Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening today and if you've listened before, welcome back. Today we're going to be opening up the Mailbag and answering questions from our listeners. We got some fantastic questions today and to help me answer them, I'm joined as usual by Dr. Rick Hanson. Dr. Rick is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, and he's also my dad. So,
dad, how are you doing today? Great and thoroughly psyched for this Mailbag set of questions, thoroughly psyched. Yeah, I thought that we got some really fantastic ones. And if you would like to have a question answered on the podcast, the best way is by signing up for our Patreon. It's patreon.com slash being well podcast. And you can also send me a message on substack. I started writing over there recently. I've included a link
to that in the about information for this episode as well. And you can always send us an email. It's just contact at beingwellpodcast.com. I thought this was, I'm so sorry, I want to jump in with an unsolicited plug for your substack. Anybody who's not yet subscribing to this, really ought to subscribe to it. Thanks dad. I subscribed to it and it's highly recommended. It's longer form. You've never written long form very much before this. But
I mean, we wrote a book together. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It turns like blog I guess something like that. Yeah. Wow. And it's so great. Fantastic. Great. Oh, thanks dad. Okay. That's it. That's my plug. Well, thank you dad. I really appreciate that. That's really kind of you to say. I've enjoyed doing it. It's ended up being a little bit more
work that I thought it would be of course because that's how these things are. But it's also given me an opportunity to just kind of think more deeply about a couple of topics, like things that we explore on the podcast. Yeah. And that's been really helpful for me personally. Okay. So getting into our first question today, how can I support a friend who's going through a mental health crisis? One of my closest college friends suffered a psychotic break several
years ago. Since then, it's been difficult to understand what's going on with them or to offer support. Sometimes I felt frustrated by their inability to keep plans or to communicate with me. How can I offer comfort or support to someone who struggles to explain to me what's wrong? This is a very far-reaching question. And on the podcast itself, we haven't really explored psychotic process. And so just I'm going to speak briefly with how I think about it as a clinician
and then speak more about how I would approach it as a friend. There's a difference there. So to use the term a psychotic break, in my world, it's very meaningful. It really describes a marked aberration, a marked disconnection from ordinary reality. And a key question is, whether the psychotic break kind of came out of the blue or whether it occurred as part of a
gradual progression into schizophrenia. Numerous people, some number, will have a psychotic break perhaps related to a manic episode or to the use of psychedelics or to an intensive experience, such as meditation, retreat, disruption of combined perhaps with disruption of sleep, change of diet, dislocation from familiar environments. And on the basis of that, they will lose touch with ordinary reality and be come involved with ideation and beliefs and actions that are
genuinely bizarre. They're abnormal. It's not just kind of weird. It's really marked. Then the question becomes what's next? If someone has had a psychotic break who's underlying personality structure and is not really schizophrenic, what I find then, it's really important to support the person in not having another break. And so, I've had clients who've had psychotic breaks and I'm going to say to them, you
cannot afford to smoke marijuana. Because for them, it just would take them out and the grout that holds together the tiles of the mosaic of the psyche properly would start becoming very unglued. Because for them, marijuana was a kind of solvent. And it was important. They need to really stay coheared. Psychotic break fragments us. It's important to focus on that which cohears us. So, and very often the prognosis is excellent. They kind of get it together and they look back on
that. It's like, yeah, that happened. It was a kind of a breakdown, if you will. But I've come out of it. I learned something from it and I've moved forward. That's different from a chronic condition that skits a frendia. It's something you're grappling with in your whole life. And so, with regard to this friend then, it doesn't sound really like schizophrenia. It sounds like there was something that happened that has now had up some big ripple effects.
So, now I'm going to speak more as a friend. And then I want to see what you have to say too for us. I think the person who's asking this question has great intuition already. And it's useful to inform yourself as well. Perhaps talk with others who are involved with your friend about what seems to be helpful. Very often, what travels with psychosis or post-psychotic process is understandably a kind of anxiety that can shade into paranoia because you feel really disturbed
internally. So, understandably, you're anxious. And so, it's very important for others to be non-threatening. And sometimes, well-meaning questions or even well-meaning advice can actually be experienced as invasive or disturbing threatening. They put you on the spot in a certain way. So, very often, the best thing to do is to sort of hang out and pay attention to that, which is not psychotic or peculiar. Just ordinary stuff like, oh, this is a nice donut we're eating right now.
You know, playing a video game. We're doing something. We're just talking about ordinary living. Your cat is wonderful. Just be a presence. What kind of presence do we want to be around a horse that's gotten really skittish and kind of freaked out and jumpy? Well, we want to be a certain kind of way. And I'm not trying to pathologize or deprecate a person who's going through this process. I'm really trying to speak to our own intuition about how to be in our calm, in our love, in our simplicity,
our undemandingness, our presence. These can be very therapeutic qualities around someone who's still dealing with some difficulties. So, one question that I would ask that's kind of a meta question here is, what does a person mean when they say psychotic break? We use clinical terminology all the time in casual speech, but when we use it colloquially, often we use it inaccurately. And a lot of the time people will say, oh, my friend, how does psychotic break?
