This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to k I Am six forty, the Doctor Wendy wallsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app AM six Party. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walls Show. Well, if you're new to my show, let me tell you this. I have a PhD in clinical psychology, but I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor, and I am obsessed with the science of love and
all are very important interpersonal relationships. On today's show, cognitive biases doesn't sound sexy, does it? Until I say the rest that mess up our love lives. Yeah, there are tricks that our brains naturally play on us that make us make those bad decisions in love. Also some of the most common relationship mistakes that people make. I put together this list and I am convinced that if you just change these few things, you can have a happy relationship.
Plus, I'll be taking your calls and answering your relationship questions from social media. Also, later in the show, I have a very special guest, an eye surgeon who can change the color of your eyes. You won't believe this but before we get there, I have been in Los Angeles media for I'm embarrassed to say thirty years. You may know me because I used to anchor at KCOP that then became UPN in the early nineties. Left there, I was over at Extra. I hosted at least fifty different cable half
hours as cable was bursting and going on. In twenty twelve was doctor Phil picked me to be on The Doctors. I've been around media for a long time, covering entertainment, covering once I you know, I got a midlife PhD, come back to media with a little bit of knowledge, and one of the people I knew as a colleague for a good thirty years was KTLA's entertainment reporter Sam Rubin. And you know, if you've been listening to any media in the last forty eight hours, you know that our heart goes out
to Sam's family because he passed away on Friday morning. It was so distressful for me because he wasn't much older than me, because he was a solid fixture that was just always there. I spent a lot of time with Sam recently because in the last few years, I've also been a love correspondent for the Today Show in Australia. In Australia nine Network, as they call it,
Sam is their entertainment reporter. I'm their psychological experts. So they would have me weigh in and a few times a month we would meet in a green room in Hollywood and he would do a segment before me, and then I would do a segment, and then he had to wait another hour for his next segment. So we always had time to sit in the green room in the afternoon and just talk about life. He talked about raising his kids.
Sometimes he had some of his young adult teen kids with him. I had mine there sometimes, and he knew a little bit about everything, and he was probably the most positive, jovial, happy person that I knew. But the thing I'm mad about for me is how much I just took people like Sam Rubin for granted. They were just always there. They were a consistent fixture in my life, have been. They were just somebody in the business you saw regularly. They were a good friend, and Sam was special.
And the reason why he was on air for more than thirty years in Los Angeles is because he never lost his Midwest attitude. He was always kind to every celebrity, didn't have a bad word. He wasn't a deep gossiper. But here's something you didn't know about Sam. His work ethic was beyond I was in awe. First of all, he lived in the Pacific Palisades. I just I'm only telling you this. You can picture the freeways.
And he would get drive early in the morning to do the KTLA Morning Shoe Show by six am, and so he drives all across it, does his segments there, then drives back to the Palisades, churns out a few blogs, makes some other videos for other clients, comes back for the afternoon show, and then afterwards would go to red carpets like two three times a week at events. And I said to him one day, Sam, are you ever going to wind down? And he said, no, I got two
kids still heading to college. I'm never going to stop. And I love it. I love it, he said. Here's a clip of Sam retrospectively looking at what he thought his career was going to be, like, I was just how I'm meant to live. Could I do backup for you guys? I think he got no work to do. Brun I love Sam Rubens so much. Sam's the great. Sam is the most talented entertainment reporter and
anchor I've ever met. I've kind of always wanted to do this. So when I first got in the morning News, oh, I was like, I can't believe I'm sitting here, and I hope I can sit here for a long time. Kermit. What I thought was very magnanimous of you, But I certainly liked using the word magnanimous. Yes, look at you. You thank you. Somebody with your little glasses, I see it. I'll say this isn't without vanity, but it probably is. I thought, oh
