Childhood Trauma Resolved | Dr. John Delony | EP 307

I've I've rarely rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate what do you actually want? They cannot answer that question, and they fill it with addictions. They fill it with hobbies. They fill it with uh dopamine chase. They fill it with so much stuff and nobody can answer that question: what do you want? It's what do I don't want and why am I feeling just uncomfortable? It's because of them, it's because of him, it's because of her.

Nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it, and you won't aim for it unless you know what it is. You won't know what it is unless you ask yourself, and then you might say, well why don't you ask yourself? The answer is, well maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to. Then maybe you don't also trust yourself, you know? Because you might think, well if I let myself know what I wanted, given my bloody track record, I would do everything I could to screw it up, so I'll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don't fail at something that's truly important.

I can always regale myself with the idea that, well, I didn't succeed but I didn't really try. Had I really tried, I might have succeeded. Whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try, you also set the preconditions for failure.

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Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube or one of the associated podcasts. I'm here today with Dr. John Deloney. He's the author of "Own Your Past, Change Your Future." We're going to talk today, and I'm very happy to do this to talk to another clinician about the fact that you live your life through a story. You see the world through a story: what that story might be like when things are going wrong, how it might be improved, and also to talk about identity and its transformations in the most practical possible way.

There are specifics that we can talk about, but that's a good place to start. What got you so interested in stories, John?

Um, I think I reverse engineered my way into it. It was learning the trauma narrative that played out in the human body 10, 15, 30 years later after the initial trauma. I've always thought stories were narrative, right? There was something I thought about. I did not understand that my body was keeping the score to quote Vanderkolk, right? That my body was revving up in fighting battles that I didn't even know was happening. So we're looking at the long-term data, man, and people are having strokes and cancer and heart attacks from childhood experiences. That made me step back and go, whoa, there's these different layers to these stories happening all over the place. It's not just narrative; it's the entire ecosystem that I call my body, right? My human experience.

As I began to pull the thread on those, man, those stories were born into, and the stories we were told have such a formative shaping of our life experience. Those stories become the stories we tell ourselves, which, as we all know in mental health professionals, shapes everything: who I think I am and what I think I'm capable or not capable of, or I'm the worst thing to ever happen to me. Those stories are highly limiting, or they are the jet fuel on and on a well-lived life, right? So if we can discuss those stories, man, what a shapeshifting opportunity for us.

Yeah, well, that idea about stories in some sense being stored in the body is kind of interesting. The way I conceptualize it is that a story manifests itself in a personality, in a set of goals, and a set of assumptions about the world, perceptions about the world. If you have had terrible things happen to you in the past—and that's pretty much true of everyone, although some people more than others—then your body computes the present danger of the environment based on how many things have happened to you that are terrible in the past that aren't resolved.

Resolved would mean that you had generated a solution for them. If your psychophysiological system assumes that all the danger that you were subject to once is still present in the environment, then it's going to set you on edge as if you're walking in dangerous territory. The psychophysiological consequence of that is that you're prepared for danger, and that does such things as burn up excess resources because you're much more reactive and on point than you might otherwise be in an anxiety-prone manner.

It also suppresses immunological function because your body isn't that worried about long-term immunological health if you're confronting an emergency. You talk in your book about changing your past, owning your past, and it's useful to define that you're likely to overcome trauma let's say, and no longer, in some sense, store it psychophysiologically if you've generated a causal story about the reason that the trauma emerged and then reconfigured the way that you're conducting your life so that the probability that a similar thing will happen to you is reduced to close to zero, right? It's not catharsis, right? It's understanding.

The challenge there is, I think, following that thread all the way to our modern psychological ethos, we've created a world that is based entirely on blame and that somebody else is responsible. I've got to continue to cut and cut and cut, and I reduce myself to a two-by-two square with which I can exist, and if you enter my square, then whether it's ideologically or physically, then suddenly you're affronting me.

I think there's something about owning your past. I look at it more in terms of can I think through what I remember to have happened? By the way, we know that memory is a disastrous narrative storyteller, right? So I care less about what actually happened and more I'm in my 40s telling myself this story that happened. Can I tell that story? Can I relive that story? And my body doesn't take off on me, right? It doesn't rush to solve the problem for me because it knows I'm driving now, right?

The thing about memory is that it's not there to provide an accurate objective record of the past, which is in fact impossible because the past is so unbelievably complex. It's more like a navigation tool which is I went here, I fell into something terrible, and now I need to recalibrate the navigation map that I'm using so that I don't fall into the same hole.

You know, one of the things that people might want to know who are listening is that if you have a memory that's older than about 18 months, and it haunts you, and when it comes up involuntarily it produces a stress reaction, what that means is that as far as your nervous system is concerned, and so as far as your body’s concerned, that danger hasn't gone away. What's happening is an unconscious alarm system that's looking for pitfalls and holes is warning you that the map that you're using is incomplete in a manner that might enable you to fall into the same hole.

One of the things that people can do that's very useful is if you have memories like that that plague you is to bring them to mind voluntarily instead of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily and then to think through what has changed and what might not have; but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose, you'd be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it. There's no other way of getting the memory to go away; merely re-contemplating it in the same manner over and over won't do it.

Allowing it to plague you unconsciously, it'll do that forever until you solve it. It might show up in your dreams; it'll show up in your fantasies. It'll trigger you, so to speak, when you're talking to other people if they happen to discuss a topic that's related to it. It's because the narrative is one of failure and defeat.

The event was one of failure and defeat, and if there isn't a map to allow you to transcend that that's functional, then the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying danger is never going to let you go. Yeah, and I think culturally we've created a pathology of discomfort. As you just outlined so eloquently, the only way through this is to turn and face it and walk directly through it, right?

If you continue to run from the memories, pathologize, and chase the behaviors, you end up with our over-diagnostic approach to everything. Instead of turning and facing these things and letting your body heal through relationships and other things in your life, man, we just end up chasing our tail. You called it out; the more you run, the more your body thinks it's winning. It's getting away from this stuff, so it actually reinforces the anxiety; it reinforces some of these psychological ailments. The further you run from it, the only healing is through it.

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If you run, then the signal that the story you're acting out is that the thing you're running from is bigger than you and that you have to hide, and that's just a recipe for anxiety. Now, it's not necessarily that easy to turn and face something, but you do detail out a variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that. You can differentiate the problem.

You might have been traumatized at work, let's say, or let's not use that sort of jargony phraseology. You may be having tremendous difficulties at work; you might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless, and so that's bothering you constantly. It's disturbing your sleep, for example, and it's haunting you, and you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come, and partly that's because the thought of how getting a new job is so daunting that you can't face it.