When what they mean is that your friend was like really stressed out for a while and started acting kind of strangely and got a little too intense a couple of times and then a game of telephone goes through the friend group and all of a sudden they've had a psychotic break. So, I think that it's really important that I'm not saying that this person is doing that and this question I'm
just saying that this is a thing that we do. To be really careful about the usage of like technical clinical terminology, when we're trying to describe somebody's normal range difficult experience. That might be a useful distinction here for people. For me, just in my own life, what I've seen over and over again is do you know what your friend who is depressed really doesn't want to talk about being depressed? Because every conversation they have with people is about them being depressed
and they're sick of it. They're bored with that conversation because the conversation doesn't seem to help. It never changes the underlying issues and it just reminds them of the fact that there's something about them that feels shameful in that moment. So, a lot of the time, I think that the best way to kind of exit some of these these cycles or to be supportive of other people is by
just normalizing your own behavior. Yeah, you can have a part of your brain that goes, hey, it might make sense for me to be a little bit more calm, a little bit more regulated, a little bit more like a stable presence in their life. But it also probably really makes sense for you to just kind of act the way that you've been acting when you had a beautiful and functional friendship in the past.
Yeah. And if you can kind of re-access that place inside yourself where you're not too disrupted by whatever's been disrupting them, I think that that can be a really helpful and supportive place to come to somebody from. Wonderful advice for us. Also connected to this, I wonder, and I wonder what do you think about this dad? A lot of the time when I've had friends, particularly who have more kind of depressive constellations about something, they don't really want that much
help. Yeah. They're kind of at the bottom of a hole. They're finding their own way out of it. And all you can really do is say to them, I'm available if you want to reach out to me. Yeah. The first time that you tell a friend, look, I'm really here for you if you need something, is really helpful. The fifth time that you tell them, I'm really here if you need something for me, it starts to feel like you're asking for something from that. Yeah. Excellent point.
So I wonder about that part of it too. And I wonder what you've seen in that and people have maybe walked into your office dad who really wanted to support somebody else, who just it didn't feel like the other person really wanted their support that much. Good question. It makes me think about the distinction between we really have asked or said what I would call the normal deep thing
or we haven't. The thing we would say to a friend, not being playing therapist ourselves, there would be the normal natural next thing to say, where it would be a typical, authentic, understandable from the heart kind of response that has depth to it. And I think to some extent, we tend to not say the normal deep thing because we think that it would be awkward or unwanted or
it's not the right time. But then the days, if not years go by and we haven't said the normal deep thing, which could be as simple as, hey, a man or whatever, I know you're a course you feel this way. This or that happened. It sucks. I get it. I don't mean to presume in any way, but anytime, anywhere, anywhere, you want some help with this or comfort or support or just a chance to be a conversation partner, someone to bounce stuff off of. I'm absolutely up for that.
And otherwise, I'm cool and I just super wish you the best and I know you're going to be okay eventually. Maybe that's perhaps your version of the normal deep thing. And then when you've really said it, okay, you're on record, they know and so forth. But if you haven't said it,
then there's the question, would it be appropriate to say? I think that's really great. And it's just good advice for almost any situation that we have relationally with another person setting aside ones where something mental healthy has really occurred in their life that we're trying to kind of offer some additional support around. And that kind of gets to our next question here, maybe. All right. Is it possible to heal from complex trauma via meditation alone or is therapy
needed to? This question has preoccupied many therapists who meditate and many meditators who venet therapy and their teachers and their institutions in the last 30, 40 years. Yeah, this is a big question. And just as context, Jack Cornfield, a friend and teacher of mine, wonderful being here at a book called A Path With Heart in which he kind of really put a marker on the ground as someone with a PhD in psychology and with absolutely foundational meditative training in Asia
in his youth. He's a real deal. So a path with heart, he made the point that there are numerous people with very developed meditative practices who are still the walking wounded. And because the presumption often, you know, in traditional meditative circles that every meditation's enough, it's just not true. It's not accurate. And there are additional opportunities for gains
through more formal deliberate paths such as psychotherapy. I'll flip the other way. I think there are a lot of people who've done a fair amount of inner work on their own neurosis for whom that work would have been aided by some form of meditative practice. And once they've done that work on their neurosis, there's still a lot of headroom. There's a lot of places to go in the
upper reaches of human potential in the paths of full awakening. Both those things. Now getting into the detail of it, I think there are also different kinds of meditations, a form of meditation that we're very familiar with at this point in the West, secular mindfulness meditation, present moment awareness, where you're just staying present and you're letting everything just kind of flow through awareness without following after or resisting anything. That basic form of
meditation is wonderful. And I'm not sure it has much impact on the consequences of trauma. Now, trauma is a kind of injury when we're injured, things change. Okay? There often is discomfort or pain around the injury and there are impairments of functionality or less functional. And so trauma can be kind of woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, but if you think about like, oh, I injured my knee. You know, well, not my knee hurts. And I can't go rock climbing.
Like I used to. Okay. It has consequences. The kind of typical meditation we're talking about, it's hard for me to imagine how I could have much that is healing with regard to the injury of trauma. On the other hand, there are forms of contemplative practice that I can imagine could have direct reparative effects. Tongue-len practices and Tibetan Buddhism, for example, or chud practices, where you're doing in effect a kind of linking. Well, linking is when we're aware of positive and
negative. I'll put it that way at the same time. So it's your meditative practices. You're bringing to bear an intensely positive resource and you're bringing it into contact with, quote, unquote, negative material inside, such as let's say the sense of injury deep down from being traumatized. I can imagine that having a fair amount of efficacy. Further, there are different ways to heal. In other words, to put it differently, there are different purposes of meditation. One has
to do with actually changing or repairing. Repairing what is injured. A second category has to do with changing our relationship to the injury. Yeah, that's kind of where I was going with this a little bit. Meditation in general and contemplative practice in general is both about dealing with content, but especially it's about shifting our relationship to content, content like trauma injury.
