The Rich Roll Podcast - Lori Gottlieb: Stories From A Therapist In Therapy

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Let's talk about talking to someone. Personally, I've been in and out of therapy for more than two decades. Over the last couple years, I've been deeply immersed in a weekly therapist-led men's group — intimate game-changing sessions that have helped me work through deep-seated stuff that lives and breathes beyond 12-step. We're only as sick as our secrets. The path to healing and personal growth requires openly sharing our hidden struggles. Bearing our vulnerabilities. And allowing others to identify the blind spots that elude us. My point is that we all need help. And as today's guest will openly admit, even therapists benefit from therapy. A Los Angeles-based psychotherapist, journalist and author, Lori Gottlieb writes the weekly ‘Dear Therapist’ column for The Atlantic. She contributes to several prominent publications including The New York Times. And she recurs as a mental health expert on a variety of national television and radio outlets including, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The CBS Early Show, Dr. Phil, CNN, and NPR’s ‘Fresh Air.' In addition, Lori is the author of three books: Marry Him,Stick Figure and her latest, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, a fun and highly relatable romp behind the scenes of a therapist’s world. What it’s like to be a therapist. And what it’s like to be a therapist in therapy. A hit that spent many weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, the book was listed as People magazine’s ‘Book of the Week.' O magazine named it one of the ‘Best Nonfiction Books of 2019.' And it's currently being developed into a TV series with Eva Longoria. This is a conversation about what happens when a therapist — someone specifically trained to understand what makes people do what they do — experiences her own personal crisis. But it’s also a broader conversation about mental well-being in general. About the benefits of therapy. And why we can all better ourselves by talking to a professional. In addition, we discuss the psychological impact of comparing ourselves to others. Healthy and unhealthy parenting practices. Repairing ruptured relationships. And many other topics. I should note that I did my very best to resist making this a personal therapy session (not easy!). As a final thought: if you are struggling in the darkness, don't wait to talk to someone. If you're afraid to shed light on that thing — whether it be anger, shame, addiction, resentment, depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts — don't wait to talk to someone. Don't wait until it's a crisis. Find the courage. Reach out. raise your hand. Help awaits you. You can watch our entire conversation on YouTube. Enjoy! Rich

You know, I talk about that tension in the book between wanting your therapist to be a human being who has life experience. You know, nobody wants to go and talk to a robot or a brick wall. But on the other hand, I think there's that tension because people want their therapist to have worked everything out to kind of be ahead of them. You have to really get to know somebody, and sometimes you have to help them get to know themselves. You know, a lot of people come in and they think that they know themselves and they don't necessarily know some key pieces of information about themselves, you know, what makes them tick or how they're relating to people. So that's really important. And I think the other thing is sometimes it's a case of the person doesn't really know him or herself very well, but sometimes it's a case of getting to unknow yourself, meaning you have this idea about

yourself that is holding you back and you need to unknow that because it's limiting you. I always say to people, you need to compare yourself to yourself that, you know, where were you before and where have you come? That's Lori Gottlieb, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Good people of planet Earth, how are you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. So I just got back from Utah. I was there last weekend participating in an endurance challenge called 29-0-29.

You probably heard me talk about it on the podcast in the past. It was an absolute blast. And the challenge was simple. Basically, you hike up this mountain, Snow Basin, the ski resort. It's a 2.3 mile hike with a pretty steep grade that went between 20 and 30% at times for an elevation gain of 2,300 feet. Then you take the gondola down and then you go back up the mountain and you do that 13 times until you have accomplished, achieved the elevation, the altitude of Mount Everest.

Now, here's the thing. On paper, it sounds very doable. I'm telling you, this was much more difficult than I anticipated, but super fun. I was there with a bunch of good friends. This event was created by Jesse Itzler, who's been on the podcast before, who invited me to participate. And it was super fun, really hard, like I said, but great to spend time with my fellow endurance junkie buddies, Billy Yang, Chris Howarth, my coach, Rob Moore, who's a good buddy of mine, who's qualified for Kona and Colin O'Brady, the guy who just pulled a sled across Antarctica unaided. So it was really nice to just connect

with those human beings as well as connect with myself. And it was a great reminder that that's what life is about. You know, I'm wired for this kind of stuff. It's what makes me happy. And it's been a while since I've done anything like that. And it just felt good. Like I felt like myself again. But I think the most inspiring aspect of this whole endeavor

was bearing witness to the many people who really pushed themselves to try to do something extraordinary. There were about 250, I think, competitors, participants, and many of these people had never embarked upon an endurance adventure before. This was like their first thing. And even if you're going at a good clip, like at the pace that we were going at, every ascent still took two hours. So 27 hours, I think it took me total to accomplish this. And for most of these people, it took them much longer. There were so many people that didn't sleep.

They went through the night to make the 36 hour time cutoff and really met their maker and pushed through to prove to themselves that they have this untapped reservoir of human potential. And it was really beautiful to see that and to participate in this amazing community of people that really bonded over the course of two and a half days to endeavor together,

to support each other on this mountain. And I'm just so grateful and thankful to Jesse, his partner, Mark, and now Colin is a co-founder in this organization, 29029. I just loved it. And I just wanted to thank them publicly for having me there. And it is an experience and a memory

that I won't soon forget. Okay, are you in therapy? I am. I think we should all be in therapy. I've been in and out of therapy for, let's see, over 22 years at this point. And over the last two and a half years, I've been solidly in therapy.

I do this weekly thing with a small group of friends and a therapist. And that setting, that weekly appointment that I have that I never miss if I'm in town has really been a game changer for me. And I think the point that I'm trying to make is all of us need help at some point in our life. And we can all use help all the time.

In my opinion, we all benefit from talking to someone, from sharing our thoughts, our struggles, because we all have blind spots and we're truly only as sick as our secrets. And so this week's guest, I think will attest that even therapists who are only human after all can also do with a little therapy. And that guest is Lori Gottlieb.

As I mentioned, Lori is a Los Angeles based psychotherapist. She's also a journalist. She writes the weekly Dear Therapist column for the Atlantic. She contributes to several publications, including the New York Times. And she has appeared as a mental health expert

on the Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Early Show, Dr. Phil, CNN, as well as NPR's Fresh Air. In addition, Lori is also an author. She has written three books, Marry Him, Stick Figure. Her latest is entitled, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. And that's a book that spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

And it peers behind the scenes of a therapist world, what it's like to be a therapist and what it's like to be a therapist in therapy. And it's a fun read. It's very relatable. It's very candorous and ultimately very human. The book was listed as People Magazine's Book of the Week, as well as one of the best nonfiction books of 2019

by O Magazine. And it's currently being developed as a TV series with Eva Longoria. So that's pretty cool. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

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go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. Thank you. including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful.

And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so Lori, basically this is about what happens when a therapist, somebody who's trained to really understand what makes people do what they do, experiences her own personal crisis. We discussed that very thing, of course, but it's also a broader conversation about mental well-being in general, the psychological impact of comparing oneself to others, healthy and unhealthy parenting practices, repairing ruptured relationships, and many other topics.

I should note that I did my best to resist making this a personal therapy session, which was kind of hard. And my hope is that you find it illuminating and helpful and entertaining. I certainly did. So here we go. This is me and Lori Gottlieb.

Congratulations on the book. Thank you. I mean, two months later and you're still on the New York Times bestseller list. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. So what do you, like when you think about that, like what do you attribute, like what is it about the book that you think is connecting with people you know so much i think that um everybody sees pieces of themselves in the people that i'm writing about including my story um and

i think that's what we read for i think a lot of the time we want to see our lives reflected in someone else's experience and i think that it's resonating because it's nonfiction. These are real people. And I think so much of the time we think, oh, I'm the only one who thinks that or feels that or does that. And then when you see other people who are doing that or thinking that or feeling that, I think that's such a profound experience. Yeah.

that, you know, I think that's such a profound experience. Yeah. I also think that as somebody who's been in therapy, in and out of therapy for many years, I found myself sitting across from my therapist thinking like, what is this person's life all about? And there's such a conscious effort to, you know, maintain that barrier and that boundary. And for you to peel that back and reveal your humanity, I think is unique and super interesting. And I don't know whether it's comforting or disturbing to find out that your therapist is actually a human being, you know, going through a lot of the same challenges that we all go through. Right. You know, I talk about that tension in the book between wanting your therapist to be a human being who has life experience. You know, nobody talk about that tension in the book between wanting your therapist to be a human being who has life experience. You know, nobody wants to go and talk to a robot or a brick wall.

But on the other hand, I think there's that tension because people want their therapist to have worked everything out to kind of be ahead of them. Yeah. Well, I'm interested in how this has affected your practice going forward, in the sense that, you know, as somebody who's looked at my therapist and thought, I don't know anything about this person, now you're sitting across from people who presumably have read your book and now know a lot about you. Has that changed the way your therapeutic modality or what that relationship looks like?

It's interesting because I didn't know how that would affect the people that I'm currently seeing. So all the people that I write about are people that I'm no longer seeing. And when I got back from book tour, sometimes people would come in and sit down on the couch and the first thing they'd say is, so I read your book,

which I never mentioned my book before I left. I just said, I'm going to be away on these dates. And so we, you know, would talk about it in terms of them, in terms of their experience of reading the book and what it was like for them to read that. Yeah. Um, but you still try to keep that boundary up. Oh yeah. We, we, you know, we didn't, we didn't talk about the things that I talked about in the book because it's not helpful for them. They're there for them. Um, you know, other people came in and haven't said a word and I, I'm sure they know about the book. Um, but you know, I think that for them it's more comfortable, which I understand. It's more comfortable for them to kind of compartmentalize that part, the writing part of my life from the

fact that they have this therapeutic relationship with me. Yeah. One of the things you talk about is never, you know, Google your therapist. But I mean, of course, everyone who's sitting with you has or, you know, knows these things about you. I would imagine there's probably a pretty big influx of people now that are trying to become your patient. Right. And the irony is that I thought that once I wrote this book, nobody would want to be my patient just because they would know too much.

