How To Strengthen And Repair Our Relationships With Others

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

When you feel like there's somebody in the world who's got your back, that's what each of us needs in order to thrive, in order to feel okay.

Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Relationships are a key factor when it comes to creating better health, happiness and joy in our lives. And we know loneliness is a major stressor and risk factor for disease. But it's not always easy. Many of us are carrying around old baggage, easily triggered and stuck in ruminating thoughts that began in childhood. It takes work, but investing our time and energy into our relationships and ourselves pays off in so many ways. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on why relationships are an integral part of good health and how to improve them. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Robert Waldinger on how we can get to know each other better, with Esther Perel on why we fight and how to and with Angelica Alana on working on ourselves to show up best in our relationships. Let's jump in.

How does connections and relationships foster health and how does loneliness biologically create disease and shorter lifespans? Because that's fascinating to me as a functional medicine doctor. I kind of want to know the why and the cause.

Absolutely. Well, let me give an example. So let's say you have something really upsetting happen during your day. Right? And you find that you're thinking about it, you're kind of ruminating about it. And then at the end of the day, there's somebody you can talk to. Maybe somebody at home or maybe you call somebody up, somebody who's a good listener, a sympathetic listener. You can literally feel your body calm down as you get to talk about it. Right? And you can literally feel your body return to equilibrium from that fight or flight mode, that agitation. Because what we know is that when you're upset, that your body secretes stress hormones, circulating levels of cortisol go up, inflammation goes up, and then the body's meant to return to equilibrium. But what if you don't have anybody to talk to about what's upsetting you? And so what we find is that good relationships seem to be stress regulators.

It's quite amazing. I think I noticed when I was researching in my book on longevity that I came upon a study that cuddling actually changes your epigenome, that just physical affection and connection. And it's true when you're with people who you have a deep connection with, who love you, who their nervous system is also sort of grounded, I would say, I just feel my nervous system start to kind of calm down at the same time. And I think that the data on all this really around sociogenomics, which is what is the biology and the effects of our social relationships and connections on our gene expression and everything downstream from that that you talked about, like inflammation, it's really, it's quite amazing. And so this is really an important study because it wasn't focused so much on what makes people sick, but what makes people thrive, right? What makes people live a long time. and have a happy life. So, what was sort of the surprising and interesting findings? What were the surprisingly interesting findings that you had from the study? What are the important lessons that you learned about relationships in particular, but also in general, when you had this sort of, you know, 80 years of data on all these men who you studied?

Yeah.

Well, the finding that relationships keep us happier and healthier was a surprise at first. It began to emerge in the 1980s and at first people running our study didn't believe the data because yeah, we know the mind and the body are connected. How could your relationships at age 50 predict whether you're going to get type 2 diabetes in older age or whether you're going to get arthritis? How could that possibly happen? And then other studies began to find the same thing. And that's where we begin to believe it. So no one study, even my famous longitudinal study, 85 years, no one study of this kind can prove anything. But if you have many studies pointing in the same direction, then we begin to have much more confidence and we begin to say, my gosh, this is real. This is powerful. And so I think one of the things that surprised us is the finding that loneliness and poor quality relationships are as damaging to your health as cigarette smoking, as obesity. So that these things that we consider so dangerous for us are no more dangerous than Isolation and loneliness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's so interesting. We have such a, quote, connected society, but we're still often so isolated and disconnected from each other. You know, we have social media, but it doesn't feel very social. It often drives more stress in our nervous systems than, than actually healing from the nature of the way we kind of interact. And it's just, it's kind of a, it's kind of a weird moment, I think, in history where we've lost our tribal communities, we've lost our connections. We live in these nuclear families or these single parent families. I was a single parent. And, you know, we kind of navigate life in these little bubbles of isolation. And, you know, it's unusual to see today, you know, big extended families and communities and, and, and, you know, you have to really work at it. So I wonder, you know, how did, how did these people actually cultivate it? What were the life skills and hacks that allowed them to keep, maintain, build and nurture these relationships that actually determine their health span and their lifespan.

Well, one thing to point out is that not everybody was successful at cultivating this. So some of the stories in our book, we have stories of our real participants and their names are disguised to protect their privacy, but we have stories about their lives and not all the stories are happy. Not all the stories have happy endings because some of these people weren't successful. But the ones who were seemed to get it that making relationships a priority, no matter where you were, at home, at work, out in the community, that focusing on people really made a difference, really helped you cultivate this kind of well-being. And so, some of our folks got it right away. Some of our folks learned that lesson as they got older, as they had more life experience.

