This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to k I Am six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Hef I Am six forty. You are Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Dr Wendy Walls Show. And this is the time in my show where I go to my social media, dig into the DMS and pull out some of your questions. Reminder to everybody, I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor, but I've been reading the research on love for a very long time.
All right, Here we go heading into the DMS. HI, Doctor Wendy says this listener, I have a connection with someone I know isn't good for me. I haven't reached out, and neither has he. I'm a woman with needs and being single is hard. I'm so picky and I don't connect with just anyone who shows interest in me. How do I scratch that itch but not engage in behaviors that are bad for me? All right? So the real question is why do you have the itch? And what I mean
is you're saying you have needs. I assume you mean sexual needs and scratch that itch. You know. I just want to go back to your very first sentence, I have a connection with someone I know isn't good for me. So this is what I would call stage two of the four stages of personal growth. Stage one is you're walking down the street. You don't see a hole, you fall in. Stage two is you're walking down the street. Now you see that hole, and you still fall in. Maybe you're
moving to the stage three here. Stage three, as you walk down a street, you see the hole and you work very carefully to walk around that hole. But stage four is you take a different street. When people say I'm so picky and I don't connect with just anyone, it tells me that you're waiting for the perfect person who will reignite your childhood conflicts, your childhood trauma if it will. You see people who have a secure attachment style just
naturally move away from people who are bad for them. It doesn't feel good to them, But there's a piece of you that's drawn to it that you have an itch that needs to be scratched. I would say, a wound that needs to be healed, and the answer is always going to therapy. Having your therapist as a wingman as you carefully work through those steps and eventually
learn to take a different street. What happens at the beginning is you may date people who seem very nice, but you feel bored with them because they're not giving you that little tickle of excitement to scratch your itch, that fear that's based or that's intertwined with love. But actually you're meeting somebody who has a secure attachment style. Because a secure relationship doesn't feel like a roller coaster. It just feels like peace. It feels calm. Good luck to you.
All right, let us move along. Here's one dear doctor, Wendy. I think my relationship is failing. Oh I feel lonely all the time. I can't tell if we're in a low or if it's over. We've been together for five years. She used to be my best friend, but now we barely talk. What can I do to get us out of this low? Well, you bring it up. So here's the thing. You bring it up, but you have to be prepared for the response. I
actually went through this recently. A few weeks ago, I was coaching a young woman, just advising friend, you know, just telling daughter daughter of a friend of mine, and she was like, Oh, it feels like my boyfriend's kind of weaning me. I'm like, I'm doing all the calling and it feels like there's less time between the calls and the texts, and I'm not seeing him as much. And I said, well, that's often how guys break up and you off or they misbehave until you break up with
them. But you'll never know unless you ask about it. You also have to be prepared for the answer, even if the answer is avoidant, like I don't know. No, I think things are fine. I don't know. I think you're making a big deal about it. I really I've just been busy, right, No, they're being dismissive and they're not taking your feelings and your needs into account. And then you've got to make a decision. So, if you think your relationship is failing and you're feeling lonely in
your own relationship, why stay there without talking about it. You've got to bring it up. But you've also got to be prepared for the answer so that you can take the action that you need. Dear doctor Wendy, my fiance cheated on me and broke off the engagement. She won't give me the ring back and has blocked me from communicating with her. I still love her and would like to walk away civilly. However, that ring was expensive and I need it back. What's the best way to go about it? Well,
I just want you to think about every single detail. I don't know what came before her cheating. I don't know why she's hoarding that ring. I don't know if there's any other money that changed hands at different times to be a relationship, whether somebody owes somebody or doesn't that. If it's one hundred percent that she owes you this ring back, then you just call a lawyer, you take her to civil court for it and see what happens.
