood something that today we're trying to bring in, that is such a, what is called today collective trauma, that was called psychosocial trauma, demands collective resilience. They didn't try to do anything on their own. Now, the first years they don't talk much. They arrive to these foreign countries

and most of the time people don't really want to hear much of what they've gone through. You tell two sentences and people can't hear anymore. Meaning even amongst each other? No, no, no. We did each other, they tell. But they don't always have to tell. You see, it could be this kind of short, that camp was a bad camp. That SS, God, you did not want to be under him.

I managed in that winter. They had all these sentences like that, that just a short hand, and everybody knew what was the reference, everybody knew what it came back to. So, to each other, they talked a lot. I've always had this image. I once told, because it's so chopperfully, every Sunday, they talked a lot. I've always had this image. I went to because it's so superfluous. Every Sunday my parents played cards. Friends came over and they played cards.

So they're playing Gin Rami and stuff. And as they were playing with these cards, somebody would just suddenly say, whatever happened to John Morris, John Mitchell, John, whatever. Oh, this one was gassed, this one was murdered, he didn't make it, he went to Australia and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He was like, there was no child development approach in my house, nobody looked to see if there's a child there to hear all of this. It was done in this affectless way, it was no affect.

Horrors were told in that what today we would call dissociation, but for the purpose of survival and regeneration, it was a very good natural defense. And I think that what is interesting about that group, which is really the first time that people understood the concept of adult trauma, because until then it was all about first five years of your life, is that they came up with some of the most adaptive, resilient ways of going about things without ever seeing a shrink, without any access to mental health, just something inside their own tradition

that history, this was not the first time Jews were having a rough time in history, right? These resources really were gleaned from a culture that is collective in nature and it's not the only one for sure. So that's I think really what helped them more than anything else. Walks in the woods was a ritual. You needed to go into nature. This is like everybody's writing about that, this pandemic here.

Something that about them knew that being in the forest is healing. Recently you wrote something on Mother's Day actually about your relationship with your mother and you wrote about all the positive things and many of the positive things that your mother did for you, but at the same time there were things she didn't do for you. And it's left you with a feeling of ambivalence, at least with respect to some of the mother

daughter things that maybe weren't there. How did that unfold for you as you went from being a child to an adolescent? I assume at the time you didn't think this was abnormal because you had nothing to compare it to. I assume this was a retrospective reflection. I would say from the time I was an adolescent to the time I was an adult is really more the sequence. So it's very interesting.

I have not talked often about this, but I just was tired of hearing about Mother's Day and Hallmark Heart, Mother's Day, and I just was tired of hearing about Mother's Day and Hallmark Heart Mother's Day, and I thought there's so many people who have complicated relationships with their mother. Maybe we should put that on the table for a change. So I whipped this thing out on Sunday because it's very easy for me with a good dose of humor to describe my mother. And what's phenomenal is thousands of people are writing to me, basically you say, this is my mother, this is my mother. And what's phenomenal is thousands of people are writing to me, basically you say, this is my mother, this is my mother. So I know she's not unique. And she comes

in every culture, and she comes in every color. But basically she had this thing with the evil eye. She was a very superstitious woman. So this whole idea that you shouldn't say good things to your kid because it will blow their head. She took that to the very concrete level. And so she had this notion that she is there to tell you what other people will not tell you and that's usually not the good stuff. And so she was true to herself till the end. She didn't say one good word to be ever, ever. How old were you when she died? She was 80 and I was 42. So by the time she died, you had already achieved a lot of professional success. Yes, in my field, but I hadn't written mating in captivity. I actually started to write mating

after she passed away. And I remember saying, this is the first time I'm actually doing something that I'm not sure I can do. And I don't think I could ever have done this when she was alive. For fear that she would be critical of you saying, why are you doing this? You don't have the experience to do this or something like that?

Yeah, I mean, because every time I made a decision, I had to have confidence one time for me and one time for her anxiety. I had to prove to her whatever it was. This was true for the hitchhiking trip, too. This was true for going to study in Jerusalem. This was true for coming to live in New York. Everything I decided, she would challenge me, challenge me, challenge me.

And so I had to have inside of me a sense that I knew that I can do it. I have to succeed at this, not to prove her wrong, but just to be able to do what I want. It wasn't to defy her, but this time I began to write and I taught to myself, I have no idea. I remember saying, I've always done things that somewhere inside of me, I think I'm capable of doing. These are sentences that I remember saying back then.

And this is the first time that I'm taking something out, I have no idea. But her voice isn't there to make me feel like I have to be sure. I'm allowed to do something without knowing. And I'll do the best I can and I'll pour my soul into this. But that's all I have. Rather than, I know I can, which was the stance I had to have before then. So, I think the ambivalence that you're asking about, it's not uncommon that you have a family and the mom becomes the strict one. She's the stern one, she's the more critical one, and my dad is sugar candy, he's the sweetest, the sweetest kindest loving, adoring dad. And what you begin to understand once you start to study family therapy is that of course

he's always kind and loving and adoring because he leaves some of the dirty job to her. She has to put the limits, she has to basically put the limits, do the discipline, do all the stuff that he doesn't like to do. And I began to understand that the good parent and the bad parent or the soft parent and the harder parent, that's a construct that is not just a matter of personality, because my mother also has a very tremendous charisma, she was funny and brilliant and all of that too. That in fact, it's because of how he acts, that that puts her in this role. And this role, then, is already the quote I is filled, so he doesn't really have to do

it. And once I saw that, I began to see my dad is not the all good, that he actually leaves her alone, comes home three hours later, doesn't call to tell her, leaves her standing with all the cooked food in the kitchen. And of course, when he comes home, she's all pissed and yelling that he doesn't respect her or that she's there standing there like an idiot in her. And me, instead of thinking, stop screaming, I began to say, why did you just do this to her? You know, in your beautiful loving way, but you just stood her up. And once you begin to reorganize the movie and the interpretation of the movie,

then you suddenly realize she's actually not only the negative. My anger goes to her and my love goes to him kind of thing. And that's when you begin to experience the ability to hold contradictory emotions at the same time. And that's ambivalence. Ambivalence is the ability to hold both ends. I love you and I also have a lot of anger towards you and those two are co-existing inside of me rather than I split off one part and then I attributed somewhere

else. Once I began to do that, then I was able to diffuse her things. You know, if she was critical of something, I had a way of joking with her that basically didn't allow her to enter under my skin. And I just could really say, you know, all kinds of diffusing tricks that I had learned basically. My favorite one, which because I have used it with so many people in my own therapy work afterwards, was to just give her a kiss on the cheek and just say, I so appreciate how you're trying to make me a better person. But I want you to know, I think you've done a good job. I'm where you, I think you would want me to be. So if you want, you can go try to improve others.

It worked very well for me. I would laugh as I said it instead of feeling the wrath mounting inside of me. So, what drew you to therapy as a career? I would ask myself, what drew me to psychology first? I'm a teenager at that time. I have a very contentious relationship with my mom. We do a lot of good screaming on occasion. I am in a school system that is extremely traditional. The student doesn't matter.

Only the content matters, the material matters. I start to read these alternative education books and I start to read Victor Frankel and I start to read Bruno Betelheim and I start to read Free Children of Summer Hill and Ardy Lang and Anti-Sykeitri. I become very, very interested in, why do we feel what we feel?

How come I'm having dreams about Hitler and Nazis? And it's not my life, I didn't go through that. Why do I have those dreams? What does that do to me? How do people get along better with their parents? At that time, sometimes when things were really, really tough with her, I had this idea that if I could disappear, then I would see if she ever misses me.

I have this fantasies of how can I disappear for a while and put the fear in her that she may have lost me and then see if she actually cares about me. And then I thought, where does that come from? Why would I want to do such a thing? And this is the beginning of my interest in psychology, in reading about human relationships, which I then did profusely. And then I also realized, I actually am quite good at this. People come to confide in me all the time, all my friends. I see what's not visible

in relationships. Everybody thought because of my languages that I should be an interpreter or maybe a journalist or a lawyer because I could argue my case, a litigator. And I decided I think psychotherapy could be a very interesting profession. For a spy, by the way, you would have been a great spy. That's right. I never thought of that way. So when you found yourself in Boston, you're now going through your graduate program. What is your first job career? You know, your first step into your professional career. Is it family therapy? No. My first first job was at the hospital as an expressive arts therapist working on the psychiatric unit. Because I had also had the whole adolescence

and young adulthood in the theater, and I had done a lot of puppetry. And I taught to study expressive arts therapies would be a very interesting way of bringing together the arts as a modality, as a psychotherapeutic modality. And I just worked two years first in the hospital as an expressive arts therapist, primarily with groups, actually. Sometimes with families, but mostly with groups.