You know, yeah, you know, sort of thinking about my father, you know, and, and I, and I, you know, how isolated he was. And, I mean, he was married, but he really kind of focused on his career and focused on being successful and kind of lost a lot of his friends and ended up, you know, really, really without a lot of friends as he got older. And then I invited him to this men's work. I've done men's work for 30 years. And we had this thing called Spirit Camp, and we would go up to this sort of camp, like a YMCA camp on top of this mountain in the Berkshires. And I invited him to come, and my friend invited his father to come. And they were both like the same age, 79 years old. And they were both kind of New York Jews from Brooklyn. They both were kind of atheists. They both were, you know, joined the Navy at 17. They were very similar. And they were both tall, interesting characters, and they kind of bonded and developed this incredible friendship. And I saw how much it enriched my father's life. And even on his deathbed, like this guy Jerry, his friend, was calling him on the phone. And, you know, I just realized how important those things are. And we often don't prioritize them in our lives. And I think it sounds like, you know, the people in the study who prioritize them actually did much better.

We asked our original people this question. We said, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? And some people couldn't list anybody. Some people who were married couldn't list anybody. And then some people could list several people. And I think what your dad found was a friend. He found a real friend who would call him when he was sick and who who would be there, who would have his back. And I think one of the things we've learned is so powerful from our study is what we call in my jargon, secure attachment. That when you feel like there's somebody in the world who's got your back, who you could go to if you were really in trouble, that's what each of us needs in order to thrive, in order to feel okay about our lives.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, I don't want to make this about me, but just reflecting on how true this is. I remember when I was a little boy, I was very isolated. I was kind of a weird, nerdy kid and hid in my room with a lot of books. It's paid off in the end. Yeah, me too. Paid off in the end. But me too. I really didn't have anybody who saw me as a kid. And then I went out west and I went backpacking. I was 18. I met this guy on the top of this mountain and we were both going to be in Ithaca in the fall. And we kind of bonded and we really had this incredible friendship. friendship for, like, 45 years. And he just, I'm in Baja, and he just left. And we had this, you know, mountain biking trip here, and, you know, we talked and we, we just, like, I don't, I, he's been such an integral part of my life throughout everything and has helped me feel like I have that secure attachment, like I have somebody to call. And, and now I've obviously developed many, many more people I can call, but it's, it's having that gave me a sense of being okay. Like, somehow life was quite different before and after that experience. So I don't know how to tell people to form those attachments or how do you find those people? How do you build that? Like, I just wonder if there were any insights from the study about how to actually create it. Because you say, oh, I want you to eat more vegetables. Okay, I got that. Oh, I want you to exercise more. Okay, I got that. But, like, I want you to have a deeper connections and relationships. Like, how do you get here to there? If you're in that. isolation stage.

Well, one thing is to be active. So you and your friend had to arrange that he would come be with you in Baja, right? You had to go out of your way. You had to carve out the time. You had to make the arrangements. You had to be active. And I think one of the things many of us, myself included, can fall into is the sense of, oh, my good friends are my good friends. The friendships will take care of themselves. I don't really have to do anything. And what we came to understand from our research is something that we're thinking about as a kind of social fitness, analogous to physical fitness, where you work out one day and then you don't say to yourself, well, I've done that. I don't have to do that ever again, right?

You don't do that.

Really?

I ate one vegetable. I know I'm good now.

Exactly, exactly. So you don't do that. You say, okay, I need to have a routine. I need to, this is a practice. both of self-care, you know, of diet, of exercise, but also a self-caring practice of tending to important relationships. So part of it is actively maintaining the relationships that you've built to make sure they stay close, get closer. Another then is if you're isolated to find ways to have contact with people and often One of the best ways is to have contact around a shared interest. So you happen to meet your friend on a mountaintop, which meant that you were both interested at least that day in taking a hike, right?

Back to the hike.

Yeah. So and you could connect around the trail, around nature, you could share things, right? So what if you volunteer for a cause you're passionate about? And so you might be shy But if you're right next to people who also care about climate change or about saving the world in some other way.

Or about gardening or about golf, fishing or whatever, right.

Fishing, anything. That what you find is that the shared interest provides a place to start conversations and that by starting those conversations, you can begin to get to know someone. I'll say one more thing which we find constantly is that bringing curiosity is a huge benefit to making a relationship. So we all love it when somebody is curious about us. Like, you know, Mark, if I ask you more about yourself, you'll want to talk about it, right? You know, you asked me about my Zen life and I told you about it a little bit before we started this this podcast. And so what we find is that when you ask people about themselves, they feel your interest, they feel seen, and when they get to tell you about themselves, they feel known. And so if you can just bring curiosity, you don't have to bring anything else. Notice something, you know, I noticed something in your Zoom background in your, notice something that's on a co-worker's desk. a photo or a little object. Just be curious and you will strike up conversations that turn out to be meaningful.

