@DrWendyWalsh - Mental Health and the Iran Bombing

it might be impacting our mental health. Also, should universities be teaching students how to love the science of love? And later in the show, my take on the new romantic comedy. The material lists some things they got really right and a few things they didn't get wrong but they forgot. I want to welcome Sam. It's good to see you, Samseyah. I'm usually having rat Wohl there. Yeah, no, I took over. I'm here. Hi, fabulous, Hi, and you have someone working with you. Hi, Nikki, she's not on

my good How are you, Nicky. Nice to meet you, to see you look good. Thank you well, thank you. That really means a lot of a woman of a certain age. Heather Brooker. Always good to see you, my dear. Hi, you too happy to be here. You've had a busy couple of days, I'm sure, and you know there's going to be a moment. I swear, No, I don't swear

it's not really going to happen. But I said to myself, you know, I prepared all this wonderful content to talk about on my show, and I bet you I'm going to say, hey, we have to go to the newsroom with Heather Brooker because something's happening.

and I hadn't seen it. So I his friand like watching trailers and reading synopsis and trying to give them some smart sounding things, and then I went to see it and I was like, Oh, there's so much more I could be saying. I'll be saying it a little while. But first we do have to talk about our mental health after the bombing in Iran. First of all, I have a feeling that I like to call not like to call I have to call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance.

I have a great deal of empathy and compassion. And while I am very patriotic, I am an American in some ways as an immigrant, I feel like I'm more American than Americans because I actually had to stand up I think George Bush was in charge then, and to swear to you know, raise take up arms for my country.

There were words I had to say that you know, many Americans are just born you have to but they don't never have to actually take an oath, and I had to take an oath as to become a patriotic American. I'm also a Canadian, so therefore I have great empathy and compassion for what's been going on in the last six months or so in Canada. And I also have many, many friends who are Persian and In fact, just last week I spoke at the Persian or the Iranian Jewish

Iranian Association. Blah blah blah blah. There are a lot of words, but it's a beautiful ballroom, and I met some fabulous women and so many k if I listeners. They came up to me and said, oh my god, I love your show. It was really wonderful. My therapist of twenty seven years on and off is Persian. When I hear a Persian accent, because you know, therapy is kind of like reparenting. It is like hearing my mother talk. You know, I have this warm affinity and I asked her,

you know, does she have relatives over there? She worried, and she said, everybody in my country is my brother and sister. And that is how I feel about Canadians too, and that is how I feel about Americans. So this is why I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance, and that is the ability to hold opposing feelings at the same time in your head. You see, many people feel like they can't stand the feeling of being on the fence and not knowing, so they grab one feeling and hold it tight and

literally reject the other. Feeling when it's okay to feel it all. And even when war isn't in our backyard, it can certainly be alive in our minds. It can quietly impact our mental health. So when the news broke last night about the bombing in Iran, many Americans and definitely including me, turned to our phones. We were scrolling, refreshing, we were doomed, scrolling. Even this morning, I was up there going. I kept saying, Julio, my husband. He's on

with Farreed Zakaria and CBS. Margaret Brenner, by the way, she's so official. I love her. I love her. She had Marco Rubio, and he was trying to not answer our questions, and I kept saying, go to Fox, see what they're saying, see what they're saying. I want to see it. I need to see every side of a question and a situation. I really think of myself as you know, I hate saying right or left or centralist,

none of that. I think of myself as a curious mind who wants as many different facts and opinions as I can get a hold of. So anyway, there was a lot of scrolling, refreshing, doom scrolling, turning, on TV's turning channels, et cetera. According to the American Psychological Association, about seventy percent of US adults report that news in general causes them significant stress. In the case of war, even far away wars, that stress can manifest in very

real ways. It can impact your sleep, It can increase your anxiety, your irritability. If you are susceptible depression, it can bring on feelings of depression. For people who have had past trauma, this can reactivate post traumatic stress symptoms.