And I think there are cases in which someone who was enormously traumatized did not do any psychotherapy on the trauma, but utterly changed the relationship to that material so that it had zero impact. It had no footing, no place to land. I think there are people who utterly radically shift their relationship through contemplative practice, but we're talking about rare beings, really rare. So anyway, that's how I kind of think about this complex question, which the short version for me
is, do the therapy. No. Do the therapy and also do the meditation. Yeah, I think that's great, great short answer. I think that the simple answer to this is it depends. And one of the things I think it really depends on is what do we mean by heal, which gets to your point about you injure your knee, right dad? Because there are some people, you know, you injure your knee and you get some kind of surgery performed on it and you go through life as if you never had that injury before.
But much more commonly you injure your knee and you've got a little lip or you've got a little lack of mobility for the rest of your life. And then it becomes not about un-injuring your knee, which is something you can't do, it becomes about changing your relationship with that knee. Learning what your limitations are, strengthening around it, developing other skills that help you
cope with the situation that's emerged inside of your life. And I think that meditative practice, and when I say meditative practice, I don't just mean kind of sitting on the cushion, doing an insight practice or doing like an open awareness practice. I mean the whole scope of what we think of as being attached to the mindfulness traditions and all the learning that's available inside of those traditions, particularly relating to something I think we're going to talk about
pretty soon, which is liking and wanting in a different episode. Often when people have experienced trauma, particularly complex trauma, what arises inside of them is a constellation of wants. Because they have unrequited needs, there were things that they needed that they did not receive. And because they did not receive those things, they searched for them later in life,
often in ways that are painful or problematic for them. And one of the core teachings of Buddhist practice and of mindfulness practice in general is that these wants are not good for us, they go nowhere, they're sort of unfilatable in nature. They keep on perpetuating, satisfying one one, just means that another one appears down the line. And I think that meditative practice is really, really good for helping us deal with those aspects of it. But I don't know if it's so good
for actually healing the injury in the way that you are describing that. Is that kind of make sense? Well, it's beautifully said, I think. You're speaking to the value of meditation for the Soquel I, as it were, he's the fancy term of the injury, right? The after effects. Right on. Yeah, it's great distinction. I want to finish on this brief point, which is that if we are going to bring meditative practice into contact with the material, which I think is necessary for full repair,
then the question becomes what's skillful? And that's where people might want to really look into my material on linking, which is about skillful forms of bringing that which is reparative in a contact with that, which is injured. If you're able to do that, and because I'm doing for a living, I'm able to do it, you know, I'll be meditating away and something will come up and
maybe relate to my childhood or some other sort of issue. And often I'm bringing in the larger perspectives that come out of contemplative practice, but I'm bringing them into contact with the material and feeling my way into a shift. You're feeling your way into the shift. You're feeling a way into that shift and you're helping that shift to happen. And then when the
shift happens, you're helping it to sink in. Right. So if you're able to do that through your meditative practice, from time to time, contacting the trauma material on your own, beautiful. Go for it. Now, I think that's really good advice. On to our next question here. I'd love to get better at beginning again, after I stumble. Start and stop is such a basic part of life. We all
do it. For example, we start an online course and then we stop or we start an exercise program and then we stop or we say we will stay in regular contact with people and then we stop. How can we do this process better? Well, you have tons of material on how to keep doing what's good for you. So I just want to acknowledge that. And so then I'll focus strictly on how to start again. Yeah, totally. Several answers. One, really ask yourself, is this a priority or not?
Do I really care? Do I genuinely care? Or am I just kind of trying to want to want something? Do I really care? If you decide you really do care, then second, I find that it's helpful to not make it a big deal and just start again. But other times, it's helpful to make it a really big deal. And have a series of conversations with yourself. I'm somehow minded of the beautiful, fantastic performance by Richard Pryor, live on the Sunset Strip. And this is worth watching. It's incredibly
funny. It's one of the best comedy performances of all time. He's describing a real conversation. He had with Jim Brown, Big Football player. And so Richard does basically the dialogue, and I'll be quick here by saying essentially, hey, Jim, let's get high together. And then he does the Jim Brown voice, Richard, what you're going to do. And then Richard starts spinning out his story. Yeah, we'll just smoke a little crack. It's no worry. It's just this one time, the Jim
Brown voice, Richard, what you're going to do. And then Richard did again. He does himself. It's they don't be harsh on me like that. You know, I'm okay. It's just great. No big deal. Drugs don't hurt anybody. Richard, what you're going to do. It's back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So sometimes it's important to actually make it a big deal for yourself. And to invoke not harsh, punitive, scolding, scorched earth criticism, but that voice of the coach inside who basically
says to you, hey, what matters to you in this life? What you're going to do? Find the parts of you that want to start again. Find the parts of you that naturally lean in this direction and open more to them. This could be, you know, drawing on, if you will, parts work from Gishtolton, Dixwar, so we recently spoke with and others. But what's the part of you that realizes that they they're happier when they're sober? What's the part of you that it longs for spiritual life? And
you naturally inclined you toward meditating in the morning. What's the part of you that feels vital and likes feeling strong when you get up out of that chair that can move you in your exercise, get in touch with that. So I would just say those things. And then I think also just finishing. It's simple to create structure outside yourself that keeps drawing you back in, even when you
kind of don't want to. Your friends going to be knocking on that door at 6.30 in the morning, even though it's cold and winter and you live in northern America, they're going to go jog in with you. So it's 6 a.m. and if they weren't going to come at 6.30, you'd roll over and turn off the alarm clock and go back to sleep. But because they're coming, you're going to start again. There are two pieces of advice that I would toss out here, one having to do with suffering
and one having to do with enjoyment. So most of the time, if there is something that's meaningful to us, and I think that that's a huge part of this dad that you just mentioned for a second there, a lot of the time we are nudged to care about things that we don't actually care about. Right. We're pressured by the latest TikTok, self-help, personal growth meme to start this kind of practice. January 1 rules around. There are 10,000 pieces of content out there about how
you're going to make this year the best year ever. We did a New Year's episode where we were focused on, hey, if you want to change some things, here's how to do it. Yeah. Like it's in the air. That can put a lot of pressure on people to change in ways that frankly they don't care about. You know, and there's no point in kind of beating myself out about that. So okay, that's a big deal. Often when we stop doing stuff, we immediately go into intense shame and self-criticism related to it.
