How to Make Great Relationships with Dr. Rick Hanson

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Where we repeatedly dwell for better or worse, becomes what
dwells within us. Because neurons that fire together, we are together,
especially negatively, because the brain is negatively biased. As you know,
it's like velcro for bad experiences, but teplon for good ones.

(00:24):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,

(00:44):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,

(01:04):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is Dr Rick Hansen, a
guest who's been on numerous times. He's a senior fellow

(01:27):
at u C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and an
expert on positive neural plasticity. Rick's work has been featured
on CBS, NPR, BBC, and all the other major platforms,
and he is a New York Times best selling author.
His six books have been published in thirty languages. Today,
Eric and Rick discuss his new book, Making Great Relationships,
Simple Practices for Solving Conflicts, Building Connection, and Fostering Love. Hi, Rick,

(01:52):
Welcome to the show. Eric again, I'm really glad to
be here. We were yacking it up before we started officially,
and oh, it's great out. I want to keep going. Yeah,
we should have captured some of that. However, Yeah, I
don't know how many times you've been on now. You know,
we've had you on with Forest and it's always a pleasure.
And we're going to have a chance today to discuss
your new book called Making Great Relationships, Simple Practices for

(02:15):
Solving Conflicts, Building Connection and Fostering Love. But before we
do that, let's start like we always do with the
Parable and the Parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with
their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which

(02:37):
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandchild stops and they think about it for a second,
look up at their grandparents. They say, well, which one wins?
And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd
like to start off by asking you what does that
parable mean to you in your life and in the
work that you do. Oh, it's it's central for me

(02:58):
as well. And we have the two wolves, and much
of life is about feeding the qualities inside the wolf
of love, of mindfulness, of resilience, of determination, commitment to
social justice, all of those things of the wolf of
positive emotions. Emotionally positive experiences are one of the best

(03:19):
medicines of all for both mind and body authentic ones.
So we want to cultivate one and we want to
increasingly disengage from the other. If we hate it, we
feed it, but we can withdraw food from it and
fuel for it. And for me, there's a resonance of
this that relates to my own background in the Buddhist

(03:39):
contemplative tradition that has to do with where you dwell
becomes increasingly what dwells within you. And also this resonates
for me very much in terms of my background and
neuropsychology and what's called positive neural plasticity, in that it's
really important to rest in what calls your heart, to

(04:00):
rest your mind and what calls your heart for a
breath or longer, to help the mental neural pattern of
the time that underlies that experience, to help that leave
residues that last behind in physical changes in your brain
in terms of altered neural structure and function, because without
that actual physical changing your nervous system, you may have

(04:23):
momentarily fed the wolf, right, but there's no lasting learning,
there's no development of cultivation. The wolf has not gotten
any bigger bigger. The good wolves get bigger when we've
taken the good and we turned positive states into positive
traits by resting in them for a breath or longer.
And I've written a ton about that and Hardwaring Happiness

(04:45):
and other books. As you know, you are right up
my alley. You know, I am right up your alley
with the one you feed. So say that about the
dwelling piece again, what was that quote that you just said. Basically,
if you just think about it, think of it as dwelling.
There's a technical word in the language of early Buddhism
of Brahma, vihara. Of vihara is a dwelling place of

(05:07):
Brahma being a really positive dwelling place. So vihara, where
do we dwell? And I find for me that this
is a very emotionally rich and embodied sense like dwell
It's like a dwelling place. Where do you abide? What's
home for you? We long to come home. It sometimes
said that all sickness at bottom is homesickness. Do you

(05:28):
understand that in different layers of meaning? So where do
we want to dwell? And where we repeatedly dwell for
better or worse becomes what dwells within us because neurons
that fire together wire together, especially negatively, because the brain
is negatively biased. As you know, it's like velcro for

(05:49):
bad experiences, but tephlon for good ones. So it's really
important to rest in beneficial experiences, particularly the ones that
you hope to grow and table eyes inside yourself, so
that you rest in them either because they're already happening.
Usually like right now it feels really good with you, Eric,
it's good. I'm resting in this. It's camaraderie's companionable nows.

(06:12):
You know, we're spiritual friends as well as worldly friends.
It's good, so they're On the other hand, you can
create a beneficial experience deliberately by mobilizing compassion for somebody
or mobilizing gratitude for something or anything else. Okay, once
you're having that experience, don't waste it on your brain.
Slow it down, so that as you dwell in it,

(06:34):
stay with it, not out of attachment to it or
clinging to it, more like a gentle openness to it
and an establishing of yourself in it or protecting of it,
often for a breath or longer. Right, doesn't take a
lot of time to change the brain for the better.
We just need to give it some time initially, especially
with positive experiences, and then do this repetitively, so as

(06:56):
you do well, increasingly in what calls your heart becomes
increasingly what dwells within you in a sense of growing
stable trades that operate in the background, or you can
call upon them quickly as needed. Traits again like the
trade of mindfulness, the trade of compassion, the trade of resilience,

(07:16):
the trade of being determined, the trade of emotional intelligence, right,
becoming more skillful in relationships, the trade of patients, the
trade of fundamentally positive mood, inner peace. Yeah. The more
we dwell on experiences of these things, the more we
dwell on experiences of them as strengths, we grow those
durable strengths within ourselves. Yeah. That idea of just these

(07:40):
brief moments underlies a lot of what I've really focused
on in the Spiritual Habits program, where you know the
core mantra there is little by little, a little becomes
a lot, right, which is these little moments? Right? Yeah.
I think it's a Tanzanian proverb. I didn't make it up,
but kind of what you're saying. Most of us don't
have big chunks of time to devote to spiritual practice.

(08:01):
Our lives are busy, but we can, little by little,
make a lot of progress. And that's what you've talked
so eloquently about for so many years. Well, I love
that proverb. I'm gonna remember it. A little by little,
a little becomes a lot. The thing I see a
lot is a psychologist therapist. And you know, longtime husband,
longtime father, longtime business person as well, is that we

(08:23):
tend to just race on we don't value enough, and
we don't have the humility to stay with key beneficial experiences.
We race onto the next one before internalizing the current one,
which leaves us endlessly hungry for more. And so it's
really important to value key beneficial experiences and because you

(08:46):
value them, internalize them, rest in them. And we also
have a culture that kind of poopoo is the sole idea,
you know, culture that basically says, you know, what doesn't
kill you will make you stronger. You know, you learn
through pain. Actually most pain has no think of it,
and most pain actually tears us down. Stress, anxiety, depressed mood, anger,

(09:07):
chronic anger is terrible for cardiovascular health. Shame, feeling inadequate,
feeling less than others, feeling endlessly driven to impress others,
and you know, win their approval again and again. You know,
whatever their approval was yesterday, you need to rewin it
today to fill that hungry whole in your heart. That's
deeply problematic. And I find so many people when they

(09:30):
first start to slow down to take in the good,
they start to realize that it's hard. Initially it's just
not their habit. It is hard, but it's wonderful you know,
it's good news, just like why not stay with the experience,
but like we want to race on to the next thing. Yeah,
I mean I've been hearing that feed the wolf. Yeah,
I've been hearing that teaching from you for i mean

(09:50):
how many years now, at six eight, right, And it's
still it's not natural to me to dwell and stay
and sav yeah, and let it sink in. And sometimes
what we rest in, what we dwell in, you know,
what we stay with is not technically something you could
actually savor, like, for example, the feeling of healthy remorse

(10:13):
or disenchantment, Like, hey, it's fun to get buzzed, but
you know, it's fun for twenty minutes, and then after
that it's all just contraction and wanting more. And then
the next day feeling you know, foggy, and your pardner
looks at you and goes your breast smells, and there
you are, well realizing that may not be an experience

(10:33):
you savor per se. And yet it's an important to
let it land, not out of beating yourself up, but
by letting the resolution and the disenchantment sink into you.
So the next time you walk a higher road, one
that's kinder to your future self, right, is going to
be paying the price for that pleasurable twenty minutes, and

(10:55):
also to the other people around you. Um, sometimes ideas
are really also used to internalize. So I'm just kind
of building all what you said. They're about savoring against it,
just adding what else people can be aware of, you know,
like the idea that you're not responsible for your partner's alcoholism, right,
or the idea that your contribution to a rocky relationship

(11:17):
with an adult child perhaps was real and worth remorse,
regret and correction, and that contribution that has your name
tag on it, you know, was one of many significant
factors and whatever has turned out that idea that understanding
is also something to really let a land so you

(11:37):
can form conviction around it. Anyway, we feed many wolves
in many ways, and little by little, a little becomes
a lot. Just like you said, yeah, yeah, I love
that idea though, about staying with things a little bit
more purposefully and consciously, both what we would consider positive
things and things that we might consider negative in the

(11:58):
sense that they don't feel good necessarily. But to me,
that is sort of the point of a lot of
the negative emotions, right used correctly, is that there's something
to be learned there if we can you know, not
all the time, not in every case, but in a
lot of them, that there is, but our desire to

(12:20):
not feel them means that we also won't learn from
them exactly. Give you a little example. So last night, however,
regular Wednesday meditation program online. People can check it out.
It's free, no big deal, and it's very open and
inviting Wednesday night. So last night, the first one of
the year, I gave a talk on what matters and

(12:40):
what doesn't because that's really central and in a fact,
we want to help ourselves disengage from what truly doesn't
matter those wolves metaphorically speaking, we want to disengage from
what truly doesn't matter, and we want to rest increasingly
in and feed and cultivate in practice what truly does
matter to us. Okay, So I gave that talk, and

(13:03):
then my wife and I have a little kind of
time together. She goes to bed a little earlier than
I do, so we hang out and we also do
a little brief meditation on the way to bed. It's
like I'm putting her to bed. It's kind of is sweet.
And we were talking and I'll spend the exact detail.
But she made a little passing comment about a situation
that I could just kind of deal with and put

(13:24):
up within effect that wasn't that great for me? And
right there I was at a crossroad. What matters most?
Which wolf am I going to feed? Am I going
to get a little irritated and a little snarky and
push back on this thing that she thought I could
just put up with that would be uncomfortable for me?
Or do I just sort of let it go by

(13:44):
and know that actually I'm not going to do that thing,
but I don't need to make a deal out of
it right now. What matters more now which wolf do
I want to feed? I want to feed a pleasant
way of ending our day together. I don't feel the
need to get into an argument just before bad. You know,
I'm trying to manage my tendency to drop in exasperated input.

(14:10):
No input is one thing, but adding exasperation. Maybe the
input matters, But does the exasperation truly need to matter
to you? Do you want to really feed the wolf
of exasperation? So that was a little moment, and basically
I could just feel myself initially wanting to chase the irritable,
kind of exasperated reply and to feed that wolf and

(14:30):
to make that wolf matter in the moment, and I
just slowed it down to kind of disengage from that
reactive cascade and rest more in a Hey, I'm okay, Still,
I don't need to chase this one. I don't need
to go to war over this one. We're all right,
and you know, slide into making that matter instead. That's

(14:51):
the wolf I've fed, and I'm I'm really happy now
twelve hours later being able to talk about it. Yeah.
I actually want to come back to that story in
a minute, because I think it's central to a lot
of things in the book. But I think we first
have to start with the elephant in the room, which
is you writing a book about relationships is ironic given
you've been married five times. What you're joking, I've been

(15:13):
married forty years to the same person. I'm confusing you
with the professional wrestler Rick Flair. I'm sorry, worry about it.
There's also Rick Hanson, who's the police chief of Calgary, Canada.
And then there's another Rick Hanson who you know, uh
disabled a play went across the country. Well, that it

(15:34):
was a stupid joke, Rick Flair, I couldn't resist. Um
right here, right here? What are we going to chase
and which is one of the central themes in the
book making great relationships? Right here? Am I going to
get snarky about that? Am I going to take it personally?
Or am I going to know that you're a good guy? Right? Um?
And if I actually had been married five times, it

(15:55):
would be ironic to write a book about making great
relationships right there, right there. We have that choice hundreds
of times each day in all kinds of relationships, all sorts,
and which one do you tilt? Where? Which choice do
you make? And that's what that book is so much about.
What do you do with your thoughts? And you're basically
your your thoughts, words and deeds, what you say and

(16:17):
what you do well you know, with your mind and
your mouth essentially, I don't mean that's sexually uh again
and again and again, and the consequences that those little things,
as you just said, yeah, build something that's a lot
over time. Yep, yep. Now that was a pre planned,
dumb joke. I know you've been married a long time.

(16:38):
Just thinking of you and Ric flair in the same breath.
It just was too good to resist for me. Let's
go back to that story about your wife there though,
because there's something interesting in that, And as I was
reading your book, I sort of kept seeing both these
things reflected. And what they are is I feel like
it's a real tension that I have certainly faced in relationship.
I think everybody does to some degree, right, And it's

(17:01):
this tension of on one hand, we want to pause,
slow down, rain in our tongue, think about what's important,
choose what do I want to feed right now? And
we're presented with something in a relationship that tendency, though
taken too far, becomes a tendency where we don't talk

(17:22):
about the things that we're unhappy about, we don't talk
about what we need, we don't talk about what we want. So, Mike,
rationale is a little bit like the one you just did,
which is like, I want to feed this peaceful moment. Yeah,
so I'm not going to bring up this thing. And
then I say to myself, this isn't the right time,
which may be very wise in a lot of cases.

(17:44):
It is I'll bring it up later, which then I
never do. I thought we could talk about that essential
tension of thinking through when do I say something about
what's going on? When do I not? How do I
determine what the right time is. I just love to
kind of explore that because I think that's a big deal.
I think it is a big deal, and I think

(18:05):
that's an example of a really big deal, which is
the whole thing of what do I do when? What
do I say when? And you know, besides being married
for forty years, I've been doing counseling for roughly the
same amount of time. That's a lot of experience, including
a lot of couples and families and other kinds of
relationships including business relationships, partners or you know, the manager

(18:28):
person they manage or to work team. A lot of
experience there. And there are thousands of books on relationships.
I wanted to write a book that no one has written, really,
which is fifty simple practices for solving conflicts, building cooperation,
and fostering love practices specific to do fifty two dus

(18:50):
that answer the question what do I do win right?
So in this particular case, I think you're right. People
can air on either side. They can air on the
side of come and in too hot or too cool.
They can err on the side of, you know, saying
too much or saying too little. Which way do we go?
And there's kind of a saying, uh. I put it
in my book Resilient, my saying which is very often

(19:13):
we're choosing harmony or truth in our relationships, and there's
a place for choosing harmony. There's a sequel to my
story about my wife last night, actually I'll tell it
to you, But at first I chose harmony over truth.
Ye all right, But there's a problem that if we
routinely choose harmony over truth, over time, we often end
up with neither. Exactly. That was an insight I had,

(19:34):
which was, like I was thinking I was keeping the peace.
What I realized I was doing was driving all the
conflict inside. It wasn't peace. There was external peace, but
there was not peace. I for that time was taking
all of it, you know, which turns out to be
a losing game for me and the relationship. Yeah. Yeah,

(19:54):
so exactly right. So again, long term therapist, it's like
learning a skill, you know, if you want to learn
to ski, which I'm bad at, you know, But when
I was trying to learn it, um, there's the foundational
things you learned along the way, right. So in the book,
it starts with befriending yourself. Yeah, because if we don't
have that fundamental quality of being on our own side,
not against others, but for ourselves, and kind to ourselves

(20:18):
and recognizing good in ourselves and having compassion for ourselves
and supporting ourselves like a good coach or a good guy,
not a critic, but a good coach or guide, and
a cheerleader as well, that's foundational. And then certainly their
general capabilities around warming the heart toward others, you know,
the cultivation of compassion, the skills of empathy, have seen

(20:40):
the good in others, seen good intentions and others even
though they are expressing them in ways that are problematic.
You know, it's on that foundation and definitely that then
you get to okay, all right, something happened, We're going
to interact about it. How do we do that? And
there's a lot in the book about the actual how

(21:01):
of moving to a conflict effectively or negotiating wants you
want X, they want why? Or you felt kind of
hurt or you felt let down, uh, you felt really wounded?
What do you do and even ultimately, how do you
resize the relationship in key ways? Uh, maybe if only
in your mind. Like, I don't know about you, if
you want to go public with this, you know, but

(21:23):
I could go public to There's certain areas where I've
just sort of given up the asshole about something, like
I I like to sort of need in orderly, partly
because I'm dealing with a million things, and that's how
I manage a million things. My wife grew up in
a family where it was his chaos everywhere, and it
was not a problem. It was a happy family. So
we're different that way. So I've given up about vast

(21:44):
areas of our home. You know, my closet is organized,
my office is clear and neat. That's a form of
resizing other people. You just resize and you realize, you know,
I'm not going to talk to them after they've been
drinking or you know. Yeah, we're gonna have lunch maybe
once or twice a year, and we're not going to
talk about Donald Trump. We're just gonna let that one

(22:06):
go right by. Uh, and that will be enough with
that kind of old friend from college, for example, So yeah,
and we could talk more about it. Thanks for letting
me kind of give an overview of the book. And
I'm happy to give marital advice if you wanted, and
happy to receive it from you as well. Yes, yes, well,
I'm teasing you about being married multiple times. I have

(22:29):
been married and divorced twice, so I may have more
war stories than you. But you've met Jenny, she's interviewed you.
I'm enormously happy now. The thing that was coming up
for me is you were kind of talking through this
and we were thinking about it is a little bit
of this sense. And I think we do this in
many aspects of life, right, which is discernment around like
you said earlier your core talk last night or earlier

(22:52):
this week, which was you know what matters and what doesn't,
Because that's what we're really talking about figuring out here
is what really matters? What things can I let go
of that don't compromise me in any meaningful way? Right.
They may cause me to have to do some adjustment,
they may cause me to have to relax a little bit,

(23:12):
but they don't compromise me in a fundamental way. But
there are other things that might. And I think we
do this in all relationships and even in things like work, right,
Like the work is a compromise for most people in
some way, it's like, well, there's all these really good things,
but then there's these three bad things, and which wa
ways which, and so there's this this sort of discernment

(23:33):
process that feels challenging. And I think that's part of
why as I was reading your book, the early parts
are very much as you said about internal steadiness, focus, work,
et cetera. Because I do think that steadiness is needed
to make these difficult discernments, because we don't make them
well when we are out of whack. Yeah, you know,

(23:55):
it might be helpful, since you've been so kind actually
to talk about the book, just going to name some
of the simple practices. Then. The chapters in this book
are really short, you know, usually three d five pages each,
so that each one of them is a specific thing.
So I'll just kind of just start naming chapter titles
starting in part four, stand up for yourself, so let

(24:18):
go of needless fear, use anger, don't let it use you,
tell the truth, and play fair, don't be bullied. For example,
these are really foundational, you know, or past that In
terms of the section on speak wisely that's the longest
part of the book, six parts total. Speak from the heart,

(24:39):
ask questions, express appreciation, try a softer tone, Admit fault
and move on. That's been one of the best for me.
Stay right when you're wrong. That goes to practicing unilateral virtue,
not out of being a doormat, but in part because
it puts you in the strongest possible position. Say what

(25:01):
you want, come to agreement, forgive them, forgive yourself to
anyway you get. Just see that kaboom of those things,
and they really are a kaboom. The longer I've done
therapy with people, I think I've become kinder. I've also
become blunter er. Yeah, and that bluntness, that kind bluntness

(25:23):
definitely runs throughout the entire book, like this is what
we'll do, this is what's in your power. There's so
much that's not in our power. Right, other people are
going to do what they do. Many people disappoint That's reality, Okay,
what's in your power with what you think and what
you say and what you do, And that's what the
book is really about. In that way, you can make

(25:44):
a great relationship even if the other person is problematic.
For you, even if you want to disengage from them.
For you, it's a great relationship because you've practiced with
it in various ways. We could all use the occasional nudge,

(26:16):
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in our day to day routine. That's why we send
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(26:38):
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(27:01):
text and sign up for free. You pulled out some
chapter titles and maybe we could go deeper into a
few of them, because I've picked a few out myself
that I wanted to kind of touch on. And one
of them is this admit fault and move on. You say,
remember it's in your own best interests to admit fault
and move on. Admitting fault might seem weak or that

(27:22):
you're giving others a free pass for their faults, but
actually it takes a strong person to admit fault, and
it puts you in a stronger position with others. You know.
You also then go on to talk about try not
to make the fault bigger than it actually is, be
specific about what it is. Talk a little bit more
about this ability to admit fault and do it in

(27:43):
a wise way. Well, you know this is saying in medicine.
I'm thinking about your two marriages so far. Good judgment
comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. You've
had a lot of experience. I've had a lot of
experience to it that has come from my own bad judgment.
So in the moment we do stuff, you know, a
tone slips in, or we dropped the ball. You know,

(28:04):
we're supposed to remember to get the milk on the
way home or something, right or we've just kind of
more globally been tuning out our partner because we're preoccupied
with work, or we're thinking about TV we want to
watch later tonight, whatever it might be. You know, a
lot of faults are morally innocent. You just slipped our
mind right about something, and okay, and it's about acknowledging

(28:27):
that and being committed to correction in the future rather
than arguing about the past. And so it's in that context.
Just two examples. One is how we say it has
much more impact than what we say. Generally, much research
on that tone and communications about the nature of the relationship,
who's on top, who's on the bottom, who's the dominant

(28:48):
person in the relationship in the moment. So you know,
maybe we said something that we stand behind. Maybe we
just said to our partner, you keep leaving your shoes
in the middle of the doorway. All right, that's a
fact statement, but the tone around it could be really problematic,
way beyond just the reasonable exasperation. After the fifth time

(29:10):
your roommate does that or your teenage child does that, okay,
and then the other person winces or they get on
your case about it, like, oh, you you're so mean,
or you said that you're so mad all the time,
and okay, so you might say, okay, you're right, you're right.
I don't want to use that tone. I never want
to use harsh tone. One of the earlier chapters is

(29:31):
called watch your Words. I use the guidelines in early
Buddhism about what constitutes white speech or right speech. One
of the kind of five key characteristics is not harsh tone.
So what is harsh depends on culture and setting so forth.
But you could go, you know, okay, yeah, I I
was cranky. My tone wasn't good. You admit that fault.
It clears the decks. Now the person has to deal

(29:54):
with the actual content that they keep believing their shoes
in the doorway, and they can no longer eva dealing
with that content, that actual truth, that fact, because they're
you know, critiquing your tone for example. Right. Another one
is where you know you did something that really warrants
some remorse. You know, it's not just about putting correction in,

(30:17):
but it's about, wow, I'm really sorry, And I just
find if there's going to be a healing in relationships,
it's important to feel that the other person gets it.
This book in a lot of ways is about being
that person that other people really want to be with
over time, because that person you are is someone who's

(30:39):
prepared and is big enough and strong enough to experience
and express genuine guilt and remorse that's in proportion to
what happened, you know. Like for example, let's suppose you
know you're routinely late, you know, for something, and your
partner's calling you on it, like, hey, you're always ten

(31:00):
minutes late, or you'd say you'll be home at a
certain time, or you know you'll be ready for a
certain time, and you always keep me waiting, and maybe
you realize, you know, the truth is, I just have
not made timeliness as important to me as things that
my job, where I'm always on time. What's with that?
Why am I making my partner or my kid, or

(31:22):
my dear friend or my aging parent less important to
me than some jaboni down the hall at work? Jaboni jaboni?
I don't know what that means. I just made that.
That's a California slang term from somewhere in my youth
junior high. I have no idea, Sorry, I I mean,
I don't. It's just a made up anyway. The point

(31:45):
is what And then you start you start to really
feel it like wow, and you start to feel how
much you care about your partner. You'd start to become
aware of your impact on your partner. It wasn't your
intent to be cruel, and yet the impact caused harm,
caused suffering, and you start to feel a little like
a WinCE and you go no, sorry, sorry, sorry honey,

(32:09):
or sorry friend, or sorry mom. I got it, I
got it. And it's that healthy remorse that will motivate
you to not do that again and to be that
person who won't do that again and when other people
see that about you. Just to finish here, here's the
moving on part where when you've acknowledged it, you can
move on. Now. They may not be ready quite yet

(32:32):
to move on because they don't trust you. And what's
useful about admitting fault and moving on is to say
I get it, but I'm not going to try to
prove this to you. I'm just going to demonstrate it.
It landed, I got it. I'm not admitting fault just
to brush you off and make you go away. I
really get it. And it's it's the admission of fault,
including sometimes with proportionate remorse that enables me to say, hey,

(32:58):
I've done my part, or you know, I've acknowledged it, confessed,
I've fled guilty, however you want to say it. I'm
not trying to minimize how it landed on you. I'm
not trying to get into some big, long, defensive explanation.
You know, internally, I'm reserving my right to judge for
myself how big a fault it is. And if the
other person thinks, oh a, on the zero to ten

(33:21):
scale of faults, it was at least an eight. And
you're thinking, hey, I just added a little exasperation in
my tone about your shoes in the middle of the
doorway for the fifth time today. But okay, you know,
for you, it's maybe a one or two. But whatever
it is, you acknowledge it and then you move on
from it, and it's great. You know, you're just moving on.

(33:42):
They can think what they think. You're walking the high road.
You know, you're practicing unilateral virtue on your own and
that gives you a real feeling of worth in yourself.
Plus over time, it removes reasons for others to find
fault with you. You know, less than less to find
fault with the ben if they go looking as some
people will unfortunately, and you're just you're impeccable, you can

(34:06):
enjoy what's called the bliss of blamelessness deep in your bones.
In twelve step Recovery, we talked all the time about
keeping our side of the street clean, right, like beautiful,
and what comes from that is a degree of peace. Yeah,
that's right. And the foundation of that is like a
phrase that you'll relate to, of course, fearless and searching inventory. Yeah,

(34:26):
of yourself, which means because you're willing to do that,
fearless and searching inventory, you can stand strong and what
you're not going to take on, you know, you're not
going to say that you're responsible for that or be
guilt tripped into feeling inferior to others because they're lamb
basing you about something that you're like, No, honestly, I
don't think it was that bad, And I have authority

(34:48):
to say I don't think it was that bad inside
my own heart because I'm fully prepared to say what
is bad based on a sincere and searching inventory. Yeah,
I want to make sure we hit unilateral vertu you
because I love that idea. But I want to stay
here for a second and talk a little bit about
a couple of words that you used in there that
that are part of a cultural conversation to some degree

(35:11):
these days, which is around impact versus intent exactly. There
are differing schools of thought and and I tend to
think people land on one extreme or the other on
this right versus a middle ground, which is there's one
idea which says, if what you did impacted me negatively,
it doesn't matter what your intent was, you are wrong.

(35:33):
There's another school that tends to say, but I didn't
mean it that way, so it didn't hurt you, right,
Or it shouldn't hurt you. It shouldn't hurt you because
I didn't mean it that way. That wasn't my intent.
And I think in relationship this becomes very difficult at
times because we go, well, my intent was and you
took it X way and you know, so there is

(35:55):
this searching and fearless moral inventory where we go, well,
you know, to me, that's a two, but to my
partner it was an eight. Now, how much of that
do I need to take on or not take on?
Because we know that people respond to things from a
variety of factors. Right, the tone about the shoes in
the doorway might be a two on its own, but

(36:17):
if you've talked with that tone for five years, it
might be an eight now, right. Or if your partner
had a dad who was slightly angry when you use
a very mildly angry tone, they might react it in eight.
So impact and intent can very often be mismatched. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I just I just love to hear you sort of

(36:37):
elaborate on that or kind of you know, talk through that, yeah,
or just add another thing. Let's suppose that you are
a white person and the person you're saying that too
is a person of color. Let's say, so there's another
element in the max in which someone who belongs to
much more of the dominant side and managed privileged side

(36:58):
and the culture including his store kally has then criticizing
and in effect commanding another person to do something. So
you're write multiple airs of that up. For me, having
worked through this territory a lot, including in terms of
kind of classic diversity trainings and considerations about it, let's see,

(37:19):
one of the keys for me that's been helpful has
been to internally cut to the chase about Okay, what's
my correction from now on? That kind of is independent
from the emotional charge and some as the accusations that
are flying or in disagreements about what something means, let
alone disagreements about what happened right, And also, can I

(37:40):
put it disengagement from the understandable backlog that a person
who's been shoved down and had the boot on their
neck and their parents and their grandparents and their ancestors
and all the rest of that to kind of effect
acknowledge that while zero in on Okay, what am I
going to do next time? Yeah, well, you've got a

(38:01):
line that says you don't have to fight about the
past to agree about what you'll do from now on.
And that line just jumped off the page at me,
because how powerful is that idea? Like, Okay, your fault,
my fault. We're rehashing what may have happened. My memory,
your memory of what happened. It's all muddled ground, right.
What we can do is say, let's talk about what

(38:23):
we do now moving on, and let's create you talk
about agreements in the book, let's create an agreement about
what's going to happen. You can't reset the emotional clock entirely.
I'm not saying that, but you are resetting it in
a sense, and you can then from that agreement then
have conversations about, you know, how we're doing with our
new agreement, about how this happened. That's right. A second

(38:44):
key distinction for me is to kind of tease apart
what the experience of the other person is from maybe
there are accusations around it, right, I don't have to
necessarily buy into the accusations you know that I was
an agreed just asshole or promulgating a bunch of microaggressions

(39:05):
from my privilege or something. I don't have to necessarily
agree with those accusations while being really interested in and
sincere about understanding the experience of the other person and
in a context of a kind of unconditional grounding in
good will and kindness and compassion, not from a pity place,

(39:27):
not from a superiority place, but just from a naturally
open heart. That distinction between what's the experience of the
other person and being interested in it sincerely and trying
to learn from it, distinguishing that from whether or not
their accusations are founded or whether they're over the top,
or whether I need to feel guilty about it, you know,

(39:47):
separating that out I found super helpful too. Yeah, yeah,
I'll give you an example of that. I grew up
in a home in which my parents had a monopoly
on the expression of anger, and so I entered adults
super uptight, really pinched, and I saw myself also, I
was very young going through schools, this nerdy young kid,
and I did not have any sense really of my

(40:10):
personal power. Didn't get it. And then it was really
in my marriage, including the early years of our children.
Now thirty five or so years ago, for our oldest,
my wife started pointing out to me that actually I
had an intensity that I was totally unaware of. And
I also grew up in a home where my parents
let fly a fair amount of emotional intensity. It was

(40:32):
not a big deal to me, and I had to
realize that the experience of other people was that they
were shaken. I wasn't abusive, but I was just intense,
and I didn't realize the impact of that intensity. And
so I learned over time to stop being so defensive
about the fact that I had every right in the

(40:53):
world to say that, because it's really true. You left
your shoes in the damn doorway again, right. I had
to separate out the validity whatever it was, let's say,
which usually there is some validity and what we say,
even if it comes out in a sort of messy,
turbocharged way, and then focus on and learn from. Oh wow,
that's how it landed on you. That's how it landed

(41:16):
on you. You know. That was really helpful and more
broadly helpful to realize that man were so affected by
each other. We're vulnerable. We're social primates who are evolved
to be, in effect, the most affected by other species
on the planet by design. Of course we're affected. Of
course you are affected. It's not because you're weak or

(41:39):
a whiner or needy. Of course you are affected by
what they do. And flip the other way, they are
really affected by what you do. The micro expressions across
your face of you know, contempt, derisiveness, you know, disdain,
like the little exasperate ration, you know, not really being present,

(42:02):
your eyes start wandering away, you're not showing up for them.
They get affected by that, let alone, if you start
adding significant anger into the mix. Yeah, and anyway, it's
just been helpful for me to have that feeling of
almost the tenderness of other people while also finding ways
to be strong and be clear and to say what

(42:24):
needs to be said. There's such an art to that,
that ability to say what you need to say and
do it in a way that has the most likelihood
of being received. It is a real skill. It is
a real skill to learn. But I do think it
really can be learned, and I think it's one of
the most valuable things you can learn to do. Is

(42:47):
you know, how do you have difficult conversations in a
effective and productive way. There is a book that's been
out a long time called Crucial Conversations. I don't know
if you're familiar with that one, but so many great
pieces in there too, about you know, how do you
approach this. You know, there's some parallels to what you're
talking about in your book and in their book, because
you know, they do say you've got to start internally. Yeah,

(43:11):
you know, you've got to start internally getting clear on
getting to a settled place, to a strong place. You've
got to get clear on what do you actually want,
what matters here, what's important. So there's a lot of
work ideally that is done now. It can be done
very I'm not saying you've got to set aside hours
to do it necessarily, but I do think it needs

(43:31):
to be done. It can be done fairly quickly. Sometimes
it needs to be done over a longer period of
time where there's some real thought about, like this is
an important thing to me, and how I'm about to
communicate this actually matters because I want it to be
both kind, but I also want it to be effective. Right,
it's good. So I'll just say from a lot of
couples counseling and different kinds of couples, including parents and

(43:54):
teenagers and family members, and also in work environments. So
first classics it up. A and B walk into the office. Right,
A says I want you to change. B says I
want you to change, and then B says, yeah, I'll
change you. First book deadlock. That's where unilateral virtue comes in,

(44:15):
where you practice I think of it as the world
of your attention on what you want from them. Meanwhile,
put eighty percent of your attention on how you could
be a better partner or friend or worker or boss
or sibling and so forth, Because that is unilateral virtue,
and you'll feel so much better by doing that. Yeah,
that's so good. T Actually I read that in the

(44:36):
book too, and I loved it because you hear people
say it's fifty fifty, or then you'll hear other people
say no, no, no, no, it's a percent you, zero
percent the other person, and neither of those to me,
is right. So I think feels about right, like eight
percent of my effort really should be on me and
what I'm doing. And but you know what, I'm a
human being. I'm not like a robot, and I'm not
going to respond and pay attention to it. For it

(45:00):
reframed everything to realize that the strongest, most badass kind
of way to be is to zero out the other
person's complaints to the maximum reasonable extent you can going forward, Right,
whatever happened in the past, focus on the future from
now on rather than arguing about the past. That was

(45:20):
the best thing you can do for yourself, and think
about what is it like to be with someone who
sincerely wants to sort out what is the maximum reasonable
correction to put in going forward without necessarily beating themselves
up with a lot of guilt. Just Okay, how can
I prevent that next time? Or what can we do
going forward. When you're with that kind of person, you

(45:41):
want to give them everything in the world, you know,
because they're chill and cool and reasonable to work with
or live with or sleep with. Okay, So that's one.
Here's another one that I've just seen a lot. People
don't make requests. They tend to make demands. You need
to get your shoes out of the door rather than hey,
I request that from now on you make an effort

(46:02):
to keep your shoes out of the doorway. Okay. Can
we have an agreement about that? And is there anything
I could do maybe even that could help you keep
that agreement, Like not rushing you so much in the morning,
pick up my damn shoes. Yeah, like not buy you
any more shoes? Kid, No, no, I'm just killing but
you see what I mean. But focus on requests, requests,
not to mounds now the other. If the other person

(46:25):
doesn't meet your request, there could be consequences, And those
consequences are not a threat, they're just reality. Right. If
you have a roommate who keeps leaving their shoes in
the doorway or the equivalent times ten, after a while,
you're going to either get you know, kick him out,
of the apartment that you have the lease on, or
you know, find somewhere else to live, or something like that.

(46:45):
There could be consequences that people don't meet your requests.
Here's the third one. If I slip it in really fast,
I'm just seeing it a million times. People routinely do
not actually speak from their heart. They don't share their experience.
They say things like you're wrong, or you know you
made me something, you made me mad, you hurt me,

(47:05):
or you're bad in some ways you did something wrong.
They find fault rather than what is much more effective,
even though it's harder and more courageous, is to just
slow it down and go with dignity inappropriately say more
like what your actual experiences, how you feel. So in

(47:26):
the structure, as you will know of non violent communication,
it's called non violent communication. It's really helpful here the structure. Basically,
when X happened or happens, I feel why because I
need Z in other words, and X is described objectively.
So when you know you roll your eyes at me
when I'm talking or when you interrupt me, which is factual,

(47:50):
I feel frozen, I feel startled, I feel kind of
flooded like I was with my kind of scary stepfather
coming at me, I feel like I don't matter enough
for you to slow down and actually give me an
extra ten seconds to finish my sentences. You know, I
feel this inside. I feel kind of scared of you.
It feel scary a little. I feel mad honestly as well.

(48:13):
I feel like I just want to back away. I
don't want to be with you. I don't want to
have anything to do with you. I'm not saying that's
what I'm gonna do, but I feel that because deep down,
like you, like everybody common humanity, I need to feel
like I exist in the minds of others who matter
to me, that I matter to people who matter to me.
You know. I need to feel that I have standing,

(48:36):
that I'm not voiceless and pushed around like I was
when I was young, as a young girl in my family.
These are things I need. So from now on, I
request that you let me finish my sentences before you
interrupt me. You know, I'm happy to make as much
time for each of us in conversation. I'm not trying
to claim more time. I'm just trying to have as

(48:57):
much time back and forth as you could. We do
that going forward. That's a very powerful framework with a
lot of dignity and gravity and self respect, and it's
very effective. You've got another line in the book that says,

(49:33):
if the results in our relationships are not so good,
it's our process that needs improving. And I think all
this that we're talking about to some degree is process, right.
It's about how do we interact with each other, how
do we talk to each other, how do we express
needs not being met, etcetera. And my experience has been

(49:54):
also that when a relationship, people can be oriented almost
as if there's this third thing that's out there, which
is our dynamic and if you and I can unite
on we're on one side, are problematic. Dynamic is on
the other side, not I'm on one side, you're on.
So by talking about process, it moves it out into

(50:15):
this thing my fault, your fault, and becomes this other
thing that is a different thing that we've co created,
of course, but that we can co resolve. There's something
about that shift that I think is really powerful. And
so I just think that line in the book about
you know, it's a process issue can be really powerful
and healing. Oh, that's right, good process creates good product.

(50:36):
So if you have good product, you know you have
good process. If you have bad results, bad outcomes, bad product,
take a look at your process with each other. How
you interact. Yeah, relationships are built from interactions, and interactions
are built from kind of turn taking. All right, you
said this, then they did that. Okay, now what do
you do right? And there's kind of like a range.

(50:58):
How can you be maximally skill full back and forth
like tennis or ping pong or something the volley, back
and forth given you know what they've offered to you.
And if you look at people who are really effective
in the world historically like Gandhi or today the Dalai Lama,
Michelle Obama, these are people who again and again say

(51:21):
what they need to say, but they do it clearly
from a place of dignity, gravity and self respect without
adding all the top spin that enables other people to
avoid the actual crux of their message. That's really effective. Yeah,

(51:42):
take a quick story A long time ago, years ago,
I got to meet the Dalai Lama and I was
on a board a meditation center, Spara Rock Meditation Center,
and we had a meeting where Dalai Lama came into
a room with maybe a d fifty teachers of various kinds,
and I was a small frog in that big pond, obviously,
and the Dali Lama came in with his translator and

(52:05):
a third man I didn't pay much attention to. And
after a while, though, I started to notice the third
man who looked kind of athletic. He was wearing a suit.
He looked like a middle linebacker and a small college
football team. And he just stood there in the front
of the room, radiating loving kindness, and his eyes never
stopped moving. And he was the Dolli Llama's ninja. He

(52:27):
was there to take a bullet for him if need be.
And you could feel there was no sense of menace.
It wasn't like he was scowling. He was just there
with this grounded presence. And you knew he was like
a black belt and seven things or something like that.
You know he could do anything. But he just radiated
kindness and goodwill while his eyes kept scanning the room. Right.

(52:52):
And I think about people who have that quality of
strength of character, who are fully prepared. They mean business
and they're fully prepared to do what's needed to serve
the greater good and to, you know, be protective and
supportive and and provide as well. That's how we can

(53:13):
kind of live into. Right, that's the wolf we feed.
What does it feel like? You know, you just feel
immediately I'm sitting up a little straighter. I'm channeling the
Dali Lama's nine little bit here, you know, and and boom,
You're aggressed in that way of being. And as we
dwell there, increasingly that becomes the habit of our heart,
that becomes more and more a way we do all ourselves. Yep, yep,

(53:33):
that's beautiful. I want to hit just a couple other
lines that came out in the book before we wrap up.
One of them is you say large issues are often
resolved through a series of small agreements. Say more about that.
Oh that's great. So let's say that you're in a
work setting, right, and you know you're part of a team,

(53:54):
and the team's discombobulated and other people's not getting the
job done, lands on your desks. How makes it harder
for you? And you know it's a big mess. Right,
Maybe that has to do with the culture of the company.
So you just start with small agreements, like when do
you have meetings? Is an agreement to come on time,

(54:14):
to end on time, do the meetings conclude with a
statement of who's going to do what by when. So
you start building in a structure of accountability and personal
accountability that's results oriented. It's about producing tangible results that
are identifiable, and you do it step by step by step.
That would be an example there or in your home life,
let's suppose, kind of classically, after you have children. My

(54:38):
first book was about taking good care of mothers over
the long haul after kids come along, which means taking
care of the partner if there's a partner involved, and
more broadly, the village it should take to raise a child,
the village it does take and should be present, and
often is more like a ghost town in the developed
countries of the world these days. In any case, very
often in a couple, let's say heterosexual couple, there's a

(55:00):
kind of you know, movement over time that maybe is
a lack of erotic interest on the part of one
person and on the part of another person a kind
of disengagement and a lack of interest and emotional connection.
And so you start to realize, oh, if we start
making little agreements about emotional connection, spending more time at

(55:22):
least every day where we're just hanging out with each
other for at least ten minutes in a row, even
though the kids are pulling on us and life's crazy
and we both have jobs. But we're going to set
aside that time or we're gonna give each other listening.
We're going to practice a deeper kind of listening where
we're really attentive for five minutes in a row. It's
not forever, and you know, we're gonna connect more. We're

(55:43):
going to touch each other affectionately, not as a prelude
to a request for sex. We're going to connect physically
like we're gonna make that important to us. We're gonna
do things that we're both interested in. Maybe my wife
and I were interested now in Jack Ryan, so we're
like going through the Jack Ryant TV stuff whatever, like
blows my mind. My wife's interested in an accent film.

