How Shifting Your Mindset Can Change a Relationship Forever | Dr. Bruce Chalmer | 189

What if intimacy isn’t lost because love disappears… but because anxiety takes over?

In this thought-provoking episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo sits down with Bruce, a Vermont-based psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with couples, to unpack what really breaks relationships apart and what actually brings them back together.

After navigating his own personal heartbreak and career pivot from statistician to licensed psychologist, Bruce has spent decades guiding couples through infidelity, emotional disconnection, and crisis. Through that work, he developed a simple yet profound framework that challenges what most people think therapy is about.

At the core of the conversation is a powerful distinction: it’s not about how couples communicate… it’s about what they are communicating. Respect or contempt. Curiosity or certainty. Faith or panic. Bruce explores the intimacy–stability paradox, explains why intimacy requires tolerating anxiety, and introduces the difference between an “aha” moment and an “oh sh*t” moment... the kind of realization that changes everything.

This episode is an invitation to rethink love, conflict, monogamy, therapy, and even certainty itself. Because sometimes the most important shift isn’t fixing the relationship… it’s shifting the mindset behind it.

💡 In This Episode, Listeners Will Discover:

💬 Why “better communication” isn’t always the solution
 🔥 The real reason couples avoid therapy (hint: it’s fear, not indifference)
 ❤️ Why intimacy requires the ability to tolerate anxiety
 ⚖️ The difference between stability and passion and why both matter
 💔 Why infidelity is often about context, not character
 🧠 How contempt quietly erodes connection
 💡 The power of the “oh sh*t” moment in healing
 🙏 Why faith (not religion, but trust in reality) transforms relationships
 🌱 How monogamy can become a gift instead of a restriction
 🕊️ Why humility in beliefs strengthens connection far beyond romance

⏰ Timeline Summary

 [2:26] Finding his true calling after personal relationship pain
 [6:10] Childhood, identity, and the self-proclaimed “recovering nerd”
 [16:38] The long road through his first marriage and the defining “oh sht” moment
 [19:40] Meeting his wife in an unexpected, almost fate-like way
 [27:21] Why couples therapy became his specialty
 [31:00] The seven-word framework: “Be kind, don’t panic, and have faith”
 [36:12] The intimacy vs. stability paradox explained
 [42:56] Should every couple go to therapy?
 [49:00] Why communication techniques alone don’t fix relationships
 [1:15:05] The difference between “aha” moments and “oh sht” moments

To Connect with Amanda:

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To Connect with Dr. Bruce Chalmer:

Website: https://brucechalmer.com

Podcast: https://couplestherapyinsevenwords.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Bruce’s Background

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Amanders and Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, and a variety of other people. Where your host, Amanda Roosevelt, will discuss her own mindset and perspective, and her guest mindset and perspective on the world around us. Amanders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Today I am joined with Bruce, and he is a psychologist in Vermont who has been working with couples for over 30 years. And I am so excited to delve down his journey, the three books he has written, and all about his experience as a couples therapist. Thank you so much for joining me, Bruce.

SPEAKER_03 1:03

Well, thanks. I'm delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Me too. So who would you say Bruce is at the core?

SPEAKER_03 1:10

I've heard you ask that on podcasts, and there are several cores of me. So you know, I don't think there is just one. And one thing I will sometimes describe myself as a recovering nerd with frequent relapses. So that's, you know, I'm I'm definitely on the nerdy side of things. My wife Judy Alexander and I do a podcast called Couples Therapy in Seven Words. There's a little plug there. And she's will sometimes say, Well, I'm the therapist. She's the real person. She's a retired educator. She's worked with people a lot too, but she's not a therapist. So she will sometimes, if we're interviewing a guest or something and the guest and I start nerding out on sort of, you know, psychological jargon or something, she will pull us back into speaking to real people. I am a recovering nerd with three power relapses. And I'm also at core, it's funny, I at core, I'm a musician. I do, I've done music my whole life. And I'm also, there's something about the work I do as a therapist that is really about my core. Because I used to do stuff that I was okay at and had fun doing, but it wasn't really who I was. And it wasn't until I got into this that getting into you know working with people in this way that really felt like, oh, this is who I am. So that's all that's part of who I am as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

I love that. So you really felt like you were embodying what you're meant to do, being the cobbless thyopast.

From Statistics To Psychology

SPEAKER_03 2:26

Yeah, and it and it took me a while to get there. Now, I don't I don't know if your podcast is anything like ours, way more people hear it than see it. I know you you do have some stuff on YouTube, but anyway, people looking they'll say, Oh, he's an old guy. Well, yes, I am. I mean, I'm 74. If you do the math, and you mentioned I've been doing the the I've been a psychologist for 30 years in private practice, and so I was already in my 40s when I got into it. So I was doing other stuff. I used to be a statistician way back in the day, and I was teaching courses in data communications back when that back when you could say that it was like a discrete field. Now it's like there's so many different subspecialties of that. But you know, I used to do all that stuff, but it was when I went through some issues actually in my first marriage. My current marriage is a second marriage for both of us, and going through the the loss of that first marriage, which took a long time to happen. The short story of my first marriage is that both my ex and I have gone on to marry really wonderful women and we're both a lot happier. That's basically what happened there. And but it took a while for her to figure that out. So that's what was that's what she needed. And and I make light of it, but it was actually very painful. And it got me exposed to being in therapy, both individual and also couples. And some of the therapy I had was really good, and some of the therapy I had I look back on now, you know, from the standpoint of experienced therapist and realized, wow, some of that was really bad. You know, it was really, really wasn't borderline unethical on cases, but whatever. But I learned from all of it, and there was something about the power of it that I just felt like, wow, I I really want to be doing this. And so I started getting my training in my late 30s and it didn't get licensed, as I said, until I was in my 40s.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Now, I'd I'd love if we could backtrack even more a little bit, if you could take us down memory lane a little bit. Childhood, your upbringing. However deep you want to take that could be as simple as like I tell guests, I'm an only child. So even if you hear nothing else, like it tells you a little bit about how we got to 25.

SPEAKER_03 4:34

Well, I am the the third son of a third son, and my and my father, you know, was a third son. I am a third son, all boys in these families. And guess what? I ended up having three boys. So I I that married into two stepkids. So I I finally acquired a stepdaughter. That was really nice to have, although they were already pretty well fully baked by the time I married their mom, so I don't get credit for them, but they're wonderful. But so, and so my my youngest is a third son of a third son of a third son, but that's somehow mystically important. I don't know why. So I'm very much not an only child. You know, I'm I'm the little one. I I I believed for decades that most men are taller than me. I'm of average height, maybe a hair above average. I'm certainly not particularly short, but I always believed that most men are taller than me because I was the youngest of three boys, and my brothers were always taller than me. So that's sort of what I figured. So I grew up in Buffalo, New York, was very much a part of the Jewish community in Buffalo, New York, and that's extended to throughout the rest of my life. I'm very active in the Jewish communities wherever I've lived, sometimes in leadership roles and often in musical roles and things like that. And what else should I tell you? I already mentioned I used to be a statistician for a while. In fact, I actually have four books out, and somebody actually bought the statistics book I wrote in 1986. Somebody bought that recently.

unknown 5:59

But anyway.

SPEAKER_03 6:00

So I used to do that way back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

So, how was school for you as a kid growing up? Were you the nerd growing up as well?

Childhood, Skipping Grades, And Identity

SPEAKER_03 6:10

I was something of a nerd. And it was interesting because I skipped third grade, and it was me and two other boys. They skipped us all with we didn't know it until we showed up for school, showed up for school, and they said, You're not going to go into third grade. We want you to try fourth grade. And so I was, and I was the youngest of those three, three of us that skipped. So I was always the youngest kid in my class all the way through school, starting from fourth grade on. And that, on the one hand, it spared me a year of school that I think I would have been pretty bored in terms of the material. On the other hand, I was behind socially all the way through school because I was a year younger than everybody else. And so, particularly middle school, early high school years, especially seventh, eighth grade around there, very painful because I was just younger than everybody else. So that was that was difficult. But I think back, you know, was it a good idea to do? And you know, I there were some positive things, but also some negative, and certainly wouldn't, it didn't come up with our kids. They weren't doing that when our kids were going through school, and I wouldn't have done it. Based on my own experience, I wouldn't have done it. But I was, yeah, I was kind of kind of a nerdy kid. I it wasn't until actually when I got into high school, I established myself as something of they made me editor of the high school newspaper at the end of my sophomore year. And then I got heavily political. This was the back in the days of the Vietnam War. You know, I graduated from high school in 1968, which was an incredibly uh tumultuous year. And I sort of established myself as like politically active and you know, organized uh a citywide school. We were going to do a like a teach-in back in the day, but anyway, back in the day. And actually it it never came off because the day we had scheduled it was the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated. And so they canceled school and we, you know, we canceled that event. But we had we had did have it organized. So, you know, when I went to my 50th high school reunion back in 2018 and saw folks that I hadn't thought about in 50 years, never mind, you know, seen in 50 years, but a lot of them were reminding me of that. Oh yeah, why you were involved in all that you know political stuff.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

So post-high school, I ended up graduating from the University of Toronto and Canada. My major was East Asian science. My specialty actually was Japanese. I also studied Chinese. While I was at it, I also took Russian because I was just fascinated with languages. I have never visited either China or Japan, but I was so fascinated by languages, specifically the different ways that different languages make you think. You know, there's the whole, it's not just they have different words for stuff and different word order, it's that it's a whole different way of thinking. And Japanese is about as different from English. Chinese, I think, is a lot easier for an English speaker to learn than Japanese. But I was just fascinated by it. So in one of the things I in my last year of college was worked with my Japanese professor on translating some stories, and because he needed help translating into English. He spoke English, but he spoke English way better than I spoke Japanese, that's for sure. But he needed he wanted some help from a native speaker of English, and I had studied Japanese with him. So that was really an interesting experience.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Now, did you have any plans of doing anything like with this East Asian studies? I guess.