my gosh, you know everybody's going to watch. Everybody's gonna see me. And maybe two weeks in I realized nobody's watching. My mother would watch for one hour a day, and her great review was, you know, one hour day, it's all I can take. You know, I figured this was not going well. Sam's self deprecating humor. We were all watching you, Sam, we were all learning from you, and our heart goes out to your family this week. So what does this mean to us? When
we lose a pear? A little piece of all of us die because all of our relationships, whether they're friendships, whether they're work colleagues, they are a piece of our identity. And when we lose somebody, and especially if it's somebody close to you, you actually a piece of yourself dies that you have to find a way to rebuild that within yourself. It happens to also be Mother's Day, and there are many people out there who have lost their
mother. I lost my mother when I was thirty. Kayla lost her mother when she was young. It's a time of sadness. I just want to say, because I'm going to say it live on air. And I'm feeling very melancholy today. Melanchocky Is that a word? No, that's called melanchochy. Gotcha, gotcha. I'm feeling very melancholy because my nest is almost empty. I got one about to fly. She's got little baby wings and about to take off. She was sending me pictures of apartments. Today I got
another living all the way across the pond in Paris. And in the last how long have you been with me? Kayla? Two years? Three years? Oh, three years? My producer, Kayla Austin has been my adoptive daughter, of course, and she's too old to actually be my daughter. Her when I was really young. Actually, no, no, I'm not
no, no, I wanted to say that, ye think. Yeah, okay, literally could have been my daughter and I would have been even an older mom having her, and so so Kayla has assumed the position, if you will, so on air, I just want to say, Kayla, thank you for being my surrogate replacement daughter during this. No one's going anywhere, right, this is not an ending or goodbye. I just want to say that it is Mother's Day and Kayla brought me some lovely Mother's Day gifts
and I'm just so grateful to you. I love you deep. Happy Mother's Day. I'm gonna light that candle. I'm a little massage. She was really generous, so sweet, so so sweet. All right, let's get off all the sad and melancholy folks. So I hope you had a great time with your mom today and you at least picked up a phone and called her. All right, let's talk about the cognitive biases that can really mess up our love lives, tricks our brains play on us. When we come
back. 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. KFI AM six forty you have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Waalsh Show. You know. I'm a psychology professor and one of the courses I teach is plainal Introduction to Psychology, and the very beginning of the semester I teach a section
on cognitive biases. I basically teach people that their brain plays tricks on them, their perceptions don't always give them the truth. A cognitive bias, as the deaf as is defined, is a deviation from rational judgment. This is where people create their own realities based on their set of perceptions. And remember, how we perceive things is often based on our experiences in life or from before, but with human beings in general, there are also certain tricks that
the brain plays because it just needs to take shortcuts. There's too much information coming at us at all the time, so our brain gets overwhelmed, decision making gets hard, and so we rely on these cognitive biases, these shortcuts. So I want to go through some of them. But this summer. I want to pertain them specifically to our love lives and why sometimes our brains trick us and people will often say to me, well, you know, I've just got a bad picker, and I'm like, well, do you
have a bad picker or did you have a nat viru cognitive bias? Let's talk about him. The first one I want to talk about is called the anchoring bias. Anchoring, and that means we rely, We over rely on the first piece of information we find out about somebody and we use it as a baseline for comparison of everybody else. So, for instance, let's say in your dating life, you have been dating people that are pretty unhappy, angry, or maybe somebody who has an avoidant attachment style and who is afraid
of intimacy. So it doesn't take much when you meet a new person for them to give you a smile, a wink, a laugh, make a joke, seem very friendly, and you're going to be like, that's what I want. I want that happy kind of person. And now you've anchored it. You're over using this without investigating and getting more information. If you find yourself saying things like, well, compared to what's out there, he
or she is really a catch. Right. The problem is this person might be just incrementally better, but you don't have enough information because you've anchored it into your first depression. That's called the anchoring bias. Oh here's another one that we do way too much. It's called the in group bias. It basically says that our brain prefers people who are like us. What could go wrong with that? Right, Well, that's how racism happens on dating apps.