And there was something missing. I felt like there must be more. Plus, you're on the bottom of the totem pole when you're an expressive arts therapist. It's like you're the recreation therapist. After the doctors have gone by, the bottom of the totem pole when you're an expressive arts therapist. It's like you're the recreation therapist. After the doctors have gone by, the therapist, the psychologist, keep them busy. And I just thought that isn't going to go very well for me. To be in a profession that is not valued when I think it is so incredible, as something

is off. I was talking to Jack at the time, who was just a colleague at that moment, and kind of mentoring me slightly to my thesis. And he said, I think you would be interested in family therapy. It's more contextual, it's more anthropological, it's more intercultural, it takes all the other pieces into account, the way that you have done. I was writing about cultural religious and racial identity, this was too small for me. I needed a field that was have done. I was writing about cultural religious and racial identity. I was, this was too small for me. I needed a field that was more expansive. The revolution was to begin to think in systemic terms, away from the individual, into a psychic model, into the interpersonal and societal

or contextual model. That just opened up a gate for me. And then I went to work at mass mental. And slowly I thought, I'm not sure that the hospital setting is the best setting for me. How does that family therapy work in a hospital setting? When you say hospital setting, do you mean inpatient setting? Yes, yes, inpatient. So does that mean that you're taking care of psychiatric inpatients as individuals or you're helping families of inpatients? Yes, with the identified patient. So I did it both inpatient and outpatient. And basically yes, you do sessions with the whole family. But it's not just who is in the room. It's how you think about what is the patient. In family therapy

language, the patient is not just a patient because they feel certain things or they are struggling with things inside of them. The patient has a function in the family, is often assigned by the family. That is the person who's allowed to struggle and suffer out loud amongst a group of those allowed to struggle and suffer out loud amongst a group of ascetic people who are just like holding it all in, that's just one tiny example. So you work with the system and you try to understand what led this person to want to commit suicide, what led this person to not eat what led this person to destroy themselves or whatever the issues are. And that notion that things are interconnected was also what I had experienced. I knew that some of the things I was feeling wasn't just because I was born this way. It was in my

dynamic with my parents, with my mother in particular. When you study family therapy, you do genograms, you look at intergenerational transmission, you constantly are studying yourself as you are learning the paradigm. And at no time did I think, oh, this just applies to me. This is a fascinating other way to look at things. Now, when you did your masters, it was focused on family therapy. My masters is in expressive arts therapy. Okay. So that's what took you to your first role. So one thing that is interesting to me about psychology versus medicine in medicine,

your postgraduate training, your residency really prepares you for what you're going to do in your career. And frankly, many people don't do much training beyond that, even though obviously one should. But it seems that in psychology, you have to reinvent yourself. I mean, if you want to make the leap from expressive arts therapy to family therapy,

you're not gonna go back and do another master's degree or do another clinical internship or something like that. So beyond your own experience, how are you finding mentors and or sharpening the tool of your trade? You can be a practicing clinician who every few years decides to learn one more modality, one more theoretical paradigm, it's endless. It's's endless. It's absolutely endless. You can have an interest in a topic.

I'm interested in the area of trauma. I'm interested in eating disorders. I'm interested in anxiety disorder. So this is one way to organize your interest. But you can also say, I'm interested in working with families. And at that time, this was the hey days of family therapy. There were five schools of family therapy, structural family therapy, strategic family therapy,

feminist family therapy, intergenerational. This where you had a good 10 years of learning, just between those five, right? You can say, I want to learn, now there is the neuroscience. The neuroscience have come in and they have so many interesting new things to say about how people regulate and co-regulate each other in relationship. I need to know that because I want to be able to use that

in my work. So my frame remains the same. I am a couple of therapists, a family therapist, do individual work as well. But I need to understand the new things that we know about the brain. Then there is a phase, everybody is talking mindfulness. I need to know the new things that we know about the brain. Then there is a place everybody is talking mindfulness. I need to know everything that mindfulness can tell me about working in relationships.

It's that way. Basically, if you are a curious person in mental health and in psychotherapy per se, which is one practice of mental health, it is an endless, endless school. I admire those who sometimes continue. They're like, I have colleagues who just throw themselves into a new approach and spend 500 hours, you know, honing that skill. You have CEUs as well, Peter, you know, there is an incentive that makes you continue to go and learn, but I think the knowledge of human beings, which I think is not different in medicine, in that sense, is endless. And there's a new way of thinking, and then there becomes a dominant way of thinking.

And then for ten years, everybody thinks like that. The truth of today becomes the joke of tomorrow. And then we move on to a new paradigm paradigm and it's amazing how, depending on when you enter the field, you basically rode the wave of the moment. If I was in the 19th, 19th century, I would have been a psychoanalyst. And you would have thought of medicine very differently than you do in a way it shows you the social construct of those fields. They are sciences and they are humanities, but they are also completely immersed in the context of the moment.

And if your CEUs are as valuable as our CEUs, they don't offer too much. Our CEUs are something that we do simply to maintain our licensure, but I'm still looking for CEUs that teach much valuable content. In fact, the ones, at least for me that I find most valuable, are the ones that are so far outside of my area of expertise that I can actually learn something, but the ones

that are generally close to what I do are not that helpful, which of course then makes me question how helpful the ones are that are so outside of my area because they may be equally far from what's likely reality. But so you're going along, you're doing family therapy, you're now transitioning obviously from inpatient to outpatient. Is this when you move from Boston back to New York? Yep. And everything's going well.

And then how did Bill Clinton change your life? There's a little bit of a road to Bill Clinton. You ask me because I think this training thing, CEO, is a really important thing. And I'm going to trace this back to my mother. I think that because of how critical she could be, I did often seek mentors. I was very drawn to people who saw something good in me. I was drawn to people who believed in me. I was drawn to people who believed in me. I was drawn to people who thought, I can do certain things.

I would melt when somebody would do that. And then I began to actually really seek these mentors, not just stumble upon them as a counselor in a summer camp or things like that. And this is kind of how I learned. I asked people who I wanted to learn from if I could be their shadow. And I just was like a disciple, an apprentice,

that watches the craft being done and learns from incredible clinicians. I mean, then I come to New York and that's when I meet one of my next mentors, Salvador Menuchin, who I have spoken about because my two main mentors have actually passed away in the last two years, one by old age and one by suicide.

So I've been thinking a lot about these things. And I basically started to work at the 92nd Street Y and then started to work privately, because that's what it had to do with papers and immigration and license and green cards and all of that stuff. And I basically did it the way that I knew my immigrant parents did. You hustle. You find a way, you enter in, you do that kind of a thing. By the time this Clinton affair arrives and by the time I start to write mating, yes I had a very nice psychotherapy practice, I would teach, I was at NYU in

the medical school, as a clinical instructor, I was lecturing and I had developed a real specialty in the area of working with mixed couples and families, intercultural, interracial, interreligious couples and families. Why? Because the way I could build a private practice in New York City is because I knew languages. I didn't know much about therapy yet, but I knew languages. And these people wanted to speak their language with me.

And that's how this began. And I had three supervisors who checked on everything I did. And that's how this began. And I had three supervisors who checked on everything I did. And that's how I began. By the time the Clinton scandal arrives, I just didn't want to write a book about mixed couples. That was the main thing. I began to feel like I'm ready for a new subject. But I need a portal topic.

And I like topics that open up to me, the connect to theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, big, like you, the CEUs take place in a different field. I like that too. And I don't know, I just got inspired by this story because it kind of really was this, what is this American attitude to sexuality and to sexuality as a matter of national political agenda for that matter. How do I make sense of this whole thing?