One of the ways of recalibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable steps. For example, one of the things that you can do if you might have to consider getting a new job because you're unhappy and miserable at work is to open up your resume or your CV and look at it. So you might not be able to get a new job, but you might be able to open up your resume and look at it.

Having done that, you've sort of cracked the surface. Then maybe you could spend an hour a week for a month updating it, or 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes every two days, something like that. But part of the trick is to take these larger monsters that are frightening enough so you want to run away from them, decide that you're going to face the situation. You lay out, for example, in your book, you ask people a lot of different questions about what they're thinking.

If something is making you anxious and afraid and miserable, it's very useful to lay out, to write out all the reasons it's making you anxious and miserable and to ask yourself what it is you're afraid of. Then develop a differentiated plan for dealing with those.

Let me ask you this: in your psychoanalytic experience, can the majority of people do this by themselves? Because if I was to distill down all the pathologies in modern civilization, I keep coming back to a central point, and that's that we are desperately and pathologically and spiritually and frighteningly lonely. I'm wondering if we can—is it even possible anymore to tell a 21-year-old boy, a 21-year-old man: hey, you need to do this by yourself? Or is because I keep coming back to you? The first thing you do before you start trying to solve your problems is get a tribe, get a gang, get a couple of people in your phone, or get a mentor, somebody you can sit with.

In our, we've had to professionalize it with mental health professionals, but get some people around you to help be a good reflective mirror for you because we're just, we're lonelying ourselves to death, I feel like.

Yeah, well, I don't think that people can do it alone in part because people—and I'm not being snide about this—people aren't very good at thinking, and they're not very good at negotiation. When we're anxious, our brains shut off rational thinking, right? It doesn't want us wondering if that's a nice bear; it just wants us getting out of there.

That's an additional problem. You know, part of the reason that honesty in speech is so important is that there isn't any difference between honesty in speech and thinking. So you said can people do this alone, and the answer to that generally is no because thought itself is generally a dialogical process.

What you and I are doing right now is thinking things through. Now, we're doing that with an audience and for an audience, but you have some propositions and I have some propositions, and we're pitting them against each other and cooperating at the same time, and we're allowing the discourse to modify our implicit presuppositions.

So we're allowing the discourse to modify our stories, and thought itself is internalized dialogue or trialogue if you're really sophisticated. Maybe you can break yourself into three people internally and have an argument, but it's very, very difficult for people to develop a systematic approach to thinking and then to counter that with another internalized systematic approach to thinking and do all of that alone.

Generally, what happens in a healthy society, as you're pointing out, is that we have people around us to whom we can express our concerns, and then they react, and then you react to that, and that's thought. The fact that we would even ask people to do that alone is an indication, as you pointed out, of how isolated and lonesome people have become.

You know, you said friends or people you can tell good things to and people you can tell bad things to, and you have friends because friends keep you sane. This is one of the things I liked about your book—the insistence that sanity, in some real sense, is distributed. It's not something inside your head; it's something that you find as a consequence of being nested in a sequence—in a hierarchical sequence of proper relationships.

If you could do it alone, man, you could do it in solitary confinement. You know, even anti-social criminals hate solitary confinement. We're social. It's the way we punish prisoners, right? It's to put them in the hole, and we've just created a society where that's where we choose to live.

I love the idea of, I like to think of society as evenly distributed. We carry each other's burdens in different seasons, and that's the way through. There's just simply moments when my wife gets sick, or my dad finds himself—my aging father is passing away. That's right, that's the old, you know, holding your arms up in the desert narrative, right? We need other people to help us navigate these.

How many, I won't put my experiences into your marriage, but the number of times over the two decades I've been married that I've been hanging out with some friends that I trust, and I say, "My wife said this and this," and my friends go, "Man, she's right. You're an idiot," right? I need that sort of iron sharpening iron to help me reframe something that my body’s taken off on.

Well, a good definition of sanity, in some real sense—and I don't mean this in a trivial or a coy way—is that you're saying if you can behave well enough that other people can stand having you around so that they can provide you with corrective feedback. If you're sane enough so that other people can stand having you around, they'll reward you when you deserve to be rewarded, and they'll punish you when you deserve to be punished, and all you need to do is pay really careful attention to that feedback, and you'll be sane and properly situated.

Now, you know that can go wrong if the entire social community takes a pathological turn, and that makes things more complicated, and that does happen from time to time. But generally speaking, you have to be surrounded by people. So we could walk through that. Very few people can function effectively without an intimate relationship.

That's because you don't have anybody who's monitoring you over the medium to long run if you don't have an intimate relationship. How can you organize yourself intelligibly and sanely without the medium to long-term orientation? You just can't do it. How can you tell if you're being a civilized human being if you're not bouncing your behavior off someone really close to you continually? You can't, that's right. You need the intimate relationship. You need the family, parents, and siblings, children for the same reason, and you need friends.

You talk a lot in your book about friends, and you have some good practical advice I would say, and this would be something for us usefully to concentrate on. I would say is you talk about how people can make friends because people really don't know. So maybe you could share some of that with people who are watching and listening.

Yeah, I think there's two tracks I want to follow, and one we can circle back to this conversation we're having right now. Evolutionarily, I think we're running a fantastic experiment because for all of the history of mankind, nobody could sit in and listen to you and I dialoguing this way unless they were in physical proximity—which that physical proximity is a form of intimacy. We're all in the same room sharing the same meal, sharing the same fire, and now we've created this bizarre intimacy where people can drive to work for two hours, you know, one way, and they can go on road trips, but they're sitting by the fire with us, right?

There's this intellectual intimacy that's happening, but I think our bodies are hollering at us when it comes to making friends. I spent a season, man; I was two inches from my wife, and I was 2,000 miles away from her. I shared a bed with a woman that I loved, and I was profoundly lonely. I always thought lonely was proximal, right? You have nobody around you.

I think it's proximal and it's emotional. I've mastered the art of being alone. I'm an introvert by nature, just a nerd. I love to read my books, and so I mastered the art of being alone in a crowded room. I can wave and smile and be completely on my own planet, and that has a physiological and a spiritual cost to it.

What I had to stop doing was beating myself up for having a lack of character or I'm a failure. No, I needed to learn a new set of skills, and that skill set was making friends. When you're a child, when you're in middle school, when you're in high school, when you're in university, everything is geared towards community. You play games together; you don't play games together. It's all about doing things together, and then you cross that graduation stage or you get out of the army, and the world looks at you and says it's now you vs. everybody.

