EP 157: The Alchemy of Connection | David Richo, Ph.D

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. You've written so many wonderful books, and it's such a cross, such a span of both kind of psychological and personal development topics, as well as spiritual topics and some quite transcendent types of things. But I'd like to begin with how to be an adult and just what you mean by an adult in that context. And then we're going to talk a lot about relationship today. But first, what do you mean by adult?

Having a sense of yourself as welcomed on the earth and here to be one of its stewards.

To act with integrity and responsibility.

While always.

Having in mind or in heart that you're here for some kind of service to humanity and that whatever gifts you've been given.

Are to be opened and shared.

Yesterday I was reading a poem by Rilke.

And in it he says, I want to unfold, because if there's any place in me that's still folded up.

That will be a lie.

So somehow.

Letting it be okay to open yourself to the world as who you really are and trusting that who you are is the same as what you can contribute.

I see that as a way of combining a spiritual and psychological sense of what it means to be an adult. And so that's what's in my book, how to be an Adult. Yeah.

Wow. Well, that's really beautiful. And I love that it begins with that sense of belonging. A real touchstone in my own spiritual path has been one of my spiritual teachers, focus on really realizing and affirming the unconditional goodness of everyone and humanity and of life altogether. And I get that sense of, we do belong here. We're here for a reason, and we can allow that to unfold from a place of ultimate worthiness and goodness rather than some sense of lack and so forth.

Yeah.

And I like the generative quality of that unfolding you're talking about as well. The quality of to be an adult.

Is to be in service.

Yeah.

Beautiful. I'm glad you're bringing that in, because it's not just unfolding who you are. It's trusting that who you are will unfold on its own when you stand on the earth with integrity and loving kindness.

So I know you find out who I am.

Yeah.

I act that way. I'm revealed to myself.

What way?

With integrity in my personal dealings and with loving kindness toward all beings.

Well, I know that you draw from both Christian and Buddhist contemplative spirituality in your work, and I want to circle back to that later, but I was hearing a lot of that right there. And that's so wonderful. So you wrote a book called the Five Things We Cannot Change, which were, everything changes and ends. Things do not always go according to plan. Life is not always fair. Pain is part of life, and people are not loving and loyal all the time. So I suspect having an adult, being an adult also has something to do with accepting that and developing a kind of unconditional acceptance of those realities. Could you talk more about that?

Yes. And you're certainly putting your finger on an important part of the whole topic.

And the phrase unconditional yes is from Carl Jung.

Part of where I got the idea for that book on the givens of life is his phrase, an unconditionally yes to the conditions of our existence without protest.

Or another way of saying it is that if we live in a world with givens like the ones you just read, and we're trusting that the world is collaborating with us in doing, making whatever contribution we can make and doing what it takes to express ourselves in loving ways, then it also must be that those five, even though they seem like penalties and limitations and in many ways they are limiting, but they're also the very ingredients of becoming people with character, depth, and compassion.

So when I'm in a world in which things change and end.

I become.

Able to feel compassion for the losses that others are feeling, feel compassion toward myself for the losses I experience.

And learn to accept what in Buddhism has called the teaching on impermanence. To see that a recognition of impermanence frees me from attachment that brings so much suffering.

So there's something about those givens that are friendly toward us.

I would say of all the practices I've ever done, the one that stands.

Out.

As the most helpful has been an unconditional acceptance of the givens of my life with all my limitations and gifts, an unconditional acceptance of the events that have happened, with all their blows and woes and graces.

And an acceptance of other people as they are.

Meeting some of my expectations and not meeting others, when I can just accept all that without judgment, just stand before it as a mindful witness. I notice that I feel better about myself and others.

So that's how this practice of the unconditional yes, the acceptance of the givens of life, rather than railing against them or denying them and the grief that goes with them, it's been enormously helpful in my personal group. Yeah.

