Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lari Gottlieb. I'm the author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the Dear Therapist's Advice column for The Atlantic.
And I'm Guy Wench. I'm the author of Emotional First Aid, and I write the Dear Guy Advice column for TED. And this is Dear Therapists.
Each week we invite you into a session so you can learn more about yourself by hearing how we help other people come to understand themselves better and make changes in their lives.
So sit back and welcome to today's session.
First, a quick note, Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical or psychological advice and is not a substitute for professional healthcare advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may
have regarding a medical or psychological condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let iHeartMedia use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and clarity. In the sessions you'll hear. All names have been changed for the privacy of our fellow travelers.
Hey Guy, Hey Laurie. So today we're going to do something a little bit different.
That's right.
Recently we did a live event where we got to share how we do these your therapist sessions every week and what we're really thinking when we're trying to help all of you through the issues that you bring us.
We also dipped into our mailbox and gave advice to some letters you sent us. So this week here's a treat Deotherapists Live. You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio. We'll be back after a quick break.
I'm Lori Gottlieb and I'm.
Guy Wench, and this is Deotherapists.
My name is Janet Gattis. I am the owner and founder of Avid Bookshop here in Athens, Georgia. Welcome, good evening, and welcome to our very special event with Guy Wench and Laurie Gottlieb from the podcast Dear Therapists. Both of these people are stellar therapists, hosts of their own podcast, and have written multiple books.
First off, I.
Am so excited that the new season of Dear Therapists just launched. As of yesterday, already heard the episode twice and as with every other episode of the show that I've heard. I'm really curious to know sort of the background of how you to process the number of letters you get, how many letters you get, and how you choose ultimately what gets on the show. Would you guys answer that for us?
Well, first of all, just thank you for doing this and having us. We were so excited to have this conversation, especially launch week. We get so many letters, and going into season two, one of the things we've always said is what made season one so great, or the quality of the letters that we got from people all over the world. We wish we could do all of them. It would be great. We would just have a million episodes, But we really pick letters that we feel have some
universal quality to them. So while each letter is very specific to a situation, like in the first episode it was about Instagram cheating, it really was about so many other things and I think you'll find that in every single episode. The one thing that's interesting about it is that we don't actually discuss the letters. So even though we will choose letters, we don't actually know before we start talking on that episode what we're going to be
talking about. We don't say we think this might happen in this episode, or let's discuss how we think about this letter.
We don't do any of that.
We act like someone has just walked into our therapy room and we're hearing this for the very first time. And I think that's what makes the show so dynamic is that it's not scripted. There's no agenda that we have in mind beforehand. We're just like, here's the letter. We have no idea what's going to happen. The audience has no idea what's going to happen, and here we go.
And by the way, that's what makes it scary also for us, you know, a therapist, because we're there, we really don't know what the other person is thinking. We don't know where it's going to go. The actual session might go in a very different direction.
Oh my gosh, that's exciting. Had either of you done sort of therapy with a therapeutic partner before, Like, how did you go about knowing who's going to speak when and what kind of feedback you would give in tandem?
We don't. That's what's.
We don't at all.
I mean, but I think that that's what's so great is that when so what a lot of people might not know is that when therapists train, often you get feedback in a certain way on your session, So some people might be behind a one way mirror, or you tape your sessions and record them and you bring them to your supervisor. All of this, of course with the consent of the client, but once you're in private practice,
you don't get that anyway. Really, And one of the things that's so interesting about working with Guy is to see how he works. He makes me a better therapist. I think watching a direction he goes, or where I might get stuck somewhere, He'll jump in, and vice versa. I think if he is sort of going somewhere and the person is stuck there, I'll jump in. And so we really tag team really well. Even though we can't
read each other's minds. Even if sometimes I think where is he going with this, I'm confident that wherever he's going is too an important place.
