Therapy Speak: Boundaries, Triggers, and Borrowing Authority | Being Well

0:00 This is your one wild and precious life. Forest says you're gonna die someday. I guess. And I do I do say that. You're right, Dad. We are all gonna die someday. It's never too late to stop going in the wrong direction. Are you planning on being 35? Cuz you're going to wake up one day hopefully and be 35. How do you want it to be? Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

0:27 I'm joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hansen. So, Dad, how are you doing today? >> I'm good. I'm I'm rocking. Ready to roll. >> We were doing a little preamble before we started recording that will probably never make it to air for the betterment of both of us, I would say. But, okay, today we're going to be opening up the mailbag and answering some questions from our listeners. We got great questions. Two of them in particular I found really fascinating and they were about the different ways that consequences can come from mental healthy content spilling out of the therapy room and worming its way into everyday life. and one of those big examples is therapy speak. So how do you feel about all of that, Dad?

1:09 >> I'm way psyched. You and I are receiving a gift from people who took the time to be open and vulnerable and to craft a real question >> for sure. >> You can just see the quality of our listeners which is really inspiring. You know, the engagement, the intelligence, the focus. >> It's great. So, thank you. I'm I'm happy to receive the gift. I appreciate it. >> I I think that's a great framing for it, Dad. I really appreciate that. And you can you can just tell the care that kind of went into these questions to your point. So, okay. Here's our first one, which actually made me laugh when I first read it. I thought it was genuinely funny. What do you guys think about the explosion of therapy speak?

1:48 Terms like boundaries, gaslighting, trauma, and narcissist are everywhere. Having been in therapy for a while, I've learned a lot of new concepts that have really helped me. But when therapy terms are used outside the office, it seems like it's mostly to pathize people or avoid accountability. I also feel like people justify a lot of bad behavior because they read something on Instagram that told them to protect their peace or whatever. Any advice on dealing with it or using these terms more thoughtfully?

2:19 Dad, what do you think about this? I thought this was just a tremendous question. >> I've reflected about things related to this question an enormous amount. I'll offer just a couple reflections and see what you think and then we'll keep rolling. So, one, I've often felt that if we lived like our ancestors did in small huntergatherer bands, there'd be no need for therapists in that so much of the healing would occur sitting around the fire talking with each other embedded in a frame of social support.

2:47 So, that would be kind of part one. We've created this very specialized language and medicalized in many ways the human condition in ways that would not have been present in past generations. So just to contextualize it, the other side of it is that I think that as soon as you can use language to make a useful distinction, it's useful. And I'm dubious about probably going back to my scruffy hippie roots, you know, my kind of libertarian, you know, rootedness. I'm just leerary of a priest class or guilds who monopolize access to tools to knowledge.

3:31 >> You're describing like therapists and mental health professionals in this way right now. >> Yeah. In a broad sense. And and I'm not saying they do. I would just say that and going to my kind of Buddhist contemplative tradition that the Buddha refused to do that to create a priest class that you know held the information secret. And I'm I'm with all that. And as soon as you read something about introjacks, the internalization of aspects of people who've been important to you, they come become a part of you. Oh, that's interesting. As soon as you read a word like, you know, projection. Oh, I never thought of that.

4:09 But it helps you understand yourself better. So, I'm I'm kind of for access to you know, distinctions and categories and descriptions and, you know, explanations of various psychonamic processes that people have access to. I'm for that. I'm for that. Now, that said, obviously, how's it used? Is it used to relieve your own suffering and that of others? or is it used to privilege yourself to put you one up with other people to weaponize you know these these this information >> right there with you. So part of this is about like what are what are we talking about here? Like when we say therapy speak what do we mean? And so for me this is when these terms are used sort of imprecisely in a general way in the flow of normal conversation like you were saying dad. another example of this might be somebody being like, "Oh, you know, my ex had undiagnosed borderline personality disorder." Or, you're having a conversation in in a relationship, your your partner says something to you like, "Oh, well, that's just your material coming up." Or something like that. Okay. So, why is this a problem?

5:16 >> Like, what what's the what's the consequence of this? What's the risk of it? What's what's the problem with it? And for me, the problem is that you've left the realm of this is just my opinion, man, >> and you've wandered into the realm of the science of psychology says that it's you, you're the problem. >> Yeah. >> You know, and and so you're borrowing authority. This language is powerful because it's very very authoritative. >> Yeah. If you're talking to a therapist and they're using specific terminology with you, actually in my experience, and I'm not a therapist, but this is just me going to therapy, clinicians are often pretty mild in terms of their actual usage of this terminology with the person that they're working with. In a funny kind of way, it's become more generalized and more broadened out in colloquial everyday speech than it is actually in the therapy room itself.

6:06 >> Like you said, so much of this is about how's it used. I wonder if it's not pretty evident pretty fast what the smell is. You know, the sniff test. Like what's the vibe here? How is someone really using this? Are they, you know, are they using it in an affirmative way? Like your friend is telling you something about their issue with another person and you go, "Wow, it sure sounds like that other person is gaslighting you." Well, you're probably doing it in the service of someone. You can kind of tell that. On the other hand, I think you're totally right. I've seen people, including in my office, kind of weaponize therapeutic language, psychological language about other people. You know, they would rarely do it with me, thank goodness, but talking about their ex, let's say, they might drop into it there.