And I hear you saying that I think you literally said something about these conditions of life actually in some ways are in our favor. Therefore they're not against us per se. So what I'm hearing, this isn't. This unconditional acceptance, isn't resignation.

And we're accepting things that are difficult, that are challenging, that are full of pain and grief. But at the same time, we have the sense that this is part of the lifestream of our awakening, of our development, of our journey. And so we can relate with it not from a sense of resignation, but a real genuine acceptance.

Yes, I think that's very well put. Trusting.

That there must be something in this that is useful.

Useful to our growth.

So you also wrote a book called Triggers How Can We Stop Reacting and Start Healing? And I don't know whether your work connects at all with the transactional analysis model where you have these ego states of the parental ego state, the adult ego state, and the child ego state. But certainly when we do get triggered, one way of looking at it is we're get. We're getting triggered into. Out of the adult ego stated into the parental download and. Or we're getting triggered into the childhood adaptive kind of ego state stuff and we're triggered out of the present moment. Old tapes are playing in a sense. Right. And so could you talk about how we can work with triggers from the adult? How do we work? I remember reading and something you said that triggers are not necessarily all bad news and that there's the trigger and then there's course either our reaction or our ability to respond to a trigger consciously. But could you talk about the whole issue of triggers? Because as we move on to talking about relationship, that often seems to be the dicey field in relationships as triggers. Right.

So absolutely, yeah. We're easily triggered into.

Fear, anger, sadness.

And as you say, it could be very positive. For instance, you could be triggered into love at first sight and that would be a joyful and exciting experience.

But my main way of working with triggers is to ask myself three questions.

And I do like how you brought up about transactional analysis, which describes the three mindsets in which you might respond. I can come from my adult self, my child's. My adaptive child self.

Or my parental self that is, is continually telling me what I should do and maybe blaming me for the mistakes I. I'm making.

But I'm also working with triggers in the book by asking myself three questions. Has this trigger been instigated.

By.

My Own shadow side?

Or has it been instigated by my.

Now aroused ego? Or has it been touched by, touched off by something from my early life? And those three S E E spell C. So it's my way of seeing where the trigger came from, because I see triggers as trail heads into the unexplored parts of myself.

So I'm not just looking at triggers.

Only in a behavioral way, like how can I stop reacting? How can I place a pause between the triggering event and my reaction? I want to go deeper. I want to go into. Each trigger is a signpost into the forest of the unconscious. And is there a way to start exploring what's in there? So the first way is.

Whatever triggered me, is it my own shadow that I'm looking at? In other words, did that person do to me what I do to others?

So I'm really looking at what I do to myself. And it upsets me when it comes from someone else. And of course, I'm simply projecting onto the other person a quality that's in me. Secondly, is it my big fat ego that got all in a huff because somebody dared to question me or not see my greatness, not acknowledge me, try to control me when I'm the one who should be in control, be one up when I'm the one who should always be on top? That part of myself.

Which by the way, is always in there somewhere. And then third, is this reminiscent of the way my parents treated me? So that's the part that comes from early life. So now I ask myself, when I'm triggered, how is this my shadow? How is this my ego? How is this my early life? And I find that enormously helpful in understanding where the trigger comes from.

Well, it's really a powerful process of inquiry because I think one of the great insights from Western psychology, and it's there in Buddhist psychology as well, is that which triggers us is the direct window into our own stuff. Right? And it is so hard to see our own habitual patterns and see our own shadows. So now you position triggers. You know, you could say a trigger is positive in the sense when it triggers a positive state. But you've really configured all triggers now as positive because they are the doorways into self understanding and self development. Otherwise we're kind of in the blind.

Yeah, they're teaching devices.

If you could allow that.

Well, it's a radical shift because, you know, most of us spend a lot of time just suffering with our triggers, reacting to our triggers, feeling resentful about our trigger, generally attributing the causation to someone or something outside ourselves. Right. And we're missing this incredible opportunity for personal growth. And who would think it's right there in what we think is the thing we want to get rid of? Right?