That's what I would do. But if you're using it as a way to keep in touch, you might want to let it go too, Dear doctor Wendy, This from a woman. I think I've lost myself in my love relationship. I talk like my partner now, I dress like my partner now. We actually live together, and we work together, and we're together all the time. I'm kind of grieving my independence, but I'm not ready to end it with her. How can I find myself again while I stay in
the relationship. Well, this is a good task for you and your therapist. This is very common, this kind of enmeshment. By the way, did you know what happened often with therapists. So there's a kind of like often at the beginning of therapy, if people haven't been to therapy before,
they idealize their therapists. So they because they the therapist understands them, they see is maybe the first time in their life when they've been emotionally intimate and they've been able to disclose all the personal things inside themselves and to have somebody who's completely accepting of all that is very exciting. And then as they're learning, they start to dress like their therapists, walk like their therapists, their
conversations out there in the world, or all my therapist says. My therapist says, right, And that's actually a stepping stone to growth and being completely independent. But it sounds like in your love and your love relationship, your attachment anxiety made you become completely enmeshed with her, and that doesn't feel like a safe place. Relationships should look like a ven diagram, You know those diagrams where you see two circles, two separate individual circle that are overlapping about
a third of the way. So each circle represents each partner. You have to have your own some of your own friends, your own work, your own autonomous place where you can grow as a human and keep bringing something new into the relationship. In the center is the relationship, and it is the backbone of both your separate identities. And so I think that it is very possible to individuate from within a relationship. That doesn't mean break up. It
means become an individual, which you've got to talk about. It sounds like the two of you have become so enmeshed and nobody can remember whose problem is whose or how to be independent. You got to work on this, and I would say with a therapist for sure. One question before we had to the break. Can a serious relationship be found in speed dating? I don't like online dating. Is there success in speed dating? Look at online dating?
Speed dating meeting somebody in the Gelson's vegetable aisle. That's all it is. You can't say, well, this can lead to a serious relationship, or that is a better place to find a serious relationship. You don't find a serious relationship. You build a serious relationship and you can find a partner in any of those places. I often say love is far about, far more about skill than luck, and so yeah, might be speed dating might not. All right. When we come back, I am going to continue
answering your questions. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. Hey have I am six forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. Oh my goodness, I'm going through my dms on social media. I cannot believe some of the things that people are writing to me. I can believe them. There's no right or wrong in life, folks.
There is human experience and there are lessons learned. And I'm here to be a flashlight in the tunnel of love for you. Just a flashlight. You can decide what to do with it. You can speed up that boat, slow it down, dive over the side. I'll just be the flashlight for you. Okay. So, dear doctor Wendy says this dude, I slept with my best friend's ex girlfriend X not girlfriend ex girlfriend. I think she used me to hurt him. Should I tell him what happened before she
does? Ooh the tangled webs we weave. So, no matter what, you're gonna be in trouble because you forgot that you're not supposed to. I mean, like we even know that as women, women never date a girlfriend's ex boyfriend or you're choosing him over your girlfriend relationship. So you broke the dude code. You slept with his ex girlfriend. So now you're going to
try a little damage control. Well, if I tell him about it, and I'm up in front about it and remind him that he broke up with her and she didn't mean anything and this didn't mean anything to me too, then that'll be a lot better than her calling him and going nan in and in and guancy why I slept win. Uh, I don't know what you should do. I don't think you need to tell anybody anything. I really don't. You just need to go to church and get on your knees.
No, I'm go to confession. He's not going to be happy with the news. Why should you be the deliverer of bad news? You're not one hundred percent sure that she's gonna tell him anyway. I just wait this one out and to see what happens. You made your bed, you're gonna have to lie in it. We'll see what happens. Okay, moving along, Dear doctor Wendy, how would you go? Oh? A question for me? How would you go about getting physical needs met while dating? For a
serious relationship. The longer you make them wait, the longer they stay. But I'm highly sexual. How do I have both? You can't? Okay, listen, First of all, I don't like this sentence making them wait. It's not about making, manipulating, or playing a game with somebody. It should be during my assessment period when I'm trying to determine if they would be appropriate to share my blood stream and my eggs and my body with. Then I still feel aroused because I'm excited. So let me tell you this.