You know, Robert, I think you just hit on something so fundamental, which is that all of us want really one thing, which is to be seen and known and heard and gotten. And how rare that is and how simple it is to actually create that experience for someone by just being curious about them. Tell me more about yourself or ask, like, you know, like, I went to there with some friends here in Mexico. I said, so how did you guys meet? What's your love story? And then the whole, like, it was like an hour and a half conversation, and it was great. It was so entertaining and fun, and, you know, they felt like we cared about them and it deepened our connection. And so I think, I think it's not that hard to do, but so many of us are just tired and burnt out and focused on what we have to do and getting through the next thing and, you know, on our own lives and, but, but stopping that and taking a breath and actually figuring out how to get curious about people in your life will 100% create real connections. So that's such a beautiful, beautiful nugget. And I think we don't, we kind of lost the art of questions. I have a friend, Andrew, who's like, he's like the master. Like, he'll just go in and ask you these piercing questions that literally, you know, probably may or may not want to share with anybody, but, like, they get, they get to the real essence of what matters and what you care about and who you are and. And those are rather than just talking about the weather or whatever, it's like having a more deeper sense of inquiry about another person's heart and soul and mind. It's beautiful. That's a great nugget.

You know, the other thing we can do is we can do that with people we think we know really well. So research tells us another interesting thing. So how much do you know your partner? Let's say you're in an intimate partnership. What they find is that we're most attuned to our partner's feelings when we first get together. 'Cause think about it, you're trying to figure out, is this person into me? Like what's going on with this person, right? So you're really paying attention and then what they find is that partners know each other less well, they know each other's feelings less accurately the longer they're in the relationship. You would think it would be the opposite.

So.

One of the tips that we find we can give to people for livening up old relationships is to bring that curiosity to a relationship, to somebody you feel you know everything about. Like one of my Zen teachers taught me this, the instruction in a meditation was, what's here right now that I have never noticed before? And if you could bring that curiosity to you know, having dinner with your longtime partner, that could get you into a much more interesting and interested space.

I do couples therapy. I have a real predilection for working with couples because I find it one of the most fascinating relational systems that we have at this moment. This couple can really induce bliss and hell in a level that is amazing. So do families for that matter. And I work with families as well. Here's the thing. It used to be that when people came to couples therapy, they came actually for their children. They didn't come to couples therapy. They came and slowly we would identify that there was something maybe in the relationship that also was interacting with the challenges that the child was having. Couples therapy really became a discipline of its own in the center that it is today, when the expectations around intimate relationships began to rise. The more we expect from the couple and the more we need couples therapy to help us with those expectations. When the couple was not the central unit of the family, but because the family was more important than the couple and people stayed together for the family. Today, not the children and not the family, it really will keep people together. They may keep them a few more years, but ultimately what keeps people together is the quality of the relationship between the yeah, right. So therefore, couples therapy becomes a much more sought after practice. I don't just do communication. You know, I was thinking, and I was editing another podcast session. And it's an incredible session. It's the first session of season five that I'm producing now. And they come in and he says, you know, we are both people who like things to be done who like to do things our way. And I said, that's okay, that's interesting. But what I'm hearing also is that you are two people who like other people to do things your way.

Yeah, that's what they meant, right?

So then I asked, you know, on what, how did you learn, you know, to say yes and how did you learn to say no? And he begins to tell me a whole story of of how basically his father would continuously belittle him, lecture to him, be contemptuous. We would start with the conversation son, and then what followed was often berating him for all the things that he wasn't doing right and living up to expectations. And she grows up with a drug-addicted mother Father who commits suicide and she is the adult in the house from that literally raises her two children. They say to me at one point, we fight about everything. We don't communicate. And I say, I don't think you fight about everything at all. Actually, I think you're fighting about the same thing all the time. The moment he experiences you as saying to him, you're incompetent. you're not doing it well, you're not doing it right, he is in that original wound of him, of his. And the moment he says, you,'re not gonna tell me what to do, you know, I'm doing it, I'm out of here, and he goes for a break, you think, I'm once again all alone with all the responsibilities and the four children on my shoulders, and I will always be alone, and I will never have anybody by my side. And you fight about that original wound. that's what every argument is actually about.