And I can say that I've many times over this past you know, a year and a half since we started working together, in my own sessions that I do in my own private practice, I'll get to a moment where I literally say to myself in my head, I'm going to do a lor here, and then I do a thing that I think Lauri would do because I was I think that's a good place, and she does that thing. Well, I'm going to do Lauri here, and I have that in my head. Many times I'm like, yep,
thank for a LORI right there. That's great.
One thing that I find really out about it is that I was just texting a friend about this last night, about recommending episodes of season one for her, and one of the things I pointed out was that even if the name of the episode and the description sound like this person, I don't have any strange daughter, I don't have any kids at all, I'm not going to get
a lot out of this episode. Every single episode there are these gems and takeaways that are impacting me, a single, forty one year old woman who doesn't have any kids. So it's just really interesting to me how you can tell very much that you too are hyper focused on the client in the virtual room, yet so many of the things that you share are really applicable to so
many of us. And that brings me to a question about sort of how the pandemic has affected the sorts of therapy you do in dear therapists or in your private practices. I know that the show launched sort of as COVID was a thing in the world, but how have you noticed the nature of people's concerns or worries letters shift over the last year or so.
Well, I just want to say before we talk about COVID that what you were saying earlier about how applicable each episode is to everyone, because relationships are relationships in the world. Whether it's relationship to self, relationship to friends, to family, to siblings, to romantic partners, to bosses to coworkers,
they're all relationships. And so I remember in season one, early on, we had a couple on and this was a married couple, they had kids, they'd been married for a while, and this young woman in her early twenties wrote in and she said, I'm not married yet, I don't have kids yet, but I use the advice with my boss at work and it was amazing. And so I think that that's the kind of response that we've been getting all through season one and we hope to
continue through season two. Is that even if you look at the title of the episode and you say, well, that's not my situation, I would really encourage people to listen to the episodes because our goal in putting them out there is to make these sessions accessible to everyone.
Not everybody can or wants to go to a therapist, but you can get so much out of one conversation if you see yourself in some element of the struggle, and a lot of it is the things that you can use in your daily life, no matter who you are, how old you are, what your situation is, and that's what we love about the show.
And as therapists, we're trained to ask questions such as, so, why are you doing the thing that you're doing, or what are you hoping to achieve? Or how did that get set up for you in your earlier relationships or in your childhood, And then that is crafted around a specific issue perhaps, but the question is relevant in a much more general way, and people hear that and they're asking ourselves that question in the context of their own lives.
And that's why you can learn a lot from it, because it's really about how to think about yourself, how to think about your situation, how to think about your patterns, how to think about the impact of earlier experiences, And that's generalized as to everyone.
Truly, So thinking keeping all that in mind, does that mean that maybe COVID era letters maybe weren't all that different at heart from what you had been getting previously.
I think they weren't that different. I mean many of them touched on how COVID was impacting these people, whether it was in a marriage, or we had a teacher who couldn't be with her students and how that was impacting her. Whatever people were going through before the pandemic was amplified. So if they were, if a relationship was very strong, it got stronger. If a relationship was struggling, or things were not discussed. This really came to light
during COVID. Really, what we're dealing with is just the human condition. And yes, there are going to be big events like COVID or you know, other things that happened, But really what we're dealing with is how do we deal with the daily stuff of life.
And speaking of people's personal stories, both of you in your talks and your books and occasionally in interviews I've I heard you'll reveal personal things about your own lives. How do you decide what you want to reveal to an audience where you don't know who's there, and how do you sort of ride the line of being someone like I'd never met you until today, but I trust you both very much. But until you saw my face, you would never have known who I was passing you
on the street. How do you balance that role of where people feel like they know you, but you really are still just a therapist to them, Like, how does that play out in your careers in different aspects.
