Yourself Through Therapy w/ Lori Gottlieb

all gone through traumas, we've had toxic relationships. For me, I had a relationship in my twenties and he was somebody that in my most insecure life, I felt like he was way too good for me, and so I had to be the perfect version of what I assumed he was looking for, which was not me at all. I mean, I became a kind of version of Ali two point oh, but it wasn't me, and I'd be came less and less of who I authentically was, and eventually it got to the point where I had swallowed

so much of myself I couldn't breathe anymore. Ultimately, these relationships always end, and when they do, you have to figure out why you allowed yourself to become so anemic in terms of who you are and why you wanted that relationship so badly. I got into therapy and talked about why I thought I'd absolutely no value in the relationship and why I gave him so much power, And through therapy I was able to find my power and eventually meet the right partner for me, my husband George,

twenty years and going strong. So I think most of us have had a version of a relationship where we weren't ourselves and it was somewhat toxic, and you know, for other people, very traumatic. But if you learn from it, you can grow from it, and you can eventually create a relationship where you get to thrive. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to my guest psychotherapist, Lorie Godly. Laurie is the author or of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being

adapted as a television series. Of course, that's all I want to talk about. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic's weekly Dear Therapist advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times and many other publications. Her recent ted talk called How Changing her Story Can Change Your Life was one of the ten most watched of the year. Laurie is the co host of the new I Heart Radio podcast Deer Therapist, produced by Katie Kuric. Laurie,

my gosh, you sound incredibly busy during this pandemic. Well, I am, but it's all work that means a lot to me, and so you know, it feels like work that is productive and helping people, and it is. I have to say, I've always been a huge fan of therapy. I even created a show called Headcase a million years ago where I've sort of had fun with it, but

it has helped me immensely over the years. And so for some of us that are thinking, huh, maybe I'm gonna start therapy, uh, for people who haven't had it, I do sense that there is a lot of fear when it comes to therapy and going deep, as they say, with oneself. So if I were starting out today and I said, Lorie, I want to find a therapist, what would you say to me? So, So, first of all, I think it's important to understand what therapy is, and

it's a very interactive process. I feel like therapy is like getting a really good second opinion on your life from someone who's not already in your life. So if you're going to go to therapy, you're gonna learn things about yourself, about your patterns, about what keeps you stuck, about your blind spots, about things that maybe need some healing, and then you have to use what you talked about

in that hour during the week. So if you're ready to sign up for that, what I would say is, please know that the first therapist you go to isn't necessarily a therapist. You're going to be in therapy with a first session and you saw this firsthand, it sounds like is like a consultation. It's an opportunity for you to sit with the person and at the end of that session, say to yourself, did I feel understood as much as someone can understand you after meeting you for

fifty minutes? And did this person challenge me? And what I mean by that is did they ask me a question that maybe made me think about something in a different way or left me with something that I'm going to kind of noodle around during the week. They might not do that very much in a very first session, but if the person is just kind of validating your perspective. Yeah, that was terrible. Yeah, that was awful. Yeah, that other person is wrong. That might not be the experience in

which you're really going to grow. Well, you've written about the need for validation from a therapist, and I've I've actually known people that have gone to therapist and when they discuss it with me, they say, yeah, and you know, Dr Blank says that I shouldn't have to do that, and Dr Blank says that I am pretty, and you go, oh no, oh, no, no, no, I'm hearing that incringing. Yeah. I mean it's a lot of projection, right to go to a therapist and try to quote unquote please them.

You're probably not going to get to a place where you can really look at your stuff. I'm assuming. Well, look, and you know in the book I talk about the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion. Yes, I was just going to get there. I love that. I think it's so important when you're looking at therapists because idiot compassion is what we get from our friends. So we go to our friends and we say, here's what happens,

and what do we do. We want to support our friends often so what we'll do is we'll say, yeah, you know that person was wrong, you were right, or that's so awful, or but maybe their response to what's happening is contributing to the problem. Just that kind of blind support wise compassion is what you hope to get from your therapist. It's where a therapist hold up a mirror to you and how help you to see yourself in a way that maybe you haven't been willing or

able to. It's not for the therapist to kind of boost yourself esteem. It's for a therapist to help you see yourself most clearly so that you can draw your own conclusions about you know how you see yourself. And also it helps you to make better decisions about your life. When you can see your role in what's not working, you can make choices and now you can actually affect change. You can't do that if all you're doing is getting, like, you know, a validation machine. And let me ask you this.