Right. If we immediately gravitate towards people like us, sometimes it works. I remember meeting these two women friends. Actually one of was a women friend, and she introduced me to an old time friend from a long time ago, and I said, how did you two meet? And they said, well, we were at UCLA together. And I walked up to her and said, you look just like me. Let's be friends. And you know, maybe they had enough other things in common that it all worked out
fine. That's the in group bias. But for many of us, we need to get out of our group. We need to look further into people who are different in some way, because that may be where we find our mate. Oh. Oh, here's a big cognitive bias that happens all the
time, especially with online dating. It's called the bandwagon effect. Sometimes it's called herd mentality group think, and basically the bandwagon effect says this, somebody is more likely to go along with a belief that many other if many others hold the same belief, So lots of If you think lots of other people hold this belief, you're gonna believe it. You know, they've actually done studies in labs where they've put a bunch of people in a room and only
one was part of the experiment. The others were confederates, says they call them. They were playing along actors, and they asked them to solve a basic math problem. And the person who was being experimented on knew the correct answer and said it, but there were all these other people in the room
who said, no, that's not the right answer. No, no, the answer is this, And eventually the person with the rational thought would actually go along with the ones who were saying the wrong answer because of herd mentality or group think. Now, how does this impact your dating life? I
know what you do. As soon as you find somebody online that you like on a dating app, you go check out their social media and you try to figure out how many followers they have, and you think, well, they have tons of followers, they must be great, they must be really popular. Maybe they just know how to trick the algorithm. Just want to say that, really, just because somebody's popular online doesn't mean that they're a good person otherwise. All right, here's one that happens all the time.
Uh huh, the confirmation bias. That means when you pay more attention to information that reinforces something you already believe and ignoring all the bad news, ignoring
all evidence to the con right. So people who are anti vaxxers, for instance, would go down a rabbit hole of I heard there was this one guy who lost his erection, I heard there's one person who got sick, right, And so all they do is look for confirmation that vaccines are bad instead of looking at the data that says, yeah, small percentage of people might have had side effects, but the vast majority of the millions of people
didn't. They didn't get COVID exactly. So confirmation bias in dating I call falling in love with hope, where you find ways to rationalize and forgive all the negative qualities in somebody because you believe that in their heart they're really a good person. Right. So that's why I always tell people when they first start dating somebody to not be looking for ways that the person's perfect for them. That's a confirmation bias. Be looking for ways that the person's not right
for them. Right. Then there's the big one, the sunk cost bias. You know what that is. Well, when it comes to investments in money, I say, that's when we throw good money after bad money. It's when, okay, let me say this. So you go through your closet, you're cleaning it out right, and there's some shoes and they are definitely out of fashion, but they were designer shoes and you spent so much money on them, and you love them. They're so comfortable, so you
don't give them to good will. You just keep them there sitting on your shelf because you paid so much money for them. Right. In the same way, we stay in bad relationships because we've invested time, or because we've invested money, or because we've just invested. Right. Most people who go through a divorce or a breakup, the most common thing I hear is, wow, I should have done it earlier, I didn't know how great it was on the other side, right, So the sunk cost bias makes us
stay in relationships that are bad for us. Speaking of relationships, if you're in one, I want you to listen up because coming back, I want to talk about the most common relationship mistakes that people make. And this comes from my own experience and a little bit of science and research, but honestly, I want you to have a healthy, happy relationship. So don't make these mistakes. I'll talk about them when we come back. You're listening to
the Doctor Wendy Walls 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 KFI and six you have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walls Show. I'd like to welcome my Instagram audience. If you want to come over to Instagram and see what we're doing here in the studio, you're welcome to. By the way, I'm in a casual no makeup day. I'm I'm just here. But the reason why I'm on Instagram
as well as on KFI. Right now is because I want to talk about the most common relationship myths, not miss mistakes, those common relationship mistakes according to me, and some from science that I think people make. And after this segment, I'm going to be taking your calls if you have relationship calls. Reminder to everybody, I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I'm a psychology professor, not a therapist, but I am obsessed with the science of
love. I've written three books on relationships. I did my dissertation on attachment theory. I think about the science of love a lot, all right, in my opinion, here are the most common mistakes that people make in relationships. First of all, having gender role expectations that are not discussed. Right.
