Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today, as usual, by Dr. Rick Hansen. So, Dad, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm psyched. And I always love the mailbag. yeah today just as you said we're going to be opening up the mailbag and answering some questions from our listeners and when we do these mailbags
I try to pick questions that both have a little bit of variety, so you're not just getting all of the same thing, and are loosely grouped around a topic. And I felt like the questions today really orbited the territory of anxiety and particularly anxieties we have about ourselves and our relationships. If you'd like to have a question answered on a future episode of the podcast,
The best way is by signing up for Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And you can also send me an email over at contact at beingwellpodcast. So to start with our first question today, and I wanted to start with this one because it's very relevant not just to the mailbag here, but to literally everything we do on the podcast. So here it is. I sometimes wonder if it's possible to be too preoccupied with the entire subject of self-help, psychology and personal development.
I sometimes wonder if I'm thinking about it too much and if that's interfering with the normal flow of life. What do you think? So, well, for starters, starting with a banger. Yeah, I want to flip it back to you a little bit in terms of what do you think about, and I'm going to distinguish three things. One, what do you think about paying attention to and thinking about the minds of other people?
Second, what do you think about forest or how do you think about mindful of one's own stream of consciousness, including its many layers and currents? And third, thinking about or being preoccupied with the topic of self-help, self-improvement, making efforts in your own mind stream to shift it.
good directions over time. So it seems to me that this person, in a way, is naming these three topic areas. And I think it's helpful to distinguish among them. And then we can, in particular, I think, dive into the juiciest one of all, which is the third one.
So what do you think about that sorting right off the top? I like the sorting. I think it's helpful sorting. And also I wonder if this gets a little bit to some of the distinctions that we drew in the episode we had recently about self-awareness. and the difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness. And I think that exploring these ideas, some of the ideas that you might bump into in that third category, is just objectively useful for people.
It's just a good thing to have a feel for some of those concepts, particularly if it's implied in any kind of reasonable way in the course of a normal life. But it is...
Absolutely possible for people to become preoccupied with these ideas in a way that maybe starts to get in the way of just like normal basic day-to-day interactions with other people where they start to second-guess themselves or... really dive into cycles after cycles of going okay why am i doing this what do i really want where is this behavior come from and i wonder if a little bit of this applies to the stages of growth model that we've talked about
in previous episodes, how there's this natural movement from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence. to unconscious confidence in most of the things that we do. And when you're hanging out in those conscious stages, it absolutely can feel like you're really overthinking everything. Does that track for you, Dad? Oh, that's so interesting that you put it in.
that frame too. Yeah. So we're talking in a way, what's the Goldilocks spot? So much wisdom boils down to the Goldilocks story. Well, in the first category, how much is... good to think about the minds, the subjective experiences, the psychology of other people compared to the outer world. I think that it's good to think about both, and many people tend to be too tilted one way or another.
There's some people who are very into feelings and thoughts and really interested in the minds of other people, but they have a hard time not running through red lights or balancing their checkbook. So I would just be an advocate for, be aware of both, if you will, material reality, as well as the thoughts, the feelings, the experiences of our fellow human beings. That seems like pretty good.
Okay, there. Then the second one, if I could, I want to make a distinction between being aware of what you're experiencing, distinct from a preoccupation or a focus on self-help. And generally speaking, with some important caveats, I think mindfulness is a fairly unrestricted virtue. The caveat is... Becoming mindful of traumatic, painful, overwhelming material that you're not prepared for is problematic for people. But in general, it's hard to...
Think of examples where people became more mindful, more aware of their own interior in any way in which a person would say, you know, I really wish I had not recognized that about myself. I wish I had not been mindful of that or aware of that, generally speaking. Maybe in the short term, it's an ouch. But on the whole, you're glad you became aware of it.
This is actually just reminding me of a conversation that I had with a person on Patreon a while back where they were raising a similar question and particularly were raising it in more of a relational setting where they felt like they were the member of a group who had done a lot of…
this personal growth work. And in part because of that, their behavior was becoming hyper-constrained and regulated inside of this group in a way that didn't really feel that healthy for them, to loosely paraphrase. And when I thought about this when this person sent in this message, after just kind of sitting with it for a while, my thought was that the goal of almost any practice that we have is to become more free.
free to choose our behavior in general and our responses to situations, including the behavior of other people in particular. So if you're engaged with a practice that you've been engaged with seriously for a while, And you really have given it kind of its pound of flesh, which we normally have to do when we start something new. And you still feel like it's making you less free rather than more free.
I think that's an indicator that something's gone sideways. Something about your relationship with it is leading to these kinds of experiences that you're having, as opposed to the problem being the thing itself. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. I think that's a great distinction. I'm going to have a couple observations about it. I mean, the first is that there's a Zen saying that we should be with our minds like the skillful rider of a horse, neither too tight nor too loose a rein.
Right here, we have the Goldilocks principle again, that middle place, that just right place. And so I think that's a good general principle when we're trying to help ourselves, you know, heal, grow, and develop. One. Two, I can imagine that someone might say, it would be wonderful to just let it rip. Just go through life rolling along. Reactions emerge, they emerge, whatever, fine and dandy. And if you can do that, and I think people get to that point of unconscious competence.
including in profound forms of emotional intelligence and awakening, at the end of a lot of deliberate effort. All right, if you could do that, great. But it was interesting that Buddha was asked this question, as best we know, a long time ago. is a baby enlightened? He said, no, that baby might be happy or sad. It's certainly present, but it's not able to be deliberately motivated.
to help itself and deliberately motivated to respond to the world and cope with it. And certainly not deliberately motivated to be able to cultivate particular qualities of mind and heart in itself. I think that it's really, in my view, important to take on learning as a value in our book, Resilient.