I've always wanted to know this. When a patient comes in to consult with you, can you tell right away if this is a person that you're going to need to sort of coaxed to be able to be vulnerable and do the work. I would imagine people are very stiff when they first come in. Yeah, well, of course, I mean, you know, you think about the therapeutic relationship.

There's nothing like that in the outside world. So you're starting the relationship knowing that you're gonna be very vulnerable with this person who is an absolute stranger to you. And at the end of it, after you formed this intensely meaningful relationship with this person, you're going to say goodbye. Um with therapy, know that that's the end goal. So I do think that it's natural that when people come in there, you know, they're not sure what to think

of the situation. And rightly so, you you have to form a relationship with a therapist, and that takes some time to build that trust. Are you in therapy? I am in therapy and in the book, In fact, the book follows the lives of four patients of mine as they go through their struggles, and the fifth patients in the book is me as I go through my own therapy. So I think it's really important, you know, I say at the outset that my greatest credential is that I'm

a card caring member of the human race. I know what it's like to have struggled in the world, just like any other human being. Right. You also write about therapists now they're simply seeing kind of a snapshot of a person at a particular or time. Is that what you mean about? You know, let's say forty five minutes, and then the rest of the work is still the work of them going out and living their lives the

rest of the time. What I mean is that we can be so critical of ourselves, and so when people come in, they might be coming in with this very distorted view of themselves and their situation in a very negative way. They can't see the whole picture. You. I always say we're unreliable narrators because we're telling our story through a subjective lens. So a lot of what I'm doing is editing, really helping them to flesh out other perspectives.

So when I say I'm looking at a snapshot when somebody comes in, I'm seeing them at a moment in time. But they're seeing that moment in time as the entirety of their lives. And it's just not right because there's so much more. And a day later, a week later, a month later, if you took a snapshot, their lives will look very different. And you say that therapy can't

help people who aren't curious about themselves. You must know right away when a patient comes in and they're being told to go to therapy versus they've come in and they're ready themselves and curious, as you say, about themselves, to go into therapy right And what I mean by that too is that a lot of times people will come in even willingly, and they definitely want something to change, but what they want to change is someone else or something else out there, and what they learned is that

they're going to need to make changes. So really therapy is about how do you relate to yourself and how do you relate to others and what changes do you need to make so that things go more smoothly for you. One of the main things I want to talk to you today, especially when we're trying to grow a relationship with ourselves, is sort of toxic behavior and past relationships and how they inform us now and how they inform future relationships. Um you say we are our own jailers

and freedom involves responsibility would scares us. I love that phrase because it is very scary to sort of go into your own life and your own responsibilities of things that have happened or relationships that you have had. There's a lot more to come after this short break. Welcome back with more. Go ask Alli, talk to me about sort of past relationships, how you deal with them, how somebody like me can deal with them and not have them paralyze us in our own lives. Yeah. Well, there's

this thing that we marry our unfinished business. And what I mean by that is that so often if we've been hurt by somebody else in the past, we replicate that when we look for a new partners, or even if we've already married them. Um, if you had a parent who wasn't very affectionate, you end up somehow marrying somebody who's withholding in some way. Maybe they're physically affectionate,

but they're emotionally withholding, or vice versa. Um, if you had a parent who drank a lot, suddenly you're like, wait a minute, I'm with somebody who has some kind of addiction. And so what happens is when you're drawn to someone, you think, oh, that person is going to be so different from that person who hurt me in

the past. Because they present very differently. But once you're actually in the relationship, you start to notice, wait a minute, And what happened was it was like you're unconscious was saying, hey, you look familiar, come closer, but your conscious mind is like, you don't look familiar at all. That's why I want you.

It's called repetition compulsion. And basically, you know, the unconscious mind is sort of like, well, this time I'm going to get what I didn't get, right, So it's like you lost before, and this time I'm gonna win this time, I'm going to get that from that kind of person, this is comply outside of our awareness. And by the way, this doesn't happen once you've kind of worked through whatever happened earlier, So it only happens when it's still sitting there.