Languages, Early Marriage, And Vermont

SPEAKER_03 9:48

Yeah, I thought for a while I was gonna go to Japan to study, and ended up what happened was my my then wife, my first wife and I, and we were very young when we got married. We were 20 and 19 when we got married. So we were still in school when we got married. We ended up right after I graduated, and she was gonna go, she had one more year to go, but we ended up coming to Vermont where she had a sister, and we were hiking on the long trail. And you're you live in Massachusetts, so you might have heard of the long trail, not all of it, but part of it is part of the Appalachian Trail. So we were hiking along during the summer, and we sort of stumbled into jobs as caretakers at one of the lodges on the long trail, which was a job that just involved kind of cleaning up, you know, being a present so that people didn't trash the place, cleaning up, doing a little bit of trail clearing work, stuff like that. So we did that for that summer and decided during that summer, we did it was the summer of 1972, we did not want to go back to Toronto. We wanted to move to Vermont. So I ended up getting a job as a taxi driver in Barrie, Vermont, which lasted all of two days because I made so little money there was no way I could possibly live on it. And I ended up applying to the state of Vermont and got a job working for the state of Vermont as a, what do they call it, personnel research technician? It just meant they were doing, it was a section in the personnel department that was doing test validation because that was right around the time that there was a court case that said that if you had selection procedures for jobs, you had to prove that they were valid. If they had any sort of discriminatory impact, you had to prove validity. So there sprung up this small industry of people working for state governments and other and city governments, places like that, working on validating their selection procedures. So I was involved in that, and the the head of that section left a year or two later, and they made me the head of that section. And I convinced the state of Vermont they should send me for a master's degree in statistics, because I was using all these statistics that I didn't really know much about. And they sent me, and I took one course, and it turned out they were looking for somebody to work at the University of Vermont as a statistician programmer. So I left the state of Vermont, ended up there, and that's how I was able at the University of Vermont to get my master's degree in statistics, and then later a PhD in psychology without having to pay tuition because I was a full-time employee of the university. So that worked out very nicely.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Wow. Okay. Now I'm curious, you said your master's in statistics and then your PhD in psychology. Around what was the timing between those?

SPEAKER_03 12:36

Yeah, so I got the master's in statistics in what was that, 1977? 78? I think 78. And took a year off after that. It was still working for the university, and they did not have a PhD program in statistics. And I wanted to go on and get a doctorate, but they had one in psychology that would use all of my on the research side, not on the clinical side, that would use all of my credits for my master's. They they I had worked actually with some professors in the psych department on my master's in statistics. One of my jobs when I was a statistician was as a statistician at the Vermont Regional Cancer Center, and they were doing research testing to see whether nurse home visits would improve the quality of life of patients with advanced cancer. And to do that, they had to find some way of measuring quality of life. So I did my master's thesis on how might one measure quality of life in patients with advanced cancer and did a lot of research on that. And that involved a fair amount of statistics. And so I worked with the psych department. And so they said, well, come get a PhD with us. And of course, because I was a university employee and they didn't have to give me a that was cheap. So that they let me in. You know, it was great. So that's how I got my PhD in psychology. I didn't get the clinical training until a few years later. So the PhD in psychology was 1982. So I guess it was four years after the master's degree. I had to do well, it took me about that long between that and the dissertation I wrote and all that stuff. So I didn't get the clinical training until I didn't start getting clinical training until almost 10 years later. And that had to do with what was going on in my marriage. And so I didn't go back and and you know retake courses, but I got clinical training through internships and supervised practice and all that stuff. Ended up getting licensed as a psychologist doctorate by the state of Vermont.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Wow. Now, also that sounds like such a fascinating project that you did at the end, how one measures the quality of life.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. I and you know what I remember about it was it's not a unidimensional phenomenon. That's what the, you know, and I was studying some of the research that was done by the National Opinion Research Center and folks who've studied happiness and satisfaction and things of that sort. You know, the stuff that makes us happy the the app let me put it this way, the absence of the stuff that makes us miserable is not what makes us happy. In other words, if you there's stuff that can make you miserable, right? Being sick and in pain and you know, and and uh you know not having enough money, and I mean all the sorts of things you could imagine could make somebody miserable, by golly, it's pretty effective for a lot of people and making them miserable. But if you remedy that, which is a wonderful thing to do, that doesn't necessarily make people happy. It just makes them less miserable. The things that tend to make you happy can make you happy even if you're also miserable. In other words, they're they're not they're they're not exactly orthogonal, as we would say, nerdily. You know, they're not exactly you know completely unrelated, but neither are they neither are they perfectly related. So it's different stuff that makes you happy than stuff that makes you not miserable.

Measuring Quality Of Life In Cancer Care

SPEAKER_01 15:59

No, that that makes a lot of sense. I bet it was fascinating though, some what you found from that.

SPEAKER_03 16:05

It was interesting work. Yeah, it's funny. I I was just uh over on my shelf. I have a copy of my my PhD dissertation, which was heavily statistical. That one wasn't particularly psychological at all. My PhD in psychology was heavily statistical. My master's degree in statistics was heavily psychological. And I I I must have it somewhere else in the house, but I haven't looked at my master's thesis in a long time.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

You had mentioned about your first marriage. How did that, or maybe even when did that start to come to an end for you?

First Marriage, Pain, And Therapy Lessons

SPEAKER_03 16:38

It took a long time to come to an end. Uh the sort of crisis mode happened when we'd been married for close to 18 years, I think. It was going to look back on it now, and you know, easy to see in hindsight, oh, there were signs I might have detected, but I didn't know to detect them. Nor did my ex, by the way. I think she knew a lot more about them than I did, obviously. But I was quite willingly somewhat clueless. I didn't really want to see the signs. In a lot of ways, we got along very well. And then there were ways we didn't. And that's I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail on that, partly because that's not only my business, it's also my ex's business. It took a long time for, you know, what happened was when we finally figured out, or really, she finally figured out that she was gay, is basically what happened. When she finally figured that out definitively, was willing to tell herself, and you got to realize she's about my age. She's like six months younger than me. She's also in her 70s now. This was happening when she was in, well, 20s, 30s, 40s. And our generation has a much had, has had a much harder time with that than yours does. And so that's it took a lot of courage for her to be able to figure out what she needed to figure out and actually face it. I remember the moment actually. Said, oh my God, we're going to have to divorce, which was really painful because we'd been married at that point for three years. And, you know, and three kids. Now our now, our youngest was almost ready to graduate from high school, which made things a lot easier. So, you know, we waited to actually file for divorce until we didn't have to worry about custody issues. Not, you know, we weren't going to fight about it, but we didn't have to worry about it. Our youngest was already 18 when we divorced. But that was it that took a long time, and it wasn't until we had a really good story that then we could know what to do. And by good story, I simply mean a story that said, oh, neither one of us is broken. The problem here isn't that you're broken or I'm broken. The problem is, oh, we're incompatible in some really important ways. And so we're gonna have to sadly and lovingly split up, and that's basically what happened. So it was ridiculously short time after we separated that I met my now wife. The kind of thing that I would never the kind of thing I routinely, and anybody in my line of work is this well, there are probably people who don't say this, but most of us say, oh my goodness, don't immediately get involved with someone else, you know, right after you've just separated. I mean, I wasn't even divorced yet. But my now wife had I I just happened to check out J Date, the Jewish dating thing. This again, this was happening in the early 2000s. This is in 2003. And, you know, dating services, you know, like match.com was already in existence in those days. Well, J Date was the one for people who are looking for Jewish people. So, and I was heavily Jewish, and I knew I'd if I was gonna find anyone, she would have to be a Jewish woman. And mostly because I knew that no uh nobody else would tolerate me being who I am. It's kind of it was kind of like that. But she had managed to post on J Date, and she hadn't, she'd been divorced for years at that point, and she hadn't even she wasn't even checking J Date anymore, but her profile was still there. Well, she put her profile and the one phrase on there that was pretty well designed to attract me out of all the Jewish men in Vermont. And and I'll tell you what the phrase was, and for those of your listeners who are Jewish, maybe will get it and maybe won't. The phrase was an eshetchil but a woman of today. So why did that why did that attract me in particular? Well, you have to know what an eshetchil is. That's a quote from Proverbs. Eshetchil means a woman of valor, but it's it's a particular quote. It's it's what uh traditionally is sung on Friday at the Friday evening meal. It's sung in praise of the Jewish wife. You know, it's very, very old-fashioned stuff. And if she had just said an ashut Khail, I would have said, Oh, no, I think she's more religious than I am. You know, she's more observant than I am. But she said, a woman of today. And I'm saying, uh-huh. That sounds interesting. And so then, you know, we end arranged to meet again, way sooner than I ever would have thought. And so I wrote to her when I saw her at profile, I said, All right, all right, I'll write to her, all right, just to see. This is just so intriguing. And I said, last time she lived in Burlington, I lived in Montpelier, about 40 miles apart. Montpelier's the capital. Anyway, so I lived in Montpelier, part of a little tiny Jewish community there. She was in the big city of Burlington, you know, population 50,000, depending on whether UVM is in the University of Vermont's in session or not. But anyway, she was the education director at one of the synagogues in Burlington. So it didn't have her name there. So I wrote and said, Well, gee, last time I was in Burlington happened to be for the performance of a cantata that I wrote with a music group I was part of. And I'd written this, you know, hour and 10 minute long cantata, a big long my magnum opus. And she wrote back and said, Well, I was there and I love the music. And so I thought, well, okay, if you know the Yiddish word beshirt, that means foreordained. It's like, okay, this match was foreordained. And then we met it and headed off. And turned out she had a background in astonishingly similar to mine in many ways. She used to lead services in her little community when she lived in southern Vermont. She teaches kids. She's a Jewish educator. We meshed right away. So that's but that's a I covered a lot of history.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

No boot. That's beautiful though. And no, I'm I'm just personally curious. You said she didn't have a photo. So did you see what she looked like before you sent her a message or no?