It's funny because in Maybe You Should talk to Someone. In my most recent book, I follow the lives of four very different patients, and then there's a fifth patient in the book who is me as I go through my own therapy with my therapist, and I say at the beginning of the book that my greatest credential is that I am a card caring member of the human race. That I know what it's like to be a person in the world, and I didn't want to present myself
as sort of the expert up on high. And I feel like that translates over into the podcast, because you know, we're sitting here talking about our personal lives in the podcast, but we use our personal experience to connect with people
on a very human level. We obviously are using our training and our expertise and everything that we have learned as therapists, but we're also relating to people just human to human, and I think that's what makes the episode so compelling, and I think that's what makes therapy so compelling.
It's an interesting thing. People will come up to me sometimes will recognize me from either Ted Talks or the podcast or writing or different things, and they will come up to me as if, as you said, is if they know me when I don't know them, and this in essence, they don't really know me. But it's there's something that I So far in my experience, people have been very respectful. They feel a certain affinity, a certain fondness because if they heard something it might have touched
them or it might have resonated with them. We've been very fortunate in that way. At the second speak to my experience that when that does happen, when I do pass people in the street and they stop me, or in a restaurant, an airport, once in the gym in the shadow but that's a different one, and.
In the broad department of a department store just like why.
But thankfully it's been friendly and so those are okay, Oh my gosh, it's funny.
Yeah, and maybe you should talk to someone.
I say that therapists are like Dalist celebrities, you know, it's kind of like the only people to whom they are, they're.
Like, oh my gosh, you know who that is? Who I just saw in the restaurant.
Is the people who have come to see us, right, or the people who maybe read our books or listen to podcast.
I don't you know.
Obviously from the podcast you don't see us, so you only hear our voices. But I've actually had people recognize my voice from across a restaurant.
Maybe I'm just a loud talker. I don't know.
But like guys said, I think people, I think they feel a connection because they've been moved very personally in these very intimate conversations by something that we've put out there.
And so that's I think incredibly meaningful to us.
We appreciate the fact that we have touched somebody's life in that way.
That's beautiful.
And speaking of that again, writing the line between really knowing someone versus only interacting with them. On this one episode, I've been really curious about the letter writers who end up being featured on the show. What is that the vetting process like in order to figure out if yes, this is the letter writer we want, and then what kind of conversations and things do they need to keep in mind when they are putting their voices out there, even if they are kind of masking identifying details.
What people need to know, especially people who are writing in is that, as in a therapy session, you can come with issue A, but everything has to be on the table because if we think issue A is related to other things, we want to be able to explore those things and we want to be able to ask questions about those things. And therapy is a very non
linear process. Its zigzags all over the place because connections are made in patents identified by doing that, and that's kind of what we do within the podcast, And so we edit out any identifying information, So people use pseudonyms in that way. I think people can remain anonymous, but they have to be able to truly open their hearts as you do when you go to therapy.
I really appreciate how in the shows we can't see you two or the person you're speaking with, but you both do a really good job of saying like, I see your eyes are filling with tears, or you looked away from us just then. But yeah, I just really love those moments where you kind of let us have a peek into what's going on for that client.
We say that as much for the audience as we do for the person that we're talking to. So sometimes people don't even realize that they're tearing up, so we want to have them slow down in that moment. Say I notice that you're tearing up. What are you feeling right now? What just came up for you? Because people will just go right over that because they don't want they don't want to notice that, and we want to slow them down so that they do notice it. So
because something important just happened there. If they smile, sometimes people don't even notice that they experienced joy or that something, you know, something really resonated with them. So say, I noticed you smiling there, so I think that that resonated with you. So it's for both. It's actually what we would do in a regular therapy session too.
I like that a lot.
I know, even in I won't spoil it for anyone who's not already heard the first episode of season two there's a moment there where I was surprised by what you observed in the letter writer, and I hadn't expected you to say you saw on her face what you saw, And that was kind of a fascinating moment to hear her saying, kind of reflect on what you're bringing up.
I really appreciated that.