It's one of the 12 fundamental strengths. And as you know, I'm a fan of it as the strength of strengths because it's the one we use to grow the rest of them. So I think there's a real place for deliberately asking ourselves with... neither too tight nor too loose a rein, how can I heal a little? How can I grow a little? How can I awaken a little today? I'm a big fan of that, as you know. What I've observed is that when people kind of start out with that,
It's a little bit like suddenly now you're incredibly fascinated with skiing or fly fishing or ceramics or your guitar. You spend a lot of time on it. You're kind of preoccupied with it. Yeah, there's a place for that. But over time, it starts to move more and more into the background because you're increasingly living with the fruits of the efforts you've made with your own mind over time. I love what you said toward the beginning of your answer about...
the freedom that people want or that feeling of just let it rip. Yeah. I think there's a real question to investigate for people. What does freedom mean to you? Because if freedom just means- going with your first impulse, that is a bad kind of freedom. That is a kind of freedom that causes a lot of problems, causes problems for you, causes problems for other people. And so I don't think that dysregulation is freedom.
I just don't have that model. But I think that that's actually a model that a lot of people basically carry around, that the only time that I'm liberated is when I just get to do whatever I want, and every other time I'm not liberated. For me, liberation is about being able to make choices. It's about agency. It's being able to choose one door over another door. So if I want to choose the door of just letting it rep, I get to choose that door.
I don't feel limited in my ability to access that door. And if I want to choose the door of being really thoughtful about what I do and say in an interaction, I get to choose that door. To me, that's what real freedom looks like. I hope you extract that clip. And post it on YouTube. It'll go somewhere for sure. Preach, brother, preach.
Thanks, man. I've been thinking about that one a lot recently. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, including just socially with other people. I think you see it all the time that people just kind of confuse. Yeah. You see it a lot with the word authenticity. It's like, oh, I'm only authentic when I'm just like...
shooting from the hip and all of those kind of things that people say. And I just think that's kind of a misunderstanding here. That's great. Great. All right. I think good place to leave that question. So moving on to our second one here, which also really liked, very deep question. I recently realized that there is an unhealed, more immature part of myself that is running too much of the show. It's characterized by an unquenchable thirst for approval and finds rejection unbearable.
It's affecting my relationships as I overreact to sensed or assumed rejection from friends and family. I practically obsess over how they just don't like me and find it hard to develop a firm view of myself as worthy and likable. What could help me with this? And so for me, Dad, this feels like some real social anxiety content here, maybe a little self-worth or a little self-valuing stuff going on as well. What do you think? I have been this person.
And this way of being a person is also an extremely common and frequent topic in psychotherapy. So you are in good company. You've got a lot of reps with this one, Dad, both in your personal life and in the counseling office. Yeah. So I find that it's helpful for me to... go into what can you do about it. And as usual, I have a plan with some major headlines.
I'm not going to go through the whole thing straight up. So I'm going to do a headline, one headline at a time, all right? And so I don't drive you crazy here. So first headline, to the people in your life and your selection of them. There is in us what Freud called a repetition compulsion. or what's called control mastery theory has to do with the tendency to reenact certain patterns from childhood in order to overcome them or heal them or finally get a better result.
I call them doomed quests. You know, we're trying to get blood from the proverbial stone or we keep going down the same old tunnel thinking that this time there's going to be cheese down the tunnel. So think about who you're with. There's a place for that. Maybe you're with people who are not very approving, right? Or who tend to be sort of dismissive, even as a kind of an attachment style, you know, fending people off and pushing people away who just want to feel.
understandably closer and understood. Give some thought to that. And also look for fertile ground, people who would be able to be more harmonious with you. Maybe you're like me, kind of neurotically triggered about certain things, but... You might be able to seek out people who are more within range of manageability when they trigger you because the triggering isn't quite so intense. So that's my first headline. Okay, what do you think about that one?
I think it actually connects to the first question a little bit. When people start to explore internal factors more, one of the things that sometimes starts to get left out is the presence of external factors. And external factors including... supportive social environments are arguably just as important a variable as internal factors, like developing more inner strengths and inner skills. And people just don't talk about it enough a lot of the time.
There's a place for asking people to budge. There's a place for asking people for what you want from them, including wanting things that they would do inside their minds. not just what their words or deeds say, asking them for the cheese you long for. I actually spent a fair amount of time, you know, your mom would laugh at me, including before you came along, in which...
I would deliberately pull for narcissistic supplies, healthy narcissistic supplies. I would pull for them. I would pull for that approval and, you know, prizing and cherishing to fill that hole in my heart. And she would laugh at me and smile, and some of my friends would kind of roll their eyes a little, but they'd understand what I was doing. All right, there's a place for that. On the other hand...
When people show you who they are or believe them the first time or the third time or by the 10th time, definitely. Maya Angelou, paraphrase here. And they're just not going to give you cheese. They're just not going to do it. They don't want to do it. They don't understand cheese. It's not their style. Maybe they're getting themselves some secondary gain from being that way with you. And at that point, there's a place for just sort of waking up and...
It's painful. There's mourning involved sometimes. There's grieving, but just, hey, I just ain't going to get what I need here, and I need to look for more fertile ground. Okay, that's my first headline. Second headline. Obviously, there's a kind of longing here for what we might call narcissistic supplies. Approval, connection, prizing, mirroring, cherishing, and so on. Valuing.
in a word. Great. When you have opportunities to experience it, including in low stakes interactions and relationships, bring a big spoon, gobble it up, slow it down, and take it in. bit by bit, breath by breath, synapse by synapse, you start growing a greater sense of self-worth inside that's increasingly unconditioned, not contingent.
on what is happening around you so that when narcissistic injury lands on you, when others are disapproving or rejecting or just not... valuing or connecting, it lands on an increasingly big pile of positive experiences taken in to implicit memory, woven into the fabric of your own nervous system. that can support and buttress and buffer your own sense of self-worth. What do you think? I feel like that's clearly the case and is clearly a valuable thing for people. And I wonder...
for many people who have this kind of a challenge, they really know that. Like they understand that it would be great. if I were just able to internalize more positive experiences and really build up this felt sense that other people really do in fact like me, or at the very least are more than happy to tolerate me in a given social environment. Like, they get that.
