How to Get On the Same Team: Relationship Mailbag
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist. He's a bestselling author and he's also my dad. So dad, how are you doing today? I'm really good, Forrest. And as always, I just love being here with you.

Ah, thanks. Likewise, Dad. I love doing this with you. Also love answering some questions from our listeners. We get great questions, and today we're opening up the mailbag to answer some more of them. The ones we got today mostly focused on dealing with issues inside of our relationships.

and particularly finding a kind of middle path between two competing interests or two pretty good options. If you'd like to ask a question to be answered on a future episode of the podcast, you can reach us at contact at beingwellpodcast.com if you want to send us an email, or you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And dad is a longtime couples therapist. You must have been pretty into these.

These questions are right in my wheelhouse, and I'll say this maybe once so I don't have to say it for each one of these mailbag questions. I find it really helpful to use empathic imagination for what it's like to be each of the two people involved.

What is it like to be, for example, the person who's being told by your partner that you're not sensitive enough, that you're over the top, you're too much for them? On the other hand, what's it like to be the person who feels kind of blown out of the water by how your partner is in some ways? What's it like for each of those people? So that's kind of where we start and we'll move into a lot of practical things as we go along.

Great, so you already introduced us to the first question. Here it is. I recently had a conversation with my partner where I felt they said that I was too sensitive and took things too personally. This might be true. I'm a sensitive person, but I feel like their comments are often unnecessarily critical. How do I figure out if I'm being overly sensitive or if they're being too harsh? I don't want to be a doormat, but I also want to be open to normal feedback.

It's always helpful to go back and forth between the subjective and the objective, the inner and the outer, to go back and forth from really feeling and opening to and exploring, okay, what's it like for you on the inside? And then pop up to that more objective, impersonal, third-person perspective, the bird's-eye view that looks at behavior objectively.

I imagine five reasonable people observing the same movie of the same interaction. Okay, freeze frame. What's your view?

the partner, not the person who asked the question. Is the partner staying more or less inside the lines or clearly are they really outside the lines? Are they really over the top? Way too harsh, way too critical, way too punishing. Yeah, totally. Now, it's really important to understand that those lines really change depending on your culture. What might be culturally normative to vastly generalize

East coast, west coast. My good friend Daniel, he's a New Jersey guy. He has certain cultural ways. I grew up in California. We're a little more buttoned up and I was raised by Midwestern culture parents. Very laid back, very calm. Yeah. That changes things.

Then there's the practical question of what to do. I think it's really helpful to be prepared to ask for things from our partners. And it can be particularly helpful if we ask for things in the frame of nonviolent communication, a way of speaking that really focuses on our direct experience rather than blaming them for our experience or leading with a criticism. For example, imagine take one, take two.

Take one is I say to you, Forrest, you know, you're just freaking rude. And I've had it up to here. You're over the top. You're bad in how you talk to me.

Take two. Forrest, I love you dearly. And I'll just say that when you start talking with me in a certain kind of a way, you get really fast. You start pointing your finger at me. Your voice rises. There's a lot of anger in your tone. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying factually the impact on me is I start feeling small and scared and also mad and like I want to lash out at you as well.

I'd rather not feel that way. So I'm just kind of wondering if we can find a way to make a shift here. It's a little complicated because the second version might be technically correct, but it's not how people really speak to each other. So you need to kind of find your way between A and B, right? To have sort of a normal interaction with your partner about something that feels natural and feels like a fit for the two of you, right? Culturally.

Because if a random person who does not normally talk to their partner that way just drops into that way of speaking, the other guy's going to be like, are you trying to therapize me? What are you doing here? So there's kind of a dance is what I'm describing. That's true. Although I do know a lot of real people who have all kinds of cultural backgrounds who find their way into learning how to speak in that way. Sure. Yeah. And you can adopt that as a shared culture inside of a relationship.

Yeah, and moving in that direction, certainly one of the most courageous things to do is to just, in a very straightforward way, report out your own experience.

while taking responsibility for it, by being completely clear that you are the one who's constructing that experience inside yourself. You're not blaming the person, the other person, but there's a certain authority there and you are sharing your actual experience. And then you negotiate on what to do. I find it's helpful sometimes to try to bypass

The person on the receiving end is essentially saying, but what you want from me is not justified or what you want from me. I'm not doing anything wrong. Why do you ask this of me? And then they get into a whole argument about how, well, it is justified. A much faster way to cut to the chase is to, again, in your own way, this person might say to the other person, well, the truth is I am sensitive.

And I am affected by what people say to me, especially people I care about. And yeah, I'm doing some work on the inside, maybe over time to make sure I'm not overreacting to things and to help myself. I'm doing that to become more resilient. I have a copy of this crazy book from Forrest Hansen and Rick Hansen on resilience. And it's helping me, right? Really, really chewing on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But separate from that, I'm not saying that what you're doing

to the partner is unjustified, I'm just saying as a request, because you care about me, because you care about the relationship, because of the effect on me, would you be willing to use a softer tone or to slow things down, especially if I kind of look like a deer in the headlights? Just for me, would you be willing to do that for us?

I think that's a great point here, Dad, just in general, that style of, would you be willing to do this for us? Because it gets to something, the first thing that stood out to me when I read this question, because there's the presenting problem that's happening, which is this certain kind of interaction inside of a partnership. The deeper question for me is, are we on the same team?

Are we approaching this issue from a shared stance of, hey, this is not a me problem or a you problem. The me-you problem is, am I too sensitive or are you too harsh? The us problem is we're having a communication issue here.

And that has a lot of consequences for a relationship as a whole. And so the underlying question is, can we move toward being on the same team? Can I move, person who is wondering whether or not they're too sensitive, toward their team a little bit? Can I say, okay, I'm going to really take it on as a value that this other person has

that I'm going to try to beef myself up. I'm going to try to get a little bit more comfortable with criticism. I'm going to try to move toward them one and a half steps. And then can they take on as a value, hey, my partner really cares about how I talk to them. So I'm going to be just a little bit more conscious about using a slightly softer tone. And we're just both going to be a little bit more sensitive about this. And so it's going to become a shared issue. It's not a me problem or a you problem. It's an us problem.