Not that there's anything strange about what I reveal in the book, but just that they now have a lot of information about me that they wouldn't have about another therapist. But I think it speaks to another thing that you talk about and an issue that I feel strongly about, which is when you have the courage to be vulnerable on that level and to show your humanity, it creates connectivity. You think it's going to repel people, but actually it magnetizes them to you. It does. And that was a big message of the book was, you know, you see the people in the book as they struggle to kind of keep you away from whatever the truth of who they are is. And they think that they'll be more, you know, better liked, better, more well-respected. And that if they show the truth of who they are, that people will run.

Yeah. And instead people are drawn toward that. That's the glue that connects people. Why is it so hard though? Why is it so hard for us to just be honest? I mean, I'm a pathological people pleaser. You know, I've had many experiences in therapy. You know, you talk about this too, like trying to win over the therapist or, you know, not being honest because I just want to, you know, covet or curry favor with the person. Yeah, there is a performative aspect, I think, when people first come in. For a lot of people, not everybody, where they want the therapist to find them entertaining, witty, smart. They'll agree with a lot of what you say, even though they don't necessarily agree with it.

And you look for that as a therapist. Are they trying to get me to like them? And is that getting in the way of us having a much more authentic conversation? So when someone comes in and you can sense that, what is the strategy for getting them to, you know, open up a little bit more or peel back that layer? Well, I think, you know, sometimes in L.A. too you have people who are maybe like comedy writers. And they come in and they're sort of, you know, they feel like they're in the writer's room and they're, they're, you know, trying to be funny and, and, Hey, look at me. And I'm not responding to that in the way that they want me to respond to that. Um, you know, therapy isn't the cocktail hour. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's a mask. Right.

Right. And, and in this room, I'm saying to them by my lack of response, right? In this room, we're going to do something different than you do out there. That's scary. It is scary. So even for people who are not doing this job of trying to entertain people, we all try to entertain people. That's what we do out in the world. That's our social face. to entertain people. That's what we do out in the world. That's our social face. And the therapy room is about, hey, I'm going to see something about you that you are trying to hide, and you're

going to find that it's actually beautiful. Well, we all have these blind spots that, you know, kind of create, you know, repetitive crises and problems in our lives. And no matter, it's sort of like, you know, until you reach that point where you're in sufficient amount of pain as a result of this, it's very difficult to identify that or to see it. And it takes someone like yourself to be able to point that out. I'm curious about what you've learned about how we, you know, why is it that it's so difficult for us to see these things that continually trip us up that are perhaps easily identifiable to the people that are around us? It's so much easier to, it's kind of like having like on a Google map, right? If you can zoom out, you can see things so much more clearly. So other people have the vantage point of not

living our lives. They're outside of our lives. And so, so much of the time people will come in and they're complaining about something external, that the problem is their partner, their child, their parents, their boss, their coworker, the society, the culture, whatever it is. And all of those things might be true. But at the same time, what are they doing that is, it's almost like they're shooting themselves in the foot and they're over and over and over and they end up stuck in the same place. And they can't see that their response to whatever's going on in the world is part of the problem too, that they have a role in their own lives. A lot of people will come in and act like, you know, the world is happening to me and I have no role in this. I have no agency in

this. Right. You call it the presenting problem, right? Somebody comes in, I'm in a relationship crisis or something's happening at work or whatever it is. And your process is to then get behind that and look at the behaviors and the actions and the responses that have kind of cultivated that repetitive situation in their lives over time. Yeah. Yeah. I always like to say that I'm listening for the music under the lyrics that they're telling me about a situation and I'm kind of listening for, well, what is the underlying struggle or pattern

that got you into this situation in the first place? And this is something so different from what our friends do. So if you tell your friends something, I talk in the book about the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion. Idiot compassion is what our friends do. Yeah, he's a jerk.

Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. That person wronged you. Wise compassion is what a therapist does, which is we hold up the mirror and help people see their reflection in a way that nobody else is going to do for them. But why is it, what is the rationale or the thinking behind the, not reluctance, but the kind of refusal actually to give proactive advice. Like you see these people come in, I'm sure the problems are very similar to each other with all the patients that you've treated. I would imagine that you can easily identify within moments, like what this

person's core thing is. and do you have to hold yourself back from saying listen you just need to like see this thing and stop doing this one thing that's such a misconception about therapy is that is that we have the answer right and we're withholding it for some reason um i have this word taped up in my office ultra crepidarianism which is it translates roughly to the habit of giving advice outside of one's knowledge or competence. And the reason that I love that word is because I may know what I would do in that situation, but I don't know what you should do in that situation because I can't live your life for you.

So part of it is that. There are a few other reasons too. One is that when you come in and tell me a story, you're telling me the story through your lens if other people involved in the story were also to tell me the story i'd have so much more information that might change my advice right because you're telling me this story you know and you're almost gunning for me to take a position um and so if i had a broader sense of of the problem by knowing like what are the other people doing in this story too, that might alter the advice that I would give. So I might be giving bad advice

if I'm only giving it based on your one version of the story and the other part of it is that we want to encourage people's independence. We want people to be able to make better choices in their own lives. So if every time they need to make a decision, they say, oh, I've got to ask my therapist. Well, we're doing you a disservice.

It's like with your children, you want them to grow up and be able to not need you in the same way anymore. It almost feels like inception. Like you need them to come to this realization on their own so that they can own it and fully comprehend it for themselves rather than being

told, like to establish some level of agency and deep self-understanding, self-knowledge around these issues so that they can kind of rewire their brains to respond in a different and healthier manner. Right. So many people are making decisions based on some historical artifact that they're carrying around from their past in terms of how they think about themselves or the world. Like if their narrative is something like, nothing will ever work out for me, or their narrative is, I'm unlovable. They're going to make choices through that lens. So one of the jobs of therapy is to help them see this is this narrative, this faulty narrative that you're walking around with, and it's influencing the

way that you make decisions on a daily basis. Yeah. But why can't you just tell them that? We do. Oh, you do? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we're not like these ciphers who are holding back information. We want people to leave as soon as they can. You know, but sometimes people aren't ready to hear something. So you have to say it in lots of different ways. And timing and dosage are so important, right? How do you gauge that? Like, how do you get to the point where you believe someone's ready to hear something that you've been waiting to say for a long time? You float it out there and you see what their response is. And if they get to the point where you believe someone's ready to hear something that you've been waiting to say for a long time. You float it out there and you see what their response is.

And if they recoil, you backtrack a little bit. You don't backtrack, meaning you don't take back what you said, but you say, okay, I'm going to have to go in a different way or I'm going to have to time this differently. I'm going to have to plant some seeds before they're ready to really look at this. And what's the process when somebody comes into your office, they sit down and they say, I'm just not fulfilled or I have some low grade anxiety or depression or I just feel a little bit lost, but I don't have any identifiable childhood trauma.

There's no big inciting incident. There's no precipitating event that I can look to as an explanation for how I feel. I'm just confused and I don't know what to do. How do you unpack that? I would imagine that's a pretty common condition. It is. So we look at what is going on in this person's life. And as they start to talk, often what happens is there is more going on.

I don't mean that they had childhood trauma. I just mean that the situation is more complicated than they initially presented it. Right. And that's a process of slowly peeling back the layers and learning more about their life? Or how does that look from where you sit? Yeah, you have to really get to know somebody. And sometimes you have to help them get to know themselves. A lot of people come in and they think that they know themselves, and they don't necessarily know some key pieces of information about themselves,

what makes them tick or how they're relating to people. So that's really important. And I think the other thing is sometimes it's a case of the person doesn't really know him or herself very well, but sometimes it's a case of getting to unknow yourself, meaning you have this idea about yourself that is holding you back, and you need to unknow that because it's limiting you. Yeah, we all have these stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and why we do what we do and why we react and behave in the manner that we do. And the more I kind of learn about this world, the more I realize that these stories are essentially fallacies, you know, in the positive and in the negative.

Well, they're very subjective. And I think none of us want to think that. We all want to think that the stories that we're telling are very objective. Here's what happened. Here's what he said. Then I said this, then he said this, and here's what happened. And it feels very objective when you're telling the story. And that's why I wanted to include my own story in the book, because you can see my evolution as I go from this person who has this very clear cut in my mind story about what happened with my boyfriend. And as we start to unpack this, it becomes much more nuanced. Right. So tell the story a little bit so people understand. I mean, basically, you're in a relationship and the guy decides to leave, which is a big surprise to you. And this kind of, um, uh, you know,

leads you into, you know, a journey of self-discovery of your own. Yeah. So, um, you know, originally I was going to write about these four patients and not include my story, but this is what was going on while I was seeing these four patients. Um, I was going to get married to this boyfriend and we were planning to get married. We talked about it all the time. We had, you know, I was about to move in with him and, um, you know, he had just checked with his HR department about whether he could put my son on the medical insurance when we got married. You know, it was, it was married. It was not like some vague idea. You weren't imagining this. Right, right. Exactly. And then one night, we're just having a normal conversation,

and he gets quiet. In this way, there's not the comfortable silence that people and couples are used to and really enjoy. And I noticed that his foot is shaking, like kind of up and down. And I say, what's up? And, and, you know, nothing. But what comes out is he's decided he can't live with a kid under his roof for the next 10 years. That kid is my eight-year-old who had not been hiding in a closet the entire time that we were dating. And he had been really grappling with this, but he didn't tell me because he really wanted to be able to work this out for himself. He really wanted to get past this feeling of, oh my God, I'm going to have to sort of go back to this child-raising part when my kids are about to leave for college and I was really looking forward to the empty

nest. And he just didn't tell me about it the whole time that, you know, he wasn't grappling with it the whole time. It was, had been going on for a few months for him. And, and finally he, he tells me this. And we had just like picked our movie for the weekend, you know, it was one of those things where you're kind of like, when were you going to tell me and how is this going to come up? So my version of the story, and I very intentionally say my version of the story, was that he's a jerk. I mean, how could you date someone for this long and say you're going to marry this person and get to know person's child. And then all of a sudden come to this conclusion when the kid was there the whole time. Right.

