Julia Samuel

that really does sound disgusting. Though. I have to say, however, I can think of some brilli rank things that my mother used to make, boiled beef and carrots, spoiling beef. She's trying to find a way of doing it so it would be tender, and it turns out there is no where. Hello, I'm Mini Driver. Welcome to Many Questions,

Season two. I've always loved Pruce's question. It was originally a nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. It's just the scientific method, really. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make

observations about which truths appear to be universal. I love this discipline and it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted prus questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think a pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest?

What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with.

You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is best selling author and psychotherapist Julia Samuel doing my own podcast feels like therapy an awful lot of the time, so it felt only right to have an actual psychotherapist

on the show. I was first introduced to Julia's work when my mom died and somebody gave me her extraordinary book, which is called Grief Works. And even though I couldn't read it right away because reading about other people's experiences of grief and loss just compounded my own. But it's interesting. In the process of grief, you reach a point where you need to feel that solidarity, or I did, and you need to feel like you're not alone. And that

book helped me so much. And every time I have a conversation with Julia, I feel like I unravel some deep Gordian knot that I've been holding onto. And this conversation that we had was no different what person, place, or experience most altered your life Working in the NHS. Will you explain what the NHS is, because I have

a lot of American listeners. Yes, so the NHS is held in this sort of brand of What is the best thing about the UK is that you can be ill and go into an NHS hospital or doctor and at the point of meeting you never have to pay whatever is wrong with you, whether it's acute, whether it's chronic, you will have your health needs met. And it is true. Of course, it's also broken system because the weight and

burden of it is so enormous. But for me, I mean, I'm now on the Ethics Commission of Imperial College because I couldn't leave it, and I still meet the doctors. So for me, I would walk there from home. It's about half an hour walk from when I was thirty two, an hours fifty six and wearing my lanyard. I loved my NHS lanyard that would give me ten percent of from the coffee shop. But also beat doors, opened the door, and as I beaked into the door, there's this crappy

building that is Victorian and falling apart. But I belonged, and there was a little sign that said, you know, psychotherapists this way. And it was this thing of being part of something that was so much bigger than me.

There was the building that contained me, the people in it who I knew for decades, the nurses, the amazing doctors, going up to the special care baby unit, going into the pediatric intensive care unit, working on the maternity wards, the families I met who when I was there, there was seventy five languages spoke in the hospital every day, so I met thousands of types of lives and living and beliefs, and it expanded me. And I kept my lanyard. I can't I don't know what to do with it.

I honestly want to kind of embalm it in silver frame it. Oh my gosh, definitely I'll do that for you. I have to say, that's the most inspiring answer to that question I think I've ever heard on this podcast, because it is the thing that makes me proudest to be British is the NHS. It's the fact that we postwar like looked at what had happened to all these people, and as a society and as a country, made this change to go. We will have socialized medicine. No one

will pay for healthcare. We will take care of everybody. There was just something out a country that wraps its arms around you, and then that people go and that you work there for peanuts. You work there and you are in service. All the nurses and all the doctors and all the people that work on those wards are there in service of the people that live in that country, and there's something that is so beautiful and community based,

so it's incredible. It was incredible being part of something where I saw those doctors would work fifteen hours to save a child's life. I would support teams of nurses when there's been a death, or and doctors, or we go out and have most disgusting pizza to celebrate it Christmas. But it was the best Christmas party I ever had, you know, all of those things because of the dark humor and the knowing each other and the tears and

the hugs and the intensity and the exhaustion. But also they saved lives and I had a tiny part to playing that. I supported the families through them and it was just I feel so lucky. So what quality do you like least about yourself? Do you have an alm? Yeah? Actually I do quite like myself. But the one I don't like because it scares me, is I'm not good with my own anger. It kind of sits in me and it kind of ruminates and tox ifies all my

other feelings. And except for my husband, I'm really good at being angry with and he's quite good at kind of dealing with me when I'm angry, I'm not good at expressing it, and then of course it hangs around, and then I kind of wake up at four in the morning wanting to punch someone's lights out, rather than as I would tell them to do if they were my client, to be a sort of talk clearly, say what you're upset about, you be specific, But I don't.

I don't do it myself very much because I'm so friended of them knocking me out when I'm angry with it? Has that happened? Have you been overwhelmed by your rage? Twice with one of my children and with my husband? That is not said with pride. I understand that I feel like everybody has, and the people we are angry is with and hate the most normally well, in my case, the people I love the most and need the most. In difference is the opposite of love, isn't it not hate?