And the problem for most people is more of a, sometimes people call it like a nurturance barrier or something like that, where you just have a hard time kind of taking in the good thing. And so I'm wondering about that aspect of it. That's really good you highlighted that. So I have a lot of experience with this path because it's a really fundamental healing path to take in the so-called...
in psych lingo, corrective emotional experiences today that were missing when you were younger. But what's really important is the internalization of them and then what that surfaces or blocks. So for some people, there is going to be a problem around recognition. They haven't been in the space for...
a long enough period of time or haven't recognized about themselves that they have this as a constellation of issues. But once you get to that point, it's very practical. It's about that internalization act. It really stands out to me just in my own interactions with people, like how tough it can be to actually absorb a positive experience. I've definitely seen it for myself in my own life. And of course, that's what you do. Yeah, yeah.
I traffic in human misery. And it's understandable. So let's just kind of go through it kind of quickly. So think of a three-step process. see the good fact in the first place. So now you are, let's suppose you're in a situation, let's say it's a mild to moderate, kind of mid-range encounter with a friendly hot dog vendor or...
a casual acquaintance at work or, you know, a friend says something nice in passing, the good fact is there. First of all, you got to recognize it. And you're right. A lot of people don't recognize it. Okay. Second, help that knowing become a feeling. They are liking you. Can you help yourself feel liked? They are appreciating you. Can you help yourself feel appreciated? You have to move from knowing to feeling.
crucial step and that is the hard step for many many people it's real and then around that what's helpful is to just pay attention what are the blocks is it hard to sustain attention Or is there a fear that if you actually let yourself feel cared about, something terrible will happen, including some intense clutching for more caring will start bubbling forward?
from the three-year-old recesses of your mind that will create trouble in the relationship. That's not uncommon. Actual fears of experiencing what you really long for. you can explore and become more mindful of these blocks. And mindfulness and awareness of these blocks is probably the primary solvent in dissolving them.
Very effective, actually. It often doesn't take a lot more than that to just be aware of it. And you realize, oh, that's an old fear from my childhood, really understandable. But in this moment, just having this pleasant back and forth, it's okay. for me to let that one sink in, right? And then you move into the third step, you know, so see the good news that's true, help yourself feel the good, and then take in the good. You slow it down.
If you just stay with the experience for a breath or longer, it's naturally going to start internalizing. And then do it a thousand times, you know, over the next year or two. Now, repetition is really the game here. Yeah. And it's really okay for it to move slowly. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. But look for those opportunities. And now, being a little blunt here, long-time therapist, I've become, I think, more compassionate over time, but blunter.
More curmudgeonly. Curmudgeonly, there you are. Well, you're in your get off my porch era, dad. Is that what's going to go? Is that what's happening over here? There's no replacement for effort. for getting on your own side and really helping yourself and making the effort to actually do this. Okay, that's the second headline. And the third one is to do the linking process, broadly stated, in which...
In addition to directly receiving evidence of your own worth, that others like you, they love you, including potentially these key people, in addition to taking in what's available, And based on my first headline, coming to terms with what you're just never going to get from certain people and you need to look for elsewhere for there even to be the possibility of that. Okay. In addition to that.
You can then, in this third headline, take the good experiences you're having and connect them with those very young, hungry, hurting places inside. That's the process that... I did not invent. I call it linking, where you're aware of two things at once, positive and negative together. And you bring the positive into contact with the negative.
making the positive bigger so it's not overwhelmed by the negative and the positive gradually associates the negative neurons that fire together wire together and soothes it eases it and eventually even kind of replaces it. You never forget the events of your childhood or your first marriage or your last job, but the sting, the emotional charge on them can be gradually healed.
by this process that I'm describing of bringing the good into contact with the old bad. Great. And something you haven't really spoken to yet, Dad. is the IFS-er aspect of what this person is speaking to, this idea of an immature part. that is asserting itself in certain kinds of environments or is maybe coming forward with its fears or concerns in environments that are less obviously supportive for it. We talked with Dr. Richard Schwartz a couple of times on the podcast.
about IFS. We've had other conversations about working with different parts on the podcast in the past and you can probably search for those. I don't know if you want to speak to that kind of quickly here, but we've already spent a lot of time. Oh, I think you're naming the fourth headline. Really important. And I'll speak really briefly about it. I think it's really helpful to, at least for me it's been helpful, to...
regard to really recognize the youngness of that hungry, hurting part. Yeah, and I think that's already a big part of it, yeah. Yeah, which then naturally... You know, and this is something you can cultivate as well, of course, but for me at least, and I think many people, it naturally evokes a caring attitude toward ourselves.
I just did a workshop, as you know, healing and secure attachment. People can check it out. We recorded it and so forth. And you can see this part of it. But we can relate securely to ourselves. Now, even though other people are relating insecurely toward us by dismissing us or rejecting us or not hearing us. And as a kid. people related insecurely to us. We can relate securely to ourselves. We can be that good parent or being.
or friend or ally toward ourselves. So now you have a sense of this hungry, hurting part. For me, it varies, but it's four years old. It's 10 months old. I can see that part. And if we just sort of let it... I don't know how we talked about earlier, if we just sort of let it rip, just burst out, it's going to kind of overwhelm people because it's really upset and very self-referential. It just wants what it wants.
because it needs what it wants. Okay. But if we can guide it some and manage it a little bit and be a little amused by this bumptious four-year-old. who's demanding, hey, everyone, look at me. You know, but if we could kind of relax around it and be a little charmed by it and, you know, understand that we're, you know, as you said earlier for us, regulating it, keeping it in bounds, then we can make more room for it.
in our own psychology. And we can even let it sometimes come out to play with people who are appropriate. I think that's great. And a great... tight summary of a very complex topic and one we've talked about on the podcast in some length in the past. So I'd love to move on to our third question here because in classic being well fashion, we've spent 25 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is of this This might seem surprising, but I have always struggled to eat enough vegetables.
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Let me get you started with my special discount. You'll get 20% off your first order. Just use code BEINGWELL at fieldofgreens.com. That's code BEINGWELL at fieldofgreens.com. So we've got question number three. How can you tell with a reasonable degree of certainty that you really are trying your best? It seems like this would be obvious, but sometimes it's hard for me to tell if I'm really fully depleted because I gave it my all.
or if I'm just using that as an excuse so I can stop. Man, Dad, I got to tell you, this one actually hit home for me in a pretty real way because this is something that I've definitely struggled with. Oh, I'm incredibly intrigued by this. question and I can tell I'm going to really enjoy a question if I feel initially confused.