SPEAKER_03 22:33

No. And it's interesting because I didn't have a picture either. You know, and she didn't we didn't care. And she happens to be, in my humble opinion, beautiful. So and you know, and when I fell in love with her, she'll like before we respect the most beautiful woman on earth. So, you know, that sounds kind of smart of me, but that I mean that that is kind of how it worked. No, neither one of us is is was particularly worried about that. We weren't, you know, neither one of us is all that visually oriented. You know how people are more some people are more visual, some people are more sound. She's more visual than I am. I am not particularly visual. And it, but but as soon as, you know, as soon as I got to know her, I mean I fell in love with how she looked and everything else, you know. So I'm always fascinated by people who sort out people based on how they look, you know, like swiping right or swiping left. It's like, wow, I maybe that works sometimes. I kind of doubt it, but maybe it does.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

No, I agree with that. You know nothing about their mindset, even if they look decent.

SPEAKER_03 23:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

But no, that seems so much like fate to me because you really didn't know much. You can see what she looked like. You saw one quote. That seemed that seems like fate to me. I don't know.

Meeting Judy And Building A New Life

SPEAKER_03 23:42

Yeah, I mean, it it had enough information. I knew I wanted a woman who had kids herself. Because I have kids. And and in fact, not only did I want a woman who had kids herself, I wanted a woman who, if it came to a choice between me and the kids, would pick the kids. I didn't ever want to come between somebody and her kids. And I, of course, didn't want her to come between me and my kids. I've mentioned I'm working on a book. I might as well mention what that's about. This next book I'm working on now, it's a workbook. It's not spiral bound, and you know, where you write on the book, you have to write on your own paper. But it has lots and lots and lots of questions and then lots of suggestions and things like that. It's a workbook. It's and the the title, I haven't got the subtitle for sure yet. I I'll give you what these, what the subtitle idea is, but the title is The Passion Paradox. And the subtitle is When You Feel Miles Apart and Still Love Each Other. And so it's for people who feel miles apart but still love each other. In other words, for people where they're feeling like, wow, we used to have this wonderful sense of both stability and intimacy. Those are the two needs I talk a lot about. And somehow something's gone wrong. And maybe we've got lots of stability, but no intimacy. And I don't just mean sex, I mean more generally, more no emotional intimacy. Every once in a while, I'll meet a couple that has intimacy, like they might have sex, but but no stability. But the vast majority of folks I work with is the other way around. And so this is a workbook for those, you know, those people. I'm writing a section now dealing with step-parenting issues. And I did a little quick Google just to see what you know, what are people telling step parents out there. And I came across a couple of really interesting threads on Reddit where they were talking about people were saying, if you don't have kids yourself, don't do it. You know, don't marry someone with kids. I would, I don't make blanket statements like that. But they're saying that it is so, it can be so difficult. And for both parties, it can be so difficult to understand what that's like and to recognize you, yeah, parenting and stuff parenting and you usually aren't the same. You know, remember the Brady bunch? That has done horrible things to people's expectations about what a blended family is all about. And you know, they because they, if you remember the Brady Bunch, it's like there was no there no evidence of the previous parents ever existed. I think the the boy's mother had died. I think that might have been some passing reference to that. I have no idea what happened to the girl's father. But whatever it was, they they presented it as if it's just all one big happy family and there's no issues around that, and that tends to be, shall we say, unrealistic. If I was gonna before I would even date someone, I wanted it to be a woman in the ballpark of my own age. She just made the cut, it turned out, because I at the time I was 51, and so Jay dates categories and went 45 to 55. So that was a I wanted somebody in my age category. I didn't want to I want somebody who would get the same references, the same cultural references. She was 45 at the time. She's six and a quarter years younger than I am. So she fortunately just made the cut, or I wouldn't have seen her profile.

unknown 27:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:08

No, I'd love if we could transition back to when you first started doing therapy and working as a couple's therapist.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

How did the beginning of that go for you?

Becoming A Couples Therapist

SPEAKER_03 27:21

It was fascinating. I got trained a number of different really, really valuable experiences as an intern. And my first experience as an intern was doing psychodynamic, very heavily psychodynamic work. I'm not gonna, I won't get into all the weeds of what that means. I knew I needed to get out of that the day when I realized I don't want to think of people the way you have to think of people to do psychodynamic work. You know, it's this is a caricature, but you know, the the uh the classic psychodynamic explanation for when the client arrives for the session. If they arrive early, they're compulsive. If they arrive early, they're anxious. If they arrive late, they're resistant. If they arrive on time, they're compulsive. You know, it's like, oh, okay. So I don't want to think of people either way. It's just everything is pathologized, it seems. That's I say I'm sure that's an unfair characterization. But anyway, so I got trained in family therapy, and that also included some training in couples therapy, did an externship at New York at the Eckerman Institute for Family Therapy, and was just fascinated by that whole process. And so when I finally got my license and got it, went into private practice, I was seeing individuals, I was seeing couples, I was seeing families. The longer I did it, the more I was drawn to couples work. Just found there was something so compelling about it. I don't have a better explanation than it just felt really inspiring. And I learned so much from the people I worked with. I think most therapists would probably say this. We learn more from the people we work with than from any of our training, even if it was good training. I did get a lot of good training. But real people is where you learn the skill. And so the longer I did it, the more I started specializing in couples work. And it was probably eight or ten years ago, I think I just stopped taking individuals entirely and I just focused. I just accept couples now, as do clients.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

So it's only couples you work with now.