(56:03):
But okay, we are shared interests. Maybe it's you play cards,
maybe you go for walks, maybe you have a cat
or dog you care about together. Okay, fine, And then
on the basis of those small agreements, then suddenly the
erotic dimension of your life has more of a foundation
for it, and you can start coming to mutual understandings.
They're not like you're trying to mandate some sort of

(56:24):
forced thing, but you start having understanding. It's like, Okay,
at a certain frequency, we're going to connect in that way.
Once a week, once a month, twice a week. You
know we're going to connect in that way. Uh. Then
you know, a bit by bit you start making those
little understandings. It creates more of a sort of a

(56:45):
field of mutuality with another person that's really hopeful, instead
of feeling like, you know, the proverbial elephant has to
be swallowed in one byte, Uh, you don't need to
eat elephants, should not eat elephants. Obviously, big pilot tofu,
let's say, Uh, he's just a bit by bit, spoonful
by spoonful. Right, And as you put it, I love
that proverb. A little by little, a little becomes a lot.

(57:07):
Yea certainly ties back to that. You say that in
your experience as a therapist, poor empathy is the core
problem in most troubled relationships. Let's not talk about how
the couple got there, but let's talk about the path forward.
If empathy turns out to be the core problem. How
do you start building that back. That's great, and that
goes to your topic earlier about impact distinct from intent,

(57:29):
you know, for example, just about that when you start
to imagine, you know, what's it like to be you
you over there, the you that you're living with, sleeping
with maybe, or the you that you're now in the
middle of this kind of awkward conversation where maybe you're
a person who has a lot of advantage in the culture,
and you're suddenly like, I didn't mean any harm, like

(57:51):
what you know, And what's it like to be that
other person? What's it like to have grown up in
the ways that they've grown up. What's it like to
know that their parents and grandparents have not great grandparents,
were enslaved, were property, you know, and had their children
taken away, sold themselves, their own children sold into slavery,

(58:12):
for example. It's really staggering to enter into the world
of others and you start to understand, of course they've
had it up to here with all that. And it's
not that you personally are doing a bad thing. It's
just that you're interacting with someone who's had so many
bad things happened to them and to their parents, and

(58:33):
grandparents and great grandparents. Of course understandably they feel that way,
and so empathy is really important entering into the world
the mind of another person. Technically, so now the how to,
I'll do the quick how to here. Empathy basically boils
down to three circuits in your brain. That's a real
how to write. So we have empathy for actions, we
have empathy for emotions, that we have empathy for thoughts.

(58:55):
To simplify a lot of stuff, three major neural substrates
are involved in those things. So one thing you can
start doing is tracking the body language and the micro
expressions of the other person. Imagining what would you be
feeling if your body was moving or sitting or being
contracted in that way, if your shoulders were coming forward,

(59:16):
hunching over yourself like theirs are, and their head is
kind of ducking a little, how might you be feeling
like you might be feeling beleaguered and less than and
not powerful, and kind of like you're trying to appease,
but underneath that is a growing seething rage and having
to freaking appease yet again, how might you feel or

(59:36):
looking at the expressions right around their eyes or on
the corners of their mouth, the main areas of micro expression.
A great TV show speaking of is Lie to Me,
especially the first season where they really go into Paul
Ekman's work about micro expressions and really tracking what's going
on in another person in expressions that last half a

(59:57):
second or a couple of seconds at most, but you
can really learn a lot so right there. Empathy for actions,
mirror neurons, mirror like networks get involved in that, empathy
for feelings, like what are their feelings, especially beneath the surface?
They're coming at you all hot and heavy, angry, angry?
What's underneath that? Are they frustrated? Are they anxious? Do

(01:00:18):
they feel hurt? Have they just had it up to
here with you being the next person in a long
line of folks who have been disrespectful, who haven't slowed
down to really listen? What might they be feeling underneath
it all? And with training and practice, you become more
comfortable with that kind of empathy, and last, empathy for
thoughts that it's called theory of mind, or basically you

(01:00:41):
kind of imagine what might they be thinking, given what
they're saying or how they're acting, or given their personality,
and you can think of personality in lots of ways,
like the angiogram point or the Myers Briggs or that
this is or that their their horoscope. Who knows, you
know what I mean, their upbringing, given how they were
brought up, given their situation in life right now, given

(01:01:01):
the fact that they've got chronic pain, let's say, physical pain,
given the fact that their previous partner cheated on them massively.
You know, given that fact, what are their hot buttons? Understandably,
what are the questions running in their mind? You know,
the thought balloon over their head, like in a cartoon,
write the thought balloon over their head? What could be
cooking in that thought balloon? You're forming hypotheses, you're speculating

(01:01:24):
a little bit about what could be happening. These are
things we can all do. It doesn't mean you're trying
to do mind reading. You're not being a therapist. And
actually what promotes empathy is boundaries, because if you feel
more rooted, like a tree, deeply rooted, you can be
more open to the storms blowing at you from other
people or happening inside their minds, the hurricane in their head, right,

(01:01:49):
you can be more open empathically to it. If you
feel deeply rooted, and you're also clear that's their mind,
it's not necessarily my mind. And just because they're upset
does necessarily mean it was my fault. Just because they
want something, because you contune into the wants of others,
doesn't necessarily mean I have to give it to them.
Just because they think things things have a certain meaning

(01:02:11):
for them doesn't necessarily mean they have to have the
same meaning for me. You know. It's the establishing of
that differentiation. Is the technical term that boundary fences make
for good neighbors, the old proverb right. And I find
this so exciting. I'm a longtime rock climber. It's about
the courage to venture past your point of protection, to
enter into the world of the other person, and to

(01:02:34):
feel the nobility in that a little bit, the moxie,
you know, the badassery a little bit, and at being
brave enough and strong enough and caring enough, really kind
enough to really enter into the world of the other person.
These are ways to help yourself enter into that world
and train so that increasingly you're just much more rapidly empathic.

(01:02:56):
You feed the wolf of empathy, and you can become
more empathic over time, and then when people feel jan
segel is a great phrase. When we feel felt, feeling
felt right, when you give others the experience of feeling
felt by you, they tend to cool their jets because
very often that's what people really want. You know. Yeah,

(01:03:17):
they want you to give them what they want, but
really they want you to understand what they want and
recognize why they want what they want through empathy. And
then also empathy gives you a lot of useful information.
You start realizing that the real issue here is not
about the shoes in the doorway. It's not about that
at all. It's about the fact that you're physically big

(01:03:37):
and they're physically smaller. It's the fact that they've been
bullied when they were young. It's the fact that all
kinds of haughty white people have been telling them what
to do their whole life one way or another without
even recognizing the fact that they were doing that, and
they've had it up to hear and you suddenly realize, Okay,
that's useful information. You know, I can take it into
account going forward. Yeah, yeah, empathy can be so helpful.