I think we just have to say, hey, I don't have the skill set, so what do I gotta do? I think we overthink it. I think hospitality, going first, asking people over to your house, to your events, to your thing, and just go first. Get over yourself; look at it as you've just got to quit smoking at some point. I just got to make friends at some point. I'm going to go first; people are going to say no, they're going to challenge you. You're going to find out that nobody wants to be around you, so you gotta go to the mirror and ask yourself what is it about me that I'm projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with me.

It really challenges, but man, just let's stop over-pathologizing. Let's just go be weird, Coco. Be weird, and be hospitable. Go first, go first.

Yeah, well, you know, you said that you're an introvert, and the thing about introverts is they often have to learn consciously how to socialize, right? Because extroverts...

That's right. Well, they're tilted so hard in that direction; it just comes naturally to them. We could walk through some of the initial stages in forming relationships in a very behavioral manner because people might find that useful.

So Benjamin Franklin said that one of the things you could do when you first moved into a neighborhood was to ask one of your immediate neighbors for a very small favor. The reason for that is because it gets the reciprocal trade moving in the proper direction. People like to be of service to other people. If you ask someone to do you a very small favor, then you put yourself in their debt, and then you can also reciprocate.

You allow them to show themselves in their best light because you allow them to easily indicate that they're positive and friendly and willing to do something for someone else. They're very happy about that if you get it right, and then you're in their debt so you can offer to do them a favor. But we got to be very honest about how countercultural that is now, because overnight, just with a snap of the finger, we don't ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore, man. We just get on Amazon Prime and it shows up at our house.

We don't ask a friend to drive us to the airport anymore; we just click a button on our cell phone and somebody comes and picks us up. Overnight, I think we have shifted this idea from I'm going to honor you and allow you to be of service to me, which is a gift, and I'm going to allow my needs to be heard out loud. I need some sugar; I need an egg; I need a ride; I need you to help me move.

The worst call we've pathology—a sudden thought we've suddenly become—we think we're a burden, Dr. Peterson. We think we are a burden to our friends and neighbors, and burdensomeness, perceived burdensomeness—the idea that people are better off without me—that's one of the pillars of suicidal ideation, and our entire civilization has run that way. We've considered ourselves a burden, and so the very act of asking a neighbor to help with something is an act of defiance in our current era.

Go for it, man; you want to be crazy and you want to be countercultural, ask somebody to help you with something. What a gift, you know?

Well, you can also do things if you move to a new neighborhood. For example, there will be a local café somewhere. You can go there once a week for like several months or twice a week at a regular time, and you can introduce yourself to the owner, and you can tell them that you’ve moved into the neighborhood, and you can introduce yourself to the waiters and the waitresses, and you can become a known fixture there, and you'll start to feel comfortable there, and then you’ll be able to start to have conversations with people there.

You can do the same thing with people at your local store. You have to—and you know, I had clients who didn't even know how to introduce themselves properly, which can be a real impediment for people, so you know, you say to someone, well you look them in the eye because then you're watching their face and then you can see how they're reacting, and your unconscious socialization abilities will kick in if you attend to the right cues.

You say, hello, there. I'm Jordan Peterson; I just moved into the neighborhood. I'm going to be dropping into your store pretty often. I thought I'd introduce myself, and then you stick out your hand, and you look at them, and you make sure that you're paying attention to them and not you, and you say, what's your name? Everyone responds positively to that, and maybe if they don't, then it’s time to find a different corner store.

That's right, you know? And then you try to remember their name, but if you don't, you say, you know, we met the other day, but I'm terrible with names; I forgot your name; could you tell me again? If you do that, then you know that little corner store then, it’s not completely foreign territory, and you're not alienated from it. You're going to start to feel comfortable, and the same thing is true for this place you might go every week. You have to establish these routines of socialization because otherwise, you're in enemy territory, at least unknown territory, and that's extremely hard on you physiologically because you don't know if you're surrounded by friends or foes.

So, it's the same with your neighbors. You are proposing an act of revolution by going to a new environment and sticking out your hand and saying, "Hi, my name is John. What is your name?" And actually listening to the response. That is a revolutionary act; that is a transformative—I take my son, he's 12, and so I've started being highly intentional about our relationship because I'm in the early stages of raising what is soon to be released in the wild—a grown man.

We have breakfast every Tuesday at this establishment here in the States called Waffle House. It's just a chain diner, and one of the revolutionary acts I'm trying to teach him is the act of radical generosity. Again, I struggle with sometimes basic "hi, my name is…" So the way I began doing this: The Waffle House opened in our small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I started over-tipping in a significant way because nobody wants to be working the 6 a.m. shift on a Tuesday at a Waffle House.

I told my son, hey, we're going to take care of these waitresses. They're awesome; they bring us coffee; they bring us juice; they're lovely. Within a few months, they know our order when we get there; they are smiling when we walk in, and it has absolutely transitioned our social interaction. Now I look forward to spending time with my son, but also hanging out with these great waitresses and asking about their cool tattoos, right? But it's just going first; it's just going first, going first, going first.

Yeah, well, that emphasis on somewhat excess generosity in those situations is extremely useful too because it doesn't take that much to distinguish yourself on the attentional front from the run-of-the-mill customer. You know, you only need to imagine this: you probably only need between 10, maybe under 10 places to go in your social community in order to be well situated.

And so you said, is it every week you do this with your son? Yes, sir. Okay, so then we could do some quick arithmetic around that. How long, how long in all does that whole event take? We are, by the time we sit down and I get him to school late every Tuesday, it's probably a grand total of 45 minutes.

And what about travel time? It's probably 20 minutes there, so it's about an hour and a half. Okay, so it's 90 full circle; it's 90 minutes, and that's once a week? Yes, sir. Okay, so then you figure you're awake for about 16 hours a day, and of that awake time, say 12 hours is useful for doing the sorts of things that you're doing with your son because you're going to spend four hours in just self-maintenance, right?

So let's say 12 hours; 90 minutes is about approximately one-tenth of that. We'll just use that as an approximation for easy mathematics, so you've fixed 10% of one day, and there's seven days, and so that's basically 3% of your life you fix by doing that. And that means you'd only have to fix 30 more things, and you'd have fixed 100% of your life. Well, you know, how about you tell a story in your book about one of your friends who was talking about exercise and health, and he said to you, change the things you do every day, the things that repeat, those are your life.

That's the routine around which your life is built. People very much overvalue special occasions and vacations and that sort of thing, and they don't pay nearly enough attention to the kind of thing you're doing with your son; it's like that's once a week. You might be able to do that for years; it's 3% of your life if you get that perfect.