6:56 In your interactions with people, do they do you find >> Does this happen often? I think that I'm I'm a weird person to ask because I've got like I live with three therapists. So like yes, this this kind of terminology comes up, but I I do think that the popularization of this language like I'll have conversations with people at dance conventions where they're throwing a lot of terminology around and sometimes they're using that terminology pretty pretty accurately. My experience though is that a lot of the time it's fudged. And I think this kind of funny thing happens. One of the problems associated with therapy speak is this weird kind of inversion that almost happens with the language sometimes. I think that triggers are a really good example of this. In actual therapeutic work, the the goal of what you're trying to do related to a trigger is you're trying to improve somebody's awareness of different triggers that they might have. And then frankly, you're helping them learn how to face those triggers more effectively most of the time. In certain extreme circumstances, maybe you're understanding that the person needs to like swerve away from these triggers for a little while or you want to be thoughtful about how intense the engagement with them is. Okay. But our goal is to increase the the real estate that you've got in your life. This is why people do things like exposure and response prevention therapy. but that's very different from how triggers are typically framed in the culture broadly, which is mostly about avoidance, right? and what we're trying to do actually is the opposite of that. We're trying to do hopefully gentle, more graduated forms of exposure to make you a little bit more comfortable with that. same thing kind of happened with boundaries. I had Nedra Glover Touab on the podcast fairly recently and she basically wrote her most recent book to really oversimplify and generalize about the fact that she thought that people basically took the work on boundaries which she was a huge part of and just kind of went crazy with it and were using it as a way to essentially control other people. There's a really famous example of this. Jonah Hill, the actor, his text got publicized, I think, by his ex-girlfriend and he was using this really intense like boundary language to essentially try to control her inside of the relationship. And this is one of the moments, this was like 3 or 4 years ago when questions about therapy speak really took off because it was just such a public example of somebody just really losing the plot on this whole thing. So, I don't know if there's anything in there that you want to want to kind of comment on here, Dad.

9:18 Well, what's in there is something that is really implicit, which is a view of what is human flourishing. It's a we there's a values-based view implicit in what you're saying, which I certainly agree with. >> I I actually don't know what you mean. Yeah. What do you mean, Dad? >> So, when we think about someone who, let's say, what's the aim? What's the value? What's what's the frame of reference here? for someone who uses trigger language to avoid being challenged as far as much as possible. In other words, I'm triggered over here. I have a problem over here. And I'm going to solve my problem by insisting that you change for example like you're you're objecting to that. Implicit in that objection which I share is a view of oh interesting that a full human being is one who can within the range of their temperament which will go to probably the next question we're going to get at in ways that are consistent with their values who basically is able to cope with a wide variety of normal range experiences and manage their reactions to them and in general be reasonably effective in coping to the extent that they can while fully acknowledging that there are all kinds of conditions that we can't cope with we just have to bear we just have to endure get through live with you know let's etc etc do you think that in American culture it does relate to this question as some critics say we have swung kind of collectively too far in the direction of coddling people being overly attentive to their sensitivities and sensibilities.

11:04 >> Mostly straw man >> to be honest. >> Yeah. >> I I had I mean I live in the San Francisco Bay area, you know, like this is where you would imagine this would be happening, right? If it's happening anywhere in the country and I wouldn't really see say that I see an excess of coddling. >> if anything, I see an excess of >> my way or the highway in American culture. I think that you could see a lot of the consequences of that over the last 10, 20, 30 years.

11:29 >> depending on how you want to kind of interpret that. There's also this idea that again maybe takes us back to the question a little bit. It it's a philosophical idea. It's called epistemic injustice and it was something that I thought made sense to talk about here with regards to this and it also speaks to your your question here, Dad. This was introduced by somebody named Miranda Fis Ficker. I want to hope I'm saying that correctly. She coined it in 1998 and it's when the ability of a group to produce knowledge or be the one who knows is questioned.

12:00 And I thought this was a really fascinating idea. So the basic idea is that more socially privileged groups are given what's called an excess of credibility. And this means that they're treated as the authority not just on their own experiences but the experiences of people who are different from them. And then more oppressed groups exist in a credibility deficit where they're generally regarded as kind of unqualified to speak on their own behalf. And there's a class dimension to this whole thing that I think also exists in therapy speak. Like who are the kinds of people who have access to therapyish language, this powerful set of words, right? Well, these are probably going to be people who can hello afford therapy for starters. but just in general, they're going to be like more educated, more wealthy, things like that, right?

12:46 And I think that therapy speak is really double-edged with regards to this. if you think about terms like PTSD, before we had the term PTSD, there was a whole group of people who did not have a way to refer to their experience and be taken seriously >> or even like the rise of terms like sexual assault in the 1970s. Like it gave a group of people language that they could use to describe their experience. And because that language was given credibility by the group, the absorption of the language validated those kinds of experiences. If you think about women talking about women's health issues with their doctors, right? This historic area where women are not taken very seriously. You see the same thing with minorities. Minorities are often not taken very seriously when they go into the office and they say, "Hey, something hurts."

13:34 Doctors historically have paid a lot more attention to you. If you're a white guy who walks into the office and says, "Hey, doctor, something hurts. so there's there's this way in which the broadening of the language has really helped people speak to their own experience. And has that led to like additional coddling of them? I don't know. Most of the time the people saying that are the people who belong to those more historically empowered groups who are now like having to share that power with people that they're not used to sharing it with. And I wonder about that as part of like the source of this critique. I I hope that didn't get like too wonky or inside baseball, but I just found it like a really fascinating overlap with this question. Running a business comes with a variety of challenges and one of the big ones is finding the right people to work with.