So it's people that really make okay. I can be annoyed with someone at work, we don't really want to punch their lights. It's people that I really care about who really get to me. I think that's a very

noble way of looking at anger. I don't know there's someone right now who I am so angry with, and they are not somebody that I love, and they've triggered in me all of these feelings of like lack of self worth and there are really in quotes powerful person and the fact that they're a woman makes everything worse. But it's funny. I've just sort of been sitting with the anger, and as opposed to being triggered by it,

I've sort of been. I've been trying to be fascinated by it and interested and curious, and it hasn't shifted anything yet, but it feels slightly more or being the observer with it than being in it. It's weird. It makes my heart beat faster actually thinking about even thinking about it. It's so interesting with such little animals. I mean, we really are. We We forget because we think we're so bloody clever, but we're really not very well animals,

and we respond like animals. And I mean, I would guess I have not the faintest idea and I could be completely wrong that the level of your anger is probably to do with an earlier part of you that felt overpowered by someone it is that probably wasn't this person. No, it's exactly right. It was being bullied by a girl when I was younger. It's the same feeling of powerlessness to make them like you. But that comes with shame. It's huge amount of shame because you can't help but go.

There must be something wrong with me because this person doesn't like me as opposed to there is something going on with them that makes them need to be whatever it is, aggressive or intolerant of people around them. But I don't know. I like the idea that even someone like you who helps people all the time with the things that are difficult in their own lives, that of course you deal with things that are difficult about your own character, but that the awareness is surely what makes

it bearable. I mean, I have as many flaws and battles as other people. I can probably tell you what my flaws are because I have quite a lot of insight after like thirty two years of doing this thing. But I'm as flawed as everybody else. And for my family, it's unbelievably annoying when people come up to them and say things to my husband like, oh, your wife, she's amazing, She's amazing. I mean, this must happen to you too.

And he literally wants to say well, he does say, well, you should try being married to her, and then they say no, and I'm standing there. I've just been a complete cow in the car, all the way wherever it is, been a total bit And then I'm smiling. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, oh my god. But this is what When I came on your podcast, we talked about this, because I'm still obsessed with it. I think I've been upset with it.

My whole life is the idea of being completely aware of a quality that is not necessarily a good quality that we see about ourselves, and the effect that it has on the world around us, and yet there doesn't seem to be any evolution in the way in which

one interacts with it apart from having an awareness. I literally feel like I went from being ignorant about my ship to being completely aware of it and being able to talk about it and give it a name and be articulate and probably right about it, and yet I haven't seen any actionable change. I always thought that becoming aware about something would be the kind of nascent point of the evolution of that difficult thing. And why the

fund is that not true? Because you're who ever told you that knowing something and naming it would make you three hundred and six degrees unflawed. I do. I have this idea that there is this place where you can take all of the hard things about yourself, and that if you do the right things, you can clean them up and then they will heal and you will be

a better person. Well, I don't know which books you've been reading, but from my understanding is it isn't that we take our bad stuff, turned it up and make it look nice and shiny and new. It's that we have all the wounds that we had. We get ignited, annoyed, triggered in the same ways that we always have the same fault lines. The thing that awareness does, it means

that we can choose between response and action. So you have that moment where you choose, and in that choice is the difference between a serious disaster and actually speaking out for yourself. Because how you represent that part of you that wants to say, punch this woman's lights out will be informed by all the different aspects of yourself that are going on. But you can do it with a kind of confidence and assertiveness. I mean, I'm saying

this having not been good at anger myself. But what I'm arguing is that there is never going to be a picture perfect version of any one of us. It's how we manage our fault lines and frailties and stuff. Well, perhaps that's what I can work on, or that we could all work on. Is managing I mean, Julia, I'm ashamed that I wrote a book called Managing Expectations, and yet my expectations are completely unmanageable. What relationship, real or fictionalized,

defines love for you? It is my husband. I mean, I've been married forty two years. I got married when I was twenty wow, and I'm sixty three, and without question, it was the single best decision I ever made in my life, and one I did really from complete ignorance. I mean, I was literally just twenty. I got engaged two weeks after my twentieth birthday. Holy ca. I mean, I want to run him over, obviously, and all of