It's the same story over and over.

You know, and that was so illuminating for them that it wasn't about the chore chart that she had made, and it wasn't about the kids, and it wasn't about his parents. It was about, you know, I don't want to be inadequate and I don't want to be alone. Those were the themes that each one was really and Then we started to work. So that becomes different than just communicating, how do you say things nicer?

Yeah, yeah.

How do you get people to kind of move past those really primordial conditionings of childhood? That's the $64,000 question.

Yes, I think the most important thing is that you teach people two things or you, when I say teach, it means you help them see two things. you help them separate the past from the present. The fact that this brings back vividly the experience of back then doesn't mean that it is actually what used to happen back then. The past and the present sometimes feel like they come together into one, but they are not. And the second thing is that you then say at seven, you were helpless. at seven you couldn't respond. At seven you couldn't just leave the house and say this is dangerous for me to be here. You you know whereas now you are an adult and you have choices. So and then you go and you basically help them first of all through the body to separate the past from the present. In this moment I get that tension, like I want to start fighting. Like this man was a master of defiance, you know? But he got all his confidence through defiance, which means that it was pseudo-confident. And when she would actually say, Go ahead and do things, I'm with you, I support you, then he would start to talk about all his doubts. He was always sure only when he was in opposition. When he was in a fight, then he knew what he wanted. But when he had somebody who was actually loving and giving, then he didn't know what to do with himself. and you go through the body and you track the feeling because a feeling is also embodied, then you articulate the experience. And then you know what I really did with them? I really had a lot of fun. They had a lot of fun. I said, lay down flat on the floor. And then I said, now continue the argument. Do you know that you can't fight when you're lying flat?

Yeah.

Or if you take your clothes off, I think that's another thing I've heard from couples. Everybody take their clothes off. start to have a fight.

You know, it's like we are meant to fight in straight up position like that. So then it opened up a completely different and it went from the fighting to the action behind the fighting, which is often the fear of loss, which is often, will you leave me? Will you be there for me? Etc. And then you go deeper, deeper, deeper, and that takes some time.

So beautiful. Well, you know, Esther, you've been at the front seat of literally probably hundreds, if not thousands of relationships in ways that most people don't ever have insight into by simply the virtue of your job. Just like I've seen so many people who've been sick, you've seen so many people who've had relationship challenges. So in that perspective, looking back after decades of doing this, what do you define as the success of relationships? day to day, like what are the keys to a successful relationship and what are the things that really destroy relationships? Yeah.

I will start with what destroys relationships.

And I'm taking notes.

I will really refer to the work of John Gottman and John and Julie Gottman here on what destroys them. You know, they have a wonderful way of kind of separating between the masters and the disasters. And they talk about the Four Horses of Apocalypse.

Yeah.

And basically what will kill relationships is chronic criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and the killer of them all is contempt. Because contempt, and this we know also in large scale traumas, is contempt is the dehumanizing. Contempt is whatever you feel or think is irrelevant and doesn't matter. you don't even reach me. So that those, those four horses of apocalypse, I think kind of summarize things well. And once, so criticism, a lot of things. Defensiveness.

Criticism, defensiveness and Stonewalling, basically shutting it, shutting down.

Right.

Shutting people out.

Yes. Yes. Being rolled off and contempt, which is basically the, you know, shame is on the, shame is one side and contempt. Contempt, shame is contempt for oneself and contempt for the other. It goes in both directions.

Yeah.

I think when I once wanted to write a paper, I wanted to write a paper about what are creative couples? Because we talk about lasting couples, we talk about stable couples, but we rarely talk about what is creative couples or what you may include in successful couples and what was fascinating is what you said before. The majority of people, when I said, do you know couples who have a spark? Couples who inspire you? And people would on occasion come up with one, maybe two, often none. It was really scary to them because if I said, can you come up with entrepreneurs, with artists, with writers, with intellectuals, people have lists of people that inspire.

Of course.

But here is everybody wanting to be in a relationship, and not many people, you know, can think about, yeah, I like that. I want to do this. I never wrote the paper because what people ended up saying seemed rather banal to me, as in that's, I know that. But then I have been sitting on this thing for years thinking, actually, maybe it's not that known. But what they said was this, and that was very interesting. This is not in order. One is admiration. Admiration for your partner. It's not respect, it's different. Admiration always implies a level of idealization. I look up to you. I admire you for who you are as a person, as a human being, more than just in your role as a partner, as a parent, as a... So that was one big one. Two, the relationship is basically a foundation with wings, meaning there's a solid anchor of trust and that solid anchor of trust interacts with the ability to take risks in life and in the relationship and to be playful. It's what I often have looked at, the combination between the integration between our need for security and safety and predictability and reliability and our need for change and novelty and exploration and discovery. These two fundamental human needs. I think that the best relationships have a nice balance between what is togetherness and what is separateness. People have their own lives, but before I even continue, I think the best thing to say is this: There is no one size fits all.