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15:29 upwork.com. >> I loved the topic epistemic injustice. I thought >> what a great way of looking at things and it goes back to my kind of scruffy unruly rebellious streak as you know that doesn't like it when people claim a monopoly on anything. >> Yeah. On terminology, on power, on whatever it is. Totally true. Totally. I suppose maybe to like kind of answer your question more succinctly here, Dad. My hope would be that the broadening of these things gives people a way to speak to their own experiences and therefore hopefully feel more empowered about them and therefore hopefully feel like they can do stuff to like push that pie out and risk more experiences and broaden what's possible for them and all of that in a way where all of this like psychology language doesn't just serve to make somebody seek a smaller and smaller and smaller experience because they're stacking up acronyms that describe them.

16:32 >> What do you think about shortorthhand? Like I I know people who will just introduce themselves to others when they have the shared understanding. Oh, I'm an INFP and a >> I don't love it. >> Seven with a wing and six. >> Personally, I I I don't love it. >> And you know, I'm I'm on the cusp. Believer Scorpio, a lot of Scorpio rising. What do you Yeah, >> I I think it's very reductive and and I I would hope that people would think about themselves more broadly than that.

16:59 I think that that's part of what I'm kind of saying here is that >> I think that when diagnostic and I'm I'm just shooting from the hip here. I'm not a clinician. Take it with a grain of salt. >> I think that when diagnostic labels become somebody's whole personality, that's not good for that person most of the time because again, they've built this very like constrained vision of who they are. But there's a push pull there.

17:20 Diagnostic labels also allow people to have access to services and they also help people like you're saying give that kind of shortorthhand. Yeah. You know I'm a this kind of person so maybe that'll help you interact with me better. So I I can see I can see the pluses on both sides. I'm a I'm an arguer for possibility and potential when I can be. And so that's kind of where I lean I would say. How about you?

17:41 How do you think about it? >> It's complicated. on the one hand >> maybe we should have just answered the question that way. It's complicated. >> Yeah. Right. Yeah. on the one hand it's a shorthand like so for myself I'll just say it like this I learned about the enog which is a for me one of the really best most accurate models of personality which on a good day might account for maybe 50% of who a person is for example that said when I realized oh wow I'm actually a seven on the anagram in a way that fits for me it explained a lot of stuff. It was sort of like all these disperate Yeah. Totally. Couldn't agree more strongly.

18:23 >> Images were floating around in the forest and I went, "Well, walks like and sounds like and quacks like, holy moly, I'm a duck." >> When Elizabeth got her ADHD diagnosis, it was gamechanging for her. >> I felt like game changing for her. Totally. >> I wish I had realized I told the people that said it, you know, if I had realized this five years ago, it would have saved me three years of grief >> basically, if not more. Yeah. So on the one hand there's something about and that's one reason why I love the language of psychoanalysis because in a way you don't even need to know how can I put it whether it fits you it's just a great exploration you know the terminology it it kind of opens up things. So on the one hand, on the other hand, I get very restive about, as you've put it, the reductionism of the therapy lingo and to realize, wow, I am so much more than a seven on the anagram.

19:19 >> I am so much more than somebody who has ADHD. I'm so much more than somebody who's much more than the child of alcoholics. I'm so much more than, you know, I probably one of the 10 genes for OCD or whatever. You know, >> I think you got at least two of them. >> Hey, I'll take it. I'll take it. Most high performance. >> I've got I've got at least two of the jeans for anxiety, so whatever. We're trading off over here, >> right? Take anyway. See, I cope with my anxiety through OCD. Just think it could help for you.

19:50 >> Yeah, it could help. >> Honestly, maybe it could. Geez. All right. I don't know. Is are there any kind of closing thoughts you want to give here for this question? We are magnificent and we should quote the paragraph from Robert Heinland about a human being should be able to and he just fills in about 85 things and he finishes specialization is for insects. >> Yeah, I love that quote. I love that quote. And I think that in in all of this my my summation of it is it's a question of power I think at the end of the day. which gets back to the epistemic injustice thing. Like, are you using this as a power tool >> or are you using it as a way to communicate?

20:30 >> And I think that that's just a a key distinction in everything that we're talking about here. Are you using it as a tool for self-standing or are you using it as a form of avoidance? You know, are you like what are what are you using this as? And I I think that like sometimes we do both, right? I have used words both as tools for self-standing and absolutely as forms of avoidance. >> That's great. All right, >> let's do the second one. Second one.

20:57 Okay, question two. I'm a very introverted person. I'm not shy and I don't have social anxiety. Being around people just drains me. Friends have fallen away over the years and I haven't worked to replace them. I feel lonely occasionally, but even just going somewhere where there are other people, like a coffee shop, is usually enough to fix that. I talk to my family regularly. I go to art classes in the gym. My life feels healthy and normal. I'm mostly quite happy. But I'm constantly coming across content about how connection is essential, how we're social animals, and my social conditioning even tells me that it's kind of pathetic that I don't have any friends and that I should really start looking for a romantic partner. I can't point to any major trauma or rejection or life experience that has made me this way. I really just have no desire for friends. But I know that we don't always want what's best for us. So, how can I be sure that I'm not just avoiding some aspect of growth that is very difficult for me? Thought this was a fantastic question. I really loved this one. I'm with this person in that >> I have bocked at a fair amount of push in the broad self-help mental health space that really emphasizes the primacy of relationships. And you'll see people who just say declaratively all trauma is cured in relationship.

22:25 >> Well, first of all, it's just factually not true. Second, a lot of trauma doesn't involve relationships with other people. It's something happened, you know, car accident, an event, got an illness, you know, just very different kinds of things. So, I think that people really vary on a range. I think some people are very very extroverted. They themselves really rely on relationships and they write from and and teach and practice from their own particular psychology and then universalize it to other people. Not so good. so I'm kind of with this person and at the end of the day it goes back to what we were kind of nudging around earlier. You know what are the standards or values or descriptions of an optimal human life? you know, a worthy human life, a good enough human life broadly.