So, well, maybe I'll just ask you. For you, is it really intuitive? Is this like not a question at all? You just know if you've tried hard? Almost always. Okay. But I acquired that. Awesome. Go ahead. Take this wherever you want. Yeah, yeah. So some kids just come out of the box. They're kind of perfectionistic, frankly, and compulsive and really fixated on.
high performance. I wasn't. I really wasn't. But over time, I want to kind of unpack a few things here. First is, I would say commitment to excellence. and interest in accomplishing at a really high level. And I think one of the kind of answers or inputs into this question is to ask, what are my goals? What is good enough for me? What are your standards that you're relating effort to?
And are they healthy or unhealthy? Yeah. Are they too much or too little? Are they too high or too low? What's, again, the Goldilocks place, right, for your standards? Then I think there's the question of the difference between deliberately lifting weights. and I've learned from you about this, where you're getting, you want to have, as you put it to me once, you want to be close, Ted, to the last one or two reps in which you can have good form, but you're...
really, really approaching exhaustion. You're trying hard. Yeah. Yeah. That's the place because that's going to stress your muscle cells and build them and build more muscle cells. Most things in life are really not like that. The way the person asked the question was about being depleted. Fully depleted. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah.
I think that if you're, you know, the Olympics just passed, if you're running a, what, a 100-meter dash or a marathon, you know, or a basketball game, whatever, definitely you don't want to leave anything. out. You know, you want to leave it all in the field. Yeah. I get that. Most of the time, probably not. Yeah. But is that really that sports metaphor that can tend to be idealized?
But those metaphors don't really apply to most things that really matter. I think that sometimes in these questions, there's a phrase that gives you a little hint about what's going on here. Yeah. And I think that that fully depleted phrase is the phrase in this question that gives you a little hint. Yeah. And so what you said early on there, Dad, about what are the standards that you're holding yourself to?
And how are you thinking about how hard you need to try for it to be hard enough is kind of a little clue here. And I wonder about that for this person. I wonder if maybe that sense of being totally exhausted. If that's really the target for most people most of the time, understanding, of course, that they're outlier situations. At the same time, I really empathize with this. Like I said at the beginning of the question, because...
I'm somebody who likes to end the day feeling like, you know, maybe I didn't give it 100%, but I gave it 92%. And I want to be in that above 90% most of the time. That's my good enough standard, and that's what's fulfilling for me. I am happier. at the end of the day when I feel like a towel that has been mostly wrung out. And when I feel like there's a lot of water left in the towel, that's when I get the most, you know, irritable as Elizabeth would be.
the first to tell you. So that's what I've become the most annoying to be around is what I feel like I haven't really given what I have inside of myself. And to use your exercise metaphor, Dad, I think that it is really true that most people really have no idea.
what zero reps in reserve actually feels like. So there's this notion in an exercise called reps in reserve. Basically, how many reps do you have left in the tank when you finish an exercise? And what I was basically telling you to do was to leave one or two in reserve. for most people most of the time. But there can be something in really pushing to zero reps and reserve so you know what it feels like.
So you actually understand what the upper bound is for you. And then you pull back from that a little bit and you go, hey, this is what I can maintain, not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the next day, because life is in large part about consistency.
So maybe a question for this person would be, have you pushed to zero reps in reserve in the past? And do you know what that feels like? And do you have an internal model of accomplishment that allows you to still have one or two reps in reserve? and let yourself feel accomplished. So the issue could be on either side, right? It could be that we aren't truly going that close, or it could be that we haven't allowed ourselves to feel good with one or two still left in the tank.
Yeah, that's great. A couple other things strike me. Think about two voices inside or committees, if you will. On the one hand, we have the parts that we might call the pusher and the critic. forming a committee that tends to say, do more, do more, do more. And even if you go to
nothing left in the tank. You have fought for you, the final battle. There's literally nothing left. They might look at you and blank and say, okay, do it again tomorrow. I mean, that's as good as it gets from the pusher and the... critic. Yeah, the best you can do is go to 100% all the time until you burn out, and then you get really self-critical about the fact that you burnt out. Then there's this other stream of wisdom coming at us from the inside.
I think I call it the caring committee that is guiding us and encouraging us and cheering us on. And much like a really good coach is saying, you know, you could do more or wow. You've already done a lot, right? Which voice are we listening to? And I think becoming clearer about the distinction between them and realizing that we can be firm.
We can guide ourselves in areas where we really do want to have high standards and we really do want to put in a good day's work toward them. As we define a good day's work, you know, they can help us in that way. That's an important point. Second, related to this, is to have standards not just for results, but for process.
And I think process standards are actually more important than results standards. Yeah, I love this. Love this. Great point. I totally didn't think about this, but this is a great point. Yeah. What does it mean to do your best in terms of process? And for me, process aims a lot boiled down to three things. And you'd kind of know if you can go to sleep with that feeling of good enough today, good on you today. One.
Did you bring your heart to it? Were you sincere? Did you have courage? Were you heartfelt? Were you wholehearted, as Brene Brown would put it? Were you rested in what you actually care about? Heart. Second. Did you make reasonable efforts? And I think a good standard here is to look outside yourself to how would you judge the reasonable efforts of others as applied in particular endeavors, whether it's weightlifting to build muscle.
or to sustain a long-term marriage, or to raise children as a single parent with very little support from the outside. For you. What's a reasonable effort? Did you make efforts? And we kind of know in our own heart whether we phoned it in or we really tried. And for you, a reasonable effort is to have 8%, because you said 92, I think, still in the tank.
That's fine. That's a reasonable effort. So did you make efforts? And then the third process criterion, for me at least, is did you learn along the way? Were you paying attention? Did you... Did you take correction? Did you recognize ways to become more skillful? Did you receive input? Maybe you had to filter out, you know, the wheat from the chaff in the input, but at least you identified at least one grain of wheat.