Be Kind, Don’t Panic, Have Faith

Stability Vs Intimacy Explained

SPEAKER_03 29:15

So that it's it's funny. If you ask various therapists, there are the therapists who will say, Oh my god, I don't touch couples with a 10-foot pole. And then there are the therapists who say, No, I love working with couples, and I'm one of them. So I will tell you this is this sort of connected to that. Like, what was it like to get into that? I mentioned my wife and I do a podcast. We've been doing that for five years. We started right at the time that that first book about couples therapy came out, Reigniting the Spark. It came out on February 29th, 2020. Well, gee, what was happening right around February 29th of 2020? The pandemic broke out. So we couldn't do any in-person promotional events. So we decided we would do a Facebook Live. And some folks looked at that and said, Oh, you guys should do a podcast. And I wanted her to do it with me because she's wonderful on she, you know, she just has a wonderful presence about her, and we have fun doing it together. So going back to when I started doing couples therapy, so uh it was a year or two in, I think, two or three years, whatever. Early on in in that practice, I was at a consultation group meeting, and a colleague, we were getting up to go. I don't remember what we were talking about, probably couples therapy, I imagine. But we we were getting up to go, and this colleague and friend of mine turned to me and said, How do you do couples therapy anyway? Which is sort of this like, how am I supposed to answer that question? You know? But I had actually given it a bit of thought. You know, because I was wondering that myself. I would just sort of, you know, bounce that around. It's like, what the hell am I really doing here? You know? And I realized if I boil it all down, essentially what I'm trying to convey to people is be kind and don't panic. And be kind, I don't just mean be nice, I mean be kin, you know, recognize your kinship. And you can't do that if you're in a panic. So, you know, most of the techniques that we learn when you learn how to do this, when you're trained in zillions of different schools of therapy exist, right? Schools of thought about how to do this, you know, but they all share the idea that you need to be able to talk about stuff without freaking out. You need to be able to go there to these potentially really anxiety-producing topics without freaking out. And so I'm realizing, yeah, be kind and don't panic. And I start sharing that with some of the couples I work with. And they would say, Well, okay, how do you not panic? And they had me there because I'm thinking, dang. You know, because be kind and don't panic is great. So how do we not panic? Because we all know what panic feels like. We are all wired to be able to panic. So I didn't have a, I still don't really have a simple answer for how do we not panic, but I gave it thought over a number of months and I realized if I thought about the couples I work with and just very loosely divide them into two camps, you know, the couples that came in, and you could just see they were, they just were having a hard time. You know, those those are the couples that would come in and say, let's say they were dealing with infidelity, which a substantial proportion of the couples I'm working with are close to half, I think, are dealing with infidelity or some similar kind of betrayal. And so they're coming in and they're freaking out, of course, understandably. And the person who did the cheating is by the time they're in a therapist's office, they're feeling terrible about it. You know, they've already been busted, so to speak. And the person who was cheated on is feeling angry and hurt and doubting their own sanity. And I mean, it's just a mess, understandably. That's sort of what it's like at first. The couples that come in and say, we just want to go back to how it was. It was fine. You know, the one who was cheated on will say, Yeah, I'm pissed and I'm hurt, and we just have to make sure there are rules so that that pastor will never do that again, you know. And the one who did the cheating is saying, Yeah, I'll never do it again, I'll never do it again. I must have been crazy. No, yeah, let's just go back. That is panic. That's just basically panic. You can't go back to how it was, and you shouldn't go back to how it was, because how it was is what got you in trouble. So clearly there was something going wrong. You know, what it was varies from couple to couple, but there was something not working right. The couples that would come in, same sort of just really hurt state, but they would often say, and I'll quote especially, let's say, the one who was cheated on, and let's make her the woman this time again, too. And she says, you know, I know he's not crazy, I know he's not evil. I've seen him, I believe him when he says he loves me, even, but he cheated on me. We're gonna have to understand what was going on. I know he's not a terrible person. Maybe I can trust him and maybe I can't. If I can't, I suppose I'll need to divorce him. But I want to understand. And the guy comes in, the guy who did the cheating, and he's saying, I can't just write this off as being crazy. I wasn't crazy. It's terrible. I feel terrible about doing it. It's almost like I found myself doing it. But we better understand it. That's faith. They have faith that there is meaning to be found even in suffering. There's meaning to be found even in bad bad behavior, that life is fundamentally right to be what it is, even when it sucks. So I that that created a seven-word formula for like what couples therapy is all about. And that's the the title of the podcast my wife and I do is called Couples Therapy and Seven Words. The seven words, for those of you who are actually watching, I have it on a cup. Those are the seven words. That's the logo for our so that kind of going back, that took me a while to develop that concept, but that's what I've been working with. And people find that again, that obviously doesn't answer all anybody's questions, but they find it's a useful structure. So I will often it's funny, I'll I'll structure things around, I mentioned earlier, those concepts of stability and intimacy. I'll usually give a little talk in a first session about stability and intimacy is these two sets of needs that are both needs and yet they're somewhat in conflict. But the key in terms of what lets you experience intimacy is to tolerate anxiety. And the way to tolerate anxiety is faith. And again, I don't mean religious faith. I mean, it's not, I'm not ruling out religious faith, but I've known plenty of religious people who are not showing the kind of faith I'm talking about. They, you know, they may be into like some sort of fundamentalist and very rigid ideas about the way things are, but they're not accepting the rightness of reality. They're not saying, well, we're gonna have to understand this. They're thinking they already understand everything and they're just pissed. And that gets you nowhere. The what I'm talking about is again, I've known non-religious people to show this kind of faith. It's not the same as religious faith. But it is that sense that reality's right to be what it is. That's what will get people through this.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

And now you mentioned for intimacy, it's to you need to be able to tolerate anxiety.

Affairs, Anxiety, And Cracked Sidewalks

SPEAKER_03 36:19

And sometimes people will ask questions rather like you just said that. It's like they'll sort of look at me quizzically, like, wait a minute, I thought intimacy is supposed to feel good, right? When it does, doesn't it? Of course it does. Intimacy can be lovely. But of course, I'm not just talking about sex. Intimacy, in uh the way I define intimacy, sort of you know, loosely, is intimacy is when you are present and honest with yourself and each other. That's what I mean by intimacy. And intimacy, when it, of course, when you're having a lovely shared experience, be it sexual or otherwise, we have a you know, a lovely meal together or a lovely music experience together, or seeing a beautiful sunset, or whatever, those can feel lovely. That's not about anxiety, but intimacy also involves things like something as simple as a complaint. What if you want to complain? You know, I don't mean that in a whiny sense. What if you just want to say, hey, I wish you would pick up your underwear, you know, or whatever that might be. You know, in issuing any sort of complaint to your partner, it's not going to be fun for them to hear. It's gonna raise anxiety a little bit. Now, if it's something trivial, you know, you can sort of laugh about it, it doesn't have to be a big deal. Sometimes it's not at all trivial. Sometimes it's like, wow, for example, wow, I think I might be gay, you know, and we're in a heterosexual relationship. Uh-oh. You know, that to have the courage to bring that up is an that's a very intimate moment, and yet it is hugely anxiety-producing. Or even to say things about, you know, I think I I want us to move overseas for six months or something, and yeah, I'm worried that's gonna freak you out if I suggest that. Or I I want to I want to open up a business and I'm worried you're gonna belittle me if I say that. And you know, all sorts of things that people might say about, or or fantasies, again, in the sexual domain, especially. Somebody has some fantasies and they're worried that they're, or even just desires or preferences, something they want to try, and they're worried their partner's gonna think them weird for even wanting it. And if they have a history of conversations going off the rails when somebody says something that raises anxiety, that makes it even less likely they're willing to share that stuff. And what's happening then is intimacy is basically being compromised. I always like to use my favorite metaphor about stability and intimacy. If you think about a plant, and you know, a seed gets planted in fertile soil and it germinates and it sprouts and starts to grow, then somebody comes along and paves the sidewalk over it. Well, that's for stability. You know, it's that's for the use of people walking at it, it's more stable. But of course, what does it do to the plant? The plant has roots for stability, but intimacy is the energy for growth. What that plant is going to do is crack the sidewalk or die trying. It won't tolerate just being paved over. It'll either crack the sidewalk or it will die trying to crack the sidewalk. And we've all seen, you know, cracked sidewalks with plants growing through them. That's that's really powerful. So, you know, it'll find a way through somehow. And so that I call it a metaphor. I think there's something, I'm not sure it's only metaphorical. I think intimacy is pretty much that same process for any living organism. It wants to interact deeply with its environment. And a couple is a living organism also. So what happens when intimacy is compromised because people are avoiding it because they're too afraid, you know, because it's it doesn't go well. What happens then is somebody or something tries to crack the sidewalk. Now, what does that look like in a couple? Sometimes it looks like an affair. It's not the only reason people have affairs, but it's one of them, is that there's it to you know, there's no intimacy happening and they're they're starved for intimacy, so they become vulnerable to someone else's attentions. Again, not the only reason, but it's it's one of the biggies. Sometimes lack of intimacy looks like you can't talk about anything without getting into an argument. You know, you argue about anything and nothing, and people will say, why are we uh so pissed off about such trivia? Well, often, not always, but often that is an indicator of compromised intimacy. Sometimes somebody blindsides the other and just says, I'm out of here, and they had no idea that was going to happen. You know, all those sorts of things are the symptoms of often the symptoms of compromised intimacy.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

No, that that makes a lot of sense about being able to tolerate anxiety, you know, because to reach that deep level of intimacy, you've got to be able to talk about anything. And is there's gonna be some anxiety with certain things. Even like you mentioned the move. You mentioned like even things that could happen, whether it's you want to go to school in a different like any slight change, you know, it doesn't have to be the minuscule like the underwear, and it doesn't have to be as extreme like the heterosexual versus the lesbian, but like even something, you know, like and it can be it can be nerve-wracking to bring up that conversation because it's a change and change change is hard, even if it's something both people want.

SPEAKER_03 41:33

Yeah, exactly. That's you know, I talk about intimacy and stability, and I don't mean to downrate the importance of stability. I have met couples where they, you know, they can have a great sex life and they can be really passionately involved, but they can't stay together for longer than, you know, three weeks without splitting up or getting into huge arguments or things like that. Stability is important too. Uh the skills are very different. The skills of stability are about the skills like I hit the way I like to put it, the skills of stability are basically boring. They're really important, but they're boring. You have to be responsible and accountable and predictable and reliable. You know, those are really boring. They're really important, but they're really boring. Those are the skills that give you stability because stability itself is pretty boring. Right? I mean, it's it doesn't change much. But of course, you need that to not be freaking out all the time. Nobody can be intimate 24-7. And so, you know, if what couples will often tend to do is that they will favor stability over intimacy because stability is a lot less scary. But of course, my whole thesis is that, well, yeah, intimacy turns out to be a need too. People don't tolerate lack of intimacy for very long.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Now, I'm I'm curious, I want to transition a tad. But do you do you think every couple should go to couples therapy?

Should Every Couple Do Therapy?