And then I wrote this article in 2003 in an obscure magazine that was known only in our fields, and that changed everything around. I've read this obscure article in the obscure magazine, and you comment on being at a conference and noting the fundamental difference that all the people at the conference who were American had, versus all of the non-Americans. Say a bit more about that. I think that one way to say it is on a cultural level, there's been a real push to see sex as a risk factor in America. Sex itself is the risk factor whereas I think the European notion and the public

health notions in Europe is that sex is a natural part of human development. Being irresponsible is a risk factor. That changes everything. And so I don't think that clinicians in the field of psychotherapy is free from that. I studied couples therapy and family therapy without one hour about the subject of sexuality. How can that be? In a culture where sexuality is so central and in a love culture I'm talking, not just a modern ideology of love, is put that dimension front and center. How can we do Kaboostearpi and not ever talk about it? Years! Something is missing. And the field had organized itself in a very interesting way to never have to talk about it,

because it said, if there are sexual problems, it's the consequence of relationship problems. If there are sexual problems, it's the consequence of relationship problems. Therefore, focus on the relationship, fix the relationship, and the sex will follow. And that is sometimes the case, but so many times not. There is more to the story. My thinking has always been, this is not inaccurate, but there is more to the story. That's the way probably that sentence drives my curiosity. You could be at an entire conference that talked about sexuality and never hear the word pleasure. Connection, sexual connection, eroticism. None of these words were being used.

And if I looked at the literature, you know, the nice thing about languages is I go and I read other countries literature and I'd realize this is actually not the only way to do this. There is another way of looking at these things. That's where I was. How is sexuality a lens into society? Because I get the sense that your real interest is deeper than sexuality. Sexuality is a vehicle, I think, for you to understand more. Yes. Understand society, understand people.

Yes. And cultures. Yes. Understand society, understand people. Yes. And cultures? Yes, yes. And I think where this thing really originated for me, when you write a book, there's about four or five books you've read that are kind of the foundations for, oh, wow, you could see it like that. So at the time I read Octavio Paz, the double flame, essays on love and eroticism.

First of all, he distinguishes sexuality and eroticism. That distinction, that is so important. And then he looks at religion. And then he analyzes how religion has intersected with sexuality, because every religion has had to do something about sexuality. Here is what I began to look at was this. If you look at a culture or rather the civilization and you look at its most archaic, rooted, sometimes intransigent aspects, what it holds on to, many of those things will be organized around sexuality and particularly the sexuality of women and

children. And if you look on the other side at revolutions, radical changes, progressive changes that happen in a society often also connected to industrialization and scientific developments and medical development etc. it also takes place around sexuality. And so in that sense, I think sexuality is a lens. It tells a story of the values, the behaviors, and the attitudes towards the body, towards pleasure, towards power, towards connection, towards the division of spirit and flesh, or mind and body, or all of those things.

The women in the psychiatric hospitals of Shakhku were not just hysterical. They were victims of sexual abuse. That's a very different story. And they were there because some crazy way this was still safer than to go back to the places where they had been used and misused. That's a way of beginning this answer. Does that make sense? Yeah, give me an example in the United States where I mean, there's an obvious example, which is a sexual liberation in the 1960s, which is a step function change in the political climate.

So I can certainly see that lens. I think I've never thought about it through a technological or scientific lens with one exception. The one exception to me that doesn't get enough attention is the development of the birth control pill, which I've always thought is one of the most underappreciated, highest ROI philanthropic developments ever. You know that the cost of developing the birth control pill in today's dollars, I believe it was less than a hundred million dollars, and it was mostly footed by one woman

McCormick, I think was her name. I'm blanking on her name. I used to know the story quite well but it was an amazing story and She basically partnered with a scientist at Harvard whom she'd met at a dinner and he had this idea that if you gave women enough estrogen and progesterone you could actually basically suppress ovulation and flatten the luteal and follicular cycles. It was one of these things where everything came together at the right time. So it was the combination of doing it in a political environment, I think prior to, I think they started their work prior to the Kennedy administration. There was a lot

of fear that a Catholic president would not allow the FDA to endorse such a thing. But nevertheless, she very quietly plotted along in funding this scientist. And I can't believe I'm blanking on his name, but the two of them really did this amazing work. And it's one of the few things where there's no ambiguity about the impact it had. So if you look at pre-birth control versus post-birth control, you look at the number of women that have advanced degrees, the average income of women. I mean, these things changed not subtly, but logarithmically. I'm trying to think of other examples where sexuality is so clearly tied, for example, like the space program, or something like that. Are there other examples I'm just missing? I mean, I typically look at three of these revolutions. One is the democratization of birth control,

first and foremost. I mean, it changed so much other things. Yes, of course, the entrance of women in the workplace and the advanced degrees, but also it fundamentally changed the meaning of sexuality in romantic and long term committed relationships. It also allowed for the first time to separate sex from reproduction. And then we began to separate reproduction from sex. And now we are separating anatomy from gender. I mean, these are conceptually revolutions. The mind has to adapt to this thing. What that actually would mean, an entire history of humanity does not understand that sexuality could ever not carry the consequence of intercourse. You know, penetration could never be separated

from the potential of childbirth. And unwanted child, et., etc., etc. So the second revolution for me is the gay movement. They're not in order here, you know. But I do think that in those countries where the attitude to homosexuality has shifted, so many things shifted because by definition once we had contraception and once we were able to have sex before marriage, we basically began to queer our relationships. Homosexuals have often, gay people have become more straight in their pursuit of marriage sometimes, and for all the legal and other recognition pieces that are connected to that,

I mean, it's really one of the most important shifts around that, including taking it out of DSM, deepatologizing this. I mean, sexuality, the history of sexuality is a fascinating history of society and cultures. When was it taken out of the DSM? I want to say 73, but I don't remember exactly. I think we should have this double check. This is one of these dates I look up regularly and forget. But it is to me equally important. Because Gaze was so considered as this aberration,

this deviance, the anti-normative, and sexuality has been so much something organized around the notion of what is normal, what is acceptable. And the women's movement. I mean, I think that too. The notion that sexuality is not just a woman's marital duty, and that sexuality is not organized around duty, but around desire. And the emergence of the concept of desire, which completely goes hand in hand with the growth of the capitalistic society. So these things are so powerfully interconnected.

That's the three main revolutions. And then you look at them across the continents. If you read Foucault, the history of sexuality, it really tells you the history of our attitudes towards children, towards women, towards old age, towards pleasure, towards how much agency do we have versus how much does somebody look at us from above there and sees everything we do. It's the history of so many things that is being mediated through the history of sexuality.

That's what I mean by it's a lens into culture. But you probably could say the same thing about the history of medicine. I haven't thought about it that way. There was a day when medicine wasn't scientific. In my mind, I divide medicine into medicine 1.0, medicine 2.0, medicine 3.0. We have these different, and obviously the first iterations of medicine were entirely unscientific. As science developed, so too did better understandings of not just germ theory, which is perhaps the first and most salient advent within medicine, but it allowed you to dismiss the idea that bad humors were the cause of so many ails. But it's interesting.

I just haven't thought about it through the lens of that, but certainly the genetic revolution, even though it hasn't panned out as very interesting from a treatment perspective, I think being able to clone the human genome some 21 years ago was a big step forward from a cultural standpoint, and that we now realize how similar we all are. We're less dissimilar than we probably previously thought genetically.

And I think it also gave us a sense of realizing how non-deterministic genes are. In other words, it feeds into the importance of the environment more. So much more about what probably creates differences between us is either epigenetic or simply not modulated genetically at all. So this is exactly the same way that I think in terms of psychotherapy. Same more? Well, you're looking at the contextual factors. The environment, the ecology, the social class, the non-deterministic gene is the same as I am looking at the non-essentialist view of a person. You become by

virtue of your interaction with others in certain places at certain time. It's that juxtaposition between environment and person that creates issues as we call them. You are describing exactly the same thing when you say the jeans are not deterministic just on their own. They become by virtue of their interaction with the host of factors in the environment. exactly the same thing when you say the genes are not deterministic just on their own. They become by virtue of their interaction with the host of factors in the environment. We have the exact same paradigm. From you in medicine as I bring, it's not always the case, but I bring it that one to my work.

Now your work today is quite vast and well, I think many people publicly who know you are familiar with your writing, your talks, a lot of it focuses on sexuality. But yet so much of your clinical work is still rooted in couples therapy that doesn't necessarily involve sexuality or doesn't involve sexuality as the core issue. Individuals whose issues go far beyond sexuality or maybe don't include sexuality at all. You do a lot of trauma-based therapy, and that's not surprising based on the background in which you came from. You experienced firsthand what it's like to grow up with trauma survivors, and you alluded to earlier kind of spending time reading,

did you ever come across Felix Adler's quote, I think he said something to the effect of the purpose of a man's life is not happiness but worthiness. I'm curious if you agree with that. Even if you didn't have the butt, I don't understand the sentence that the purpose of a person's life is happiness. Happiness cannot be a purpose. Happiness is an outcome of multiple purposes for that matter. Happiness emerges out of something. It's not the goal, at least not in the way that I look at things. Wouldn't people come to you and say, I'm not happy, and that's a chief complaint? Oh, yes.