And I think that that's kind of the big question here is, do you feel like you can move toward that inside of your relationship? Are you on the same team? Yeah. And also, what's your vision of how good a relationship can be? And just like in any domain, there are things that make relationships better or worse. One of them has to do with becoming skillful with criticism. I mean, we could do a whole episode, I think, on that.

My view is that there's a place for pointing out falling short. But if you're going to do it, do it right. So one really important piece is to separate the tone from the content. People really react to tone. And so if there's something you need to say, like,

You promised to do the dishes last night and I woke up this morning to a full sink with a lot of ants. What's up? That's the substance of it all. The tone can be really harsh, but it need not be so harsh. So separate tone from content. Second, be really clear that it's worth the price because every criticism has a cost.

And you have to ask yourself, gee, is it really, really worth it to do this? And then third, if you're going to criticize, separate the behavior from the person altogether. You know, people talk a lot about that. And then I think the last thing is to really be careful about getting sucked into your case about other people, especially if you feel aggrieved.

And this is a total are we on the same team thing that you're pointing to. The idea of having a case like I have my argument, you have your argument, we're both arguing for our argument. Oh, that's excellent for us. That's right. No, we blow that up. That's the enemy. We have a shared argument that we're both trying to move toward. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And know what it's like when you kind of get contracted inside, you build up a head of steam, you're trying to make your point, you've had it up to here, be careful. It's already a yellow flag if not an orange flag. And even just the feeling of that. And you can notice that feeling rising inside of you as you're having an interaction about something. It's a very trackable feeling for sure. Yeah, that's good. One final thing about this before we move on, this is a classically gendered issue.

And so I think it's appropriate to just kind of acknowledge that this is something that tends to come up. Men often perceive women as too sensitive. Women often perceive men as too harsh. Some of this is because men are often really punished for demonstrating sensitivity while women are often really punished for demonstrating harshness. So that's an aspect of it that is in the soup as well. And it makes it just even more important, I think, to have that shared stance with it

the male partner who's being a little bit more harsh, does he have a space to be a little bit more sensitive? Is he sort of allowed that inside of the relationship? On the other hand, is he allowed to feel like he can say how he actually feels and communicate to you directly because he's no longer concerned that you're just going to dissolve if he actually says how he feels to you?

And then flip it around. Are you able, the female partner, to communicate with more directness and more assertiveness and to really express yourself in this kind of way? So I think that this is another version of the can we find that happy middle place where we get both of our needs met. I want to say one last thing about being on the receiving end of criticism. One thing that I did

that has really worked for me is to realize that the best way to protect myself and to get my own needs met was not to be defensive at criticism, but to fairly quickly sort out what I considered to be valid and useful and what they had to say and translate that into correction, if you will, for myself going forward.

Even if I thought I didn't do anything wrong, so be it, we could maybe think of this even more as skillfulness, or I'm just going to do it for them to get them off my back. And then one by one, I would line out your mom's or other people's complaints about me to the maximum I thought was reasonable, so that increasingly, there was really no basis for

for criticism. And it was increasingly clear to me that anything that did come my way, not that I was becoming a saint, but that was really more their problem. I decided for myself what the standards were that I wanted to maintain, and then I prodded myself to maintain them, which substantively tends to chill out other people and also gives you the bliss of blamelessness, because then you know most fundamentally, hey,

I'm really taking care of my side of the street. And it puts you in a stronger moral position also to finally start asking them to take better care of their side of the street too. Yeah, totally. You have more kind of relationship currency that you can bring to the table there. So let's move on to the second question, which explores very similar ideas here. My partner and I have very different emotional processing speeds.

They want to talk through conflicts immediately while I need time to process my feelings before I can discuss them productively. This creates additional tension in our arguments. They feel ignored when I need space, and I feel pressured when they want to talk. How can we bridge this gap? And I'll just start by saying that you can basically apply everything that we just talked about at the first question to this one in different ways. But is there other stuff that you would like to add to the mix here, Dan? Yeah, I would ask the question, how long is the time out?

Great. It's a really good question. Yeah. Are you talking about as long as it takes you, hypothetically, to go use the bathroom? Is this a five-minute timeout or is it a five-day timeout? Yeah. Or an interminable five months to eternity timeout, right? And if it's a fairly brief timeout,

That's a reasonable thing to ask for. One of the things that's really helpful for couples, especially if there are recurrent issues, is to talk about talking. That's a very helpful place to go. You pop up to kind of the meta-level view or the process view. Can we talk about how we talk with each other and what it's like for each of us when we talk with each other? And for us, as you were saying, Forrest, what would be really best here? So for many people, it's helpful to realize that I'm going to distance from you

briefly, in the service of connecting with you. It's in the service of connecting with you. For instance, making for good neighbors.

Brief is good. Open-ended, interminable, that's not good. And then it obviously leaves the other person to keep pursuing you in effect because if you're endlessly distancing- And that's kind of part of the problem here, totally, is that you're putting both people into the role that the other partner is the most annoyed by, essentially. And you're just reinforcing that by not putting kind of an expiration date on when we're actually going to talk about this issue. Yeah, that's right.

Then I have to say, I think there's kind of a question about processing feelings. What is really meant by that? Is it that you really need time to process feelings or you're just getting overwhelmed by the intensity of the interaction or the sense of being flooded by the proximity, including emotional proximity of the other person?