Did you also feel like the fact that you're a therapist, psychotherapist, that you should have been able to see these signs coming along the way? Oh, absolutely. Because you're specifically trained to be able to identify these things? That must have been, compounded the confusion of the whole experience for you. Right. And I think that's why I stuck to my story so vehemently, because if I acknowledged that I had missed all these things, then what did that say about me? Right. And you should be somebody who doesn't have blind spots.

So the realization is sort of, well, even though I do this for a living and I know all this stuff, I still don't fully understand my own internal roadmap. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, as a therapist, we know that we have our blind spots, but this was such a glaring one

that I think I felt a lot of shame around it. How could I, of all people, have missed this? Right. So enter Wendell. Yeah. So I think enter Wendell, stage left. So what happens is I don't even consider going to therapy because it seems so clear cut to me that, okay, well, boy, as my friend said, boy, did you dodge a bullet. You know, good thing you found this out about him. What else was he hiding? Right. Um, so he became

demonized. He became the villain, the, the boyfriend. Um, and I just thought, well, you know, I'm going to move on from this and, and move forward. Um, but I wasn't moving on. I was, I was a mess. I mean, professionally, I was fine. Like, it was actually respite from the sort of, you know, all of the emotional turmoil I was experiencing. But once I would go home, and then once I'd get my son settled, and, you know, that would be over, I could distract myself with my son. There was this gaping hole. I mean, that's where boyfriend was, right? I call him boyfriend in the book. That's where he was. And, you know, I was like, unable to focus, I was unable to sleep. I was, you know, I like tripped on a step in my garage and like,

badly bruised my knee. I left my credit card at Target. You know, I was just sort of like, not there. And a friend of mine who is a therapist said, you know, maybe you should talk to someone. And so I thought, well, yeah, hence the title of the book. And I thought, great crisis management, I'll go in, I'll get through this crisis, and then I'll be good to go. And of course, that's not what happens. And that was your first experience with doing therapy yourself? No, no, no, no. So as part, first of all, I think a lot of people who become therapists have done their own therapy because they're really interested in understanding themselves better. And then as part of our training, we do 500 hours of therapy. But it's,

I think it's really different going to a therapist when you're an intern and you don't really feel like a therapist yet. You very much feel like the patient. Later, when you're an intern and you don't really feel like a therapist yet. You very much feel like the patient. Later, when you have your own practice and you've been doing this for a while, when you go back to therapy, it feels very different because you sort of have your therapist hat on at the same time that you're the patient, at least initially for me, that's how it was. Right. And do you feel like you're sort of calcified around these ideas? Like, oh, I see why you're asking me this. Like, you know, it's sort of like, if you're in, I mean, you've come from television development, like if you've been in the entertainment industry, it's hard to go to a movie and just immerse yourself in the story. You're

like deconstructing the whole thing and trying to figure out why they made these choices. Is that a similar experience, like going into therapy as a therapist? Yeah. Oh, I know that trick. That's a great example. It's almost like a magician going to a magician. It's like, oh, I know how that was done. So in my first session, I feel like I know why he's asking certain questions. And I answer in a way that, again, going back to that performative aspect, that will make me look good. And also, I don't want to delve into anything else because I don't think there's anything else to delve into. It's so hilarious. Isn't it?

Isn't it how blind we can be to ourselves? And right in the first session, I'm talking about everything that has happened. I'm telling this story, of course, so that I come off as the hero and the boyfriend comes off as the villain. But I don't realize I'm doing that. I mean, that's the important thing is I don't realize I'm doing that. It's very much just how I'm telling the story. And what happens is I say at one point, now I've wasted all this time and I'm in my 40s and half my life is over. And my therapist gloms onto that phrase, half my life is over. And he keeps trying to direct me back to that.

And I'm like, it didn't mean anything. But it meant everything. Right. In other words, this fear that you're missing out on some aspect of life and this was your opportunity to have that and now it's gone. And what does this say about how you're going to be living from here on out? Well, I think what happens is I think that we think of grief as being something in the present, right? Like I miss this person today. This person isn't with me today. I miss this person's presence, but we're also grieving the future. We had a whole future with this person that now has to

be rewritten. And so when I said half my life is over, there were other things going on in my life that I wasn't even really thinking about because I could distract myself with I'm going to get married to this person and that's going to be my future. But there were definitely other things in my life that I wasn't addressing. And what was really happening was I was looking for meaning. I was looking for how do I want to spend my time much more intentionally now that I'm aware of my mortality, now that I'm in my forties and I realized that I don't have forever. How do I want to think about that? And I wasn't willing to think about that until this breakup happened. And so how has that changed? Like, how do you think about that now versus then?

Well, a couple other things were going on at the time. One was I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness. That's an interesting story, actually. Can you share a little bit about how the book changed from what it was supposed to be into what it became? Yeah. So originally, I had written this cover story for The Atlantic called How to Land Your Kid in Therapy. And the subtitle was Why Our Obsession with Our Kids' Happiness Might Be Dooming Them to Unhappy Adulthoods. Right. I want to put a bookmark on that because I want to get back to that, but go ahead. Sure. So it went viral. It spread like wildfire. Yeah, it was like the most emailed story in the history of the Atlantic, right. And publishers, of course, wanted me to write the book version of that.

And it was this crazy thing where they offered me a tremendous amount of money. And I was a single parent. And this could really change the landscape of our day-to-day with what they were offering me. And it was an easy book to write because I'd already written the article. But I said no and I said no because I felt like this I didn't really have a lot more to say I could easily eke out a book but I felt like it was there's something fraudulent about it it didn't feel authentic it felt like I would be sort of jumping on the the parenting bandwagon there had already been a lot of great books written about that. What would mine add to it? And so I said, no, and everyone thought I was insane. And I said, you know,

I'm really, I was starting out as a therapist at the time. And I said, I'm really interested in what's happening with the adults. I want to write about the adults. And so they said, well, write a book about happiness, which, which even though I didn't want to write a book about happiness, I thought I can like make it the book that I want to make it. But every, and they didn't offer me by the way, that amount of money to do this. So it was like doubly stupid. Um, and every day I would sit down to try to write this book. And every day I was paralyzed. I could not write this book because I felt like it just didn't reflect the nuances of what I was seeing in the therapy room, what real life was like. Um, you know, the studies just can't really convey that in the same

way. But my agent said, well, if you don't write this book, you'll never write another book because you turned down the kid book and now you're going to screw up this happiness book. So just write this book and then you can write what you want. But I absolutely could not do it. And I was telling no one. And I was so ashamed of it. I was so ashamed that this is happening. I say in the book that I was like the closet gambler who gets dressed for work in the morning and says they're going to the office, but drives to the casino instead. My casino was Facebook. I would just sit on Facebook. I was dating my boyfriend and I would write these fabulously long, witty emails to him, but I would not write this book. And I couldn't tell anybody. And anyone

that would ask, I'd say, yeah, yeah, it's coming along. It's coming along. And I didn't even tell my therapist. It was this big secret that I couldn't tell anyone because I kept thinking, well, at some point I'll just write it, but I couldn't. Right. So how did you get over that? How did you see your way through? Eventually, secrets are this thing where, Carl Jung calls secrets psychic poison because they're so corrosive, but also they're all about shame. And so this was a secret that was all about shame for me. And the thing about secrets is once you reveal them, everything opens up for you. And so when I finally told my therapist that this had been going on, I felt this lightness.

I felt like I don't have to carry this burden with me, like this albatross around my neck, that somebody else knows this. I am not alone in this now. And when I told him about it, it wasn't that he could solve my problem. He didn't know anything about the publishing world. it. It wasn't that he could solve my problem. He didn't know anything about the publishing world. And in fact, he, at a certain point, gave me some really not good advice about it. But what happened was it made me really have to focus on it. Once you reveal the secret,

you can't deny that it exists anymore. You have to deal with it. And so eventually, I canceled the book contract, even though I have to return the money that was paying for my internship. Um, and, but I just, it was not, it felt so good to tell my editor, I can't write this book. This doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't feel authentic. I feel like this is not the book I want to write. I don't know if there's another book that I'm ever going to write, but I'm going to cancel this book. I am so sorry. And my editor was lovely. And in fact, when this book came out, maybe you should talk to someone. She was the first person to say to me, I read your book. It's amazing. This was so, so much the book you had to write. That's great because I could easily also see her saying, well, you'll never work in this town again. It was the opposite.

Two strikes and all of that. So the book that you did end up writing was with a different editor, obviously, in a different publishing house. It was with a different editor, but she very much said, I would love to work with you. But mostly she said, this book, she really is in therapy herself. And she talked about how much it resonated with her personally, how much it changed her life just reading the book. And that was so, it felt so gratifying given how long I spent in that secrecy of I can't tell anybody that this is the wrong book. Right. And the lesson that I gather from that is that the creative output has to be authentic to you. You can't write a book that you're not feeling. Right.