That's why we say we marry our unfinished business. I mean, I'm a child of multiple divorces, and now that I've done some work, I look back and I think what my parents did was they started with whatever were their issues, you know, with their parents, and then they married somebody that looked totally different, and then went, oh no, not that, and then react, which I know as a teenager. I looked at that and said, I'm not going to do this.

I'm going to be very conscious of not having a reactive set of relationships, right, And that's very common in what happens is what we want in our relationships as you want to feel a sense of home, but but a healthy home, a safe home, a loving home. And so if you do that kind of reactive thing and you go completely the other way, that person is going to be so different from you that they won't feel like home at all. You won't really have any any

sort of touch points, anything in common. I think we've all had relationships that didn't work out for whatever reason. Talk to me about how I wrestle with the idea of moving on from a toxic relationship and yet allowing it to be a particle of what makes up who

I am. I'm so glad you asked that, because this is one of the most common questions that we get to the Dear Therapist podcast where somebody rights in and they say it was in this relationship and I'm having so much trouble moving on from it, not because they necessarily want to be with the person anymore, but because it sort of scarred me, and what happens is usually the person is sort of telling a story about that

relationship that again needs some editing. So their idea of what happened in that relationship and their idea of what it means about them is something that is distort And so it's important to look at your role in what didn't work in the relationship, but it's also to be able to distinguish what was yours and what was theirs.

And I think that so many times what happens is, especially if you did not want the relationship to end, you think there's something unlovable about you, there's something wrong with you. Um, you know, why did this person not love me enough to want to marry me? Why did this person pick that person over me? Or sometimes people have said things to them really upsetting things that are just not true for all kinds of reasons that don't

match the reality of you. For example, we had somebody right into the podcast and they said, you know, I was with this person and then at the end he said, you know, he never really loved me. And you know, you know, like all these things that were just so cruel that were said to them, that were said, yeah, the person said later when it kind of exploded. People will say all kinds of things to protect themselves, to

justify things to themselves, to make themselves feel better. Um, the person who said that had a lot of sort of narcissistic tendencies that you know, sort of came out at the end of this very cruel explosion. But she took it literally. She she thought what this person is

saying is true and it's not. And so I think that's where a lot of people feel stuck and like they can't move on because they're they're sort of like replaying those scenes in their minds as if you know, they're accurate when they're not, which is giving that person a tremendous amount of power to right. It's sort of like, how did that person become the arbiter of your self worth? You know, you can have a good experience as a child and still fall prey to this because those intimate

relationships are so powerful. You know, you can still be incredibly hurt and confused and just gutted by the end of a romantic relationship, even if your childhood gave you sort of the foundation of having a loving relationship. So how do we not get in a relationship with someone who's similar to someone we may have been hurt by in the past. So it's really important to understand, Yes, that other person was hurtful to me in these ways, but why was I drawn to that person? Why? And

then why did I stay? So a lot of times people say, well, you know, what do all these guys have in common? It's what what is it about me that I keep going after people who are going to disappoint me? Right? You hear women say a lot you know, I'm just attracted to bad boys, and it's kind of like, well, why what is it in you that is attracting you to quote unquote bad boys? Right? So you want healthy chemistry.

There's unhealthy chemistry and there's healthy chemistry. The unhealthy chemistry is that there's incredible draw to these very toxic people. That's unhealthy chemistry. Healthy chemistry is Wow, I'm really excited about this person. I want to get to know them better. Right. It's funny because I was attracted to unhealthy qualities when I was, you know, in my twenties, one after another, and when I finally did a lot of therapy and

later on in my thirties met my husband. Uh, I had that sort of healthy reaction, which is I want to talk to him and get to know him better. And then for me, the fact that I was sexually attracted to him was like, oh, thank god, it's there. It's all there, because I I always thought I wouldn't be, you know, right right right, Well, that's what people imagine, and that's the excuse that they give themselves. There's this

woman in the book. I called her Charlotte in the book, and she's this young woman who keeps dating the wrong people over and over and over, and she sort of has this attitude that a lot of people have when they don't realize that they have this role in what's going on. And she's like, men are terrible, you know, like men are just there's no good men out there. And it's like, no, there are plenty of good men out there. You just you just don't seem to be