Now you've got 3% taken care of, and you can move to the next small piece and do the same thing. You do that with some friends, and you do that with your wife, for example, a couple of times a week for a couple of hour sessions. You know, one of the things I found in my practice was that this is useful for people who are trying to embark on an intimate relationship is you need to talk to your wife about the domestic economy and the practicalities of your life together for about 90 minutes a week, and you need to date at least once a week for that length of time or maybe twice if you can manage that.

If you don't do that, you will become isolated and lonely, and you'll develop a backlog of communication, and if you don't fix that, you'll end up divorced, and then you'll be fixing it for the rest of your life—absolutely, absolutely.

Whenever a backlog of communication—I love that—I love that idea as though I'm just putting rocks in a backpack, and eventually that backpack's going to wear me down if I don't have a regular practice of communication. And again, I somehow, this became a moral or characterological issue. I think it's a skills issue, man.

I think taking some of the drama and smoke out of it and just saying, hey, I don't know how to—the problem is I don't know how to tell you, wife. I've never seen it done; I didn't see it at my house growing up; I've never seen it; I don't know how to do this, so I want to practice once a week.

Let's go over our calendar; let's go over our budget. Like how are we going to spend money this week? And let's practice. I'm going to try to tell you what I need this week.

About five years ago, my marriage was, I mean, we were hanging on by a spider's web just hanging on. My wife and I realized we gotta—if we’re going to hang on to this thing, we're going to have to rebuild it out of ash, right?

I can’t tell you I’m a six-foot-two, 195-pound—I lived in Texas my whole life; Texas male—what it took for me to look across the table and tell my wife, I just occasionally want you to tell me that you’re proud of me. That was a hard thing for me to say, and I didn’t even realize how desperately I’d been searching for her approval for the first 15 years we’d been married and how much I kept going out on a limb and on a limb and on a limb, and I was taking her non-response as rejection, and I never put my needs out there, and I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it.

Then she said, "Man, that would have been super helpful 15 years ago." Now she makes it a regular practice of our marriage to say, "Hey, I see you and I appreciate what you're doing for our family."

Golly, what a gift! And I didn't know that doing the dishes was akin to foreplay. Great! I will knock those dishes out all day long. It's about practicing saying your needs out loud, and then man, get out of your head.

The number of hours I've spent researching workout programs when I could have just gone to work out or researching how to tell your wife instead of just telling her. What a waste of time! We have too much data, man. We have too much information.

We need to go do, go do, go act, go! Well, you can have a preliminary conversation with your partner, let's say, and say something like, "Look, we need to tell each other what we need and want, and we’re both too stupid to do that because we don’t really know what we even want and we have almost no practice at it."

Worse, here’s something about that that’s really quite sad and frightening: if one of the things you wanted to hear is that your wife was grateful to you for, let’s say, providing property for the family. So say, "Proud of you," there’s a part of you that’s quite insecure that wants that message, and you’re vulnerable on that point.

Hey, and then if you share that vulnerability, the person with whom you’re sharing it knows exactly where to stick you if they want. And so it’s real trust to do that, but the alternative is—assuming that—and people do this all the time—they’ll say things like, "Well, if you love me, you’d know what I wanted."

It’s like, well, first of all, that’s a pretty perfect love, and second, I’m not clairvoyant, right?

Well, right! Well, you’re not even smart enough to do that for yourself most of the time. Someone else—and so, you know, you can make an agreement with your partner and say, "Look, here’s something I’d like to hear you say, and here’s the words I’d like to hear. Will you just say that?"

Another person might object and they’ll say, "Well, that sounds false if I do it, or it won’t be real because we’re just practicing it, and it’s artificial," and then you think, "Well wait a second. We’re going to be together for the next 10,000 days if it takes 20 stupid practices to get it right, that’s not so much stacked up over 10,000 days."

You know, and it might be with many marriages, I would say there’s probably 10 things that each person wants to hear on a quasi-regular basis that would make the difference between the marriage succeeding and the marriage failing. But it means you have to sit down with your partner and say, "Look, we should decide jointly what we need and want, and we should have enough courage to try to express ourselves stupidly in the attempt to get it, and then allow ourselves to make mistakes while we’re practicing."

I love that. I find that we've become goal-obsessed. So if I want to do these things so that I can keep my marriage, I find that I end up way out on a limb. I find out by chasing somewhere I don’t want to go. I find it more valuable to say I want to live a life that is not chasing happiness because that’s just cocaine and cotton candy, but I want to chase a life of joy, and all of the data tells me a good marriage—a good connection with a romantic intimate partner over a long period of time is the best bet I have in maximizing joy.

If I’m going to do that, that means I’ve got to be awkward. And by the way, if you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, "Do you see me and do you still want to join bodies with me? Do you think I’m beautiful?" Surely you can say, "Hey, when I see dishes in the sink, it makes me feel like I’m not being the romantic partner. I feel like I’m less of a wife because I’ve created this narrative in my head that this is what a perfect wife does or a perfect husband does. Can you help with the dishes?

Good gosh, you can—do you stand in front of somebody naked and say, "Here I am?" Surely you can say, "Hey, can you help with the dishes?" Right?

Then we have to be—stop being so looking for people coming at us. What’s that great saying? "What have you got looking for in the world, you’re sure to find?" Start receiving that feedback as an invitation, not as a you’ve been screwing this up, right?

My wife could have heard that, me saying, "Hey, I just want you to say you’re proud of me every once in a while," as me throwing a grenade. "You’re failing me because you’re not doing these things." She took it as, "Here’s an invitation; here’s a way you can love me better." What a gift, man, what a gift!

Yeah, well, you could get over ourselves, man. You can help people box those sorts of things in too by saying, "Look, let’s make this discussion about the smallest thing possible," right? We’re not opening up Pandora’s box and assessing the validity of our entire marriage. We’re going to try to get one small thing slightly better, and we’re going to assume that lots of things are going well and so we’re going to sit down for 90 minutes a week, maybe that’s not all at once, and we’re going to share what’s on our minds and we’re going to talk about what we would like to see happen and how we would respond positively to that.

We’re not going to leap to the conclusion that that’s a generic criticism of the whole marriage. This is partly also why people don’t have these conversations. Hey, especially when they have developed a backlog of communication.
So my wife and I had a rule too, which was, well, we had a couple of rules that helped us along with this to not have the backlog. One of the rules was don’t agree to anything that you don’t agree to because the last thing—
Well, the last thing I wanted to hear five years down the road after we had embarked on a particular pathway was, "Well, I didn’t really want to do that, but I just went along with it because I thought you wanted to." It’s like, well, now what am I supposed to do about that, you know? That was five years ago and we talked about it, and I didn’t want you to agree because you thought it was easier to agree. I wanted a consensus.