And I think that somehow, in some ways, I was even worried about putting it in, maybe you should talk to someone, because I thought, who's going to relate to this? They'll think, who's this first world problem person who has a book contract and she can't? Right. But I think that it's applicable to anybody because first of all, I was really struggling with something about what am I doing with my life in this profound way? So many of us wonder, especially when we get to midlife, am I making the choices I want to make? Am I living the way that I want to live? Am I wasting my time? And so I think with this book, it was about, I can't do something that feels false anymore. I have to be true to who I am, even if I'm going to suffer consequences. And there were significant consequences, by the way.

It wasn't like this easy thing where you say, okay, I'm going to cancel this book contract. It was like, we had to change our lifestyle in order for me to cancel that book. And it was really hard. Wow. Well, in the book, you also, at the same time that you're telling this story about yourself, you're also tracking a couple of individuals and their stories. So are these people like amalgams of several patients? Are they certain individuals that you then got permission from to tell their stories or how did that whole process work? That's a great question. So I addressed that in an author's note, but I think a lot of people are curious about that because especially if

they're in therapy, I think they wonder, is somebody going to write about me one day? Or like when someone comes to see you, like, is this going to end up in a book somewhere or in the Atlantic? Like, right. Well, first of all, so there are two separate issues. One is I think with a therapist who's not a writer that's handled differently. In my situation, I was a writer before I became a therapist. And so in my informed consent, I say that people can end up in my writing as long as I disguise all of the identifying details. up in my writing as long as I disguise all of the identifying details. In this case, I wasn't comfortable writing about people that I was currently seeing because I felt that I couldn't go to a session and then be writing about that, that the lines were too blurred.

And so I only wrote about people that I was no longer seeing. I, of course, got permission. And some of them are composites, meaning I might take something from a very similar patient that didn't happen to the patient that I was writing about, but it was so similar and there was something too revealing about the original patient. So I use this other example. But I think every story is very true to the experience of what it was like to treat that patient and what that patient went through. Yeah. Have you talked to any of these people since the book has come out? Yes, I have. What do they tell you? I think everybody's really proud of it.

I feel like they feel like I honored their experience in the book. And also they know why I was writing it because I wanted to bring, I, you know, I think what happens in the therapy room is it's you and another person and no one ever sees it. Um, and so much happens in the therapy room that is transformative or there are these heroic moments. Um, you see people change in these ways. It's almost like if you could do that time-lapse photography, you know, you don't, you don't see like these huge changes every session, but over time you see someone really transform. And I wanted to bring that experience into, you know, to a, to a broader audience. And so I think that the people in the book are really glad that it's out there. I think

it's done so much to kind of normalize the human experience in a way that if people are just in rooms talking privately, nobody really knows that other people are going through something very similar. Yeah. So no one was like, well, I told you you could write about me, but I didn't know you were going to write about that part. It's all good. I didn't write about anything that we hadn't already talked about in therapy. So I think part of the appeal too of the book, I think, is that people get to hear, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? You know, what is your therapist really, what's really going on in your therapist's mind?

And I think that they're pleased when they hear that. It's not, you know, we don't want to be sort of these wizards that are, you know, holding these secrets. And so I think that anything that I was thinking or feeling while I was seeing these patients, I brought up in the room at the time, right? Or maybe I didn't bring it up at the time, like with John, who is this very difficult to like patient at the very beginning. He's very narcissistic. He's abrasive. He insults me. I didn't say what I was thinking in that moment, but later on,

and you could see in the book when he says, do you think I'm an asshole? Right. And how I answer that, which is very truthfully about sometimes he comes off in a way that makes people think he's an asshole. Right. Right. And so John's this big shot producer. You've, you track him, you have this Charlotte is her name, the woman who ends up in all these bad relationships with guys. You have an elderly woman who's contemplating suicide. What is the, how did you decide these are going to be like the test cases or what is the identifiable through line in the challenges that they're facing and grappling with that made it relevant to the narrative that you wanted to tell? I wanted to pick a variety of stories.

So all of these people look so different on the surface, different ages, different gender, different histories, different personalities, different time of life, everything. But I think that what I do with the stories is I think that they're all in conversation with each other because I think that all of the patients have something in common with one another. And I'm the fifth patient and I have something in common with all of them. And I think the reader, patient by proxy maybe, has something in common with all five of us. I liked their stories because I think that they show how you can think something about a person at the beginning and how that can change so much over the course of getting to know them. So I think these were very vivid examples of that.

Yeah. I've read, or I've heard you say as well, that there's this adage that the modality of therapy is less important than the sort of connectivity or the bond that you establish with the person that you're seeing. It's that relationship, the intimacy of that relationship and the honesty that it's infused with that really makes the difference in whether a patient is going to see results or not. Yes. Yeah. So that's really interesting because study after study shows that more than the therapist modality or their years of experience or whether their gender, those kinds of things, the most important thing is whether you have chemistry with your therapist. How does it click? And I think that people kind of think that they're

coming in and talking about outside relationships and they don't realize that they're also having a relationship with the therapist. And what people do in the therapy room is a microcosm of what they do out there. So if somebody's avoidant out there, they're going to be avoidant with you. If somebody, you know, goes off on tangent after tangent to distract you from whatever they want to talk about, they'll probably do that out there too. If somebody's a people pleaser, they'll do that with you too. And how long do you think, like what is the typical length of treatment with your patients? Like how long do they stay with you and when is it appropriate to move on? Is that just a very personal thing?

Yeah, it totally depends on what they're there for and what their goals are. I think that there's this misconception about therapy that people come to therapy, they talk about their childhood ad nauseum, and they never leave. And that's just not true. We talk about goals from the very first session. You know, why are you here? What's going on? And we try to understand more about what their problem is right away. You know, some people are coming in because they have a very discreet problem, and some people are coming in because there's something more amorphous, like a feeling of stuckness or a free-floating anxiety.

I just got back from Europe. My wife and I, we host these retreats. We've been doing it for a number of years and we take a group. We had like 45 people in Italy and we took them through like a seven day experience. And a lot of it is fun. We just, you know, we eat amazing food and we meditate

and we do stuff like that. But we also do these workshops and try to really help people confront and grapple with some of the issues that they face. And one of the things that was really striking to me about this experience is that the condition, almost unanimously amongst this group, the main thing that they're confronting in their lives is this sense, this feeling of not being enough. It was kind of amazing. Like almost every single person identified that as like the thing that they really struggle with.

And I'm interested in whether that's mirrored in your own practice and experience and what that's about. Yeah, I think that that's so true. I think about Charlotte in the book, who's this young woman who's in her 20s. And as you were saying, she keeps hooking up with the wrong guys, including one from the waiting room where she thinks that's a step up because she says, at least he's in therapy. That guy was a bad boy though, right?

Yeah, he was. Yeah. So her kind of picker was off, but she also has an alcohol addiction that, that she's not really, um, willing to look at. Um, you know, she thinks she's just kind of a social drinker and, um, and, and she's not. Um, and I think that this feeling of not enoughness, you know, we mask it with all kinds of things with addictive behaviors. Um, you see a lot of people who are using all kinds of substances to mask that. Even the internet. One of my colleagues calls the internet the most effective short-term non-prescription painkiller out there. I think we distract ourselves from that feeling of not-enoughness.

And so when you're in the therapy room and you don't have those distractions because we don't use our phones in there, There's nothing pinging, dinging, vibrating. You're not having a drink. There's nothing, just the I thou of the room. Um, that comes out a lot. And I think that people feel so, um, they compare themselves so much. There's so much comparison going on. And I don't know whether it's worse because of, you know, Instagram and Facebook and all of that. But I think people always compare themselves unfavorably to other people. Or if they compare themselves favorably, there's this narcissism, like in John's case, right, in the book. And I always say to people,

you need to compare yourself to yourself that, you know, where were you before and where have you come? And it takes away from that sense of like, I'm not good enough because you're not looking at people out there. You're looking at yourself. And a lot of times I think to people, um, people are so unkind to themselves. Um, so, you know, I think this feeling of not enoughness has to do with the way that we talk to ourselves to you know, whose voice is that? I had this one patient write down everything she said to herself, like in her head for a few days, she came back, and she was so embarrassed. She almost like she was like, hesitant to read it to me. She's like, I can't read this out loud. I can't say this out loud. And when she did, it was like, she's like, I'm a bully. Like I'm, I'm horrible to myself. So many of us don't notice

the ways that we talk to ourselves. And it comes from this feeling of like, what's wrong with you? You know, we literally say things like that to ourselves. Oh yeah. I mean, the relationship that we have with ourselves, we would never have with another human being. Nobody would talk to us. Talk to us like that. We wouldn't be friends with that person, right? And I'm wondering whether there's something specific that's going on in our culture that has made this so acute right now. I mean, certainly I think social media fuels this, but maybe something else outside of that as well. I mean- I think there's this sense of disconnection that does. So no matter what people

come in with, I feel like there's this underlying sense of loneliness. Even if people are, you know, they're happily married or they have lots of friends or family, people tend to feel disconnected from the people that are important to them. You know, so many of us are not, like just sitting face to face with somebody else. Sometimes the only experience they get of that with no phones, nothing else distracting

them. Um, the only experience they get of that really is that 15 minutes in the therapy room. I also think that the signals that we receive are confusing and overwhelming. Like it's, it's no longer okay to just be a mom or to be a professional. Like you have to be an amazing mom who, who does all the right things so that your kid doesn't end up in therapy. You have to be a successful professional. You have to be able to show up at all your kids' events. And now I think that that has spilled over into expectations on men as well.