And if that's the issue, it might help you to become more a quantumist, to work on equanimity. Quick plug, my talk tonight, which...

will have occurred by the time this episode posts for my online weekly meditation program. Sure, it happened three weeks ago or a month ago or whatever it is, but yeah. It will be on equanimity and the value of it. People might go back to my Wednesday night meditation program to check it out. It's all free and see what you think. Anyway, but yeah, also giving yourself a little distance, like maybe literally just moving your chair back.

while you're talking could enable you to stay in the room more, to stay in the field of connection with that other person because you've gotten a little more breathing room. And this is a great joining example. This is the Rick Hansen classic start by joining. So what supports us in getting on the same team here? So the team is very clear. There's an issue on the table that we need to be able to explore inside of our relationship.

And our typical pattern is that they come in a little hot, maybe with a lot of problem solving, maybe with a lot of cognizing.

and I get kind of hit by that and I get overwhelmed and blown out. And this then puts us into a pattern where I'm the distancer and they're the pursuer, and neither of us are happy in that pattern. This isn't going well for us. So we now need to problem solve. We have a joint issue. The problem is not that I'm retreating or that they're approaching. The problem is that we have a joint communication issue.

So what supports us in solving this joint problem? Maybe it's what you were just saying, Dad. Maybe it's like, oh, we talk to each other a little bit further away from each other in terms of our physical position. Maybe it's Elizabeth and I really had to figure this out. I was the chatty problem solver.

And she was the more kind of slow-moving somatic feeler. And it took me a while to figure out and really get from the inside out that I would get more of what I wanted and what I needed if I was willing to spend the first minute to 15 minutes of this interaction that we were having really hanging out with her in the feeling of it.

Really slowing down and being like, "Yeah, well, that really makes a lot of sense. That sounds hard. That seems difficult." Just really, again, start by joining. I'm moving into her way of being, and it's actually when I move into her way of being

that kind of counterintuitively, I'm able to reestablish my way of being down the line because her need has been met. And now she feels present and resourced and capable of kind of moving into whatever it is that we're doing. And we're both doing things. She's also meeting me halfway. I'm not doing all the work there. That's great, dad. I think that that's about what we can do with this question today. So I'm going to move on to our sixth and final question here.

which didn't really have to do with relationships, but I just thought it was such an interesting question that I was personally curious about your take on it. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Creating a truly great retail experience is hard work, especially if you're juggling in-person storefronts, online sales, staff, shipping, inventory, the whole deal. It can get complicated fast, but with Shopify's point of sale system, it doesn't have to.

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You've mentioned that children who grow up with chaotic or problematic parents, after ending a long-term relationship where my partner's reoccurring behavior, emotional volatility, was harming both me and our child, I'm left wondering what more I could have done. How do we determine when a relationship problem is truly a deal breaker versus something that requires more patience, different approaches, or even professional help?

What concrete steps should somebody take when they feel their partner's behavior must change for the relationship to survive? This is a profound question with often fraught consequences, particularly if children are involved. So it's a big one. My view overall from the research literature, many, many biographies and autobiographies, and my own

direct interactions with thousands of people at this point, including as a speaker, in which I'm available to thousands of people adding up over time. People come up to you after a talk and they tell you about their history there. I've seen you do it. A lot of book signing, handshake live, 90-second interaction. I'm the last one to leave. I'm available. And my own personal experience. Summing up, my view is never bet against the human heart.

And it's so hopeful to appreciate that with skillfulness and effort and occasionally some support and grace from the outside, it's possible to really grow and heal and transform profoundly. There are certain constraints.

fundamental factors of your own personal temperament, and even potentially the impact of very intense life experiences, for better or worse, commonly for the worse, like in trauma,

Within those broad constraints, it's tremendously possible to change over time. That means, therefore, that many, many, many, many issues are really a matter of won't most fundamentally than can't. If a person were sufficiently motivated to make the effort and acquire the skill and reach out for the support, they really could budge in that way.

Now, they may choose not to do all that. There are ways in which I could myself change, and there are probably at least a few that would make your mom happier with me, probably involving how I drive a car when she's in the passenger seat. But anyway, I'm getting better. I'm getting better at it. We make choices about that. But fundamentally, most things really are a matter of won't rather than can't. So inside that context then with a partner,

You're really observing the trend line and the learning curve from here. So maybe you're in a situation where there's been some back and forth, there've been issues. Let's suppose you're still in the relationship and you're asking yourself, is the rate of likely change for the better?

as I define better on my side of the street, is the rate of change for the better in my partner fast enough to really make me want to stick around? Now, you may, depending on how old you are and the nature of the relationship, whether kids are involved, you may take a breath and you may say, you know, that rate of change is not really very fast, but for various reasons, I'm just going to accommodate to it. I'm going to give up about certain things, or I'm kind of going to quietly bide my time

or I'm going to, and or I'm going to accept that this relationship, it's fair. It's fair to middling. It's not abusive. It's not horribly toxic. It's not terrible. It's fair to middling. And it's probably not going to get any better than that. So I'm going to have a fair to middling relationship as just one of the major slices, but only a slice of the total pie of my life. And I'm going to find ways to really enjoy the whole pie, including this

Just fair to meddling relationship. You know, people come to that. They really come to that. On the other hand, you're getting older and older and you start realizing, well, it's kind of this one making a work with this person or clearing the decks for another possibility. Then it becomes, you know, definitely harder to make that call. And that's why I think the rate of change is really a good thing to evaluate. So then how do you accelerate the rate of change in the other person? First and foremost, increase your own rate of positive change.

Take care of your side of the street. Practice unilateral virtue. Focus on yourself. One by one, eliminate maximum reasonable extent their complaints about you. And then in terms of influencing them to

to change for the better. That's the whole topic. But I find it's really helpful to sort through what are your A priorities and what's everything else? And maybe what's your number one priority and everything else? And then enter into a process with that other person about seeing what's possible. And then you and I have both written a lot and taught a lot and other people on this great show that you have here for us have talked about this too. How do we talk with

our partners about things that really matter to us deeply. How do we express our wants clearly? How do we negotiate? How do we help them stay on the course and all that? And then at the end of the day, you make the call. And I find that people, on the one hand, often make the mistake of not being willing to really go to the mat to influence their partner around something that really, really matters to them. And

They're afraid to go to the mat. They're afraid, in other words, to be strong, to be clear, to be grave, to be persistent. Or they feel like it's not okay to do that, but it actually would be okay to do that. You know, they don't bring to bear the influence and seriousness that they really could on the one hand.

On the other hand, I've also seen people make really reasonable efforts to influence their partner in a direction that would be better for them, and they just kind of don't want to admit it. They don't want to see that, you know, that dog won't hunt. You're trying to send a duck to eagle school. It's just not going to happen.

And it's important for you to really see that and then make some fateful choices accordingly. Yeah, I think that there's a chance that we have a

Not really like disagreement, but maybe a slight difference of view about the dimension of the can't versus won't of it all. I think that's actually a really complicated question for people. For me, I think that some of my view about it is driven by my experience with Elizabeth in particular domains, particularly around her ADHD and her personal history with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And I've really seen the massive difference that medication, particularly Adderall,

made for her in dealing with ADHD, which is obviously one of those things where it is truly a can't issue, not a won't issue. But for a long time inside of our relationship, we were together for five, six years before she started taking Adderall and even longer than that before she started using it very consistently. So I was carrying around a lot of view and a lot of

frustration inside of the relationship driven by my belief or the belief of a part of me that this was a won't issue, not a can't issue. That if she were motivated enough, she would be able to do all of those things. And so why doesn't she care enough to do these things? And the truth is it was a can't issue. So it actually would have kind of simplified some issues inside of our relationship if I'd been able to kind of frame it that way for myself earlier on.

that was driven also inside of a broader container where Elizabeth's great, I love her dearly, we have a warm and wonderful relationship. And so there was a lot in the mix, and it wasn't a situation where she was having these emotional explosions all of the time and it was totally unmanageable or something like that.

More to the point of this person's question, I think interventions here are complicated and limited because when you start moving into intervention, you often exacerbate the issue. So if this person has an emotional volatility and emotional outburst issue, having a conversation with them where you say something along the lines of, hey, if your emotional outbursts don't reduce in intensity, I'm going to have to move on to a different relationship is quite likely to trigger an emotional outburst.

So there's a little bit of a catch-22 about the whole thing. And there's a total place for safety planning in all of this and taking steps to protect yourself if you think that you're going to be entering into that kind of a conversation with somebody who you perceive as being emotionally volatile. I do also want to name that. But I think that if you've gotten to this point inside of a relationship and you've been together for a while and there's a little bit of a shared sense still, maybe

maybe there's a lot of love still present amid different problems that you have. That real like, you know, go to the mat conversation where you're like, hey, I want to make this work. I am on your team. We are on a team together. We want to do this. But in order to do this, I'm really going to need to see A, B, and C. And that's

And that's just my reality in all of this. How do you feel about that? There's a total place for that conversation if there's the space in it inside of your relationship. And if you have that conversation two times with somebody and it's just not changing, I think that's a big indicator for me. I think what you're bringing up there, Forrest, is really important to be able to see

other people in our life as different from us and valid in their difference. And with beginner's mind, don't know mind, just see it for what it actually is in terms of cognitive style, how people process their temperament, their physiology, all the above, all the aspects of the psyche that are relatively fixed. You can't change those things. They are relatively fixed.

We can make a lot of efforts in how we manage our various tendencies within reasonable limits, but it's really important. I entirely agree with you, and I'm very glad you brought it up, to have a respectfulness and a sensitivity for how life has landed on other people alongside their own genetic endowment. Completely true. Completely true.

I think it's also true that I'm an effort guy and that's hopeful to me. Totally, totally. I reject the Kobayashi Maru scenario and I'm just right there with Froggy who kept churning in the Vatacreen and eventually turned it into butter and hopped out. And I think that it's hopeful to realize that we always have moves in the game.

if only to go into complete surrender to the game as it is. So I think that's generally true. Totally. With regard to bright, shining lines, I find it's actually my personal experience of dealing with a lot of couples, certainly in the population I dealt with, which tended to be middle class, fairly well-educated people in a suburban community. For every one person I saw putting some kind of demand on the table in a couple,

that they were in my office to talk about, I saw 10 people, if not 100 people, who were not prepared to just say, "Look, this has got to stop." For sure. Or, "This has got to start." And so that's an important thing too, particularly if your child's involved. But then the last thing I'll just say is that I think there's certain red flags. A key question is, will the other person repair? And if the person will not repair,

will they repair the lack of repair in effect in a broad sense? And if that other person is not prepared to repair, that to me is a red flag in any significant relationship.

I think that was a great answer to this question and we can move along to the next one. Does that sound good to you? Super. Awesome. Yep. So fourth question, I'm a serial ruminator, particularly around relationship concerns and trust issues. I know I ruminate, but I've also had plenty of very real bad things happen to me. How can I distinguish between unhelpful rumination that I should work to manage versus anxiety that might actually have some signal value?

When my mind constantly revisits worries, especially about relationships, is this just an unhealthy thought pattern or could it contain some valuable information?

And I'm contractually obligated at this point to mention Rick's rumination course, which I think probably just happened at the point that this video is coming out. It started on March 29th. I think it's like a five-week online thing. You can learn more about it on his website. It's rickhansen.com backslash ruminating. We have a coupon code being well25 for all of Rick's stuff. Okay, anyways, now that I got the plug in, go ahead, Dan.

Oh, no, it's real. And people can also look at the recording and say, oh, I want to put a plug in for the episode we just recorded on pitfalls and self-knowledge. Yes, yes, yes, which I totally think relates to this. Yeah. And in that conversation, we basically started to explore the difference between unhealthy rumination and healthy introspection. That's kind of what we're getting at here. Yeah, yeah. You sort of orbited that topic for a minute, and then we talked about some other stuff. But go ahead. Yeah.

Yeah. First off, as a way in, interestingly, research has shown that a certain amount of activation of the default mode network, which is sort of the substrate for

For ruminating in brain, it's kind of like that's where the ruminator is primarily headquartered, right? In the midline of the cortex, kind of spreading to the sides. Anyway, a little bit of activity in the default mode is actually healthy, particularly if it's associated with positive emotion.

And our mind is wandering or just musing on possibilities. Maybe there's a little planning, maybe there's a little kind of remembering this or that, and it's all sort of nice. It's kind of good. It's a little bit, it's a way for things to settle out, for the brain to take out some of the garbage metabolically and let things settle out. Great.

On the other hand, if your internal preoccupations have negative emotion associated with them, like anxiety or relationship concerns or trust issues, then it's really important to ask yourself, is this productive? And what's my relationship to what I'm ruminating about? Am I sucked into it and just doing laps around the negativity track?

in my brain, which are reinforcing those circuits in my brain. Neurons that fire together can wire together. Or is this actually moving forward in some way? As I reflect on these issues, for example, am I doing it to surface things inside me, to unpack them, to disentangle them, to air them out, to let in some light? Is that why I'm doing it? Well, that's healthy introspection.

Also, does this whole process go to some conclusion, some decisive clarity about the way it is or decision about action? That's productive. If it's just looping through negative emotion again and again in a way that isn't productive, I think that's really bad for people. I think that's kind of the equivalent of pounding your foot with a hammer. I think this is such an interesting question because

because it's such a natural objection to any helpful content we create about this topic. It's a generally helpful piece of advice for most people to say, hey, we're really biased toward paying attention to negative information.

And then when the objection to it is a version of, well, I have had all these bad things happen in my life, so shouldn't I be paying attention to signals of threat? It's like, yeah, you should be paying attention to them, but we want to be thoughtful about the degree to which we let these things take over our life and particularly be thoughtful about bounding our predictions about how likely negative events actually are to take place.

And so I think that you can do both be aware of your tendency either way without really letting it overwhelm you, right? Like I'm aware of my tendency to be a kind of top-down chatty person.

But I don't let that turn me into a mute at a party. I just try to let it turn me into somebody who has a little timer running in the back of my head where I go, okay, 90 seconds, that's good. 45 seconds, that's good. Pass the ball to somebody else. And that's my correction. My correction isn't don't talk. In relationships, which this person is bringing up, this person is ruminating to become safe. They want to be safe.

It's kind of like they're inside a cage or inside a cell and they're scratching. They're ruminating. Is there a way out? Is there a way to make my way to safety? And just really quickly, part of the reason that we're answering this question in this way is because we don't know. We don't know whether this person's ruminations are rational or not. We're not around them. We're not living their life. We're just raising the kind of broader questions that are sort of on the table around this kind of a question. Yeah. Anyways, go ahead, Dan. That's right. So if this is a person who says, I've had

Plenty of very real bad things happen to me. Yeah, negative experiences, totally. On the one hand, wow, I totally feel for you. And also, okay, what can you learn from those painful experiences? What drew you into those relationships?

and what enabled those people to mistreat and hurt you in the ways that they did. Not to so-called blame the victim, not to blame yourself, but to just try to see clearly in a way that's really hopeful in that you can then learn from your history and then use that learning in your selection process for new people in the future.

so that you can trust yourself increasingly to choose people that are going to be better for you. And also, watch carefully. You know, as Ronald Reagan put it, I think, trust but verify. In other words, in an ongoing kind of way,

verify what's really going on so that you can trust your own perceptions, you can trust your own capabilities to see what's really going on. And then if there are issues in which there was a kind of a seeming breach of trust in which you'd agreed to meet, let's suppose, somebody for lunch and they just blew it off and didn't acknowledge that and left you hanging,

Wow, that's a really big deal. So restoring trust, which is grounded in reliability. Is this someone you can count on? Can you count on their word? Will they keep their agreements? Do they care about keeping their agreements with you? Do you matter to them? Do they have integrity in general? And you're trying to establish that with other people in real terms. That too, can you trust yourself to actively trust?

Keep strengthening the foundation of trust in the relationship. And then ultimately, you can't make other people be trustworthy. At the end of the day, there are limitations to how much it's appropriate to monitor them, to regulate them, to ask for or demand reassurances. There are limitations to that. And there's a place that's kind of radical where you feel good enough about yourself so that you can actually accept

that they might betray you. They might breach your trust. And if they do, shame on them, not shame on you. And there can be a mourning and grieving about it, like it hurts, okay? But fundamentally, you're going to be okay. So building up that sense of confidence so that you don't get caught up in over-controlling other people to make sure that they're trustworthy and they stick around. At the end of the day, it's like,

They're going to do what they're going to do. And if they screw up their relationship with them, that's their loss. You're going to be okay. And to keep building up that sense inside. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good...

kind of deeper root solution to this sort of a problem, which is that fundamental sense of self-worth. So that in the event that something bad does happen out there, you know, hey, I'm a good person. I'm good at building relationships. I can fix these problems in the future. I can trust myself. I can solve this issue. And that can then help with the anxiety that tends to lead to this kind of rumination. So moving on to our fifth question here. After

After ending a difficult relationship where I felt hurt, I'm struggling with how to process my anger.

I tend to be forgiving and see the best in others, but I wonder if I need stronger boundaries. Part of me wants to develop more of a protective response, strengthening my protective parts, so to speak, to prevent similar hurts in the future. But I'm concerned this might create emotional barriers that block future connections. How can I honor my need for self-protection while maintaining my naturally open heart? Well, here I find myself a little perplexed

to start with. Yeah, there's a premise in the question that I'm not sure is true. Yeah. Yeah. There's a term in psychoanalysis that you're bringing that up called countertransference, which is the therapist's reactions to the client. And the deep notion here is to use our own reactions as data

that can help us understand more deeply. So my initial reaction here is to feel kind of perplexed about what are we actually talking about here or what are the elements here? So I want to kind of honor that response as it were. And so we start with anger.

Okay? Persons hurt and struggling with how to process their anger. And how does the processing of anger, how does anger relate to wanting to prevent being hurt in the future? To me, it's kind of separate.

Yeah. There are a couple presumptions in this. Boundaries are related to anger. I'm not sure that they are. I think that you can set boundaries from a lot of different places that are not anger. You could set boundaries out of self-love. You can set boundaries out of an appreciation for the other person, frankly, being like, hey, I don't think that this, whatever behavior is coming through that you're boundarying, I don't think this is good for you either. So there's a kind of almost like a nurturant aspect to the boundary that

that often arises around issues with substance addiction. That's a big one for people where the family starts to set boundaries in order to kind of support them fundamentally. So I do not think that boundaries and anger are necessarily... I mean, they're often traveled together, but they don't have to travel together. So that's the first thing that I would say about this. The second thing that I would say about it is that I'm not clear that

having access to your anger or even setting healthy boundaries with other people has anything to do with having a closed or open heart. What I think this person is really speaking to is a feeling of how trusting should I be with others? How immediately open should I be when I move into relationship with them? Should I just be like this clear pain

Or should I have a little bit more space, you know, the old double-paned window, something like that? And what's the healthy balance of kind of like distancing, protection, boundarying versus like total moving toward it?

And what I do hear from people who sometimes struggle with enmeshment or tend to be a little bit more anxious often is that there's a kind of concern where, oh, but if I protect myself, that means I won't be able to do this thing that I really love doing, which is this sense of being just totally in the relationship and kind of like consumed by it. And we're both completely fused inside of this. And that's actually this really beautiful feeling for me that I sort of crave.

But I understand that all of these problems accompany it. And so it's another kind of maybe slightly psychoanalytic thing where there's this objection to the obvious solution, which is to move away from a behavior that is costing you more than it's giving you. And what's costing you is your ability to protect yourself, your ability to have a relationship with other people where they're both standing on their own feet, which is often not present in amassed relationships at all.

and it's leading to just a lot of turmoil for you in your life. So that's how I would square this particular circle, Dad. What do you think about all of that? I hope we're not doing an injustice here to the person who sent us this question. Sure, yeah. And that we're appreciating it in terms of what they're asking. Yeah. One reason we get hurt is that other people are being hurtful.

They're just being rude, aggressive, dismissive. They treat us like an it to their eye rather than a thou to their eye. They use all kinds of language or behaviors that are just, eh, they hurt us. And it's in the service of the heart to protect ourselves

from that kind of behavior and to do what we can to influence the other person so it doesn't happen again in the service of the heart, in the service of, as you said earlier, us. So there's definitely a place for that. They're not at odds with each other. And it's helpful to appreciate that and also to realize that very often resting in your heart in an open-hearted, whole-hearted, as Brene Brown would put it, kind of way

is actually highly protective of you. Because when you're rested in the heart, it protects you and it feeds you and it kind of grounds you. And it tends to actually reduce mistreatment by other people.

in part because they just look like such a fool when they're pounding on someone who's just kind of calmly, sincere, and open-hearted, and self-respected. So they're not at odds with each other. So that's one source. Another source, which I wonder is part of what's happening here intuitively, is we become invested in other people. We become invested in the relationship. We give our heart to them, and then they abandon us maybe, or

Over time, they decide that we're not their cup of tea and they want to end the relationship. So we've become invested. So here I wonder about protection is a kind of code language for not investing that much in a relationship or seeing clearly

more quickly what the limitations are with this other person. So I don't become so emotionally invested in them. And so it's not so devastating when they withdraw from me. And there I think, huh, what does protection look like in that regard? And I think a lot of it looks like clear seeing, but also better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, as the

I find that if we really give our heart to other people and we, on reflection, can enjoy the bliss of blamelessness, we feel on the whole that we were really a stand-up person in it all. We were sweet. We were sincere. We were not misleading. And

They just weren't interested in us. So ultimately, it's painful, but there's a kind of sweetness in the pain that you know you did the best you could. You can feel really glad about that. There's something noble and heroic about being really real with our heart, being a fundamentally loving person who wants to be in love.

wants to be loved in return. That's really good. And if you're that kind of person, you're probably going to be fortunate with the next person you end up with. That's great. That's beautiful. Yeah. And it's kind of a good example of this. Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel good about that one, dad? You feel complete on it or is there anything else you want to throw in here? No, I think that's great. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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Now, back to the show.

So third question: In a recent Mailbag episode, you briefly touched on the distinction between "can't change" and "won't change" in relationships. And I'd love a deeper exploration of this complex topic. Sometimes blame themselves or otherwise normalize that dysfunctional behavior. How does this early conditioning influence their own adult behavior patterns?

Specifically, are people who grow up with certain parental issues, like narcissism, more likely to develop those same traits themselves? What determines whether someone repeats problematic patterns they witnessed in childhood,

versus developing healthier alternatives. And I think it's that last sentence here, dad, that I would like to really focus on because the first part of the question could easily get sidetracked into like a nature nurture thing. So I think that what they're kind of asking is like, if you remove the nature component, is a kid just going to behaviorally replicate these kinds of problematic behaviors that they witness in their parents or not?

Wow. 10,000 social scientists would love to know the answer to this question. Would love to know the answer. This is like one of the big questions in the world of social science. It's huge. And it really gets to things like generational trauma.

gets at the whole question of the authoritarian personality, which is very politically germane these days and has to do, and is certainly historically germane as well. You know, children who tend to be punished severely and harshly, including sometimes beaten, tend to grow up with an authoritarian personality. They look for authoritarian leaders that kind of repeat that childhood paradigm and become that way themselves. You know, there's a tendency

Totally. So the short answer is there's definitely some kind of nurture-driven tendency here, yes. Particularly in terms of the part of it that you just named there, dad, with cycles of violence. Absolutely, that is clearly a thing.

That's correct. And so with regard to narcissism per se, I'm not aware of any research that talks about the generational transmission of narcissism. My personal experience is that I've rarely met a highly narcissistic person who had highly narcissistic parents. Very often it's the opposite. People who grow up with very self-absorbed, narcissistic, entitled parents tends to often really not want to be that way themselves in my personal experience.

small sample size of experience there. Which is also possibly the sample of people who are seeking therapy and so on. Yeah, there you are. I don't think there's a lot of genetic loading on narcissism. Obsessive compulsiveness tends to have a bit of genetic loading. We could also talk about parents who are depressed. There's a certain tendency, it increases the odds to develop depression oneself in terms of first degree relevancy.

relatives. So just naming that piece of the puzzle here. At the deep level, what determines whether someone repeats problematic patterns they witnessed versus developing healthier alternatives? Wow. I think one thing that determines it is how much they suffered those problematic patterns from childhood so that it's really salient to them. They didn't like it. They're motivated to not be that way themselves.

I think it also has to do with in terms of what determines the influence of other people. If you grow up in a culture in which

parents treat kids certain kinds of ways, then there's a tendency to treat your own kids those ways. But if you meet other people from different cultures, they nudge you in a different direction. Yeah, I think the Kawaii Longitudinal Study, all of the research on that is a huge part of this, the presence or absence of a key person or persons who bring this kid in the right direction. That's great. You're bringing up one of my favorite studies. Actually, that's really cool.

I think that's true. And I think at a deep level too, it goes back to something we talked about, about can't or won't. I think maybe the biggest factor of all is motivation or commitment, even particularly at a sort of soul level or an existential level where deep down inside, you just say to yourself something like, I love my dad. He did the best he could. And I just never want to be that way with my partner, the way he was with my mom.

I have so many friends who would check that box and who feel that way. Some version of like, wow, love my parents, but man, do not want to replicate that one. Yeah, that's right. And it could be broader than that. For myself, my parents were very loving and decent, and partly because of their circumstances growing up in the depression, their vision for what was possible in life was within a certain circle. And that circle was

much bigger than the circle of life in which they grew up. My dad on a ranch, my mom, the

daughter of a single mother restaurant hostess in part, but still I grew up with a certain vision of what was possible for how people could interact with each other or how life could be explored and just been determined to live in a wider circle. So that would be a different kind of an example of a person saying, you know, I really am determined to walk a different road, at least in some regards.

I sort of return to what you said at the very beginning, Khadad, where this is one...

that if we had the answer to it, it would get published in Nature magazine. If we had the answer to this one, it would be a very big deal because it's one of the big questions that we wrestle with when we talk about psychology. What is our level of agency? It's kind of a big fundamental part of in here and we just don't know. Different people are going to come down in different places with it. There's a lot of contradictory evidence that's out there for both the nature and the nurture side of this particular debate.

the things that we can say really conclusively are that yes, there is some degree of heritability to most of these behaviors that people describe as problematic. Yes,

social support really matters. That's the big variable over and over again that people point to. And yes, there is this sort of mysterious individual agency component to the whole thing where it's like-- this is a weird analogy, but two people can go through the identical experiences. One of them ends up with PTSD, one of them doesn't. Why? We have no idea why. We don't know. And it doesn't seem to have anything to do

with any of the standard inventories that you would give. It's not that the person who doesn't develop PTSD is grittier than the other one or they're a tougher person. None of that seems to matter very much. There's just this sort of weird component to the whole thing. And I think it's one of the big outstanding questions in the social sciences is how does all of this work?

I had a great time answering questions from our listeners today with Rick. If you would like to ask a question to be answered on a future edition of The Mailbag, you can find us at [email protected]. You can also join us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a number of bonuses in return like transcripts of our episodes or ad-free versions of the episodes.

Almost all of the questions today focused on our relationships. And for me, I've been thinking a lot recently about this 90-10 idea, right? It's come up in a bunch of our episodes. So what's the 10% that gets us 90% of our results inside of our relationships? How can we apply that idea to what we talked about today? For me, it's just the question, are we on the same team? And then the obvious follow-up, can we get on the same team? Do you feel like you and your partner are in the same boat?

rowing in the same direction? Or do you feel like you're either in a race in two different boats or you're in the same boat, but you're rowing in opposite directions, right? And I think this question of are we on the same team really cuts through so much of the complexity and confusion that gets to relationships. Because so often inside of a relationship, we feel like we are playing tug of war. We're pulling in two opposite directions. And the way that you slice that Gordian knot is by asking, okay, how can we turn this into

into a third direction, into kind of a different space where we both get to have our needs met, where I'm able to step a little bit in, you're able to step a little bit in, you start by taking on my position a little bit, I then move into your position a little bit more. And through that process, we're both able to get to a place where we actually get more of what we want.

And this is not a novel idea. There's a lot of relationship content out there that's made that asks questions like the ones that I'm raising here. And then the great question is what tends to get in the way of that? And what often gets in the way of that is a fundamental unwillingness on behalf of at least one of the people, if not both people, to kind of drop their case and move away from the stance of approaching this like it's an argument with a right answer and a wrong answer.

and to move toward much more of a space of curiosity, a willingness to let go of the things that don't matter so much in order to get what actually does matter, which is a great foundational sense of connection with your partner.

So the first question that explored some of these ideas asked basically, "Am I too sensitive or are they too harsh?" And for starters, why not both? You can be too sensitive and they can be too harsh at the same time. And if you're able to have a conversation about this sort of stuff with your partner and inside the question, they had sort of suggested that they had already talked with them about aspects of this kind of thing,

it means that you're open to talking about things at all. And that's a great starting point. A lot of people are not open to talking about things at all. And one of the points that Rick made is that there can be a difference between the sort of objective conditions of what's going on. If you had sort of a jury panel of five people watching this interaction, what would they say about it versus your subjective experience of it? And he gave a number of pointers, some related to what's called nonviolent communication, which is a particular style of talking.

We've talked with people on the podcast about NVC in the past. The point is not so much this particular structure, which can sound a little therapist talky. The point is what you're trying to get to, which is again that feeling of being on the same team. And in order to be on the same team, you can't be blaming each other all the time. It can't always be their fault for them being too harsh or always be your fault for you being too sensitive.

There needs to be some third option. And in my experience, these issues resolve inside of a relationship when both of you take on the other person's position. When the more sensitive partner is able to essentially take on their partner's position and go, you know what? I'm going to really focus on becoming sturdier. I'm going to really care about them feeling like they can really communicate honestly with me.

and say what they need to say and get it off their chest, kind of however they need to get it off their chest, within reason. And my focus is going to be on that.

And then they're able to go, hey, you know what? My focus is going to be on being more sensitive. It's going to be on expressing myself in a more vulnerable way. It's going to be on really getting that I'm going to get my needs met more if I'm able to start by joining with you and taking two steps forward into your position. And they both really take that on as their personal objective. Essentially, they swap cases with each other.

It's not always easy to do this, but you can raise it as a deliberate practice. You can both agree to really try this on, to really try to have them take on your view and you take on their view. And you just see what happens after a little while.

The second question kind of similarly was about two people with very different emotional processing speeds and tendencies during a conversation. One of them tended to get a little overwhelmed and need to take a step back, need some time to collect themselves. The other person preferred to really dig into a conflict immediately, tended to be more cognitive. And a great question that Rick asked right at the top of this was, what do we mean by time to process feelings? How much time to process feelings? Do you just need five minutes?

Do you need an hour? Or are we talking about something just running endlessly and they check in a week later and you're still kind of processing your feelings? And this is another place where that great Rick phrase, start by joining, which really exemplifies the idea of getting onto the same team.

Can we begin by moving into our partner's way of being or our partner's way of thinking in order, kind of counterintuitively, to eventually reestablish our own way of thinking and being? And we understand that by scratching their back in a healthy relationship, most of the time your back will eventually get scratched.

The third question was about can't change versus won't change in relationships, and particularly a situation where somebody had moved on from a relationship, but they were kind of processing, did I need to move on? Was there more I could have done?

And particularly the question, what concrete steps should someone take when they feel their partner's behavior must change for the relationship to survive? And Rick and I started by talking about the can't versus won't of it all. Rick is a big believer in the power of a person to change, including in very profound ways over time, if they're sufficiently motivated to do so. Whereas I have, I think, a little bit more of an appreciation for the ways in which

Call it can't, call it won't. Some people really struggle to change in particular ways, even if they're very invested in that process. Some of the key points here that Rick raised were first paying attention to the trend line in a relationship. Does it feel like they have a growth curve at all? Or man, are they really pretty set in their ways? And

And second, are they willing to repair? Are they open to the idea of being different tomorrow than they were today? And if you have some kind of an interaction that goes sideways, are they open to patching it up? And then third, have you clearly communicated with them the real stakes that are on the table here? Have you had a conversation where you went, hey, this is a big deal. This is a deal breaker for me.

And so if we're going to move forward as a partnership here, you need to be willing to honor that as a deal breaker. And you need to be open to budging around it. And if you're just not open to budging around it, this probably isn't going to work. As Rick said, sometimes, yes, people overcommunicate. But most of the time, in his experience as a couples therapist for 35 years or whatever it was,

Most of the time, there are so many undelivered communications inside of a relationship that if somebody just had the courage to actually say how they feel and actually put it on the table like that, so much could possibly change. Another question that we answered had to do with setting boundaries and processing anger.

And the person in particular was concerned that by setting more boundaries with other people, they would start to essentially build a kind of shield around their naturally very open heart. And there was a lot in this question that kind of slowed Rick and me down here. For starters, there seemed to be a lot of assumptions in it about what boundaries meant. That in order to have a boundary, you had to be angry, or you had to be frustrated,

or you had to close yourself off in some kind of way in order to protect yourself from other people. When truthfully, that's not my experience of boundaries at all. You can often set boundaries out of love. You can set boundaries out of a deep sense of connection with another person. You can set boundaries because you love yourself and have a profound sense of self-trust inside of all of this.

And boundaries can deepen connection in so many different kinds of ways. My relationship with Elizabeth is much more connected than it used to be, in part because we are better boundaried with each other, in part because we've been much clearer about what we both need from the other person in order to make things work. When people think about topics like this, they often create these dichotomies that just don't exist. So part of the question was, how can I honor my need for self-protection while maintaining my naturally open heart?

But the irony is that being able to protect yourself is how you maintain your naturally open heart, right? If you can't protect yourself, you have to close your heart because you got to do something. Otherwise, you're just going to be overwhelmed and at sea all of the time. So it's actually by establishing different kinds of systems for creating safe distance with other people that you're able to open yourself up to them in different kinds of ways.

Finally, we were asked one of the big questions in social science research, which is how likely it is for kids to take on the more negative behaviors of their parents. And man, if we had an answer to this one, it would be a pretty big story. We don't have a perfect answer to it. Behaviors are definitely passed down in different kinds of ways.

How and why this happens is a massive space for debate. I'm not an expert on it. What we do know is that a big part of this is social support. We know that for sure, that if a kid has other options out there in terms of seeing other people in the mix who have different behaviors, who are also kind of role models for them or who can be a good influence on their life, that can make a huge difference for a kid.

So I hope you enjoyed this mailbag. Again, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. That's the best way to reach us. If you want to ask a question, you can also send us an email, contact at beingwellpodcast.com. Quick plug here at the end for Rick's rumination course. I think it's a five-week course, if I'm remembering correctly. It's online. It's recorded. You can watch the old videos if this is after it started. I think it started on March 29th.

And you can learn more at rickhansen.com slash ruminating and use the code beingwell25, that's two five, the numbers, for 25% off the purchase price if you're interested in it. If you've made it this far and you somehow haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, we would love it if you subscribe. That really helped us out. The best thing you can do though is just tell a friend about the podcast. It is truly the best way that we have to reach new people. So until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.