SPEAKER_03 42:56

I've been asked that question a number of times. Short answer, no, I don't. It's funny, I was just writing about this in the book I'm working on. Should you be in couples therapy? And I'm saying this is a book written by a couples therapist, you'd think I would say yes. I don't say yes, actually. Well, I want to say this carefully because I don't I don't want to be disrespectful to other people doing very good work, you know? But I'm just so not interested in sitting with people while they while they're doing navel gazing, you know? And the folks who want to work with someone so they can improve their life. It's just that part isn't fun for me. I want to work with people who really need help. I don't want to work with people who want to enrich their lives. Good. There are people who do that. Go do that, not me. I want to work with people who are in serious trouble that need serious help. Like right away, because you know, there's no, they're not, they're not having to say, gee, I feel a little off. No, you don't feel a little off. You're in crisis and you're worried that your whole world's gonna fall apart. Those are the folks I want to help. So, you know, from that perspective, well, what how did I get there from your question? Should everybody do You know, couples therapy. No, I like the sort of the family doctor model, you know. When do you go to your family doctor? I mean, yes, I suppose you might go for checkups, right? Uh especially us old old fogies. You know, I I have my Medicare checkup, my annual Medicare checkup coming fairly soon. But usually, you know, you go to the doctor when something's bothering you and you go and you get help, but ideally they figure out something to help you not be bothered, then you don't go back. You know, I mean, maybe they check to make sure it's okay, but then you don't just keep going and going and going. That's how I I tend to view going to therapy of any kind. Really useful. And so when I work with couples, I don't say, well, you have to do a course of X number of sessions and then you're done. No, I'll work. I don't, I don't ask people at the end of the session, I don't say, when would you like to meet again? I say, would you like to meet again? And sometimes I every once in a while, somebody would, when they are not used to that, they'll look at me funny and say, Well, don't you think we should? And I'll say, No, of course. I just want to make it clear, it's always up to you. You know, I'm always focusing on people on on that question. In fact, the very first question I ask people routinely is, How will you know if this is helping? And that focuses them right off. It's like, yeah, you know, it is your responsibility as the person using my services to decide for yourself, is this helping? And of course, with a couple, it's fascinating because they don't always agree on that. So there are three different opinions, you know, mine and and the two of them, about does it seem to be helping or not? Of course, of those three, mine, I think arguably is the least important one. But I'm, you know, I have my own opinions too. And but so you can't always tell that sometimes people say, Well, what's your success rate? Well, it depends on who's defining success. I've worked with some couples where one of them ends up saying, Oh my god, this has so helped me clarify. I know I need to get out of this relationship. You know, that's really sad. And the other is thinking, I was hoping this was going to save our relationship, and you know, you've blown it. So who's right? Well, both of them. I'm not gonna say either one of them is right. Those are those are valid, you know, those are valid opinions. So, you know, all of that by way of saying, no, I don't think every couple ought to be in couples therapy. I I I'll I've met with couples where they'll set up a session for six months down the line just sort of as a little check-in, but they don't usually do that very many times. You know, if they've done a they've done a bunch of work, they've recovered from some serious pain that they've been having, and they'll sometimes set up something later. Those are nice sessions because they, you know, they'll just talk about how things are going well, and that's lovely when that happens.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

Now, I'm curious if you have, and obviously this would just be your opinion, but like as a couple therapist, when a couple would realize that like maybe they should try couples therapy.

When To Seek Help And Contraindications

Why It’s Not About Communication Rules

SPEAKER_03 46:59

I mean, if there's there's a few contraindications, right? Clear contraindications. If there is serious violence happening, if there's somebody at risk of physical harm, there's no way they should be in couples therapy. It's dangerous. It's simply dangerous. You you have to, I mean, it's not that I want people to piss each other off, but you have to be safe if you do. So there's that. That's a contraindication. Another one that I just have no fun working with is if it's mandated or if they're in the middle of an adversarial proceeding, if they're in court as adversaries, I won't work with them that way. It tends not to be very useful. What they need is mediation, not a therapist. Now, occasionally I've worked with folks who have canceled their divorce application or whatever filing because they want to actually explore getting back together, I'm happy to work with them. Or people who know they're divorcing and they're not fighting about it. They just want some help, you know, helping them divorce in a way that is more humane for themselves and their kids. Happy to work with that too. But I'm not going to work with them as part of an adversarial proceeding. If those things aren't the case, then one sort of seat-of-the-pants way of deciding, you know, maybe couples therapy is a good idea, is if you keep trying to have the same damn conversation and it never goes well. Couple therapy could be very helpful with that. Because, you know, what is my job there? There's a couple different ways I can say it. I already mentioned, you know, the chief thing I probably offer more than anything else, according to my own little construction, is faith. I'm sitting there saying, you're all you're you're both valid people. Me too. We're all, you know, we're all valid people in this conversation. Doesn't matter, you know, we've all screwed up in one way or another. I'm not saying that's the same, but I'm just saying, you know, we're all valid people, we're all imperfect people, we're doing the best we can here. Let's work with that. I start with the assumption that nobody involved is crazy, evil, or stupid. You know, we're all we're all all of those things occasionally, but in general, the people I work with aren't crazy. Everyone's in in 30 years, how many times would I say this? Four or five times in 30 years, I've met a couple where I wouldn't say, oh, you know, one thing you've got going for you is neither one of you is bad shit crazy. When I'm talking about stability, I usually say, Well, you you seem to have one thing going for you, you're not nuts, you know, and they'll laugh. And I don't mean to make fun of serious mental health issues, but they're, you know, they're not psychotic. They're not in the middle of the manic episode, you know, it's not that sort of thing. Every once in a while I have met a couple or an individual where that is the case, so I wouldn't say that. But the overwhelming, you know, and sometimes they think the other one is crazy. And that, you know, and and I I'm making it sound sort of funny, and I don't mean it in the funny way. I mean they'll think the other one that, you know, they'll go online and and diagnose the person, well, I have a narcissist, or I have a borderline, or I have a fill-in-the-blank, you know. And it's not that those are completely useless terms, but they are also bludgeons. They also they close down the conversation instead of opening it up. So they may think each other crazy, but I don't. And we start with that, I start with that assumption. So that's they're getting faith from me. But the other thing they're getting, which is sort of associated with that, is they're getting a relatively calm nervous system compared to theirs. So they're in a conversation with someone who is genuinely curious, genuinely cares about them, because I care about all the people I work with, genuinely curious, not you know, not condemning them and not freaking out. And, you know, on those rare occasions over the past 30 years where I have come close to freaking out, I haven't been very helpful to people. And I that's one of the things I think with experience I've gotten better at. It's I've gotten better at not freaking out. I'll hear about something, or I'll I'll hear it's especially this is a classic, especially some guy's being sort of a jerk. And I know what it's like to be a guy, and unfortunately, I know what it's like to be a jerk. You know, and so you know, you know what I mean? This is a classic for therapists. The stuff in ourselves we don't like. And so I, you know, I would sort of start feeling really condemning of that guy who's being a jerk, and I because I recognize it, you know, too much. I've gotten better at that. I don't think I'm any less prone to being arrogant or whatever. I just I'm less prone to being less prone to condemning it in other people. So I can, you know, I could generally work with folks now more lightly. So that again, a long answer to your question, but yeah, the time to go is if you keep finding there's stuff you just can't get past certain conversations, and you'd like to be able to. That's those are often good ideas to go to couples therapy. Now, if what happens when you go to couples therapy, if your couples therapist proceeds to say, oh, you need to communicate better and teaches you rules for communication. Here is my controversial statement, undoubtedly overstated, but you know, the the title of my second book was It's not about communication. Why everything you know about couples therapy is wrong. That's a snarky title. But what I mean by that is if you go, you know, if I start teaching people, oh, use I statements, not you statements, you've probably heard of that, right? Everybody's heard of that, or most people have, of course. It's not a bad idea, it's not a terrible idea. Or active listening, you know, repeat back to the person, make sure you understood what, you know, those aren't bad ideas at all. But if you use them as techniques, instead of, you know, what those are when I statements and active listening and stuff like that is, what those are is if you are a fly in the wall watching a happy couple talk to each other, you will observe that there's very informally, they're not formally doing that, but informally they're doing that. If they're having a conversation about something to disagree about, you know, check out John Gottman's work on that. He did an enormous amount of research, still doing it on couples and what makes it work, you know, in terms of when they have a conversation about something they disagree about. If you are flying the wall watching a happy couple, you would observe, indeed, they are sort of active. Listen, they're making, you know, they're they're trying to really genuinely understand what the other person is saying. They're not calling each other names, you know. All of those things are good ideas. If you teach those as rules to people who aren't happy, it won't make them happy. They'll just argue about how they're not following the rules. Or they won't be able to follow the rules because they're too freaked out. Or they'll be every bit as contemptuous with an I statement as with a U statement. So those techniques don't help. They're just ridiculously cumbersome, and they make people think they're helping, but actually all they do really is give you something to do while you're not being intimate, while you're not being honest with each other. But my point, and the reason I've you know sort of resort a book with that provocative title, is to point out, you know, it's it's like what what analogy did I use? As I recall, you know, I I'm not much of a tennis player. I used to play with my kids when they were in high school. You know how how the real top tennis players they'll grunt loudly when they hit the ball? So I guess they should give grunting lessons in tennis so that you grunt loudly and that makes you uh that turns me into Rafael Nadal, right? No, it doesn't. Probably the grunting has something, there probably is some correlation between the grunting and them being top players, but it's not the grunting. It's the being a top player. Maybe that's associated with the grunting. So couples that are communicating following those rules informally, they're doing it because they're happy. They're not happy because they're doing it. And teaching those rules won't make them happy. There was a oh, what's the name of the oh I know what it was, the four seasons. That you I don't know if you would know the film that came out, it was probably 30 years ago at least, with Alan Elda and Carol Burnett. But just recently they made a mini-series on one of the streaming services of based on the same plot, basically, the four seasons. It was uh Tina Faye was in the Carol Burnett role. I forgot who was in the Alan Elda role. Anyway, they did this really hilarious send-up of one of the main couples who had obviously been to couples therapy and they had been taught these communication techniques. And so they they would switch into that mode and communicate with, you know, I need a moment. Oh, and then they would switch into the mode and do their thing, and it was obvious they were actually getting nowhere, but they had learned the technique. I thought it was great.

SPEAKER_01 55:39

Okay.