23:17 And I think, well, this person's happy. They say, I'm not hearing about work, so I kind of wonder about occupational functioning. Is, you know, is that good for them? But are if you're functional at work and you're happy then I would have a bit of a question which is since lovingness is a major factor of physical health and longevity and happiness broadly. Even if this person is not particularly interested in or they don't value or need a lot of receiving of care and interest from others. I would just wonder about, you know, maybe the possibility lightly said, of the value ad, maybe of being deliberately kind and compassionate and benevolent and encouraging on very short cycle times, you know, for 5 seconds in a row, with strange, you know, with other people. I would wonder about this for that person.

24:18 >> I think the fact that they're asking this question at all is probably a sign that they're not in the worst shape here. if you were somebody who was a chronic avoidant socially, you probably wouldn't be asking this question in this kind of way. You would have just kind of bought into your avoidance. So, the fact that you're interrogating it, really, really good sign. flip side of the coin, sometimes the avoidant person doesn't feel that much anxiety about intimacy because they're social distancing is working really well.

24:46 they're not in situations that would be anxietyprovoking, so they don't interpret themselves as having anxieties about connection. So maybe that's something to to flag here. When you are in more social environments, do you start to feel what you could describe as anxiety kind of boiling up in you? Or are you really good to go? In which case, you know, hey, all good. I think I'm I'm pretty much right there with you, Dad, where if you're living a happy and functional life, okay, you know, great. Good for you. Fantastic.

25:14 we don't have to buy into those kinds of narratives. There is a functional question here though that I think is worth flagging which is that you're fine right now but are you still going to be fine when you're 72? >> Yeah. >> You know to grossly oversimplify the historic purpose of living in community was so we don't die when things get really rough. >> You know isolation is tough and isolation only gets tougher as we age.

25:36 So do you have anyone around you that you're planning on aging with to some extent? Do you have hobbies or social groups or something where it doesn't have to be like a really close intimate friendship, but there would be a person you could call when things got rough and they would pick up the phone who's outside of your immediate family group. >> so that's the one piece of this that that I would flag as like, hey, yeah, this is just like a good thing to develop if we want to live a a good complete life. Even if we don't really have so much of a feel for it, >> there could be a lot of other motivations to develop that resource. I think that's great.

26:13 >> Yeah. By the way, a a pet is sometimes really a nice thing. >> Yeah, totally. >> Yeah, totally. >> And for some reason, I don't know, I just want to I would again, if this were this person, I would say, so this is your one wild and precious life, quoting Mary Oliver. Forest says you're going to die someday. I guess I do I do say that. You're right, Dad. We are all going to die some, Dad.

26:42 >> And if you had a year to live roughly and you were looking back on your life, what will you then be really glad that you had done in your life? And when you look back, will you be just kind of fine with the very thin social networks you have? Or when you look back, would you think, you know, there was some kind of developmental challenge or some higher aspiration that I just I kind of swerved away from on any given day. It was easier to just swerve away from it. No, I would wonder about that. The one other flag that I'll throw up here as a possibility is just this phrase fallen away.

27:23 >> Yeah. >> You know, my friendships have fallen away. There's a a phrase that really speaks to me sometimes with different kinds of choices which we might bump into in the very last question that we get as well. and it's this phrase sliding versus deciding. So this is normally used in romantic contexts where you see a couple just kind of slide from one landmark milestone to another without ever really making like the active choice. This is the person I really want to be with for the rest of my life. And those sliding couples historically tend to do less well. They tend to divorce at a higher rate. They tend to have higher rates of marital problems, that kind of stuff. So much in the same way, was this just kind of a slide with your loss of friendships over time and now it feels like a lot of work to get them back in the mix or are you really deciding this is the kind of life that I want to lead? And I think either of those could be totally fine. I would just encourage you to be an active chooser one way or the other. Anything else you want to throw in at the end here, Dad, or are you good?

28:27 >> Yeah, this this little bell has been ringing inside me throughout this whole question. And I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that going back to what we were talking about earlier about values for a life well-lived. What what are what are we kind of not so much prescribing but describing in our two cents here as all right, these are aspirational values for how to how to be in this life. Well, I have an aspirational value that I think is beneficial for people particularly in the general process of healing, growing and awakening. If we imagine that as kind of a sequence and with people being able to give more attention to growing and awakening after they've, you know, gotten some healing under their belt, etc. So in that context I think it's valuable for people to feel one with everything to feel rested in a very highly relational field in which they feel and they recognize they feel what they know that they are being lived by everything. I think that's a good thing.

29:34 I would I you know I value that. And so for this particular person, I would say, you know, I don't think it's necessary to experience that in a way that really privileges human beings as co-creators in that field. But the broad experience of relatedness, a profound interbeing, as Tecton Han put it, I think that's a good experience and a good >> maybe for that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And I'll just throw that in the mix. And it does not mean that you need to go to cocktail parties.

30:06 >> Hey there, thanks for watching and sorry for the brief interruption, but it turns out that over 60% of the people watching this right now are not subscribed to the channel. So, if you could just take a moment to hit the subscribe button, it would really help me out. I'd appreciate it a lot. All right, back to the show. So, let's go to the third one here, which is very Rick topical. I'm mostly going to just hand this one off.