those things. But he knows me, and he loves me as he knows me, and I feel safe with him. What are the chances of two people's evolution as parallel individuals but joined together in holy matrimony? What are the chances that you would manage to evolve in concert with each other, and are there things that you both had to do in order for that to work. I think that if you look at the stats, it's just under probably couples divorce, but more couples don't marry, and their

stats of separation are higher than divorce. But to marry somebody at twenty, when you're closer to a child, you're closer to being a little child than you are to being like who you are today? Like what's your husband's name? Michael? So you and Michael? Like I just find it fascinating that if he was in his twenties that twenty year old Michael and twenty year old Julia can have of two, thirty, thirty five and now sixty. My aunt who was married for sixty years, she said it was just a decision.

It's a decision that you keep making every single day, and that it's no more complicated than that. But I feel like there must be some extraordinary thing that people who get married in their twenties and are still married when they're sixty one do or figure out, and what can you please tell me what that is? I think your aunt is right I think he's partly a decision. I think all the things that you've heard, you know, many times from many people before, is like if you

ask yourself the question, are we a good fit? Do we have the same beliefs? Do we have the same outlook? Are we good at repairing after a rupture? Do we talk the same or collaborative love language? Do we love each other in the right way? You know that works for each of us. I mean, one of the things that works for me is that I have to work quite hard to get his attention and his love, and that is quite good for me. It really drives me nuts,

but it keeps to be interested, right. And also the kind of other men that I was brought up with, they never believed in me to work or have a career or to use my brain. And he always and his mother actually always from the moment we got together, wanted me to work. I think he wanted me to work because he wanted me to be tired and less sassy, less sassy and not having affairs tire her out. Should be too tired to have an affair, should be too

tired to give me lip. I think that is part of it, and the idea of me having lunch people all the time and shopping. It just was not his thing. But luckily I always worked, So I mean I worked from when I left school at sixteen. I've never not had a job. That's really funny. I love that love would be having you know, a really robust work ethic for your partner Like that's that's really sexy and romantic actually because there's longevity built into that. Well, because he

doesn't have to meet all of my needs now. And I think that's also the biggest misnomer is the idea that our love partner should somehow tick all of the boxes of the things that we need from other people. It's just absolute bollocks. So I mean having a job that I find that I can do, which because he earns a lot more than me, he enabled me to do. I have a completely different work identity where I'm not known as his wife, I'm not known as a mother. I'm known for my job as a therapisn't that I

can go on doing? You know, all of my lot of my friends, their children have left home, the husbands are retiring, and they're kind of you know, working in bits and bobs. But I have this kind of machine inside my brain that just wants to keep going, and it keeps me interested, and I think it keeps me interesting. I mean I'm not always interesting, obviously, but having a purpose to get up for. Freud talked about love and work. You need love for connection and meaning, but you also

need work for structure and meaning. And you know, what are you for? I've always known what am I fault? It is so interesting curiosity, enthusiasm. I mean, my mother did everything she possibly could to keep her businesses afloat and was constantly making financial choices that were startling to her children and maybe to other people of why she would keep investing in things that, by their metric weren't working. And it's not the only metric, it's not. And I

saw it was worth it. It was worth her putting all the money that she had into these businesses because her interest and her curiosity and her work ethic that's what made her happy. And the idea of sort of saving all her money, I think it was very much like, well, what am I saving it for? I need to keep investing in being engaged with life in the way that I see it. I really understand that, like how that fuels a life and keeps a person interested and interesting.

Being sixty two year sixty three, I'm of the age in the background, and I was never expected to work. So I have a twin brother who my father expected to go to university to go and get a job and to carry on working. Whereas when the school said to my dad she should say gay levels, my father went, what for? What would you be going to university for? What is the point? And it made a decision to

me From a very young age. I can remember sitting at my desk in my bedroom and to share with my sister who didn't like you at all, and doing my homework and work for me has been a savor, so using my brain, having homework to do, getting a job done, and it's probably been too much, but being determined to do it has saved me from many holes. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more work Before my son, work really was the great love of my life, I mean, and still is in a more balanced way.