I am a clinician for almost 40 years. I write a book about sexuality, and suddenly it looks like that's all I do. Of course, it's by far not. It's a subject I find very interesting, but it's one of many. Now, when people come and they say, I'm not happy, my first thought, this is not what I say to them, but in my mind, what I'm in line of this historical perspective we take, I'm thinking, this is such an interesting thing, right?

For so long, happiness belongs to the heavens, to the afterlife. Basically, you suffer well on earth. And if you've done a good job at that, you may get rewarded later. When did we bring happiness to earth? When did... And this is a book actually called Happiness. I met the author whose name now escapes me at a conference. And he was telling me that one of the very interesting developments was how did the Western parents?

When you ask, what do you want the most for your child? The main thing they will say is, I want my kids to be happy. This is very recent. That sounds like a knee-jerk reaction. I would catch myself saying that. Right. They don't want them to be healthy, right? Well, you could argue we almost take it for granted, right? Maybe that's such a part of U.S. culture now. Exactly. Because your thing about the contraception is how much contraception not only changed female sexuality and couples sexuality,

but it also changed the meaning of the child. When you have 10 versus 1, I tell you, the child has a very different role in the family. Plus, you needed to make sure that kids could live past age 5, and that you were not living with child mortality as a massive phenomenon, and then you can begin to talk about early attachment and all those things. It needed kids who survive for us to develop attachment theories like this with early childhood and look at the child development so completely different.

When people say, I want my kids to be happy, it needs you to know that it's a given day we are healthy. That's after them being healthy, what's the next thing you want? Or you don't want them to give good people decent human beings. That is a framework that also is obvious because the notion is if they feel good about themselves, they will be good to others.

That's the new framework that self-esteem becomes the root of this thing and not values. That's a new paradigm. So when people say they're not happy, we start a long conversation. Before we go there, which I want to come back to, I want to go back to this point of when did that transition take place towards the self-esteem view of the world? Because again, I think back to my parents who are also immigrants. It's just a different world, right? I mean, the world they came from, you never puffed your chest out, your parents never puffed your chest out and told you how wonderful you were and how special you were.

And Bill Marr, who is absolutely hands down one of my favorite commentators on this subject, says, we live in a world today where if a teacher complains that the child is doing something bad in class, the parent attacks the teacher. When I was growing up, if the teacher complained to my parents, I was always assumed to be wrong. Even when I wasn't, by the way, there was sometimes when the teacher was wrong. But there has been this transition towards the child is always right. Self-esteem is the most important thing. What drove that?

I think that what we have is the rise of individualism that goes hand in hand with modern economies and modern psychology. You know, for most of traditional life, basically you lived as part of a community, your sense of identity, your sense of belonging, your sense of continuity, it was all assigned to you. All the big decisions, basically, were made for you. What you were going to do, if you were going to be in the priesthood, in the military, or on the land, and we had very little freedom, but we had a lot more certainty of some sort. And you got your happiness or your sense of well-being from doing the things that were expected from you. That's probably where the values actually of your parents too. If you provided well for your family, if you were able to take care of your loved ones,

if you were an upstanding person in the community, if people respected you and invited you at their table, you were happy. We move to a system in which the individual becomes the center, not the community. And you have a lot more freedom for the first time, but also a lot more uncertainty and a lot more self-doubt. On the other side of self-esteem is self-doubt. And you have to make all the big decisions yourself now. And therefore, you need a lot of certainty to know that it is the right decision.

You're not just part of a legacy that says, this is how we do it. This is the transmission of what this is supposed to mean, how this looks like, whether the protocols, it's all up for you now in this world of innovation. Now, when does it start? I think there's different stages. Romanticism is already a beginning of that too. End of the 19th century, but the 60s, the growth in our psychology, modern psychology, it really is the beginning of the growth movement. This notion that we can change ourselves. The goal is no more to stay connected to

the past and to the tradition and to the transmission. The goal becomes to be able to innovate, to change oneself, to uproot oneself, to leave, to go and be in a whole different part of the country in order to do more. That begins to really change the notion of, when you are a two-year-old, I'm not just expecting you to do by learning and seeing what everybody else is doing. That's a piece of it, but I'm also saying, when you are, I say, use your words, tell me what you want, what do you want to eat, what do you want to wear, because I have a sense that if I give you that notion of knowing thyself and being

able to make clear affirmative statements about it, that this is going to build your sense of self and your sense of confidence. Now this is a Western model, let's be very clear, but that starts from the beginning. I am going to build that individual that becomes my child. Now given that for virtually all of our evolutionary history, that was not the case. So much of our identity was based on our group. We weren't looking to leave our tribe, our relationships with the others around us were at least as important, if not more important than our relationship with our self. And what you're describing is quite a recent phenomenon. I always ask

this question through the lens of, I don't think evolutionary biology teaches us everything, but I always like asking the question first through that lens. For example, when you introduce a new food that's never been around, it can have bad consequences. If our body never, you know, adapted to sugars in the quantities we're consuming them now, it doesn't mean it's bad in an absolute sense. Give us another million years and we might catch up, but we're not going to catch up in 30 years. So similarly, does this pose a challenge put a more negative valence on that? Does it pose a concern for you that we're an uncharted territory with respect to this model? I can answer this on a personal level and I can answer this on a professional level and I can answer this on a professional

level, right? I mean, we do actually know the consequences of how child-waring is creating strengths and vulnerabilities in our generation. It is interesting that we suddenly have a proliferation of work and research on the concept of grit. Why do we research grit today? Because there is this other person. There's an absence of grit in growing up, yeah. Yes, because we have mush and there's a bit too much mush sometimes and so that mush needs to be strengthened into grit. We study things because we start to realize that we need more of them and that we've lost something and where has it gone and what has it morphed into etc. I mean you and I do not

raise our children at all the way we were raised and our parents tried very hard to stay loyal to those who had raised them, but then also to see what was happening around them. Because they were immigrants and that's what immigrant parents often do. They own the past and the future. And on some things they want to actually do what the local culture does, because they find that something that they appreciate and on other things they are a gas that they think I'm going to do it the way I have known it. And I think we have not immigrated but culturally we are also in transition in terms of child wearing. There's a

lot of questions today about these are also class issues. This is a we have to be very mindful of that as well. But there are questions about what does it mean to have a system in which there is one or two children for two parents who often are disconnected from their grandparents, live far away, have full time jobs and need to assume all those roles. And if you add a pandemic to it and the confinement, you get a real picture of what those stressors are like. What does it mean when we solicit the opinions, the feelings, the thoughts of the young ones? Because we believe that it is important for them to know them, to be able to communicate and to be able to expect that adults will change the plan to accommodate to the will and the feelings of those little ones. And we take it for granted.

Every second book today is not written to make the life of the parent better or easier. Easier is a better word. It is written through the lens of what does the child need. Now the books until the 60s, even Spock is the real transition point here, where all written child-raaring books are another good entrance into cultural changes. And this is more recent than evolutionary biology. This is just a few decades where the books before, where basically what we thought was, is that a child, it was like the Hussau view, right?

A child comes into the world, and your role is to shepherd this child through the pre-established stages of development that are universal, and you just have to help the kid go through those stages. It doesn't really change much if you do this or if you do that. That's how child development was conceptualized. And it moved to a notion where child development is much more flexible and much more responsive to the circumstances and to the kind of input

that the parents put in. And so now, if you listen to Mozart while you're pregnant, you could actually maybe develop some musical taste in utero. And this is completely non-biological. This is completely cultural. And what I do with my kid, other people who I leave my child in the care of need to be able to do, so we need mass-reproducible child-waring techniques. This is a very important shift, for example, in terms of child development that is a preset number of stages that I'm just there and the kid goes through them versus child development that is in the hands of the person who raises the child.