30:26 >> Someday it may be yours. >> Oh, it it's been mine in a lot of ways. but this is like classic couples counseling stuff which you did for years and years and years. My partner and I are trying to move away from scorekeeping around child care and household responsibilities. We built an accounting system for household tasks and child care. Whoever does more in a given period of time gets compensated. It works for getting stuff done, but it's also eroded my sense that I intrinsically deserve support. And even though I can always ask for and receive help, I feel less gratitude when it's part of a transaction. We've accidentally made it impossible to get brownie points. We both want a new system, but neither of us grew up with a healthy model of how to divide labor. So when we try to move away from strict hourby- hour accounting, fear creeps in that we're doing more or less than our fair share. And yep, that's eventually what happens. It's not like one person is slacking. It's just so easy for things to get out of whack. Any suggestions on how to relax the rigid counting while still being able to see that things are equitable or equitable enough? All right, Dad. What do you think about this?

31:39 >> Super deep question. My entry into this a lot was when you came along because prior to that, your mom and I could just live in sort of our own bubbles and we loosely divided responsibilities. I, you know, a little bit along gender lines, fairly typical. Well, I did more yard work. She maybe did more laundry, but then you came along and wrecked everything. And we had to suddenly >> That's what I do, baby. That's what I'm here for.

32:03 >> Oh my goodness. And we had to get it together. >> I am the bathwater and the baby. >> Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And then meanwhile, I was getting really interested in Depleted Mother Syndrome and the basis for our first book, Mother Nurture, which we've revised in our republishing. Actually, >> I was just about to promo it for you there, Dad. I'm glad you did it yourself. Do you know what's the pub date for that, by the August 25th, 2026, a happy, healthy mom, definitely updated. All the research behind it is updated. Everything's really solid in it. So, in the relationship territory, I learned that in the average American family, certainly 20 years ago, and I'm not sure it's a lot better today, in a heterosexual couple with a child, the woman on average is on task about 20 hours a week more than her partner is. And it's probably better than it used to be in terms of the gender split. husbands today typically are doing more child care and housework than their own fathers did.

33:01 And research also shows that kind of generally generalizations here. Many exceptions. dads are doing less than they think they're doing and more than their wives think they're doing. So there this is a hot topic and inequities actual and perceived totally eat away in a relationship. We're talking here about sharing the load fairly. Now there are other issues when kids come along like parenting from the same page and preserving an intimate friendship as well as taking good care of the individual well-being of each of the people.

33:37 The more that you are indeed parenting from the same page, the more that you're supporting and protecting your intimate friendship, and the more that individual well-being is being supported, the easier it is to resolve equity issues. Okay, let's just now focus on equity issues. There are three kinds of equity issues. There's the stress the task load in terms of time on task. Then there's the stress load because some tasks are more stressful than others. And then there's the third category. It's sort of the executive load where you're thinking about things or you just feel burdened by things. So it's in that context then that you step back and you want to get at okay what's sustainable here and what do we want to do? Now, what I'm hearing here is that these people have really nailed a one of the things that I think is helpful for people, which is to be pretty solid on the facts, to recognize what the facts are, but they've gotten sort of trapped by this bookkeeping system they've got and they're trying to break free of it. So, now that you have a pretty good idea of what the facts are, what are your fundamental values?

34:54 Can you talk with each other in a really heartfelt way that starts with appreciating what the other person is doing? And I'm going to use a phrase, step out of your mind's integrity system into your being's integrity system. You know, the mind is keeping score. And in terms of appropriate forms of equity tracked over, you know, a time scale of a month or so, it ought to roughly even out. I think that's appropriate. I also think that sometimes one person just has more capability than the other and they're okay with that because they're interested in the greater good. They're they're not operating on an kind of an arithmetic of time. Like maybe one person just doesn't need as much sleep as the other person does and they're fine with getting up early with the kids. They like that and they don't need payback about other things later on.

35:53 They're just happy to throw that into the mix. finishing here too. So shifting out of the minds accounting system into more what is in your heart? What do you really value and appreciate in the other person? what are some ways that feel good to you to create a basic household schedule that you more or less kind of keep that'll give you a kind of a framework and fundamentally to the longing of this person. How can you shift into a generosity model rather than a scarcity model? Right? what's in your heart for each of you to want to give into the family rather than be you know really really nitpicking about what is taken from you. I think that was great for me. The piece of this that is complicated is that I think that tracking is good in a lot of cases because tracking helps you figure out what's true.

36:55 >> Yeah. >> And we need to live in a shared understanding of what's true. particularly when child care comes along for all the reasons that you're describing here Dad. But that tracking can also become kind of a cudgel or a power move or a source of argument. And so then that's when the shared frame aspect of it that I think that you're really highlighting here gets really important. Are we interacting with this from a just kind of fundamental stance that I want to do, you know, 60% of the work and I'm really happy to do 60% of the work. And if both people are really trying to do 60 to 70% of the work, you'll probably end up okay.

37:39 >> Excellent. >> That kind of a frame, am I trying to give more than 50%. Is a good one to be at. because most people tend to just kind of underestimate their contribution in a bunch of different ways. sometimes people overestimate their contribution in a bunch of different ways. And if you just kind of shoot for the high end, a lot of this will come out in the wash. Particularly if you have a fundamental frame with the other person where it's about love and communication and all of that good stuff. The tricky part of this is resentment. which is for me fundamentally a communication issue.

38:11 When you move away from an accountability system like the one that this person is describing, you have to add more communication because the accountability system or the tracking system kind of does the communication work for you, right? You don't have to open up about how I feel like I've been doing more than my fair share for the past couple of weeks now and it's really been kind of eating at me and I don't know how to communicate that to you in a way that doesn't come across like I'm trying to attack you or I'm trying to make you wrong. That's a much more difficult thing to do than to point at a spreadsheet and say, you know, hey, here are the numbers. Right.