It's all, yeah.

I can't tell you one, it's like you with health. It's not like you have a sense in health that it's an interaction of different parts.

Of course.

If it is more of this or more of that, you know, some couples have Venn diagrams that are completely overlapping. They do everything together. They spend all their time together and it works beautifully.

Yeah.

And some other very creative and successful couples are much more differentiated and actually they have a strong core but with big individual lives, you know, separate. So there is no one size fits all. I really would love that to be actually my opening line to your question before I even say what makes for success. People who feel free in a relationship that makes for success. For sure, people who feel oppressed or under surveillance or who have to constantly lie or hide or, you know, don't not say what they bought or what they that kind of stuff, those are major differences that I would add to the Gottman list. It's a degree of autonomy matched with a deep sense of belonging. These two together is a beautiful dance.

It's beautiful. But I think there's some really practical ways that you talk about for people to achieve whatever it is there, best relationship is, right? Boundaries, routines, rituals. You know, what are the kinds of things that you help people establish within the relationship to build that foundation, that structure? Because it's not something we know automatically. It's not something we, we actually are taught. How do you help people build those structures in those relationships and help them get to that?

So it's very interesting. This couple that I was mentioning before, where he kind walled himself off with no needs because he was all alone and there was nobody who could help him anyway. And she is like permeated by all these voices. I thought that I had done a rather limited session with them. I really thought, I didn't really reach them. I didn't really go underneath the noise, etc. And then I get a letter today that you never know, you know, you never know about how much some of the tiny things that I did that I thought were almost slightly, you know, they were not, basically, I would say, it's one thing to say, how about you tell Esther about this versus shutting your partner up and talking for them. Of course, you want to, to bring something up, but you also want to let them tell their own story.

Yeah.

How about when you have a problem or a question about sex or about children, you don't first go to your mother and grandmother assistant Just make a request and stick to that. And adding up these things, basically they write to me three weeks later and say there's been a fundamental shift. We haven't had a single fight. I was able to no longer go and talk to my mother about everything. He feels much more open to me because I'm much less critical with him. And I appreciate his openness. And that makes me more fond of him. and that makes him more asexual with me and more expressive of his desire for me. And it becomes the opposite of the escalation in the negative direction is now a kind of escalating.

Yeah.

The going up in the positive direction. That's the work.

Yeah, it's so powerful. It's so powerful. What are the things that you've learned after decades of working with couples and relationships that are sort of nuggets of wisdom that you would leave people with about that could help them with relationships that they may be struggling with. What are the things that people should anchor to? And of course, there's your book, Meeting in Captivity and the State of Affairs and your podcast and all that, which is great. People should dive into that in your TED Talks. But I wonder if you could distill down what you've really learned.

The first thing I would say, and I think I have really, really learned it from the the millions of people that listen to Where Should We Begin? is that you're not alone. These days, on the one hand, we have unprecedented expectations of our couples' lives. But at the same time, we are also in a machine of fake news on social media. So people curate and posture and filter, and you kind of don't know where is the truth. You know, when people lived in the village, You hear you heard the fights of the neighbors and you heard the frolics of the neighbors. Now your best friends can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming.

Yeah, right.

Nobody tells you the truth about what goes on in the couple's relationships. And yet, and then you're left thinking these are great. Right, right. They're doing great and we are alone with our problems. And so I think really where should we begin showed me that when you listen deeply to the stories of others, you see yourself in front of your own mirror. and you don't feel as alone and you get the tools for the conversations that you want to have. I think that's the first thing I really realized that this is a unit that doesn't talk. Friends talk to friends. Couples often talk to nobody about what's really going on. They may be struggling with infidelity. They may be struggling with infertility. They may be struggling with bipolarity and mental health issues. They may be struggling with unresolved grief They may be struggling with economic hardships, with unemployment, with addictions, and they won't talk about it to anybody because they have to present themselves a certain way. And it breaks my heart sometimes to see how alone people are with some of these major, major challenges. So that's the first thing I've really learned, is to make sure that that's part of the game too, is to give people a tool to make hard conversations less difficult. The second thing that I have really learned is this couple that I was describing where I thought, oh my God, this is, you know, they really came in to say, we need you to tell us are we broken? Are we beyond repair? And I thought, at the end of the session, I thought, I don't know where this is going. And I have been so many times surprised by people where I think there's not much left here. And then when you change one thing, like this woman, she stopped trying to change him, and she went ahead and took responsibility for her contribution, and she changed a few things about her own behavior. And it just unleashed a cascade of changes for the better. And that is a real important piece. Sometimes it looks like everything is interconnected, and it's like impossible heap of nuisance and yet if you make one shift, it has the power because systems are interdependent parts to activate everything else. That's the second thing that is very important. The third thing is that there is a big difference between what you feel inside and how what you experience inside affects the people around you. you may be depressed and feel weak and hopeless and helpless and anhedonic. But when you are in relationships with those who love you, you often wield all the power.