What is the impact of that then to the patient who arrives in your office? Who is a product of that child rearing? The impact is how the narratives get created. Who is responsible for my own happiness? Why am I unhappy? If you want to take the unhappy presenting issue, have I always been unhappy? How did people respond to my unhappiness? How alone did I feel with my unhappiness? In an environment where you expect your parents

to be attuned to you, if they are not, you will experience your aloneness, your isolation, your emotional disconnection, very different than in an environment where the attunement of your parents is really not part of your expectation on an emotional level of what parents are. You get that attunement maybe from your grandmother or from your auntie, from other parental figures who can be kind and sweet because your parent is there to make the rule and to make the discipline and to shape you. That's two different models. So, I keep that model in my head when a person comes in.

And I also know where they're coming from and what were their expectations? What did you think your parents? What did you want that they would do or whoever were the people that were in charge of you? And how much do you blame them? Look, I was working yesterday with a son who feels that his father has been always critical of him, that he can never please him enough, that he could never do good enough for him. And I was thinking, a hundred years ago, would there have been such a sum? Yes.

But he would have probably never thought to have said anything, right? Well, he wouldn't have had a therapist to go talk about this with, and to think that the father has to come and apologize to him. And thinking, this is very interesting. The father on some level does think he did something challenging. But the parent of a hundred years ago, with F.Sett, I did the best I could. My role is not to pop you up. My role is not to make you feel good about yourself.

My role is to make you into a responsible person who takes your role seriously and does for others that what is expected from you. That's my role. My role is not to make you happy. These conversations take place all the time at this moment because there are generational differences and cultural differences. I mean cultural as in the conception of what is a parent? What is the role of a parent? What do we expect should happen between parents and children, little ones and older ones? It is changes non-stop, it moves, it moves, it moves, especially with the father. One of the biggest changes that has taken place in modern family, Western families, is the rise of the role of the father, not just as a material provider, but the father as an emotional unit, which coincides with the woman going

to work as well, so that they can both be material providers and emotional caregivers. This one to me is very interesting. I'm saying a lot of things in us. Well, this particular issue around the role of the father, because I think back to when I grew up, I can harken to countless discussions between my parents where there would be an argument over why wasn't my dad ever watching me at a sporting event or going to a parent teacher night or doing anything that involved being a part of my life. The reality of it was, he worked 14 hours a day, six days a week, and on the seventh day

he worked maybe eight hours. There was simply no time for him to do those things. Frankly, incredulous that he would even be asked to do such a thing. But he was at your wedding. Yes, he was at my wedding. Right, was he at your graduation? Not high school, but college and medical school. Of course not high school.

He had a few major dates where he knew the father shows up there. And his point was, I am doing the thing that I am supposed to be doing. This business of working, he would say, I don't do this for me, I do this for you. That's right. And you can imagine that he was an extension

of the culture he grew up in, where it was harsh. I mean, it was very harsh. I'm sure there were many people my age who grew up in that environment and are now being confronted as the ones to change that, as the ones that will not simply be able to mirror the environment they grew up in. Right, but first of all, you dad is still the majority

of fathers on this planet today. That notion that you work to take care of your family, when you work all these hours, it's for them. And you come to a few major events, not because you don't care about the others, but you have not received a license to think that the others are as important. Isn't it fascinating that the high school graduation is not considered something where the father should be at? This is not things that your father decided alone. This is totally handed down, passed down through generations. Now comes your generation and you will attend more things.

You will attend more games, more birthdays, more graduations, you have a license, a collective cultural license to think of more things as places where you are expected to be at, be, not be from that, for what is he doing here? Where shouldn't he be at work editing instead? But there is still a lot, a lot, a lot of other places where mom will dominate culturally and people expect her to be there and not you. It's funny you say something there about why is he here. I used to have this reaction when I was growing up and I would go to my friends' homes and their dads would be home for dinner

and their dads would be home for dinner. Oh. And their dads would be around on weekends. And my reaction was not, why don't I have this? My reaction was, why are their dads so lazy? What is it with these lazy men who come home at five or six o'clock and have dinner and then watch TV. Why aren't they working? This is really how I felt and I just couldn't understand this idea that a guy would sit around on a Saturday and mow the lawn and drink a beer and watch some sports.

Peter, but that's not just how you felt, that's how you were taught. And that's how your father was taught because he needed some way to justify why he was working himself to the ground. If you want to get a man to work day and night, you have to make him feel that this is what real men do. This is what responsible fathers look like. This is what people who are driven do. This is the name of your podcast, the drive. If not,

you need to create a consonance between the behavior and the belief and those are cultural systems. And then the sun, in order to accept that his dad is never there, he needs to internalize that system too. Because otherwise he would say, I miss my dad, rather than, I'm proud. I have a real hard working father. He's never there, but he's the best father, because that's how I've learned it. I've put it together like this. And then when I see that guy who's home at six o'clock, I'm thinking, not serious. Not serious. Not serious. Let's talk about these narratives because I'm very interested in these sort of intra and

interrelational narratives that come in and out of your office. There's a form of psychotherapy. I'm sure that only deals with the relationship with oneself. And undoubtedly, there must be a lot of good that comes from that, but you don't view it as a vacuum. You don't really think that it is possible to simply better one's life by bettering your relationship with yourself. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. And I would say that a very framework of bettering your relationship with yourself is in itself a cultural narrative. That's a construct. That's exactly what happened in the last 50 years. Suddenly,

this thing, bettering your relationship with yourself, feeling good about myself, becomes an organizing principle rather than feeling good about how I act towards others is my organizing principle, or feeling good about how I stand below others is my organizing principle, or feeling good about how I stand below God is my organizing principle. So I think there's an emphasis. Nobody just looks at itself and doesn't see it the relationships to others, but there's an emphasis. And one, my emphasis is the constant dual track

between the intra-personal and the inter-personal, between what's happening inside and how what is happening inside is affecting my relationship with others. I can't think about one without thinking about the other because I don't fundamentally believe that one can know oneself without knowing oneself in relationships to other. Now, that is a construct, too. It happens to be the one that I work and think by.

That is not a truth, that just is the way that I organize relational thinking. I think of people as relational beings. When you talk about your father and especially when you talk about the way that you look at these other men, to me this is a beautiful example of how you say this is how I felt and I know that you're feeling sits on a cultural message that the narratives, the frames with which we interpret and give meaning and give value that the things that are happening to us, they don't just come from us.

They come from a combination of the collective manufacturing and the personal responses to it. It's always both at. Is that clear? It actually is, and as an outsider, one of the most difficult aspects of what you do must be changing a narrative. Because when somebody comes in with a narrative, it seems almost hard-wired, which is not to say they were born with it. Of course, this gets back to what's predetermined and what is not. But when a person shows up in your office, it's often in the same way that they show up to the doctor. Very few people come to the doctor when everything is perfect to say, hey, I'm just here for some

preventative care. I feel so good. I just want to make sure I feel this good in 20 years. What can you do for me? Similarly, most people aren't showing up in your office saying, I've never felt better. My relationships are amazing. I want to keep this going. So there's a negative selection for people who walk into your life, which is on some level they must have a narrative that has failed, that has led the mystery, and either a narrative about themselves, a narrative about others, and probably more likely a combination of these. Those narratives are probably often quite entrenched. So how do you go about challenging them? You're right. Both medicine today and psychotherapy are problem-ridden contexts.

They're problem-ridden narratives. If you don't have a problem, there's no reason to come to me or to you. That's right. If you don't have a diagnosis code, I can't even charge your insurance company for you to be here. Same here. So that is a cultural construct. That is a narrative. So people come to therapy to talk about their problems. They don't go to therapy if things are fine. This is a very important piece of information, by the way, for couples therapy, because couples therapy is in a bind. Relationship therapy is couples therapy, because couples therapy is in a bind. Relationship therapy is a, but especially couples therapy is in a bind, because on the one hand,

so many people come way too late. Way too late. Stuff has been so entrenched, and you kind of want to say, why did you come five years ago? On the other end, if they would come when things are still okay or somewhat okay on occasion, then what's the problem that you are already going to therapy now? This is fascinating. It's like you can't go if it's good, but then when you go when it's really bad, you should have come when it thinks we're really better. Okay, so this is one thing. I think what you've just articulated is probably the core of a lot of my work. It is not the core of old psychotherapy work.