I think when I talked to clients, who are you know in the stage like my daughters are, of having children and working, even keeping your foot in the work door to go back to that you can kind of work part time while you're parenting, then you can go back to it, because you know, it's likely if we're lucky, that we're going to have a long life. The average life expectancy for those of us that are kind of lucky as well is a hundred. So what were we going to do with all of that time if we're

not working? Yeah, it can't all be Love Island, Julia, clearly, Can you tell me about something that has grown out of a personal disaster? I can't. As it happens, I first went to a a when I was five. I started smoking when I was seven. That's a picture of me writing lines with my twin brother, Hugo, I promise I will never smoke again. And I started drinking when I was about eleven, and everyone in my family drank a huge amount. And luckily, I literally woke up one

day and I thought, I just can't do this. I can't do this, And I tried doing it on my own without a and I sort of count the number of units and then I do deals with myself the whole time, like if I more today, then I won't have to tomorrow, you know, But you get pissed one night. Then you'd have a hangover two days and then get pissed like day three or for whatever it is. And so I went to A and I did not speak a word for like two years. I only went twice

a week. I went at lunchtimes. It was near my office. That's what got me interested in therapy. I had no idea people could talk about how they felt. That was a whole new world to me. I always thought you just faked it and pretended everything was fine until I went to A. So that was your first experience of therapy was seeing somebody getting up to share. Was it shocking hearing them speak about how they felt about their life and the things that happened to them. I was

completely blown away, completely blown away. And the only person I told I was going was my husband because I didn't dare tell anybody because then, you know, this is forty forty years ago, was still quite shaming. Then there was a diction, was still quite a shameful thing. I haven't drank since then at all, But then when I used to go out for dinner, people would like look at me weirdly when I wasn't drinking, and they kind of try and ply you with drink and stuff. But

it was a complete revelation. It was amazing. But I didn't speak. I was just learning and taking it in, and I'd rehearse in my head what I would say, and I never dared actually speak it out. What made you eventually raise your hand? I can't remember. I genuinely can't remember. I would tell you, but I do remember speaking. And I didn't die, and the sky didn't fall in and people were kind. Did you have a sponsor even when you weren't speaking? I just like it was literally,

like it was my secret. I'd go in on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sneak out. I must have been ashamed of it. Well, you stayed, which is the only thing that matters. He stayed, and I stayed sober. He showed up when he stayed sober, amazing. I was cycling this morning and I had the first time I've ever had this thought, what if I start drinking again? What would happen if I started drinking again? And I thought, oh, that's such a dangerous thought. That is the gateway to

Julius Samon. You do not want to go down because you don't know what's the point of risking it. Yeah, I second that, Julia Samuel. Yes, I'll be the echo to your Jiminy cricket, keep cycling, don't drink. So what question would you most like answered? I'm going to have to put this in context. So the context is that

my specialty is children and babies dying. So for for like thirty years, I've supported families who have children and babies that and so my perception of children living to a long life has been changed by hours every working with terrible death. So my question, which actually makes me christ saying it, is are my children and my grandchildren going to live and have a long life? Because it's what I want more than anything else in the world,

makes my heart stop. I'm sure I can imagine exponentially as a grandmother, but it is the worst thought in the entire world as a mother, like it is, it's heart stopping. If you knew the answer that question, would it change the way in which you lived your life? Yeah?

I mean every night before I go to sleep, I thank God that my children are alive, and one of my grandchildren I say their name, every single one of them, and my sons in law and my daughter in law I'm not an anxious person, and I don't feel anxious all the time, but I think I would feel liberated in some way of having that as my worst worry. Yeah, listen, it's an awful to carry around having one child, having multiple children who then have partners and their own children.

It's a lot and a joy, you know, it's the greatest joy as well. You know. Love is a risky business, right, Yes, it really really is, and it is not build as such. I feel like I was sold a very odd bit of goods. I think by myself being the small shopkeeper that I was selling this idea that love was going to solve everything, as opposed to push you really to the limit and make you know yourself and give you

all these gifts. I mean, love in all of the books and the films that you're in and and other great movies does are in is like a soft skill, right, But love is hard. It's the hardest thing we do. It's the thing that matters most. That love is the strongest medicine. It's the thing that heals us and holds us together and gives our life meaning. And when we look back at our lives, it's the people that we've

loved and loved us that matter most. But also it's the hardest thing to sustain and allow ourselves to dare to love and take the risks and the costs. And it's build as a soft, easy thing, but it ain't. Yeah, And I think that's a lot of like Hollywood and music is where the way in which it is sold. But it is rigorous. Love is rigorous and deeply painful. But then so as being a human, you know, that could also be descriptive of the fundament of being alive.