Yeah.

Because you activate everybody around you to try to make you feel better, to give you advice, to try to lift you up. And in the end, they feel defeated and deflated like you. so power doesn't always come from the top down. Power often comes from the bottom up.

Yeah.

Places that are not nearly that obvious. I think we really don't understand enough the complex, you know, interplay of power dynamics in relationships. If you want to change the other, change yourself. And maybe the last thing I would say is beyond most issues that people argue about, there generally are three themes. Control and power, care and closeness, and respect and recognition. Whose priorities matter? Who has the power here? Can I trust you? Do you have my back?

Yeah.

And do you value me?

Yeah.

These are the three major themes. many, many couples basically struggle about, but it comes in the forms of talks about sex and money and family and, but that's not the issue. It's not the issue. It's the emotional crucible in which those issues play off.

How do we know if we're in a toxic relationship versus a healing relationship? Well, step one is you're in projection. You're not aware of your own integrated pain, your partner's pain, and you're just You're blaming one another essentially and trying to have that person meet your needs and refusing to meet your own needs, which is a big one. I want you to say all the things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's the first fallacy of relationship that our partner's job is to meet our needs. That is not their job. Ding, ding, ding.

That's our job. Yes.

Yes. And that points to, which is very useful information. So when we see that in ourselves, we don't have to shame ourselves. We can look at that and go, okay, So for example, me, I had this unmet need in my childhood. So my greatest unmet need from my perspective as a child was that I just needed a safe and stable place. So before I did this healing work, I was running around looking for a man to give me a safe and stable place, but refusing to give it to myself. And that was my inner 10 year old running my love life and sex life. And most of us who haven't done any relational healing work have a 10 year old, a 12 year old, a 7 year old. running our love life and our sex life. Yeah. Which is I didn't get this need met and I'm going to find someone who reminds me of the person who didn't meet the need. And I'm going to play out my unfinished business with my parents, with them, and hope that they meet the need, even though I'm refusing to meet it myself. So, yes, step one, owning your needs, which, by the way, actually makes it easier for other people to meet your needs. That's the kind of like mind bending part of that when you when you come to someone and you're not saying, I need you to do this or else, and you say, you know, I recognize it's my responsibility to create a safe and stable place for me, and I will always be the one to do that for myself. And if I, you know, I've always come back to at least aiming to do that for myself. I know it's my responsibility, but can you help me? Different energy, right? And so moving into a healing relationship is taking ownership of your own work. And then who are the people in your life, whether it's romantic partners, friends, family members who empower you to do your own work. They can't do it for you, but they can love, support, encourage and empower you to do your own personal development work to, as the cliche, become a better person through them, loving you, supporting you and you doing your own work. A toxic relationship is one in which you feel consistently disempowered from doing your healing work.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I found a new framework that's really helped me in my current relationship, which has really been extraordinary. And that is, there's me, there's her, there's us, and then there's this third entity, which is the stuff that we bring into the relationship. You know, the traumas, the triggers, the fears. that aren't really who we truly are, but are things that we've brought in. And instead of being obstacles, they're opportunities to actually together hold them outside of the container of the relationship and look at them and be curious about them and explore them without judgment, without fear, or without having to have a certain outcome, but just in an honest clear and curious way go, gee, this is coming up for me. And instead of me going, oh, that means you don't like me, or that means blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, okay, this is interesting. Where is that from? What's that about? How am I showing up that's creating that? Or where is that place where we can learn about what's driving us and how do we become free from it? It's a very different framework. you know, because I often see people sort of in relation, again, you know, I'm not meeting, you're not meeting my needs. You're not meeting my needs. It's like, it's like, I'm not going to do what you want me to do until you do what I want to do. And it's like this crazy, weird dynamic that this doesn't get anywhere. And it's, it's like, it's, it's, it's like, if you look at love as a container for creating your own spiritual evolution, then it becomes a very different perspective on how to actually be in the relationship. It's not about them fixing you or you fixing them. It's about being curious together about how to evolve together and individually.