And the corollary to that was if we’re going to talk about something that needs to be addressed now and that will be fixed in the future, we don’t get to drag up the past because that’s another thing that happens, right? You start talking about things that are problematic, and one person or the other goes, "Well, you’ve always acted like this." You’ve always acted like this, and there’s no chance in the future that you’re ever going to change. It’s like, well, instantly you’re in a fight because your whole character past, present, and future has just been savaged.

When the conversation should be something like, "Our mealtimes might go 15% better if after you were done eating, we had all finished, you brought your dishes to the sink and rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher, and here’s what I’m willing to do in return for that."

Well, I like to even take it one step further and personalize it, because I find I react when somebody says you need to, right? As soon as somebody points their finger at me, I just—I am fully limbic, man. I go fight or flight instantly, and so I tend to say, hey, here’s a good example: I work here at Ramsey Solutions in Nashville, and I have a history of helping people get out of debt, pay their financial debts off, and work together as a community and as a couple to pay the debts off.

One of the most common questions we get is, how do I get my partner on board? Like he wants to just buy a huge pickup truck and buy the biggest house, and he’s run the credit cards up, and I keep coming to him with these numbers. It’s very short, or it’s not about numbers, and if you come at somebody like, "You need to sell your truck, and you do this," then you've started a war, right?

There’s a difference when you sit down and say, "Hey, I’m scared to death and I can’t breathe because we are so indebted." There’s something about saying, "It would really be a gift to me if when dinner was over, if you took and rinsed your plate and just took six seconds to put in the dishwasher, that would be a gift to me." That's different than "You need to take your dishes out," right?

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Yeah, yeah. Well, that conversation about debt too is one of the ways that you cooperate and negotiate with your spouse and your friends, your family for that matter, is also to jointly develop something like a joint vision. You know, because you might be able to sit down with your wife and say, "Well, look, if we could have the dinner times that we really wanted, if they were optimal, what would that look like?"

Well, let’s say, yeah, a couple of kids; you think, well, do we all want to sit down together as a family? That’s a quick—this has to be a question, right? To both of you, yes, that you're actually imagining. Do we all want to sit down? Okay, yes. Well, how often do we want to do that? Like seven nights a week? Is this something that's actually a crucial foundation for our family? Or can we do it five nights a week and maybe do something different on Friday?

You think, well, do all those micro things have to be negotiated? And the answer is those aren't micro things. You do that every day. They're absolutely foundational. And then you want to hear what the other person has to say because if you don't, they're not going to be fully on board. Plus they might have a better idea than you. You never know.

It's like, so let's say we decide, well, we’re going to have dinner together at six o'clock five nights a week and we're going to let people forage one night a week, and maybe sit in front of the TV, and we're going to go out one night a week, something like that.

We’ll try that for a while, and then the next question is, well, what would we like to serve, and who's going to cook and who's going to clean up? And if we wanted it to go as well as it possibly could, how are we going to get the kids involved, and do we want to experiment with some new foods?

And that mealtime, if that's the evening meal, let’s say, that's 90 minutes, that's more than one-tenth of your day, and so that's 10% of your life! That’s literally 10% of your life. If you get the evening—yeah, but it's bigger; it's compound interest that grows over time. I think that 10% you take care of; it’s like putting 15% of your income in retirement. It grows to infinitely more than 15% of your income over time.

Yeah, right. So if you take care of that 10%, it's not just taking care of that 10%. Suddenly, if your marriage is in sync, you’re an infinitely better parent, right? Infinitely better citizen, infinitely better worker, and it becomes much recursive.

The famed psychiatrist William Glasser, he gave me—I love this analogy. He says that he could fix any marriage in two sessions, and he said we think in pictures, but we speak in words. If couples can simply align their pictures, then you get a very clear path.

So when my wife comes to me on a Monday and says, "Hey, this weekend you and me, we're going to go on the hottest date," and then she just walks away, Monday night I'm wondering where we're going, Tuesday night I'm wondering what I'm wearing and for how long, right?

By Wednesday and Thursday, I'm wondering who's going to keep the kids and do we have a hotel we’re going to end up at. Then Saturday comes along, and I show up in a suit, and she shows up in her running shorts and a T-shirt, and I say, "What are you doing?" and she says, "What are you doing?"

I say, "I thought we were going on a hot date," and she says, "It's seven tacos for ten dollars down at Taco Hut. We're going on a hot date."

Hey, I love tacos, and I hope she loves the occasional rendezvous, but we both use the word date, and we had very different pictures. Now I’m upset, she’s upset, and so in my house, every single day of the week, every day I’m not on the road, we ask ourselves this question: "Hey, what’s the picture of today look like?" It’s just become a vernacular in our home.

When she says, "I need some space this evening; I need some time by myself," I tend to go, "Okay, cool, after dinner, and after the kids, and after you’re done writing, enough, I won't hassle you for the last eight minutes of the day." For her, she’s thinking the moment you walk in this house, I’m out, and I might come back in a week.

Right? We just have to align our pictures, and I’m cool either way, and she’s cool either way; it’s just managing those expectations and being so clear with one another.

Yeah, well that’s exactly the process of defining a shared vision, and one of the things that’s lovely about that is it makes you—it you're not reactive then. So you're not the thing that’s being chased by the monster or the dread. You’re the thing that’s actively conceptualizing the manner in which the future is going to shape itself, and what you have is the delightful opportunity to share a joint vision that, in principle, would be better for both of you than anything you could do alone.

Like you said, all the data shows that one of the best things you can do in your life to maximize your long-term health and increase your probability of at least some joy is to have a functional long-term intimate relationship, and so you have to attend to that, and a huge part of that is the development of these shared visions.

It’s really useful to develop micro visions, and so, you know, we just talked—what would you tell clients back in the day when they would come to you and they’d have a three-year-old, and they would have just had—and they have an infant; they have child number two, and they would say, "We’re not having sex anymore."

We have like an intimacy; we’ve become co-managers of our house. Your response as a clinical psychologist would be, "You’ve got to schedule it."

You’ve got to put it on a calendar, and the response always is, "I don’t want to do that anymore." That’s a great question. Well, my first response is, "Well, how often do you want to have sex," and people hate that. People hate that question, and so they avoid it. They say, "Well, you know, we don't really want to be that calculating about it."