Contempt, Respect, And A Breakthrough Story

SPEAKER_03 55:39

It's not that communication won't help at all. Uh a happy couple is communicating well. And there are there's it's a very small percentage of the couples I see that actually do need help with communication. They're the people who are on the autistic spectrum. In other words, there are some folks who, for example, you know, what they used to call Asperger's, and they they did away with that as a formal diagnosis because it was too vague. It wasn't it wasn't specific enough. But one of the characteristics for a lot of folks who get that label Asperger's is they have a hard time reading someone else's emotions. They don't know how to read. That's a communication problem. And that causes all sorts of difficulties. So they need actual training in communication, and they're folks who do that, you know, can help folks who are in in that situation. But and I suppose I could say, yes, every once in a while I bet a couple where only one of them, you know, if they're if they're seeing me, at least one of them speaks English, because that's the only language I'm fluent in. So one of them speaks English, the other doesn't have much English yet. So they're having communication problems. And sometimes it's cultural, even if they're both fluent in English. Sometimes there are cultural communication issues that are interesting. Oh, you thought that was a compliment, or you thought that was an insult, but in my culture that's a compliment. You know, that sort of thing. That can happen. Those are communication issues. That's not the bulk of the folks that I work with, though. Even the folks that do come from different cultures, they figured that stuff out long since. That's not the stuff they're having trouble with. No, the problem they're having, it's not how they communicate. The problem is what they are communicating. If what they are communicating is respect and love and consideration and deference and curiosity, how they communicate will follow from that. If what they are communicating is contempt and anger and mistrust, you can teach them rules all day long and they're still going to be communicating that. So the the issue that will help them isn't how to frame how to frame your contempt so it doesn't sound so bad. That's not going to help. The issue is, gee, how come you're contemptuous? And I don't mean that even in a I don't even mean that to sound like it's a you know a tut-tut sort of, you know, you shouldn't be contemptuous. It's like, no, seriously, you sound contemptuous. Think about that. Like, what's that about? Where's that from? Yeah, it could be that they're sounding contemptuous because they're really angry and they haven't been able to notice its anger. Or what one of my favorite stories is a couple that came in. I actually tell this in that book, a couple that came in, we'd had five or six sessions, something like that. We'd have a few sessions talking about a lot of the same stuff. And they had to actually listen to some of our podcasts. They were doing the work. Their presenting problem was that anytime the husband would make a suggestion to the wife about something he thought she could be doing better or differently, and she would either often clam up or she would feel terrible, clam up or lash out or something. They couldn't figure out, you know, what's wrong here. So we had a few sessions and they came in at that sixth or seventh session and they were just both beaming. They were both delighted. I'm saying, gee, what's what's what are you so happy about? What's going on? And the guy said, Well, you know, went back and thought about stuff we've been working on. I realized I do think she's a moron. So he's smiling, right? Saying that, right? You think he's smiling? What kind of a jerk is this? You know, she's smiling. Now, why are they both smiling? Well, because what he means by that is he's saying, Look, I know perfectly well she's not a moron. I know she's intelligent. She's at least as intelligent as I am. You know, he I know that. But I realized that when I would make my suggestions, the reason she was responding the way she was isn't because I wasn't framing it correctly. It's because I was genuinely being condescending. I genuinely thought at that moment I know better than she does. I wasn't actually giving her credit for being intelligent. You know, this took some soul searching on his part to figure that out, you know, and he had to not be dissolved in shame. Now, why is she smiling? You think she could be mad as hell, you know? She's smiling because she said, Well, first of all, I'm glad he figured that out. That really is a relief. You know, it means I wasn't overreacting. It's like, no, I the reason I was reacting is he really was being condescending. We didn't, neither one of us knew it. The reason she didn't know it, she said, she said, it's because I agreed with him. I thought I was a moron, too. Now she knows better than that too. But she had absorbed that from her childhood. She had often been put down a lot by, especially by by men and you know, by father and brother. And so she was used to being accused of being an idiot. And so she she didn't know to say, wait a minute, you're you're treating me like I'm an idiot here. You know, she if she could have done that, they could have confronted this a long time ago, but she couldn't. And he didn't he didn't know it because we as men, like here I am talking to a woman, man's planning to about what you know what men do to women, right? Here you go, right? And you know, and we don't know it. You know, we we really I mean we, you know, I'm speaking for all men here, right? No, we mean well usually, you know, most of us are totally jerks, but we are often, as many, many women have informed me, we are often actually quite condescending. You know, that's the whole concept of mansplaining, you know, and there's a basis for that. And when we start to get it, if we don't dissolve in shame and if we don't get pissed off about it, we start to get it, it's like, oh shit, that's what's going on. So they didn't need communication that he just needed to realize, oh geez, if I'm not condescending, maybe she'll listen. And the wonderful thing about that was once they figured that out, he could then make any suggestion he wanted. And he wasn't doing it in a condescending way. He was just saying, hey, I have an idea. And she would listen and agree or not agree, and it didn't matter. They were both freed up by that. It wasn't this sort of thing, this hidden thing where she was constantly being put down, and neither one of them realized it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:29

Wow. Yeah. So it's not how, but it's what.

Regaining Passion And Long-Term Monogamy

SPEAKER_03 1:01:34

And that's not so simple, right? That isn't that doesn't yield to, oh, let's learn some techniques here. That yields to yields. I mean, how do you get at that? You know, you have to first of all accept it as worthy of investigations. Like, well, gee, why did you cheat? You know, or why do you think she's a moron? I mean, you know, or what is that about? You know, where did it come from? Not, you know, I've especially like the why did you cheat thing? It's like there's a thin line between blaming the victim and looking at context. And the couple that is willing to look at context and not go into blaming the victim, uh, they're the ones who can actually make some progress on that, but they're gonna have to figure that out. The only way you're gonna be able to trust each other again is if you really have an understanding of what happened, that you know, where you can say, it's possible that a decent person could have done that. Uh, they shouldn't have, but I can sort of see how he or she could have done that. I wish they hadn't, but we know better now. But yeah, I see how the circumstances were such that you were susceptible to that. And then they can get past some of the anger, and then they can figure out, okay, well, can I actually come to trust this person? Is it can we understand this enough that I can actually trust this person enough to want to stay with them?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:54

Now, do you think there there's any couples that couples therapy won't help?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:02

Well, it depends on what you mean by help. But in the sense that there's plenty of couples where couples therapy will not will not result in their wanting to stay together, because there are some couples, and it's like, no, you guys should split up. You know, it's like, no wonder you're miserable. You've got all kinds of good reasons that you're miserable. You'll be better off if you split up, you know. So couples therapy could actually help that. But are the it's it's the ones, yeah, the ones that are harder to help are the ones, again, it's this is a broad over overgeneralization, but the ones who come in and aren't showing that kind of faith I was talking about. The ones who just want to deny reality. It's like, I just we just want to go back to how it was. You know, that's kind of the the paradigm there. Couple therapy isn't going to help them much, but they have to be willing to look at what happened without, you know, without sort of preconceived ideas of what things must be. And that's that's the therapist, too, by the way. If the therapist, and we're all we are all susceptible to it, and anybody's line of work is susceptible to it. If I get too fond of my own, you know, brilliant ideas, I'm not gonna be helpful. If I think I know, that's you know, that was that that snarky subtitle, why everything you know about couples therapy is wrong, that applies to me too. If I think I know right off, before we get started, I know, or I've I've oh now I've got you diagnosed. I know what this is about. You know, I'm not gonna be helpful.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:28

Now, you you mentioned for the couples that want to go back to how it was, like cut with therapy isn't isn't really gonna do anything for them. Now, is that only for the couples that something has happened?

Changing Norms Around Marriage And Family

SPEAKER_03 1:04:42

Well, look, the title of my first book was Reigniting the Spark, you know? It's like, yeah, the the implication there is indeed there are couples who say, Wow, we used to just be so passionately in love. We've lost that. Can we get that back? Well, absolutely. I'm I'm not saying they can absolutely get it back. I'm saying that's a worthy thing to work on. It's yes, sometimes. Sometimes they can. Sometimes, and you know, it's never the same as what it was because we're not the same as we were however many years ago. Nobody is. We've had life in between. We've grown, we've learned, we've changed, you know. That's the that's inevitable. But that doesn't mean they can't find that really intense spark. That it, you know, that's um it's something of a myth that you know people will say, well, you know, that that novelty stuff always wears off, and uh different people will say it's based on the particular neurochemicals involved. They'll say 18 months, sometimes maybe two years, you know. Then then it's a slog, then it's work, you know. That just sounds so dismal to me, you know. It isn't, it doesn't have to be. But again, I'm not saying every couple can have that, but there are there are certainly many couples, and I don't mind saying I'm in one, frankly, where the passion has ever been as strong as it was on. Day one. It's different because we're, you know, 22 years older and have known each other that long. But it's every bit as intense. And in fact, we keep learning more and more about each other. That's all about intimacy. That is about not freaking out at intimacy. And we both, both my my wife and I benefit from having been in marriages that didn't work, saying nothing bad about our exes. But we benefited from that, those experiences. We learned a lot. Both came into knowing each other way more equipped to handle intimacy than we were either of us in our first marriage.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:42

You know, that makes that makes a lot of sense when you mentioned about how you're not you're not the same people. Like even if not something like, because I was mainly thinking about infidelity. Because I, even though I'm not a couple therapist, like you hear all the time, like even from friends and even from people I've I've known. And I I used to be a paralegal in a family law office. Like, we just want to go back before the infidelity happened. And so I was honestly just curious if even if that thing didn't happen, and maybe they just feel like they're not connecting, but they're different people.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:15