My mom is here at this event too, and she and I listened to on season one, Jeff's critical parents on the way back from a road trip, and I very am, very thankful I have great parents who are not critical of me and are positive. But it was fascinating to listen into that with her. And then afterward I realized that that storyline echoed in several loved ones in my life, so I was able to send that
episode to them. But I think that one in particular, I remember hearing the moments where you're pointing out how he's reacting in the moment. I think you also do such a great job for the audience. I know it's for the client, but it helps us a lot when you kind of catch like the tone someone's using with himself, or the way that he's speaking about a certain scenario, and how the roles are changing. I just find it so fascinating. So a lot of all of us are
made up of stories. And Guy and I were talking a little bit before we started recording about how he worked as a bookseller. I think as an adolescent. Laurie has done a thing that we linked to on our Instagram a couple weeks ago written an article on bibliotherapy, which is the process of using books and the written word to help people get better in touch with themselves and their emotions. Can you talk a little bit about some books that you have recommended for particular clients and why it's.
Really wonderful When you have a book in mind that you think would be really useful for a specific person, it always feels like, oh, I have the perfect thing for you. One book that I recommend a lot to expecting parents who are expecting for the first time is a book called Welcome to the Club one hundred Parenting Milestones You Never saw coming. It's by a comic called
Rakeldia Piece. She's actually an Emmy Award winning writer. But it's a wonderful book because it's hilarious, but it's about everything that goes wrong, and the idea there is that parents are so terrified to bring home this baby for the first time, and they think that anytime they do something wrong, it's terrible, and they don't realize that everyone goes through it, and all parents make all these mistakes, and in the humor it normalizes, it humanizes, and I
find that people when they read that, it just lows their anxiety tremendously by the humor of it. So that's one book I love recommending.
I actually never thought I would become a therapist growing up, but I was an avid reader. And how this relates to your question is that I always found that novels were the really good ones, the ones that I would think about, the ones I would reread at different stages of my life, really had these deep psychological truths embedded in them. And that's what made for the kinds of characters that really lived inside of you. And I think when you're reading a novel and you have those moments
of that's me, I see myself. I'm not alone, and you think you were the only person who felt that, did that, thought that, and this character does things, says the same things.
It's such an amazing moment of connection.
And that's what books have always been for me, and so later when I became a therapist, I was always recommending books. Even in my training when they said, oh, don't recommend books. You can't do that because you're supposed to be very neutral, and I was always like, are you crazy, Like you know, books are therapy, and that's why I wrote that New York Times piece about bibliotherapy. So I really tailor my book suggestions to the particular person.
It's something that comes up in the moment where.
You know, I'm like an encyclopedia with books, and so someone says the thing, I'm like, wait a minute, stop, if there's this book you have to read. So for me,
it's less nonfiction than it is great novels. But I will recommend nonfiction if there's something particular, like someone's struggling with, you know, some of the themes even that we see on the podcast, but also in the therapy room, estrangement partners who maybe have some characteristics of personality disorders, or family members who do books about In fact, guy just recommended a great book on We just taped an episode for season two where he recommended a book on anxiety
to the person and she found it so useful even just starting the book that first week. So books can be incredibly healing and informative at the same time.
By the way, the book the Loid just Reference is called The Anxiety Toolkit by Alice Boyce. I also get a lot of recommendations from my patients because they will come in and they're like, oh my god, I read something and it was so helpful, and I'm like, tell me what it is, and I'll write it down and I'll check it out, and it's very useful in general.
I had that experience with maybe you should talk to someone, where interestingly, a lot of therapists did not know about it at the beginning. It was general public kind of book, and so many therapists said, I heard about your book because a client brought it in and they were talking about it, and I had to read it because they kept talking about it every week, and so it didn't go from therapist to client. It went from client to therapist. So guys write books do go in the opposite direction.
That's funny. Yeah, I'm a huge fiction reader, and I remember for a while in my mid twenties when I wasn't sure what my career was going to be. I was like am I do. I want to be a therapist because that's what I love the most about reading novels.
I do not hold the degrees that you have or the experience, but there is such an element to working in an independent bookstore where we get to know our community members, and I and my staff are really good at reading the emotions on someone's face and kind of helping them figure out what the next book is it's going to kind of help them move forward.