It's like, "Okay, right, whatever.” We’re going to parameterize this once a year; it’s like, "No, that’s probably too little. Okay, 15 times a day; it’s like, "No, that's probably too much." Okay, so now we got some parameters here, somewhere between once a year and 15 times a day; let’s see if we can narrow that in.

This does make people uncomfortable, right? They don’t want to specify their needs and wants, and I think it’s—what’s the source of that discomfort? Where does that come from?

I think they’re embarrassed that they need anything fundamental—shame. Like, it’s that same exposure of nakedness, and then they’re unwilling to share the information with their partner because it’s revealing, and then they’re afraid they’re going to be rebuffed, and they’re afraid they’re going to get into a fight. They’ve got lots of reasons not to want to do it, but then that rolls back to those stories that have been haunting them since they were kids, right?

Yeah, yeah, and they don’t want to have the difficult conversation up front. So we might say, well okay, let’s be reasonable about this. It’s going to be some number of times a week.

You guys have jobs; you have kids; you’re busy. You're not going to have a hot date every night. You just don’t have time for it. So why don’t we be reasonable about it? We can try. Let’s aim for something like twice a week.

It’s like, can you think or maybe we could start with once a week because zero is a lot more than zero. It’s a lot more than zero. And then you think, well, all right, and then they say something like, "Well, you know, we did all that dating when we were dating, and now we don’t want to do that anymore."

It’s like, okay, so what are you saying here exactly? You’re saying that you don’t want any more romance and you don’t want any more hot sex, and you don’t want to put any work into it, and it’s just going to happen magically even though it’s clearly not happening?

That’s your theory—and then let’s run that theory out—okay, so now you have new kids, and that’s going to be like that for a few years. Maybe until they’re 10 or 11, you’re going to be occupied with your family, so now you have a sexless marriage with no intimacy for a decade. So what does that look like in like 2032 when you’re in divorce court?

That's right. How’s that? Or you're recovering from some addiction, right? Of work or of alcohol or whatever it is because your body’s got to meet that need somewhere, and if it can't get it if it can't get it a true deep connection, it will come up with all kinds of cheap substitutes, right?

Yeah, like an affair— that's right. So, of course, you don’t want to do this. This requires difficult—how would you like to have your marriage deteriorate into hell over a 10-year period?

How does that sound as an alternative? It’s like, well, that’s not very good. It's like, okay, so which of these two things are you more afraid of? And then the—when people really think that through, they think, "Oh yeah, well maybe you know I could take the risk of making what I want known."

Then okay, so now you specify it. Well, a date—which night? How long? How are you going to find a babysitter? Are you going to do this every week? All these details have to be negotiated and then we remember, you know, by the same logic that we’ve already employed, if this is two hours a week, then that’s 15% of one day that’s another 5% of your life.

And if you got that right, my God, you might be a much happier person! And so that’s another one of the only 25 things you have to take care of to set your life up.

But I mean, you said why are people afraid to do this? They’re afraid to show their vulnerability, man. They don’t trust their partner, they don’t know how to negotiate, they don’t even know what they want themselves.

You know like it’s not that easy for someone to admit that they need any physical attention at all, even though everyone obviously does. Because you’re putting yourself on the line then, and that is the definition of intimacy in some sense.

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Absolutely, absolutely. I can't tell you, and I know you've experienced this too, whether it's whether it's a single mom with three kids just trying to figure out what day it is, or it's a multi-multi-millionaire who's got resources that far exceed anything I could imagine.

I've rarely, rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate what do you actually want? They cannot answer that question, and they fill it with addictions. They fill it with hobbies. They fill it with uh dopamine chase. They fill it with so much stuff, and nobody can answer that question, what do you want?

Because we just don't have a culture that has a shared vision of where we're headed. We have a culture of you're hurting; it's somebody else's fault, and let's start pointing fingers. Man, we've got to circle the wagons on a shared vision moving forward.

Yeah, because what do you want? No, that's not a question anybody asks. It's what do I don’t want and why am I feeling just uncomfortable? It’s about them; it’s because of him. It’s because...

Then if it's what you don't want, you're driven by negative emotion. If you're if you're running from, not to, if you're driven by a vision, that's positive emotion because approaching something positive in a visionary manner generates positive emotion. If you're only fleeing from things you don't want, then you're constantly in a state of anxiety and depression. That's how it works.

Because where did that go? Where did we lose a shared vision? Why can't somebody put a flag in the ground and say, "This is where we're headed?" That seems to be gone.

Well that's a complicated question, you know? I mean, I would say that’s the consequence—in the most fundamental sense—of the death of God. In the most fundamental way, it’s the death of a sense of higher ordered unity.

Now, it’s also a very complicated question. If you ask someone, "What do you want?" If you could ask your wife that, "What do you want?" you’ll probably freeze her into immobility because it’s really like asking how do you want all of your life to go. Please summarize.

One of the things—I think we did that on the dating front already, right? We talked about that—we talked about how you might think about how you want your mealtimes to go. We only talked about dinner time, but you could talk about breakfast and lunch as well, and then you—and there are other micro-domains that are very crucial that you can also consider. It’s like, so you could ask yourself, well, if you could have the education you wanted, what would that look like?

If you were on, if you had the job or career track that would motivate you, just hypothetically, what might that look like? Sketch out a bad plan. If you had some friends—do you? Well first, do you want some friends? And if so, how many? And if you had friends, and the right number, how much time per week would you like to spend with them?

And if you had some time outside of work and familial responsibilities, what might you like to do with your time that you would really like to do? And the thing about these questions is that they’re real questions. You know, there’s this gospel statement that if you knock, the door will open. If you ask, you will receive. If you search, you’ll find.

People who are faithless, in some sense, think about it as kind of a Hallmark greeting card approach to the world. It's just, well, you just ask for things and they appear. It’s like, no, that isn’t what any of that means. It means nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it, and you won’t aim for it unless you know what it is, and you won't know what it is unless you ask yourself.

Then you might say, well why don't you ask yourself, and the answer is, well maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to, which is a crucial issue. And then maybe you don't also trust yourself, you know? Because you might think, well, if I let myself know what I wanted, given my bloody track record, I would do everything I could to screw it up.

So I'll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don't fail at something that's truly important. And then I can always regale myself with the idea that, well I didn't succeed, but I didn't really try. Had I really tried, I might have succeeded, whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try, you also set the preconditions for failure.

