Why Avoiding Conflict Is Destroying Your Relationships (and Your Health) with Baya Voce

This is where boundaries come in, and boundaries are really important and highly misunderstood. We think boundaries have to do with someone else changing. We think a boundary looks like, hey, stop talking to me like that. And then if they don't, they're not respecting our boundary. But that's not what a boundary is at all. A boundary is, I am going to take care of myself and it requires nothing of you.

Hi, I'm Dr. Avanti Kumar Singh, and this is the Healing Catalyst Podcast. I'm a medical doctor with over 20 years of experience and also a lifelong practitioner of Ayurveda. I created the Healing Catalyst Podcast because we all deserve a different kind of conversation about health, one that's honest, holistic, and rooted in both science and soul. On this show, I'm joined by the world's leading experts to give you science-backed tools that you can start using today and actually stick with to build real health and longevity. I am so glad you're here. Now let's get to it. Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome back to the Healing Catalyst Podcast. I'm Dr. Avanti Kumar Singh, and today's episode is probably going to challenge some things that you probably believe about relationships. It definitely challenged me and what I believe about relationships, because here's what nobody really talks about. When you avoid conflict in relationships, When you sweep things under the rug, when you don't talk it out and try to resolve the problems after a fight or a disagreement, when you just let it go, it doesn't just hurt your relationship, it hurts your health because your nervous system stays in a state of threat. Stress hormones stay elevated. Your body holds on to the tension because it never got the signal that it's safe. My guest today is Baya Voce, one of the leading experts on relationship repair. She holds an MSW from Columbia University and has been mentored by Esther Perel. Yes, the Esther Perel, and is a co-investigator on groundbreaking research with MAPS and Columbia studying MDMA-assisted couples therapy. Her TEDx talk on loneliness has over 5 million views, and she works with couples who feel like they've tried everything. And her core belief is that repair done well is the antidote to loneliness and disconnection. What she's going to share today is probably going to surprise you because almost everything that we've been taught about conflict and repair in relationships, it's wrong. You're going to learn that repair is not a communication skill. It's a nervous system response, that it's not about saying the right thing. It's about your whole system, your whole nervous system settling down. You're going to learn that conflict doesn't destroy relationships. Avoiding conflict destroys relationships. And that the loneliness that you might be feeling inside your relationship, even when you're not technically alone, is real. It's common, and it has a name. By the end of this episode, you're going to walk away with one simple practice that you can use tonight in any relationship in your life. And here's why I'm so excited to bring this conversation to you right now, because repair isn't just about your marriage or your partnership. It's about how we show up with our families, our friends, our communities, our workplaces. And in a world that feels as fractured as ours does right now, I think this is a skill that every single one of us needs. Let's get into it. Hello, Baya. I am so excited to meet you today and to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this with me.

I'm so excited. This will be a great conversation.

Yes, it will be. You know, I was so impressed when I heard you speak at the Eudaimonia Conference and you were talking about repair in relationships. And I think right now when there's so much disconnection in this world, you know, not only in our personal relationships, but just in culture, in communities, right? I feel like your focus on repair in relationship is even more needed than ever. And I don't think that this is something that most of us are taught when we're younger, of like how to even address conflict in relationships, or what does that even mean to repair? So I'm really excited to talk to you about this because I think it's so much more than even just our health personally, but it's our health as communities and globally too. And I'm so incredibly excited about the research that you're doing at Columbia on MDMA-assisted therapy for couples. And I can't wait to dig into all of that because it's like cutting edge, so groundbreaking. So we will get into all of that. So super excited to talk to you.

Great. I mean, I think you're right on that we are so fractured right now. We've been fractured. Culture has been fractured for a long time, for many years, in different ways, in various cultures, various traditions, etc. So it's not like— I don't think this is new. I think it's in our faces a little more right now. And to your point about, you know, where do we learn these skills, like, I think that's actually a good place to start because, I mean, for your listeners to just like really start to think about, okay, in my own life, where did I learn what it meant to be in a healthy relationship? And I don't actually just mean love relationships. Like, this could be friendships, sibling relationships, adult-parent-child dynamics. Of course, it could be partnership, it could be co-parents. But what did we actually see growing up that modeled what relationships or quote unquote healthy relationships were. So for most of us, that was some sort of TV programming, Hollywood movies, books, and of course, family of origin models. Right now, it doesn't matter if I ask this question to 5 people or 5,000 people. If I ask how many of you want to emulate the relationship that you saw modeled for you in your household, right? No, one or two people raise their hands.

Mm-hmm.

And, and those people are both rare and extremely lucky.

Yes.

But for a lot of us, we grew up in households where even if we weren't seeing conflict, we were feeling the tension of whatever was being swept under the rug, right? Or we were seeing conflict that never got repaired, right? It never, we never saw what it looked like to come back together. So we would see parts of it. Parts of conflict, but we had no idea what it actually meant to return. And now we are living in a day and age where we're not only seeing on social media like hashtag couple goals and looking at things that just do not resemble our relationships, looking at— we're, and we're over here being like, wait a second, why doesn't my relationship look like the one that I'm seeing online? But now With AI, we are starting to build relationships in a one-way model that, that is giving us empathy and attunement, but is requiring nothing of us. So we are in an environment right now where the natural normal friction of healthy relational dynamics is not mimicked in the virtual frictionless space. Right. So what we experience on a day-to-day basis, whether it's swiping, ordering groceries, looking at brands, and then seeing another brand just like it show up on our algorithm, right? We're entering into more and more frictionless experiences. That's, that's not going anywhere. And in fact, it's going to get better, right? And then we walk into our relationships, any kind of relationship, and those have That tension that we experience all of a sudden feels like, wait a second, why does this act? Why is this? This shouldn't be so hard.