38:47 >> Right. >> And so, so there's a place for the spreadsheet, but I also think there's a place for the vulnerable communication about how you feel here. I'm also just kind of curious for this person you know why are they so concerned about this question of fairness inside of the relationship in a context where where both people are trying to do their best and both people are mostly even contributors. There's not a suggestion in the question that one person is more of an overcontributor than the other.

39:17 Like why is there such a focus on fairness? And I' I'd be curious about that if I were talking to this couple. The gender here is unstated. Did you get any clues about gender when you >> I'm not sure. I would have to go back to the original question which I'm Yeah. >> Well, certainly statistically it's most likely that they both grew up in relatively conventional homes with you know a father and a mother and the father did very little in the category of housework and childcare and so they both grew up with that model. So the way it's framed here is that each of them is equally concerned about the other. But very often actually in terms of the task load, the stress load and the executive load the playing field if you will tends to tilt in favor of fathers you know on average. Another aspect of this though is that sometimes there's an issue around earning money and one of the people in the couple is working really hard to earn money and the other person is not really working very hard to to earn money. And so that's another it's not really named here. They only named childare and household as responsibilities, but there's there are income responsibilities in families too where again you're really looking there at level of effort. And I guess deep down we going all the way back to our, you know, rodent ancestors are very attentive to freeloaders.

40:53 And when it starts to smell like, wow, I'm sweating bullets over here and you're just kind of filling the blank talking to your friends or watching TV. And that's a common phenomenon. people people form resentments. And so then you want to you kind of and it's hard to talk about too because issues of shame come up when your partner's looking at you and going, "Wow, you know what? Where's your heart in this?

41:24 Where's your integrity?" You take your >> you take your role at work really seriously. You would never want to be thought of as a slacker at work. You would never want people noticing that you're just kind of, >> you know, being carried along by the team. And yet you're okay with that in our family. So it it's a it's yeah it's >> for sure we we always have to make assumptions when we're listening to these questions, right? Because all the information isn't isn't always there. My assumption with this question is that both of these people are positively motivated and doing their best from an effort standpoint. And that makes me think that there's a bit of a communication issue here. Maybe maybe they aren't so good at naming to each other when they feel like it's getting out of whack or when they see the resentment building up earlier in the process. Maybe they let things get a little too far before they do that. But that real question, how to relax the rigid counting? Like what would support the ability to do that? And I think that it's this feeling of being on the same team, which I've been coming back to a lot personally and just in conversations I'm I've been having with people >> where we often start to feel like we are in our own little rowboat and our partner is in their rowboat and we're sure like maybe we're rowing in the same direction kind of >> but we're in different rowboats.

42:43 >> Yeah. And so I think the the question is like what helps you feel like you're actually in the same rowboat together and on that sense of team with each other. >> Beautiful. >> And does that then open up the ability to have a conversation where like hey I feel like I'm I'm rowing pretty hard over here and I I think that you're rowing a little less and what do you think about that? And are both people sort of motivated from that stance of team? We are both trying to land this plane. We're both trying to help the kid. We're both trying to do the dishes.

43:08 We're both trying to make this work. How do we do that? How do we operate from team? and I think that relationships that don't end up working out are typically ones where there's not that sense of team. >> Fantastic. Excellent. >> Well, thank you. And got one more question if we got a little time for it here. Dad, I am 27. I have a bachelor's in anthropology and geography. And after working in the field for a couple of years, I realized the job options around me weren't what I wanted. Since then, I've started exploring therapy as a career, something this podcast played a role in. how cool. It interests me intellectually, and I think I genuinely enjoy the work. But it's been so difficult for me to fully commit to the switch because it feels like I've wasted my bachelor's degree that I worked so hard on. And part of me feels foolish for doing so. Your episodes on caring and goal setting helped me reconnect with some deeper values, but my rational brain is really stuck here. Do I stick with what I studied or commit to a path that will take serious time, money, and effort? It feels like there's no clear right answer, and this is really frustrating for me. I'm trying so hard to use everything I've learned to make a decision, but I end up just not choosing at all, which is so much worse than the ju than just choosing one thing or the other. All right, Dad, what do you think about this?

44:33 >> I think this person is very wise and would make a wonderful anthropologist as well as a wonderful therapist. And I'm thinking also of the proverb, it's never too late to stop going in the wrong direction. right? if you're digging a hole in in the wrong direction, stop digging, in other words. And and so I look here at 27, that's really young. And >> got a long runway here.

45:04 >> Yeah. And also, u your background in anthropology and geography, it'll serve you when you start exploring a lot of diversity of minds, many different kinds of minds. And we are really shaped by our own you know history in terms of culture that aspect of anthropology and also really shaped by biological evolution and sociobiology that aspect of anthropology. So you know serves you well also how many people really use their college degree. I mean, I did a degree in institutional structures that I invented at UCLA, which I was allowed to do back in the day, and I don't know. I never use that. Do you use your what?

45:50 Political science, >> my interdisiplinary studies degree. because Berkeley did not have a political communications major, and I was trying to make one up. >> Yeah. >> I mean, peripherally at best, I would say. Peripherally at best. Very little. >> Been out of college around 15 yearsish. >> Yeah. >> So, you know, >> hardly at all. Yeah. So, so there's that whole part. what is it that makes us want to double down on our sunk costs? >> Yeah, this is a sunk cost question 100%.

46:22 I I I think that this is a sunk cost question and it's a bit of an acceptance question. There's a story that you told me a hundred times. you've also told it on the the on the show I think at least once or twice. >> And you were talking to a friend. I think it was before I came along. question. You know, you were you were alone, but you were a young whippers camper. >> Very very young. You were talking about how hard it was going to be to become a doctor. Oh, it's going to be so so hard.