So it's risky, but the alternative is, well, you don't know what you want. So it is a meditative practice. Like, okay, if I could have what I wanted. Imagine the world was constituted so that the entire planet wouldn’t explode in an apocalypse if I got what I needed and wanted.

Yeah, right? It’s like, what would that be? You know, what time? Okay, so is this a cognitive—well, I don’t want to use jargon—is this a thought exercise or is this a feeling exercise? Because here’s what I’m seeing across the country: I thought it would feel different when I finally got that associate vice president, John.

I thought I would feel a certain way when I got a car. I thought if I could just get her to date me, I would feel a certain way, and people are realizing in rapid fashion, I thought if my politician won, I would suddenly feel a certain way. Here’s a great—I testified in a court case against somebody years ago; a former student of mine got into some significant, some really terrible things. He got a long jail sentence, and the next morning I woke up and I read what the judge had written in the sentencing. He—the judge used some of my words, and I remember feeling sick to my stomach.

I called a mentor of mine, a psychology friend, a professor of mine, and asked her, I said man, I feel gross. She said, John, nobody wins here. I had this perception that I was going to feel a certain way when justice was done and the right thing happened, and I realized, man, I had thought this through cognitively, but I had not managed how I was going to actually feel because nobody wins.

Somebody's life is ruined over here; somebody’s life is still ruined over here. I think we have to—I don’t know, let me, you’re infinitely—you’ve got infinitely more wisdom than I do on this, but I find that the cognitive exercise is helpful, but it really is important to sit down and say, okay, how are you going to feel five days after you've bought this car that you think you have to have?

Well, okay, so the first thing is, is that the probability that you’ll be happy because you’ve accomplished something in any permanent sense is virtually zero, and the reason—

Yes! Thank you for saying that!

Well, the reason for that is that isn't what positive emotion is for; positive emotion is to indicate that you're making progress towards a valued goal. Now that's the driver, right? Not the finish line, exactly.

Well, and that's actually pharmacologically separate, right? Because a satiation reward, which would be the accomplishment of something, calms you and stops that program from running. So for example, once you've become vice president, if that was your goal, then the whole pursuing vice president program comes to a halt.

Now the problem with that is it leaves you without a goal, and it also leaves empty space, which you immediately have to fill. And so often people feel disquiet because now they don't know what to do, and they miss that rush because they’re no longer pursuing something.

And so it's very important to know that positive emotion is experienced in relationship to a valued goal. And then the question becomes, well what’s the most valuable goal to pursue? And that's really a metaphysical and a theological question.

In terms of the mechanics of feeling. So imagine that you're negotiating the structure of a date with your wife, and you're developing a shared vision. And so you say, well on Wednesday nights once a week we’re going to go for dinner, and maybe you specify the restaurant and you're going to make the arrangements, and I'm going to get dressed up, and then we’re going to go see a movie, and you’re going to pick the movie, and then we’re going to have a romantic interlude afterwards, and we’ll run that and see how it goes.

And then what you want to do is you want to picture that and you want to watch how your body reacts on the emotional level. And that’s a bit of honesty; it’s right, and you can see, well, if we went to this restaurant, oh I don’t really like that restaurant; I think it’s kind of expensive. I had a bad time with waiters; I don’t think I’d be happy there.

Then you say those things to your partner. You say, well I’m thinking this through, and I’m imagining, and here’s the objections that are coming up. Maybe they’re wrong, maybe I’ve got this wrong, but I’d like to hear your input because, you know, we want to get this right.

Should we reevaluate my feelings about the restaurant, or should we think about a different restaurant? That should be a question because you don’t know; maybe you’re just stupid about the restaurant or you’re cheap or you’re afraid to go there because you don’t have the right clothes. I mean, you don’t know, right?

But if you want to get your feelings in line, you develop the vision, and then you apprehend the vision with your feelings. It's kind of what you do when you go to a movie and you fall into the fantasy of the character. You know, you embody all the emotions, and you evaluate it that way.

The other problem with that more goal-directed approach that you described is I think people should plan, and they should develop a vision. You have to develop the vision and then be somewhat detached from it because it needs to be updated, right? It has to be modified.

Hold it loosely. Yeah, that’s right. You hold it loosely. Yeah, that’s right, because you're fallible, and maybe you can come up with a better plan, not every minute because you’ll drive yourself mad that way, but, you know, but now and then, or I was obsessed as a young higher education professional with becoming a college president until I sat down at the senior leadership table, and I realized I want that life.

I don’t want that life. I don’t want 24/7, 365 and the politics. I don’t want it asking for money; I don’t want that life. And I didn't have—I didn’t have a backup plan. I didn’t know what to do. I was, right? Like you nailed it. I was completely rudderless because I’d made the finish line the goal.

Going all the way back full circle to the how you open the conversation. I think that becomes really important to lay out an identity and reverse engineer: who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? And the goals end up, you know, it’s like the old days, when you went to grad school, a Ph.D. was simply a— it was a high five on a journey of continued learning.

I’m going to continue going down this rabbit hole, and now it’s become a destination. People walk out and announce themselves as educated because I’ve crossed this finish line. Just because you get across a—you run a marathon or walk a marathon, it doesn’t mean you’re fit; it doesn’t mean you’re healthy.

Well, we talked about the necessity of goals, and so there are higher order goals, and you need the higher order goals because they integrate you, and a goal of becoming a college president is a higher order goal than no goal at all in just sitting in your bed and eating Cheetos, right? It's a better plan than no plan at all.

But—and this is where things become profound and serious, and I would say even in a religious sense because what’s religious is about what’s profound and serious in some sense, by definition. So you might say, well, who should I be? And you might think, well, I should be the college president; I should have this car, I should have this house. Those are all very particularized versions of yourself, and the problem with them is that they're concrete and final actualities and not processes.

And so here’s a good vision that’s a high order vision, and I think it’s the vision that our whole culture is founded on: I should be the person who genuinely confronts the problems and challenges that confront me in my life. So that’s a—that’s an attitude of active and voluntary engagement, right? I’m going to—that’s what identity—

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that’s a nice—it’s an identity of process as well. It’s like I’m going to be someone who doesn’t shy away from the challenges of life. Yes, okay, and so that’s St. George and the dragon and that’s a precondition for therapeutic transformation because in order for you to improve, you have to identify the problem, the dragon, and you have to be willing to face it voluntarily.

That’s who I want to be. And then another element of that is, oh, I can’t do that without telling the truth. I have to be willing to see what’s in front of me, and I have to be willing to admit to myself what I think and feel, and I have to be willing to communicate that.