Right.

When actually it's really healthy. It's very natural in order to have intimacy. We have to have a little bit of tension because two nervous systems coming together with different histories, different patterns, different desires, different traumas. Of course we're going to have tension.

Yeah.

When I say it, it's sort of like, duh. But that's not how it feels in our nervous systems.

Thank you for that, because that's— first of all, there's so many things to unpack from what you just talked about. But you know, what you're talking about is this frictionless world that we live in, right? And I also think that sort of harkens back to what so many of us grew up seeing, where it was all about falling in love, and that was frictionless in a way. Everything is beautiful and wonderful, and then We don't know how to stay in those relationships. And it's something that you wrote on your website, which is we're taught to fall in love, but not how to stay there. And I'd love to dig into what you mean by that.

Yeah. Talk to different relationship therapists, experts, etc., and they're going to have different views on what I'm about to say. So I'll just name that.

Yeah.

I look at relationships in kind of fundamentally 3 stages. So you have the honeymoon phase, which all of us know about. It's the one you're speaking to. I also call it the merge. And this is a necessary phase where we're sort of enmeshed with the person where we don't really see red flags. Their creativity is, is so exciting and enlivening to us. It's not that they're messy and maybe not on time. We're not looking at that.

Right.

And then we move into the next phase, the second phase, which is the power struggle. And this is where most people end up. This is where friction starts to occur.

Right.

We oftentimes automatically assume that that friction is wrong. I'll tell you the number one question I get in my inbox is, what is too hard? Should I stay or should I go? This is really hard. I don't know what is too hard.

Mm-hmm.

The power struggle phase is meant to be hard because what we're doing is we're coming out of enmeshment, like this period of, oh my goodness, we're one. And we're now needing to differentiate, meaning I have to figure out how to both be an individual while also being in relationship. It's one thing to be an autonomous human who is just acting for themselves, but to act for yourself with another human in mind who may have a very different idea of what they think is good, healthy, safe, free, et cetera, all of a sudden we're going to come up against necessary friction. I mean, I'll tell you, my wife and I, one of the experiences that we had very early on was we met, I had gotten out of a relationship with somebody who, it was kind of the COVID days and he and I stayed in a lot. We didn't have a rich social life. So by the time I met my then girlfriend and now wife, Emmy, I was starving for social experiences. So we would go out all the time and it was the best and it was great until I actually started to hit my max, which is more for me, my, my baseline, my like, okay, this is like, I don't, I'm kind of an introvert, kind of, I kind of go between worlds.

Mm-hmm.

She didn't change. Turns out she's like extrovert through and through, has so much, she has more social stamina than anybody I think I've ever met in my entire life. And all of a sudden I was like, whoa, like, and why this becomes kind of like tricky and nuanced. And again, for your listeners just to be thinking about, okay, so what's kind of the underneath piece that when we're covering content, which content is we have different social stamina. She likes to stay out later than I, than I like to stay out. When we stay at that kind of top layer, we're not actually getting to the pain or the value underneath. And I'll, and I'll explain that. By way of story. So she and I all of a sudden start getting into these fights about like, she wants to stay out, I want her to come home earlier, or I would stay out and kind of override, and then I would be cranky in the morning because I didn't get enough sleep. Right. She would come home early and not be excited that she came home, or like it was, we just could not figure it out.

Right.

One of the things that really helped was I started to understand that part of why it was so hard for me, and this took excavating, right? This takes work. Work on a person's end. I started excavating. Well, I was engaged before, way, way before, in my 20s, and he ended up lying quite a bit in that relationship. And those lies were uncovered in like a pretty shocking way where I found out he didn't go to school where he said he was going to school. He didn't have the job. I mean, it was like it knocked me off my feet in the— I mean, I, I— it was one of the most shocking relational things that had ever happened to me. So now fast forward years later, almost a decade actually. And Emmy and I, she wants to stay out and I feel my nervous system responding to her going out. She had done nothing that would have made me feel like I couldn't trust her to stay out without me. But every time she went out and stayed out, my nervous system would have this response that I was so scared that when she would come back, she would tell me something and all of a sudden admit to doing something, whatever that something was, that I would then go into shock. And I had this, you know, this whole kind of, uh, response to that. It wasn't until we got into the underneath that we started understanding, okay, so this is probably gonna be a sensitive piece for me. There's a, there's a body of research that basically says one of the highest predictors of relational satisfaction is a term that's called accepting someone's influence. In this example, that would be me not blaming Emmy because that's gonna make it really hard for her to want to do anything. And believe me, I did that. I tried, it didn't work. Mm-hmm. But actually saying, oh, here is my pain, here's my wound. This is way more vulnerable, by the way. This is part of why we don't do it, cuz it sucks because it's so vulnerable. Would you be willing to make a concession sometimes? Either come home with me, come home earlier than you would have. Can we talk about what happens the next morning? What, like, can you not sleep in and we get up at the same time? I mean, we just had to really start negotiating, but there was no negotiating when we were staying at the topic of content. It's really hard to negotiate from that place. Accepting someone's influence would look like, yeah, it's not like my preference to come home early, but I care about you, and so I'll come home earlier than I would've wanted to. Or maybe I won't go out one night, or the thermostat is not where I would put it, but I'll like put it up a couple degrees because you get freezing. Or the tone that I'm using, I don't think I'm yelling, But you feel threatened by my tone. And so I need to figure out how to speak in a way that's not going to be threatening to you. Not because I think I'm bad and wrong, not because I think I quote unquote should, but because this is another person I care about and their nervous system is different than mine. And so we've got to figure out a way to make both work. No harm, no foul for me if I like quiet my voice a little bit or slow down a little bit so it's easier for my partner to hear me. But oftentimes where we'll get stuck and trapped, and this is the power struggle phase, is someone says, watch your tone. And then I say, what do you mean? I'm not yelling. And they're like, what? Yes, you are. And I'm like, excuse me, let's talk about decibels. What's like the power struggle term is so apt for what actually happens right now. We're in this tug of war over who's right and who's wrong. But one of my colleagues, and I think one of my favorite relationship teachers and therapists, Terry Real, has a line that I just love where he says, there is no such thing as objective reality in relationship. There are just two subjective experiences happening at the same time. So if someone is going 10 miles over the speed limit, and the other person says, you're going too fast. And one person's like, what are you talking about? It's 10 miles over the speed limit. That's fine. Or 5 miles over the speed limit. And the other person's like, no, you're going too fast. Nobody's wrong.