No longer is the man just the provider. He's got to be the amazing ever-present dad who also has to go to all the stuff. And it's hard to check every box and feel like you're showing up and present and 100% in all of these categories. So it's almost impossible to not beat yourself up if you're not meeting your own expectations that you set for yourself in all of these many categories. Right. Well, we always feel like we're falling short, but the question is whose expectations are those, you know, are those, are those expectations out there or are they your own? You know, and I think there's also, when you talked about men,

there's this gender difference, I think, where men come in and, you know, they talk about all the things you're talking about. They have the same issues that women do about, you know, what's going on in their marriages and what are they like as a parent and how are they feeling about their careers. And how do they feel about their own, you know, relationships with their own parents and siblings. And they have all the same issues, but they don't have the outlet in which to talk about them. So men will come in and they'll say, I've never told anybody this before. And then what they tell me is so, like, at first, it's like, so mild to me, you know, it's kind of like, that was the secret you were holding, like, you know, I don't like my neighbor, you know, it's like, it's like something, you know, women will come in and they'll say, I've never told anybody this before, except for my mother,

my sister, my best friend. Right. So they've told like a handful of people. But when we actually start talking about these things, the men and the women, they're talking about such similar things as what am I like as a partner, as a parent, as a worker, as any of the, as a human, you know? Um, and so I think it's, it's really important that people are feeling more open to these conversations because people are really struggling by themselves and they're not talking to anybody about it. Yeah. I mean, just because I'm a man, I have that perspective. But one of the things that I think about a lot is, you know, what is it like, what does it mean to be a present, responsible, loving husband to be sensitive. And can I hug that person? I probably shouldn't hug anyone anymore. Like, what are the rules? Like, you know, it can be kind of disorienting and confusing.

And what I find myself doing is kind of just withdrawing, you know, and isolating rather than confronting these things and trying to figure out like how to best navigate all these landmines that are out there. I see a lot of couples in my practice, and that's something that happens with them too, which is they get confused about what the partner's expectations are of them. And so then they just, they feel like I can't win, you know? And so they just withdraw.

That's our response to feeling like, well, there's nothing I can do. So, you know, it's like learned helplessness. Yeah. You wrote an article about it was an argument against equality within the relationship, within the marriage context. No, I'm not against equality. That's the wrong way of saying it. I'm mischaracterizing it. I'm very much for equality.

Yeah. way of saying it. I'm mischaracterizing it. I'm very much for equality. It was a piece from the New York Times Magazine. And it was about this research that showed that in a marriage, when men did more feminine chores, that the couples had less sex. And when they did more, when the kind of household duties were divided more along sort of traditional gender lines, like the man will like fix the roof or the car or take out the trash, and the woman will do the laundry and the dishes, let's say, that they had more sex. That doesn't mean it was a better marriage. That's just about quantity. It doesn't say anything about quality. It just says, hey, we have these programs inside of us about gender, and they're very deep-seated. So sometimes women might not see their husband as sexy, even though they say that. If you see your husband doing the dishes, you like, you feel really, really good about him. Right. But are you, does that, does that increase your sexual desire? Right. And so that was the question in the article and it wasn't, it wasn't, it didn't come to any

conclusion. It was sort of like, here's the research. Here's what a lot of people are saying about it. We don't really know what this means yet. That had to be a little controversial though. Well, yeah, of course, because, you know, I think a lot of people interpreted it the way that you were first describing it, which is that somehow, oh no, somebody's making a case for going back to these traditional marriages that were really unfair to women. That's not at all what the article was suggesting. Let's talk about the Atlantic piece about how to keep your kids out of therapy. As a parent of a bunch of kids, this is something I think about a lot. It's actually like a running joke with my 15-year-old daughter. Every time something happens, I'm like, well, this is the thing you're going to be talking about in therapy.

And, you know, I find myself often believing that I'm parenting in contraposition to the way that my parents parented me, like reactionary. Like they did that. I don't think that worked. I'm going to go in the other direction, maybe a little too far in the other direction. And yet at the same time, I'll catch myself doing the exact same thing that my parents did. So what I think I'm doing and what I'm actually doing, when I have enough self-awareness to understand my impulses and behavior are very different things. There's this great paper that came out decades ago called The Ghost in the Nursery by Selma Freyberg. And it's about how we think that we're going to be different from our parents, but actually it's really hard not to do exactly what they did at times, right?

It's like a fascinating paper. I highly recommend it. So, yeah. You know, but I think what happens is like the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. And it's great that I think people are having these much more, much richer, I think, relationships with their kids and really understanding their inner lives. But what happens is we're so worried about, you know, any displeasure that our kids are experiencing, any, you know, anxiety or sadness, you know, any of the logical consequences that come with like, you didn't get the role in the school play, or you didn't get into that college because you actually didn't work hard,

or just you didn't get into that college because lots of people applied and that's what happens in life. You're going to apply for jobs and you might be completely qualified, but you're not going to get that job. But I think, you know, parents are, you know, they really have a hard time tolerating any discomfort that their children are experiencing. Yeah, it's not good. No, it's not because they're the kids. It's creating a generation of people that have no ability to navigate difficulty and setbacks, which does not set themselves up well for life. Right.

So when I wrote that article, it was because I was doing my internship and I saw all these people coming in right out of college saying, my parents were the best. They're my best friends. They made everything so easy for me. I have nothing to complain about. And yet I feel unequipped to be an adult. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As a parent, your child shouldn't be your best friend. That's a strange violation of emotional boundaries that says more about your needs as a parent than what's in the child's best interest. Right. There is, I think, this sense, especially because nowadays I think a lot of people are feeling lonelier because we don't have community in the same way. So in the past, you could walk outside and the kids would play and the adults would talk and the kids would be like doing their own thing and the adults would be doing their own thing, right? Like nearby. But now it's like, if you want to have some kind of social interaction, you have to like make a

plan and it might not necessarily intersect with your kids' plans. And so we don't have like neighborhoods, community in the same way. A lot of people are really lonely. They don't have a lot of people to talk to. And so what happens is they end up, you know, like getting a lot of emotional gratification from being the helicopter parents. Like, you know, we're going to go to music class now, and then we're going to go do this class, and we're going to go do this. And because they don't really have any adult time. Yeah. Lisa DeMore and Susan David both talk about this. I mean, Susan calls it emotional resilience. And Lisa talks about the importance of allowing our kids to fail and putting them in that position so that they experience how to develop that kind of resilience at a young age.

If they're fully formed in their 20s and they're meeting resistance for the first time in their lives, they're ill-equipped to manage it. and it causes all kinds of breakdowns. And I think we see that now getting played out on college campuses at the moment. Yeah, there's even, I think it was at the University of Chicago, they have this person at the end of when you drop off your kid for freshman year that the parents weren't willing to separate from their kids. So they had the parents go in this one procession to literally extract them from their children. Yeah, like bouncers.

You need to leave now. Right. All the parents come this way, and all the kids go this way. So the parents can't accompany the kids to the dorm, and the kids need to go and meet each other and bond and do all their freshman orientation activities. And the parents weren't willing to leave. So they actually have a, you know, a protocol, you know, that's laid out now. And so, you know, I think that that says a lot about how things have changed from one generation to the next. And it's not that one,

you know, like the old, the old way was better. It's just that I think there's a happy medium. The old way was better. It's just that I think there's a happy medium. You can have this rich relationship with your child, but you also have to prepare your child for adulthood. And you have to have your own life. So many parents nowadays, they don't have a life at all. They don't have a time when they have their own social life.

They're afraid to leave their kids. You know, their whole social life is about, you know, what am I doing for, where's my kid need to be at this moment? And besides the sort of inability to navigate challenges later in life, what are some of the other, you know, what is the symptomology that ends up showing up in these kids later in life? They can't access their feelings. So when they were sad, you know, let's go to Disneyland. Or if something happened that made them sad, like, well, at lunch, so-and-so wouldn't sit with me today. The phone call happens to the school. Right. Somebody's fixing the problem all the time. Right, someone's fixing their problem for them. We're gonna erase your sadness right now.

We don't want you to experience that. But the thing is, if the kid could experience that, they could actually problem solve too. They would come up with a good solution. Or they would experience rejection, which is part of life. And so you say, okay, what is my kid gonna do? Well, your kid will probably find other friends. Your kid will probably find a way to eat lunch with somebody where it's a comfortable situation. And why is that so difficult for us as parents to

take that step back? I think that part of it is that we remember how hard it was when we were kids. Like if we experienced rejection and we project that onto our kid, like that's going to scar you. Um, and, and it won't necessarily do that. If you can support your kid and say, that was really, that sounds really hard. You know what happened at lunch? Um, you know, and then you just let your kid talk and they'll come up with something. But if your kid thinks you're going to fix it every time, every time something goes wrong, they're going to come to you and say, I'm sad about this. I didn't like what happened here. And they're going to expect that you're going to either give them a

solution or you're going to fix it, you know, by calling the school or calling the other parents with whom they had a conflict. Yeah. And then they have no acuity for doing that themselves. Right. And then they get into the workplace. And what happens is people say these kids are like, you know, they, they, they, they have a sense of entitlement. Um, you know, they don't think that they should be doing menial tasks because everyone told them they were so special and they were so wonderful. And all of a sudden it's like, what do you mean I need to get you coffee? Um, you know, I, I have a college degree. Yeah. Whereas like that was expected before. That was part of the job. You want to learn the job?

Okay, part of it is you're going to have to do things that feel useless. Yeah. But at the same time, you're going to be in these meetings. Yeah. So you get the coffee, but you get to sit in in that meeting and learn how to produce that show or how to negotiate that deal or whatever you're doing. Yeah.