attracted to any of them. Um. And it's not because they're not attractive, by the way, right um. And so it's like what you said with George is like, oh, yeah, you know, you you can have both and and most people who are happily in really and ships and happily married that's what they have, um, but I think that that would happen with her, as you know. Then then she finally meets this guy in the waiting room of my therapy office who happens to be seeing another therapist

in my suite. So then he shows up to therapy with this other woman like in the waiting room, and we're trying to figure out, you know, is it his sister. Maybe they're doing family therapy, and I'm like, no, I'm sure it's like his girlfriend. And of course it is,

because that's who she goes after. Unavailable men. That's what she is drawn to, and isn't until she can really see the connection between her father, who was somebody who would be incredibly loving and incredibly available and then kind of disappear, right and then he'd be incredibly loving and available and then disappear. Those were the men she went after, and she refused to acknowledge that there was any connection between what she grew up with and what she was

drawn to as an adult. And once she started to see that, then she had to confront her relationship with her father, and she had to talk to her father about relationship, and she had to come to some place of being an adult in that relationship and not being the vulnerable child every time he disappointed her, because he would continue to disappoint her as an adult. Right, what a lot of people are trying to do in their adult relationships is get a redo on their childhood with

this person who is not their parents. And it's not their responsibility to give you a redo on your childhood. And also they can't. And if Charlotte found somebody that she was attracted to because he was sort of hard to obtain and she finally did get him, let's say he was completely there for her, wouldn't she ultimately, if she hasn't dealt with her own stuff with her father, lose interest in him. Well, what happens is people who have that kind of upbringing have a fear of abandonment.

They pick people who are not going to really be intimate with them, right, be emotionally intimate with them, who are really going to be there for the long haul. They actually pick people who will abandon them because then they don't actually have to be intimate with somebody where it matters. And so this whole thing about chemistry where they meet someone great and they say, yeah, but I'm

not really attracted to him. That's because he actually won't abandon you, and you will be forced to be in this relationship that will make you so uncomfortable because he's going to show up and he's going to be present, and he's not going to put up with all your bs, right like he's going to call you on your stuff and and you know you're going to have to This is like primetime relationship now, and you're not really ready for prime time because you are so afraid of showing

up and being intimate because that hasn't worked out well in the past. And how can we be sure that our president or future relationship is going to be a healing one? Like how do we know we're not in the habits? And you can't be I mean, the price of loving is is that you know you can get hurt. You will get hurt, even when it's the right person. Look at what happens. You know, how many times do

we hurt the people that we love unwittingly? We don't mean to hurt them, but we do because we're human and we're imperfect, and so we will get hurt by the people that we love, and we will hurt the people that we love. But the question isn't will I get hurt or will I hurt someone? It's what happens when we try to repair it. How do we do

the process of repair with each other? And so we we have this phrase rupture and repair, So there will be ruptures in any intimate loving relationship, and the question is how do you repair? And if you are good at repairing together, then that's a really healthy relationship. What do you do about when we disagree? How do we repair that? When we've hurt somebody and we didn't mean to, How do we repair that we've heard someone and we met to because we were we regressed in that moment, right,

how do we repair the um? And we do that? You know you practice that with your kids all the time. Right? Are you the parent who can say to your child, I made a mistake, I'm so sorry, and then your kid learns how to do that, and your kid grows up and says, I know how to do that in relationship. It's funny. I just had that with one of my daughters the other day. Whereas I an old habit would have been uh it just to be defensive. Well, that's because you do that that's why I said that. That's

why I did that. It took a lot for me, and it was It was very healing for both of us to go to her room and go, you know what, you're right, and I believed it. It's true, she was right and I was sorry. That's soothed her instantly, Whereas we could have had a fight that lasted days, right, and and it brings you closer when you're able to say, you know what, I screwed up, I'm so sorry, it creates more trust between you. I had a relationship that

I ended because of it. I had a full depression afterwards. I was crying. You would think that I was a person that was broken up with and it took me a really long time to understand, like why am I so upset I ended it? Well, I think what people don't understand too, is just that a relationship, and so

does the future that you had imagined. So it's like, here's a plot twist in your story, and people grieve even if they don't want to be in that relationship, even if, like in your case, you were the one who broke it off because it wasn't the right relationship. You're grieving this idea that you had in your head of I found my person, and um, this is what the future is going to look like. And now you're back to will I ever find the person? What's going

to happen? All of that uncertainty. Humans don't do well with uncertainty. And sometimes the reason that people stay in relationships aren't working longer than they should is because there's the certainty of what's right in front of you, even if the certainty of what's right in front of you isn't great, versus the uncertainty of will I ever find what I'm actually looking for? It's kind of like the devil.