I think there are different ways to enter the story. What I mean by the story is the life of people. I believe that our relationships are a story. We tell stories about our relationships are a story. We tell stories about our relationships. And I think that I remember in the first episodes of Where Should We Begin, I said, when people come to me into my office, I was trying to explain to the people

I was producing the podcast with, what is my couple's work? And I said, people come to me with a story. At the end of the first session, the only goal of the first session is for them to live with another story or with a sense that there can be another story. I was about to say, your first goal strikes me

as far too ambitious for one session. I would think even casting doubt, casting doubt on that narrative and suggesting there may be an alternative one would be an amazing outcome for two hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Doubt and hope, an enormous part of my work is to reframe. I think that this is an amazing piece. Why? Because it's not just an intellectual thing in my head. It's because I think that words shape the experience. The way I tell the story is going to create the way I feel about the story. And then it's going to create the way I therefore will act upon the story that I think there is. If I talk with you now and in my mind I have

this notion, he doesn't really care about me, he doesn't really value me, he's just doing this to be nice. He would have stopped this an hour ago if he could. I have no idea, I think he disagrees with everything he has said. He really doesn't think I have anything interesting to say. He's so sorry he invited me. I mean, this instantly feels my belly. So this is not just a thought, this is not just a feeling, this is also an embodied experience. So in my belly now, I have this knot, you know, and what am I going to do now?

And I just feel so bad about myself and I don't know how to talk to him and then it's going to influence how I'm going to talk next. And now I'm going to start to talk all too long and too much because I'm actually feeling unsure and my insecurity makes me talk more and I'm rambling and I'm all over the place and he's even more now thinking that I am not interesting and This could all go into my head right now my narrative that one phrase Becomes my experience and my experience becomes the motor for my behavior and the motor for my behavior the motor for my behavior, and the motor for my behavior is going to land me probably in a place that is often the exact opposite place of where I actually want to go. That's a narrative. Now if I sit here and I think Peter is really happy we're doing this. He's been waiting for this for so long, and I think he's, you know,

he had a doubt for a moment, he was wondering, should we should we not? And I think he's, you know, he had a doubt for a moment. He was wondering, should we should we not? And I think he's feeling good that we did it. That is going to completely change my entire experience. Now, maybe this example isn't a great one, but does it matter which of those is reality? But the reality is the story you tell. It's the subjective reality. Yeah, your story is independent of how I feel.

That's right. It's a projection. It's what I imagine. It's how I've internalized it. It's how I think my mother did or did not love me. Yes, the interesting thing is, is it reality completely? Because it's the one that is dictating my life. That's why it is reality. Not because there's a factual truth to this. So the reframe is not that this is more true.

When I teach my students, I say, when you reframe the only way that you know, it's a good reframe, it is because the other person bites on it, takes it, likes it, says, oh, I prefer to live by this view. Your father wasn't neglecting you because he was away 14 hours a week. Your father did this because he thought that this is his total devotion to his family, is to actually never be there. Is the ultimate presence and devotion. Now do we have a different feeling about you, Dad, and about what happened to you?

I'm just playing with this here, right? Of course. I suspect there are so many patterns that you see in these narratives. And like if you think of all of the negatively valence emotions, depression, anxiety, sadness, anger, all of the things that can not just hurt a person but hurt their relationships. I'm curious as to what are some of the common themes that you see around those and how you begin to chip away at the armor of a person's firmly held beliefs that are no longer serving them. Let's go back to your word before about wordiness.

What I just played out here with you are probably two of the most important narratives. The first narrative is the narrative of being unwanted, fundamentally unwanted, not just because born, not wanted, but unwanted, unloved, uncair't forned, undervalued, unappreciated, unseen, un and something after. And I can bring this from my childhood, I can bring this from the way that I grew up. I can bring this from the way that other kids in my classroom never ever looked at me. There's loads of places where this emerged and then grew inside of me and becomes the lens through which I see myself in the world. The second narrative, where I think, hmm, you think it's okay.

It may not yet be where it wants it to be, but I'm not in a state of self-condemnation. I actually am looking for the appreciation. I'm looking for the acceptance. I'm looking and experiencing that acceptance that I am worthy. There's a reason I'm here today, all of that. I think those two are probably the most fundamental of our narratives. And they are rooted in trauma and in neglect

and in having had too much of something or too little of something, right? This is pretty much where trauma sits. To me, that's the dominant. And it will influence my anger, my sadness, my loneliness, my sense of, shall I tell him what I think or what I feel, do people even care? Does it matter?

Would they miss me if I wasn't around? My despair, all of these bigger pieces, you can see the way that they are interconnected to this fundamental, is there a reason for me to be here on this planet for being alive? Do people think of me when I'm not there? Do I exist inside others? Do they want good for me versus the opposite of all of that? To me, they're not that complicated. And then the stories, thousands of stories, multitude of different stories can be brought back to these two fundamental pieces. Similar

with, do I experience a sense of agency and control over my life? Can I make changes? Or am I completely at the mercy of? I have very little power. I live with a sense of powerlessness. Nothing I will do will make a difference. Those two are directly connected to the first two, by the way. Is there anything adaptive about that narrative? Because so much of the trauma response is initially adaptive. And again, if we use the childhood trauma in the case of your mother

We could probably look at many of her responses once she survived these concentration camps and Say, wow, even though through the lens we would look back We would say those were really maladaptive behaviors. They actually had a very adaptive Root or origin. They protected her in a way. They shielded her from subsequent pain. In the examples you just gave of feeling unworthy or unwanted, what's the adaptation there?

I don't understand how that is even at an emotional level. I'm not disagreeing with it. I'm just trying to understand what the adaptation is and why it's so, because usually when something is so prominent, there's a reason for it, right? Or at least that's my teleologic explanation. Of course, with the same information that we just shared, I could do a narrative analysis, an attachment analysis.

This is one lens, one reading of this thing. So for example, I'll give you a person, there's actually two personal examples that just came to me. One I probably have, I don't even know, one if I've ever thought of it, but it is, I sit with a patient one day who is also a child of Holocaust survivors like me and he's telling me by age 8 I made sure my kids can take a train and be on a bus and all of that and he says to me I'm very protective of my children and I'm thinking to myself you're so lucky you're talking to me because I too have that same distortion protective isective is not, I make sure that I'm not

leaving my eight-year-old alone on a plane. I sent my seven-year-old alone on a plane, because in my parents' book, to be protective was not to be there for you. To be protective was to make sure that you would know to survive if they were not there. And it was the way I was raised and in many ways I did pieces of that with my own children as well. It's like I wanted them to be able to manage on their own in case I'm not there. Manage on their own really meant survive. We didn't use those words but that's what the legacy was underneath this.

My parents also, without ever saying this, but told enough stories that let you think that in the camps the vulnerable died. When my children exhibit the vulnerability, it scares me so much, it did, because I've worked a lot on this, that I sometimes wouldn't know how to just respond in a simple, basic, empathetic way. I was so scared, I wanted to toughen them up, that they would say to me, why can't they

joke now with me, that if they were not with, what is it in America? In 42 degree fever, they could go and do whatever they needed to do. If you're not dying, there is no reason to stay in your bed. I had that mentality that if you have to be really, really, really sick, do not go to school, and things like that. And now they laugh. But I know that they may probably moments when they wish I would just say, come, I'll put you a cold compress on your head, which I did too, but I didn't do it from that place of, oh my little one, you know, I was more, okay, that's what you need to do in order to get you back out.

I was great driven if you want, in that sense. So that was adaptive. It was adaptive for her, and then it was no longer adaptive for me, because we're not in the camps. And I don't need to raise them to survive as if we were in the Holocaust, because we're not in the camps. And I don't need to raise them to survive as if we're in the Holocaust, because we're not in the Holocaust. And that is the most important piece around trauma work, is to understand that your reaction is the reaction as if the past is happening right now. And in fact, it isn't happening right

now. And to be able to then create the ground underneath you, to put a reality, a different way of experiencing yourself, that is not fed by all the horrible things that happen to you then, that is a part of the trauma healing work. And that transition, I think, for anyone who's gone through it, it's really quite a process because it requires pausing. And for many people who are in adaptation mode, there's no room for pausing.

Once you have an adaptation to cope with trauma, it selects. It's reinforcing itself. It's making you stronger and stronger and pushing you further and further. And you might miss the fact that it's become maladaptive. The transition from it being adaptive to maladaptive can be so far in the rearview mirror you've entirely missed it. And I think this is where this idea of the relationships with others starts to become the mirror through which you can actually be confronted with something that says, hey, there's something wrong here.