The more shame that we pile on the cessation of an activity, I think the harder it becomes to start again, because all of a sudden, moving through, yeah, all of this psychic material that we've just like pulled on our back and it's become such a big deal. So what can we do to lessen those shame experiences and just make it a little bit less of a big deal? So second side of it, flip side of the coin, really focus on if you can, the aspects of that experience that you're trying to begin,
that you authentically enjoy. We make a huge mistake a lot of the time when we're trying to build a new behavior. And it's because we're trying to replace a behavior that we actually do enjoy with one that we don't really enjoy. So think about exercising more. You're trying to replace restorative sitting on the couch, browsing TikTok, free dopamine everywhere with getting up and doing a painful activity. That's a double whammy. That's a lose-lose. Okay, we're trying to replace a
reward with a punishment. Horrible. Horrible. Who would ever do that? Like that, that sounds crazy, right? So no wonder we fall off the wagon all the time. Oh, it's a classic line. You know, every so often I get the urge to exercise, but then I just go back to sleep. Yeah, exactly.
I wait until it passes. Yeah. And so like, hey, if you're either trying to sustain or trying to restart, living in that mindset of I'm trying to do this painful thing and this painful thing is hard, but I know I should do this painful thing and it kind of sucks, but I should do it, is just a total loser. You are never going to get anywhere. If that's the framework you have in your mind, so the only way to change it is by trying to find things about it that you authentically
enjoy. Great, great, great. And if you can kind of lean into those more and more and more, you typically find it a little bit easier to sustain the activity. We all know that the food we eat today affects how we feel tomorrow, but what if I told you that it could affect how you felt in 20 years? We're learning so much these days about our bodies and one of the challenges for people right now is that there's an enormous amount of information out there, but it can be difficult to separate
fact from fiction. We had Dr. Tim Specter on the podcast a few years ago. He's a professor of genetic epidemiology and the scientific co-founder at Zoe. And the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast is truly one of the best resources out there when it comes to this stuff. With the help of world leading scientists, they help you make smarter health choices every week. And you don't have to
just take my word for it. Avid podcast fan Naomi's Apple Review says Zoe Science and Nutrition is super easy to consume, even if you don't understand the science, with loads of actionable tips, a great mix of guests and interesting cutting edge science. With the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast, you can join Naomi and millions of others transforming their health. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Anyone who's listening to a show like ours knows mental health challenges
are a part of life, but they don't have to define who you are. If you're navigating something difficult, one of the best things you can do is get some high quality help. And the Dr. John Delani show is a great place to go for that. If you like being well, I think you'll really enjoy Dr. John's show. It was recently in the top five of all podcasts on Apple podcasts, which is just an incredible accomplishment. Dr. John has a PhD in counseling. He's been working with people
for over 20 years. And the show has really a very cool format. Real people call into the show and he walks them through how to make good choices related to difficult situations and common challenges like facing depression, overcoming anxiety, or connecting with other people. You can send them your questions by leaving a voicemail at 844-693-3291 or emailing ask john at ramzilsolutions.com. It's a great resource for people and a really nice compliment to the work we do here on being well.
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Fourth question. Hi, Rick and Forest. I love the podcast. I've been listening for years. Oh, we love that. I recently listened to the episode on feedback and wanted to ask the following question. This is an episode from a while ago by, with the way, do you think feedback is necessary for growth, especially for self-improvement or artistic and work improvement? I think that feedback is not necessary for many kinds of growth, that have a life of their own,
they're emerging from within us, they're arising great. I think feedback is necessary for the kinds of growth that have to do with self-aware correcting of something or improving of something. In other words, when we observe the distinction between intention and result and then we iterate. And then in terms of feedback a while ago, I realized that it was completely self-interested and on mission for me to be very open to negative feedback. Negative feedback was my friend.