Right.

It's totally different perceptions, subjective realities that are happening. And I'm, by the way, not talking about actual lying. I'm not talking about manipulation or coercion or anything like that, but, you know, the everyday kind of messiness of human beings. So. If we stay at the level of you're speeding and going too fast, okay, I might be speeding, but it's not that fast, right? Versus me being like, hey honey, when you drive that way, I get nervous.

Right?

Can you slow down?

Right. And so what you're talking about is this power struggle, which is what most of us are not even taught to even identify or to figure out how to deal with. And so let me just go back to this idea of repair because I first want to start with what, how do you define repair? What does repair actually mean in a relationship and what does it actually look like when it's successful between two people?

Well, I'll say I used to define repair as there's an impact and somebody takes ownership for that impact and you come back together, like more or less. I no longer see it that way. Because what I see in my practice, what I see with the thousands of people I'm talking with online, and what I'm watching in my personal relationships and in kind of culture writ large, sure, is that so far the conversation about repair has required two people to be involved in it. Okay. But the truth is, sometimes you, like, your mom might not be able to come to the table and use I language. Your boss, you might not be able to like slip them a notepad that says, here's nonviolent communication, let's active listen together. Like that's pretty unrealistic. And yet if we don't want to cut these relationships off, we have to have a solution that makes amends in a way that works for us. So how I see repair now is a nervous system response. So if you can think back to A time where someone apologized to you and they said the exact right thing.

Mm-hmm.

Like they named the impact, they took responsibility, but something in what they said didn't actually land for you.

Mm-hmm.

Like they did the right things, but your system was like, that wasn't quite it. And then now think about an experience where someone comes up to you, they don't actually say anything, but they give you a hug. and your whole system just settles into it and you don't actually need to have a conversation. Like, mm-hmm. You feel, you feel the somatic experience of softening.

Mm-hmm.

And of your triggers going down and of coming back to homeostasis. Right. To me, that's repair. Now, when you think about the roles reversing where you've been hurt, but the other person can't or won't come to the table. And by the way, that could be an ill parent. That could be somebody or a friend. This could be so many dynamics where someone can't or won't, but you still don't want to cut that relationship off. Then what you're doing is you're building the skills inside to build your resilience, tolerance, and capacity for tension. And in doing this, repair doesn't happen because the other person gives you what you want. Repair happens because you watch your own nervous system begin to shift and change, and you build confidence by doing that.

Right.

So we have been taught that repair is a communication skill. You say this, I say this, you say, right? You listen this way. And again, I'm not saying that's not important. We need communication. And when both parties are into it and can do it, fantastic. In a romantic partnership, it's probably not gonna be doable to maintain a close dynamic when one party is continually not coming to the table with repair, with owning their part, with seeing their role, with apologizing, with really getting your world. But with a lot of other relationships, when that might not be possible, repair is still possible. It just becomes a one-person experience. So, so far repair has been taught as a communication skill. What I'm saying is repair is as much a communication skill as it is a physiological and capacity skill. Repair is about building your capacity. And that is just to take it right back to the beginning. What we are losing, what is being atrophied right now in the digital, virtual, frictionless world is our capacity for tension. Now, I don't mean that Somebody comes to you and they're screaming at you and you just tolerate it because you're building capacity. No, right? What I mean is somebody comes in and yells and you either, you know, okay, these are my moves to deescalate and these are my moves to set a boundary if it doesn't deescalate. But there's no way that you can do either of those if you are completely triggered yourself. And you're out of your window of tolerance and now you're in your red zone and you are yelling back or shutting down or caving or whatever it is, or just literally sitting there and taking it, taking it, taking it. So repair to me is choice. It's, I can stay regulated enough so that I can come to this conversation and have choice. So when you are yelling at me, I can say, Instead of, again, doing any of those things back, I can say, hey, listen, when you talk to me like that, I actually can't hear you. Can you take it down a couple of notches? Or listen, I hear you're angry. Here's what I'm hearing underneath. Am I getting that? And maybe that deescalates, right? But if it's feeling unsafe or if you're just like, absolutely not gonna put up with that, which is fine, that's your MO. The only way that you can make a move that is for you instead of because of your programming and your defense mechanisms, is to stay in your window of tolerance of at least being semi-regulated. And maybe you're not deescalating, but you're saying, hey, it doesn't actually work for me when you talk to me like this. I'm going to leave and I'll be back in an hour. Let's come back to this conversation and we can continue it then.

