Orna Guralnik (Couples Therapy)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather. I'm joined by Manus Mouse. We have the most special guest today.

I can't believe this happened to us. Some people in the comments sensed the Easter egg, which I didn't mind at all because they were as excited as we were about it. Our very favorite therapist from our favorite show, which is called Couples Therapy, our doctor in residence on Couples Therapy, Orna Guralnik. Orna's here.

Orna. Oh my God. What a thrill this was. I wish I could measure how much brain space I give to Orna, how much I think about her and her advice and her abilities.

I want her advice. Me too. Spoiler, we did the right thing and we didn't take up this interview asking personal advice. But it was tempting.

Sometimes it came out a little bit. Yeah, a little bit happened. Right out of the gate, I think. Okay.

Orna is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Season four premieres tomorrow on Paramount Plus with Showtime. Couples Therapy Season four.

We've seen it. It's spectacular. So good. So please enjoy Orna Guralnik.

He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur. Is that Nico?

You're like in waiting for me. There's a fox in here. Shh. It's a wolf.

I have a fox. No, she's a fox. She's a wolf. She's a wolf in fox clothing.

It's a rare. That was never a curse. She's actually a human in a wolf's clothing. Hi.

Hi. I'm Vax. Nice to meet you. I'm so excited.

Thank you for inviting me. I brought a fam. You can acknowledge us. But you're on par with Nico for me, so I'm going to take my moment because I'm getting a nice push against my body.

She's smiling. She's smiling. She's smiling. You say, mom, I have a friend.

How old is Nico? Nico's almost eight. Nico, why don't you show me getting friendly at you? But she's almost eight.

Her face is so youthful. Oh, another friend is here. All the guys here. Nico's here.

Hello. Oh, girl, excuse me. Sorry. You're very popular.

Very. Nico's a... Kind of like the dog in Anatomy of a Fall. Was that on thing, Nico?

No. Oh, just holding on a second. Oh, thank you. Hi, Monica.

It's so nice to meet you. Thank you. I'm thrilled to have you. Yeah, you're in the right place.

It's only once in a while we have someone that is in something we consume, you know, pathologically. Yeah, yeah. Because there's only so many shows, so it's like once in a while some of my very favorite show comes in. It's extra exciting.

Well, if Nico needs anything, I'm in the house. If she needs a potty break, I'm happy to take her out. Have a wonderful time. I can't wait to hear it.

Hi, Moni. Hi, buddy. You're fine. You're fine.

Have a wonderful time, you guys. Love you. Moni, how was your two days? It was fine.

It was fine? Yeah. I had a little bit of a meltdown. I have a big update for you.

Oh, my goodness. Involving the people on the sidewalk? No. Okay.

I haven't seen... Oh, actually, I do have an update. So I've been... I'm curious.

What's happening? I've been going on runs, and there's a group of people who stand in the middle of the sidewalk for an hour. That's obviously a place they've decided to congregate. And talk?

And talk. And it's a lot of people, a lot of dogs, and they don't move. When you're coming, when you're running, down the street, it's been making me crazy. And Dax suggested I take another route.

That's the obvious, like... Yeah. But... I hit it with the yes, Randy, pray for me.

Yeah. It's the obvious solution. Yes. But you don't want the opposite.

I don't. I don't. You want to fight. Actually, I don't want to fight, because I do want the world to change.

I do want the world to change. And, to be fair, to me, the other route would require the run to be a lot harder. Because it's awesome. So you're just lazy.

God. Oh, no. This is awful. This is awful.

You know what's amazing? You're beginning to do something you don't actually do on the show, which is, like, you run right out. Like, I'm going to solve all this in eight minutes, not ten weeks. No, no, no.

I did change. I changed my time. There we go. That's not the update.

The update is that I know I've talked about it on here, so my passive-aggressive hope is that maybe it would get back to them. I don't care if they stand. I just want them to step out of the way when people are coming. Anyway, one of our friends knows one of the people standing there.

As you might guess, from your reaction, and I have a certain one, it's been a polarizing topic in the comments. Oh, it has. Oh, it has. There's a lot of people going, you know.

Saying what? I should run in the street? No, more of what I brought up, which is, like, if you look at it from a utilitarian point of view, it's like, you know what? You're one person.

There are ten people communing. This is just measurably more effort. It's more effort for them to not. For ten people to adjust what they're doing versus the one person.

Even though what they're doing is. Also, if they're standing and talking with their dogs, it's fine. Nice thing. Community.

But in the middle of the sidewalk, where everyone's walking? Sidewalk. You think the sidewalk is for standing and taking up students when moving? Yeah.

This is huge. This is huge. Of an ever-evolving crisis here. This has been a situation.

Yeah, for a couple days. This is always a situation. This should cue you into our level of privilege that this is the enormous issue in our combined life. It's symbolic.

Enormously. She is a minority. This is the majority. Oh, right.

There's a minority also. I mean, I didn't even think about that. All right. I need to readjust.

Here we go. You thought I was a minority in this world. And specifically from Georgia, so from the South. I think that group does represent something a little bigger.