(01:04:01):
Let's end with one last idea here, or you start
with this very early in the book. And this goes
back to being with ourselves and handling ourselves. And you said,
everything I've learned about practicing with the mind fits into
three categories, being with what you're experiencing, reducing what's harmful
and painful, and increasing what's helpful and enjoyable. And so

(01:04:23):
I love these three basic things. Can you run us
through those three real quick? Oh? Sure, that's really foundational.
And by the way, it's a very astute conversation, Eric,
no surprise, and you know I appreciate it a lot. Yeah.
A good metaphor is imagine your mind and the brain
mind go together as like a garden. Well, we can

(01:04:44):
witness what's happening in the garden with mindfulness, kindness. Hopefully
we're not trying to do anything to the garden, we're
just simply being with it. Second, we can pull weeds, right,
we can pull weeds or prevent them from landing in
the garden in the first place. Third, we can grow
flowers right. So right there, In terms of the two

(01:05:04):
wolves metaphor, we can be with the two wolves without recoiling.
Doesn't mean we're agreeing with them. We can see what's there,
we can be with what's there. We can also withdraw food.
We can stop feeding certain wolves. And third we can
start encouraging and even breeding if I dare say that

(01:05:26):
other wolves the flowers and fruit that we hope to
grow in the rest of our mind. So those three
are really helpful to recognize and in effect. The second
and third are about working with your mind. The first
is about being with your mind. Being with your mind
is primary, but it's not enough. Many people in the
mindfulness new age self help world overvalue just witnessing. Yes,

(01:05:48):
you know, you can witness your mind forever and it
isn't going to change because the structures in it are
baked into your brain. There physical especially the negative ones,
which are designed to really sink in deep roots. The
brain is very fertile for weeds by design, because that's
what kept our ancestors alive back in the Jurassic Park

(01:06:08):
and the Stone Age essentially. So it's important to work
with your mind actively, not just be with it. Second,
very often there's a natural flow. Something has bothered you.
So your partner, let's say you left the shoes in
the doorway. Okay, so your partner, you know, reads you
the riot actor about the shoes yet again, and uh,

(01:06:30):
which you could do first to slow it down in
your own mind, by yourself ten seconds by yourself, five
seconds by yourself, five minutes to kind of go whoa
and be aware of Man, you're getting so piste off,
so many reactions are arising. You're having a flashback to
your childhood where you're angry. Parents kept constantly criticizing you,
and you became rebellious about it. So now it's like,

(01:06:51):
screw the world, I'm gonna leave my freaking shoes wherever
I want. Let's say, so you become aware of these
things in you. You're not acting them out, you're not
trying to change them. Being with them, that's where you start.
And then at a certain point, often after a few breaths,
maybe a few minutes, you start moving into releasing. You
start letting go of that angry reactivity. You start disengaging

(01:07:12):
from that turbo charger from your childhood, you know, even
traumatic history and childhood. You start disengaging from these thoughts
you have about your partner that they're a total assholet
and you've had it up to here and you're not
gonna tell me what to do anymore, you know, you
just let it go, let it go, let it go, disengage,
and then after you've kind of released that for a while,
after a few breaths or maybe a few minutes, you

(01:07:34):
start to let in. You start to replace what you've
released with something beneficial, like, Okay, the feeling that you
can stand up for yourself reasonably without being a jerk
about it, that there's a middle way between being a
jerk or a doormat. Okay, I'm gonna let that in.
I'm gonna know what that feels like, just to be there.

(01:07:57):
You can also let in that, Yeah, in the scale
of wrongdoing, this is like a one I left my
shoes in the doorway, but the fact that I keep
doing it maybe makes it a two or three. I'm
gonna let that land, and I'm gonna correct. I'm going
to commit to not doing that in the future. You
could let that in, right, You could let in more
empathy for the other person, Like, given their history and

(01:08:19):
their background, the fact they're juggling a million balls, maybe
they're the primary homemaker and caregiver for the children. The
last thing in the world they need is your shoes
in the doorway. On top of em anything else they're
dealing with. Okay, you let that in and then you know,
you come to some kind of resolution. So, in effect,
three steps, let be, let go, let in. It's a

(01:08:43):
wonderful structure, and to really make sure you let in
a lot of people focus on letting be and letting go,
but they don't grow the flowers. And as any gardener knows,
if you don't replace your weeds with flowers, the weeds
come back. So it's very important in the space that's
left after release to focus on what is the wolf,
your metaphoric gap that you want to feed to grow

(01:09:07):
and fill in in that space. Yeah, yeah, I love
those three things that I love that garden analogy. I
think it's a really powerful way to think about how
to work with the mind. And I agree with you,
I think mindfulness taken too far that it's only about
seeing is incomplete. I think it gets such an emphasis
as because what most of us do is we don't

(01:09:28):
do that first step and we start either wildly pulling
at weeds or throwing seeds all around trying to find
something positive. Yeah, instead of actually spending enough time to go, okay,
this is what is the feelings that come with it
I may not like them, but I can be with
them from there. And this is the sort of to

(01:09:48):
recap your book, right, is from that place now of strength,
of grounded nous, of consideration, I can now think about
what is the best strategy in my relationship? Is it
to go plants and flowers? Is it to go talk
about a difficult issue? You know? But I'm doing that
from a place of wisdom and strength. Yeah, that's great,
And I know we're finishing. I'll just maybe finished with

(01:10:10):
a plug here at least, not so much for my book,
although I invite people to check it out. Actually it's
the result of forty years of work, and it's my
first book that's entirely focused on relationships, and I just
kind of packed into it everything i'd want someone to
know and I wished I had known. You know, my
own good judgment that's embedded in the book has come
from my own experience as a bad judgment anyway. It's

(01:10:33):
that I think we can get caught up also in
fighting with the weeds. And the truth is the mind
is inherently imperfectible. It just unfolds, it keeps unfolding, and biologically,
you know, we have tendencies of various kinds. We do
the best we can with them. But where the great
opportunity is really is to deepen in our capacities, to

(01:10:57):
be with our minds not identified with first and second,
to grow more flowers there, to really tend to the garden,
and to focus on beneficial experiences in which we can
dwell right and then increasingly become we dwell within us
as we turn beneficial states to trades. And I would

(01:11:18):
really encourage that for people, because it's so hopeful. You know,
we could be pulling weeds forever in the garden, never mind,
and certain weeds will never leave, you know, the impact
of certain traumatic experiences. It will always hurt to think
about what happened, let's say. But what we can do
is grow the good alongside all that is else there,

(01:11:39):
and then we have more of the good inside ourselves
to offer to others too. Beautiful, Well, Rick, thank you
so much. It is always such a pleasure to have
you on same here. We'll have links in the show
notes to your book, to your website, to all your stuff.
But again, thank you so much, and such a pleasure
very much myself. And you're growing and feeding a lot
a lot of good wolves in this world. Eric. If

(01:12:16):
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Eric Zimmer

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How to Make Great Relationships with Dr. Rick Hanson