You are and you're not both. Do you know what I mean? And I'm a sucker for good paradoxes, you know? And so much of the work. In fact, one of the things I've said in this most recent book is the most important skill you will ever learn is the ability to accept contradictory truths. Which, of course, is very different from what you get in a law office. In a law office, you're going to slug it out and you're going to find the truth or at least find who wins. And that's, I'm sure that's an unfair caricature of law offices, but whatever. And it's funny, I have a lot of respect, even in as a couple therapist, a lot of respect for lawyers and the law, because it often what it offers people is a huge incentive to try and not freak out. Because what they'll realize is if they're too rigid, some judge will quote unquote decide for them. You know, they'll they'll say, well, here's your solution. And it may not be a solution either one of them likes, or it may be a solution one likes and the other doesn't, which doesn't work. I was once in when I was, I guess I was not an intern anymore, newly in practice, when I went to a continual education event, and they it was a psychologist presenting this protocol that she had developed for working with high-conflict couples. And she was sort of proudly presenting this protocol she'd worked, and she used an example. Now, of course, she changed names, right? You have to do that for confidentiality. But the agreement she passed out, I recognized immediately because I had worked with the family. And so I'd seen the agreement. I knew the psychologist who had done this work with this family didn't know this because she was done when they signed the agreement. I knew that literally the father had violated the agreement. He was already threatening his ex with legal action when what they had just signed an agreement to do was not to do that. It had failed miserably. The person who had developed the protocol had no idea. I didn't tell her that would be violating confidentiality on my part, but she had no idea. And I realized, you know, people will do these things when they do these sorts of either mediation or uh psychological assessments are like this a lot. If someone does an assessment, they have no idea what the effect of the assessment was. They're done when they're done with the assessment. That actually turns out often to have bad effects. Maybe good effects, occasionally, often bad effects.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:43

I don't remember. I don't remember. Different people, but they're also not different people, you know, like going back to how things were, you know. But like I get what you mean by they're not different people, but they are a little bit. Even if a little bit of time has passed, you know, like even if we think about ourselves individually, like we're different than we were six months ago, you know, interests, hobbies, things we do, how we show up, even if it's little things, like, you know.

Aha Vs Oh-Shift Moments

SPEAKER_03 1:10:13

Yeah, and when a couple is doing well, that becomes part of what's exciting. They don't expect to marry to remain constant because nobody does. That's a reality. That's that's an element of faith. It's like, well, of course we all change. So it just becomes an element of, you know, there's always new things to discover. And also there's an element I think in couples that do well in in monogamy. You know, that one of the things I've noted over the years is that there are some folks, and I I don't mean this in any judgmental way, there's some folks that just don't like monogamy. You know, that's one of the reasons people cheat. I mentioned the one about, yeah, there's contextual problems in the main relationship often, but often you will hear people say, no, no, no, no, I totally love my spouse and we have a great sex life and we have a great life, and you know, but I just couldn't resist, you know, exploring this other person, you know. They're just sort of not cut out for monogamy or don't really believe in it or something like that. So I have met folks like that. And if you like monogamy, and I happen to like it, and again, it's clearly not for everybody, but I like it a lot. And you know, I what I like about monogamy, if people who like monogamy, I think, and this is what I was starting to say in terms of you know what will keep people together when they're monogamous, it's that they will view monogamy not as a restriction, but as a gift. There is a level of intimacy, I think, you one can have in monogamy that you can't have any other way. And it has a lot to do with the fact of knowing somebody over a long period of time and going through changes together and going through crises together and going through joys together. There's something about that that is a level of intimacy, if you can tolerate it, because again, a lot of times people in long-term relationships, it feels too risky to try something new. It feels too risky to be actually honest with your partner because stability is so important. But if you can, there is a there's a intimacy you can achieve that way, I think, that isn't like anything else. Now, I what do I know? I'm only on one side of that. You know, as I say, I like monogamy. That's you know, I've been monogamous in each of my two marriages. You know, I I think I'm sort of wired that way.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:20

I I get what you mean though, by like some people, man or woman, just aren't wired that way. You know, like even working in the family law office, I've I've met men and women like that were they just wanted to be with somebody else. You know, they've been in the marriage this long, but it was just something they had a desire to do.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:40

Yeah. You know, I've seen that, I'm sure that there have always been people like that. There's probably less of the social stigma around that than there used to be. And similarly, marriage is not what it used to be. It ain't what it used to be, but it isn't in a lot of ways. The statistics on who gets married that's changed a lot. In some countries in Europe, it's well over half of the women having children aren't married to the father of the child. And many of them are in fact partnered with the father of the child. It's not like they're, you know, they're casual relationships, but they have chosen not to get married. And that's in this country, it's approaching half. I think close to half of the kids born now, their mother is not married. I'm old enough to remember when there was. You know, that's oh, oh my God, a child born out of woodlock. Of course, it happened, obviously it happened, but there was stigma associated with it, and it happened a lot less. And now there is virtually no social stigma associated. And I'm not saying there should be, I'm just observing. So, what effective that is, marriage itself has kind of gone out of style.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:44

I have noticed that myself as well. I'm a lot younger, but I noticed like on the tail end, like I had relatives in my life and in my family that like when the first child that was born out of wedlock, nobody was going to that baby shower because she was supposed to be married and she wasn't married, and I still remember it. And it was me, my mom and I went, but there were so many family members that like did not go to this, and because the child was born out of wedlock, and it was just not something they wanted to endorse, I guess, wanted to accept. So Yep.

Male Fear Of Therapy And Honest Admission

SPEAKER_03 1:14:20

It's still around, but it's kind of quaint, you know. It depends on which particular sort of subculture you're talking about. This is a big country. There are plenty of very traditional folks of different traditions that would still there would be a big stigma about it. But kind of mainstream, like when I was a kid, you would never see a celebrity where they would say, Oh, you know, so-and-so is pregnant and the father is her fiance. They would never say that. Ever. Now that's kind of the rule, that's the norm.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:50

Now, Bruce, I've got a question for you, a little bit off topic, but a lot of people have experienced multiples of these in their life. But I'm curious what you would say the biggest aha moment was you experienced in your life.

Rapid-Fire: Advice, Values, And Legacy

SPEAKER_03 1:15:05

Oh, wow. Well, I so there's aha moments, and there's another one that that I like to talk about called the oh shit moment, which is a relative of the aha moment. So I want to talk about both of those if I may. It's one of my favorite topics, actually. Because the aha moment, aha moments, I have well, I've experienced little aha moments. You know, I used to be a math major for a while, you know, before I was an East Asian Studies major, I was a math major. And you know, you get aha moments, you know, that feeling that aha, it's math can do that for you. You know, you wouldn't think. But other aha moments in my life, maybe an aha moment when I figured out, oh wow, I really want to be doing this work. That was kind of an aha moment. The but a cousin of an aha moment is the oh shit moment. The oh shit moment is when you realize, oh shit, that's what's happening here. It's not an aha because you haven't solved the problem. But it is a moment, it can be an oh shit moment with a couple can be deeply intimate. They haven't solved the problem. That's why it's an oh shit moment, not an aha moment. Aha moments are great. Aha moments like, oh, that's what you want? I didn't realize. Ah, well, no problem. I'm happy. Let's sure, let's do it that way. That's an aha moment. Those are lovely. You know, that's great. But the oh shit moment is like, oh shit, that's what you're worried about. I have many, many examples of this, but one of them is, how do you I actually have a chapter or in the book, particularly aimed at women, because this is very much gendered this way, not exclusively, but very much gendered this way. How do you get your reluctant guy to go to therapy? Because it's women who want to do couples therapy and men don't. Now, that's is that always true? No, of course not. But overwhelmingly, that's it's a it's a big percentage that way. And so there's lots and lots of women that are trying to convince lots and lots of guys to go to couples therapy. And I hear about it, there they are in couples therapy, and I often hear about it. No, because I'll say, you know, what precipitated your coming, you know, why now? And very often part of the story will be he will say, Well, you know, she's been trying to get me to go for the last five years, but I you know, I haven't seen the need. Or she'll say, I've been trying to get him to go for the last five years, but he keeps refusing. So how do you, you know, how do you get him to go? Well, my basic thesis about that is the reason we as men resist it is we give all sorts of reasons that often really annoy women for good reason, I think. If you're the one who has the problem, you should go. Or, you know, therapy is for crazy people or stupid people or weak people or all of those sorts of things. Meanwhile, the woman is thinking he doesn't care enough about me. I'm saying we're having a problem, he doesn't care enough about me to go. You know, she's thinking he doesn't care. And all of those reasons are missing what I think is really the main point, which is the reason that we as men resist is that we are terrified. It's not that we don't care, it's that we do care. And we are terrified that if we go to couples therapy with uh with the woman in our lives, we will lose her. We will lose the relationship. Why do we think that? Well, because we have good reason to think it, because that happens a lot. And you go to couples therapy, they end up splitting up. The guy will think, well, you know, that's that's much more women's territory than men's territory, because it is, and I say that as a male therapist, but it is. It's a women want to talk about this stuff way more than men do. Many women can talk rings around men when it comes to talking about emotional stuff, have much better understanding. So the guy feels at a huge disadvantage, and he's worried that the therapist is going to say, Oh, you know, say or imply to the woman, why are you with a jerk like this? Because sometimes he is a jerk. So, all of those reasons, he's got really good reason to be afraid. But he's not saying that because being guys, we don't want to say we're afraid, especially to women, but really to anybody, we don't want to say it, but we don't want to know it. We refuse to admit it to ourselves, but we're terrified. So the oh shit moment comes in. If the woman can actually say, wait a minute, I know you're not crazy. I know you do care about me. Why, what is wrong? You know, what it what are you worried about? What is your worry if we went to therapy? If she says that with not to try to wheedle him into going, but if she says that with actual curiosity, it's like, wait a second. I'll bet you're afraid of this. And for good reason. I don't think you're crazy. It's like, what's what's worrying you? Then the guy will often say, Yeah, I'm worried they're gonna split us up. And then she might say, Yeah, I'm worried about that too. You know, it's like, oh shit, that's the oh shit moment. It's not that they agree, it's that they suddenly have this moment of saying, She's she's sitting there thinking, oh shit. That's why he's been, you know, such a jerk about this. He's not a jerk. He's scared. And he's saying, Oh shit. First of all, he with any luck, he's saying, I've been kind of a jerk about this. You hope the Opie's saying that. But also, he's saying, Oh shit, she's worried about it too. We're not as far apart as I thought we were. She's not just trying to drag me in and put me down, she's worried too. That's an oh shit moment. So those that the the purpose of therapy, here's an overstatement. The purpose of therapy is to bring about oh shit moments so that they can, you know, because there are moments where they're not they're not fighting at that point. They're not necessarily they haven't solved the problem. If they solve the problem, it's aha. But there's oh shit, that's what's happening here. We better look at this. That's faith, right? It's like, oh, there's in other words, this isn't just that you're being horrible. This is that you have reason to be that way that I hadn't realized. And I can kind of relate to it. Let's figure this out, you know? That's an oh shit moment.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:49