They don't pay me to say anything. I'm just saying it's the best workout on the planet. But you're exhausted afterwards. I laid down, and my heart rate in a laying down position. I don't know if you know, the average heart rate of a human at rash should be between sixty and seventy beats a minute. I'm in pretty good shape. I wake up in the morning, minds around fifty five. I like that. I laid down and it was seventy eight seventy eight, so I took a whole bunch of

deep breaths. I got it down to sixty eight. The funny little aside, I was watching my Apple Watch. It was taking my heart. Right as I was doing my deep breathing, I thought about Julio, and I thought about how much I love him, and it's shot back up again. Not because he brings me stress, but I think love does make your heart go bit or bad or even five years later. Anyway. We need to do this for

our mental health. We need to limit our exposure. We need to turn off all those AutoPlay videos as much as possible. I mentioned earlier as I was briefly on the Chris Merrill Show, we have to learn to name our feelings. When you can give your feelings a name, it takes away the power. And also instead of saying I am mad, say I'm feeling mad. Big difference. One is your whole identity and the other is huh, that's a feeling, it's a messenger. Wonder what I should do

with that? Right? How can I not turn that into negative behavior? Hey, there are things you can do that are good that will relieve your stress. Donate to humanitarian organizations, Write to your elected officials if you have an opinion, attend a piece for vigil, do something that helps other people. And like I did today, use some grounding practices deep breathing, nature, walks, prayer,

hugging your loved ones, hugging your pets. Right, so, even though the bombs are falling thousands of miles away, I know those shockwaves can ripple through all of our minds. I want you to be gentle with yourself this week and everyone in your family. Forgive people stress. Response isn't weakness, Okay, it's really a sign of empathy. When we come back, we're going to have one of my mentors and role models, doctor Kevin Vulcan from California State University, Channel Islands. He's

got some things to say about how war. He actually teaches a course on Nazi psychology, but how war actually helps leaders gain more love and more power. Let's talk about this phenomenon and a few other things before we come back. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app KFI AM six forty. You've got Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show.

As we continue to talk a little bit about our mental health in the face of the bombing in Iran, I wanted to invite on the show someone who I consider to be a mentor and someone who I really respect. You've heard him before, psychology professor doctor Kevin Vulcan from California State University, Channel Islands. Hi, doctor Kevin, how are.

tried diplomacy. Those are all real world concerns. But from the point of view of psychology, you know, we have a lot of things that we call and say ecology projection, where we take all the things that we don't like about ourselves and we project them onto the other guy or the other group, and the other group does the same thing to us simultaneously, and then we have ourselves mutually projecting these negative things on each other, and that allows us to you humanize the other, to make the

other group somehow, you know, a target for violence, those kind of things. And I think, you know, given the history of Iran and America, there's a lot of that going on. There's certainly a lot of that going on with Israel and Iran and other places as well. And I think one thing to be on the outlook for, looking out for is the idea of, you know, how,

you know, to pull back those projections. Can we look at the situation going on without projecting our bad stuff, things that we don't like about ourselves on to the other person. And this is the job that I think diplomats, you know, have to take on. And this is very hard because the diplomats act from a kind of rational actor model. You know.

a family member, but somebody you hate. And then I want you to list all the things you hate about them. And then once we've done that, she said, now I'd like you to erase the name at the top of the page and write your own name in, because that's your shadow.

very difficult to do. And this is where I think psychologists have a role to play in international relations and negotiations. I wish when they got together with the Iranians, and the Israelis and the Americans and then whoever else is spoken at. My wish would be they would have somebody who had some psychological training in the room with them to help with this kind of stuff.

would be landing on the moon something like that. You know, we did just great things in nation. We all rally around that, and then the other thing would be some kind of trauma that's happened. You know, we got bombed or you know, a good example in America's nine to eleven, you know, and we all rallied around that, and it

brought us all together. And a lot of times, leaders, especially in arcisistic leaders will will will use these things to rally people now, especially when they're having a little bit of trouble. So one way you could look at and maybe I'm you know, I'm speculating here to tell you with a grain of salt. But one way you could look at the Uranian thing is, you know, I'm I'm running the United States, I'm the president. You know,

my polls are not doing very well. I'm done some deeply unpopular policies with regard to immigration, and you know, you know, disappear ring people et cetera, et cetera, who aren't illegal immigrants, all this kind of stuff going on. And you know, but if I start a war with Iran, now I've done this great thing. We've had this great military victory, and this is a chosen glory, right, we can all rally around the chosen glory. Then my guess is what will happen and then just speculating again, Iran

does some kind of retaliation. Americans are killed, and now the leader uses that to rally people around the chosen trauma. And I think, unfortunately that is something that I would guess there's a very big possibility of that happening. And you'll see if that does happen, that it will be an attempt to rally everybody around the chosen trauma. The chosen traumas are more powerful than the chosen glories.