You know. It's interesting because we're living in a world of uncertainty right now, and so I think it makes everybody completely anxious, right And and with that, just like with the end of a relationship, comes that grief and that loss. Um, there's the loss of the illusion of certainty, right and so much this year, of course has been lost, literally like loss of life, loss of health, loss of jobs, loss of income, lots of dreams. People think, well, if I have a roof over my head and food on

the table, I'm not allowed to feel that loss. And when you go back to that question that you asked about going to therapy. That's what prevents people from going to therapy, that they think there's this hierarchy of pain and that you know, we don't do that, by the way, with our physical health. So what we do with our emotional health is we say, yeah, I'm I'm sad, or I'm anxious, or I'm having trouble in my relationship or my marriage, but I'm not going to go see someone

because you know, it's not that bad. I'm not suicidal, right right, right, you know, it's like I can still function. Right. Um, when you break your arm, you don't say, well, I don't have cancer, so I'm not going to go to the doctor and get an extra and get a past because it's not that bad compared to somebody who has cancer, Parkinson's or whatever it might be. But that's what we

do with our emotional health. You know, it's like, well, yeah, something feels off, I feel stuck, I feel like something's not working in my life, but you know, it's not that bad, so I'm just gonna wait. And what happens is people don't come to me until they're having the equivalent of let's say, an emotional heart attack, and at that point it's harder to treat because now you're in

a much more difficult place. So we have to kind of get you back to baseline and then work with what we would have worked with if you'd come in at that time. And also, and more importantly, you've suffered unnecessarily for however long. So often when people come into therapy, I'm not just asking what's going on right now? I want to know why now, why, this day, this week, this month did you make the call? Because for me,

I'm assessing for readiness. And hopefully it's not a problem that's been going on for years, but sometimes it is, and I always feel like, wow, I wish that we could get the message out to people. You don't need to wait years to go and talk to somebody. Right, the lyrics are I'm here because of a breakup, But what is the underlying soundtrack? Right? I always say I'm listening for the music under the lyrics, And the lyrics are I'm here because of a miscarriage, I'm here because

of trouble in my marriage. I'm here because I'm depressed. He was some kind of loss um. But the music is what is the underlying struggle or pattern going on here that maybe plays into this. It's interesting. I have a friend who so wanted this picturesque life, you know, like we talked about like the dream, and her marriage blew up and it turned out he was a methodict

and gay and embezzled all their money. And I said to her, you need to go into therapy right away, and she said, why, it's you know, the worst is over. And it's interesting because I hear that a lot, the excuse of, well, we broke up, it's over, you know, push it down, move on, And those are the people that aren't dealing with it's scary, deeper stuff, right. So you called it scary, But see, I don't think of our feelings is scary. I think that our feelings are

like a compass. They're like GPS. They tell us what direction to go in, and if we're not paying attention to our feelings, it's like it's like walking around with a faulty GPS. You don't know how to make choices or decisions that are good for you because you're not paying attention to the information that your feelings are giving you. And so what do people do when they don't want to feel their feelings. First of all, they judge them. They're like, I'm sad or I'm anxious. That's a bad feeling.