It was relevant for you. Did you learn along the way? And you can apply those standards, those values, really, for a process to a day and, frankly, to a life. And I can say, honestly, that... You know, as I've looked back, as I've gotten older and older, being able to look at my life and to really feel that on the whole, on the whole, you know, I brought my heart to it. I made efforts and I did learn along the way. That's a real comfort.
when you take the big picture and look at your life as a whole. I think that's great, Dad. So let's move on to the fourth question here. My partner and I are very independent, which largely suits both of us. But I would sometimes like a little less independence, and conflict usually arises when there are things that I would like us to make joint decisions on. My partner resorts to either I make the decision or you make the decision.
when I would sometimes prefer more of a dialogue, exploring each of our needs and wants and coming up with a solution together that suits both of us. I've asked my partner directly for this type of dialogue, but whenever we try, he gets defensive and frustrated. He is on the autism spectrum. Might that make these types of conversations more difficult? Do you have any advice?
on how we can work through this and how we could make these conversations more accessible for him. So a lot in this one, Dad. I know that Forrest looked into good material related to autism and the spectrum broadly. Maybe it would be great to start there so we can kind of acknowledge whatever's true about that and then keep going. Yeah, great. For starters, obviously, neither of us is an expert on autism.
And anything I say in particular is just quoting what I've read in the research or is drawn from my personal experience interacting with other people as opposed to any kind of clinical experience here. It's really important to start by remembering that Autism and autism spectrum disorders are extremely variable. Presentation or tendencies are going to vary enormously across that group.
It's also, I think, helpful to acknowledge here that we don't know what this questionnaire means by on the autism spectrum. There has been a huge amount of what I will call spectrum creep in the last five to 10 years, let alone the last 20 to 30 years. And I think a lot of ways that are really, really good. I think that...
90% of that spectrum creep is fantastic. It's inclusive. It acknowledges people's experiences in really important ways. That's all great. I think 10% of it, we start to get a little blurry about what these words actually mean. And we maybe start to apply this terminology a little loosely to people. That said, a general finding is that people who are on the spectrum do tend to prefer more clarity and structure and particularly familiarity.
Change or uncertainty, particularly a person's defeated expectations about what's about to happen, do tend to activate a lot of anxiety.
And this is why there tends to be an emphasis on supporting autistic children by creating more predictable routines, like a very predictable bedtime routine or a very predictable morning routine. And related to this, there can be what appears to be maybe a lot of more... rigidity or stronger kind of black and white views on things and the style of communication that the questioner is kind of proposing here this
we consider both of our values and needs we're interactive in our problem solving you bring your stuff to the table i bring my stuff to the table and we really figure out how to meet in the middle that could be a great style of communication. But it is also fuzzy. It requires a lot of emotional regulation and management in the two different people. It also frankly requires a lot of attentiveness often to this sort of subtle flow of interaction between two people who are trying to manage.
manage their different wants, where there's a lot of calibrating how much does this person actually want this thing? Do I want the things I want more than they want the things they want? And that kind of unspoken dance. could plausibly be a bit more uncomfortable for somebody who had more autistic traits. Again, not an expert on the topic, but I thought that this could help maybe lay a little bit of a foundation for what you're going to talk about here, Dad.
That's a wonderful summary. And as you're speaking for us, my life is passing before my eyes. What I mean by that is that many, many episodes. with couples in my office of a particular kind are just passing along there. And I've also really appreciated what you're saying about creep.
Diagnostic creep in general is a big issue in the field right now. Yeah. Even as an outsider to it, I'm aware of that. I'm very resistant to the D word that gets tacked on to a lot of these things. Is it really a disorder? It's a way of being. It may or may, in some certain settings, it has tremendous benefits. In other settings, it kind of is not a good fit for certain demands or expectations. Got it. Just kind of in that.
And I've also seen situations in which people in a couple, they have listened to one too many podcasts or something, and they just kind of reach for that category. Maybe for good reasons because it sort of helps them understand their partner better. You know, if it walks like a duck and eats like a duck and quacks like a duck, if you conclude, oh, there's a duck here or something quite duck-like, that then can help you.
you know, pattern recognition. On the other hand, it can be a way of pathologizing your partner. Like, oh, well, you know, they're borderline. Then, you know, oh, great. Or, well, maybe they're not. borderline in any technical sense, but you know, they had a rocky childhood and their temperament's sort of sensitive and they don't like how you're sort of rejecting and dismissive.
Right. Hello. You know, like maybe that's what's really going on. Or maybe your partner is very bright, quite introverted, tends toward being very analytical and. is also quite sensitive interpersonally. And because of that sensitivity, deliberately needs to sort of take a step back because things land on them kind of intensively. And, you know, honestly, it's often a he.
He's just not that interested in processing a lot and some of the stuff you care about. And that's what's really going on. It's not that he's... Yeah, it's not that he has a disorder or something. Okay, so that all has come out of my life passing before my eyes here. All that said. And on the other hand, it can be a great comfort for people. Recently, very interestingly, I forget his name. I think his first name is Hayden.
Hayden Thorpe, maybe? He's the editor-in-chief of Science Magazine at the absolute pinnacle of the science establishment in the world, certainly, you know, in North America. And he recently... said, wow, I've come to realize that I'm on the autism spectrum. And it explains a lot of things for me that have been a real comfort for me to understand that it's biology.
character defect, and I now am more able to take certain things into account because I understand myself better. Like, wonderful. So, place for all that. Now, this situation. I wonder, first of all, what this person means. They put it in capital letters, joint, joint decisions. In other words, for A and B here, if A...
really wants something. Let's say the person sending in the question is A and B is the partner. A wants something. B says, okay, fine with me. That's a joint decision of sorts. And I can understand the... The bee person who maybe is seen through this autistic frame a bit, who basically says, I told you what I want. You didn't want what I wanted. You want...
X, I want Y. Okay, we're just going to do X. What's your problem? Why do we have to keep talking about it? I can get that person to some extent. They would be like, I don't get it. It's a joint decision. I agreed with you. I acquiesced. I'm fine. To highlight something you're saying here, Dad, maybe I wonder the extent to which...
And again, maybe this is just drawn from like painful personal experience or whatever. This is really about achieving a compromise versus the person who's sending in the question. wanting their partner to agree with them in a more emotional and full-throated kind of way. Exactly right. Yeah.