You can practice what is called auto sexual behavior, and almost every human on the planet practices it. That's sex with yourself, folks. You can do that. You can go get a massage for the skin to skin touch, not to have sex with your massage therapist, but just for the touch, the dopamine. You can get a pet and pat your dog and there's more touch. Don't have sex with your dog, I'm saying, I don't
know if they can give consent. Just that's the issue. But I don't want you to think that you're forcing someone to wait as an active manipulation. If you're waiting to have sex, it's because you want to focus on the emotional parts. And it's okay at the beginning of a relationship to feel aroused and talk about it, but not move forward, right, all right, moving right along here. Oh, this is a fascinating question, Dear doctor
Wendy. I feel like I'm in competition with my man's dog. The dog doesn't like me and even sleeps in between us when I spend the night. He thinks he I guess the boyfriend thinks it's cute, but it gives me the X. How can I address him about this? My biggest concern is that he will choose the dog over my feelings. Okay, I don't have enough information. I don't know how long you guys have been going out, whether it's a new relationship. I don't know what your commitment level is.
I don't know how often you sleep over there, So I need a whole bunch more information. However, I'm gonna tell you a story. So way back in the late nineteen eighties, way back in olden times, I met a guy who was good looking and smart and wealthy and had a gorgeous house. But he had these two darn German shepherd dog who he treated like children. They were on little dog beds beside his bed. You know, they
all just spoiled, ratting, spoiled ratting, these dogs. And I remember thinking, you know what, the guy's good, the house is good. These dogs have got to go. Jump forward five years, six years, six years. We were together five years, then I move out. I missed the dog so darn much that during the time when each of them eventually passed away, who do you think was there nursing them, going to my
ex boyfriend's house taking care of the darn dogs. I ended up falling in love with these dogs more than the man, I think, So just say, give it a chance. You never know. However, if you want to have boundaries about where you sleep and who sleeps and if dogs are allowed on the bed like that is kind of ick for many people. So you tell them you bring it up. It's a boundary for you, and if you can't get with the program, then you got to decide what your reaction
is going to be. That's on you, Okay. Your concern is he's gonna choose the dog over your feelings. Well, if he does, then you have the information that you need, the information that he's not right for you. Oh oh, oh oh, I told you it gets this way near the end. Ah, Dear doctor Wendy, I'm reading this as I'm going A pregnant woman just texted me telling me she's seven months pregnant and that my boyfriend, a boyfriend is in quotation marks is her fiance. I'm done
with him, But should I tell her everything? I mean, I don't want to stress out a pregnant woman. No, you've already said I'm done with him, And if you have some compassion, you don't want to stress out a pregnant woman. You just move along. If you're done with him and it's done, then it's done. So she's got a deal with that cheater. She's gonna have his baby, and there's a whole bunch of mess that's about to come in the future. This is not probably not a good
guy, and you're probably not the only one he's been sleeping with. So no, don't stress out the pregnant woman. Just let it go, all right. When we come back, I have been talking about journaling. You know, one of the things I teach is health psychology, and there's so much research on the benefits to your physical health and your mental health of just
writing stuff down. So I had producer Kayla tracked down the actual researcher who did all the early research on journaling, and I've got him with us when we come back. You are listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show and KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the
iHeartRadio app. You know, I kind of fan girl a little bit when I get like great big brains on my show, especially people who write about like literally do the research and write about it so that I have something to teach, Because if I didn't have good brains behind me, nothing would be coming out this mouth in the classroom. So I am thrilled to welcome doctor James Penna Baker. Thank you for being with us. So nice to be here. And you're in Austin, Texas right now, right, that's right.
Well, I want to tell everybody that you are a world famous professor of psychology because one of the things that you have contributed to the science is our use of language and how it impacts us. And in fact, back in the day, you were one of the very first people to understand the connection between our writing I use the term journaling, expressive writing, and even our physical health, our work performance, all kinds of things. And you
know what you do is obviously related to linguistics but also cognitive psychology. I would be remiss if I did not say that you are the author and editor of a dozen books and over three hundred articles. Some of your books include one called Expressive Writing Words that Heal or how about this one opening up by writing it down? Ooh, I love that title, How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain. And we're going to get into it after the
break. This book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, What our words say about us Okay, Dr Pennebaker. Everything starts out with a seed. It germinates, how did you come up with this idea that language is so intrinsically related to our mental and physical health. You know, I didn't really have a seed. I was more I stumbled across a finding that really intrigued me.