So, if you have an idea that men are supposed to do something or women are supposed to do something, and you haven't decided to tell your mate that you have this feeling, then you're going to run in clashes all the time, and you're gonna wonder why now I happen to have a relationship that, in some areas has some traditional gender roles and some not, Like, for instance, I have an internal idea I'm sorry to say this. The men should take out the trash. It's just me, okay, And
I happen to have a boyfriend who takes out the trash. It's never come up whether it's his job or not. He just does it. On the other hand, here's the good thing. I love, love, love to cook. Love it not because I'm a girl. There are lots of great male chefs out there. I just love to cook. And here's the wonderful thing. He happens to love to do dishes. Literally, after a meal, I take my glass of wine, I go sit over, look at the Telly, read a little New York Times wait for him to finish the
dishes. I don't even offer to help. But anyway, if you don't talk about these things, then you're gonna wonder why you're erupting over little things. All right, here's another big mistake that a lot of people make in their relationships. They don't resolve their childhood issues on their own first, and instead blame their partner for quote unquote triggering them. As if your partner did something to you to trigger you. Now, I want to remind you,
if we're going to go with the metaphor of the trigger. You're holding the gun and you pull the trigger. Okay, it's up to you to resolve your childhood issues so that you won't go off. You won't metaphorically press that trigger, right, it won't feel hurtful. It's your job to take care of your stuff and not blame your partner for triggering you, whatever that means.
Here's another mistake people make in relationships. They fall so deeply in love or they get so enmashed or com a cocoon that never separates, that they don't get enough social support. In other words, they don't have enough of a life outside of the relationship. Now, I'm not saying you should have a kind of life that threatens your relationship, hanging out with people who might be potential, you know, romantic partners for you. But you should bring
something back to the table, something interesting. You know. My favorite thing is at the end of a work day, my boyfriend will say to me, oh, get this, and then I know he's about to embark on a really great story of something that happened in the day. Get this, he says. When I hear the get this, up comes the story, right, and that brings new energy into our relationship. I come home from
KFI Radio and I say, get this. You know what Kayla said today, right, producer, Kayla, you actually come home with us sometimes. Did you know that? That makes me very happy? So grow yourself as an individual, not in a way that threatens the relationship, but in a way that brings stuff into the relationship. All right, here's a big, one, big mistake people make. They spend a lot of time on this in their relationship, trying to change somebody else. Guess what, you can't
change anybody else. You should spend time learning to accept them, or at least tolerate them. Also, you need to work on changing your reaction to them. Okay, here's an example from my life. Tiny thing. You know, they say it's the little things that break people up, right, They get irritated. They say that the way they roll the toothpaste, how they bang their razor on the sink and leave the hairs, whatever, the little stuff, right, that pile up and then you have a big war.
So in our case, my boyfriend loves drawers. I don't know why he loves drawers. I like shelves. My closet has shelves in it. He likes dressers with drawers, okay, but he never closes all the drawers fully. In fact, in any given dresser that may have six drawers, six of them are open in different amounts, and in chair two inches there, a quarter inch there. Drives me crazy. Drives me crazy. So I could nag him and try to get him to change his behavior so I
will be happier, or I could change my reaction to it. And here's what I decided to do. About a year ago. I adopted this. I said, those drawers are a great opportunity for me to get in shape, because if I do a very deep sumou squat, I can use my knee to get the bottom drawer closed. If I stretch high to the sky and turn around and do a pirouette, I can use my back heel to do an arabesque and close the top drawer. And every time I close a drawer, I say the words I love you, Julio, I love you
Julio, I love you Julio, and he laughs. He could be in the other room and he hears me, and he knows I'm getting a workout closing his drawers, and I'm grateful that he left me a workout that's what I am. Right. You see you change you reframe it your attitude instead of trying to change somebody. Oh here's a big one. I'm not going to share a story about this one, but just saying. People get into long term relationships and one of the biggest mistakes they make is they think their
sexual desire should be effortless. It should just happen, it should just come. No, you have to work at it, you have to schedule it, plan it, make novelty happen, all kinds of stuff you have to do. Right. Oh, and I want to end with two that are really really, really really important, thinking it's your partner's job to make you happy. I just want to tell you right now it is nobody's job but yours to make you happy. In fact, happy people have happy relationships.