American public right now. And you know, that's one way you can look at this, and you know, you know, if you look back in history, you know, starting wars has been a way that you know, presidents and other leaders have used to deal with these kinds of you know, deeply unpopular you know, times when the population isn't like them, or the economy's gone bad go out and start a war, and it's you know, you can ramp up production, you

can help the economy, you know. So you know, if you're a little paranoid like I can be some time, you start thinking about these kind of things, you know, this is a you know, you've got a crisis, say you go out and start a war, and that seems to take care of it. The problem that we have, we saw this with the Bush administration in the Iraq War, is that it doesn't work very well in the Middle East.

These strategies have not worked very well in the Middle East, and people who have gotten involved in wars I think I think a lot of the conflicts are are very historical. They they they they They've been around for a long time, you know, I mean, you know, back to Biblical times if you want to go back to that far, but certainly back to when the British were involved. And yeah, you can you can trace back bad things in the

world role usually where the British were around. You can chase a lot of stuff in the Middle East back to the British and you know, it's been going on for a long time, and you know, these are deeply intrinsed things. You know, you have lots of you know, religion is involved with it. You know, the a lot of these are existential questions for the Israelis, existential question you know, of their own existence and their right to exist and have their own homeland and these kinds of things.

Then you have you know light likewise, you know Palestinians and other people, and so I think, you know, Americans, we don't understand the psychology of what's going on in the Middle East very well. And I think we get into these things thinking, you know, like an American, like irrational American, and then we realize there's a lot of stuff below the surface that we haven't dealt with.

their family. They want to raise their family, want to be comfortable, they want to be able to have a spiritual dimension of their life. So I separate that kind of religion from the religion that the leaders use to rally people to get them their negative projections onto other people. And so that's how I'm seeing religion, how it plays out as a form of getting people to put their

negative projections on another group. And I don't think that's especially healthy, and I don't think that's especially what most religions actually advocate. If you actually read Christianity, read Islam, it's.

see it. You should see it too. It's cute, Okay, It's called The Materialist and it's in theaters right now. So the story is very simple. A New York City matchmaker, she herself is kind of emotionally guarded. She's looking at her clients as pieces of meat, in the sense of she's looking at, you know, how tall they are, how much money they make, how old they are, how she can match them up, et cetera. But she meets a billionaire who she calls a unicorn. He's so perfect and

he's totally into her. But then she meets her free spirited ex an actor who's a waiter. The lead characters are played by Dakota Johnson. That's Don Johnson's daughter. Do you know that? Seans and Pedro Pascal. Let's hear a little clip from the movie Sam. Clip from the movie here it comes.

miss you deliver? Okay, So basically this group gets together, it becomes a love triangle, and the big question that America is asking is should she take the billionaire with all the money or should she take this ex boyfriend apparently they've been together five years, who she has deep feelings of love for, but he's still in an apartment with two roommates and living like a grungey twenty something in his thirties because he's still trying to make it as an actor. So here's my take on the movie

and love in general. The movie did an excellent job of describing the social pieces of love. You see, love is partly biological, it's partly psychological, and it's partly social. Social are the things that are in your dating app profile. You know where you live, what your zip code is, how you like to eat, are you vegan? Are you a carnivore? What your politics are? Are you conservative or liberal? How educated you are, where you went to school. This is part of your social world. And this is not

the full picture of love. Now it can influence love, of course it can. Certain traits are more attractive. When men make more money, they tend to be more attractive to women. Listen, if you're out there, ladies, and you say you're not a gold digger. Let me ask you this. Let's say you meet some identical twins. They're gorgeous guys. One of them's a waiter and one's a billionaire. Who are you gonna marry? I promise you it's going to be the billionaire. Everybody, every woman is a gold digger

somewhere in there. All right, let's talk a little bit about the biological piece. So here's this matchmaker in New York. She's trying to fix up all these people, and she's wondering why they don't connect because on paper it looks so good. It's everything they wanted on their checklist, but they don't have the chemistry. Because love is partly biological. Love has to do with pheromones. How somebody smells. Think about it, the best sex you ever had in your life,