There's also an interesting dynamic that you live in New York, and we live in L.A., which has its own cultures about moving about. What is the culture here? If you're in a car, you never stop. Right.

You try to run everyone down. You have this illusion of anonymity in it. And so you behave in a way that you would never on the sidewalk. That's fascinating.

Which in New York is not true. The pedestrians totally rule. Yes. And it's incredibly democratizing.

Even if you're a billionaire, you have to walk on that same sidewalk. In New York, if it was crowded, if someone did that, people would freak out. If someone did what? If they couldn't get through.

You're constantly in situations where you have to maneuver around everything, whether it's the city drilling into the street for the hundredth time. That's true. Or like a line for something for a show or a bus. I mean, you're constantly maneuvering around a lot of people, and you just adjust.

You just move around. You're just cool with it. There's also randomly seven, 800 bags of trash. Like, it's trash day.

And now there's a mountain of trash in the evening. Yeah. I'm not being disparaging. It's just the reality of the logistics of the city.

I haven't noticed the trash. You haven't. No. You're probably not out late enough.

Now I know something about you. I'm out early. First of all, I want to ask a quick question about headphones. I'm just curious.

You don't have to wear them, or you could. I don't want to wear them. Great. I was curious, because it would not feel nice.

And you're like, I don't want that feeling. I never wear headphones on interviews and stuff like that. I don't understand why people do it, actually. I can tell you.

Tell me. From my point of view. Yeah. It eliminates and reduces the stimuli to just your voice and Monica's.

So it's a very kind of focusing auditory experience for me, which a lot of people don't need. I don't need that. I have super focus. And I actually like to hear all the ambience so it feels real.

If I'm too in the headphones, I'm like, wait, am I in reality? Is this pretend? Right. Yeah.

It kind of makes you self-conscious of what you're hearing or overly aware of it. Super focus. I don't need the super focus. I have my own desire of associated focus.

I don't need more of that. I want to feel in reality. I like it. Okay.

So when did you move to New York? 1990. From Israel? Yeah.

I was born in the States. Oh. I was born in Georgia. Oh, my gosh.

No, I was born in D.C. I lived in Georgia. Actually, I was born in D.C. I don't know.

You don't know. Atlanta. I don't know the neighborhood. Suburb of Atlanta, yeah.

Moved to Israel when I was seven. My parents were Israeli. And I lived in Europe. I lived in all sorts of places.

I came back to the United States in 1990 for grad school. At NYU? I went to grad school at Einstein, which is in the Bronx. Okay.

I did NYU later when I did psychology training. And I wanted to actually start with more of an umbrella question. There's obviously numerous reasons why a therapist keeps their private life private. I mean, you could list them, but there's quite obvious ones.

There's like, it's a pretty important place for boundaries. Can you tell me what your assumption is? Yeah. My assumption of why that wall should exist to some degree, I think that knowing a lot about you distracts the person to some degree.

And probably you are unavoidably drawn to make comparison. Like, if you have children, I have children, and I'm dealing with something. Like, I'm going to start using a lot of shortcuts. Like, you know, and you understand.

I'm going to be incorporating you a lot more than probably is fruitful. Is that some of it? That's a lot of it. When you know too much about another person, at least some of us feel inclined to then start taking care of them.

Oh, yeah. It takes the focus away from you, as you were saying. Whether it's comparison or caretaking or assumptions that, oh, I'm gay, they're straight, they're going to judge me. It brings a lot of extra data into the room that gets in the way.

It's why you have a therapist, sort of. Yeah. To have it be a third party. Yeah.

And then there's that thing called transference. You want the option for there to be somewhat of a blank screen so that you can project all sorts of things that you don't know and assume about your therapist. And that's part of the work. That's like really interesting.

Yeah. I would imagine too, I could easily hear some details and now ascribe an archetype to you that is already triggering to me or resembles some parent, some teacher or whatever the thing is. Or you'll hear some details and it will rob you of an archetype that you really needed to work on. Let's say you wanted to think that your therapist is a bigot and then you find out actually they're married to a person very different from them and it kind of ruins the fantasy.

So given that, do you have certain reservations and misgivings about doing press and letting people get to know you and doing interviews? And doing the show. Right. Let's start with that.

First of all, I do keep certain boundaries even when I do press and, you know, I have people do profiles on you and I did draw certain boundaries that I thought would be just too much for my patients. But I think it's cost my patients something. The fact that I'm more of a public figure, that they know more about me. Has anyone said anything?

It's interesting. Patients that have been with me since before I became this kind of public figure, they've said all sorts of things, lots of things. Yes, they've said they've suffered. They've carried a certain burden.

But it became part of the work, as most things are. People that joined my practice since I've been doing it, it's just like a given. Okay. It would be impossible that you're not experiencing a lot of the things and actor experiences when they become known.

And the people in their life, it's a very triggering experience because the first knee-jerk fear is like, well, I won't be as important as this new status. Or they're going to a status that I will get left behind. So that's the story. So then the confirmation bias kind of takes over and they look for only signs that that's happening.