Yeah. So that's very interesting. And here's where, if I understand it right, let's say you're a couple, you're trying to figure out, you know, where are we going to go to dinner tonight? And we have to choose, right? And... Let's say it's a she and a he. She proposes a restaurant, he proposes another restaurant, and neither of them like the other person's restaurant. So then how do they talk about and find a third restaurant that they'd both be happy with?
How to have that happen. One is to explain certain kinds of interactions in concrete procedural terms to certain kinds of people, including people who... You know, are a little bit on that, you know, spectrum territory. More analytical. Let's just say more analytical, yes. Yeah, it helps to make it very procedural and concrete.
So let me describe to you what a conversation might look like in which we're each saying certain kinds of things, and I at least am feeling certain kinds of things inside. Maybe you as well. this description is what I'm hoping for. And it's sometimes really helpful when things are more neutral to talk about that in a very sort of outside-in behavioral way that...
Maybe the other person will never fully feel on the inside or care about on the inside in the way that you do, but at least they can move closer to your range at the behavioral level, if nothing else. including their understanding, conceptually, of what's happening inside your emotional world, you know, if they're prepared to act with you in that different way.
I have found that to be really quite helpful to just sort of think to yourself, well, gosh, shouldn't they understand it already? Or, you know, aren't they, why can't they be normal? Well, hey, they are normal. For them. They're normally normal for them. You're the oddball from their standpoint. You know what I mean? Don't be careful with what you think is self-evident, right? So I think that's really helpful.
It's also really helpful to have even modest examples of the kind of interaction you want and being able to point to them. Yes. Yeah, this is great. Yeah. Think of it as cultural differences, you know, cultural competence in a sense. How can you step into the world of a certain kind of a person and be competent in their frame without always demanding, you know, that they come over to your frame? Okay.
I've been rattling on. What do you think about all this? I think that example that you had about having examples to be able to point to can be really, really helpful for people. particularly people who are a little bit more literal or a little bit more analytical in their orientation, being able to show a clear example of what you want.
And to distinguish that from the way that you're currently doing things is, of course, really helpful for people. I'm also inclined to make kind of a more general point here, and I hope this is taken the right way. Sometimes what happens in couples... or in relationships of any kind, is that we have this notion of compromise and yet we're very rigid about how we want to achieve that compromise in this funny kind of way. And here's what I mean by this.
The questioner wants a relational, emotional exchange that gets to some kind of a mixed, blended decision. But in order to get to that blended decision, they want to go about it essentially exactly the way that they want to go about it right so they're willing to compromise on the outcome but they don't particularly want to compromise on the process
And so I would wonder about compromising a little bit more on the process. What are some ways to get to a joint outcome that look a little different from what this person is asking for? A classic example of this, our life got a lot easier when I was growing up. When we moved to a decision method between my sister and me, where one of us got to cut the cake.
and the other one got to choose which slice of cake we ate. One was responsible for the distribution, and the other was responsible for the ultimate choice. To use your restaurant example, Dad. One person picks three restaurants. The other person decides which of those three restaurants you go to. that is a joint decision. It's a blended outcome. That's great. That's so good. And so I wonder about that. And look, I get that these are very simple, concrete examples.
complex problem solving in a relationship. You're not just always going to be able to have one person slice the cake in half, the other person pick the slice. But you can think about it kind of in that way. And I wonder if that approach to the problem solving would be helpful for them here. Oh, it's fantastic.
Last point, just kind of on the way out the door here on this one, makes me think about business environments or other settings in which there's a collaborative problem-solving process. And that might be a way also to talk about it. with the partner here. There's a lot of evidence that it's helpful for two or more people to talk through a complicated situation and have what emerges be greater than the sum of the parts.
have, you know, have it be creative and collaborative as a result. That also, that model, which may be familiar to the partner, right, who's... Not so comfortable with joint decision-making. The more analytical partner. There we go. Thanks for that. Yeah, you might be more familiar with the more analytical partner. It's a form of collaboration. I am going to possibly step in it here by making one final observation that may or may not get me into trouble, but okay.
As we've gone through this question, I've moved over to the language of more analytical. And the reason that I've moved over to that language is because of this notion of scope creep or spectrum creep, right?
I don't know what this person means when they say autism spectrum, and therefore I default to using essentially more conservative language to describe this individual. And one of the problems with... creep of any kind of diagnosis, any kind of diagnostic creep, is that we tend to focus on how many more people we're including by scope creep, right?
The description is broadening and therefore we're including more people and we want to be more inclusive. This is a good thing. I generally agree with that. But... Sometimes that terminology ceases to serve the population that it was actually designed to serve as we broaden it. So now we have a situation where somebody who would walk into any psychiatrist's office...
and receive a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders, their experience might not be spoken to as effectively because there has been so much casual creep around usage of that terminology. And that's really unfortunate. And it leads to situations like us needing to use terminology like more analytical to describe this person as opposed to the actual diagnostic terminology. And sometimes we just lose sight of that a little bit.
So just to mention that at the end. So glad you said that. Really, Forrest, really great. And I guess if I could tack on two quick postscripts myself. One is reading the question, I... Did not get the sense that the person who sent it in wanted to mandate a certain kind of process per se. So I just want to acknowledge that. And also, I wanted to really honor.
Yeah. For many, many people, it's a very, very strong and for them natural and normal need to want to feel like there's a collaborative process going on, that they are a we. It's a... us together making decisions about this or that, that that's really important to people. And so, you know, we're trying to figure out here how to, how to both cut the cake.
And make sure that this person is happy with your piece. Is that what you're trying to do here, Dan? That's right. That's right. All right. We, as with all of these, we could just live here for another 20 minutes, I'm sure. But all right, we're getting toward the end of it. So one more question. And this is a question that I thought...
it was appropriate to kind of end the episode with because if you made it this far, you're probably into our stuff and into maybe some of the more technical things that we talk about. And this question gets to brain systems and therefore is a little bit more technical than ones that we typically answer in the mailbag. But I thought it was really interesting and was curious if you have any thoughts here, Dad. So here it is.