You know. I remember the first head book I ever read, that's probably about twenty five, and there are lots of catastrophic things going wrong. And the first line of M. Scott Peck's book, A Roadless Traveled was life is difficult. And I thought, hang on, no one ever told me that, although it had been my entire life. But somehow it's

the secret that no one had said. It's normal that it's difficult, not like I'm struggling through it and I'm the one that's failing and everyone else has got it sorted. Life's difficult, right, Okay? Boom God. I mean I wish, first of all, I wish it was taught in schools in like a robust and fluid way. I wish we

were taught about love. I wish we were taught about death and were taught about these things as opposed to sort of picking it up from God knows where, like all these this little patchwork that I've used as a map in my life was created by this little child who had no idea about any of it, but piece

together what became pretty good. Man. Well, I mean, it's a constitution that I'm now finding it quite difficult to amend, even though I would really like to, like my ideas about love, I'm now, you know, at fifty two, I'm with this extraordinarily wonderful man, having been constantly in my life, absolutely sort of brought to my knees by my relationships with men, and in a way that I kept going, why am I not learning? Like? Why is everything seemingly repetitive?

And I feel like I'm only now being able to amend this constitution that I wrote when I was little about what love is or what love is meant to be because this person has this extraordinary spirit and patience and also what he call it. He said, we have a shared fortitude He's like, it's not me being patient with you. It's that we have a shared fortitude and I love that. But I'm only now figuring that out.

That's why I wish it was taught in schools, Like why I wish these big things like love and death and life were actually taught alongside physics and maths and history. I think they should be taught or at least discussed, you know, so that they're not this huge journey that a child is expected to go on with no tools. Because the tools that all children have they learned from the adults around them, and that's the map that they're given.

Their kind of internal working model of love looks like this, and moods look like this, and work looks like this. You learn it from the people around you, the adults around you. It's interesting when their tools have been my mother and my father's tools bore you just get on with it, which is a very very useful tool to have, but it also has implicit in it, like not dealing with stuff. Turn away, yeah, forget and move on, just keep going, kick on. That's the English saying exactly. It's

very very British, it really is. It is a very useful tool, but it needs to be augmented it and kick on and name what's going on, experience that, express it. Let the pain of it change you. Let pain is the agent of change. Let the pain run through you, and it's painful asitors, support yourself through it so that you are expanded and grow through the pain, rather than build your armor to block the pain in your life, Julia,

where and when were you happiest? It was not difficult for me to choose this because I'm never happy in those big kind of scale things like your birthday or

a big event. My happiest moments are those tiny moments like I remember New Year looking around the done room table and all my children were there, and they all had a partner who loved them, and they had jobs, and nobody had a problem, nobody had some awful thing that was happening, and I just felt this it makes me cry on me, so I felt this kind of relief like and then of course, by two weeks later,

something terrible happened and you go off again. But those moments of all of the people I love most in the world are loved and they have kids and they are happy is an amazing amazing moment. I love that so much. I think about that so much as well, of the lily padding, the leaping from the lily pad, Like is it the respite is the anomaly? The happy moments and the stress and the difficulty is what's normal?

Or is it the other way around? I look at it that the happier moments are the moments that sustain you when you go through the difficult moments. And sometimes I look back at them when it's been difficult. Quite soon after, I look back at them with a kind of poignancy, like Oh. I wrote a book called This Too Shall Pass, and at the beginning I said, you know, we say bad things are going to pass, but we have to remember things are going to pass too. It's

not just a one way street. Yes, but I as I can feel the bad thing happening, I then have It's like a photograph album the moments that have been good or it's often simple, isn't it When they're simple and it's not complicated, there's nothing big happening and they sustain me, completely sustain me. Do you return to them in moments of hardship? Do you consciously sit down and

remember something good? Remember sitting around the table with your children, all of them peaceful and content, And does that put a dent in the hard moments? Do you think in the peak of the hard moment, so you've just been told some bad news, it's too painful to look at the happy one because it's too far from where I am. But as the intensity lessons, then I can look back,

and that's what gives me hope. And the hope is the alchemy that turns a life around, you know, believing that I can have moments of that, and that I will have moments that because I've already had them, and I know from my job at myself that my belief