I mean, in your own personal case, it's like you went to Yale, you went to Stanford, and then you became an assistant in Hollywood, right? Yeah. And we all know what that looks like. Yeah. I mean, in your own personal case, it's like you went to Yale, you went to Stanford, and then you became an assistant in Hollywood, right? And we all know what that looks like. Yes. It was not glamorous. Yeah. I want to talk about that in a minute, but to kind of stay on this track. So outside of the helicopter parenting and the tiger mom kind of scenario, what about the other side of the spectrum? Like, I feel like with my 15-year-old, I've given, my wife and I have given her a very long leash. Like, we're probably on the other side of that equation. What are the perils of too much freedom and allowing this person like a very wide berth to experience their life?

like a very wide berth to experience their life? You want to give them enough freedom where, you know, they're ready for it, but, or maybe they're, you know, where they're comfortable with it. You want it to come from them too, right? So, you know, my son is 13 and I leave him for periods of time, right? Meaning, meaning I'll go do something. I might go have dinner with a friend, and he's doing his homework at home, and I'm close by. Some people say, wait, no one's with your kid? When I was 13, I was actually babysitting. When I was 13, I was the person who was taking care of the little kids in the house. He's perfectly capable of sitting at home and doing his homework.

And he's a really reliable kid. Like, I know he's not going to be, like, playing Fortnite while I'm gone. Right. So, you know, I mean, you want to give them that. Like, he likes that. Well, and they develop a sense of agency over their own lives.

And they feel, yeah, and there's a confidence about that. Like, you know, and he likes it. He's like, oh, no one's here. This is really cool, right? He gets to choose how he spends his time. And he knows what is a – he doesn't just have to do his homework. He can do other things that are enjoyable to him. But what goes into raising that child such that they do make the choice to do their homework when you're not there and they're not on Fortnite?

I think that giving, giving kids freedom makes them more responsible. That if you, if you, if you're, if the leash is too tight, they're going to be like, I never get to do this. I have to do this any minute I get freedom. I'm going to do all these other things. He has enough freedom where, you know, he knows if he has time, he'll do his homework. Um, he wants to do his homework cause he doesn't want to like, you know, leave it to the last minute and then feel stressed so it's about his stress level it's for him not for me but he's not just going to sit and do his homework

I mean he'll do other things like he might draw or he might read a book or he might you know who knows does he have an iPhone? no he doesn't but he's getting one this year probably I would say like by, by eighth grade. It's going to be an interesting journey.

We have a contract. You do? Tell me what that contract is. So I'm writing it. I'm writing it because we're in the process of negotiating getting one. It's just a contract that's, like, here. It's, like, one page. It's not, like, you know. It's kind of, like, the basic rules.

Like, here's what you've got the phone for. Here's how to use it. You know, here's how not've got the phone for. Here's how to use it. Here's how not to use it. If I find you doing these things, here's what happens to the phone. It's just very clear. So there's no question about what's appropriate. Like set hours and certain apps that can be used

and others that can't? It's not that specific. It's kind of like you will be respectful of people when you use the phone. You're not going to say mean things about people on social media or texting to your friends. You're not going to use it for that purpose. It doesn't belong. After a certain hour, it goes off.

Basic things about when I call, you need to answer. Those kinds of things. like, when I call, you need to answer. Right. Those kinds of things. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you know, I struggle with my own attachment and addiction issues with the mobile device. And I'm seeing it played out in my kids and particularly my 15-year-old daughter. Like, it's just so powerful. It has the capacity to just override all of your better impulses and hold you hostage. So I think the rules are super important and then consistently enforcing them and employing them. Right. Like we don't have phones at the table ever.

That just, we don't because we're having a meal. Right. You know, and I think that people think that's weird, you know, that we're Amish or something, you know. It's like, we're not. It's just that it's mealtime. Like, why should our phones be at the table? Right. So just things like that. But we're not, you know, but we use technology.

I use technology all the time. So it's not being anti-technology. It's just saying technology has a place in our lives, but we don't want to drown in it. Right. Well, let's talk a little bit about how you got to this place, because you have a very interesting, unique, circuitous route to doing what you do. Yeah. I always used to say that I was either very versatile or very confused, and probably a bit of both.

But more confused, I think, than versatile because I'm actually not that versatile. But the thing is, like, it's that thing where you look in the rearview mirror and it all lines up perfectly because all these things inform each other so well. That's right. So I didn't realize. Yeah, I didn't realize that I was actually doing the same thing. So I was basically working in story and the human condition just from different angles. So when I started out after college, I started working in the entertainment business and I was doing motion picture film development. And then I moved over to do TV

development. And I was like a baby executive at NBC the first year that two very successful shows happened to premiere. One of them was Friends and one of them was ER. So I know you worked on ER. Did you work on Friends also? So once I went over to current programming, not really, because I was in development, but in development, yes. And so that first year, yes. And it was interesting because in ER, we had this medical consultant who was this ER doc. And he would, you know, make sure that everything was accurate, you know, that the trauma basings were choreographed correctly and that the terms were used correctly. And I would hang out in the ER with him because he's really fascinated by that. And at a certain point, I would hang out there a little more than I should have been.

And he said to me, you know, you seem much more interested in what we're doing here than what you're doing back at the office. And he's like, maybe you should go to medical school. And I was like 27. And I wasn't even a science major. I was a French literature major. I'm not going to medical school. But the more, and I thought this is just a hobby, just a hobby.

But then I started hanging out with other doctors in other hospitals, and I was obsessed with it. And it was sort of like when you're telling stories on television, I loved ER because there were these very authentic feeling, rich human experiences. And I think that's why the show was such a success. But then you see the real stories. You know, when you go into the ER, you go into, you know, wherever you're shadowing these doctors.

And it was like, wow, this is what it's all about. You know, you're at that stage in life where you think this is what it's all about. And would you come back from one of those experiences and share with the writer's room what you'd experienced? And did any of that end up in any of the shows? Really, Joe was the one who, Joe, this consultant was the one who interfaced with them in that way. But I would come back, certainly you could add your two cents. But really, it was more of a personal thing. It was like, oh, this is fascinating. And at a certain point, I realized that I couldn't deny

that this was not just a hobby. And so I took all the pre-med classes and I went up to Stanford for medical school. That's crazy. So you're 27 at the time. Well, now I'm like almost 30 because I had to take all the classes. That is like. So you're 27 at the time. Well, now I'm like, now I'm like almost 30 because I had to take all the classes. That is like such a huge life shift and commitment to take on at that stage in life. Yeah, it was. So did you do the pre-med, you took like the pre-med core,

all the courses that you had to take while you were still working at NBC? No, I left NBC and I started writing, which is funny because, again, the writing, I was so interested in, I think, seeing all the writers when you're at the network. I felt like, oh, I really like writing. I don't want to write on a show. But I decided to kind of do journalism. I could freelance and then I could take my pre-med classes.

So that's what I did. So I supported myself with the freelancing and then I took the pre-med classes. Just down here in Los Angeles? Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. And then I took the MCAT and I applied to med schools. And I was old at that point, old in the sense of most people applying are seniors in college.

And at the time, I didn't really know what I wanted to do in medicine. I didn't realize at the time that what I was in love with was these relationships that you have with the patients and being involved in these incredible life moments. and being involved in these incredible life moments. And so I went up to medical school, and all of my professors started talking about this newfangled thing called managed care. And they were really frustrated because they had had these practices that were very much their calling.

And all of a sudden, they had these 15-minute visits, and the insurance companies were telling them what to do, and they had to see so many people in the course of a day and the whole landscape was changing. And I realized that I wasn't going to be able to do the kind, you know, I had this like fantasy of being the family doctor who guides people through their lives. And this romantic idea just got pulled out from underneath you of what exactly that relationship was going to look like. It did. And so, and while I was there, you know, because I had started writing, I thought, well, I'll go be a journalist and I can really get involved in people's stories

in this deeper way. And so I did. And I was a journalist for about a decade when I had my baby. So you left medical school after like two years, right? Two years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And you're just, I have to just say, like, you, you're somebody who, when you set your mind to do something, like you do it, you're like, I'm going to go to medical school. And then you're at Stanford medical school. I'm going to be a journalist. And then you're publishing everywhere. Like, you know, it's in, in, when you look at it that way, like when I look back on it, I think it's kind of amazing.

But at the time, it was kind of like everything felt like there was some internal motor that said, like, you need to go to medical school, right? You need to. And then I got there and I realized it was all about story in the human condition from whatever angle, whether it was like, you know, on ER or whether it was later, you know, in medical school or later as a journalist. But then I had my, my child and, you know, like we were talking about parenting, parenting can be really isolating nowadays. And I realized like the UPS guy would come with all of his deliveries, and I got a lot of deliveries at the time. And I'd be like, how about those diapers?