Yes, this worked for you before when you had no other responsibility. This maybe worked for you when you didn't have a family. But now that you have a family, this is no longer adaptive. Yes, I used the word generally. It was useful then. You badly needed it, but it's not serving you now. Your reality has changed and you're still holding an umbrella even though there is no rain. Another way of saying it is a lot of people, this is if you go to the survivors, but I think

you can translate it, often felt that it was very difficult for them to get close to their children. They had lost children, they had lost parents, they had lost siblings. How on what basis will I allow myself to get close to anybody or love somebody again? Now, here they had these kids, but they couldn't get close to them because if I don't get too close, then I won't be in such pain when I lose you. Now, it didn't keep the dead closer. It didn't create a good relationship with the children who constantly felt like there is nothing I can do to win your love, because I will never replace your dead ones.

This idea that when you've had loss and massive disruptions and injured attachments, that you protect yourself by not coming too close to the other people. Now I'm going to go back to your original question. It may even have been adaptive for you, but in your relationship with your child, it's been a major lack. So, intra-personally, I understand it. Inter-personally, it's problematic. It's not adaptive, inter-personally. Hence, I need the parent, or whoever is on this side, to understand the effect of how you protect yourself on your child. And I need you, the child, to understand that what your parent is doing isn't actually

because of who you are, but it's because of what happened to them. Did you get this? This could be a couple now, too. I just did it with parent and child. I completely get it, and I now want to ask a question about the ability of the person who is able to make that transition versus that who is not. So if you look at a hundred women with breast cancer who all receive comparable standard of care, depending on the stage at which they're diagnosed, it's very clear to predict how many will live and how many will not. And truthfully, it really comes down only to the biology of their cancer. And I know that's a very unpopular thing to say, but I really do not believe that the person who lived wanted it more, and the person who died gave up. I've seen too many people who fought like hell who died, and I've seen too many miserable sons of bitches who didn't give a damn who lived.

So the reality of it is, a survivorship in cancer comes down to a lot of luck and a lot of biology of the tumor and things like that. In your line of work, and what you're just describing, very specifically for this transition, that person who goes from having traits and narratives and coping mechanisms that protected them at a time and are now either hurting them or hurting their relationships. Why are some people able to do the hard work that's necessary to make the change and others not? What are the predictive factors of that?

I think this is one of the most difficult questions. And why the same family? Did one person land here? And the other person with the same circumstances, took all of that. For this person, it became everything that drove them. And for this person, it became everything that broke them. It is a question I ask myself so often. I can refund it, but honestly, I do not know.

It's one of the mysteries. It's multifactorial, is for sure. It's not the same thing each time. Your example is so nice and clean. And I should clarify in my example, I think there are lots of things the patient can do. I think their nutrition matters, exercise matters, management of stress. I think the point I wanted to my example, I think there are lots of things the patient can do. I think their nutrition matters, exercise matters, management of stress. I think the point I wanted to make is there will, I don't believe, matters.

Whereas I wonder how much will power or desire to improve by itself is the critical ingredient here, or if in times that's insufficient. But personally, will doesn't just exist inside one person. But you have one said, maybe I'm wrong on this, but didn't you once say that the key to couples therapy is the moment that each partner is less interested in what the other one is doing wrong and more interested in how they can be better or something to that effect? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Now I come to therapy and I've decided that I do want to talk about what I have been

doing. Or I want to talk about the ways in which I have stayed far. Or the ways in which I've never said to you, I love you. Or the ways in which I even tell you about how I've lost so many people important in my life, I don't really know what it means to love. I don't trust that when I love it's there to stay. I actually even have developed a view that when I love someone, he dies or they just, if I love something, it breaks, it destroys, it disappears. This can go very far, this notion, right? This is, now my will, I'm coming to talk to you

about this whole part. But my will now, the moment I have said something, is now public domain. And now it will all depend. The shape of my will from here on is going to be in part what I'm holding and in part how you are responding. If your response to me is, now you're telling me all of this? Why? Because your wife is about to leave you? Is it because I put you in an ultimatum? Is because your son hasn't talked to you in two years? Now you're telling me? That instantly is going to do something to my goodwill, let's even put it like that. My ownership, my responsibility, my vulnerability, my just putting myself out there. If instead you say, nothing, and I'm like, are you hearing this?

How are you receiving this? I need to sit with this for a while. Thank you, but I do need to sit with this. I'm not prepared to just say, I forgive you. It takes a little more for me. Or number three, I say, everything you've just said was all about you, and I appreciate that, but you haven't said much about how you think that this has had an effect on me. And I need to know that you have a sense of what that did to me. You're being absent or

critical or belligerent or violent or you know too little or too much of something. Version 4, I really appreciate you're saying this. Then this by the way can be in one session or over four months, right? But in the next version, I say, I've been wanting to hear you talk about that. I've done my own work, and I know that a part of your distance from me is because of what happened to you, and that it's not because I had an A or a B or a C, that this is not of any of this.

All four responses will shape the will. This will is not, you know, one fixed what you call the predetermined gene. This will is completely malleable and will change and express itself differently at the mercy of the response of the other person. And obviously why all of this matters is something you and I have spoken about in the past, which is everything we're talking about factors into longevity, not just in sort of a biochemical sense where in theory, if your relationships are better, your hormone levels would be better and cortisol levels would be lower and all of these things would be better. But in just a more fundamental stark manner, what advantage is there to living

longer if your relationships are poor and the quality of your relationships, therefore determines the quality of your life? I'm a full convert to that. That's something that five years ago I would have never given a thought to. I mean, was not even in my ballpark of thought. And today, of course, I believe it emphatically. To me, one of the things that's been interesting is learning that if that is true, there needs to be a new comfort in sitting with uncomfortable emotions, that the ability to sit in discomfort must be a new trait. If I use myself as an example, historically, anytime I felt uncomfortable, I had a tool to numb it, to get away from it, to distract myself from it.

So anything that I didn't like emotionally, I had a very quick bandaid for such that I never had to sit in discomfort. And what would you do? It would depend, but it was usually, it could be anything from binge purchasing watches, exercising obsessively outbursts of anger, which sounds paradoxical, you wouldn't think of that as a tool to numb discomfort. But of course, as I talked about on the podcast with Terry real, anger

is very transiently quite numbing. In the immediate moment of an outburst of anger, it actually squelches the feeling of inadequacy and loss of control and sadness. But if you want to move into this quality of life where now all of a sudden your relationships are important, you realize very quickly there are times when you have to be uncomfortable and you have to sit in that. A psychologist, Susan Davis or something, she gave a TED talk. David. Yeah. And she gave a TED talk and I really liked it because she said something to the effect

of, she said it much more eloquently, but the gist of it is the admission you have to pay to a meaningful life is being uncomfortable, is being able to sit in uncomfortable emotions. And she made a very funny comment in the talk, which was, if you tell me you don't want to feel blank, blank being some uncomfortable emotion, then I tell you you have a dead person's goals.

I probably saw that talk three or four years ago. It was very profound to me. How does that factor into your work? Couldn't agree with her more. Susan David was a guest on my training platform on sessions recently. And when she says it, I couldn't agree with her more, but it's a very basic thought of anybody who does psychotherapy. Anybody who does psychotherapy, as I understand psychotherapy, my goal is not to make you happy,

to make it look like you never going to have any of these feelings. Because that person that came in saying, I'm unhappy, would love to not have those feelings sometimes. Sometimes, not always, huh? So, the idea that this is what you feel, and that doesn't mean you have to act on it or do something or chase them away or make it disappear. This is your experience in this moment. Now, we can do a lot of things with this experience. We can understand it, we can name it, first of all, we can name it, we can name it first of all, we can name it, we can frame it, we can understand it, we can put it in context, we can celebrate it, we can write about it, we can physicalize it, we can do a lot of things with this experience, these feelings that

you are having. And you need to understand that sometimes they will just come through. They will pass through you and then they will get out to the other side. You don't have to squelch them. You don't have to judge them. You don't have to be contentious of them. I don't say it in those words. This is the idea. You don't have to numb them. Because you were numbing them, not just because you were numbing them. You were numbing because you were judging because you didn't think you should be feeling those things because what's wrong with you that you have those things. So there was the content in it as well.