46:45 It's going to take so long. It's going to cost so much money and I'm not going to be a doctor until I'm fill in the blank, whatever it was for you. I think it was like 40 years old. >> It seemed at the time seemed Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. it still seems ancient to me and I'm 38. because I am ancient. That's not because I think people who are 40 are ancient. That's because I think I am ancient. I want to clarify.

47:04 and your friend just kind of turned to you and said, "Well, are you planning on being 40?" >> And it was just >> totally and then then he asked me, "How do you want it to be?" >> Yeah. >> If you're going to be 40, how Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. >> And and I think that that for me has been so helpful so many times in terms of like, well, you planning on being 30, 35, 40. Do you want to be a therapist or do you want to be an anthropologist when you're 35? And if you want to be an anthropologist, great. be an anthropologist. And if you want to be a therapist, pain and suffering is incoming, baby.

47:38 But you can do it and you can pay the bills and you can go to the school and you can do the training and you can pass the test and you can become a therapist. it's going to be a haul, but you'll get there and then you'll wake up when you're 35 and you'll be a therapist and that'll be really cool. >> That's really good. Here's a thought experiment for this person >> and it's a good thought experiment actually I'm realizing for anyone. Okay, the thought experiment experiment is what if hypothetically you took a pill, the green pill, and it made you amnesic for your entire history, but you're still your person. You're still who you are, but you no longer know anything about your personal history. You don't know what you majored in in college. You don't know what you studied. You don't know what you invested in. You don't know. So at this point you are looking forward to your future without any reference to your past and your choices about your future are in no way implicated or shaped or contingent on your past at all whatsoever. So at this point in time now, knowing what you know about your interests, your talents, the economics, different careers, would you choose at age 27 to embark on a training process that'll probably give you a clinical license master's level or PhD level, you know, M's level, you know, three to four max years from now. You know, in other words, do you plan on being 31?

49:19 How do you want it to be? Would you choose that? What would you choose? I think that's a really clean way to look at it. It's a cool thought experiment. >> Yeah, because here you are. And >> yeah, >> you know, I I get that it's uncomfortable to give up your your undergrad, all the training, all the work you've done to this point in that kind of way. first point, you already made a dad. You're not really giving it up. You still know that stuff.

49:43 it's still going to be included as a part of who you are and a part of the work that you do. >> Yeah. >> I just used epistemic injustice in the podcast episode that we're doing right now. I I learned that probably a decade ago or something when I was doing polycom work. >> and these are these are ideas that will be just as influential when you're working with people. but like what kind of work do you want to do on a day-to-day basis? Do you want to do the day-to-day work of being an anthropologist or do you want to do the day-to-day work of being a therapist?

50:11 Because that's going to be what shapes your life is that labor day in and day out. What how do you want it to be? >> I think this is an awesome thought experiment. The more I play with it, you know, any woke up. >> Yeah. Boom. And you like, whoa, here I am. And and it grounds you and don't know mind. Beginner's mind. Talk about beginner's mind. And you're you're looking forward to the rest of your life. What do you want?

50:32 >> I've got another fun one. I I hate to cut you off, but I this it came to me in a dream. It just came to me right now. All right. Here's what you do. You imagine your life at 50 and you did not choose to become a therapist. So you followed your current career path. There you are. You're 50 years old. You're doing the work that you project out that maybe you would be doing. Okay? Whatever it is, you close your eyes. You wake up.

50:57 You're 27. Do you want it or do you not want it? You know, you you're you were thinking all the thoughts you were having at 50. You were like, " I wish I could go back in time and be 27 again and make a different choice." And then you wake up and here you are. You're 27. Did I just reinvent the wheel there, Dad? >> No, it's fantastic. And it's scary in a way, in a good way, like to just stop.

51:24 >> Totally. Stop. Stop in your tracks. One one way or another, you stop in your tracks and you go, "All right, limited runway." You know, when you're 27, the runway is fairly limited. But 27, 77, 87, maybe you got 60 years of runway. You know, what's the life expectancy of a 27y old, let's say? okay. How do you want it to be? And then you get to be my age. Maybe you runway. I'm kind of going for another 20, you know, kind of going for it.

51:55 what matters? What matters? I I think so often we're trapped by our past. That's what we're really talking about here. >> How we get the tentacles reaching into the present from the past keep dragging us back in like in the Godfather movies, you know, they keep dragging me back in. Wow. What happens if you just cut loose from those tentacles? You're not bound by them anymore. Who do you want to be? How do you want it to be?

52:28 Awesome stuff. Well, I think we did a pretty good job with this one. Dad, how are you feeling about it? >> I'm visualizing the Kraken just big tentacles reaching up out of the sea, dragging us back. And >> I, you know, there's the closing lines, right, in The Great Gatsby, something about being carried back in time as we be forward in the future. >> Something something carried into the past. I I'll try to look it up. Maybe I'll share it in the outro.

52:58 No, it's so real. It's so real. And one of the episodes that I want to do in the near future, and you don't actually know this, Dad, you had a line not too long ago on the podcast where you talked about becoming a secure base for yourself >> when we were talking about insecure attachment. >> Yeah. >> And I've just been kind of chewing on that line ever since you said it. And I want to do an episode on it, like what's it like to become a secure base for yourself? And as part of the prep for that, I've been really thinking about this kind of like how the past influences the present thing. And so I think that's going to be a major theme of what we end up talking about.

53:33 >> Sign me up. >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a good one. I'm looking forward to it. Okay, well that's it for today's episode. Dad, thanks so much for doing this with me. I love this one. >> Yay. Really enjoyed answering questions from our listeners with Rick. We got some fantastic questions from people. The first question was about therapy speak. We took quite a while with this one cuz it was a really interesting question. So what is therapy speak? Therapy speak is when people use clinical terminology or terminology from like the world of psychology in general in a kind of imprecise or superficial way. So why is therapy speak something that we should be aware of or be careful with? Well, it's because you're borrowing authority when you use it. When we use more colloquial language to describe something, it's just me talking. You know, it's just Forest. But when I start talking using various acronyms or using clinical terminology or any of that kind of stuff, well, I'm basically saying the science of psychology says this thing is true. It's no longer just me talking. This is some kind of overt statement about the world or about the way that people are. And I try to really call out on the podcast pretty frequently that I'm not a therapist. I'm not a clinician. So, I try to use that terminology pretty carefully and with a lot of nodding in the direction of research or what somebody else said about it or that kind of a thing in part because I want to be really careful about the misuse of these terms. And as we talked about therapy speak, we kind of separated it into two buckets. There was one bucket which is just people misusing this kind of kind of terminology. Is that problematic? And the second bucket is when people deliberately use therapeutic terminology as a kind of power play. And one of the problems with the colloquialization of these terms is that it's really easy for stuff to get left out. So we use triggers as an example where in more of a therapeutic context with something like exposure and response prevention, triggers are something that we're made aware of and we want to be very careful about and we want to be very conscious of and all of that good stuff. But the goal of the treatment over time is to actually make you more comfortable with the thing that activates you. It's not to identify what that thing is so you can never encounter it again in your life. And generally speaking, therapy is trying to argue for possibility. It's trying to look at somebody and say, "Okay, how can we make your life the biggest and best and most complete version of what it is?" And as we talk about all the time on the show, some of it is about knowing that I'm the kind of person who isn't great at fill in the blank or who really doesn't like this other thing over there, so I'm not going to go out of my way to seek it out. And that can be great. The second question was about this to some extent. But the flip side of this is that therapy language and the broadening of this terminology can help us with something that's called epistemic injustice which I talked about at some length. And the idea is that we want to give people the tools to talk about their experiences.

56:29 And particularly we want to give those tools to groups of people who historically have not had those tools. So when we come up with a phrase like post-traumatic stress disorder, it becomes easier for a group of people to speak to their experience. When we come up with a phrase like premenstrual dysphoric disorder or PMDD, it becomes easier for a group of people to speak to their experience. As Rick talked about a lot, it this terminology can also give people a way of understanding themselves, a way of communicating themselves more clearly to other people.

56:57 I think that all of that is great. The problems come when we're either really misunderstanding and simplifying things or when we're using therapy language as a kind of power play with somebody else. Second question was somebody who was a naturally introverted person who had received a lot of messaging about the importance of social connection and went okay am I really actually an introverted person or am I just avoiding a difficult experience and the first thing that we emphasized was that everybody's going to be a little different here and it's really okay to just be an introverted person who isn't that interested in developing deep friendships the kind of flags that we raised about this whole thing were in a couple of areas first Rick really mentioned the importance of having sources of connection in your life in general, even if that's not with other people. If you feel connected to your pet, if you feel connected to some kind of a practice you engage in regularly, if you feel connected to other things out there in the world, if it feels really good for you to be in a group of people every once in a while for, you know, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, doesn't have to be a long period of time, that can be enough for you to kind of refill that battery. Few other things we mentioned, are there things that maybe you're avoiding here? Is it that you don't feel anxious because you're not in situations anymore that would provoke anxiety? So, you go, "Oh, I don't have social anxiety." It's like, "Well, maybe or maybe you're just not putting yourself into those kinds of situations." So, that could be a possibility for this person. Another question is, did they just kind of slide into this or did they really choose this as the way that they wanted to live their life? And then the final question I would raise is, how is this all going to turn out? not right now, but when you're 50 or 60 or 70 years old, are you going to look back on this and go, "Wow, I really wish I had developed some more meaningful friendships in my life." And the point there is that there are a lot of different reasons that you could want to develop friendships that aren't just because, you know, I really want to feel connected to a group of other people.

58:49 Third question was about scorekeeping inside of a relationship. I thought that Rick gave some really good advice here. He talked a lot about the context of this kind of scorekeeping. regular gender imbalances that exist inside of a relationship, particularly when it comes to housework and child care. These are thankfully getting a little bit better, but they are still unbalanced. And we ended up landing in a place where the emphasis was really on teamwork and communication and feeling like we are rowing in the same direction with each other. And if you're motivated from that stance, you're probably going to be able to even a lot of this out. Our final question was somebody who had a bachelor's in anthropology but was looking into becoming a therapist but was really struggling to make that choice and to really decide on it and make that career transition essentially because of feelings of sunk cost like wow this therapy thing it's going to be expensive it's going to take a long time man do I really want to give up all the training I've done to this point and I thought the best answer to this question was really Rick's story of are you planning on being 40 okay well then how do you want it to be are you planning on being 35 well okay do you want to be a therapist or not. Cuz you're going to wake up one day hopefully and be 35. How do you want it to be? It's going to take time. It's going to take effort. You're going to have to work at it. But you're going to look back on this moment, more likely than not, and go, "Wow, I'm really glad that I made that choice." I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time talking with Rick. Couple of quick reminders. We have a Patreon page, patreon.com/beingwellodcast.

60:18 You can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you listen to your shows, we are probably there. If you do find us on one of those platforms and you want to help us out, you can leave a rating and a positive review. We really appreciate it. You can also tell a friend about the show. That's the best way that we have to reach new people. So, until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.

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