Now positive feedback, I think is actually more informative than negative feedback, because negative feedback just tells you that you missed the bullseye. Positive feedback tells you you hit the bullseye or you're getting closer than on your previous attempt. And that's really useful because then it helps you converge on the bullseye. And then you're left with how do you help yourself
have rapid feedback cycles? I've known a number of people who unnecessarily delay the pace or rate of their feedback cycles, whether it's in their area of work or let's see self-improvement or art, but also in their health. So yeah, I'm a fan of feedback for yourself. Here we're really talking about feedback for yourself. And then obviously you can solicit feedback from others. And then I think it's really important to look for good feedback. Good sources of feedback, because in my experience,
most people are bad sources of feedback. Totally. Yeah, I think that essentially this whole question boils down to, who are you getting that feedback from and is a good feedback? I think that good feedback is immensely useful for growth. And there is very little that's more destructive than bad feedback. And a lot of the time we don't actually realize whether something is good feedback or bad feedback until a long time in the future. And we just kind of cast the best bets that we can,
based on the kinds of people that we're talking to and how much we trust them. It's hard to learn without any feedback. And the research on learning suggests that essentially the best thing a person can do to learn quickly is by shortening their cycle of useful feedback. So we get high quality input more rapidly. But the problem is that like most of the feedback I've ever gotten in my life has made me more uncertain without providing much value. And particularly if you're trying to be
artistic. Yeah. There's this huge and complicated place where you want to retain your own sense of taste. Like that's the whole point of art and taste varies, right? So just because something is not
aligned with somebody else's taste does not make it not artistically valuable. And that's like a really complicated thing in that space that is a little bit related to personal growth stuff, I think because individual people vary so much and preferences around like how extroverted a person should be or how relational a person should be or whatever else just like really vary from person to person. And it's really hard to pin down what right is. Excellent point. I also think
that there's negative feedback and very little positive feedback. And so then a person is left with the sense that oh wow, you know, my work in general is no good. When in fact the negative feedback applied to one element out of 20, let's say in what you did the other 19 elements were either a B or an A and then were some they were an A plus. Wouldn't it have been much more helpful if the person had said to you maybe circling, you know, the words or the sentence as repair
graphs in attacks or talking about these moments in your performance. Wow, that's where it really sang. That's where I just was carried away and I love that. Let's do more of that. That would be really, really helpful, wouldn't it? So look for that kind of feedback. And trust yourself too. I'll just say personally as someone who's now published seven bucks and therefore has been edited seven times. My experience of editors, even the best New York publisher, etc., or wherever
editors is that about a third of what they offered to me was just debt on arrival. They just really misunderstood something or it was completely unnecessary or it was just a matter of personal taste. They kind of prefer chocolate. I prefer vanilla. That was the level of it. So I ignored it. A third of the time they named a problem but their solution it wasn't really right. And so then I fixed the thing that they pointed to but in a different way. And in about a third of the cases,
it was fantastic. Boom, boom. I made the change run out the top. And to me, that's an okay way to think about it. That's pretty good. Two-thirds of the input was right on. A third, let it go. And trust yourself to be able to make that distinction of those three categories. Okay, so let's get moving on to our fifth question here. People often don't like talking about money and mental health spaces, but it's a big part of all of our lives. I have a hard time
raining in my spending or tell myself no when I want something. Nothing crazy. It's just difficult for me to commit to saving. And the long-term costs of that are pretty high. Is this a form of addiction? What can I do about it? And how can I reward myself for spending within my means?
What do you think, Dad? I love this question. And I think overall, we want to find a place of wisdom that's kind of in a middle path in which on the one hand we're not anxious and preoccupied about money and caught up in greed and saving, saving, saving, denying ourselves endlessly in the present for the sake of saving for a future. On the other hand, we don't want to be foolish about who we will become someday. Suggestion number one is to know what you're trying to save,
based on how you want to live when you're 60, 70, 80, 90, and so forth. And I think around money, one thing that really comes up for people is that they're uncomfortable being regulated by anything, including regulating themselves in terms of saving. So they have to kind of surrender to being controlled by the wisdom part of them that knows what they ought to say. So that's a psychological issue to be aware of. A related psychological issue is that in a certain way, they're
uncomfortable contemplating on what life might be like when they're 80 years old. And to really face the gradual accumulating understandable frailty, wear and tear. You want to think this through, and I think some people really resist considering who they will be at age 60, 70, 80, or 90. But that's
really important to take into account. So then based on that, either on your own in an hour, two or three, if you're, you know, if you have some basic arithmetic skills, figure out how much you want to essentially have in the bank to live off of, plus whatever you're going to get from a pension and or social security, et cetera, et cetera, when you're at the point that you want to be living off of what you've saved, I no longer be burdened by the requirement of generating an
income, work backwards. What is that number? X at age 70 that you want to have, right? And then from that number X work backwards to how much you want to save each month or each week to get to X. At least you have some clarity about what your number actually is. This might sound excessively analytical. It's incredibly useful. It's common sense. If I could speak now to my younger 25 year old or 35 year old self, I would be saying this to that person who did not get it at that
time and then paid a big price for it in, you know, his 50s. That was me because he really had a huge amount of catching up to do. So note your number is. And then the standard advice is that should be your first check. Set up an automatic savings so that transfer out of your checking
account may be have some kind of automatic structure in your paycheck. If you're employed, that you're maxing out the contributions to your retirement account, one way or another set up a practical system that does it for you based on clarity about what your number is, which is based on a kind of soulful, existential sense of kindness and responsibility to the person you will be in your old age. What's underneath this question is how can we delay gratification?