Yes. That's the paradox.

Yeah, that's beautiful. So in your most recent book, which I think is a new edition of the earlier version of it, how to Be an Adult in Relationships and Five Keys to Mindful Loving, you address being in relationship with oneself. It's not just about, you know, intimate relationships or your relationship with oneself, relationship with others, primary partners or other. And then also a relationship, I believe, with kind of humanity altogether, our relationship to all beings, all of life. And you talk about.

The five A's, five basic needs that we're born with and that we seek throughout our lives. And then later, I think you talk about how they're really the basis of relationship as well, and that these are attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about how these five needs and their relationship.

Talk about them in general and then their relationship to both giving and receiving love as an adult.

First of all, the five.

Fulfillments that you mentioned, acceptance, attention, appreciation, affection and allowing are actually.

Keys to the very first needs that we ever had. So we came into the world needing attention 24, 7. And our caregivers were supposed to provide that. It was a difficult task because, of course, we had no vocabulary. So they just had to read our needs by being attentive to us at all times. Did we need to be fed? Do we need to be changed? Do we need to be held? And they had to learn how to read our various cries to know what we wanted. And hopefully they did come through in good enough ways so that we could then trust that we were born into a world in which others do pay attention to us and fulfill our needs. So it's the basis of trust, the very first project in human life, according to Eric Erickson.

And then as we started to show our personality traits.

We needed acceptance.

We needed to see that our parents accepted us just as we were. Rather than try to reform us into what they thought we should be.

Then.

We needed to notice that they cherished us.

And that's what I call appreciation.

They appreciated what we were feeling. They appreciated us as important members of the family. They.

Held us as having great value.

So that's the appreciation. And in all of this, they were continually showing, through their appropriate touching and holding, the affection that. That we felt in every cell of our bodies and Thereby we knew that we were really not only loved, but lovable.

And finally, when the day came for us to crawl across the room instead of being carried across.

When we started to show some independence, they were totally on board with that. They were okay with that.

And then, of course, we left home altogether to go to school. And finally, in the young adulthood, we left all together to start our own life in the world. They were always okay with allowing us to have freedom rather than trying to hold us back, failing to launch us.

Being afraid to let us go. They weren't like that. They were okay with the freedom. And obviously, people don't give us freedom. We're born with it. But.

What we're talking about here is having the freedom acknowledged. So these same five A's turn out to be the very same set of needs that we have all through life. In all our relationships, whether intimate or at work or anywhere in friendships, for instance, we want to be paid, listened to. That's the attention, accepted, appreciated, and so forth. And when that happens in both directions. So when I give those five to you and you give them to me, that's my definition of intimacy.

So it's the same the five A's between the two or more people. However many people are in the relationship.

That you can trust that they will be given most of the time in a good enough way. Not every minute. Just my new phrase is most of the time in a good enough way. I like that. And that would be the adult dose rather than the dose we needed. When we came into the world and we were little infants, we needed 100%.

But as we grow, we have so many new sources.

To draw from. Friends, family, spirituality, ourselves.

Our career. We no longer have to get everything from one person or two.

So that's the overall view. Yeah. Of the five keys to mindful loving.

Well, you're referencing some really liberating insights there as an adult. And.

I love that you include the allowing, because that kind of brings up what sometimes feels like a polarity of both the need for belonging and connection as well as the need for autonomy. And.

You know, you described kind of the ideal childhood developmental process and parenting process.