It's like, no, there are no good feelings or bad feelings, even envy. I always say to people, follow your envy. It tells you what you want. It tells you about desire, and if you kind of stuff down your envy, you will do nothing to pursue your desire. And so what do we do when we have a feeling that we characterize as bad. Well, you can think that you're kind

of stuffing down your feelings, but you're not. You can't compartmentalize them that well for very long, and so it comes out in too much food or too much wine, or an inability to sleep, or a short temperate nous, or problems in relationships or the mindless scrolling through the internet. Right, we don't want to feel. So people come into therapy and they're in pain and they say, help me not to feel. And they say, no, I'm going to help

you to feel, because that's where freedom lies. So beautifully said, we're gonna take a short break and we'll be right back. You're listening to go ask Alli, let's get back to the conversation for couples, you know, and again I want to keep it about sort of growing a relationship with yourself, but but many of us have uh a significant other

and it's incredibly difficult. I would imagine when one person wants to kind of quote unquote do the work and the other person doesn't or were there reluctantly pulled in the therapy. Um, when a couple comes into you, can you tell right away if it's going to work, if

it's not going to work. Yeah, So, you know, even on the podcast recently, we had this situation where the woman in the marriage had cheated on the guy and at first she did not want to be in the marriage, but then she came back to him and it was very apparent to us that she really didn't want to be in the marriage, that she was doing that for the kids and a sense of sort of safety, but she really didn't love her husband, and he could not see that. We tried to help him see that was

going on. It's very painful when that happens. Um, you can't do couples if both people aren't interested in in doing the work. And so what I do before people come in if they want to stay together. I always say I want you each before the first session to write down not what you want the other person to do, but what you want to do to improve this relationship.

And that changes the whole dynamic of what the couple's therapy is like because instead of coming and say, well, you need to do this and I'm not getting this and this needs to happen. It's no matter what the other person does or doesn't do. Here's what I am going to do to improve this and let's see what happens when I take the steps to make this relationship back. Have you ever said to a couple it's not gonna work.

I'm just gonna stop you right now. Well, sure, I mean if if, If you're not going to be honest. That's the biggest obstacles, people really being honest about what they want and where they are. So they're they're pretending, and then they don't really want to come to therapy, you know, they're sort of like become late or they won't show up and the other person is waiting there for them. I need them to be able to say in the room I'm not sure, and for the other

person to be able to tolerate that. Can you tolerate the I'm not sure of your partner and do this work together, you know, without being like, well, if you're not sure, I'm leaving right, because then you're never going to see what could be between the two of you. And sometimes the work is how can we split up? Right? Like where they both are saying, we don't want to be together. We know this is over, but we want

to learn how to co parent together. We want to learn how because we're going to have a relationship with each other for the rest of our lives, because we have kids together. When a couple comes in and you see that one person has not dealt with sort of letting go of path toxic relationships, do you ever sort of split them up and say you need to do individual therapy and we'll also deal with it and how you sort of interact in your marriage or your relationship.

Oh yeah, I mean absolutely, sometimes people need to do individual work. I will say that couples therapy can sometimes move you along individually a lot quicker than individual therapy. Will Oh, that's interesting because I am seeing you in relation to somebody else who is not me, and so so when somebody comes in, it takes me longer to figure out, well, what might be going on with their partner? What part of this story are they not telling me?

What parts of the story are they emphasizing or minimizing in terms of their own role in it? Because of shame, Right, that's why people don't talk about those parts. In a couple of therapy and hearing parts of the story that the other person is leaving out because their partner is sharing that with me, so I get a much fuller picture. And you know, as you say, the nuture of life is to change, but the nature of people is to

resist change. And if we're speaking now to a lot of people that want to improve themselves and their life, how do we jump that hurdle of resistance? Right? Well, you know, I think that part of the resistance is that we are worried that we're going to again go into this place that's unfamiliar to us. So I think change is listening to what is that voice that's preventing you from changing? What is that voice in your head? Um?

And I will say, by the way, that we are so self critical when we actually into that voice, when we're talking so much about relationships today, and we're talking about relationships to others, and I want to talk for a minute about our relationship to ourselves, because we can be our own worst enemies. And when I give talks, I will often say to people, you know, show of hands, who's the person that you've talked to most in the course of your life. Isn't your partner? Million hands go up?

You know? Is it your sister, isn't your mother, isn't your best friend? Is it? You know? Who? Who is it? Right? Um? Lots of people think that that's the person they talked to most in the course of their lives. But the truth is the person we talk to most in the course of our lives is ourselves. And what we say to ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful. So I had this patient who came to me and I could tell she was so self critical and she could

not see it. And I said, listen, I want you to go home and really listen to that voice in your head, and I want you to write down everything you say to yourself over the course of a few days and cut back next week. Who we'll talk about it. So she comes back the next week and she starts to read this. She had dutifully done the assignment, and she's crying and she says, I can't even read this.

I am such a bully to myself. And there were things like just in the course of a day, as she listened to herself, like she made this very minor mistake, and as she was working, and she said, God, you're such an idiot, right, and it's really really like just a horrible tone to herself. If her friend had made that very same mistake, she would not for a second think that her friend was an idiot, and she would

not have handled it that way. Or just like she saw herself when she was walking by like a store window and she thought, God, you're so ugly. You look terrible to me, you know, and you would never I mean just that things we say to ourselves we don't even realize that we're saying that. Some people think, well, you know, that's how I hold myself accountable, that's how I grow and change, as if I'm really tough on myself. No, actually that's the opposite. If you talk to yourself that way,

it creates shame. And what do we do when we feel shame? We hide. It's not like we say, yeah, I'm going to improve myself now because I'm so uglier, I'm so incompetent, and I'm such an idiot. Think about it as how you would talk to your child. If you said to your child, you made that mistake, you're such an idiot. Are they going to be motivated to change? No? Are they going to learn from that? No? Will they grow from that? No. So when you think about self, compassion,

that is how people change. Like if you're compassionate with your child, if you say, oh, honey, listen, you made a mistake there, let's talk about that, let's understand that better. Then your kid is going to grow from that. They're going to be kinder to themselves, and then they're going to say, oh, next time, now we know what to do. And so if you're compassionate with yourself, you're not going to be bathed in shame, and therefore you'll be able to look at your mistake for what it was and

then you'll be able to make changes. So in a relationship, if you say, wow, I'm able to apologize, right, you know who are the people who can't apologize in a relationship Are the people who have so much shame around their mistakes. They grew up thinking I have to be perfect. I can't acknowledge when I make a mistake, because then

I'm going to be shamed. So they don't want to apologize to their partner because they think that their partner is going to say, oh, see you were wrong, I was right, when their partner is not going to do that at all. Their partner is going to really appreciate that you can take responsibility for your role and whatever happened, And so what do you do with you know? I like to think of it as like a little film clip that goes over and over in your head, that

are those bad messages? How do you stop that? If I wanted to learn how to sort of self soothe and be loving to myself, what would I do? How would I start? Well? I think you have to notice what is the story that you have in your head, and then you have to really examine that story. And sometimes people are carrying around these very old stories that just not only aren't accurate, but we're never accurate, but they were told to you, and so you believe that

they're accurate. But as an adult, it's like wearing clothes that don't fit you anymore. You're just carrying it around because you've never taken the time to step back and say, wait a minute, does this really fit this story? Is this really does this really match my reality right now in this moment? And what you find is that it really doesn't. And you can rewrite your story. If you don't revise your story, you will relive your story. And

what about the bully in your head? You know, I've always thought, well, those damaging I call them damaging messages in my head, But maybe they've propelled me to where I am today. Maybe I wouldn't, you know, have had success in the entertainment industry if I wasn't so hard to myself. Chris Rock famously says he if he wasn't bullied as a kid, he never would have become a comedian. Sometimes are these voices beneficial? Do they push us forward?

I think the experience of being bullied makes you a keen observer of the world because you go into this your place, you're very alone. You feel very alone when you're bullied when you're young, and you don't have a lot of support. So when Chris Rock says, you know,

and I don't know what history is at all. So I don't want to be presumptuous, but I would say that when people make those kinds of comments, like, well, I was bullied and it made me like a comedian or a writer or whatever, that's because you were a keen observer. You know pain, you know what it's like to be alone, you know what it's like to feel things. And is that different from the voice in your head that bullies you? Is right? And so the voice in

your head is the internalized bully. And the question is, you know, why do you need that? And some people think I need that because that's what propelled me, That's what got me to this place. But no, what got you to this place was was your reaction to saying something is not right about the way that I'm being treated. This is not right, and so why would you keep doing that to yourself? Now you can say, oh why wait. I have the freedom to look at things a little

bit differently. I have the freedom to treat myself with more race than I was offered when I was younger. And it's from that place of grace that not only will you be more compassionate to yourself, but you'll be more compassionate with others and that will help you to have stronger connections in your life. And when you have stronger connections in your life, you live a more fulfilling life.

And there's this myth that as a writer, and I'm a writer too, so there's this myth that as a writer, you know, you have to have the sort of tortured existence to have material um and that is such a myth. I treat so many creative people in my practice and they're so afraid of letting go of their pain because they feel like, well, then what am I gonna How am I gonna write? I write from a place of pain? Is like no, you write from a place of knowing. You write from a place of knowing what it's like

to feel. Pain is like this monolith. Pain is you know, you think that it's your pain, is like your's like your teddy bear from when you were a child, this pain because that's all you knew. It's familiar, right, familiar. You don't need that teddy bear anymore because that teddy bear actually is not comforting. That's so interesting Before I turn this into a personal therapy, how how often does that happen? When you do a podcast with somebody and

they just start clearly voicing their own issues. Um. It happens on airplane. Oh, I'm sure you know when when people say what do you do? I never say I'm a therapist. I always say I'm a writer, and then nobody wants to talk to you. If you say you're a therapist, you are stuck next to somebody for the entire duration of the flight, where they feel like, oh, let me tell you about this argument I just had

with my mother exactly. I mean, in my head, all I'm doing is now, don't ask her about that stuff with George, you know, but I wanted to end the podcast with, dear therapist, what are you finding? Is uh something you're hearing more and more about on your podcast. I think that COVID amplified whatever people we're already dealing with. So if somebody was anxious, it amplified their anxiety. If they were depressed, amplified their depress But I don't think

that the concerns themselves were so different. And you wrote that the opposite of depression isn't happiness but vitality, and I think now more than ever, we can disrupt the depressive state with action, right, Well, that's right, creating social connections and finding compelling reasons to get out of bed besides you know, binge watching Netflix and eating ice cream, and there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. So I want to say that it's a balance, you know.

I think that we need time to ourselves. So I think so many people are talking about connect connect, connect, and people feel a lot of pressure around that. They feel like, well, wait a minute, I just need time to think. I need space for myself sometimes, especially if you've got young children or you're juggling a lot of things. Um. But I think that it's really important that we have that balance. It's not just like let me just keep moving, let me just take action so I don't feel my feelings.

I think you have to feel what you're feeling, and I think you also have to do something and you have to be in motion too. During COVID, a lot of people have said, um, you know what relationships matter to me? Which relationships do I want to prioritize and which ones are not really ones that I want to

invest my emotional real estate. That's been a really positive thing, as people are saying I was wasting a lot of time on a relationship that is not that important to me or that doesn't really nourish me, and I wasn't spending enough time on this other relationship that is really bringing me so much joy right now. And I think at the end, what every question is about is how can I love and be loved. I think that that's at the core of every single dilemma, issue, problem that

people grapple with in life. So again it's it's connecting, it's reaching out, but I think it's knowing your audience, like reaching out to people who are nourishing to you. That's a great way to end this podcast. Thank you, Louri god Like. This was amazing. Well, thank you so much for the conversation. Of course, I can talk about relationships forever me too, and I'm again trying to was trying to veer off making it all about me, because I could go through every relationship if I've had in

my life, starting with my parents. But I'll come see you offline. Thank you so much for being with us today, my pleasure. I'm a huge advocate for therapy, and I've had a lot of bad therapy. I remember one time being in therapy and somebody knocked on the door it was the patient for the next hour, and both the therapist and I were fast asleep. So there's that kind

of therapy and there's actually good therapy. And I think now there are so many outlets, So do yourself a favor, whether you can afford to have therapy, or you can listen to podcasts about therapy or read columns like Dear Therapist, Um, you won't be sorry, and it actually helps you to do that inner work so that we could all kind of stay away from the toxic situations and relationships in our life. Thank you for listening to Go ask Alli.

Join me next week when I talk with actress activists and Phil Donahue's better half Marlo Thomas about the ingredients to a long and loving marriage. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me on social media on Twitter Ali E Wentworth and on Instagram the Real Ali Wentworth And if you have questions or guests you'd like to hear from, I'd love to hear from you. Call or text me at three to three four six three five six or email me Go ask Aali podcast

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