You know, it's the ability to look at something sensibly and be like, hey, my life will be better in the future if I do not do this thing, right? And delay gratification is really hard. Yeah. Because we're bumping our heads against what I was talking about in a previous question, about we're taking on what feels like a punishment now in order to experience some kind of reward later. And for a lot of people these days, the reward that they're going to experience later
feels very uncertain, maybe unattainable in some ways. They feel extremely burdened by various debts. They feel like their future earning prognosis is uncertain. They feel like the world is chaotic and weird and who the heck knows man. There's a lot of realness to all of those feelings. But accompanying that realness needs to be a question of like, how much are these thoughts serving you as an individual? And how much are they impacting your behavior in ways that end up
with you doing things that really screw you long term? Yeah. And that's just been that I think is just like a very complex place right now whenever we talk about money with people. And in terms of like interacting with our own mental health and like, what are the thoughts that we have that support us and being able to reach various goals associated with money? And what are the thoughts that tend to get in the way of that? Yeah. That's deep forest. And I want to add a smidge to it. I
said first, there are multiple ways to care for your future you. Other ways in practical terms involve, for example, investing in different kinds of community that you can be part of. Sometimes it involves establishing a resident somewhere, maybe through your own labor, you're building a home or you're you're adding things on and you're making a place for yourself. There are different ways to make a place for yourself. Second point, the capacity of people to do what I've described
really varies. There are people who have saved a lot and whose savings have been wiped out by hyperinflation based on multiple reasons in different countries. Without America, other parts of the world. So things can happen. And I want to acknowledge obviously that you and I are operating in a pretty comfortable, certainly privileged, you know, American, upper middle class framework. At least I am. And so, you know, I want to really acknowledge certain or other factors in play here.
That said, this person is asking the question, basically saying, I have discretionary chunk of money. Yeah, that's the frame. And you know, I'd rather spend that 100 bucks on this or that than bank it. So it's kind of in that I was just sort of saying, yeah, half two versus one two. And if you let it really land that you just have to save money so that you can protect your future self, you just have to. Then that sense of half two can sink in and then you just surrender to it.
You surrender to what you have to do. And one way to think of it almost is that is duty. There are certain things that we don't want to do. It's on our preference. It's not gratifying, but it's our duty. We understand that. We just have to. And the question that arises here, what's your duty to your 70 year old or 80 year old self? And you know, if you can kind of let that
land, you might find it easier to do, you know, to save. And you might feel a kind of nobility even in that act of saving that can be gratifying, if you will, in its own kind of way. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about another aspect, maybe, of increasing enjoyment here, which again is motivating in terms of our behavior, my behavior with money really changed dramatically.
When I stopped ignoring it as a major issue in my life, I started appreciating that it was a majoring issue in my life that I wasn't saving that I wasn't on track for the things that I needed to accomplish. And it felt spooky and big and impossible. And so I made it a major goal to become competent and educated about the way that finances work. And when I say work, I mean, including
like the structure of obvious stuff like compound interest. And the fact that a dollar today is a lot more than a dollar 30 years from now, if that's kind of your time horizon, like it is for me. And that turned it into a game. And I felt like I could win the game. That's right. Maybe not like, you know, win capitalism because I'm not sure if anybody's
wanting that one outside of it. Very small subset of people. But you know, like win the game of getting enough money in a certain bucket by a certain period of time because I understood the rules and could get better at playing it. And so that mastery motivation started to kick in for me. And I started to care about being skillful in this area, whereas I didn't care about being skillful in this area when I just kind of didn't understand it. And it felt overwhelming and spooky.
So if you're somebody who like me has that kind of game motivation, which has been very present in my life since I was about seven years old, then that can be a way in here. Maybe that might be helpful for you. That's wonderful. That's fantastic. Yeah. Great. So our next question here is a bit of a longer one. Many of us have done a ton of personal work to heal a relationship with our families. And for me, in this question, it's my mother. Most of the work I did was on my side of
the fence because she was unwilling or unable to communicate about the past. Still, I thought I did what I could. I communicated with empathy, the things that I needed to say, and I found some peace and acceptance and sort of laid it to rest. But recently we experienced a tragic death in the family. And my mother's behavior in that context left me just dumbfounded and enraged. No longer confused child without a voice, but now an adult who could clearly see how she's hurting
those around her. She doesn't seem to have the ability to recognize what she's doing or a tune or feel any remorse or even discuss these issues in a meaningful way. What can I do with these feelings? And is there anything to do here? Or do I just kind of do my best to get through it and move on? So what do you think that? First of all, as a parent, I want to really applaud this person for being prepared to have repair conversations. And I think that's wonderful. I don't know the
particulars. I'm struck first by the ways in which something has happened that has really reactivated material that as the person puts it had seemingly found some peace and acceptance and sort of laid it to rest. Oh, huh. What was it about your mother's behavior around this tragic death that really is reactivated a lot of stuff? And there might be something useful to to understand about that. Was something particularly egregious? Did it really get at something in you
that maybe hasn't been really put to rest and you have found peace with? What was that about the current event? That's part one. And so then the question becomes, how do you practice with all this inside yourself? And as we've explored immensely in the podcast and their resources elsewhere, there are different ways to practice with it inside yourself. I won't say a lot about that. I think some of the obvious ones are to try to understand what it was, as I've said, about this
particular trigger that it really got you. It really moved you the chinks in your armor. What was it about this? They really, really got you. Second, what's the perspective of other people in the system? Maybe a death in the family? Probably other people besides you know your mom? What's her take? What happened here? What can they offer here? So that might give you some perspective and then there are other tools you can use inside yourself. Then you're left with what do you say to her?