So that was going to be my question, is that you're in that situation. What do you do if the person that you are trying to deescalate with is not deescalating? Like, you know, you have this intention, right? The other person, depending on who it is, right? A boss, a parent, they may not have the same intention. Yeah. Or even have the same consciousness of what's going on. Right? So what do you do now?

This is where boundaries come in and boundaries are really important and highly misunderstood.

Mm-hmm.

We think boundaries have to do with someone else changing. We think a boundary looks like, hey, stop talking to me like that. And then if they don't, they're not respecting our boundary. But that's not what a boundary is at all. A boundary is, I am going to take care of myself and it requires nothing of you. Now, that doesn't mean I'm gonna stay in relationship. So literally what I just said, I might say, hey, when you talk to me like this, it doesn't actually work. I'm gonna hang up the phone or I'm gonna leave the room and I'll come back in an hour or I'll come back in a day. Telling somebody you're coming back is a deescalating move, by the way. And then again, when you are not triggered, when you are regulated, repair is choice, right? So then at that point you're thinking, okay, does this work for me? And if not, that doesn't necessarily mean, oh, let's just go to the end of the rope and cut this person off. That might mean here are the limits. Here's a way we can talk to each other. I need somebody else in the room when we're gonna have hard conversations, or we're gonna talk for 10 minutes at a time and then we're gonna stop so it doesn't escalate in the way that it did, right?

Right.

So there are plenty of kind of middle moves here that aren't staying in a conversation that is not healthy and are setting boundaries for yourself. Now, I think the truth is in the day and age that we're living in, we're conflating discomfort with safety. And I'm never going to say someone should stay in an unsafe dynamic. Absolutely not.

Sure.

And uncomfortable and safe are different. And so to understand what that is for you, and by the way, that might be different for different people. If somebody grew up in a household where there was a lot of screaming or abuse, and then you enter into a relationship where someone gets loud, then the tolerance for someone getting loud might be, wow, I have a lot of tolerance for this, probably too much tolerance because you're so used to it. Or it might be, I have absolutely no tolerance for this. By the way, both of those, okay.

Right.

There is no right answer here on how much is too much or not enough, et cetera. Right. This is what is workable for my nervous system and how am I taking the deliberate steps to work on my nervous system to build its capacity. For some of us, that capacity looks like staying in the room longer than we're able because we dissociate or we completely shut down when things actually aren't dangerous. There's just tension. For others of us, that nervous system regulation that we need to work on is going to look like leaving a conversation way earlier than we would have.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So for all of us, the nervous system work to build capacity for tension is going to be different.

Right.

And the way to understand that is to understand what's my edge here? Do I stay too long or do I leave too early? Do I let somebody walk all over me or do I say things too quickly that I didn't mean to say and then I regret? Right. We all kind of fall on different spectrums here.

Sure. And so, you know, this is great cuz I think these are like really good strategies for people to sort of keep in their minds of like, how can I deal with a difficult moment or trying to repair or dealing with conflict? But here's my question about the conflict piece, because you said earlier that you think that conflict is actually necessary in a healthy relationship. So, How do you balance that? Because I would say, even for myself, you know, growing up, most of us are programmed to think that conflict in relationships is bad. And so we all avoid it as much as possible. Where what I'm hearing from you is that actually is not the way to go about things, that it's not healthy to avoid conflict in relationships.

Listen, not all conflict is created equal. There is unhealthy conflict.

Sure.

Listen, one kind of identifying question here that I think can help kind of cut through the noise about whether or not the conflict is okay or like needs to be exited from is, am I becoming more of who I want to become even through the tension? Because conflict is meant to grow you. So if it is growing you, then your relationship is a dojo, right? If you are learning how to breathe through something that's hard, and by doing that, you're finding connection at the end of it. Or if you're learning to not be so impulsive and say the thing exactly when you need to say it, and you're just learning to slow down, right? If you're learning to stay in the room 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 1 minute longer than you were, than you could have before, even though the conflict is hard, even though that sucks to feel in your body, but you're noticing yourself growing in your capacity, that's a good sign. If you notice yourself shrinking, disappearing, becoming less of who you are, trusting yourself less, questioning yourself, these are all probably pretty good signals that something in the dynamic— it might be you, it might be them, it might be just the two of you together— sure, doesn't actually work. I had a very close friendship at one point where the dynamic got so close I would watch myself literally collapse, like collapse completely when she would bring anything to me. And she had a kind of harshness about her. And there are other people who could deal with that harshness. Like they could like let that slide. They didn't take it too seriously. For my nervous system, what I started watching myself do is she would bring something to me, it would be harsh, and my whole system would collapse. Like I would go into a full fawn response, I wouldn't even recognize myself. For me, in that moment, during that time, repair wasn't possible except for getting out of that and taking the space that I needed to understand what's my work here. Like that, to me, that was like climbing Everest. I can't do Everest climbing. I'm not there yet. I'd like to be there yet. I'm working on it. I'm doing better, but that's like, I need something a little more tender in order to even approach my own work, which is not fawning, which is standing up for myself, right? Which is saying things in a clean way instead of bottling them up and then coming with a bunch of stuff at the same time. But I couldn't, I literally, my nervous system would not allow me to do it. So I actually ended up breaking off that relationship, not because that's the thing I wanted to do. It was like, okay, I needed space from that. To start to do my own work and then have the intention actually of coming back, but in a way where I've done my own work and I can actually meet that part, or we don't come up against that part because we're not as close. And so we're in a kind of right relationship around. So do you see, like, it begins to get so nuanced.