And so you could say, well that makes you—that makes your goal something like, to think about it archetypally, you talked about Jungian approaches earlier, is that that makes you into a truth-telling hero. And then maybe underneath that it's like, well, could I become a college president? Could I be successful in my business? Could I be successful in my marriage?

It’s like that’s all well and good, and those are more concretized goals, but the highest order goal has to be something like an approach rather than a final state, right? Because you might say, the approach never ends. That’s right.

Well, and you can say to yourself, I want to be the guy who listens to my wife. Yeah, okay, so you’re never going to finalize that, right? Because you’re doing that all the time. And that’s also really useful because you don’t hit the target and then and then find yourself left with nothing because you can do that every day.

I want to be the guy who listens to my kids; I want to be the guy who pays attention to my friends, and I want to be the guy who speaks my mind carefully and judiciously. It’s like you can bring that anywhere, man, and you’re…

You’re talking about the difference there, that approach. Let’s use your example. I’m a—I want to be a guy who’s a good steward of my wife. I want to be—that’s my identity, and that means I’m going to have to backfill it with some goals.

We’re going to meet once a week, and I’m not going to try to fix her like she’s a car engine; I’m not going to try to solve her problems with her as though she's infantile. I’m going to just listen, and so when she says—

I’m really struggling with my boss at work, I’m not going to jump in with, well you know you should probably tell him. I’m just going to listen, right? But listen, over time I begin, I really look forward to learning more about my wife and what she's experiencing in this season and it’s different than last season and it’s going to be different in the new season.

I think it was Esther Perel who said, if most adults have four or five great loves in their lifetime, and if you work really, really hard, it’s with the same person. And you become part of their journey, and now I can’t wait to hear about what my wife’s been reading, who she’s becoming and how I can best be a partner to her in this new season, whatever it is.

It's not constantly trying to get back to remember how much fun we had when we were dating. Man, what a waste of a life! Let’s go this way; right, let’s move forward.

I think—tell me if I’m on the right track here—that idea of owning and acknowledging reality: I didn’t mean to, but I’m looking in the mirror, and I’ve gained 100 pounds. I didn’t mean to; it wasn’t my intention, but now I’ve spent 15 years in a middle manager job, and I hate my life.

I hate going to work every day. I think we do not have the skill set for one of the most important psychological functions that we just—we just took it out of life, right?

And I think it’s Ernest Becker’s work and Yalom’s work. I think we don’t have any sort of ability to grieve privately or as a group. We’ve lost a skill set of grief, and so we can’t acknowledge reality because we don’t know what to do when we look in the mirror and say, I didn’t measure up to who I wanted to be.

I didn’t mean to yell at my kid, and I did. I didn’t mean to get another dessert, and I did. We can’t deal with that grief, and so we blow by it and say you keep putting desserts in front of me, or if you had just picked up your trike, six-year-old, I wouldn’t have yelled at you.

We just outsource our dysfunction everywhere because we can’t sit in that gap between what we wanted and our reality.

Alright, so a couple of things there. You talked about finding yourself on the adventure of transformation with your wife. Often, men feel compelled, obligated to generate a solution to the problems that their wives bring them.

The reason that is because women feel more negative emotion is that they are more likely to bring up problems. That’s why 70% of divorces, by the way, are initiated by women. It’s because they feel more negative emotions, so if the relationship is shaky, they’re going to suffer for it more first, and they probably feel more negative emotion because they're more sensitive because they have to take care of infants.

Anyways, we can put that aside now. It might be that you should help your wife solve her problems, and maybe she’s coming to you for that. But one thing you need to understand—and you might understand this as a diagnostician—is, well, do you know what the hell her problem is?

And the answer is, well, probably not because she doesn’t even know. So why does she want to sit down and tell you about her problems? And the answer is because she wants to find out what her bloody problems are.

You see this very often in therapy, you know? When Carl Rogers made a lot of this, he said, you know, if you just listen to people, they'll often solve most of their problems themselves.

So somebody comes in, and they say, "Well, I’m really upset," and you say, "Well, what's on your mind?" Now, what's so interesting about that is often the people who are in therapy have absolutely no one to tell their problems to.

You know, like I think the Rogerian magic, though, was listening, and he brought that other side of the equation that we leave out. He listened and he genuinely did his best to love the person in front of him.

Yeah, well okay, so not sit in judgment of that person. So my wife says, "Hey, I’m going through this." I instantly go, "Well you know you should," instead of sitting back and going, "I love this person; tell me. Let’s connect, not let’s solve!"

Right, yeah. So you’d hope that your mindset—and this would be part of establishing that high order goal—is imagine you would like your wife and you to have a good life.

So when you're listening to her, that's uppermost in your mind. We’re trying to have a good life here, okay? So what’s your problem? Well, if you’re listening to someone therapeutically, they’re going to scattershot the problem.

They’re going to say, well it might be this and it might be this and it might be this and it might have something to do with the past, and it might be this. It’s quite a mess as they try to calibrate the real problem, and you have to listen to all that.

What you’ll find is that the person will dispense with most of those hypotheses themselves as soon as they utter them. They’ll think, well here’s my problem—no that’s not exactly right—and now that’s off the table.

And they’ll say, well it might be this, and here’s some reasons for thinking that, but no, it’s probably not that. What you’ll find is the problem space will clear. Now Rogers also pointed out—and this is very useful—is that one of the things you can do when you’re listening, apart from asking questions which might be, well, I don’t quite understand what you meant by that, or you said something 10 minutes ago and it seems to contradict what you just said now which are just helpful questions.

The other thing you can do is summarize, and you can say, well I’ve been listening for 10 minutes, and it seems to me that this is what you said; is that right? And that people really like that for two reasons: A is one is you compact all that searching into the gist, and that’s a gift you can give someone, and then also if you hit the target, if you say, yeah, that’s exactly what I meant, then they know full well that you’ve really been listening.

So if you can, if you're a man and you're listening to this and you want to know how to deal with your wife when she's presenting you with problems, the first thing is step back a bit and say look, she probably has to go through the whole problem set, and try not to take that personally, just listen.

And you can summarize and you can ask questions, but mostly you want to find out, well, what the hell is the problem here? Now you might want to leap to a solution for a bunch of reasons. One is, well, to show that you have a solution. Two is to show you're smarter than your wife, which is a very bad idea. The third is to shut her up so that you don’t have to sit there and listen, and that’s also a really bad idea because you can’t shut anybody up about an actual problem, right?

That just doesn’t work because it’s an actual problem; it’s not going to go away. Or if she’s coming to you to connect and she’s not looking for your solution, she just