And that seems like a kind of a key question here. I'm struck by the difference between saying something to get it off your chest and saying something to produce a result inside the mind of the other person. It sounds like you've kind of realistically given up on producing any useful thing inside the mind of your mother. So then you're left with, is it appropriate and valuable for you to be on record to speak from your heart to serve notice, perhaps with other people
being aware of the fact? Is it worth doing it this time? And it might be. This might be such a pinnacle crystal clear example of what's problematic about your mother that it would be a preeminent and wonderful and timely example or opportunity to really say what's true for your own sake, for your own sake. Maybe you do that. On the other hand, maybe you look at her and you just kind of shake your head and you think, wow, it sucks to be you. Wow, it's hard to be you. And wow,
you have zero learning curve. And wow, I don't see any upside for me to get into it with you. And wow, I'm just not going to do that. And I'm going to process this stuff internally. So that's sort of how I kind of think my way through this situation also with definitely compassion and support and respect for the person who wrote this to us and is going through it. Yeah, I think that's so much of this gets to again, material around wanting. And what are what do we want
from this interaction? Like what is it that we're trying to get out of it that we haven't gotten in the past? And there's a real place for just being like, look, this person is not going to give me what I want. And if we get to a point with it where we just have a want that is not going to be required by another person, that's a place of practice for us, including the practice of really understanding that like there's no blood there. There's no blood in that stone. And so
what do I have to do to get comfortable in these environments? What do I have to do to find the space that I need in order to love this person on some level if that's still meaningful for you? Maybe that's maybe that's a lot of space. Maybe that's multiple zip codes. Maybe that's the space you need to love them. And that's what I think a boundary is. It's a great phrase from Elizabeth, my partner, who's a therapist. Boundaries are the space I need to love you. I think about that
with questions like this, particularly having to do with family relationships. And the reason that I go there is because a situation happened that stirred up material in a very kind of psychological, sort of unconscious, subconscious material kind of way. And so I wonder about that part of it, that unhurting of this material and then okay, where did that material come from and what can we do to kind of work with it inside of ourselves when it seems like the person just isn't really gonna
going to change in the ways we would like. I think that's incredibly thorough and deep. So one final question, if you think we got the time for it here, Dad, if you're up for it. My baby and I experienced a traumatic birth and postpartum this year. Should I be concerned that this will have long-term consequences for him psychologically? I had my own traumatic childhood and I want something different from my son. Is there anything I can do to support him?
Beautiful question. I'm currently re-engaging a lot of my own academic and clinical background in the zero to three period. Part related to exploring some potentially simple, doable, highly leveraged interventions that could be accomplished in America as a starting point to improve mental health outcomes in the first year of life. That's very cool, Dad. Yeah, it is pretty cool. Four million kids are born in America each year and for three million of them, it's a new experience
for their parent too to become a parent. Then you think about how in the world to improve those outcomes. First off, the fact that this person is so full of concern and already inside is an extremely important resource to trust. That's really good news. Second thing is to realize that getting really worried about events in the first year of life like, oh, something you're evocable and unrepairable has occurred. That's not helpful, so I want to steer away from that and
I think it's good to steer away from that. All of that said, the best way to support the child and to offer something different is a lot related to positive emotional experiences with you as a caregiver and perhaps with others as well who play a role in the life of the child. Simple, ordinary everyday experiences of reliable availability, sensitive responsiveness, skillful attunement, taking care of yourself enough. My first book was Mother Nurture. I recommend
finding a copy. Forest actually helped me do a copy that's available on Kindle and we're going to reissue it in print soon in the next year or so. But anyway, you could probably still find it somewhere. It's a really good book. Look at ways to nurture yourself so you can really nurture your child. Oh, that's really important. If you want, you can draw on resources in things like the 0-3 program or nonprofit organization. The Yale Child and Family Study Center has a lot of freely
available resources online that you can take a look at. Healthy Start is a wonderful national program full of resources as well that tracks milestones of healthy development and emphasizes different kinds of skills and things to be aware of in your baby and ways to interact with your baby along the way. All of that is really, really good. The last thing I'll just say is that there's a
place for kind of matching. I describe this with linking in the heel structure in which we're matching an appropriate positive resource to a related, I'll call it negative experience or condition. So if what was happening in the life of let's say the newborn for a few months was that a parent was, let's say, depressed, postpartum depression and not so available emotionally for the child. Nothing abusive was occurring, but there was just a lack of a
of emotional availability. Well, that's something to really pay attention to going forward. Being present, emotional, emotional presence. Or a second thing is that maybe if there was postpartum depression in the first several months, understandably the parent was not very able to access what are sometimes called excitation effects. Like the kind of, oh, what a cutie. That sort of stuff. The parent could do their job, but they're depressed. Obviously, it couldn't do it. Let's say also,
I'm not hearing other caregivers being very involved. So maybe now is the time to bring in more of what was missing, not in some authentic over-the-top kind of way, but just paying attention to, oh, what may have been kind of missing that we can now deliver to this child in a way that has a specificity and its relatedness to what happened during those first months. Last, I'll just say, bad on yourself, bad on the human heart. I don't believe people who say that it's impossible to
repair things that happen in early childhood. I'm not going to bet against the human heart. I'm not going to bet against the human spirit. I'm not going to bet against the power of a mother's love. That's really beautiful, Dad. I think that's a great place to leave that one. I really don't have anything to add. I think you'd covered it in really fantastic ways there. This was a great episode. We dug into so much during this episode. Man, again, we could have turned almost any one
of these questions into its whole own thing. If you made it this far for starters, thank you for sticking with us. I hope you found it really interesting. Again, if you want to send in a question to get answered on the podcast, best way to do that is by following us on patreon patreon.com slash being well podcast. You can also find me on substack and send me a message over there. If you're watching