Yes.

But the framing question of, am I growing more into who I want to become and is my capacity getting stronger and is that giving me more confidence? Is that making me more excited about who I am, even if it's hard, or am I shrinking? And those are pretty distinct and obvious pieces that people can generally understand in themselves.

Yes, they can. But I also think, and this is the question I have for you, is that for many people, they don't even know how to identify that piece. They can't even go there because they're so stuck in the feeling that I'm doing something wrong. Oh my gosh, this is my fault, right? I know a lot of people will go right to that piece that they get into this conflict and before they can even say, is this helping me? Am I growing? They can't even go there because they're stuck in a blame of themselves of saying, I did something wrong. I caused this problem. So what do you do in that place? Because I see this with a lot of women in my life. Yeah, especially being South Asian, first generation. I see this in a lot of kids, a lot of young adults that I know, especially women. And this is, this is a constant problem that I'm seeing, is that they feel like everything is their fault.

Yeah, listen, I mean, I relate. I'm in that camp too. So there are two pieces I want to name. I think most people who try to do this work on their own, it's too hard to do on your own. We're talking like our very basic reptilian wiring here.

Right. Right.

And I think we try to do that by ourselves. I think we need way, way more support than we're getting ourselves. That's just the truth. I think, I think doing this work on your own can keep you looping. And it really is a support system, therapist, coach, friend, group, that to me helps actually build the muscle. And that's really, really important. So one is that I feel like way too many people are trying to do this on their own. So that's one. The second piece is where a lot of people get into trouble is they try and resolve the conflict when they're in this trigger. And so it's the trigger saying, this is my fault. But actually, when you come back to baseline and when you take— when you find yourself in a more regulated place, that's when your prefrontal cortex is online and you can see a little more nuance. You can see a little more of like, okay, wait a second. But if you're literally in the place of this was all me, the likelihood that you are still triggered is high and nothing effective is going to come out of that. That's just a collapse, right? To me, something like a group, a therapist, like doing this on your own is probably the hardest thing you can possibly do. And to just know that for some of us to just get in our heads, oh, it's not my fault that this is hard. It's that this is actually deeply ingrained and wired into me as a response. And if I can't get out of it myself, even when I'm not triggered, the likelihood that the dynamic is going to change without support is going to be really low.

Right.

We need someone to— we— what— and maybe that's a friend, right? Like, or maybe that's a book, or maybe that's a course. I don't care what it is. It doesn't need to be some high-ticket something or other, but the kind of either cultural piece of not seeking help or the martyr piece of not seeking help, that I can do this on my own, are also two big pieces I see as barriers to support.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that what you're also talking about is this is not just only happening in our personal relationships, right? I mean, that's the one that so many of us think about. We think about our intimate relationship, right? Our romantic intimate relationship. But this is extending to like, and you've given great examples of that. Family relationships, parents, friendships, professional relationships. And repair across these can be a little more tricky in the sense of, you know, first of all, we have to identify that we need to repair in those relationships, right? Because I think a lot of people don't even see that as being the relationships that they need to repair or that they need to even think about. They just think that they're stressful and like, I'll just avoid it. But then when we understand how to repair in these relationships, I feel like that can also shift how we are in our culture, right? The dynamics that we have between people. There's also this interesting piece between repair and loneliness that we avoid repairing, we avoid conflict, and then we feel lonely. I know you did a TED Talk on loneliness, right? And so this is all connected in these ways. But I really want to, you know, sort of dig into the loneliness piece because I do think so many people are very lonely. We know, we know all the epidemic stats on this, right? It's a huge issue, especially out of COVID It's become like the second pandemic from that, right? How do you see loneliness showing up in these partnerships, whether it's intimate, personal, professional, friendship? When people think that they're actually together, that they're working together, that they're friends, but they're still lonely. Like, how does that all come together?

Well, I think we understand largely loneliness to be isolation. And so when we are in relationship and we feel isolated and lonely inside of relationship, it can feel really incongruent. It can feel quite disorienting. But relational loneliness is just as pervasive as isolation. I wouldn't say one is better or worse. Obviously they're both terrible, but they're different. And relational loneliness looks like, I thought I should feel connected to this person and seen and understood and valued, and I don't. And that is disorienting because there's this huge gap in between what I think I should feel or what I have felt and what I am feeling right now. And there is no way that the other person is seemingly able to comfort that kind of well of loneliness. It's like, how many of us have gone to bed with partners and we turn off the light and we've just had a huge fight, we didn't figure it out, we turn off the light and there's like this silent scream. That's loneliness. Loneliness also shows up, I mean, listen, we're in a world where we are constantly semi-distracted on our phones. So loneliness also occurs in moments where connection would have otherwise occurred. In transition moments of coming home, people are scrolling right before bed. During meals, people have their phones. When someone is talking, someone's just kind, maybe even just checks their phone once and then puts it down. I've seen some research that even having your phone on the table, even if if it's face down, can have people, can be off-putting. And so in these micro moments of day-to-day mundane experiences where connection used to live or be able to live and breathe, it's now being taken by this micro distraction. But because it's happening for all of us, it can feel hard to name and it can feel like, what are we supposed to do about this? It's not like I'm going to have my partner or my friend or my mom or whatever ban my phone. That's just also completely unrealistic. I think largely because we haven't learned how to repair, we also haven't learned to ask for what we want. And so we do it in a way that's unclean, and then we don't get the thing that we want. So instead of saying, I really want to feel connected to you, before bed, can we put our phones down for the last 20 minutes before we go to sleep? We say, oh, there you are, distracted again. Right. There's that term dry begging, which is like, oh, you're going to go out again without me? When really what we're saying is, hey, I miss you.

Right.

And so I think part of what the cost of not learning these skills is that we can find ourselves asking for what we want. Over and over and over again. But if we're not doing it in an effective way, we keep getting met with resistance or defensiveness or shutdown or anger or whatever. And then we say, what do I do? I've done my part when actually we just don't know what our part is.

And part of it is also is that so many of these behaviors have been normalized. The phone is the perfect example. It's normal. Normalized to have a phone at dinner or during a conversation, right? That somebody's checking their email. Like, not that that's okay, but I think that also becomes a barrier and once again can make people, especially women, feel like they're asking for too much.

Yeah.

Right.

But the piece that I think is really important here is that, that experience of feeling like you are asking for too much or never getting your quote unquote needs met, Could be your partner. I'm not saying it's not your partner. It could be your friend or could be, but it also could be the way that you're asking.

Mm-hmm.

So that's really important to just name that how we ask something either often inspires somebody to say yes, because people who love us want to win. Yes, they actually do. And so, I mean, I hate to say this, it sucks to say, I wish it were different, believe me. We have no control over anybody else.

Yep.

Zero. No, they can either say yes or they can say no, and ultimately that's up to them. And the only thing we can control, right, is ourselves. Now, for women, we're not trained to ask for what we want. We're not trained to negotiate. We're trained in the opposite. And so it's going to take practice. It's going to take real practice, real training in order to build a different muscle that is not sweeping under the rug, not asking by complaining, and also setting boundaries when boundaries need to be set. All of those things in and of themselves are very hard skills to develop, but so doable with practice. So doable and so necessary for you to find your way back to yourself. Which is part of loneliness anyhow. It's also the feeling— loneliness is also the feeling that you have gotten so far away from who you are, your values, your desires, your dreams, that you don't— you're not even recognizable anymore.

Yeah. I mean, this sounds so overwhelming to even figure out where to start because I think there's so many pieces that we've talked about, right? There's the skills that we were never taught, and it's not just repair, it's asking for what we want, right? And even seeing that we have needs, I think, for a lot of us. But then it's also what we've seen modeled. So we don't even quite know what healthy conflict is in a relationship versus not, because it's all been sort of glamorized to be the honeymoon phase, as you talked about, right? And not the power struggle, which we don't even understand how to do that. So like, there's so many levels to this that I feel like so many of us need a lot of coaching or just learning new skills, relearning skills. Even at my age, I'm 54 years old, like this is probably something I need to learn, which is why I think, you know, what you're doing with some of the research that you're doing at Columbia with MDMA is so interesting because it feels like this amazing tool to sort of get into a place where you can actually start to learn these skills a little bit more and have that openness. So can you first tell us a little bit about what is MDMA? Because I think a lot of people get confused between psilocybin and MDMA and what that means as far as MDMA-assisted therapy is. Like, let's get into sort of what this tool is that could be quite revolutionary for so many of us.

Yeah, so MDMA is not a traditional psychedelic. It's actually called an empathogen. And if you think of the word empath, right? It is one of its benefits is to help you open your heart and it downregulates your amygdala. And so you're able to see another person's perspective. So far, this has been studied mostly with PTSD, and the results are pretty astounding with PTSD. And we are just starting to study it with couples. This is so— this is brand new. We've— there is some research by Ann Wagner and a few other folks in Canada and some in the US also who have done some research on couples, but one person has a PTSD diagnosis or only one person is taking MDMA. So if you picture a couple who've done a good year or so of talk therapy, right, they can name their pattern, they can apologize, but the second one of them feels accused, right? Their whole body kind of flips into threat and their defenses show up and they leave the session thinking like, okay, we talked a lot and somehow we're still stuck. Or a couple who comes in with a lot of trauma and they're dealing with like they can't even get past square one.

Right.

So in studies, MDMA tends to increase emotional empathy and prosocial or affiliative feelings. Right. Meaning people feel more warmth and openness towards themselves and towards another, which can completely change what's possible in the room with a couple. Then research also shows that MDMA can dampen the threat reactivity to social cues, right? The amygdala. It just sort of quiets that response, including reduced amygdala response to angry faces, which has been shown in an fMRI study, which is one of the reasons it's talked about in helping people stay present with hard relational material instead of immediately going into our fight, flight, fawn, freeze, right? Our adaptive patterns and mechanisms. So for couples, it's really helpful to start to understand, oh, can we actually sit inside the feeling, have a hard conversation without going into threat. And having the embodied experience can be so unbelievable. Now, I will say MDMA is not a panacea. I actually think for a lot of couples, it's not the move. The shadow side of this is that you can take it if you have access to it somehow. It's illegal. I'm, I also just want to name, I'm not advocating to do this outside of an approved clinical research setting. But what I will say is that a lot of couples who take it recreationally, what they're finding is they might feel good in the moment and it might feel really yummy, but then they get off of the medicine and a week, 2 months, whatever later, they're back in their same pattern because they haven't integrated. And so there are 2 kind of concurrent studies happening right now that I'm involved with. One is with Columbia and MAPS, and what we're doing there is we are surveying and then interviewing underground couples, MDMA couples therapy practitioners. So these are people who have been working illegally for many years, some of whom have worked since MDMA was legal at one point. So they've worked since it was legal and then gone into the underground and continued working with it. We're also interviewing practitioners who are doing this work in research settings. And what we're learning is what are the protocols? How are they dosing? How are they even getting their medicine? How are they prepping their couples? How are they integrating their couples? Right now, the only thing that we know is in research settings. Nobody has talked to the underground practitioners who are most of the people doing this work. Like, that's how most of us are not going to be taking MDMA in a research setting. If you're doing MDMA and you're doing it facilitated, you're likely finding an underground practitioner. And so there's a wealth of knowledge in the underground. Of people who are using their own protocols and what are these protocols? And then how can that help inform what we eventually— the hope is legalize. So that's one study. And then another study is with Rick Doblin, who's the founder of MAPS and a clinic out of San Diego called Enamory. And that is a pilot study where we'll be taking 6 to 12 couples through an MDMA-assisted couples therapy protocol where we'll give them a number of dosing sessions, maybe 3 or so. We're still developing the protocol, but 3 or so dosing sessions, which would mean you take MDMA and then in between doing integration sessions. So we'll see what we find, but this will be one of the very first studies of its kind where we're not just looking at diagnoses and people who are highly traumatized or PTSD. We'll be working with people quote unquote, it's such a bad name, healthy normals, whatever that even means. You just are, you know, have your normal everyday stress and anxiety and depression, you know, but, and seeing what happens after that. So we don't have data yet. These are both still in the works, but it's really exciting because for couples, MDMA, given how it works in the brain, MDMA is a really exciting tool that has the possibility to be to your point at the beginning, like kind of a cutting-edge resource for couples who just cannot get unstuck. But again, it's not for everybody. And it can be dangerous in that a couple can use it, have this experience once and feel so ooey gooey, and then a week later, they're back in their same patterns. And now they're feeling worse than before, because they're like, but we were able to do that a week ago. And now we can't even touch that place. So it really does take good practitioners and facilitators to be able to work through integration and put practices into place so that what gets uncovered in the MDMA sessions can actually stick.

Yeah. What are you hoping is going to come out of this research ultimately?

Listen, I hope we find that the underground has some commonalities. Like, I hope we find that people in a pretty siloed space can all of a sudden be like, oh wait, they're doing this. They're all kind of doing the same thing and it's working for them. Wow. It would be really great to uncover cover something like that. I don't know that we will, so we'll see. And then with the pilot research, I'm really hoping that we see couples who have historically not been able to come back together after conflict, not being able to repair, meet each other in a very new way using MDMA as the support. But we'll see.

Yeah, I mean, it's exciting. So what gives you hope right now in your field of this relational healing in what you're seeing in your work with your patients or in your studies. Let's talk about what's hopeful because this feels very overwhelming to think about how to even address repair in relationships because it does require so much insight on your own self of understanding where you are in the relationship. I think that's hard, especially when you're triggered like we've been talking about.

Well, I'll say just to hopefully quell some of the overwhelm, there are important pieces here that are simpler than they seem. So for instance, what we're working on at Baseline is regulation. We're working on what it means to regulate our nervous systems. That could mean starting a meditation practice. That could mean practicing with somebody having hard conversations. That could mean the little things that are like, if we're talking on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being a high trigger, 1 being nothing. You know, they leave a kind of a wrapper on the table, or your parent says something to you that kind of irks you, but it's like a 5 or below. And you practice saying the thing instead of avoiding it, or saying it cleanly when usually you would have said it kind of mean, or pausing for 10 seconds to a minute before responding to a text or something like that, right? So they're actually quite simple practices that are, that we're really working on expanding our window of tolerance. Our window of tolerance is the window in which we have choice. When we don't have choice, we are either hyper-aroused, which are my friends, I fall into this category, which are my friends who cry, get loud, talk really fast, want to prove their point. And then my hypo-aroused on the other side of the window of tolerance are my people who shut down or dissociate or literally leave the room or can't tolerate anybody saying anything. Before they literally just collapse. And so we're working to expand that. And we do that by these practices, by meditation, by breathwork, by practicing having semi-hard conversations that are not just the conversation that's the big fight. And listen, like this offering that I have, the Repair Lab, is like a really good way to practice. This is what we're all doing. So come join. It's, it's cheap right now. So, and I'm doing that so that we can all do this because it's easier to do this in a group. So I find actually a lot of hope that the pendulum swung for a while into self-preservation. Boundaries mean I need to exit relationships and toxicity. And I think we've started to realize, oh, that doesn't actually work like that. That harms me. I feel lonelier. I don't feel as connected. I feel myself missing something. And we're coming back into the middle. I really do see that. I see way more people talking about capacity building than I do about people saying, making the other person wrong and saying to leave, which we had a lot of in the years previous. For sure. I would say that's what I'm most hopeful about. I'm connected to a lot of the people in my field, and I feel like we're all seeing the conversation take a different tenor of just being like, okay, what does it actually mean to feel like we have more agency? Because the truth is, part of why this can feel overwhelming is because it doesn't actually feel like we have control over it or that the pieces are too big to do anything about.