And do you have kids? And how's the weather? And he would literally be backing up to his big brown truck. And I'm like, I need some kind of adult interaction in my profession every day. And I loved my child, by the way, P.S. I love you, honey. But, you know, it was like, it was like, there was something that was missing. And so I called up the Dean at Stanford Medical School, I'd become very close with her when I was there. And I said,

maybe I should come back and do psychiatry. Because I was very clear that like, I love like the way the mind works. That's what I was really into at the time. But also, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but a normal impulse might have been like, well, maybe I'll join a book club or I'll go to yoga or something like that. You're like, I'm going back to medical school. I wanted to do it in a really intentional way. It wasn't like a hobby. It was like, I want to do this as my calling. So I said, maybe I should come back and do psychiatry because then I could, you know,

do the things that I'm doing, but I would have interactions with people and they'd be meaningful. And she said, you know, I think that I remember how you talked about this in medical school. And I think that if you went back, had to do, finish medical school, do internship, do residency with a baby, with a toddler, and then you'd basically be prescribing Celexa in 15-minute intervals. You could do talk therapy, but why do you want to go through all of that when you can get a graduate degree in clinical psychology, focus less on medication management, and focus on the kind of relationships that you want to have as a therapist? the kind of relationships that you want to have as a therapist. And it was one of those things where, you know how people talk about aha moments and we don't get very many of them in life? This was one of them where it was like, oh, all the puzzle pieces. Somebody just put the missing piece of the puzzle into the puzzle and now I can see it. And I thought, yes,

that's exactly what I need to do. And that's what I did. And I realized that I went from telling people stories as a journalist to helping people change their stories as a therapist. And I still do both. I wouldn't want to do one without the other. So I have a part-time practice and I have a part-time journalism career. And has your experience as a journalist made you a better therapist? Absolutely.

No question. They very much inform each other. Explain that. In what way? How do they complement each other? I feel like as a therapist, I'm almost working as an editor. So people come in with a story, as we've talked about, and the version of the story that they come in with usually has some problems with it, like a first draft does. And it's sort of like, well, is the protagonist moving forward or is the protagonist going in circles? And who are the heroes in this story? And who are the villains in the story? Like in my example, boyfriend was the villain at first, but as you read the book, you realize, oh, wait a minute, he's not a villain. He's a really good

guy. And you watch that change and you see like, I was responsible for part of this too. And so when people come in, I want to help them edit their stories. They need a massive rewrite usually. That's what's keeping them stuck. And so I think when we look at character, motivation, arc of a person's life, that's embedded in story. So I think that that's how they're kind of in conversation with each other. And I think as a journalist and as a writer, even writing this book, you look at, well, how am I telling this story? Is this true to the experience? Is this emotionally true?

Yeah, and they're also different, though. journalist, you're trying to track down some objective truth and you have to keep some distance between yourself and that story. Whereas the patient therapist relationship is a much more intimate one. I mean, there's boundaries as well, but where does the journalist path and the therapist path kind of part ways or distinguish themselves from each other? Well, I would say they're not as different as you think they are, because I feel like as a journalist, you do insert yourself into the story a little bit. You're not the story, but you're forming a relationship with that person when you're asking those questions. And I think as a therapist, I have a lot of, I would say would say training but also it's an instinct after a while like how do you get people to talk about what you really want them to be talking about well you can

weaponize that right like if you're chasing down a story and you're you're interviewing someone and they're being evasive you have a toolbox to try to get them to reveal something they perhaps might not ordinarily do because you know exactly how to get to it yeah I wouldn't say't say weaponize it though, because I feel like it's the story. Well, no, but I also feel like I don't have like, I don't have a malicious intent that I want to tell the story because it's an important story. Not because I want to make them look bad. And whatever I tell about them is not going to make them look bad because I don't tell those kinds of stories. So basically I want to get to the truth of their story. And so how do I get to the truth of their story, even though they may feel reluctant to share that? And what do you decide? How do you make decisions about what to write about as a

journalist? Usually, there's some question that I see played out in different ways in the culture. And I want to tackle it from a different angle. So like in the parenting story, for example, right? Lots of people had written about helicopter parenting. I was interested in what's happening with all these people who are coming in to see me and they had these great childhoods, you know, it's the opposite of what people think of therapy and they're, they're depressed or anxious or, you know, unable to kind of function in the ways that they hope to. In the story that you were talking about with the New York Times about, you know, like what's happening in marriages, I'm really interested. I see a lot of couples, and I was curious about this, that on the one hand, people will say to

their husbands, like, you know, I want you to be more sensitive. I want you to tell me how you're really feeling. And then they do. And then in the therapy room, the woman will be like, oh my God, he cried. You know, it's like, I want you to be sensitive, but not so sensitive that I feel unsafe. Well, why does that make you feel unsafe? You know, what is sort of this hardwired gender idea that they have? You're asking for one thing. And then when he gives it to you, you're repulsed by it. Yeah. In your practice, uh, treating, treating couples, what is the, what is a recurring thing that you see? What are people struggling with in terms of how to relate to each other and have productive relationships?

I think partly for younger couples, they don't have a lot of experience relating because they grew up in sort of the age of technology. Um, they didn't date in the same way that earlier generations dated. So they have less experience with like what happens when relationships don't look like the movies. Um, and, um, you know, they don't have a lot of maybe communication skills. Um, they have a lot of, um, unrealistic expectations of what their partner can provide for them or what a partner should provide for them. You know, he's got to be like, or she has to be my best friend, my, you know, rock my world in bed every single time. You know, read my mind, have, you know, be telepathic, you know, not hurt me in any way. you know, they just don't understand sort of like

what happens in relationships. They don't understand sort of what we call rupture and repair that people hurt each other or make mistakes all the time. The question is, how do you guys deal with that and how do you repair it? What, uh, what do you think about, um, in, in treating those people or, or counseling those people? Like what is a picture of a healthy, what does a healthy relationship look like in terms of how two people are interacting productively? I think when they can hear each other and understand that everything that they,

each of them thinks is subjective, that, you know, like when somebody, like if you see a couple and they'll say, here's what happened. And the other person says, here's what happened. Both things happened. This is the experience of each person. So they're parallel stories that happened. And there's some, like in the Venn diagram, there's some overlap where they agree on sort of, but they had different experiences of the same situation. And so a lot of times people will say something like, well, you don't listen to me. And I always say to that person, if you want someone to listen to you, ask yourself, how well do I listen to that person? Yeah. People don't want to hear that. But it's so helpful. And when they do hear it, they, it really makes them

stop cold in the therapy room because they're not hearing it in a critical way. They're hearing it like, oh, wow, I didn't think about that. Like, I'm talking so much because I'm trying to make my point. I'm trying to get this person to hear me by talking a lot. And the way that I can get this person to hear me is by listening to that person. And when I was training, a supervisor said to me, you have two ears and one mouth. There's a reason for that ratio. Yeah. Well, I think that it's very difficult to not project upon that other person this idea of who you think they are and who they should be. And mentally, we create this framework and a rule book for how that person should behave to meet our needs, right? And this is a sort of an unspoken social contract that's going in two directions. And it's inevitable that that contract is going to get broken.

And when we're projecting too much onto that other person, that's what creates conflict and heartbreak and all the rest. And my wife and I have been together for a very long time. And one of the things that we've worked hard on is to have our own independent lives that, that, you know, we're not looking to the other person to, you know, quote unquote, you know, complete each other. Like we are complete, you know, self-sustaining organisms in our own right. And, you know, we, we navigate the world together, but also separately and kind of respect each other in that, in our, in our, in our, in our discrete, um, separate paths. Yeah. That's so important. Um, and I also think that a lot of couples, um, they, they don't

understand, um, that they need to get, they need to have their lives together before they meet this person. I don't mean totally together. You're going to evolve and you change in the course of your marriage, right? You're a different person in your 20s than you are in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera. But I think that if you feel like this hole or this emptiness and you feel like this other person's going to fill that for you, well, that's a recipe for disaster. Right. But that's an epidemic. I mean, that is just what so many people do. Yeah. I also think that people, going back to what people attributing something, like the reason that somebody's acting a away toward you um so many

people are wrong they're just flat out wrong like you you when you did this it was because you wanted this it's like no that's not why i said that or did that right and they really need to hear how wrong their projections can be um for them to start having different kinds of conversations so they aren't you know often people are having basically the same fight every week so i don't do couples therapy where we analyze the fight of the week. I think that gets us nowhere. I want to know the pattern underlying it so that you don't keep having these kinds of fights.

I don't need to know the specifics of every single fight. I want to see what is this pattern? What is this conflict that you repeatedly get into that creates the different fights that you're having. Why is it that we tend to seek out partners that reflect the way that we were parented? So I talk about that. Yeah, when it was unhealthy. Like the example in your book of the woman who ends up in all these relationships, you know, that mirrors

her experience as a young girl. Right. It's almost like what you said about parenting, that we say we're going to do the opposite of what our parents did and that we do sort of the same thing. We do the same thing anyway, yeah. The thing about that is with Charlotte, she doesn't realize that she keeps saying, well, none of these men, you know, I can't seem to find a guy who wants a relationship, but she keeps picking these guys who are very much like her parents were, um, you know, which is sort of like, sometimes they're very present and sometimes they're not, they're always keeping her guessing. Um, and we grow up and we say, I don't want that. That felt bad. I want something different, but it's almost like we have radar for

the familiar. And if you're not aware of it, you're going to keep choosing people who tap into that very familiar feeling of home. It almost feels like home to you, even if home was miserable. You're like, I'm home. Right. Even if it's super dysfunctional. Right. You're like, oh, that feels like my teddy bear. That feels like my teddy bear. I recognize that. And the problem is that if you go outside of your comfort zone, if she were to pick somebody who was available to her and present and wanted a relationship, she would feel like what she would do with him when she said, oh, I'm not attracted to him. It feels foreign.

Why can't we be attracted to the person that's good for us? Because it felt foreign to her, right? Because it's scary to go outside of your comfort zone. All of a sudden, you're in this strange land, and you don't know the customs in this land. You don't speak the customs in this land. You don't speak the language in this land. It's so much more comfortable to cling to the familiar of, oh, I know what that's like to be on edge and wonder if he calls. I know exactly what that's like. I grew up like that. Right. What's confusing about that though is I can understand intellectually

like, oh, that's uncomfortable and confusing, but why the, then there's the sexual attraction component to it. It's like, why am I sexually attracted to the person that's not good for me? And I can't find myself sexually attracted to the person that, you know, like how does the sexuality aspect of it get confounded with the other confusing part? Well, I think the attraction is holistic. It's not, you know, it's not compartmentalized like that. So you say like, I'm really drawn to this person. Like,

like it doesn't even have to be sexual in the sense of people pick friends like that too. They'll pick like friends who are not reliable or friends who are kind of flaky or friends who are addicted if their parents were addicted. Um, you know, they tend to kind of recapitulate, um, whatever they grew up in until they really, really understand it. And I don't mean just have an awareness of it. In the book, I say insight is the booby prize of therapy because you can have all the insight in the world like, oh, now I understand why I keep picking those guys. But if you don't make changes out in the world, i.e. pick other guys, the insight is useless. So many times people in couples therapy

will say like, oh, now I understand why I get really triggered by that when you do that and why I react that way. But then they don't change anything. Well, you're wasting your time if you're not going to change anything. So I think in therapy, you have to be both vulnerable and accountable. So you have to be vulnerable, but you also have to be accountable for what are you going to do with the work that we're doing? How are you going to make some tangible changes in your behavior when you leave here? The change part is so hard. Right. And people don't realize that. They think, oh, it's positive change. So it should be easy because people want something better to happen. But with every change comes loss.

Yeah. The revelation feels like progress, but it's actually not doing anything. I mean, I've been sober a long time and, you know, the adage in 12 step is self-knowledge will avail you nothing. And when people say to me, like, well, why do you think you were an alcoholic? Like what happened when you're... And I've learned, like, it's interesting to explore that, but I could spend all of my time trying to deconstruct that, and it actually doesn't help. It doesn't inform how I'm going to make decisions going forward. I have this toolbox now, and I apply these tools to how I make decisions and how I run things by other people that have allowed me to maintain my sobriety and become a more productive member of society. So for me, it's about the actionable tools. And I think it is like, it's so difficult for people to change. And in my own

personal experience, I didn't change until I was in... The pain of continuing on the path that I was on exceeded the fear of the unknown, should I change? Right. So what is that like? How do you get people short of having to have some cataclysm in their life to make those adjustments and actually put your information and your insight into forward motion? information and your insight into forward motion. There was something that my therapist said to me that I write about in the book where he said, you know, where I was like, just feeling trapped by all of these sort of external circumstances. And I wasn't willing to make changes. I wasn't willing to look at what I could do differently. And he said, you remind me of this cartoon. And it's of this prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out. But on the

right and the left, the bars are open. And it was like, you know, at first I thought, oh, that's really cheesy. But then I thought, wait a minute, he's right. Because so many of us would rather be the prisoner shaking the bars saying, I can't do anything about this. We don't want to look that it's open on the right or the left. Because then if we walk out and we go into the sunlight and there are no bars and we're free, with freedom comes responsibility. And now we have to take responsibility for our lives. We can't say, oh, the problem is that I'm trapped here. Now it's like anything that happens is I'm responsible for that. And so change is hard for that reason. It's easier to feel trapped in whatever childhood drama that you're reenacting than to actually do something different where you might have to be responsible for your

choices. And when you're trapped in that paradigm, you can get a lot of idiot compassion coming your way. Yes. And that feels so delicious, doesn't it? Yeah. It's so good, right? Yeah. I'm such a victim. Yeah. I know you are, isn't it terrible? Yeah, but the idea that you could be free,

which is awesome, is terrifying. Yeah, yeah, we don't know. And especially if you grew up without that kind of freedom, without the emotional freedom, all of a sudden you feel like, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to be free. It just feels too risky to go out there and do something different. Do you think everybody should be in therapy? People, since the book came out, everybody asked me that. Do they? They do. And I think it's interesting.

I'm not, you know, I think everybody can benefit from therapy. I don't think everybody needs to be in therapy. You know, but I do think this. I think that so many times people come to therapy later than they should, meaning that, you know, we think about our physical well-being different from our emotional well-being. So if somebody feels like something is wrong with their body, like you're having chest pain,

you'll probably go to the cardiologist before you have a massive heart attack. But if somebody feels like, oh, something doesn't feel right emotionally, we tend to ignore it or minimize it. Will I have a roof over my head and food on the table so I don't really need help? And what happens is they think that they can just make the feelings go away or not pay attention to them.

But when you don't pay attention to feelings, they become stronger. And they come out in a behavior, in an irritability, or in a short-temperedness, or in a self-defeating, self-sabotaging way of being in the world, whatever it is, or in an inability to sleep, whatever. way of being in the world, whatever it is, or an inability to sleep, whatever. And so people then don't come to therapy until they're having some kind of crisis. And it's like they're having an emotional heart attack. Like, why would you wait that long? Because you've suffered unnecessarily for all of this time. And also, it's harder to treat once you're really, you know, once you've gotten to that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no downside. Well, time, money. The biggest downside, I think, for people, even though there are logistical problems that are very real, is that a lot of people kind of unconsciously know that if they go to therapy, they might need to make changes. Right. Yeah.

You know, it's like, if I go to therapy, Who wants that? Like, I might need to do something different in my life. I might need to be uncomfortable, and I don't want to be uncomfortable. So I'd rather just, you know, just keep things the way they are. Right.

Status quo. And so what's next for you? Well, I'm still writing my, I have my practice and I have my weekly Dear Therapist column that I write for The Atlantic every Monday. And I am about to do a TED Talk that I'm writing. Oh, you are? Yes. Oh, wow.

Can you talk about what it is or is that under wraps? Well, you can, I'm taping it in September. Nice. Yeah. Is that for like TED Med or for the main Ted? No, the main Ted. Oh, wow. Yeah.

That's exciting. The red circle. Oh my goodness. Are you nervous about that? Not yet, but I know I will be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a super cool opportunity.

Yeah. And tell me about the book is being developed into a television show. Yeah. So this brings you back full circle once again. Right. Where all these worlds intersect for yourself. Yeah.

And I'm really glad that I worked in television before because one of the things I think about as we're adapting the book for television is that, you know, I think that a lot of the ways that therapists have been portrayed in the media give people the wrong impression and it keeps people from getting help. And so, you know, I think that therapists are either like, you know, like the very distant, cold therapist, or they're like the hot mess, the train wreck, right?

And the therapists that I know are neither. And so this television show is about a person who happens to be a therapist, but it's not about a therapist, if that makes sense. Meaning she happens to be a therapist. And so you meet her family, you meet the people that she sees, you obviously are in the therapy room. But it's not about all of the cliches and tropes about therapy. This happens to be her job. Right. So it's not like in happens to be her job. Right. So it's not like in treatment.

No. No. Yeah. And where are you in the stages of development? It's being written. It's being written right now. Yeah. Are you writing it?

No, I want it to be good. Are you tapping into all your entertainment contacts from back in the day? Well, no. So it's Eva Longoria's company that's producing it. And so it's all through them. Yeah. That's exciting.

Well, super nice to talk to you. So nice to talk to you, too. Thank you for sharing with me today. It's fascinating. I could talk about therapy, psychotherapy all day long. The book is amazing. Check it out. Maybe you should talk to someone and come into a TED stage soon, right? Right.

If people want to connect with you, they can go to your website, right? lauriegottlieb.com. Where else? I'm also at lauriegottlieb1 on Twitter. And I just started using Instagram. I still don't know how to use it. But I'm at lauriegottlieb underscore author. And if anybody wants to give me a tutorial,

I welcome it. I'm happy to do that with a 13 year old about to get an iPhone. I think you're going to have to get up to speed. That's right. Maybe Snapchat too. Well, he told me, yeah, he doesn't think that, that he says Twitter's not cool. Um, Instagram, he's not sure if it's cool. Snapchat is apparently cool. It's pretty much Snapchat at that age, I think. So anyway, happy to talk to you more. Thank you. All right, thanks. All right, peace. Good times. Hope you guys enjoyed that. More than that though, I really hope that it helped inspire you to embrace the power of talking to another human being. So if you're listening to this,

if you feel stuck, if you have shame or guilt or pain, if you feel alone or isolated, I can't stress enough the power of reaching out, of raising your hand and finding somebody to share that interior life with. I really believe that it is the path to healing and the way forward. So if you got anything out of this conversation, So if you got anything out of this conversation, it's just that very thing. Please extend yourself, raise your hand, reach out for help because the solutions that you seek and the answers that currently elude you are available. If you're inspired by Lori, you can reach out to her directly as well. You can find her on Twitter at Lori Gottlieb1.

Let her know how this one landed for you. Check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com to expand your edification of Lori and her work beyond your earbuds. And of course, don't forget to pick up a copy of her new book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, or check it out on Audible. If you're struggling with your diet, if you want to master your plate, but you feel like you're at a loss, you don't like cookbooks, you don't have the skill or the time or the budget to eat right, at least that's what your mind is telling you, please check out our Plant Power Meal Planner. We created this platform, this digital platform to answer one basic simple question, how to make healthy eating delicious, nutritious, affordable, and accessible to everybody. So when you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you get access to this incredible library of thousands of delicious and easy to prepare plant-based recipes. Everything's totally customized based on a series of preferences that you input when you sign up. And it integrates with

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And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I wanna thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, help on the scripts, interstitial music, all kinds of behind the scenes stuff. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing the podcast.

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So this will mark the return and it's a good one. You're not gonna wanna miss it. So until then, be well. Seek help if you need it. Raise your hand, extend yourself. Share your secrets with another human being. Peace, plants. Namaste. Thanks for watching!