And what you just described so beautifully is what we touched on earlier, which is this idea of undifferentiating, unblending from your reaction, but still looking at it and sharing about it. curiously, one of my good friends, Sardha Simone, is an amazing Buddhist teacher. And he says, the quality of your curiosity is the quality of your liberation. And I love that. It's what you're saying. It's, can I create enough space to look at what I'm feeling, not disassociate from it, not disconnect, not shove it down. No, have it leak out sideways. But can I just have enough space so we can be curious about what's here and learn how to grow from it and shift from When I win, you lose, or vice versa, this win-lose power struggle, into how do we compassionately and creatively get both of our needs met? Takes creativity.

Yeah, or how do we actually realize that our happiness isn't really about the other person meeting our needs, but us becoming whole human beings and meeting each other as two whole human beings in the context of love. It's something we don't really have a model for. We're not, I certainly, you know, did not have that model for me as a, as a, as a boy. It certainly isn't modeled in our culture. It's certainly in modeling books and movies and TV. And, and so we're kind of flying blind a little bit. And what's really exciting is that there's, there's a sort of this emerging consciousness around love and sexuality and redefine what love is that kind of is exploring a don't need a way of thinking about it. I read a book called All About Love by bell hooks, who's recently died, a woman who was really insightful talking about the nature of love. And it kind of was great because it kind of taught me that a lot of the ideas, the concepts, the beliefs, the conditioning, the, the Norms are kind of fabricated. And, and what would love look like if we kind of shed those? And we asked ourselves, you what do we want? How do we create a different way of being with someone? And to use all those opportunities, whether they're triggers or things that cause us to kind of have some physical sensation or body of fear or disconnect as a gift, as an opportunity to look at ourselves and to look at what's happening and to be able to transmute that into a really different way of relating to somebody.

Yes, yes. And we need skills. It's about upskilling, right? I didn't know about conscious communication, right? I didn't know about regulating my nervous system. I didn't know about being hijacked by my emotions, my reactions and my triggers or how to get space from that. Like that's my aim is to upskill my clients, right? Not just the somatic healing work, but also to give them and upskill them in relationships, in sex. Like what are the skills we actually need to succeed? Because, and also this healing relationship, it's not about perfection, but you do want as you're as as you're sharing, what is the vision and intention for your relationship? It might look totally different. Is it that you want to spiritually evolve together? Is it that you want to create a safe space to do your own healing such that your relationship becomes a healing presence for your kids, for your family, for your community? Like, what is the intention of even being with one another? Like, why are you together? So that when you forget, because Lord knows you will, hopefully one of you can remain in your mature adult and can help to empower the other to remember. why are we here to remember what is the style of communication we've agreed on? We don't use name calling, we don't use raised voices. I love you, but I won't allow that. That's not within our framework. We have different skills, we have a different intention, and learning how to repair after rupture. Because even if you have all the best intentions, me and my husband have, I still act like a petulant child sometimes, and I think, oh, wow, still got work to do, but I have the skills now to repair.

Exactly.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think, you know, a lot of us, it's almost like, you know, we wouldn't imagine getting in a car where, you know, everything was unpredictable, where the car was for right, which was for left, the brakes would slam on, the gas would go forward, you know, it would flip around backwards. I mean, we wouldn't, we'd be terrified. But that's exactly how we navigate emotionally in relationships. It's like, yeah, like some crazy person driving the car.

Right.

And blaming the other person in the passenger seat for how it's driving.

Exactly. And so learning how to kind of get a hold of the control, the control switches on our amygdala, which is our ancient, we call it our fight or flight response. But in medicine, we learned they were the four Fs, the feeding, which is our baby around food, fight or flight, and reproduction. That was the fourth F.

I thought you were gonna say forn flight, Fight, freeze, flight, fawn. But no, I like that. The fourth F, yes, very important.