That's one of the things I love about independent booksellers is that you walk in and they know you, and if they don't already know you, they will talk to you until they do know you. Every book that I have gotten as a recommendation from an independent bookstore has always been one of the books that stays on my bookshelf forever because I think there's that personal element. Just like therapists can very personally suggest something, so can independent booksellers.
You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio. We'll be back after a quick break.
A lot of the time I've heard you recommend to people that they write a letter or do some sort of introspective work that requires them to do a letter to themselves a journal entry, rewriting their own biography. How does writing help your clients in you and how do you use that as a tool in your therapy.
The people who come on our show, they're not our clients by definition, their guests on the show. Writing is a very very powerful tool because it uses all kinds of parts of the brain. It's not just the idea that you have that has to be translated then into various specific words that have to follow grammatical rules. You need to find motor skills to type it or write it.
And when you're trying to get someone to think differently about a task or to discover something about themselves, giving them a writing task affords them a certain level of emotional and psychological distance because by the time it gets translated into the written word, they are experiencing what the
thought might have been very emotional and difficult. By the time they write it, they have a layer of distance from it, which gives them that little measure of objectivity, that little different kind of perspective that will allow them to potentially see this in a new way. So it's a tool that therapists use literally all the time. Then we use it in very different ways for different people
in different situations. We use it in the show, of course, all the time, because it's very very useful and impactful to really see something in a different way than you might if you were just thinking about it.
I think what happens is people come on the show and they'll often say, I've been dealing with this problem for years, and they're stuck and they don't know how to get unstuck, and you need to get them out of whatever they're doing which hasn't been working. I think that most people truly know what they need to do. They just don't know what's getting in the way of doing the thing that they need to do. And what we do is we help them to do that through
these various exercises. And just because it's a writing assignment doesn't mean it's the same. No two writing assignments are the same, and we don't suggest a writing assignment on every podcast, obviously, but when we do, it's very unique to that person and their situation. There are no two
episodes where they have exactly the same homework assignment. I was a competitive chess player growing up, and one of the things that was really important was how do you get in there, which if I make this move, they're going to make this move, and then uh oh, I better adjust my plan and make this move. Guy and I are constantly thinking it's very strategic when we're doing this. How do we get this person to the place that they need to go in order to have things change
for them? Because really the show is about change and growth and healing and transformation, and we only have one session to do that. We want to get as far as we can. And what we've been so surprised by is that even with that one session, people are able to make significant shifts in their lives. And in season two we have where are They Now? Episodes where we take the season one guest so we don't just get the week update, but we get a year long update and we find out where are they a year later?
And it's been so gratifying. I don't want to spoil it.
Guys looking at me giving me the look like, don't say it, because we have heard them now we know where everybody is. But we are just blown away by it, and we think people are going to be so moved when they hear you know where people are a year later after having just one conversation not because we're so great, but because.
We move them to a new place and then they took it from there.
That's beautiful. There's one episode in season one where you have a letter writer explore a situation in his life from his ex spouse's point of view, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, because we have a lot of readers in the audience right now, just that change of point of view and how that type of exercise in particular can help shift someone's perspective.
That was an exercise in perspective taking. That was a person who had cheated on his wife and then left her for that person, think a month after the birth of their second child. And this person was actually a good person, but they really had trouble connecting to the ex wife's perspective of how their actions must have felt
to her. And when we asked about it, you could see that there was a wish to connect, but he couldn't articulate or see it from her perspective, and so we literally took him through an exercise that some of the feedback that we've gotten was, Wow, that sounded so difficult. It was emotionally very challenging. Because he ritually had to put himself in her shoes and look and see the
impact of his actions on her and tell story. The exercise was from her point of view, from the beginning of meeting him, through the marriage, and through the cheatings. So it was a very difficult exercise, but he was really gained to do it, and he was brave to do it, and it was painful for him, but he eventually got there and was able to connect with her perspective in a way he really hadn't been able to despite thinking about this for a very, very long time.