So what was the biggest oh shit moment you've had in your life?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:52

Oh, when my then wife said she's figured out that well, I'll just put it that she basically figured out she's gay.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:00

Yeah, that was a huge oh shit moment. But it was like and it's kind of my paradigmatic oh shit moment, you know. But it is one where on the one hand it was painful, on the other hand, it was an enormous relief. Because it was finally an explanation. I said this earlier, it was finally an explanation that we're neither one of us is broken. So that's that's oh shit moments could be like that. Yeah. Our that OSHIP moment led to us splitting up. You know, I would say happily splitting. I mean, it wasn't easy, but you know, we were both a lot happier now. Some OSHIP moments lead to reconciliation or lead to, oh wow, I think we can understand this. Let's work with this, and they could actually find each other again, and that's really beautiful when that happens.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:44

Wow. No, that makes a lot of sense. I really liked that comparison to the cousin to the aha moment. I have never heard of that in my life, but I really liked that. I might start asking guests about both. I liked that a lot.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:58

Yes, uh, feel free. Yes, yes. That's I I think I made it up. I don't I don't recall reading it anywhere, but anyway, it's it's out there for people to use.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:06

So I'll reference you. I like that. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:14

Well, you're very welcome. I've enjoyed this, and it's it's great.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:18

Me too. Now, have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:23

Not immediately. Why it I maybe let's put it that way. I I don't immediately recognize it, but maybe. I don't know what tell me about.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:31

So he's got a podcast, he's written some books, and he's got a podcast called On Purpose, and he ends it with two segments, and I use those two segments. They're not mine. He's you don't have to know him to be able to answer the questions, but they are not my questions, and they are specifically from his show. So I give him credit before I ask these. The first segment is called The Many Sides to Us. There's five questions, and they need to be answered in one word each.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:01

Oh boy, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:05

What is one word someone who is meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:11

Nerdy.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:13

What is one word that someone who knows you extremely well would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:20

Thoughtful.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:23

What is one word you'd use to describe yourself?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:30

No. Caring.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:33

That's a synonym for that word. What is one word that if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:42

Arrogant.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:44

What is one word that you're trying to embody right now?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:49

Faith.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:51

Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in up to a sentence. What is the best advice you've heard or received?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:03

Oh wow. Best advice I've heard or received. Oh, this is so hackneyed. And I don't even believe it, but I'll say it anyway. Follow your bliss. Though I deconstruct the hell out of that one, but follow your bliss.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:19

Why is that the best if you don't believe it?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:22

Because it's there's elements of it that are incredibly important. I that I think of that when the the I won't get into all the details at this point, but some moments in my life where I made decisions that were difficult and uh and kind of risky. And it's that element of follow your bliss that I was following in that. Even though, as I say, I could I could I could reject a lot of the narcissism involved in that concept, but that notion of saying, you know, follow your heart, follow, follow what really matters to you. That's kind of the idea. And I have received that as advice on occasion.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:59

What in the worst advice you've heard or received?

SPEAKER_03 1:25:05

The worst advice I've heard or received. Wow, the worst advice I've heard or received. You can always find the answer if you look hard enough.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:16

Why is that the worst?

SPEAKER_03 1:25:18

Because you can't. And thinking you can leads to all you know that I was saying earlier about how the a hugely important skill is to be able to accept contradictory truths. Thinking you can always find the one, that's fundamentalism. It's it's it's bad advice.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:37

So you don't think you can always find the answer?

SPEAKER_03 1:25:40

No. I think you can always find answers.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:43

But not the answer.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:44

You can never find the answer. You can find answers that work well. You sometimes can find one answer that really works well. But if you think you're finding the answer, you're part of the problem, not the solution.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:00

If you think you're finding the answer, you're part of the problem and not the solution.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:06

Because there's multiple answers.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:08

Because there are always multiple answers. Yeah, some math problems maybe not so much. Although even math is fascinating if you get into, you know, that that's how non-Euclidean geometries happen. Somebody said, What if we question the parallel postulate and out came all this really useful? What turned out to be useful stuff? They at first they thought it was ridiculous, turned out to be useful. Imaginary numbers. They first thought they were ridiculous, turned out to be useful. Things like that. No, you don't always there's there is life is more complex than any one understanding of it. That's kind of an article of faith.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:45

What is something that you used to value that you no longer value?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:50

Hmm. Well, this is too cheap after what I just said, but it's like the quest for the what answer. I think I think the reason I'm I'm so you know strident about that is I think I used to think there was one. That's a cheap shot, right? That was a cheap shot. My wife and I were playing ping pong, and somebody, and we're not keeping score, and somebody you know just sort of hits one back easy that the other person's one was out, it hits back easy, and somebody slams that one, that's a cheap shot.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:17

If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it, what would you want it to say?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:24

Again, too easy because I've got my little seven-word formula, you know, be kind, don't panic, and have faith.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:31

But if it had to say something else and it couldn't say that, what would you want it to say?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:34

I would wanted to say so so is it's something that that people would remember me saying or promulgating or something like that?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:43

Yeah, your legacy. If somebody was talking about you.

unknown 1:27:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:47

Yeah, I would wanted to say what he what he taught was that we need to we need to recognize that even if we disagree, we're not crazy, the other side isn't crazy. We need to recognize we actually there are. Multiple there are multiple understandings that could be simultaneously valid even when there's someone office.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:06

That would be a I love that. I think that is so so key, even outside of couples.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:14

Like very much outside of couples. There's an organization called Braver Angels. They were formed uh in 2016, and uh one of the one of the founders is in fact a couples therapist, Bill Doherty. But they organize groups all across the country where people on, you know, the the red states and blue states are, you know, you sort of self-identify as red, blue, or purple, you know, very, very loosely, and they get people talking across, talking respectfully across real differences. And I find that incredibly inspiring.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:45

It's really the same thing with the If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:56

Yeah, one law that everyone had to follow. I mean, you know, there's the snarky moments when I'm thinking no one should be allowed to put deceptive stuff in their emails or in their snail mail envelopes. That's but that's just snarky. No, one law for everyone to follow is is humility of is be humble in your beliefs. In other words, that's not exactly a law, is it? That's not exactly a piece of legislation. But it that's I could have said that in in response to the previous question, too. Be humble in your beliefs. In other words, nobody knows it's the knowing, it's the thinking you know. You know, it's don't be ideological. Ideas open people up, ideologies shut them down. So I would this it's this so it's so oxymoronic to say it. I would outlaw ideology, which is hilarious because that's an ideological thing to do. But I would outlaw the ideology and say, no, you can have all you can have lots of ideas and talk about them as ideas, but you know, thinking you have the answer, no, I would outlaw that. I would outlaw the answer.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:02

Okay. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Bruce. I really appreciate this.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:08

Thanks for having me on. I had a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:10

Me too. And no pressure, but I do just like to give it back to the guests. Any final words of wisdom you want to share?

SPEAKER_03 1:30:21

Be kind, don't panic, and have faith is kind of queued up for that. So that's usually the that's how I usually answer that question. Be kind, don't panic, and have faith. And you know, and that's just an opening. You know, think about that and see where it leads you. Because that's really what's important. It's you know, those words themselves don't solve anything, but it's a guide to think about those three principles and see where I love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:46

Be kind, don't panic, and have faith. Thank you so much, Bruce. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:51

Well, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:53

Of course, and thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Meand News Mindset. In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you. I'm booting for you, and you got this. As always, if you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review, and share with anyone you think would benefit from this. And don't forget, you are only one mindset shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.