Sure.

And so we don't know where to bite off. But if you literally bite off one practice, you meditate for 5 minutes in the morning, or you bring a relational practice to your partner by saying, hey, when you leave the wrapper on the counter, here's how it makes me feel, instead of, will you stop leaving your dirty wrapper all over the counter? When we start to practice that again at a 5 or below, We are practicing repair. We're practicing when we say, okay, let's practice having a hard conversation. Let's do it for 10 minutes and then we stop instead of just launching into a long conversation that is an hour long and both of us lose our capacity to stay in the room with each other.

You've given so many great examples of things you can do. So I call my podcast The Healing Catalyst because I really want to help people make impactful changes for their health. And that's the whole point of doing all of these conversations, of having this podcast. So along those lines, I mean, you've given us so many things to think about. What is one simple thing, not easy, but simple thing that the listeners could start doing today to really inspire healing that comes along with repair in relationships, genuine connection? What is one simple thing that people could think about?

Move from complaint to request. It's the lowest lift, highest reward that I could think of, which is anytime you have a complaint about anybody and you practice this, right? Even if it's a complaint to your boss, you literally turn that into a request. You literally say, or your co-parent, right? You say, instead of saying you're always late picking up the kids. It can become, hey, if you're not able to make it on time, I can actually make other arrangements. Is it possible for you to make sure you can pick them up at 3:30 tomorrow?

Hmm.

Right? So you're moving from complaint to request, or to your partner from like, I feel like you're kind of consistently distracted on your phone when I'm trying to have a conversation with you, turns into something that's like, you know, it makes me feel really connected when we're off our phones during a conversation. Can we both put our phones away? For 30 minutes during dinner, or to a friend saying, instead of saying, you never pick up when I answer, you're saying, hey, I'm feeling a little disconnected, and I notice that part of when that happens is when you don't pick up. I'd love to like have an understanding of what's happening when you're not picking up so I don't create this whole whirlwind of a story for myself. So complaint to request. It's simple, it's not easy, but it's so effective when you do.

Mm-hmm. Baya, thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation. I could ask you so many more questions because I feel like we've just scraped the tip of the iceberg of so many of the things that are involved in relational repair. But, you know, I will make sure that all of your links are put into the show notes so that, you know, folks can find the work that you're doing, the programs that you have, so that if they really want to dive into this work, they can be supported by someone as wonderful and as an expert as you. But thank you so much for doing this today.

Thanks so much for having me.

Okay, so I need to sit with that one for a minute. Two things that Baya said that I cannot stop thinking about. First, repair is a nervous system response, not a communication skill. It's not about saying the perfect thing, all the right words. It's actually about your whole nervous system settling down and feeling safe in whatever you say. And most of us have never been taught that. Second, conflict is actually necessary for healthy relationships. It's not the conflict that destroys us. It's the avoidance of conflict. It's the sweeping of things under the rug. It's turning away instead of turning toward. And when we avoid it, our nervous systems stay stuck in threat and our health pays the price. And then there's the loneliness piece that you can be right next to someone and feel completely invisible. That relational loneliness is just as real as isolation. I think so many of us probably needed to hear that named out loud. I know I did. And so if you're sitting with all of this and thinking, okay, but where do I actually start? Baya gave us the answer and it's simpler than you think. So here's your HealthRx for this week, straight from Baya. Move from complaint to request. The next time you wanna say, you always, or you never, take a pause, take a breath, and turn it into a request. Instead of, you're always on your phone, Try, it makes me feel really disconnected when you're on your phone and more connected when we put our phones away during dinner. Can we try that tonight? Start small. Pick something that's a 5 or below on your trigger scale. Just practice the muscle. One complaint, one request. That's it. This isn't about fixing your relationship. It's about repairing one small moment at a time. And if this episode made you realize that your mood, your reactivity, your exhaustion might be connected to what's happening in your body and not just your relationship, I want you to know about something that can really help. Every week, my co-founder, Dr. Dharmise Sethi, and I put out what we call Your Weekly HealthRx, a short podcast episode with specific actionable protocols rooted in Ayurveda and backed up by science. Personalized to your biology, your dosha. It's like having a physician in your pocket giving you guidance that's built for your body and your emotions. So start with the free dosha data assessment at myarvazi.com. It takes 5 minutes and it'll change how you understand yourself. Your constitution, your dosha, affects how you handle stress, how you process conflict, how your nervous system responds under pressure. And in relationships. And when you understand your dosha, you finally have a framework for what your body actually needs. All right, so head over to myarvazi.com. This is rooted in tradition, backed by science, and personalized for you. Thank you so much for being here. And if this episode hit home, share it with a friend who needs to hear it. Share it with your partner. Share it with anyone who needs to know that repair in relationships is possible and that wanting more in a relationship isn't asking for too much. Okay, my friends, remember, healing isn't just possible, it's in your power. I'll see you again next time. Until then, be well. Thank you for listening to The Healing Catalyst. If you found this episode episode helpful, please hit follow and share it with a friend. And if you feel inspired, please rate and review because it helps others find this podcast more easily. For more insights and tips, head to my website at avantikumarsingh.com. And to connect with me directly, find me on Instagram @avantikumarsingh. I loved sharing this episode with you. My hope is that you heard something today that that sparks a catalyst in your healing journey and helps you build lasting health. Be well, and I'll see you next time. This is a Dante32 production.