So it's incumbent on you to figure out what you need and not be dependent on somebody else to make you happy. Oh. I just want to throw in, also, your partner's not a mind reader. If you find yourself ever saying they should know really tell them, communicate better. And I will end with this. The biggest mistake people make in long term relationships is they wait too long to go to couple's therapy. They wait until they're broken up
and then they go to a therapist for her or his anointment. That it's okay to break up. You should go when the little squeaks and wheels in the machine are happening, it's getting a little creaky. That's when you go for a tune up. You don't wait till the end. All right, when we come back, I am taking your relationship questions. The number is one eight hundred five two zero one KFI. That's one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. Here's what's going to happen. Producer Kayla's going
to go to the phones. You get to say hello to her first. You don't have to use your real name. You can be anonymous. I know this is very intimate things. I get it, but give us a call. I'm happy to answer your questions. The number is one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. You are listening to the Doctor we 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 FORTYFI AM six
forty do you have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show and this is the time of the show where I take your calls and answer your social media questions. I still have Instagram on board. Somebody just asked me on Instagram. By the way, the number is one eight hundred five two zero one KFI. That's one eight hundred five two zero one
five three four someone on Instagram just ask me. If you broke up with somebody and then you get back together, what are your chances for success? And the chances are great if you don't enter the same relationship you were in before and others. It could be with the same person but different kind of relationship. So going to couple's therapy is really important so you can learn new relationship skills. So figure out what went wrong? Right? All right?
Producer Kayla, who do we have on the line. We have Bree with the question, Brie. Hello, Brie, It's Doctor Wendy by Doctor Wendy. What's your question? Like I listened to you like every week. My question My question is about it's a relationship but not a love relationship. Well, I love my sister, yes, and uh so long story short, my mom passed away and I took it really hard, and afterwards I made some very poor choices and it resulted in my sister having to adopt my daughter.
Long story short, And this was almost two years ago. Oh it's just two years. This is so new. Yeah. And how old is your daughter that your sister adopted? Four? Honey? Honey? And I she excuse me, sorry, take your time. And I've turned my life around since then, mm hmm. And she she can't move forward from the past and forgive me and has taken all communications. Oh my daughter, Oh no, no, no, oh, dad, I just don't know how to how to move forward. I know, okay with her and everything.
So that I have it clear, your mom passed away, and two years ago, your sister adopted your two year old at the time, right, because of some bad life choices, some you know, response to your mom's death. May I ask, Bree, how old you are? I'm thirty three, thirty three and you have a four year old out there who you're not allowed to see or talk to. Now I can, legally, but my sister just doesn't think it's a good idea. Oh wait, you can't legally. Yeah, it's they've just made it up to her my sister.