I recently came across a research article that explores the brain's seeking system, which you've talked about on the podcast in the past. This system relates to our natural curiosity and instinctive pursuit of novelty, which supports intrinsic motivation. What I'm wondering is how this instinct is balanced with our sense of self-preservation.
That is, sticking to what we know in order to feel safe. How does an animal, like a human, both curiously seek novelty while simultaneously sticking to what it knows to be safe? And how does this relate to humans who seem to both have an innate desire for curiosity, but also avoid change? I see you looking around for a book in the background. Well, I'm looking over my shoulder for my copy.
of Affective Neuroscience, second edition, by the wonderful Jock Punkset, bless his memory. So that's where some of this terminology comes from. Who really coined. the notion of the seeking system. Alas, I can't readily lay my eyes upon it and therefore my hand upon it so I can show you the cover. But in any case, yes, Yach Pankset, bless his memory. Just wonderful and also incredibly humane in his sense of the inner life of our non-human relatives. Well, there's a lot here. I mean...
I know you've developed some great material about it, so I want to make room for it. I just want to make kind of two quick points here. The first point being that in evolution, our ancestors had to balance the need to forage and explore. and get some food or mates. They had to balance that with the need to not be eaten themselves, right? And so how do you balance that? And you have different species that have different...
combinations of those strategies. But those are the two we have to balance and you can see them in attachment theory. The need to build up a secure base and have a secure base, which then... helps a child be more comfortable in exploration and taking risks and going out into the world. How do you balance those? So the seeking system, paradoxically, is really supported by establishing safety.
and also supported by internalizing multiple capabilities, taking in the good, so that you can be more successful in your seeking and efficient about it while exposing yourself to fewer risks. and also more resilient and capable if, while seeking, you hear the growl of a saber-toothed tiger. The simplest answer to this question is exactly what you said, Dad, from just evolutionary biology.
Our ancestors that couldn't do both were not very successful. That's why we have both systems, because you need to be able to do both, right? To approach the question a little bit more in the spirit, I think it's intended, which is how do you balance these things and develop one versus the other? So we need to be able to both approach different kinds of reward and avoid different kinds of punishment, right? And being fueled by a feeling of what's going on over there is a great way.
to find new rewards and it also ties as the question says to intrinsic motivation right enjoyment curiosity all of that stuff which we can contrast a little bit with extrinsic motivation That's based on directly acquiring rewards and particularly avoiding punishments. Now, extrinsic motivation is really closely tied to survival. As you're saying, Dad, when safety is under threat, more extrinsic motivation.
tends to come in. And there's a theory of motivation called self-determination theory that really explores this. And to very quickly summarize a very complicated thing, the basic argument that self-determination theory makes is that we're naturally intrinsically motivated. Little babies, when they're running around, they're very interested in what's going on around them. And we have these three needs. All people have a need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
competence means your need to feel effective and capable relatedness involves the need for connection or belonging, and autonomy is about personal agency and self-direction. These are just our fundamental needs in the universe of self-determination theory. The problem is... we bump into all of these environments that are not very supportive of those needs, if you think about unsupportive family structures or social environments. And when those environments come in...
we stop being so intrinsically motivated. We become much more focused on extrinsic motivations. In other words, the signals that we're getting... from our environment. And that's what tends to turn off that more seeking system in people and turn on this more linear, extrinsic, survival-focused system that you were talking about there at the beginning, Dad, in terms of
finding safe environments, because actually when you're in a safer environment, then you get to do more seeking. Well, since I'm the cranky dad on the lawn, but it's a certain kind of a point I want to make here. I think most people are scared most of the time. And me included.
And it's really, really, really important to keep focusing on developing that secure base inside and those strengths inside that can manage both actual and also... inflated, perceived, overestimated threats, and to really, really, really take seriously building up those qualities in your own psychology as well as whatever you can do. in terms of influencing your relationships and your circumstances, so they become relatively safer and relatively more supportive of seeking.
fulfillment and actualization and important life values in various ways. Absolutely. But wow, one thing I've really learned for us in my, you know, long and troubled career is do not underestimate the power of fear. We're so vulnerable to it. And it's partly because I think many, many people, you know, they're not well resourced in terms of their safety needs. And so focusing on that.
as then, and this person is implying, then you have a lot more basis for curiosity and exploration of the inner world, as well as the outer one. Totally. And that point about most of us being afraid most of the time, I think, can also lead to smarter interactions with other people.
when we consider what's going on inside of them, their experience, what's happening in their world, all of that stuff. So I think that's as good a place as any to leave this question and therefore to wrap our mailbag episode today. This was a really great one, Dad. I really enjoyed these questions.
As a quick reminder, if you want to ask us a question to be answered on the podcast in the future, you can sign up for our Patreon, patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. You can also send me an email, contact at beingwellpodcast.com. Sometimes also we'll ask questions.
questions to things like our YouTube subscribers. Say, hey, we're going to do a mailbag. Comment down below if you want to have a question answered. That's a great way as well. Yeah, I think that those are most of the major methods. Anything else you want to say at the end here, Dad? I want to say a little thing that I was realizing about seeking. Oh yeah, go ahead. Having said all the stuff we've said, beware...
I'm going to summarize a lot of stuff quickly. Beware using seeking as a quote-unquote manic defense against depression. One of your favorite authors, Alice Miller, drama of The Gifted Child. talks about that. And she's using the word manic there. Not in a full-on, that's definitely diagnosis creep there, in a sense. She's using it sort of loosely. But getting revved up, getting pumped up, always...
you know, reaching for the stars as a way to just get away from and not feel those hurt, longing, depressive, soft, sad feelings inside. So be careful about using seeking in that regard. And there's also the form of seeking that can sometimes show up in ways that are called counterphobic. In other words, a person who is actually anxious about something, maybe for good reason, but manages it. by doing the opposite, by going in the full other direction to push over the fear.
push it down as well. Sometimes, you know, with catastrophic consequences. One of the counterphobic examples that's sometimes used is Evel Knievel. I guess the motorcycle rider who would launch over a bunch of burning automobiles. frequently crash as a result. So those are two little comments I'd make about this too.