I was doing some research on why people report physical symptoms, and I was doing a book very early in my career, and I thought, you know, I should have a questionnaire that just get a sense of what kind of people report lots of symptoms. So with my students, we sat around and we just generated questions that we thought would be interesting. You know, how you eat, your relationship with your parents, everything. And one of the people said, how about this, prior to the age of seventeen,
did you ever have a traumatic sexual experience? Yes? Or don't? And this questionnaire ended I've being went on forever. We get handed out to about eight hundred college students, and that sexual trauma question was completely different from anything I'd ever seen. People who endorsed that and there was about fifteen percent of the students reporting that they had been to the student health center at much higher
race. They reported more physical symptoms, everything, major problems, minor problems. And I was steindling by that, and then I was ended up contributing to an article that was going to be in the magazine Psychology Today. And this was back in the days when this was was the most amazing magazine around. And they put a questionnaire in the actual article and they got to about twenty four thousand people who completed it. And these were people across the age
spectrum, across the social class, everything. And we analyzed some of the data and we found the same thing. Twenty two percent of women, eleven percent of men reported having had a traumatic sexual experience prior to the age of seventeen. And those who endorse that items were twice as likely to have been hospitalized in the previous year written in the previous year for any cause. They're more likely to have been diagnosed with high blood pressure with answer, with coal's
flus, everything. It's amazing. One of the things I teach is health psychology, and I try to teach each my students this connection between trauma and indeed even our most intimate relationships and our health. And so you were able to discover it. So how did that move forward? To writing about trauma. I mean, I'll review by saying that when we have such early trauma and sexual trauma tends to have so much stigma attached to it, sometimes a
lot of feelings of shame. And I would venture to say that the body speaks for these people. In other words, they can go and get care in a physical way and not be shamed, not be stigmatized. But how did you now make this connection between trauma and journaling and writing down our feelings. So, first of all, I started interviewing some people, and also the editor of this article of psychology today, I did the same if.
What we both discovered was that people who had had traumatic sexual experiences had kept them secret. And I later did some more studies with it with non college to people. These were people in a large corporation, and we found the same thing. And it didn't matter what kind of trauma person had, any kind of trauma that they had kept secret from others was associated with it with
higher health risks. And so I started wondering, well, if keeping a secret is so bad, what if we just brought it in the lab and asked them to talk or write about it. But you know, I'm not a clinical psychologist. I didn't want to have them talking. I don't know how to respond, so I thought I'll just have them come in and write about it. And that was the beginning of it, and that first study
it worked and it really changed my life. And you know, it was one of those things I was just going on a hunch that maybe just putting upsetting experiences into words could be kind of the first step toward improved physical health. And there's all sorts of biological explanations, but the point is is that writing, as I started to discover, helps still the mind. It helps put things together for somebody, and even the first nights after they write,
they sleep better, they feel more relaxed. It brings about a really significant change for a lot of people. I remember reading somewhere that part of the miracle of journaling is that once you write something down, now nobody puts that book away and never goes back to it again. They reread what they've written, and when they read it, they've now become a watcher, like they're in the audience watching a movie instead of the victim experiencing it. Am I
correct in saying that, you know that's true for some people. In our studies, you know, and it's interesting, I don't call my approach journaling, is journaling kind of implies doing it all the time. We ended up calling it expressive writing and thinking of it more as a way to deal with particular issues. And that in our first studies we had people write four times, about fifteen minutes a time, and these would be four consecutive days.