There's a lot of things very, very, very, very quick before you've even gone to buy your next watch or whatever thing you were doing. So sitting with your inner life and remaining somewhat curious and kind to your inner life and some call it today self-compassion, but sometimes it's not necessarily always compassionate, but at least it's not contentious and judgmental of your inner life, or despairing of it, or terrified by it, that it will never go away, that it will never leave you, that this is your state forever now, etc. This is psychotherapy, this is individual therapy. For me, I'm going to really put myself wrong. In the kind of work I do, this is the essence of a lot of the individual work. Fascinatingly, when I see somebody alone and then I get to see them with their partner and now I see how

all those things play out not just inside of you but in between the two of you. It's a whole other story. It's like I've just spent time in one room of the house and I didn't even know there was a whole annex to that house. And this is when you understand the difference between the relational thinking, which Terry, of course, is one of the main teachers of, and the individual perspective. And I think that the real importance today is for most of us to be able to not just live in one. The mistake of a lot of the systemic thinkers was that they stopped thinking about the individual and the internal life. It was all systems thinking. That didn't go. And the mistake sometimes of the lack in people who have just an individual perspective is that they're not looking like you talk about the gene in context.

That integration is where the nexus of my work sits. Would you agree with the following statement? So a very, very close friend of mine, Jim Kochalka. You know what's very weird, Peter? I'm used to hearing what you think about what I say in this time. It's like you move on to the next question. So I'm kind of left with that. It made me think of this other thing, right? It made me think of this, this idea that I've been really internalizing.

And I'm curious if you agree with it. A friend of mine, Jim Kuchelka, who's a wonderful psychologist, though I've never worked with him in that capacity. He's a friend, said something to me once of the effect, you can't believe everything you think. you can't believe everything you think, you can't believe everything you feel, the mind is a very dangerous organ. I had never contemplated that until he said it.

I had contemplated the first half of it because that's what mindfulness meditation teaches you, that you can't believe everything you think, right? As you separate yourself from your consciousness, you begin to realize that you have a constant internal monologue, and it is not the same as you, you are not your thoughts. But it's when he layered on this second piece, which is, and you can't even believe everything you feel.

And then he pointed out, basically, look, the mind can be very dangerous sometimes. And it then takes me back to things that you've said, which is a lot of these narratives that we have about ourselves and others are surprisingly well-worn, and they're not novel, even though for any individual in the throes of pain they feel incredibly unique. No one else could possibly feel the way I feel right now. I completely agree with him because the mind creates narratives. It's a different way of

saying the same. When you say you're not your thoughts, but subjectively. It's a shorthand, yeah. Right. At the same time, I could say, but subjectively, you manufacture your thoughts and your thoughts define you. But it's not immutable. These are constructs. What I mean by construct is its creations and creations can be changed with new creations. You can't totally believe what you feel because sometimes your mind is making you believe the feeling. For example, your mind can make you believe that you feel at this point nothing. A, you can feel nothing because you're frozen. B, you can feel nothing because you're trying very hard not to show anybody how upset you

are. Three, you're trying to make it look like you're not attached to this person at all and if you want to break up with me, no big deal, I was never that in love with you anyway. And this is the mind trying to pretend that it knows my feelings and it wants to convince me that I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt at all. And the more a person says something like that to me

and the more I want to go and hold them and press right there on those places those bony handles were so much of that sad fragile hurt wound sits and then just I've had people in my room where the tears are literally streaming down their face and they're saying, I'm not hurt, and I'm looking at them and I'm saying the fracture inside. One part of you doesn't know the other part of you, in literal terms. Your eyes don't know that they're tearing. Your heart doesn't know that it's aching. This is our work.

To me, this makes sense, and it stands in a bit of a contrast to, I think, something that Susan David once said, which is, the key to resilience is the radical acceptance of all emotion. And do you see those as compatible beliefs? The key to resilience is the radical acceptance of all our emotions. So, to me, there's a lot of truth in that statement, but it presumes a certain definition of the word resilience. And it is a view of resilience as internal traits, personality traits. And that's a very individualistic perspective on resilience, like you are a resilient person. You know how to face adversity. There are many

definitions of resilience actually. This is one, but resilience is also our ability to face adversity in a way that allows us to rebound and then to reengage with life. That would be when I say my parents were resilient, that would be another definition of resilient. It wasn't about just the things inside of them. It was a combination of what I said, the collective support, the community, the people who helped them, the luck, you know, what they had experienced before the war, how they grew up, you know, lots of different things. A collective definition of resilience is our ability to tap into the collective resources. It's actually not what's inside of you. It's what's around you.

That too is resilience. Sometimes resilience is actually the ability to know and to go and ask for help. I'll give you a very beautiful example that my husband was telling me recently about a young man. Basically, I forgot the details now, but it's something about how guilty he feels. I wish I will not mess up. It's like telling a joke when you're not arrived to the end, right? The man feels tremendous guilt because he actually went to call the police at the neighbor's house because of the violence

that was in the house. And he has carried this as the ultimate betrayal all the time. What he didn't take into consideration is that it actually prevented the father from doing something even worse. And I forgot what that thing was. When the therapist just said to him,

what you think was about how could I run out of the house at that moment and leave my mother with my father? You actually, by calling the police at that moment, were able to bring other people in that could do more than what you could do as a nine-year-old. And what you did was one of the most loving things you could have done for your mother. Now, that's a reframe. Now, is it true? It only depends if the person bites. If they take that story in and that story replaces another story

and gives them a completely different sense of what they did and what it meant and what the consequences were. Therefore, it is true. Not because it has any truth in absolutes, that's what I thought was the worst, actually, was probably the kindest. I have not been that bad person. I was young, and I tried to do this, and blah, blah, blah, it goes on like that. That is a different description of resilience, you see, and a different description of the power of narrative in resilience, than just to see it as it's the radical acceptance of all emotions. I think it's a trueism, there's a truth in that statement, but it doesn't capture the way that I like to define resilience. It's probably a better way of saying.

What problem about the human condition are you still most curious about? You're a person who you know is endlessly curious and is constantly evolving. What is the next frontier for you clinically? I could answer it in topic and I can answer it in yesterday I did a session. At the end of the session I said to the person, it took us three years to get here. I feel like we finally, it's not true, but it is true. It's both end. You know, the one hand, no, we've had many very important sessions. But on the other end, there was a level at which we got that I thought, man, something

is take time. I'm sometimes impatient, and I sometimes forget. It's like a painter till the end of your life, the next painting will be something different than the one before. It's like a session needs to be something different than the one before. There are times when I think, what more can we talk about? And then we just open and stumble on something. So in that sense, it's less about what I want to learn about human condition as how deep can I go, how deep can we go in a conversation, in understanding the fast continent that is the human being.

And then there is the thing you said before, which really is a question that fascinates me, which is, why this one yes and that one no? I'm very intrigued by that. And by the way, that is a different definition of resilience. The vast majority of people who could, and then this question that you can ask yourself too, that really had conditions of life that could have left them in very dire circumstances and who actually turned those things around and became driven and ambitious and creative and successful in the multitudes of ways that people can be successful. And I think one of the things that I always ask and I think that that isn't piece of

vision, it's, was there a teacher, a coach, a neighbor, a family member or friend that saw that thing that nobody else was seeing, not because they didn't care about you, but because they were too busy with their own craziness. And the person saw them and they could let that person help them. Mentor them, teach them, connect them, give them the first job, you name them. That piece seems to be a big, big, big difference between those who are living more richer lives, maybe is the best way of saying it, and those who just struggle remain at the center of their life all the time. That doesn't mean that the other ones don't struggle.

They were able to put some of the pieces together. And I find that an incredible thing, that it sometimes hinges really on, it is about connection, it is about relationship, but it's not just a relationship with your parents or it's someone in your ecosphere that put that hand out. And you took it, it's not just because there are many times people put the hand out but the people don't take it or they take it and then they let it go and then they drown. They held it. They held it when there was absolutely overtly no reason to want to hold on to it. I find that a very important moment in our life. And many of us have had moments like this. As there I want to thank you for sharing so much today and for all of your work.

It's touched the lives of many people myself included. And I hope that there are a number of people who maybe aren't familiar with you, who have become more familiar with you now. And maybe people who are familiar with you through one very narrow lens, who can now appreciate sort of the breadth of your, both your interest and your expertise. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics

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