Great comments at the end here, Dad. And man, I did not expect a manic defense against depression shout out at the end of this particular episode. That's good stuff. And yeah, of course, a drum of the gifted child.
I think it's one of the very, very few books in the space where pretty much everybody should read at least the first chapter of it. You can get most of the overview in the first and the second chapter, and they're short chapters and pretty readable. So I'd recommend it to most everybody. So again, thanks for listening today, everybody, and for sticking it out to the end here.
I really enjoyed today's episode where Rick and I answered questions from our listeners. We started with a question that was focused on whether it's possible to be too preoccupied with self-help psychology and personal development. Thought this was a really interesting question. Obviously, it's very important to us as people who create content in this space. And Rick started by making some important distinctions between different kinds of categories, different...
self-helpy things that somebody could conceivably be preoccupied with. Maybe we're a little too preoccupied with stuff that's going on inside of us, or in other people, or in that broader world of interacting with self-help content in general. And what we landed on is that it's pretty hard for somebody to be too preoccupied with mindfulness or too preoccupied with self-awareness. You can get there, but you have to kind of try.
but you can certainly be too preoccupied with your engagement with any kind of subject matter, including maybe subject matter like listening to this podcast or watching YouTube videos or whatever else you've got going on. We can take anything, even very objectively healthy things, to unhealthy extremes. Then, bottom line, the goal of practice is to become more free. But there's a big question here. What does freedom mean to you?
I think that freedom is about choice. It's about agency, being able to choose the door that we walk through in our life. I want to be the person who decides, and I want to decide pretty consciously. whether I'm going to be loose and free and shoot from the hip in a conversation, or when I'm going to be really thoughtful and really apply a lot of top-down regulation about what I'm thinking and what I'm feeling in a given interaction with somebody.
I want to be the one who chooses. I don't want that choice to be made for me by my conditioning. The things that are taught in more personal growth spaces are unquestionably useful on their own. More self-awareness, more mindfulness, less reactivity, all great stuff. But the point of the whole process is to allow you to express yourself the way that you want to and make those deliberate choices.
And if you feel like things have gotten to a point where you can't do that, where you're too preoccupied, you're too concerned, you're too, in a word, self-conscious, well, something's probably gone sideways. Second great question from a person who felt like they were overreacting to sensed or assumed rejection from friends and family. Some social anxiety had crept in.
And the social anxiety was coming from what they described as a younger or more immature part. Rick then walked through a great process focused on taking in the good, some ways that we can internalize positive experiences these days that can... help us heal old wounds, particularly those wounds that happened in childhood, which is where a lot of those younger and more immature parts are locked.
He particularly highlighted the role of linking, which is when we take a good experience in the here and now and allow it to be matched to an unpleasant experience in the past. letting the positive experience that's happening now be larger, stronger, more powerful, more potent, more present for us. And Rick really talks about how to do that, particularly how to do that in safe ways.
elsewhere in his writing, which you can probably find pretty easily just by Googling something like Rick Hansen linking. Third, we had a question about trying your best. And this was from somebody. who said that they were having a hard time figuring out if they were really fully depleted because they gave it their all or if they're just using that as an excuse so they can stop.
And Rick and I both kind of attached to this idea of fully depleted. Wow, fully depleted. That seems like a pretty high bar here. And so we broke this question essentially into two different parts. First, what is a reasonable expectation for yourself in terms of the effort that you give? And is that expectation too high or is it too low? And then second, how can we get better at feeling into our capacity and having a sense that we really have given something a full-throated effort?
One way to figure that out is by going to what I called zero reps in reserve. This is a term that comes from exercise and it describes a situation where you really can't do any more reps of something. You have nothing left in the tank. And I think that a lot of people really don't know what it feels like to truly have zero reps in reserve, to have nothing else left to give. And if you fall into that category...
Well, it can be really helpful to figure that out, to figure out what it feels like to have nothing left. Not so that you stay there forever, that's pretty unhealthy, but so you can calibrate back from that a little bit. and find a place where you are giving an effort, you are achieving your goals, you are doing the things that you care about, but you're doing it in a way that's sustainable, where you can keep on doing it day after day after day.
Fourth question came from somebody who wanted to solve problems with their partner in more of a collaborative way. And what they mentioned is that their partner was a bit aversive to having more of a dialogue where they explored each of their wants and needs.
and they tended to prefer it when one of them just made a choice and they went along with it. As part of this question, the person mentioned that their partner was on the autism spectrum, and a considerable part of our response to the question focused on that detail. Rick also gave some general advice.
around how to have good conversations like this, including finding good models of what you want this conversation to look like that you could then point to and offer to your partner as a clear example of what you're looking for. I also talked about finding a way to be collaborative in the model that you found of what kind of conversations will work for both of you as a partnership.
It sounds like one person has one way that they like doing things, the other person has a very different way that they like doing things, and hey, maybe there's a way that's actually in between these two ways that could represent a kind of compromise for both of you. Finally, we closed with a question on the brain-seeking system, which is about the pursuit of novelty, and the question asked how this is…
contrasted with and can exist alongside the brain's systems for self-preservation. It feels like these two things are opposites, how can they exist together? The simple answer to that one is that our ancestors that didn't have both systems just weren't that successful, so we evolved to have both of them. But the deeper answer gets to the balance between these two things that's healthy inside of a person.
And what are the kinds of situations a person might be that leads them to lean into one of these versus the other? What makes us go into more seeking-oriented behaviors versus more self-preservation-oriented behaviors? Rick's big point here is that safety fuels seeking. So the safer we are and the more supported we feel by the environments that we're a part of, the easier we're going to find it. To explore, to be curious, and to develop that felt sense of intrinsic motivation.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time answering these questions. One final time, if you want a question answered on the podcast, you can find us on Patreon. You can leave a comment down below this video with your question if you're comfortable doing that. You can send us
an email at contactatbeingwellpodcast.com. You probably cannot send a carrier pigeon or a snail mail, but outside of that, we'll take your question pretty much anywhere else. We're on most of the major social media platforms, and it's pretty easy to get in touch with us. As a quick reminder, if you've made it this far and you are not currently subscribed to the podcast, please subscribe. That would really help us out. And until next time, thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon.