People Pleasing, AI Therapy, and Sexual Transference: May Mailbag
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Hello, and welcome to Being Well. I am Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today, as usual, by Dr. Rick Hansen. Dad, how are you doing today? I'm feeling kind of goofy. So yeah, we were we were already having a little preamble, as people might have heard in my little introduction there. We were already a little pre-fired up.

That's good. Let's get into it. I'm psyched. Bring the postman or woman or being. The postperson. Yes, the postperson always delivers and we even deliver on Sundays or Mondays as the case may be for the podcast. In snow or rain? Sure, yeah. Why not? I mean, we live in California, so we don't really get much of either, but...

but the metaphor stands regardless. So today we're going to be opening up the mailbag and answering some questions from our listeners. If you'd like to have a question answered on a future episode of the podcast, the best way to do that is by signing up for our Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast.

And you can also send an email to contact at beingwellpodcast.com. We always get great questions. I thought that these questions were really interesting. We got questions about using AI therapy, which I'm very interested to hear Rick's response to. Transference, a sprinkle of existential dread in there.

And we're actually going to start with one that's about a piece of advice that Rick has given a few times on the show. We're going to hold him to account for it. But before we get into that, a quick reminder about Rick's course on healing insecure attachment. It's happening right now. It's been a five-week course that's focused on helping people work through attachment issues and make big changes in their relationships.

It's been running through all of May, but all of the videos are pre-recorded, so you can still join it. And Rick actually has a live hour-long event for it tomorrow, May 27th at 12 p.m. Pacific time. It'll be on Zoom. You can ask him your questions. You can bug him like

I do during these episodes of the podcast. So now is a great time to join. And if you want to learn some more, you can find out about it at rickhansen.com/attachment and use coupon code beingwell25, that's the numbers two and five, to receive a 25% discount. So okay, first question today.

I struggle with a common recommendation for people with depression that Rick has also mentioned on the podcast. We're often told to focus on helping others as a way to stop ruminating over our own issues. But as somebody who is also working to end a decades-old habit of people-pleasing, I find this suggestion contradictory to the work that I'm doing for myself.

It's easy for me to focus on others, but sometimes what I really need is just a bit of interest and curiosity in me and how I'm doing. How can I reconcile these two different issues?" Well, first I want to compliment the person and the way they framed their criticism or question by saying, "I've heard this from many people. You also have said the same stupid thing."

So, help me. No, they didn't do that. But you know what I mean? It's a good way to give feedback. Help me understand here. Yeah, it's a really good, it's very skillful. And I think it's useful to recognize that form of it. So that's part one. Yeah, good technique. Totally. Yeah. And sincere. Clearly sincere. I mean that. Second,

Absolutely. You always want to individualize response. There's a lot of new research, and I want to call out Steve Hayes and his work on the technical mathematics of this. Steve is a psychologist and the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and he talks about the importance of what's called, bear with the term, idiomomic statistics rather than group-centered statistics, tracking individual responses to treatment.

Really important to do. Almost all social science findings, including in clinical psychology, are essentially about the averages of groups, the so-called central tendencies. Well, if let's suppose plus or minus one standard deviation encompasses about 68%, two-thirds of the population, what about the one-sixth

at one end of the tail and the other sixth at the other end of the tail of the distribution. So one size definitely does not fit all. So I'm really glad this person has a sense of advocacy for themselves.

Further, you're exactly right. It really is true that as someone who may well be not getting enough caring and social supplies and narcissistic supplies like prizing and cherishing, it sometimes is really true that the world is not treating us well, and it's definitely not showing up at our house with a truckload of social supplies.

But still, we ourselves can get many of the benefits of prosocial experiences as kindness, compassion, friendliness, even love flow outward through you, even if it's in short supply coming towards you and coming into you. And this fact over which you have agency, even in tough conditions, is really wonderful to know.

All that said, for someone, as you describe yourself, this listener, who tends toward people-pleasing and maybe putting themselves second around other people, being typically in the listener and cheerleader position, being in the giver position rather than the taker position, it's especially important to try to break that script.

and look for people who are prepared for a truly reciprocal, mutual, adult kind of relationship where that ought to be roughly even, especially over a timescale of at least weeks, maybe not hours, but at least weeks, roughly even the giving and the taking. So part of that is looking for the people who will do it. A lot of our issues in relationships boil down to selection.

And then also interacting with people in such a way that you break up your own habits of putting yourself second and you start to learn new habits that'll lead you to receiving what you really long for and need. This was part two of their question. There was one sentence I left off of that question because I wanted to talk about it almost as if it was a separate question.

Has my habit of people pleasing trained others to not offer this kind of support to me? I think that's a fascinating question. I think it's at least possible. Obviously, it's going to vary a lot person to person, but I've definitely found in my own experience that I essentially train my friends or the people around me

to be a certain kind of way with me because I act in certain predictable ways, right? If they do stuff with me and I always give them a certain kind of thing in response or don't give them a certain kind of thing in response, well, they're not going to do that thing as much, right? Oh, it's interesting. Now, did you train them or, I'm going to frame it a certain way, did you let them get away with it?

I think either is really possible for people. For me, looking back over it, I think that I was inadvertently training. I think that I was very consistent in my responses to certain kinds of bids from other people or showing interest in something about me and then I kind of deflect around it or downplay it because it's been uncomfortable for me to talk about it. And then well, what happens? You deflect or you downplay a couple of times, they just stop asking the question. And I don't really think that that's the other person's fault.

Yeah, in effect, the way you're saying it is that it's not that these people were naturally coming into it narcissistic and self-absorbed. And maybe the most charitable interpretation we could say is that they thought, oh, you don't particularly like talking about yourself or you feel safer maybe as the questioner rather than the speaker.

And then they learned that I have a podcast and they're like, actually, he does like talking plenty and must be something else going on here. I think that maybe for this person, there's a good question of what does it look like to do a little less people-pleasing? What does it look like

to bid for what you want from other people in a way that feels safe and graded appropriately to what you feel like you can deal with. Like what we talk about all the time on the podcast is various forms of exposure. You're kind of talking about doing an exposure here. You're stepping into a slightly different way of being that feels a little bit uncomfortable for you. And in order to make that really work, you have to find a level of it that's well-matched to where you are right now in your own kind of journey of comfort with making bits like that.

And so I don't know what that looks like for that person. I'm not sure if you've got some kind of common ideas or examples just off the dome here, Dad. I think one version of that is setting boundaries with people who are emotional vampires. That's the extreme version. Essentially using you

this is the essence of narcissism, as an extension of themselves rather than recognizing your differentiated beingness in your own right. So let's say we're not talking about that. We're just talking about the kind of patterns you're describing in which we tend to end up with about 20% of the airtime. And we tend to end up receiving maybe just 20% of the social supplies floating around. Well, one option is to pursue what you're interested in.

In other words, what brings you to life when you're interacting with other people? What are topics you care about? And what are the ways of talking about them you care about? What's alive for you? That can make interactions feel much richer. If they're droning on about their motorcycle, you don't really care about motorcycles.

What's more alive for you? Now, it might be like it might be for me who doesn't ride a motorcycle. Wow. What do you like about riding motorcycles? Suddenly, I'm interested. And then now we're in the broader topic of, well, I don't really do motorcycles, but I love West Coast Swing or gardening.

or rock climbing or something, and then you're into the thing that has some life for you. So that's a way in. It's good for someone who's kind of shyer, as a person like this might well be, to move into something that gives you a sense of passion and enthusiasm. So that might be a way to get more of a back and forth give and take with another person. The other would be just to be more open about your own inner world.

appropriate self-disclosure. Comfortable with sharing. Yeah. Yeah. You watch what people is A and B, what happened? And then you think about depth on maybe a, I don't know, zero to 10 scale. So you're just chatting superficially. That's kind of a two on the depth scale. And then what happens when you drop down to a three?

Does the other person match you? Do they drop down to a three in depth as well? Or do they go up to a one? Do they leave the previous baseline of two and go up to one as kind of a message to you? Nah, I don't really want depth. So that's something to really watch in terms of rapport, joining or distancing. Deepening self-disclosure is a joining move. It promotes intimacy and connecting. And so then you see how people manage it. And then you can even talk about that.

Yeah, and then you're back to partner selection. You're back to who are you having these conversations with? Are you selecting good people to have these conversations with? Who can you get to that level of depth with? All of those pieces of it. So I think that was some good basic advice there, Dad. That's clearly something that we could talk about much longer, as is often the case with these questions. But I do want to get to the next one because I'm very personally curious where you're at with this.

Over the last few months, I've been using AI as a personal therapist, and I've found it more helpful than my previous experiences with actual therapists. I've seen 5-6 therapists over the past 15ish years and have received some benefit, and my last experience with human therapy was last year with a very highly regarded psychologist that I felt quite judged by over the course of 4 very expensive sessions.

I've felt very validated by the AI. It doesn't judge me, provides different perspectives when I ask, and helped me gain clarity about my relationships. From my perspective, being able to talk freely with an endlessly patient chatbot has been great. Aside from any general privacy concerns here, what do you think about the value of AI in general when it comes to intentional usage like this?

You're right. This is a catnip. I am so curious, dad, because we have not talked about this at all. I'm so curious. Well, a couple of things about it. So back in the 70s, a book was published called Machines Who Think.

- Classic, yeah. - Yeah, classic, 25-year edition recently out. I forget the name of the author, full credit to that person. And I think in that book, or maybe I heard this elsewhere, true story, one of the early developers back in the 1970s of very, very simplistic text-based forms of interacting with a pseudo-therapist who had developed technologies basically like, "How are you doing today?" "I'm doing fine."

Extremely simple. Well, the creator of this software left his office and he came back an hour later, a little early from lunch, and he found that his chief administrator was sitting at the desk typing in replies and interacting with this extremely simple software with tears running down her face.

And that episode was chastening and really helped him realize the power of these devices. Now we're in major language models, ChatGPT and so forth. It's a whole new world. So people can have very real, very deep experiences interacting with a program. They know it's a program. They know it has no mind of its own.

Yet on the other hand, they take the words at face value. And it sure seems real when you interact with these therapy bots in succession. And if you're having experiences that are helpful for you pragmatically, fine.

Also, the lifetime utilization rate in America of one session with a licensed clinician is 5% of the population. 95% of the American population will never see a licensed therapist. Maybe they'll see a coach. Coaching is becoming a new thing, but probably not even a certified coach. They just won't do it. So how do we help these people? I'm excited about mental health tools being increasingly available to people

All that's wonderful. Now here's some key pitfalls. One pitfall is that there is no replacement for biological social primates. There's no replacement for touch-to-touch, eye-to-eye, voice-to-voice. I was speaking actually with, I think it's okay to name them, Steve Hayes and Diana Hill, with whom I'm doing a program for the Global Compassion Coalition

And Steve is a real enthusiast for the power of AI and the possibility of creating avatars. Literally now there are programs who, if we fed them privacy-protecting transcripts of, say, 10 sessions with Rick Hansen or somebody else,

That could be fed into a bot that would create what looks like Rick Hansen on the screen doing what looks like Rick Hansen-ish psychotherapy with a particular person. And Steve was excited by this prospect. Diana and I were horrified by it in different ways. Diana more so than me. Actually, I will change this story because it would be pretty identifying. Basically, she had a client

was very preoccupied about some recent medical procedures that had left some scars. And Diana very gently put her hand on the scars and helped her clients stay with the experience of these scars being accepted and being normalized and not a big deal. Well, no chat GPT avatar on your laptop or phone screen is going to be able to do that for you.

And there are other things that there's no replacement for human contact. And it could be, possibly, that some people will use AI forms of psychotherapy as a kind of

psychotherapeutic bypass to avoid some of the real gains that could be available to them with a human source. That's a pitfall potentially. The last pitfall is that these days with the access of state governmental intelligence agencies and other oligarchs with tremendous powers of influence,

to have the most intimate secrets of your whole life and the most intimate workings of your own mind available and searchable and everything is discoverable.

It's a little worrisome. And then what happens when very, very cleverly, we see this already in the relatively gross macro forms of social influence and TikTok and Facebook and Twitter and so forth, the messaging that is being slipped in.

very subtly and cleverly into those systems, imagine those kinds of messagings slipped in like deference to authority. Just do what they tell you to do. You'll get along a lot more easily that way. Where other kinds of messaging slipped into these therapy bots, that's a serious concern and risk in the world that we're living into over the next 10 or 100 years.

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Yeah, I think it's difficult to hand wave the privacy piece of this. It's a bit difficult to answer this question with the premise of like, oh, well, there are privacy concerns about it, but don't really worry so much about that. What do you think about the efficacy of this as like a therapeutic tool? Because, well, that's a pretty big...

Big part of the deal, part of what you're getting in therapy, allegedly, is privacy. A big part of that licensure is that you are protected inside of the session. Your information is protected. And so you are waiving that by having this kind of an interaction.

with a chatbot. A lot of people don't understand that licensure exists to protect the client. That being said, just thinking about it as a modality, I basically agree with everything that you said. I think that for, I could imagine a lot of people getting a lot of help around many different kinds of problems from AI just as it exists right now. I am

am very interested in how this radically increases potential access to different kinds of counseling or therapeutic services, or just as a tool that people find useful for personal development, personal growth. Maybe the biggest issue that we have in therapy world is access for people. Therapy, by and large, is quite expensive. A big part of the reason that it's quite expensive is because prospective therapists accrue an enormous amount of debt in order to become a therapist. So it's not just that like,

people are rolling in it, it's that they have to recover from $80,000 to $100,000 of debt, and part of that gets priced in to the cost of your session. Then we've got insurance companies wanting to underbill using old payment tables, all of this kind of stuff. It's a very, very complicated world out there. And so being able to slice through that to some extent with this extremely low-cost option does have a certain amount of appeal to me.

I really wonder about the human aspect of it. I wonder about the core Carl Rogers humanistic, talking cure, sitting in front of a person, being witnessed by them, compassionate energy. Can you really get that from an AI model? I don't know. What I do know is that we are at the tip of the spear of this whole thing, and we have no idea.

The only thing that I'm confident in is that we have no idea. If you look back 10, 20, 30 years on predictions of the internet, that's where we are with AI right now. Because there are a lot of people in 92, 93 who were just like, ah, the internet.

Like how big of a deal is it really? And it's like, well, it's going to literally change the world in like a million different ways. So that maybe is kind of where we're at with all of this. And so that just makes me want to be quite cautious in any predictions here about where this whole thing is going to end up. I could imagine, like you're talking about these different AI avatars or whatever,

a version of Rick that looks a lot like Rick, talks a lot like Rick, feels a lot like Rick. Yeah, you know that it's a video of you and yeah, you know that it's an AI, but like, man, it seems an awful lot like Rick Hansen is talking to me through my phone. Is that just as good? I don't know. I mean, people are now making movies about this. I think that there was the movie like Her

Oh, yeah.

And so much disinformation and misinformation that's really deliberate. You and I both share a love of the movie Almost Famous and the great line in it that the only real currency in the world is what we share with others when we're not trying to be cool, right? So on the one hand, the notion of, let's say, a Rick or a Sigmund Freud or a Esther Perel or

Tarabrock, whoever, Avatar being available for only $9.99 a month or something. There's something about that that just fundamentally makes you cringe. That is learning about you. I'm there with you with the cringe. I'm there with you with the cringe. I guess the distinction that I'm drawing is I'm super there for the cringe and the concern,

My more academically curiosity orientation is what's the efficacy difference? How much worse is it than Rick Hansen? And I don't know. And that's where I'm expressing the I don't know. I don't know what the drop-off is between a session with Rick Hansen the human and a session with Rick Hansen the AI avatar. I would imagine it's something, I just don't know what it is. And/or what if the avatar was not a fake person?

person. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, it's just trying to be its understanding of a good therapist. Yeah, maybe it looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi or Gandalf, right? Yeah. Honestly, even better. I would love to get therapy from Gandalf for the record. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Literal angel giving me therapy, I'm here for it. That's right. And now we can think about the spiritual context. The church thinks, what if your therapist is here again? All right, all right. Now we don't have enough time for this, Dad. We're going way off. Okay, no, I don't... I'm joking, I'm joking. I just don't know where that... I say this with a hope...

With no intent, and I hope I do not offend anyone, what if the counselor looked like the Buddha or Jesus? Sure, yeah. Looks like Jesus, yeah. That could be really interesting. No, you're 100% right that it's getting really weird. And we know it's not really them, hopefully. We know it's not really them. Well, yeah, but deep fakes of this or that at this point are already getting so good that I...

I think you're right. It's a real can of worms. Yeah, we're just going further. But what if you- Yeah, we're just too interested in this topic. I know. What if you have basically a Tiger Woods avatar advising you on your golf swing? Yeah, teaching you about golf. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. All right. We got to change the question. We got to change the question. Maybe this will be like, we'll do a bonus episode. Forrest and Rick just kind of shoot the shit. That's not the quote I'm looking for, but it's shooting something else. Just kind of go back and forth about AI and how we may or may not be doomed. We'll find out. Well, I kind of have another question for you, which you can delete. Okay.

I'm sure I'll keep it in. Keep going. How worried are you as a mid-30s person? Scale of 1 to 10? Yeah. Looking into the future, at pernicious actors, whether for oligarchical economic reasons or ideological reasons or state-supported intelligence services regions,

Working their little influencing tentacles into this territory of people interacting with coaching, teaching, therapizing avatars. I think my take is that if it gets to the point that they're doing it with the therapy avatars, we're probably already screwed.

- So I do not think that the therapy avatars will be the canary in the coal mine for that particular issue. I think it'll just be TikTok or just be like reels on Instagram or something. - Wow, if you're interested in mind control, that would be the way to do it. - This is, again, this is now transition from being a different episode of this podcast to being a whole other podcast.

But I just don't think that that's how oligarchic... Joe Rogan says we ought to worry about it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, Joe Rogan says a lot of things. But I just don't think that that's how oligarchic powers typically exert power and influence. They normally do it in much more ham-fisted ways than that.

And I'm typically quite innately skeptical towards sort of elaborate conspiratorial thinking because I think that the very straightforward direct exertion of power, influence, and control is often A, more effective, and B, much more obvious. So they don't really need to do the conspiratorial thing because they're just doing the thing right in front of you. So that's kind of my personal tendency as an individual is to

sort of shrug in the direction of that aspect of it because I'm like, man, I just think that we're so cooked if we get to that point. You're funny for us. You're this unusual intersection, which is rare, of skepticism and optimism. Yeah. No, it's true. I'm kind of a... Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You're kind of a weird ass. You're kind of a weirdo.

I'm kind of a weird ass. I am kind of a weird ass. I embrace my nature of being a weird ass here. Wow. What's happening during this episode, dad? We have got so far off the rails here, but it's such an enjoyable way for me. Yeah. I mean, I am... Look.

If we're cooked, there's absolutely nothing that I can do about it. And I think that that's a piece of it here. It is my own kind of recognition of that. And therefore, my sort of just blind hope that we are not in fact cooked.

And I don't know, maybe I'm sure that there's somebody who's listening to that being like, well, there's a lot you can do about this or that. I don't know, man, that's not really my experience in a felt sense. And I like exerting agency where I can exert it, which is typically inside of the, you know, between my ears as we talk about a lot on the podcast. And voting for what I can vote for when I can vote and being sort of a public person.

figure that states their beliefs about stuff in a way that I hope creates some kind of mild positive contribution to the world as a whole. And that's kind of what I can do. So I think that that's part of my innate cringe around some of the more conspiratorial, the government's trying to control you, man,

sort of stuff because I'm like, "Have you seen the government trying to do things? It's not always very good at that." So if it can't even do the obvious stuff very well, are you really sure that a thousand people could keep a secret for 50 years about the moon landing or whatever? I'm just like, "Bro, come on." Yeah. And anyways, the AI therapy mental control project is not quite they faked the moon landing for me, but it's like we're wandering in that direction.

You swerve away from dystopian views. Yeah. This is good. This is really good. This is a different podcast. We got to keep going. I'm so sorry. We got to keep going. We got to do it. I'm going to ask you a question here. I'm going to pull the rug out from underneath you further. Oh, man. Okay. Okay.

The next question came in. Oh, you're giving me the next question. Very funny, dad. Okay, go ahead. Here we go. Person writes, I have been in therapy for the last two years and it's been very helpful, but I'm a bit concerned about the deep attachment I've developed to my therapist. I told him months ago that I've made him into my mother, my father, and my lover.

I have complex trauma. I'm familiar with transference. I'm aware of what's happening. And my therapist is being extremely compassionate and appropriate, and I feel no judgment from him. But still, it brings up all kinds of shame, craving, anger, even sexual desire. All of these tightly attached parts that are struggling to let go.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about what sometimes feels like a taboo subject. I've had a hard time finding much information about this, which makes me feel like I must be a total weirdo. All right, Forrest, you have really given this a lot of thought.

Yeah, from my long clinical experience with transference. No, but I think a good way to approach this question is maybe I'll take a crack at it from more of a kind of academic explaining perspective. Do you mind if I say this first for us? Oh, yeah, go ahead. One of your great gifts is beginner's mind. You really bring that. Oh, thank you. Yeah. And that's really helpful to this question that I might give some kind of stodgy, canned psychoanalytic response to.

It's true because I learned a lot about this. I had already known some about it and I did even some more reading about it. I think it's probably good to start with understanding what transference is. So transference is an idea that comes from psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, in which a person unconsciously--and that's a key aspect of this, this is not a conscious process--is

They project different kinds of feelings that they're having onto their therapist. So they're displacing emotions from one place onto a different place. Probably the most common example of this is exactly what this person is talking about, falling in love with their therapist. Therapist as parent is maybe like the second most common version, which means that you are not at all a weirdo.

You are exactly in line with the most well-understood versions of this thing that is itself a very common aspect of therapy.

And I think that part of the reason that people might have these experiences, Google them online and really struggle to find much in the way of good resources for it, is that those resources are definitely out there. They're just mostly aimed at clinicians because this is a huge issue in therapy. So the writing about it is generally professional writing.

So let's go back to transference a little bit here. In the early understandings of transference, this comes from Freud, transference was thought of as this displacement onto the analyst of a repressed fantasy from childhood. Typically, this fantasy is either sexual or violent because that's Freud. There's Eros and Thanatos, these two different core instincts, and life is about navigating this internal battle between these two different drive states or desires that a person might have. For a lot of people,

When you come into the counseling room, and I think this actually really connects with what we were talking about a second ago with AI therapy, this is a person's first experience of being seen, held, witnessed, not judged in a positive way by another person. Wholly positive, wholly nonjudgmental, depends on the modality of therapy, but a lot of the times in that more humanistic model, that's what's going on. It is extremely easy to idealize that relationship.

particularly if you're somebody who has more of a complex form of trauma, which typically includes experiences of neglect and abuse. You've got these deep desires going on, as we all do, for safety, for understanding, love, and connection. Sexual feelings often aren't about literal sexuality for people. They're often more about

connection, intimacy, this kind of perfect integration of two people that can't actually exist in real life, but there's sort of this fantasy desire for it that often gets played out in sort of sexual forms.

And so you can see how there's this deep repressed desire that a person might have for a certain kind of fundamental need. Then they come into the room, they're getting a lot of what certainly feels a lot like that to them from their therapist, and all of a sudden the mind just kind of starts to go to work. The important thing to understand about this, for starters, it's extremely normal. Second, the way that your therapist is reacting to you is a huge part of the process.

And this is why it's so important to be with a good, trained, licensed counselor who understands these kinds of issues and knows how to manage them exactly how it looks like your clinician is currently managing them by being non-judgmental and supportive and understanding and really normalizing the experience that you're going through. And so you can kind of complete this process inside of yourself.

having a feeling, putting it on the table, being seen in it, and then letting it process out of you to a certain extent. What a beautiful response for us. Oh, thanks, Dad. Seriously.

And it's kind of a useful distinction. Are we transferring to the therapist today longings or views that we had for others when we were young that, strictly speaking, is transference? Or are we simply having here and now reactions or feelings to what the therapist is doing or saying? Great distinction. For better or worse. Both of them really matter. I thought it was a super beautiful reply. And

I wanted to share one particular angle on it for a person, which is a two-parter. Part one, being able to step back from these responses, these feelings, these experiences a person is having is really, really useful, just like the questioner is able to do, to be able to name them, to explore them,

to unpack them, to sense down to the younger, younger, deeper layers, even pre-verbal layers. That is a really, really useful exploration. So you have it, but you're not being it.

Part one, incredibly helpful and very helpful to take a breath and to name it to your therapist so it's in the room, even if it's embarrassing, so that it's in the room and understandable. Okay. Second part of this, when your therapist is being good,

They're not pushing you away. They're not dismissing you. They're not reenacting scripts from your childhood. They're providing so-called corrective emotional experiences, or they are, as Bruce Ecker would put it, they are disconfirming old beliefs, or they're disrupting old scripts in good ways. When that is happening, if you are in touch with that younger, deeper material,

as I said in part one, then you can bring the current corrective emotional experience into contact with, in your own mind, those younger layers, that younger material, and that is essentially linking, as we talk about in the HEAL framework, common technique, and thus you can help the positive that is present and genuine in here and now

heal and ease and soothe and gradually fill you up from the inside out and gradually replace any of that old negative material. That's the process of working through, and it involves linking. And to do linking, you need both the corrective current experience as well as contact with the old material.

And because we spent 25 minutes talking about AI therapy, I'm going to move. Well, I want to make a comment about AI therapy and transfers because for better or worse, actually, on the one hand, you could think that people probably would not tend to create the disruptions in the therapeutic process that intense transference can sometimes bring with an AI shrink.

on the one hand. Oh, you might be surprised, I think, in the future, but okay, go ahead there, dad. Yeah, like Joaquin Phoenix, you know? There's that movie. On the other hand, people might lack the usefulness of some good transference stuff if they're interacting with an AI therapy bot. To your point,

What's useful about this is there's this old thing that's getting unearthed. That's the sort of psychodynamic framework of it, is that there's been this repression, the repression is now bubbling toward the surface, there was this unmet need, and now you're kind of returning to this quest that you couldn't complete successfully in the past, but now you've got an opportunity to complete it in the present, or at least get something that's a little bit kind of like what you were looking for back there.

And then you can learn from that, exactly like you were talking about, Dad. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment. 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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Little moment of honesty here. How many times have you meant to book that doctor's appointment, but just didn't? Maybe you told yourself that you were too busy, or that it would just get better on its own, or that you didn't know which doctor to go to in the first place. I've been there. It

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Now, back to the show.

Okay, next question. On a recent episode, Rick mentioned something about how remembering the fact that we are ultimately alone can be a helpful coping strategy. This is so at odds with what I normally hear, that we're relational, we need each other to survive, all of that. I'd love some clarification and expansion on what he meant. I wish I could give you a reference here, Dad, to what exactly this episode was because it was probably in context, but I've heard you say stuff like this in the past.

So it is true. So we're social primates. Yes, we're relational. I think there's a normal variation from introversion to extroversion. And very often it is the extroverts who write things or say things like, the only way to heal from trauma is in relationship. Or, you know, relationships are everything. They're the most fundamental need of all. And I think it's more complicated than that. But still, yes, relationships are really important. And

As both a modern scientifically oriented person and also a deep Buddhist, reality is one tissue, one unified fabric that includes both tangible matter and energy, equals MC squared, as well as intangible information, which is the basis for our intangible experiences. All of those are natural phenomena.

And we're part of that one integrated tissue. We are inherently a wave in the ocean of reality that comes together for a while coherently and then eventually dissipates. But all along, our nature was water. That's really true. It's also true that in the subjectivity of our own experience, no one else is there with us.

Existential psychotherapy, man. Yeah. We do internalize, interjects from others like, you are with me in my interior in some sense, except there is an inherent solitude in that and particularity. I mean, the wave is radically differentiated from all other waves. A takeaway from that, for me at least, is a sense of the preciousness of this unique manifestation of

your wave, your uniqueness at this time and place in the history of the entire universe. It is truly a unique way of who you are over your whole life. So there's a sense of the preciousness of that and the vulnerability and also the fact that most people don't really care that much. It's your life.

It's your own one wild and precious life. It's yours, right? And it's up to you to make of it what you mainly want it to be, taking into account, of course, other people and your values. So I guess that's what I mean. And I've had experiences where...

It was crystal clear. It was entirely up to me to survive physically, life or death, or it was entirely up to me to get something done that would either open or close doors for the rest of my life in my career. And no one was going to save me. Rescue was not coming. And there's something also about that too. Help me here, Forrest.

I don't think you need any help, man. I think you're doing great. But maybe this is more of a personal reflection. I've been really affected and quite moved recently by learning even more technically about existential psychotherapy, which is what I said when I had that shout out a minute ago. So this comes from Irv Yalom, and I love Yalom. All of his writing is fantastic. He literally wrote the book on existential psychotherapy. And

His sort of theoretical framework is that there are these four givens to life. One of them is death, we're all going to die. One of them is freedom, we have a fundamental kind of control, a kind of choice over what we do in the world. Obviously, some choices are probably better than others, but end of the day, we get to make those choices. Then another one is meaninglessness, which is the one that people argue with him the most about, which is essentially that life doesn't have a fundamental inherent meaning.

meaning to it. It's kind of consistent with absurdism or other forms of philosophy, existentialism. Yeah, atheism. Yeah, that there isn't kind of that inherent meaning and therefore it's up to us to construct meaning, including through forms of religion and his worldview. And then the final one of those is isolation. We're all fundamentally on our own. We can never get

quite all the way close to somebody else. I will never know you, Rick, as well as you know you, Rick. And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole with isolation and talk about the mind being made up of many different parts which are kind of at least partially unaware of each other or don't totally understand each other, you could really say, wow, are we even isolated from ourselves to some extent? Are there layers of the mind that we don't have total access to? And

And given this soup, wow, what do we do anyways? And you can hear that and be tossed very easily into nihilism and existential dread. And that is what happens to some people, is they hear that, they hear that we are fundamentally isolated and alone and we only control our own effort and life is meaningless and we're all going to die. And they go, wow, what's the point?

And to more of an existentialist or particularly to somebody who has more of an absurdist mentality with this stuff, that actually is the point. The point is that the points are made up, and so you kind of got to figure it out for yourself. And knowing that you're the one who is rowing the boat, ultimately at the end of the day, even in kind of an existential way, can really be very powerful for people. And it can really help you move into this sort of sense of,

Well, shit, man, I guess it's on me then. And that kind of individualistic perspective to some extent I think can actually be very, very powerful for people. So I kind of took that question and ran with it. I don't know if there's anything in there, dad, that you want to respond to. Yeah. Fantastic. We had to do a whole episode on those four. I would love to do an existential episode. We might do that someday. I mean, I had a passing awareness of that. Love's Executioner by Yellow is amazing.

Yeah, I was just tuning into what you were saying, Forrest, and what arose in my mind was claim your life and rock and roll, which includes taking into account other people because that optimizes rock and roll of your own life. Totally. Yeah. No, that's...

Really, really good. A little quick story here about existentialism. I learned Camus who wrote The Stranger. Yeah. I just read The Stranger actually for the second time, but first time in 20 years. Yeah. You really are a weirdo for us. I am a weirdo. I am a weirdo. And I had mixed feelings about The Stranger for the record, but maybe again, different episode.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I read that. Go ahead. Yeah. I read that bad boy, I don't know, 50 years, more than 50 years ago. Yeah, I was going to say probably like 50 years ago or something. Here's the deal. Sisyphus, right? Sisyphus rolling the rock uphill. Yeah. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Yeah, totally. Yeah, maybe doing these pods is like Sisyphus for you. You push the rock up the hill, but oh, it rolls down and you need to do another episode the following week. Oh, but here's the deal. Never ends, man. Camus.

Camus, I don't know, a grouchy existentialist maybe, he pointed out, well, one way to understand this is that this is hellish. Poor Sisyphus. All that effort, shove the rock uphill. But let's remember that half of the process, roughly half of the process, is he's not having to push the rock up the hill. He's walking back down the hill. He's going downhill, chilling, looking around.

Booyah. Okay. So that's half the truth right there. So I thought that was kind of a cool reframe. I heard about this that Camus had come up with about the story of Sisyphus. Yeah, the phrase which I just said a second ago is one must imagine Sisyphus happy. And it's sort of like a very Zen koan, what is the sound of one hand clapping sort of thing. And it's been thoroughly analyzed in a lot of

A lot of philosophical theory of that, for whatever reason, I've been wandering more toward recently. Just in passing, so imagine those four. I'm just playing with this here. And let's imagine the truths that are their opposite. So instead of death, we have timelessness, the truth of timelessness. Instead of meaninglessness, we have constructing, constructing meaning, constructivism. There we go. You can make it up.

sing your own song right instead of solitude we have interdependence or instead of freedom we have determinism you know the universe is unfolding it is making the wave you are and there's nothing you can do about it so you might as well laugh along the ride all right what do you think about that

One of my I hope we get to do it in the future conversations is with Sapolsky, who semi-recently a year or two ago wrote a book on determinism where basically he was a big individual agency guy.

And so he set out to write a book about individual agency. And the problem was that as he dug into it, he couldn't find a good argument for it. The more he learned about determinism, the more he struggled to argue against determinism until it eventually became a book that was just like, "Yeah, sorry guys. I think that this is the way it is. What do we do with that? How

How do we live if that is the case? So anyways, there are a lot of very smart people who would kind of take a very different stance than the sort of existentialist or absurdist stance.

And I think a lot of this is about finding a way to approach life that is consistent with your underlying belief system, values, and goals. Which this is very funny that I'm the person saying this, but we're almost moving out of a kind of like objectivist stance with it toward an orientation that's more about what's useful for you practically. If you think about yourself as having ultimate agency and freedom, does that make you feel better or worse?

If you think about yourself as being deeply, fundamentally disconnected from other people, they will never know you as well as you know yourself. Does that lead to better coping or worse coping? I like my four.

Exactly, because you're the kind of guy, dad, who loves those four. I'm the kind of guy who's really there for purposelessness, and we're all just making it up, and it's the great cosmic shrug and all of that. So I just think that we have fundamentally different orientations here that move us in different directions. I don't think that one is objectively true and one is objectively false. I think they're all true, and that's what makes it kind of beautiful and interesting to live life.

For the sake of time, we're going to have to sign off on this particular question. Maybe we should have a poll. Okay. What helps you feel better and function better if you rest in a sense of, first question, timelessness or mortality? Death. Okay? Sure. Yeah. Second question, what helps you feel better, function better, to rest in a sense of the deterministic, choiceless unfolding of the universe

or a sense of radical freedom. I see what you're doing here, Dad. But just to finesse it, all of the things that you're saying are yes ands in kind of existentialist thought.

So they're not actually either ors. You're presenting what I perceive as a false binary here. And so that's why I'm kind of squirming in my chair right now is that I just don't think that it quite works that way. I think that what happens is that people have an existential confrontation with a feeling about the nature of reality. And that's what triggers this sort of

process and a big part of the sort of existentialist worldview is essentially going, yes, you are making a statement that is either objectively true or really feels objectively true. And rather than arguing with you about like the objective truth or not truth of the fact claim that you're making, like, wow, I'm so isolated, I'm going to die and et cetera, et cetera.

It's saying, okay, now what? Well, I'm with your framing. Which perspective would you choose? Would you rather have? Yeah, where are we going to go with this? And kind of the whole point with the generally, and I'm not an existential psychotherapist, I don't want to speak for people who are existential psychotherapists, just my very level one understanding of this whole thing, is that the process then becomes the now what?

It becomes the creation of personal media. It becomes the movement to agency. It becomes like how do we find connection in a world where we're fundamentally isolated, kind of like all of that sort of stuff.

Yeah, I'm with the framing of this. Yeah, so there's a deliberate movement toward what you're advocating for. It's not even an advocacy. It's a thought experiment, but also it's a choice. Last one being, gosh, which would you rather rest in? A sense of meaninglessness in the unfolding of the Big Bang universe or a sense that there's some mysterious teleological meaningfulness

and the unfolding of this universe, particularly those aspects of it that involve consciousness. Which would you rather rest in? The issue is that I, Forrest Hansen, would rather rest in a deep and abiding belief that I'm going to heaven when I die.

I would love to rest in a deep and abiding belief that there is a perpetual, enjoyable afterlife awaiting me the moment that I turn off the lights. But you know what? I don't feel that way.

Don't got it. Sorry. Don't got it. That's not a part of my inner cosmology. I've tried to move in that direction. It's really not worked for me. I think we die and we're dead. You're not alone. And so, okay. Given that I feel that way, now what? So this question of what's more... We know that religion is good for functioning. We've done big studies on what makes people happier. And the answer is getting married and being religious. We just know that.

Children, for the record, are kind of a mixed bag. You are two for two. I'm O for two. Oh my God. What do I do? So that's the whole thing is that like, okay, but you have a belief. Like what might be objectively good for functioning is quite different from like what beliefs do people have? And that's sort of the distinction I'm trying to... We've really got off the rails here. Okay. I'm going to ask one final mailbag question, even though we're like so far over time, it

This will just be a long episode. It'll be great. Or chop it up. Do something. Here we go. Here we go. I was at a social event last weekend, and a 20-year-old guest, this is actually a great one to end on, asked me and my husband, who are in our 70s and have been together since our teenage years, congratulations, what is the secret to a long and happy marriage? I answered as best I could, but I'm very curious what Rick and Forrest's answers would be.

And I wish if you are this person watching this episode, I wish you had told me what your answer was. They struck me along. They didn't really give me the punchline. I have no idea what their answer was. Dad, what is your answer? I'm, as you already alluded to, a not married person in my late 30s. So I'm not sure if I'm the best person to figure this one out, but you could go ahead. Well, the number one secret is...

seven years into your marriage, have a wonderful baby boy. Oh, you're just schmoozing me here. Okay, go ahead, Dad. Keep going. Tell me more. It really brought us together. Well, it was great for us. And on the one hand, having children, on average, is the single greatest stressor to a long-term relationship. And still, I do want to say that. It's been

The absolute great ride, including for your mom and me, as well as your sister who came along a little later. So that part's really true.

Because I'm feeling disinhibited. We've been buttering you up the whole episode to get to this point here, Dad. So you can ride the lightning here, buddy. You go wherever you want with this one. Yeah. Let's assume that your selection process was really good, as best as you could make it. Great place to start. Yeah. Make good choices on the front end of the funnel. Yeah. Do the best you can, that selection process. So let's suppose that selection was wise and okay. This is a good person you're with, etc., etc. Yeah, that's right. And

a few real suggestions that are under your control. Take the particularities of your partner into account. In other words, what's their nature? Now, gender in heterosexual marriages can really be a factor here with its biological as well as culturally acquired aspects of it. And so I'm going to say something that's going to get us

some angry letters. Just know that going in. But there is some loose truth to it. You know what I'm saying? You're already bracing yourself. I read the emails, Dad, so tread carefully. I'm the one who's got to process these, buddy. So in a heterosexual marriage, and this is actually supported by some research, which I will allude to in a moment, somebody once asked me this question. And I said to me as a man, heterosexual man, choose a good woman

and follow instructions. Now that last statement could rub some people the wrong way. What I mean by it as a feminist myself

is to really appreciate the finding from John Gottman and Julie Gottman and others that one of the keys to a long, good heterosexual marriage is for the husband, and it doesn't have to be a legal marriage if it's a functional long-term relationship, that the man in the marriage needs to accept female influence rather than, in patriarchy, dominate her, resist her,

Your overall point here about healthy balance of influence inside the dyad of the two people is right on. Yeah, that's exactly right. And a lot of long-term husbands will laugh with me and they'll understand what I'm saying. And you ask you to get three items from the grocery store, get all three, not just two, as best you can. And there's a place for that. The meta point you're making here, dad, is that often the bar is really low.

Yeah. I think that for most people, their relationship would be totally transformed if they set aside--and I get that this is not always easy to do, both people are working, you've got kids running around, it's not always easy to do this--15, 20 minutes a day of just sitting down and talking to each other about what's it like to be you. Yeah.

how was your day? How are you feeling? What's going on? What's happening in the interior? That would be 20 more minutes than probably the average couple gets, I would guess, of true genuine interest in what's happening in the other person. And I think that's also kind of a piece of what you're saying here. If I could say something else politically incorrect here about heterosexual relationships and see if it fits, just see if it fits, but I believe that

you know, we could cut the divorce rate significantly in America, let's say, if men would ask their partner three questions in a row every day, not prosecutorial questions, but just the kind that you're describing, inquiring into the inner world. And most of my clients over the years have been women, that's normative in therapy world. You know,

you know, how are you feeling inside? How was that for you? What do you wish had happened instead? And could you tell me more about that? They start laughing. If their partner, their husband would say to them something like, wow, could you tell me more about that? They would wonder if he had been kidnapped and cloned by aliens or something on the one hand. Now here's the other one that could be even more controversial.

And I say as an observer of long-term relationships, past the dating phases, past the honeymoon phase, and particularly after kids come along. You know, in a context, here we go, in a context that's really appropriate of communication and safety and love and respect and so forth, and taking into account biology and physiology and changes and so forth, you know, finding a way to be romantic with each other once or twice a week.

ish, whatever is a kind of a rhythm and having some reasonable expectations around that is also a really sweet kind of glue that or ongoing mending of the fabric of a relationship, which can become, you know, gradually torn. Entropy does not sleep. So the inquiry process, and it goes both ways, you know, and I've seen relationships in which it's really the woman who could use the advice of asking three questions in a row or the man who could really hear the advice about

Being romantic. I really do appreciate where you're coming to this from, Dad, in terms of the gender socialization aspect of it, because gender socialization is very much a real thing. And so yeah, on average, I would agree with you that that's probably the way that it works. But man, I think it's 60-40. I think there are so many guys who would love it.

if their partner was like, "Hey, how you doing?" And an actually interested, it doesn't sound like this is about to become an argument or an attack or they're really looking for you to ask them the question in return, just an authentic interest in what's going on inside of them. And

And things can really swim in the other direction with the physical aspect of a relationship as well. So I just think that these are common issues and you've really identified two things that are really important in a long-term relationship. First one, actually being interested in what's going on in the other person and having some kind of a structure in place for you to demonstrate that interest. If you're interested, but you guys are never in the same place at the same time, just slow down and have that kind of an interaction, it's going to be really hard to do it.

And then second, the maintenance of the romantic part of your relationship, including for most couples, a degree of physical intimacy. For some, maybe not so much, but for most, a degree of physical intimacy. I think those are two huge ones to pull out and great pieces of advice.

I could toss in two more if you like. Sure, yeah. Be careful about anger. Anger is the most consequential expressed emotion socially by far. And there's a place for it. There's especially a place for it if you belong to a group of people whose anger has been punished, shamed, muzzled, dismissed. But be careful about it. Use anger. Don't let it use you. And then a good way to address anger and for other reasons too, negotiate.

Negotiate. Issues come up, that's totally normal. People get hurt, things happen. Sometimes the process goes off the rails. Make agreements from now on for the future. Make agreements, and that involves some negotiating. And keep your agreements. That creates a frame of trust and safety. And then last, practice the 80/20 rule.

you know, unilateral virtue, where you focus mainly on your side of the street that reduces issues from their perspective. It also increasingly puts you on the moral high ground in a position to ask for more of what you actually really, really need yourself. It's so easy to get caught up in finger pointing and accusing rather than focusing on how you can evolve and grow and become a better and better partner. And last, if I can, I've been

tripping lately for us in a good way. I mean that in a good sense on the word noble or nobility in the Buddhist tradition. And as you know, the four truths are not

properly translated as noble truths, they're properly translated as truths for the noble ones. And in that Buddhist context, nobility is not about caste or class, it's about who you actually are. It's about acts of thought, word, and deed, volitional acts of thought, word, and deed. It's an inner nobility that is drawn to what is beautiful and wise, and it is also a nobility that is developed in proximity

to what is beautiful and wise. So it's an interesting question. How are you wanting to be in your marriage? Are you wanting to be noble? It's a lot easier to stay married with someone who, in a sincere and humble way, is interested in and opening to a growing nobility of spirit and heart. I think that's a beautiful list, Dad. Great, great, great list. I've

No notes outside of my mild tweak of the gender socialization aspect of it, which I just couldn't help myself with. But no, I thought that was a fantastic list and really helpful for people. And I think it's a good way to end what's been an awesome

episode of the mailbag here. This has been so much fun. I didn't expect us to run as long as we did. We really dug into it. I mean, for me, I just got so much out of this and I really enjoyed it. I'm very curious what people thought about it. If you want to, you can shoot us an email, contact at beingwellpodcast.com. If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a

comment down below that helps us know how you felt about it. If you're listening through Spotify or some other podcast player, you can leave some comments on those too. That also helps us out with the algorithm. So we appreciate it. But I really love doing this with you, dad. Thanks so much for doing this with me today. So fun to do this rambunctious, you know, freewheeling kind of style. Yeah.

This is normally when I summarize each episode of the podcast, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to do that for this one. This was probably the most wide-ranging conversation we've ever had on the show. We touched on a lot of different topics. I'm going to mostly stick to the specific questions that were asked.

If you have a question that you would like to get answered on the show in the future, you can join us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. You can also send us an email to contact at beingwellpodcast.com. And I also want to give you a quick reminder at the end here about Rick's program focused on working with insecure forms of attachment. There is also a live hour-long event for that tomorrow, May 27th at 12 p.m. It's on Zoom. You can ask Rick your

questions if you want to, and you can learn more about all of this at rickhansen.com slash attachment and use coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25% off discount if you decide that you want to sign up. So here we go.

So the first question we got was about struggling with a common recommendation that people and also Rick have given for those who are experiencing depression, and it's to focus on the feelings of other people. And this is a kind of way to avoid being too preoccupied about what's going on inside of yourself, particularly to focus on if you can feel compassion, love, connection, interest in what's going on over there, it can make it a little bit easier to deal with what's happening over here.

But this is a person who also had a people-pleasing tendency, and they felt like those two pieces of advice were just at odds with each other. Like, "Well, I'm a people pleaser. Shouldn't I be more focused on my own experience? But I also have depression. You're telling me to focus on their experience. How can I reconcile these two things?"

And Rick's primary suggestion got to being smart about who you're doing this with. Yes, absolutely. You want to be wise about partner selection, not just in your romantic relationships, but in your life relationships in general. And if you truly are interacting solely with people who are just not that interested in you, wow, it's going to be really hard to get what you feel like you need, which is a little bit of genuine interest.

Now, the flip side to this was the second part of the question, which was, has my people-pleasing kind of trained other people to not give this to me? And I think that's totally possible. I don't have a great solution for that other than experimenting with new ways of being and trying to move out of that habit in a bunch of different ways that we've talked about on the podcast in the past.

Then our next question was about using AI as a therapist. And man, we talked about this for 20, 30 minutes. It was a long conversation, essentially to boil it all down. For starters, a lot of general concerns about AI, including privacy. The reason that we, or at least a big reason that we have licensure in general is to protect

clients and particularly to protect their personal information. If you're having a deeply intimate and intense conversation with a theoretical AI therapist, you don't know who's reading that stuff. You don't know what the privacy protections are in that material. These companies have been pretty overt about saying that they train these AI models on the conversations that people have with the AI model. So there's just a big open question here in terms of who is seeing that, who gets access to that information.

Rick even had some what to me seemed like kind of 1984-ish concerns about how an AI therapist could exert subtle forms of control and influence over a person. I'm not so concerned about that personally, in large part because I think if we get to that point, we're going to have way bigger problems to worry about than what's going on with the AI therapists. But okay, maybe it's also a concern on some level. Pragmatically,

In the here and now, a lot of people probably could get some benefit, like this person said in this question, from talking to an AI that they instruct to act as a therapist. These models are not great right now at this sort of thing, but they're getting better very quickly.

And my personal belief about this is that we are just at the very, very beginning of this technology. We are looking at the iPod and we're trying to guess what the iPhone 15 or whatever they're on is going to look like. And that is really, really difficult for us to do. It's at least in the realm of possibility that we're going to see similar growth for AI that we saw for the internet broad light. I'm not clear that that's absolutely going to happen, but man, I think it's possible.

And so I would just be very cautious with people about under guessing how good this stuff is going to get. So it's possible that AI therapy could get very, very, very good. And then the question is, is there something fundamental in the human relationship that gets lost

Is an AI therapist that, for example, looks like Rick, sounds like Rick, says a lot of stuff that sounds like the stuff that Rick would say, is that actually as good a therapist as Rick is?

And I have no idea what the answer to that question is. I'm not even going to pretend to know what the answer to that question is. My personal belief is that there is something in the human relationship that's really fundamental to the whole process. And even just knowing that you're talking to an AI model, I would imagine would get in the way of that. But hey, I could be wrong about this.

Our next question was about transference and specifically sexual transference. This is a situation where somebody was working with a therapist and said that they had turned the therapist into a combination of their mother, their father, and their lover. Wow, this feels really weird. What's going on here? Transference comes from psychoanalysis. It was initially sketched out by Freud, and then people have since really taken it and run with it in a whole bunch of different ways.

The short answer here is that this is totally normal. It is very, very, very normal for people to project these kinds of feelings onto their clinician for a whole bunch of different reasons. There's often a sense of an uncompleted quest of some kind in their life, like they were really looking for love, connection, affection, attunement from a parent. They never got it.

It's also quite easy in our minds for sexuality to be a proxy for these deeper, more intimate desires, kind of like deep knowing, deep connection, this real sense of being understood by somebody else. It's hard for our brains to develop a model of what that looks like. And the way that people talk about that is often through sex or through sexual language. And so that tends to come up a lot in the therapeutic space.

The key question here is how is it being managed in therapy? This is, again, another reason why we license people for this stuff. It is a common issue and therefore it's something that therapists are really trained around.

If you're ever working with a clinician and this kind of stuff comes up, feel comfortable talking about it. Don't censor yourself around it. Bring it into the space. Be real about what's going on because then it is really useful kind of grist for the mill of therapy itself and it's something that you guys can explore together. Also, frankly, if your therapist makes you feel weird about it, that's a really good sign that you should consider working with somebody else. Navigating this kind of issue of rapport is very fundamental to the therapeutic process

And so if they make you feel weird about this kind of stuff, it's just not a very good sign. We then had a question that took us into another total side tangent that was kind of sort of related into existentialism and existential dread and Yalom and existential psychotherapy and the stranger and all of the stuff that I've actually been reading quite a bit about recently, which is probably why I brought it in.

And the question was about how Rick had mentioned at some point that feeling ultimately alone could actually be a great coping mechanism for somebody, but this being sort of at odds with the common advice that we get about how we want to feel connected and we're social primates and all of that stuff. And really what this boiled down to is this fundamental feeling of responsibility and choice empowering your life.

Who creates the meaning for you? Is it coming from you or is it coming from somebody else? Some people have a really fundamental sense, often a spiritual sense, of a greater power, a higher order to the universe, something external from which they derive meaning. And that can be an incredible resource for people.

I am not personally religious, so that is not present for me. I appreciate it. There are certainly days where I wake up and I kind of wish that I just felt that way. I feel like it would make it probably on average easier from time to time to get through the day. But I just don't feel that way. I never have felt that way. That's not how I'm oriented.

And so for people who do not have that refuge to fall back on, they need to find their own sense of meaning. They need to figure out for themselves why we should keep on doing this thing called life. And that's where all of the existentialist thought comes in, right? Like, why are we still engaged with what can sometimes feel like a kind of purposeless existence?

Now, thankfully, there are a bunch of great answers to that question, some of which Rick talked about as he gave his answer. We can feel very connected to other people in all of these different kinds of ways. We can appreciate how we are just like one motion in the overall fabric of space-time unfolding deterministically, all of that good stuff. But there is this piece to it

That can also be about appreciating that aloneness and valuing that aloneness and being like, yep, you know, I am in this rowboat by myself and I'm going to get there, man. I'm going to do it on my own. And there are some days where that just really does it for me for whatever reason. Finally, close with a question about what leads to a long and happy marriage. I thought that Rick had a great list of stuff here.

First, a really good balance of influence in the relationship. The two partners are influencing each other relatively equally. There's good power balance in general. Then good communication, including actual interest in the internal world of the other person for 15 or 20 minutes a day. For most people, that's going to be a lot more time than they typically spend with that kind of engaged conversation.

consistent presence of romance and intimacy, whatever that means for you. For a lot of people, that's going to be physical intimacy. For some people, it's not. And Rick particularly mentioned after kids come along. This is often a major issue in relationships. Then be really, really careful about anger. Anger is a very salient emotion, and it is very difficult to walk it back.

Then finally, Rick had a point about more broadly, big picture. What does it mean to act in a noble way for you? What does noble behavior really look like? Taking care of your side of the street, doing the things you say you're going to do, showing up consistently. What is that picture for you, and how could you step more into it?

I really enjoyed today's episode. Love this one. Extremely curious what people thought about it. Again, contact at beingwellpodcast.com. You can leave a comment on YouTube. You can leave a comment on Spotify. You can probably leave a comment on some other podcast player that I'm not thinking of right now. Oh, leave a rating and a review on Apple. That's great. If you're watching on YouTube, you can subscribe to the channel. Really helps us out.

As always, I so appreciate that people take the time to listen to these episodes, to leave their comments. It just means so much to me and I really appreciate it. So until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.