But for many of us, it wasn't ideal, and those needs weren't met consistently. Not even good enough, much less 100%. And so what also derails relationships, I think, is we're trying to, you know, we're looking for parents instead of partners, and we're. We're even holding people hostage to meet those needs or creating unreasonable expectations for someone to Meet those needs in a parental, perfect way. And you know, that leads to all the codependency and all the rest of it and all the tangles and confusion and relationships. So it would seem that as I was listening to you, I teach a very deeply embodied approach to mindfulness meditation that I've been evolving over five decades of my own practice. And more recently I've developed something I'm calling regenerative self parenting. And it's not the inner child work of self parenting other models, which is wonderful work, but it's more neurobiological. As I was listening to you and reflecting on hearing you speak these five needs or five fulfillments, again, I realized that's basically what this approach through mindfulness awareness, meditation and a regenerative self parenting model, trying to really do that neurobiologically provide that attention, provide that acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing through enhanced interoceptive awareness and mindfulness and meditative state, really doing that for our own being. And it would seem like unless we find some way to do that where we do it ourselves through spiritual means, contemplative means accomplishing it somewhat in therapy, and whether that therapy uses some kind of transference countertransference to do that to some degree. But if we don't find some way to do it, we're going to keep seeking it in unhealthy ways in our relationships. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and how we overcome that so we can enter an ideal situation where you said, where we can be in a partnership, whether personal, intimate or professional, whatever, where we, we have a reasonable expectation that we'll meet each other's needs in a good enough way most of the time, or something like that.

Well, thank you for explaining how you work with it, which I appreciate.

I think you're right on Fleet. I would say that.

When the needs were fulfilled in a good enough way, most of the time, not only do we receive the need fulfillment, but we receive the capacity to be fulfilled ever after with a moderate dose.

Whereas when they were not given even in a good enough way.

Then, or one or more of them was not given in a good enough way, they become bottomless pits and we can never get enough. So when they're fulfilled, you can then get enough. And when they're not fulfilled, you can never get enough. So you're in the borderline situation in which you're craving what you're afraid to have, or craving what you can never get enough of afraid to have. Because since you haven't learned or experienced basic trust. You just can't trust anyone to keep giving you the A's that you're looking for.

And I like to. You reminded me of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

And I know you live in the Amherst area where she's from. And I would like to share the poem because I think it also brings up one other element that I want to discuss.

You see, when the needs were not fulfilled, we weren't just in the position of unfulfilled. We were also grieving.

Because what we knew instinctively was supposed to come to us as mammals. Namely the holding environment that Winnicott talks about. And that holding environment is one in which the five A's are shown. My definition of the holding environment.

We weren't just not fulfilled, we were also mourning.

And in this poem.

Emily Dickinson shows. Shows us something about that. So I'll recite it and then I'll comment on it. And the name of the poem is A Loss of Something. A Loss of Something ever felt I, the first that I could recollect Bereft I was of what I knew not too young that any should suspect. A mourner walked among the children.

I notwithstanding, went abroad as one bemoaning a dominion herself the only prince cast out.

Elders today a session wiser and fainter too, as wiseness is. I find myself still softly searching for my delinquent palaces.

And a suspicion like a finger touches my forehead now and then. But I am looking oppositely for the sight of the kingdom of heaven.

Kingdom of heaven is within. I'm looking outside. Yeah. So she's saying they didn't know that one of the children was in mourning for not receiving what she needed. And I thought to myself.

I better go out and look for what they didn't give me. I looked in all the wrong places for the palace that I wanted.

And I could never really find it. And eventually I realized that it would have to begin this project with looking into myself and finding the five A's to give myself.

And then I would be ready to have a healthy relationship. So it makes the case for.

The main point of my book.

When the Past Is Present, title says it all, that a healthy relationship begins with doing the work of making peace with what happened in childhood, trying to finish the unfinished business, working with any traumas that occurred. And we're never going to be completing the work, but we're always on it. And if we can do at least half of the work, that's what it takes before you can have a good picker to find A partner that fits for you. It's not about the partner. It's about.

How you readied yourself.

For a relationship.

This little quote from.

Henry David Thoreau, I think helps. I shall come to you, my love, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an alms house.

Not a house of, you know, poor beggars. Yes.

So. So that's how I see it all fitting together.

Yeah. Reminded a couple of things. Also, the. The Thoreau quotes. Something about the great masses of humans are living lives of quiet desperation. And that seems to point to.

The unfulfilled needs of our childhood lurking there in the shadows, no matter how much we accumulate.

And I was also reminded, maybe a more colloquial expression, of that line from the country song, looking for love in all the wrong places.

Yeah. So the work regarding childhood is not to blame our parents, but to grieve the loss of what we needed and didn't get. And then to forgive, by which I mean to let go of.

Any.

Ill will or need to retaliate, which we usually take out on our partner who represents one of our parents. We don't usually retaliate against our actual parents. And when you've really done this work, you no longer engage in that. What is the work? It's to let yourself feel sad about what you didn't get.

Let yourself feel angry about how it didn't come through for you, and finally let yourself experience the fear of.

Never getting it at all. And all of these are distorted ways of thinking because you can find love in right places.

And I believe grief is the pathway to it. So when her poem says a loss of something ever felt, I.

She placed it exactly where it's supposed to be. It's a loss, it's not a reason for blame.

And it's not a reason to be stuck. It's a loss. And you mourn the loss and get beyond it so you can self parent.

That's finding the kingdom of heaven within you.

Wow.

And it is so important, and I think it's.

It's.

It's so difficult to imagine that we really have to complete that parental work in our lives. And, you know, I remember one training I did where I'd done a lot of that kind of work and. And then I did this particular training, which I still have the pleasure of leading today, where I just saw so clearly that I was still on some subtle and not so subtle levels, just playing out all the mom and dad stuff continually in one form or another in my life. And I had not completed that work of accepting and grieving and forgiving. Because then we can really begin the work of self parenting and completing the quality of attachment bonding or whatever that we didn't receive. Right. So I wonder if we could explore because I know in your work there's a work we obviously need to do for ourselves to heal and complete that level of trust in ourselves so that we're not going to be trying to hold others hostage to provide those parental needs for us. And then I think if we are doing that work, there's a way we can continue the work in relationship with others, especially if they're committed to the same thing and they're doing their own self parenting as well as co regulating in a relationship where we have that commitment to grow together. So it seems that can really be accelerated to do it yourself and do it in relationship. And then you also talk about this quality of universal love. And I know you've incorporated the practice of loving kindness from the Buddhist tradition. And it would seem like there's a whole other possibility of further self healing and foundational resilience, adult resilience building. So it seems like we can work in these three domains or spheres of working on ourself with ourself to fulfill these five needs at whatever level and that healing to work how we can continue doing that in relationship and then how we can also meet that in a maybe more almost transcendent way.

Through whether we think of it as the greater connection with the greater humanity or the connection with the greater self. So I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic of working these three domains and how they might be intersect and actually leverage each other or be synchronous. I'm not thinking of the right word here, but more than two plus two. You know, two plus two equals five or something.

Well, you're certainly bringing in the spiritual dimension of it all, which does have to do with.

Something transcendent, that is recognizing.

And I and I. I think there's one word that's perfectly summarized in spirituality. It's more M O R E. There is more to me than just my ego. There's more to others than what I can get from them. There is more to nature than just scenery. There's more to experience.

Than just a set of events.

All of these are giving me opportunities to grow in integrity and loving kindness. So spirituality to me is first recognizing the more and then entering through the more into what is the opportunity here.

To do my spiritual practice. What is this practice to act with integrity and loving kindness. Not only toward the people around me, my near and dear, but far and wide and to myself.

And.

I would summarize it by saying something like I want to greet everything that happens to me today as an opportunity to give and receive love.

And to free myself from fear. I try to start each day with that affirmation.

Beautiful. Rather than just this day will be a series of events as listed.

In my.

Daily diary. Yeah.

I'm wondering if you would agree that there's no replacement for doing the work, not pointing to any kind of spiritual bypassing at all. Because we really have to do the work of healing.

And self parenting and learning to be in relationship as an adult. But would you agree that there is some level of our being that is actually untouched by the traumas and that level that beingness is in others as well and that one thing that can help us find that trust and have foundation, some combination of doing the work, the healing work, but also maybe having a foothold or even a toe into that domain of the self that is untouched by the trauma and, and seeing that in others and seeing it in the world.

And. Yeah, and it's so hard to trust that that's there because our mind is so crowded with distortions about who we are and what happened to us.

But I like what you're saying and, and it's about the. More there's a high, what Jung calls a higher self. In Buddhism we have the Buddha nature.

In Christianity we have Christ consciousness.

You could say God within.

Something bigger than just our ego.

And when I say distortions, what I mean is we're not looking directly at the wonderful bigger being, the larger life that we have. We're looking at the world and ourselves.

Through a kind of cracked prism.

That dissipates the real image of our true self. And that true self is a combination of three qualities. Unconditional love.

Perennial wisdom and healing power. And those are the three qualities that we have assigned to God and the saints. Whereas actually they are reflections of our true nature.

And that's what you're referring to as you know that the bigger life, the bigger self.

So.

So I'm always hoping to open to that. Going back to the way we began our talk with the unfolding. I am trying to.

Let myself unfold. I can't make myself unfold.

I, I only open to the grace of unfolding my grace. I mean the gift dimension of life, that, that there's something in the universe that is holding me and helping me along.

Stated so well in the 23rd Psalm. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Who is this Thou? It's the fuller reality of ourselves and the universe. And when you think of that as a kind of accompaniment on this journey, you never feel alone again or scared by how dark it may become.

So I'm trying to open myself to that.

Beautiful.

My first spiritual teacher simply called it basic goodness. Unconditional, primordial basic goodness, which wasn't good versus bad, but a deeper kind of wholeness.

And it would seem like maybe grace. We often think of when we hear the word grace. We sometimes maybe immediately start thinking of it in dualistic terms, like it's coming from somewhere. But it sounds to me like what you're pointing to is this interconnectedness between that deeper being within ourselves, within others, within the world when we can. And it's always there. So it's helping us whether we know it or not, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

And it's the archetype of the assisting force. So on the journey, there are two forces that the hero meets up with or heroine.

Of assisting forces and afflicting forces. So using a very simple example, in the wizard of Oz, the assisting forces are the three friends, the scarecrow, the lion and the.

And the afflicting forces are the, you know, the evil witch and the. Her army of monkeys. So she's. She's meeting up with both. But the assisting forces are the equivalent of the graces that come to her. And so you're finding these graces in the world around you, but you're also finding them in something that's transcendent of the world. That's the good witch Glinda, who comes from a paradisical realm and also helps you. So my belief is that we're helped both by.

The people around us and by something bigger than ourselves. I can't name that. I don't know what it is. Obviously it's called God in traditional religion, but it can be anything that has that basic goodness and bigness that you just referred to.

But I'm not giving up on having the sense that there is something larger.

Than anything I've ever imagined, that is an ally, a companion who gives graces and helps me on the.

Long journey toward mature adulthood, mature spiritual awakening. I can't do that just on my own.

It will always take.

Will always mean getting help from something.

Bigger than anything I could do.

Simple example, Robin Hood, with all his daring do and with all his athletic skill.

Could not fully save himself when he was Arrested, it was made Marion, who helped him, she represents grace, feminine dimension. And.

He recognized that. He said, thank you. He said, my men told me what you did for me. Thank you.

So that attitude of gratitude actually encourages the graces to come our way.

I love that you're bringing in these iconic allegories that are so much deeper than we often imagine, you know, and even with the wizard of Oz, Glinda sort of represents the transcendent grace, you know, power. But you have the three friends, the scarecrow and the lion and the Tin Man. You know, they're talking about their cowardice and their vulnerability. So it's that, that's. That other access point is, is the vulnerability. There's the transcendent structure, strength of grace, and then there's a vulnerability being our access to it, right?

Yes, and I'm glad you brought that up because the three friends are themselves wounded. So it's the wounded healer idea because she could have.

Have found three big bruiser football players.

And the movie would have been over in five minutes.

But instead she, she finds the graces through people just as wounded as herself. That's so significant. And it makes it understandable that we therapists are not perfect.

So we're present in the room as equally wounded people, but a chapter ahead of some of the clients.

Well, we're nearing the end of our time together, Dr. Rico, but I wanted to maybe the last question, address your book, the five what we've always wanted and already have. For me, that really aligns with what this best year of your life summit is all about. Because in this summit, we are going to be talking about making changes and trying to, you know, not give up on our dreams and move forward. And, you know, there's a lot of kind of action orientation about maybe accomplishing things. But our intention is really for that to come out of a ground of we already are who we need to be and we already have everything we need to come out of that ground of recognizing unconditional basic goodness, rather than it coming out of a sense of lack or something like that. And so these five longings to find love, meaning, freedom, happiness and growth. I mean, you know, we have a 10 day summit. We could have distilled it down to a five day summit and focused on those five. But.

I'm wondering if you could talk about how these five longings play in. In terms of both their.

Maybe their unconditional quality and their aspirational quality and the journey of the two.

The main point I was trying to make in that book the five longings. What we always wanted and already have is the difference between a desire and a longing. A desire is for something that can be fulfilled. For instance, I have a desire for an ice cream cone. I buy one, eat it, and my desire has come to an end and I now have fulfillment. Whereas also in our psyche is longing, which is an ongoing desire that never gets completely fulfilled. For instance, the ongoing.

Longing for love. We're never going to have it fully except in moments. The ongoing longing for freedom. We're never going to have full freedom.

Of expression because we have so many leftover areas of shame in ourselves or repression or inhibition. But we're continually moving toward it, trusting that it's already in us.

To be free beings. It's already in us to be loving and lovable beings. And.

I was cherishing the fact that we have longings that can never be fulfilled. And seeing the paradox of what is never fully fulfilled is the same as what's already fulfilled, filled.

So that's the point of the book.

And it fits with how to have a healthy relationship. Because instead of looking for all the love you need from the other person, you're accepting that it's already in you and that no one can ever fulfill it fully. But. But at the same time it is fulfilled fully when you have unfolded.

Well, I think you've given us so much and this, this notion of, of.

You know, this the way you define the adult and, and in such a multidimensional way.

It really provides a North Star, I think, for what, you know, to try to fulfill our longings for connection and relationship and belonging. And there is so much loneliness in the world today, it seems like, and even people within relationships. And there's so much, you know, so many of our human problems and social problems have to do with attachment deficits and so forth that are just endemic in our society. So, you know, just if there's some way for people in our audience that are aspiring to create relationship in their lives or want to take their personal relationships or intimate relationships to the next level, I think there's so much here for them to.

Find a way forward that it's got to begin with some kind of recognition of creating that trust within oneself and then finding partners where you can co create that trust together and take that journey together. So I just really appreciate everything you've given us and what is laid out in your more than 20 books. There's so many much fertile ground there for relationship. I'm actually inspired. I feel very grateful after experiencing a number of losses out of beautiful relationships in my life, to be in a beautiful marriage right now with my partner Sophie, for the last five years. And I'm inspired to revisit some of your books with her because we're always studying things together, and I think there's very fertile ground there for deepening our own relationship.

Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share, and I very much appreciated everything you said, too, so thank you.

Thank you very much. So Dr. David Rico, the author of how to be an Adult in Relationships and. And countless other books, you even have a book, Something About Ablaze. Right? Something about Everything Ablaze.

Everything Ablaze. That's on the mystical writings of Teilhard de Chardin.

Right, Right. Yeah. I love. You have such an interesting background and focus as a psychotherapist who seems to be deeply involved in the transcendent as well.

Yeah. Thank you.

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