And so our behavior really is often triggered by these ancient survival mechanisms that aren't really serving us anymore. And I'm sort of curious about a lot of these ancient techniques around, you know, embodied sexuality. And there's more and more talk about it. There's more Courses that people can take. You know, there's things that actually help people discover that. And I'm super curious about it and exploring it myself. And I think that, you know, it's sort of almost criminal that we don't have a cultural narrative of how to get through these challenging aspects of love, relationship and sexuality. And that's why your work is so important. It sort of gives people a roadmap, you know, to figure things out, which, which really we don't have a language for, we don't have a framework for, and yet, and yet it exists. I mean, it's, it's been there throughout, you know, historical cultures, you know, whether it's Tantra or other, you know, ways of thinking about love, relationship, healing the Mind, perception, Buddhism, all of it. You know, I think a friend of mine wrote, Susan Piver wrote the Four.

Noble Truths of Love.

You know, it's like, it's all about how do we, how do we get out of this sort of projection of our of our conditioning, our trauma, our lineages, and bring that into relationship and actually start to heal that. That's really what seems like the work that we have to do because right now we're in such a divisive society. There's so much conflict, you know, not just in relationship, in love relationships and family relationships, but in society as a whole. I mean, it's just sort of staggering to me the amount of conflict. I mean, there always was, I guess, throughout history, but It just seems to be ramped up and polarized more than I've ever known. I mean, America didn't seem to be two Americas before, and now it seems to be completely two Americas, which is so tragic.

Yeah, I mean, Ken Wilber, who I mentioned earlier, describes expansion of consciousness as the ability to expand what we are aware of and care for. So to both be aware of and caring of, and I think that for me that looks like, and what I see people learn how to do through the somatic healing work is hold more complexity with care, that I can make a mistake, I can hurt myself or someone else, and I can still be a good human being. I'm still worthy of love. I'm still. I can have a really period of low of depression and be overcome with sadness, and I'm still valuable. I still have value. There's this complexity, this ability to hold more with more care. And I think if we each were able to do that on an individual level, we'd be able to hold. More complex human beings in front of us that people can say something you don't like and still be worthy of love and belonging. People can have a different opinion to you and still be worthy of your time and connection, you know? Yeah, it's so true.

I mean, I deal with all sorts of people as a doctor. I can't choose who comes in my office. I can't choose what they believe, what their religious beliefs are, their political beliefs. And at the end of the day, everybody's a human being. And that's where I start. and, you know, I, you know, I remember one day my wife had a Muslim, a Christian, a rabbi, I had a top Republican, a top Democrat. It was like the United Nations of medicine or something.

And I was like, you know what?

This is all so crazy. We're all just struggling with the same things. We all care about the same things. We all want to be happy. We all want our families to be good. We all want to live in a better world. I mean, you know, we all have different views of how to get there, for sure. But I think that. That our common Humanity has been forgotten, and. And that really breaks my heart. And it seems to me that your work is really about getting connected to your own Humanity and your own.

Yes.

Center of the universe, where you're actually an embodied human that's looked at yourself carefully, that's healed the things that need to be healed, that. Let's learn how to love. yourself and others in a more integrated way. It's. It's the most important work we have to do. I I remember reading a quote. I can't remember the exact one from Dalai Lama, but essentially, it's like we want to heal the world. We have to start with ourselves, you know? And I think. Yeah, it may seem like a narcissistic Pursuit, but it really isn't. If we don't take care of ourselves, we can't be there in the world to show up for others, you know? And I think that's what it's all about.

Yeah.

And the body doesn't discriminate. You know, your body, if whatever mistakes you make, you know, your body's just striving. Even when. Even when we're sick, the body's always striving to try and deal with the toxins and the stress and everything to try and create homeostasis. It's like our body doesn't discriminate. And what's so beautiful about the body is it's always right here, right now. Your body is never anywhere else, but right here, right now. And that's what I really. love about this powerful path of body-based healing. And I think that when we get in touch with our body, we do become more present. And when we're connected to our body, I believe we're connected to the gift of getting to be alive of you, this moment, this body, this life, exactly as it is right now. And that's, for me, has been the most profound pathway or Gateway into better sex and Liberation and truly allowing myself to be seen by my husband, which I found excruciatingly vulnerable. I knew how to do the fourth F, but did I know how to make love, how to be seen? No. That took me learning and developing and better relationships, learning how to love my darkness and still say, wow, okay, that was not kind or I lost my temper there and I'm still worthy of love and belonging to take responsibility for. And then that allows me to do it with other people. I look, okay, wow. that person lost their temper. They didn't feel good. Okay. They're still wet. Can we repair? So it's like all of this work internally that does bleed outward and that is really tangible. That's what I love about the body, too, is you have an experience of it. It's not just ideology. It's not just concept. You feel it in your own way through your own lens, whether it's spiritual or religious or secular, and then you have that experience and. no one or nothing can take it from me.

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