Think back of they smell delicious, didn't they? They smelled absolutely delicious because you had a different disparate immune system in your ancestral past immune system, genes expressed themselves as body odor, as pheromones, and you pick it up. And so that means mother nature is saying, hey, if you procreate with this person, you'll actually make really fit babies. So pheromones are part of it, but there are other

things too. Let's talk about psychology. So in our early life, we have certain kinds of developmental things that happened to us that might be sexual triggers, triggers for arousal, you know. I remember one time meeting a guy and as we're walking home from our first date, he picked up my hand. He looked at my nail polish and he said, I'm so glad you don't have bright red nails, because that

would have been a deal breaker for me. And I'm thinking, really, this guy's going to be this superficial that the color of my nails are going to be the thing that turns them off. Then later, once we got a little intimate, I asked him about it again. He told me a story that when he was in middle school, a teacher was walking down the aisle, his middle school, female teacher, and she stopped and planted her hand on his desk to make a point. While she's talking to the rest

of the class, she spread her fingers out. She had lovely light pink or a French manicure or something, and he accidentally, because it's spontaneous, folks men cannot control their erection. He got a spontaneous erection. He was mortified. He was so embarrassed, and so he was trying to hide it under the desk and he just stared at her fingernails, surprise, surprise, for the rest of his life. He has a thing

for French manicures or light ballet pink nails. Right, this would be an environmental trigger, So we have to think about that part of psychology. We also have to think about our attachment style. Our attachment style is partly genetic, and it's partly what happens in the first three years of life with those genes. So some people are more angry in their relationships. They want to know, They want to know where the person is. Why aren't they texting more?

Why aren't they calling more? They had a lot of abandonment anxiety. Other people are more emotionally avoidant. They can obtain sex, but emotional intimacy is very difficult for them. And then there are people like my wonderful husband Julio, who has a secure attachment style. They can give and receive love comfortably. They have enough stealth, esteem and backbone to say when they're wrong. They know how to resolve conflict.

I can say that I used to have an anxious, ambivalent attachment style, but after years and years of therapy and probably attaching so securely with my children, I change my attachment style and you can too. And so now I really believe one of the reasons why I met the love of my life later in life was because I developed a secure attachment. So the movie was great, but it missed some beats. It was one note just

talked about the social parts of love. Speaking of love and the things that I just talked to you about. Do you think love should be a course that you should take in university and that it should be compulsory. Well, some universities are actually doing this. Let's talk about it when we come back. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show and k I Am six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I Am six forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy

Walsh Show. I'd like to welcome my TikTok audience. If you want to come in the studio and see what we're doing here, just log onto TikTok my handle is at Dr Wendy Walsh. In a few minutes, I'm going to be taking your calls, your relationship questions. The number is one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. That's one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. If you're new to my show, remember I'm not a therapist.

I'm a psychology professor. But i have a lifetime of wisdom to share with you, and I've written three books on relationships and wrote a dissertation on attachment theory. All right, First, I want to talk about should colleges and universities be teaching the science of love as a prerequisite? I mean, would you take a college course that was designed to

help you recognize the red flags and love's race course? Well, actually, one major university just launch a comprehensive course like this for gen z to help them navigate intimacy, from DMS on social media to working the dating apps. I think we actually need this more than we have ever needed something like this. I mean, think about it. You're nineteen years old, twenty, you're away at college. I teach developmental psychology.

It is a time that Eric Erickson, the famous developmental psychologist, called time of intimacy versus isolation. Friendships are so important to mental health and building healthy, secure romantic relationships are so important, but it's just so difficult in today's times. Well, the latest university to create a course is actually in India and Delhi University. Starting next year, they're going to offer in their psychology department a course called Negotiating Intimate Relationships.

I love the word negotiating because I think it's all about negotiation. They're going to help people recognize the red flags of toxic love, which is great. They're going to include, you know, real stuff like Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love, John Bowlby's attachment theory of love. They're going to get into the dynamics of intimate partner violence. So I think it is a great thing that these kinds of courses are being offered for good reason. I want you to

think about the numbers. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in three women and one in four men will experience some form of physical violence from their intimate partner in their lifespan. It's amazing, right, more than half of all female homicide victims are killed by the person they love and of course, America has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, and preventing divorce is often well. I think it's mostly about relationship skills, but it's also

about learning how to choose the right partner. So what Delhi University is doing is not completely unique. Here in Los Angeles, UCLA offers a class called the Science of Love in its Psychology department, and they get into attachment and attraction and how to form a healthy relationship. That

it's all about the early stages, right. I remember years ago I was actually in a business meeting with some business lawyers and I was putting together a business plan and I said, well, it doesn't matter because we're not actually making any money yet. And this lawyer said, all the biggest mistakes happen at the very beginning of the partnership. You know that applies to romantic love too, if you set up a system from the very beginning, and then

it's very difficult to change the system later. I should tell you that NYU, New York University, and Cornell University have also had seminars on dating and digital relationships in their sociology and psychology department. Stanford even had a course called love as a force for social justice. I love that one, connecting interpersonal love with community healing. But these really are exceptions, and I really think that more and