And there have been hundreds of studies done since, and it's not clear that there's a perfect number of times to write. And what I tell others is, look, if you find yourself obsessing about something, worrying about something, something is weighing on you, just set aside three or four days and promise yourself to write for at least ten or fifteen minutes about your deepest thoughts and feelings about this thing that's bothering you. And if after a couple of days
you feel better you don't want to write anymore. Great. If you want to keep it and reread it, great. I think the majority of the people that I've studied actually don't go back and read it interesting. They literally just get it out and then it's out there. And I don't you know that metaphor of getting it out is a complicated one. I think it's what
it's doing is putting things together for them. They now understand it. When the people who benefit, when when I asked them why did they why was it so helpful, They'll say it made me realize X, Y or Z, I now understand etc. In other words, they're using these words. That's telling me and telling them that they have put two and two together. They're putting things together that they hadn't realized were were connected. I want to
talk more about that. We have to go to a break. I love this idea of taking it out of the emotional brain and into the maybe the prefrontal cortex. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show. My guest is doctor James Pennabaker. He is a Professor emeritus of psychology. He is at You're in Austin, Texas right now, author of over twelve books and three hundred articles. Will have more about expressive writing when we come back.
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. Thank God, Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show and KFI AM six forty Live everywhere. On the iHeartRadio app my guest doctor James Penna Baker, one
of the great thinkers in the world of psychology. We're talking about expressive writing and the work that you did on people who had suffered a lot of trauma, and that trauma was then connected to terrible health outcomes, and then just by writing it down and not even for that long fifteen minutes two or three or four days each day, was in fact a way for them to process it, not just get it out, but move it maybe from being stuck
in emotional trauma into analyzing it. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's the way I think about it. It is one thing that writing does a lot of things. It's not just one simple psychological process. Part of it is just acknowledging it to yourself. Another is just translated into words. When you translate something into language, it changes the way that it's organized in
our minds, and it helps to bring things together. And once all of that happens, one reason we obsess about upsetting experiences is because we're trying to figure them out. Our brain is doing this automatically, and once once we put it into words and we start to understand it all of a sudden, our brain doesn't need to figure it out. It is figured out, and
we can move on. You know, you're talking to somebody who wrote three books for the mass market on dating and relationships while I was single and struggling and trying to figure it out. And it was funny because I'm about to get married in a few weeks. And I remember when I first dating my guy. I would literally say to myself, well, what would doctor Wendy say I should do? I would think about what I'd written in my books as a life to live. Words have so much power. I want to
talk about one of your books, The Secret Life of Pronouns. What our words say about us? Now? I teach one lecture on gender at my college level, like undergraduate, and I tell them about words, that words are a sign of respect. If somebody prefers a certain word, If I got married this summer and came back and said, don't call me doctor anymore, call me missus, they would do it out of respect. And if somebody else asked to be called a certain way, we should do it out
of respect. We shouldn't be trying to analyze do they deserve this word? Tell me what the big message is in your book The Secret Life of Pronouns. So this all grew out of the work I'd done in expressive writing. I was doing all this research trying to figure out what is it about writing
that makes such a big difference. And I ended up going and looking at the essays that these people wrote, and you know, sometimes they would write about really profound experiences sometimes and sometimes they'd do it in a very kind of mechanical way. Sometimes they would just be all over the place. And I got a group of clinical graduate students to go through and write hundreds of these
essays. And it turns out that the way these these students were looking at the essays was just so inconsistent, and it took forever, and it was not very effective. And it occurred to me, maybe if I use some kind of computer program to analyze these essays, I could get a better picture of who benefits from writing versus who doesn't. And I, at the time, this was in the nineties, there was no such program that was actually
available or available at all that I could find. And so I ended up working with one of my graduate students who had had a background in computer science, and i'd done a little computer science myself, and we ended up writing a computer program that would go through and calculate the percentage of words in any
given text. There were positive emotions, negative motions, cognitive words, etc. And as long as we were at it, we threw in things that were really easy to count, words like pronouns, prepositions in other parts of speech. In any case, we went through started doing these analyzes and started to discover that people who benefited from writing it wasn't what they wrote, it was how they were writing. In other words, it wasn't the topic so much, and it could be a major trauma, it could be just a
minor annoyance in their life. But the way they put it together and some of the things that came out, you know, I just assume that people would benefit the most that they said really horrible things, they lots of negative emotion. That's not the case. We found that people benefited a lot if they just included kind of a moderate number of negative emotion words and feelings. Also, the more that they could express positive emotions while writing about Trump is
they've benefited more. Yeah, those nice buffers, those buffers against some of these stress soores, but are you going to tell me that the pronoun I is important. I'm going to tell you that in one second. But there was another thing that really popped out, and that was use of cognitive words. These are words like because, cause, effect, understand, realize, words that are suggesting some kind of processing, and it's not just some kind
of wrong amount, but it's increasing over their writing. In other words, the people who benefit are trying to put together a story, some kind of understanding and structure. In fact, the person who came in on the first day of writing, and they already had a very clear story of what's what happened, they didn't benefit at all. It was the people who when they came in at first it was almost a jumble, but they started putting together and were struggling to come up with the story. So that was one of
the first things. Yeah, when they described that, I hear the word realize, and then I realize that my uncle was dangerous, right, and they're processing it as they're writing about it. It's fascinating, that's right.