This was the episode called Mike's Messy Affair, and we really wanted to go with that letter because I think so many people make assumptions right away. He was basically asking what the cultural assumption was in his letter, which was, you know, as Guy says in the episode, so this is a tell me I'm not a scumbag letter because he wants to know everyone thinks I'm a terrible person for doing what I did, and you know, my friends
won't talk to me. Nobody will talk to me all of this, and you know, he wanted you know, he really was concerned about his children.
Because he didn't want to lose custody of his.
Children and all of those things. I think that when you see the humanity in him, and when you see him really be able to say, Okay, the reason that I can't acknowledge how much pain I've caused is because of how much shame I feel around having done what I did. I wish that I had handled it differently. I think ending the marriage was a good thing, but this is, you know, his perspective. I think ending the marriage was a good thing, but the way I did
it was a terrible thing. And for him to go through that, and you can see, you know how much he's struggling with it. But I also hope that people have so much compassion for him and feel, you know, just how human he is, and get past the what he did and more into the where is he now and what is he trying to do now?
With all of this.
I remember that one in particular, making note of my own reaction to his tone, particularly at the beginning of the episode, and I thought like, oh, Janet, you don't have a right to judge him. But I also was like, oh, this guy, wonder what's going to happen, and just hearing just how his tone shifted and just the journey he went on was fascinating to me.
I think with Mike in the episode, he had his own struggles too. He was so lonely in that marriage. He did not know how to talk to his wife. His wife didn't know how to talk with him. They both did not know how to communicate. And that's the part that's very relatable, is what do you do when you've never had that model for you, You don't know how to say how.
Just desperately lonely? You are desperately alone? You feel you know, do you cheat?
No?
That's a choice, right, But he did, and now he knows to do something different. Now he's just learning, well, how do I communicate? What would that look like?
I do want to add when we discussed whether we should use that mesa for the show, one of the things we thought about, naturally is that, yes, it sounds terrible what he did, but he is writing to us. He's actually asking for help in resolving that very issue of like what is this about me? And how do I think about this? And that's a big step forward in terms of like, Okay, there's something to work with them, because he's actually curious and he actually wants to think
about these things. So that was what allowed us to say yes, and let's work with him.
You can't help people who aren't curious about themselves. So often people will come into therapy and they're very curious about other people, like, you know, why does my husband do this or you know all these other why does my mother do this? As opposed to why do I react the way they do? Or what am I doing to contribute to the situation, or why am I in this relationship in the first place. So when people come
on the show, we don't know them yet. We hope, we cross our fingers that they're going to be very curious that they know what the show is, because it's a show where if you aren't curious, you're you're going to find yourself really struggling when you get in a room with guy and with me.
I'm now going to pivot to something you both offered to do, which is dive into your letter bag a little bit and tell us about a few rights who maybe weren't featured on the show, but you still want to address their letters in this format. So take it away.
I will begin and I'm gonna as we do in the show. I'll read this one to Laurie. She will be the next one to me. But this is a question you get asked a lot, and I think it'd be good to just clarify it. Dea LORII and Guy I love the podcast and the Atlantic column. What does fellow travelers refer to people traveling through life? I feel like I missed the reference explanation somewhere because we always welcome our listeners to as fellow travelers and our guests
as fellow travelers. So where is that from?
So we introduced that in the trailer for season one when we started, and we were struggling with what do we call the people who come on the show because they aren't our actual therapy clients and they aren't really guests, because we feel like we get very deeply attached to these people in the course of our session with them.
And I I just spontaneously said to Guy, you know irv Yallam, the eminent psychiatrist who's really revolutionized the field of psychiatry and therapy by being so human and so real with people. You know, he broke down that wall and he would call people fellow travelers. He said We're all fellow travelers on this journey, you know, therapists and patient together. We're fellow travelers trying to figure this out.
And I just love that. And so we really thought that that maybe was the best way to refer to the people who come on and share their lives with us.
All right, let's go to another letter, Lorie.
This is a letter that came into our box.
It goes like this, Dear therapists, I could really use some help navigating my new relationship with my soon to be stepdaughter's biomm I've been a mom of my own two kids for twelve years and have learned a lot. I'm feeling very confident as a mom. My fiance and his ex have been parents for three years. I am running into a situation where I feel like the biomm is overreaching. It's interesting by the way that she calls
her the biomom as opposed to just their mom. She wants to know how our marriage house will be set up, what kind of bed their daughter will have, and things like whether we have dead bolts on the exterior doors. I feel a huge invasion by these requests. Interacting with biomom has felt like I'm being interviewed to be a babysitter and getting inspected for my safety protocols. I've tried to assuage her fears while also establishing some healthy boundaries
of my house, my rules. But I'm wondering if you have any advice for how to navigate conversations with biomm that help her unclench her fists of control. Do we try to be more open right now to establish trust, or, like my instincts suggests, would that just be a precedent of biomom having a level of control over our space, something I was already very worried about because of the way she talks to my fiance. He is a wonderful father and very doting. I just wish his ex would
see that and trust him. I'm just going to start here because I'm having a lot of counter time transference with this letter. And by the way, that's a very real thing, you know, for people who don't know. Counter transference is the is the therapist's reaction to what the person presents to them. And what this person is missing is that she is not the mother of these children.
She's the mother to her own children, but she is not the mother of her fiancee's children, and she's referring to these kids' mother as the biomm not even the sometimes she's biomm which is kind of like she wants her out of the picture. It feels like, and my house, my rules. No, these are not your kids. So of course the mom wants to know are there dead bolts on the doors? And where are they going to be sleeping? And what's going to be happening with my children.
The way she's.
Going about that is she's making a lot of assumptions about her role in this blended family.
And I will add to that again, we're not talking to this person unpacking anything with them. But to me, what stands out is that why is she the one negotia with bio mom. Why isn't the father of the children dealing with his ex wife and coming to know agreements with his ex wife about like here's how I want to do things, you know. So either he's not stepping up the fiance or she's overstepping it's one or the other. But the solution to it is let him deal with BioMA.
Well, also, I don't know the bio Mom's a problem, and I don't know what the fiance wants so nowhere in here was my fiance also feels this is a problem. So I have a feeling that she feels it's a problem, but I don't have any information about does the fiance feel it's a problem or is the fiance caught in this untenable position of this person that I'm going to Mary wants this, my ex wife wants this, and I'm conflict avoidant, so I don't want to deal with any of it.
Definitely the conflict avoidant, I would guess.
But yes, yeah, But I would just say this about blended families and gentlemen. We've had some full episodes about blended families. We had one in season one, and we do have another one in season two, different issues. But I think that people have to remember that there are many parents here. It's not that certain parents get kicked out.
That everybody is co parenting in a certain way. And when people can get along and not try to control other people and be really compassionate and emotionally generous with one another, it's better for the kids, and it's also better for the adults. And this whole like my house, my Rules thing screams of just lots of issues around control and lack of openness to what the mother of these children might be experiencing and might want for her own kids.
And I just want to maybe generalize what I said earlier just because I think it's applicable to many situations. For example, you know, I hear we get a lot of issues in the therapy, learn about this person having a lot of trouble with their in laws when they're talking about things with their in laws that they shouldn't be talking about with their in laws. The spouse should
be talking with their parents about them. And when the other person is stepping into do that communication and negotiation when it's not their place to do it, things often go awry. And it's often the issue of the person who needs to be doing it is not stepping up or doesn't think they should, or the other persons are a stepping And that generalizes to all kinds of situations where there's a third party and someone gets stuck in
the middle. It's a person who's stuck in the middle who needs to be speaking up more, usually one way or the other. Okay, next one, uh, Dear therapists, I'm forty six years old and I'm about to move from where I've lived for all my life and where my kids and family are. I'm moving to Nevada because my boyfriend of one and a half years got a job down there and it seemed like he was the one. So I found a job and started preparing to move
with my boyfriend. On the morning we were set to fly to find a home, he told me he didn't want to live with me anymore and he isn't in love with me. I had already quit my job and had accepted a job in Reno. I was devastated, but not surprised. He had been dropping hints for weeks, and I chose to ignore them, blaming them and anxiety and the stress of preparing to move. The twist in the story is that my ex boyfriend had learned I was moving to Reno with someone new, and instead of giving up,
he aggressively tried to get me back. Two hours after my breakup with my current boyfriend, I had a marriage proposal and an invitation to visit him in New York, where he now lives. I went to New York, but I'm feeling completely numb. The irony is I always complained that he was emotionally unavailable but now it's me who has become emotionally unavailable. My decision as of right now is to move to Reno on my own. I'm excited about the job down there, and I have been desperately
wanting to leave Montana since my marriage ended. My question is, how did that become so emotionally unavailable? My ex boyfriend is offering everything I wanted him to when we were together, plus a very nice life in New York. My question is am I going through a midlife crisis? I feel like Reno offers me a fresh start and maybe a way to get back in touch with myself.
Well, this is interesting because we see this a lot, where somebody is unavailable and then the other person becomes unavailable and suddenly they're very available.
All right.
So here the person who wrote the letter that boyfriend had been unavailable to her and then when he found out that she was moving in with someone else, suddenly he wants her back, and the two hours after the breakup, there's a marriage proposal.
All of a sudden. Move to Reno.
Explore the relationship from afar, Take lots of time she just got out of this other relationship. Take lots of time to see what happened with the other boyfriend, why he's suddenly emotionally available seemingly, So would she get to New York and find that he's not emotionally available again. So I really feel like she has to do what she needs to do and explore this very slowly.
From afar, I would bet that had she decided to go to New York and try it with this marriage proposal, she would find that he very soon would start to become emotionally unavailable again because there was a reason it didn't work out the first time. I'm not hearing anything from him about, oh, here's what would be different for me this time. It's just wait, But I don't want to lose you, so maybe we'll do this. And I agree the advice should be go to Reno as you're
planning to do. If he's that intent, if he's that serious, if he's that emotionally available right now, he will tolerate the distance and welcome the relationship with enough time to give you a sense that actually it's solid and he means it. But in my experience, in my practice, when I hear these stories all the time, it often not always often swings right back the minute, the person says okay, so now I'm here, and then the person goes like, oh wait, commitment issues again, and then it.
That's right.
We have an episode in season two somebody's asking if he should get back with his ex partner. One of the things that's really important that we ask people to do is to say, have they articulated what would be different this time? Have they articulated what didn't work, what they've learned about themselves, why they behave the way they behaved, whether it was being emotionally distant, being emotionally clingy, being emotionally abusive, not having boundaries, whatever the issues were, What is.
Going to be different this time?
And if nobody can articulate that on both sides, what would be different? What have you each learned about yourselves? And would what is the goal of getting back together? Not just I miss you. I think that that's really important. And here we have you know again, we don't know any other information than what's in this letter, so on the podcast we would really dig into this. But the marriage proposal two hours after she had broken up with the other guy is in my mind, something to be wary of.
Thanks. That was so much fun to get a glimpse into some of those letters. Thank you for sharing. I really am so thankful that you two joined us in supported Avid Bookshop and all of us who are here. This has been a great honor for me and for the attendees, and I know for the people who will listen to this podcast. So thank you so much, so thank you guys, thank you Laurie.
Thank you for having us well, thank you so so much for having us.
Next week. A woman's resentment of her financially successful brother threatens to tear apart their relationship.
They have a lot of freedom, they have a lot of time to spend, they have a lot of money. They just they have all these things and we don't have those things. Yeah, I wish I had those things too. I don't necessarily begrudge these people for having the thing. What I don't like is the way that they're treating me.
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