system is informed by my experience. And so my experience is that we can have really good times when everything is okay, they are quite rare, and we can have kind of life you know, normal times, and then there are the kind of also hopefully rare, very bad times, and knowing that we have all of those and seeing it like that enables me to kind of normalize it rather than well, I think you talk to me about this. When you're in the weather. You never believe the weather

is going to change, and then it does. Yeh In the moment when one wakes up every day and it's maybe faced with the same set of circumstances that have not yet changed. It's like they've just been there waiting at the end of your bed while you sleep. And if you know, you wake up and you've sat and breathed, and you've maybe done a little meditation or you've read something good, and yet still there they sit at the

end of your bed. Is there something that you do or that you recommend to people that they do to help engage with what's beyond that anxiety of circumstance to what I do? And it's so unsexy. I love un sexy. I want the flannel night dress of therapist. Thanks, I don't want the lingerie. The eighteen year army who was going forward did not see that I would be an expert on grieving a psychotherapist. I kind of thought I'd

be sexy and fancy. But now, well, why I said that was because I've had to work out for myself and for other people what works, and what works is not glamorous and sexy, but practical and the thing that works the best. Because grief or anxiety, a loss, whether it's a living loss from you know, bad news, your boyfriend's broken up, that you've lost your job, or from death. It hits your body and sends your body into hyper arizon.

So you're in kind of fourth gear. Your autonomic nervous system goes on vigilant, vigilante almost it can be that you own to attack. And the single thing that helps you most is get outside and take some exercise moving, even if you're in an urban environment. If you can get to a part better so cycle, run, walk fast, and even if you only do it for ten minutes, you will always feel better when you walk back through

the door. If you can walk back through the door and journal for like five minutes, do a breathing meditation for five minutes, and then give yourself a stauntingly good breakfast, you will feel much much better and be able to face the kind of waves of adversity and loss and whatever the feelings are as they are, sail your body. That is so brilliant. It's what I wailed the loudest is what can I do? I wail at my lovely boyfriend. I want something actionable? What can I do? And that

makes so much sense, But for you it's the sea. Yeah, it is you go surfing, but in London it's hard because there is no sea. I've often been known to run out of my house and up to the park and done exactly what you said. Just go and sit by the certain time and try and feel differently. Well, your body feels differently. Difficult feelings sit in your body and they're like looking for a place to go, and they're kind of an alert waiting for the threat to

come at you. So if you actually move your body, you tell your body you've flown, so you're throwing fight or flight. You've tell your body you've flown, so your cortisol levels drop and your oxytocin, your dopamine, your kind of connecting levels where you can connect with yourself. Get a hug from your boyfriend or anybody. I mean practically a stranger will always work for you. It's so interesting.

I do love I love the practical physical response to sort of encouraging a different way of feeling about something. And like you said, you can't get from abject misery to joy. The jump is too big. But to take small steps to put yourself physically, to tell your brain that you're in a different place, to tell your body are in a different place to then find your way

mentally to being in a different place. And then when you're in a different place, your relationship with what's troubling you has changed because you have the capacity to then think more clearly, to collaborate with someone else, to have a conversation with someone else, and their words, their warmth, their love and support for you can sink in. When you're like this hyper people, when they hug you, it's

like your brittle, it's like your armored. It never goes in, And you basically want to punch their light site and say because they're not fixing it. But when you've moved and you've calmed down and you're kind of centered, and you've given yourself a treat, I do think you know good breakfast or whatever it is. Your treat helps you're then open your expand your capacity to connect with other people.

And the single biggest thing for all of us, whatever our difficulty, that will predict our outcome is the love and connection of others. That we can't do life alone. However, we connect with others. We need to be and be close and connected to others. Oh, you're such a joy. Thank you so much. It's so wonderful talking to you. It's such beautiful insights on the things that are just the hardest, that are the most normal. Yeah. Well, it's

such a pleasure. It's really fun to Julia's new book titled Every Family Has a Story, will be in stores across America on November, and you can find her podcast, Therapy Works wherever you listen to your podcasts. In Therapy Works, you'll hear Julia's guests talk about the big lessons and challenges of their lives. I was on the show, and at the end of each episode, Julia reflects on her session with her two psychotherapist daughters, who share their thoughts

on the conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to Julia's show as much as I enjoyed being a guest on it. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, Supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Lavoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Minni Driver, Additional music by

Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison, No Day, Lisa Castella, and Nick Oppenheim at w kPr de La Pescador Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support Henry Driver