more universities should be teaching this practical thing. You know, we criticize high schools for teaching kids math like algebra and calculus, but never how to balance a checkbook, or how to make an annual budget, or some basic rules of finance personal finance. Right, we don't teach personal finance. And yet in psychology we're teaching all these grand theories about how to be a great therapist, but not like

real practical news you can use. I should say I'm a little different because no matter what I'm teaching, I throw in elements of the science of love, whether it's evolutionary psychology or in developmental psychology, I do get into Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love, et cetera. So if you take my courses, I definitely talk a lot about it. So if you can't take a course like this, what can you do to educate yourself on the science of love or what kinds of skills can you acquire so

that you can have a healthier love life? Well? I've said this over and over. Everybody should know their romantic attachment style. Okay, you can go online. You can take a test. My favorite if you google the words Chris Frehley fr l e Y. He's one of the world's most renowned researchers in attachment and it's continuing to collect data. You google the words Chris Frehley attachment test and you will come up with a very reliable attachment test that you can take. You can take, you can learn and

understand how important boundaries are. I want to say this about boundaries. Boundaries are not about putting up a wall and saying, like an ultimatum, if you don't do this, I'm gonna do that. Boundaries are just a little fence around yourself and if they get crossed, you say no, I'm sorry, that gate is closed. This is not okay. So you need and every boundary does need a consequence. You can't say, don't talk to me in that tone of voice. That's not a boundary. A boundary is I'm sorry.

That tone of voice doesn't feel helpful to me. So if you continue that, I'm going to have to leave the room. And then you do a consequence and you actually have to leave. Right, that's a boundary. Learning about boundaries and how to set them. Also watching for red flags, very like my whole brand, social media, my podcast, my radio show. Really, I'm talking about red flags all the time. Sometimes when people express jealousy early in a relationship, the

other person interprets it as love and caring. Well, they must they're really into me because they're so jealous, right, No, no, no, This can be a real indicator that this person might be controlling, manipulative, and maybe even violent in the future. Right, I mean a little bit of jealousy. Like my sweet Julio when we've start first started dating, I told him too much about I mean too much for a male

sexual psychology to hear too early on. I told him too much about my past, and so he would always use the term I have historical jealousy with you. I have historical sexual jealousy with you, right, And it was sort of a joke and it's cute, but that's different from him going where are you going? Who are you with? I don't like that, right, Although I have to tell you this funny story I actually made who I didn't

make him. You can't make anybody feel something, but I was aware that he was going to experience feeling of jealousy. So because we've been together five years, I milked it just a little bit. We were out at a wine bar and there was a dude over there who kind of waved at me, and he said, who's that? And I said, oh, this is this guy. He always talks to me when you're not here. And he goes really and then I said, in fact, I'm going to go

say hello. I wasn't really going to say hello. I was going to walk past this guy to this other woman and say hello to her. But I I tricked him. His face looked startled, and I got up and walked past like, of course, ignored the dude. I didn't stop and flirt with him, but it was just my little And then I came back and I gave hul you a big kiss. I go scared you, didn't I. It's also important if we're talking about learning the science of love,

to understand rejection. Every human on the planet experience his rejection at some point in their love life. Everybody, right, rejection is not rejection of you. It's just a redirection. I always say, you are not bad. It was just a bad match. Right, you are good for somebody. I

promise you you are right. Sometimes rejection is protection. Right, if you meet somebody and they're looking for a short term relationship and you're looking for a long term relationship, and they have the kindness and the insight to realize they would hurt you if they hung around, this is good news that they rejected you. You know, I have a friend actually who met a guy. They dated for I don't know, I think like six or eight months,

and then you know, he almost goes. I mean it was sort of light dating whatever, but he kind of he waned her off pretty fast. He was gone. So like a year later, they run into each other at the grocery store and he's now flirting with her, wants to get together, and she her boundaries are up like this, because you know, I gave you six months of my life and now a year later, here you are. Whatever. He said, just have one drink with me. I just

want to talk to you. So she consented, and he said, listen, I had just moved to town from across the country. I didn't know anybody. I had just gone through a divorce. I met you, and I said to myself. This is serious girlfriend material, this is somebody to spend a life with. But I knew I was ready. I knew I was already. I needed to sew my wild oats a bit in this town. And he said, if you will give me a chance, I will tell you I'm ready. Now. Well

loved his insight. Anyway, they've been married twelve years, so all good.

three four. That's one eight hundred five to zero one KFI. Call me with your relationship questions. I'm happy to weigh in with my life wisdom, my knowledge of the science of love. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.