this on YouTube, you can leave a comment. If you have a question, you can send us an email to contact at beingwellpodcast.com. A lot of ways to reach us. Again, Dad, thanks for taking the time to do this with me today. Beautiful and thank you for us. I really enjoyed today's conversation with Rick where we answered a variety of questions from listeners. I'm going to take a little bit of time at the end here to just remind you what each of those questions were and maybe highlight a couple
of things that we mentioned while we were responding to them. First, we got a question asking how you can support a friend who's going through a mental health crisis. Some of this gets to the specific situation and the kind of mental health crisis that we're dealing with. Rick highlighted a couple of things. The first thing that Rick mentioned was the importance of being a comforting and supportive presence under almost all circumstances. He also highlighted something that I think
is really true. We're often when we're interacting with a person, there's something that goes unsaid and maybe it goes unsaid because it feels a little cringey to say it. It makes us a little uncomfortable to touch that third rail, but there can be a unasked question or an unmade statement that's just kind of floating in the air between the two people in the room and there's really a place for communicating, hey, I just want you to know whatever's going on here. I'm really on your
team. I'm on your side. I'm available if you need me and I really want to do whatever I can do to be supportive of you. And the first time that you make that communication, it's really, really helpful. What I added on to this question is that the sixth time that you make this communication, it might not be helpful so much because it starts to feel like you want something from them,
not like you're trying to offer something to them. And attached to that, my personal experience with situations like this is a lot of the time when I'm going through something tough, I do not want to talk about it with everyone because every conversation that you have with people is about that hard thing that you're going through and you just get tired of talking about it. So it can be really, really great to be around people who are just being normal with you. They're just talking with
you the way that they used to talk to you. They're interacting with you in just kind of a pleasant way where it doesn't feel like there's that third character in the room of whatever else is going on. Then we had a really interesting question about healing from complex trauma via meditation alone versus doing it through therapy by working with a clinician. And to simplify what Rick said,
basically for most people in most situations, meditation is an incredibly useful scale. And there's a reason that meditative practice is increasingly being incorporated or maybe I should say insights from mindfulness meditation in particular are increasingly being incorporated into all these different approaches to therapy. And these are sometimes referred to as third wave behavioral approaches. Act is an example of this. It includes a lot of mindfulness meditation in it.
Mindfulness based stress reduction is an approach that is therapeutic in nature that includes a lot of information from mindfulness. Mindfulness is really used in therapy a lot these days. And there
are reasons for that. I can be a very useful tool. But a lot of what we learned from mindfulness practice broadly is how to be with our experience more effectively as opposed to really going back into our personal history and unearthing the material itself and working with that material directly, which is more what you're going to be doing through a therapeutic process. So both of these things are really helpful, but it's a bit unlikely that you're going to be able to
use meditation alone to deal with the issues that you're experiencing. But meditation might be incredibly helpful for dealing with the symptoms that arise because of whatever happened to you. Then we talked about beginning again after we stumble. And I really focused on enjoyment as a key aspect of this whole thing and avoiding shame experiences as well. When we stopped something that we knew that we kind of wanted to start or we had an intention around starting, often we
feel a ton of shame related to that. We start beating ourselves up, we get down on ourselves, we blame ourselves for once again falling off the wagon. But all of that shame often does very little to motivate us and actually kind of makes it harder to start again. We almost have to work through it before we can get to the activity that we're trying to begin. So to the extent that you can, as Rick said, try to make it not such a big deal for most people in most situations that
kind of real simplicity with it. Hey, I didn't do the thing I was supposed to do. I knew I should have done it. Ah, there you go. Hey, can I do it again today? Is your best odd strategy of keeping consistent with something? We then got a question about whether feedback is necessary for growth. And both Rick and I emphasized the great value of feedback, but also the difficulty with getting high quality feedback and how low quality feedback often just makes us more self-conscious and more
stressed out without providing a lot of benefit and return. So the real question here is, are you getting good feedback? And then final question I'll recap here. We got a question about healing a relationship with a family member who just really doesn't seem that interested in repairing from whatever's been going on in the past. And this person was able to mostly get to a place of comfort with whatever had been going on. And then something happened that really a real
awakened a lot of old material. And what Rick and I both focused on is that for starters, it's great that you want to go through this process at all because there are a lot of people who very understandably do not want to do that anymore. They are burnt out on it, they're tired and they just can't be bothered. So the fact that you're even willing to go back into that kind of a repair process with a family member really speaks well of you for starters. But a lot of the time what we
find is that that person's just not going to change in the ways that we want them to change. They're not going to turn over a new leaf. They're not going to give us what we really want. And then it becomes much more about looking inside of ourselves and trying to unpack what's going on that's making us want that that. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. We had a really great time recording it. I just want to give you one last reminder about my sub stack. I've been writing over there more
regularly. And I've really enjoyed it. I feel like I've really learned a lot through that process. It's been great to interact with people in the comments of the articles that I've posted. That's been super rewarding to me personally. Sometimes podcasting can feel a bit like a black box where I'm just talking to this microphone and looking at this camera. And we don't necessarily get a lot of direct feedback from people. So just having this space where that's more available
has been really useful for me. And I just really hope people enjoy it. If you could take a moment to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to it right now, I'd really appreciate that. And hey, the best way we have to reach new people is if you just tell a friend about it. Until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.