And then the other thing that I found was that these pronouns and these other kind of junk words that most of us never pay attention to, had a huge impact in terms of how people were writing, and specifically, I started to look at how people in general use words in everyday life and everyday interactions, and we could start to get a real sense of people by the way
they're using words. And some of these are pronouns. For example, an obvious one is the more that people in their emails or their everyday conversations, the more they use pronouns like he, she, they, you, we, They are more socially connected than people who don't. And that's almost obvious, but it's kind of interesting that you don't need to questionnaire. You can look at somebody's email and do an analysis in a second and figure out that
this person really is interested in other human beings. Wow, And I'm sure social media is doing that. Those companies, they're always scrolling through to figure out who we are. Yeah, that's exactly right, or at least they have the capabilities to do that. But then the word that ends up being particularly powerful is the word I, and for just first person singular pronouns in general, I, me, mine, et cetera. And what's interesting about
this word is it doesn't reflect the way we think. And I first stumbled across this and looking at the differences between men and women, and I've discovered you know, if I ask most people, they'll say, well, obviously men use I more because they're narcissistic self you know. But and it's true, they are more narcissistic and more self important. But narcissism is self importance is not related to I. And if you look at leadership, you would
think that somebody who's a leader would use eyewords. No, a leader uses eyewords less eye words reflect, It's a they mark self reflection looking inward. A person who's sad or depressed uses I words more than when they're not sad or depressed, When you're anxious, when you're self conscious, those are that
reflects that we are looking inward. And what's so intriguing about this is just by looking at this we can get a sense of how a person feels about themselves, and with other pronouns, we can see the greed to which they are connecting with others. So these almost invisible words can tell us a lot about others, but they can also tell us about ourselves. If you look at your own writing, you will see that when you're writing to people that
you might feel anxious about you use eyewords more. Now use this as information you are probably when you do that, you're probably reflecting that relationship. And in fact, this is true in terms of relative status if you look at interactions or emails. In fact, we can go to letters, ancient letters
that were written in ancient Greek Greek and we see the same things. When somebody is writing to a higher status person, they use a lot of eye words, and if a high status person is writing to a lower status person, they don't use many I words. That's so fascinating, especially when you think about how people text back and forth on dating apps, and you'll see
who will be who thinks they're the higher value mate. Doctor Pennabaker, I here's one thing that I, as I talk to somebody of a higher status, hate about radio. Our time is so limited. I want to close simply by saying that this is amazing. And if there's any takeaway for our
listeners, it is you know, don't keep secrets. You don't have to share them with people, but write them down, even if it's fifteen minutes a day for a few days, and be aware if you're saying I to people, it means you respect them and I am grateful you've been with us. Doctor Pennabaker, thank you so much. Well, thank you, and I've enjoyed this and that brings a Doctor Wendy Walls show to a close. I'm always here from seven to nine pm every Sunday night right here on KFI
AM six forty and live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always hear us live on KFI A M six forty from seven to nine p m on Sunday and any time on demand on the iHeartRadio app