And I think it can dramatically affect. So yeah, I would imagine some patients of yours are probably like, what am I? She's now on TV and she's everywhere. Yes, I think many patients have had that question and it keeps coming up.

If I have to, let's say, cancel a session or now I'm traveling, certain patients will be like, oh, of course you're leaving me or canceling my session because Hollywood. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So have you figured out an incredible technique to mitigate that? Because I could sure benefit from that.

My real work, my real life is my practice. I love doing the show and I love everything I've learned from it. And it's a really interesting world to visit. But my real life is my practice.

That's where my heart is. That's what I really, really love doing. Yeah, that's your real identity. I mean, everything is real, but that's my home.

That's what I care about the most. When patients bring up these kinds of questions, it's an opportunity for me to check in with myself and see, am I still following what really matters to me? Am I getting distracted? So I welcome it when people bring things up.

You're right, because it has a power that's very hard to observe. Right. There's a draw to the public and to press and all of that in a certain kind of world of its own. And it's great to have a real check-in when people say, are you too busy for me?

And I'm like, let me think about that. Let me be honest about that. First of all, with myself. So I encourage my patients to call me on it if that's what it feels like.

Yeah. Given that, are you comfortable telling me about where you're from and all that? Yeah. Okay, good.

So seven years ago, because I guess, let me even be more transparent. We interview people, Robert Sapolsky. We interview... I don't know anyone.

Okay. That's like the most embarrassing thing. I don't know anyone. That's wonderful.

He's not a celebrity. He's just like an intellectual guy. Okay, he's incredible. Eric Lander, head of Broad Institute at MIT.

People who study things that are really, really complex, and they have this enormous brain that they bring to bear on it. And then what I also think is kind of interesting is very few of them, I think they take for granted the thing that interested them was innately interesting, and they're not really curious so much about why that was a comforting pursuit. So I'm most always interested when I talk to people of like how we think we ended up here and why that looked like a comfortable... You're thinking like an analyst.

Okay. So I'm wondering, I would be guessing, but moving a lot, all those dynamics and being in group, out group, and how are people thinking and being very incentivized to understand how people think. Was that happening? Totally.

I was always with one foot in a culture and one foot out. My first language was English, and my parents spoke Hebrew between them. And I was the only Jew in my first elementary school. I was always navigating a few different cultures at the same time.

And like you're saying, trying to figure it out. Do you find that you would code switch? We maybe call it code switching. And then you get curious.

Do I even know? Can it get a little fragmented in a way? It certainly helped with creating what we call kind of in jargon, multiple self-states. So I have all sorts of self-states.

You know, when I'm speaking Hebrew and I'm with my peers, I have a certain slang and a certain way of being that's me. And then when I switch to English and speak with my colleagues, I'm a different part of myself. So I code switch a lot. And I think when I was a younger person, there was some confusion about, wait, what part is authentic?

What part is real? Where's my real home? Over time, you figure it out and you find that you're living in the in-between and it's all different versions. Yeah, if you figure it out, you just get comfortable.

You're like, oh yeah, I'm all these things and that's just fine. I'm all these things. It's not always fine, but I'm all these things. I think in a way, switching between all these different options has become sort of my life project in the sense that when you work with couples, really what you're trying to do both as a therapist and what you're trying to teach people to do is to hold multiple perspectives in mind.

You have a version of what happened. The person next to you has a very different version of what happened and they might actually be totally valid. And there's also my version looking from the outside. So there's validity to all of it and there's interest in the tension between.

So it's become kind of my life project, living multiplicity. It's in my politics as well. So I made it work somehow. Yeah.

On the show, you do get to see that because what I love about the show is we see you with your mentor. With Virginia. Yeah, who seems amazing. And then you're with your other colleagues and then we see you in practice and you are a bit different in each of the surroundings, which is cool.

And it is what we all do. Aren't we all? You're right. It's really fascinating for ease of generic title.

You're the boss in the room. You sit in the seat and then you go sit in the other seat and it's like, oh, it's a circle. So this is more of egalitarian. And then, yes, there's this kind of advisor role and we get to, yeah, see you take on these different layers in the hierarchy, which is fun.

Now, you got your PhD in the 90s. There were options on the table at that time, right? CBT is already an approach and a lot of these things are approaches. So why specifically psychoanalysis?

And I think it would be helpful for you to explain to us. To describe the difference. And maybe the evolution from Freud psychoanalyzing until now. Awesome.

Yeah, yeah. In an article you wrote that I read, you gave us a really concise layout of that. Oh, that's fine. Should I start more with theoretically or should I start about my own journey?

Yeah, tell me about your journey because you're taking an intro to psych at some point. Right. My intro to psych was not in college. My intro to psych was as a teenager.

I had, let's say, a very active teenage life, tumultuous, wild. And I got really, really lucky where my parents were clueless, but they somehow found this incredible analyst for me who changed my life. At what age? 16.

I started reading Freud and Mnuchin and Artie Lange and my whole world just opened up. That's really my introduction to the field. And it tremendously helped me understand myself, my family, what's happening in the world, all this mess of feelings that a teenager experiences. It all started to make more sense.

And it was already a very psychoanalytic or psychodynamic approach. That's what helped me. Now, just to divert and say a few words about what's the difference. So some therapies are aimed at very direct problem solving.

That's when you have behavioral therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, where you target a problem and you analyze what leads to a certain behavior, how do you eliminate it, what leads to certain distorted thoughts, and how do you confront them logically. You can include all sorts of things like EMDR, all sorts of other more physiological-based ways to, let's say, calm anxiety or regulate emotion. All very helpful techniques of solving problems and dealing with more or less the here and now. Psychoanalysis takes somewhat of a different approach, where the primary assumption, first of all, is that we're guided by deeply unconscious forces.

And those are really interesting and really impactful to discover. They're all... these different psychological techniques that basically open up a space of exploration internally where you make sense of much deeper layers of what's motivating you and what's motivating the world around you and that can include like early early experiences in your life that shaped your way of thinking it can include ways that your mind is driven by all sorts of impulses that society doesn't allow you to think about and you repress or dissociate from and psychoanalysis helps you find a language for and something that myself and my peers have been very busy with is also ways in which all sorts of sociocultural factors come into us and shape how we feel and think and we're not used to thinking about it consciously that's what your article i read was about that's the piece of the times yeah about the impact of blm and me too materializing these relationships so i think people understand this intuitively we talked about just now when monica sees this group on the street and they're all the hegemonic group that means many things it means the immediate thing which is an obstacle and that means potentially other things from the subconscious you had to mention it i didn't even clock that as a factor but i know her so well you would have been five minutes of talking probably you didn't have a time with me i don't know i don't know i think if i wasn't quote white probably i would have been more sensitive to that i didn't think about it i didn't think about it okay and i still don't know if it's hard yeah i don't know for sure at least to think about it at least to be one of the dimensions i can give a personal anecdote which is just generally i get along so well with our nine-year-old we have a very nice symbiotic flow the girl both girls and the nine-year-olds very much like my wife so a lot of practice and then similarly the 11-year-olds like me and she does very well with her so we rarely have a thing we're laying in bed and we're debating whether this math problem we did the day before the answer was this or that and i said no it was this and she said no it was not it was this you said that that's what she said no you said the answer was this and i said well no i would have never said that because this time this is that so i would have said that and now we're getting into the weeds and we are now arguing about what i said and what i didn't say and it's uncharacteristic and i go to bed that night and i'm like that was out of the blue and then the next day i said to her honey i'm so sorry you stumbled into my primal fear of being dyslexic and stupid and so it's so important to me that you know i'm smart and i got that right and i was just emotionally so activated by that but it's from when i was your age and i'm so sorry and it doesn't matter what i said and probably you're right or whatever but that's what was happening so it's like yes she and i are having what on the surface is we're debating whether i said this or that but actually something quite profound is happening for you yes and the stakes are high if there's anyone i want to appear to be smart in front of it's my children of course so that would be my subconscious right yes does it frustrate you i get a little frustrated because we do interview people that practice many different approaches to this are you annoyed by the techniques being pitted against each other because i feel like what are we talking about is like is a jog great or is lifting weights great or is pilates great all these things are probably beneficial health wise i agree with you there is a way in which i have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about these shorter term techniques first of all there's a way in which managed care has taken over medicine and the mental health field and has demanded a certain level of superficiality that i find really troubling like they want results and they want a timeline i don't know what they mean by results stop complaining and just be quiet medicate yourself and just stop complaining that's not results for a psychoanalyst a lot of the complaining is about things that should be complained about and need deep addressing so in that sense i have a bit of a chip about shorter term techniques and their cbt techniques can be incredibly useful and sometimes you do need quick and short-term solutions for things but as a way of living i'm pro the examined life take your time slowness go deep i guess i'm suggesting it's all a false dichotomy which is you could be doing that work and you could also assemble a toolkit for these acute periods where that's appropriate that's the tool to pull out at that moment yeah and i refer to cognitive behavioral therapists or to emdr i like working with people that work that way it's just funny to see tribalism percolate up in something so like right i think when it's tribalism it's ego so it's not interesting now take us from freud's kind of primary concept with the subconscious and then where we're at now in terms of like psychoanalytic thinking yeah fun questions thank you so freud he introduced a few hugely important revolutionary concepts first of all the idea that we are governed by many forces of motivation that we are unaware of just the fact that we're like governed by an unconscious it's like a huge revolution we all now take it for granted but that was like huge and it's like victorian era when everything's about just regulating behavior you know corsets and then he introduced the importance of sexuality as like a driving force the veto sexuality that it's already alive and kicking in children the children are motivated by all sorts of sexual fantasies these were all very big concepts again we take it for granted now but it was huge yeah and dangerous and needing to be regulated we're always regulating sexuality society is always super panicky anxious about sexuality and all about regulation i think uniquely here but maybe not uniquely we're pretty good at it yeah we're high on the spectrum and then came people after freud like the kleinians the british object relations school that started looking not only at drives like sexuality or aggression but they started looking at early childhood and what happened for example between mothers and babies it doesn't have to be mothers but they particularly looked at mothers and really early experiences even at the breast where what we like to think of as these beatific moments of bliss between mother and baby actually they hold within them huge dramas you remember from raising your kids the baby can be blissfully happy and then 20 minutes later they're wet and hungry and they're like screaming and the world is ending worst and best they have their life within 20 minutes yeah the great mom that was there a minute ago the great dad that was there a minute ago are now the most hated object in the world because they're not able to supply the food fast enough they're cold or they're busy on the phone and those switches between love and hate and between those extreme ways of being are where we all start and whether the caretakers are going to do a good job of mitigating that kind of daily crisis is going to shape what we expect for the rest of life is the world going to help me when i'm in need or is the world just basically abandoning and sucky is this the birth of attachment theory yes for example attachment theory and all sorts of other ways that we learn to organize our inner world it's attachment theory it's the kind of defenses we will use psychological defenses a lot gets organized early in life so that's kind of the object relations school then came all the american schools like the ego psych schools i'm gonna get into that blow right through that yeah but then came a very important american school which is the interpersonal school which really focused on the quality of relationships both between caregivers and growing children but also just generally between people and how the quality of the relationship shapes the inner world which is a very american way of thinking in a good way i'm not being critical here and that changed psychoanalysis a lot the europeans are still kind of dragging behind on that and nowadays there's what we call the relational school which applies all of that into how we conduct therapy so we change from the caricature of the analysis this kind of remote blank screen that like sits there behind the couch and says nothing scribbling and if you say to your classical analyst well you hate me the analyst will say well what makes you think that so nowadays we don't do that we involve ourselves more in the sense of well what have i done that gives you that feeling right now let me bring myself in here as part of what's going on in the room how am i contributing to what's going on in the room i'm not like an omniscient know-it-all analyst communing with god and delivering interpretations but i'm part of what's going on in the room and i'll take responsibility so that's where we are now do you only do couples i see individuals i love the work with individuals i like the combination yeah the couples are so fascinating yeah i would like you to tell me what systems thinking is because i know that's a big aspect of this right systems thinking is super important when you work with couples and when you work with groups the idea with systems thinking is that we each bring into the world a set of inclinations and traits and characteristics but then when you're joining some kind of group or systems could be a group of two it could be a team it could be a family the system needs all sorts of things from its members like it needs someone to volunteer leadership capabilities it needs someone to be the caretaker it needs someone to be the critic we need all these functions when you join a system the system calls upon its members to volunteer certain functions and we're each more and less inclined to volunteer certain things but it will change depending on what team we join like with some teams you'll find yourself oh i'm kind of a leader here and with some teams you're like actually i'm a follower because there's someone else that's doing it differently and better than me now so when you work with a couple you try to understand how they're each drawn into certain roles based on what the couple as a system needs so it's a very different way of thinking about let's say a crisis that a couple goes through you're trying to understand what's going on with the system with a unit as a whole that leads them to this crisis how do they each take this role when you're raising kids there are certain things that need to happen and not everyone can do everything what i was going to suggest as an example that people i think experience most strongly is they go out into their adult life and they kind of gravitate toward a system that they wanted and then they return home for the holidays and you can feel yourself clicking to the role you were ascribed in that situation and you're like no no no i don't want this role anymore i feel like that's when people are really aware of it yes and that's why around the holidays i cannot go on vacation stay tuned for more farm share expert if you dare money what do you think is your role in my family yeah well i'm about to go i'm going home tonight and i'm already anxious already where's home george they're still there and i was with them also a couple weeks ago and i have an incredible therapist as well and i got back from there and i was like i can't share this we talk about it so much and it's still here what's happening if they don't know how to do something or they ask a million questions there's always a million questions like okay so when we were at the can i add so you know they both moved here from india yes but my mom grew up being parents yes my parents but my mom grew up here she came from six and so they came to my hotel and they called and they're like is it this hotel and i was like yeah that's the hotel i sent you yes and they're like okay well it's gonna be 30 minutes great then they call again 30 minutes later we're here what about parking just park yeah don't leave the drive do not leave the drive when you get out that one's not gonna work and i've done a lot of work on this so i was like don't get mad yeah they don't want to park it's fine just valet valet's easy you can just drive right up and give them the car okay okay bye you know and then they come everything's great when we're there and then they're getting ready to leave and my dad's like what about the valet what do you mean what do you mean what's the problem these are easy things there's a million questions because of their anxiety speaking of role is it also because you're born here you're the one that knows and they get to lean on you well and it's dangerous actually if they expose how out of step they are with what everyone else knows for me they're exposing their otherness that's how i think my subconscious is working right it's always when we're at the dinner if i perceive that my dad doesn't know how to pronounce something i feel like i have to be the one to order it because i translate to mitigate yeah to not draw attention to the fact that we're different you're so wonderfully different though by the way i know i know i know logically i just want to add that and he doesn't consciously have any of this for him he's just like i want to know about the valet i made this existential thing where how is he living without me essentially can i ask you speaking of systems thinking when you're not around he probably knows how to deal with the valet you're quite successful yeah they are both totally functioning and that's what my therapist is always like they are fine they're living they're successful they're doing just fine but i've made it if they don't know how to go deal with the valet they're gonna die i made it so extreme in my head because i have a ton of anxiety too and i think their anxiety makes me angry because that's where i got this you're the reason i have it and it's like one silly thing again it's symbolic of everything i get it oh i get it i totally get it he's parental he's family arrangement and my brother's just there doesn't care because he's not the girl he's got a great role in the system eight years younger than me he's got what he's got a great role in the system you don't have to deal with this yet and he's just hanging sometimes i look at him and i think why aren't you feeling this kind of stress that i'm feeling but that's my issue yeah oh yeah holidays in systems trying to evaluate i think what's interesting we've got the systems expert talking about systems in general they're very interesting they are perfectly designed to produce the outcome you're observing you have to almost look backwards with systems right it's like no no this is the outcome they produce to think that this system will produce a different outcome we already know what the system produces yes you have done a lot of work on disassociation maybe we could dig in a little bit what that means for people i think very common it's a spectrum the one i'm not familiar with that seems like a sister state is depersonalization i don't know what that is generally dissociation going back to freud you really introduce the concept of repression that if there's something you don't want to know about yourself or something happened to you you repress it meaning it happened you registered it and then you push it out of mind you forget that was in quotes dissociation is a different model of mind it's when things happen that are either traumatic or to some degree something you can't tolerate you either don't process it you kind of leave it hanging and not fully comprehend what it means or you shunt it towards a part of the psyche that is not your main part of your personality you kind of keep it to the side to a part that's kind of not me that not me over there just registered all those bad things that were happening over there but i'm not going to pay attention to it because the me that needs to keep functioning is moving ahead in the world that don't happen to someone else because to take that on would be too much exactly so there are many ways to dissociate some extreme ways would be multiple personality what we call dissociative identity disorder you really shunt parts of the psyche to the side and they develop like a whole world of their own and this one is so extreme that there's almost a lack of awareness that the other states exist right one of the ways that we think about multiple personalities is that one part of the psyche doesn't even know about these other personalities or there's amnesia for what the other personalities are going through and you treat people with multiple well this season we have someone that's approaching that right yes alexis he has dissociative disorder and to the degree where he doesn't remember the arguments he's having with his partner yes alexis what happens to him is he's very afraid of his his own rage and there are all sorts of reasons why and when he gets triggered and gets enraged or triggered into like a trauma zone he really switches and becomes a very different kind of person who can defend himself who can sort of defend himself more he's trying globally he's actually making much more pain for himself right that one that's hard to watch and going back to depersonalization when people depersonalize what happens to them is in a way they sort of remove themselves from what's happening they either really numb out the feeling or they kind of leave their body and look at what's happening from the ceiling okay that's what i relate to you do yeah having gone through experiences where i go like okay we're gonna not pay attention this is gonna exist i can observe it but i'm gonna be over here distracting myself with my own thoughts and fantasies and this will end at some point and then i'll rejoin yeah yeah a lot of those experiences interesting so i really relate to that one i guess i thought that was dissociation it is dissociation when we call it depersonalization is when you suddenly find yourself feeling like actually this doesn't feel real it feels like a movie yeah or i can't feel the things that are happening to my body which i know that's depersonalization when it's mild it can be a superpower but when it's not mild it's extremely uncomfortable and it works i have done it in the past when it wasn't necessary yeah do you want to say something about it i was molested so that was an experience as a kid yeah as a kid there was a lot of violent stepdads in the mix addiction galore i'm an addict i've done weird shit i think it was a very useful tool as i was walking into a crack house in downtown detroit at four in the morning going well this is dangerous for him right but i'm just like floating yes i am and i will have the thing i want at some point here in the near future and then i'll rejoin him and when your actions aren't matching your identity what you think of yourself as your actions are not matching up i think that is common right where you just separate is that the same when your actions don't match what you say that could be simply hypocrisy right right there's plenty of people like that in the government but when you're in a way splitting yourself when there's a part that's almost zombie like doing something and your mind is over here that's dissociation specific example would be like when i was a thief when i was an addict oh we were at a person's house that person was nice and then i noticed they had extra and then i stole from them and i go we don't do this right and so there's a disconnect while that dirty business happens i'm trying to artfully hit pause on the experience i don't have to take on the reality of my behavior that's a really great way to describe dissociation being in a relationship with someone like that like in the season because i'm on alexis yes feels so like it's impossible he doesn't have memories that the other person has that are painful and aggressive and hurt them but they don't even know that they did it i just feel so epic yeah it is epic i mean you saw the two of them what they had going for them is their deep psychological insight into all of this and first of all their profound love for each other they were in process of working on this stuff alexis knew and wanted to get better at it they were an incredible couple to work with i want to earmark that case because it actually got kind of personal to you and we saw maybe one of your bad word for it but achilles yes because of course as a show you're the hero of our story so it's interesting to have a pretty insatiable desire to know about you and there's not a lot of info for us well there is there isn't there isn't i don't know your history i don't know about your children i learned you're from israel we spent time you know little nuggets here and there but a character normally would have had kind of an introduction where we get the backstory and then we take a journey with them so it's part of the fun of watching as you yourself as the lead character of a story we watch is a mystery to us which is very go ahead i have to respond to that yeah so that's uncomfortable sure just character logically but the therapist in a way is to some degree the lead character in a therapy but also not at all i'm doing the work i'm the theory i was really unspecific in what i was talking about there's the reality of what's happening that happens to get captured and there you're right you're not the hero of that then there's a documentary series that's another thing i guess i'm less connected to that as you should be i'm almost letting you into the perspective of the viewer hard for you to probably touch which is i turn on my television there's a program presented to me the couples change one person stays consistent the blueprint of my brain for story is that's my lead character that's my hero now that's not the reality of what's happening in the room at all i'm not suggesting that right this is great this is uncomfortable right yeah that is uncomfortable well first of all i'm not look people go into the profession of being a therapist or an analyst because they're actually quite private yeah yeah i like being private i like the story being someone else i don't like the idea of me being the main character but i also have a theoretical belief i understand what you're saying but you're joining me not in being myself you're joining me as the viewer you're coming with me on this journey to understand how to think how to listen not me personally we're together we're thinking about what is this human thing this human journey we're on if i had used the word guidance at a hero would that be less i don't know it probably feels like you're dishonoring it you're really dishonoring what's happening yeah by claiming to be the hero yeah i'm channeling what i've learned to do you are and i would feel that exactly yeah i would think no no no don't suggest i'm the lead of a show i think you're just saying it's human curiosity that takes over a little bit because we are learning so much about the couples we know everything about these couples and you're learning how to think like an analyst exactly and then i think human curiosity starts coming into play where you do start thinking like what's orna's deal but i think that curiosity goes down mostly when we talk about it i don't know if it's coming we talk about couple therapy all the time i've got multiple first dates that i bring it up like have you watched this you should watch this yeah but everything we're talking about are the things that are arising within the couples but then how you handle it is part of the conversation so i think what your hope is is happening we are taking in how to approach these different conversations i'm talking about this vague concept of story i'm acutely aware of story and the power of story and what we do in the format we somehow innately acquire just we're born with right archetypes and story we understand the world through story i mean even my dog does honestly i think a mammal does i would agree like wait you did this why where are we going right there's an arc here it's how we're computing this reality we're seeing multiple things are happening at once is really what it is it's like you're having your real life experience the couples are having their very real experience and they are immediate story where we meet them we know there's a problem this is very archetypal we're going to slay the dragon together yeah but unfortunately you're the dragon slayer a little bit in that yes i'm going to be interested in you i want to know about you i watch you and i'm very drawn to you i appreciate what you do and then of course i want to know everything about you yeah so the akila's heel with kazimar and alexis yeah you were referring to like my savior fantasy yes by the way i'm so glad you labeled it that because i suffer from that as well if i feel like there's someone to be protected i'm there so you have a touch of that i guess yeah yeah i mean you pick a lot of you pick a lot of profession for it right but i can't imagine it's universal among psychoanalysts yeah i think it is i mean not everyone i could see someone actually having just an innate desire to solve problems how about that and in that case maybe they don't even have that hero complex part of it those probably will go more towards cbt ah interesting manual driven evidence-based you do a b happens a little more mechanical yeah okay let me say that i hope i'm not offending anyone no i don't think so i said mechanical you know maybe i offended somebody so we're almost to the show which is you have a practice you've had it for years you also teach at nyu have you been aware of mating and captivity yes the book and the podcast yeah her podcast has a different name oh i think you're right but yeah that's awesome where should we begin where should we begin i heard that i love it in the same way i look up therapy and in a weird way i'm going to compare it to aa which is this person has a very similar problem i have and i'm hearing them out loud talk about it but i'm not getting defensive because it's not aimed at me i have this little bit of arm's length to recognize and relate and hear solution that may or may not work but it was no one pointing a finger at me and saying right so it doesn't trigger any of my defensiveness got it i'm so much more open to hearing it when it's not personal to me and i think listening to where should we begin have that power where it's like wow i'm getting to hear her say things to these people that if it were directed at me i probably would get defensive but i can't hear it because i'm not in the room and it's a huge gift that's a good way of thinking of one of the reasons this works i think that's why the show is we'll get to why it's so comforting but i'm just curious i have to imagine there were reservations and is this something that should be consumed by people or should this remain private big reservations first of all as you know generally when you do therapy there's this really really intense firewall of confidentiality i never talk to people about my patients ever it's really sacred and the feeling is that without that frame it's not gonna work that's the basic of trust and then the idea of