Okay, so it sounds like you need a lawyer, Bree, I think you need two things. Okay. You need a therapist to help you through this emotional time guaranteed, and even if you don't have money, there are ways to get affordable therapists. I always tell people this. The Affordable Care Act means that your health insurance has to pay for some. Also, every college and university that has graduate school has all kinds of PhDs there who will
give you therapy for sometimes free or very little. So you need to have a therapist, that's first thing. And then when you get emotionally a little more sound and you're feeling stronger, I would highly suggest that you work with an a turn to make sure that you have your legal rights as bio mom because your daughter, in my opinion, this is just my opinion. Now, I'm just a mom and a human being, but your daughter should know both her mothers, her mother and her aunt. And the more adults who
care about a child, the better outcomes for kids. This we know. And she wouldn't let me see her today smaller, And I just don't know how to get how to talk to my sisters. And have you been honest and vulnerable with your sister? Have you let her know how painful this is? And what is her reaction? What does she say? She either doesn't respond or she does respond. It's just like you guys just texting. You're
not talking. Oh she won't answer the phone. Oh no, you to have a line of communication up. You need to say and you need to talk to Does she live in your city? No, but she's close. She's close. She's close enough that you could set up a meeting. I think you need to set up a meeting neral and a neutral place, and you need to let her know how important this is and that you may take
the next step, which is trying to fight for your legal rights. But in the meantime, you know, you know, try to tell her. I mean, if it's true that you've changed and that you're not going to be a bad influence on your daughter, you're not going to hurt your daughter. And you're not even asking maybe even to be alone with your daughter or take your daughter out somewhere. You're just asking to check in with her and be able to see her and let her know that she's loved and cared for
and the other thing. I would say, Brie, this is just me as a mom. If this were I always put myself in somebody's shoes, And if this was me, I would be writing a letter a day to my daughter and put it in a shoebox. And someday, when she's a teenager and she's mad at her aunt, mom, you can get that shoe box to her and she can see how hard you tried and what you did and the love you wanted to give her. I think it's really important that
you document your emotional feelings and give it to your daughter. Brie. I'm sorry it's radio, and I wish we had hours and hours. I want to give you a big hug. But thank you for calling in. I appreciate it. Oh that's heartbreaking. Okay, Producer, Kayla, who do we have an ex? We have Ruth with a question. Okay, Hi, Ruth, it's doctor Wendy. I'm so glad you're there, Doctor Wendy. Oh, I felt so bad for that girl. Did you hear her? I did, and I called and I'm like, that's so similar.
But I'm the grandmother. I'm the grandmother, and my daughter got arrested. Wait, the grandmother of the woman who just called in or somebody else that would be that would be really weird. But no, Okay, similar situation. So you're a grandmother and sadly your daughter got involved with the criminal justice system, right, so she's considered a felon and they won't give her her
children. They ended up divorcing her husband, and and I thought, She's like, I would rather my children be put up for adoption than go to my husband. And I'm like, oh, hell no. So finally she's been very good since all of that has happened, but she's iced me out, and so has he. And now I have no contact. And how old are your grandkids? Ruth? They they were newborn. Okay, now there's now there's ten. The young it's ten. It's just ten years later.
Okay, So now the oldest is fifteen, thirteen and ten and so, and when is the last time you were able to see them? I went to church today and one of them was there, so I gave her a this is their thirteen year old and I'd like tell your sister and your brother. I said hello, and that I love them. But mom and dad don't want they're just okay, So that's one child, my other my that's my number one child, my number two childs He married a young lady
with four children. I mean, it's like, that was my prayer to God, God, please let me find a man who will love me and my four children. But God answered my prayer to my son, and then they had a child together and it was going great until I introduced. I told my new daughter in law, I said, look, if you come to this family, you got to know that my daughter is a felon,
and so you know, she understood everything. But then when my daughter talked to her, Yeah, my new daughter in law got turned against me. And so now they're like, oh, your helicopter grandmother and is too much. We don't want you in our life. Oh so now okay, So Ruth, okay, Ruth. I know that this is a sad day for you because it's Mother's Day and you got eight grandchildren that you were unable to
reach out to. I definitely think that you need to work through some of this stuff in therapy, and also as my advice for Bree, write a letter to your grandchildren every day because someday they're going to show up and they're going to say, where were you, and you can hand them the shoe box and say, here's my box of tears. Here's what happened, Here's why I was unable to reach you, Here's why I will always be there for you if you reach out to me, and I think documenting your feeling
letting them know is the best thing you can do. Oh, thank you for calling Ruth. All right, when we come back, I'm going to head over to social media because I see some of my dms are all about dating and hooking up and oh my, somebody has quite a moral question for me. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to Doctor
Wendy Walsh. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.