doing a documentary where you're completely letting go of that it's like what's left can you even do therapy does it even feel like therapy so that was a big concern and is it ethical when people are consenting to it do they know what they're consenting to we had a lot of reservations are they gonna be honest i mean that's they're gonna work are they gonna be honest there were many reservations and not to mention that people told me this is absolutely gonna ruin your career like what are you doing people are gonna hate you and there were many many fears and reservations but it turned out that it's definitely different doing it without the frame of confidentiality but there was so much else going on there that created a different kind of holding and frame for the participants that it worked well i would argue what happens in there often happens in this room which is people have an awareness that this ultimately land in millions of people's labs but also they forget that regularly and i forget that i'm forgetting that right now yeah it seems almost impossible but then when you're experiencing it you're like oh no it's quite possible but you originally were just coming on as an advisor is that accurate yes my first degree i did in film and i was like oh this sounds like a really interesting project but i'm worried because they're gonna find someone who's gonna botch the job and they're gonna portray the therapist as this narcissistic person and i'm like oh my god let me see if i can influence how they're gonna do it so it kind of started as an effort for you to protect because the field the field is out and then i started talking with elise and with josh the directors and they're just such amazing people their ethics their creativity the way they think of documentary and we talked so much about the parallels between like documentary filmmaking and psychoanalysis and probably also what you do here there are many many parallels and it just became something a really exciting project and required a lot of trust for me because i will say i give them an a plus on not being ever exploitative amazing which is very very hard to do it's not an easy task you could even set up with great intentions but that doesn't mean it's not it's so clean we've been doing this for years now i've witnessed them in certain very key moments when there's a certain kind of pressure from the network or test moments where it was like are they gonna go for commercial are they gonna go for ethics and they always went for ethics always and if any of us had any concern ethics was always the top top top they're amazing people because i would guess and i didn't even know this until i started researching you but that you do do more than the couples we see there are other couples that we don't follow them right and i would imagine in that situation there were some that would be quote great for tv do people apply they have a whole recruiting casting they interview thousands and thousands of couples i imagine every single couple across all seasons has been incredible incredible even though there's issues that span across every single couple they're all so specifically juicy oh it's so good and very lovable people yes yes you love every single one even at first sometimes you don't right i think that's part of the gift of the show is that you can see how you can even feel repulsed by someone but if you really take the time to listen you're gonna love them all right so now we're at the show and i have now a million questions there's just a lot of things you exhibit that i really have a hard time believing someone's capable of it so okay and we'll not name names we better edit stuff out when we talk about the show we talked about one percent we had to cut exactly when i get sued maybe if we said something disparaging about well i was specifically labeling somebody with a condition i think that could be liable because that could impact someone from our show yeah previous season and that could obviously impact someone's employment and everything else we can do this without making it specific to anyone it starts with a question of maybe do you even believe in certain labels because the thing i'm astounded by with you is i will often watch someone in the couple's dynamic and i will say oh this person's clearly a narcissist okay when someone's a narcissist now there's a known pattern that we expect i want that generally woman out of that situation my protectiveness you really seem to resist getting stuck on a label and assuming there's a predictable pattern that needs to be interrupted how on earth do you do that do you believe in labels do you believe there are people that are x y or z i have like a complex response to that i think diagnostic labels are sometimes good as quick shortcuts to capture a bunch of information but they always leave out a huge amount of who the person is and similar to what we were saying earlier about systems that systems can call out certain qualities in people you can be in a certain environment that will let's say call out for a lot of narcissism and you can be in a different kind of environment that is very safe or supportive and somebody that you thought was really a terrible malignant narcissist suddenly becomes like completely capable of caring and seeing another person okay right so it's a really deep belief in the system but it's also deep belief in humanity we're all very complex and we're capable of a lot a lot of different ways we can all be you're telling me a little bit you've been a thief you've been an addict you've been this you've been that and now you're like a dad and like you know full of goodwill i can feel it oh if i were ai and i was a probabilistic predictor yeah not in any of these situations but do you at all have to fight the inclination to diagnose i don't have to fight it i just know i can diagnose i've been a diagnostician earlier in life that's how i got myself through grad school i did thousands of diagnostic interviews and i can diagnose a person like that and sometimes it's useful when you have to like triage when you have to make a quick decision okay does this person need to be hospitalized i can do that very quickly and it can be very useful and sometimes when i work with people i can say to myself okay narcissism or schizoid or something like that but it's a temporary station on the way to being a more full whole person to use narcissism if someone has really intense narcissistic defenses there are techniques that we have nowadays to help the person through that stuck way of organizing their psyche towards the capacity to actually see another person another way i might label what i think i observed is like you have a kind of endless optimism i do i have really strong optimism i'm romantic i believe in a better world despite what's happening right now i believe israel and palestine can find the way i do well you have to you have to work backwards yeah i'm gonna pee my pants oh wonderful this never happens i can't find this happens six and a half years i'll be right goodbye i'll go too you have to go no i'll drink my coffee no no no i'm good i'm a camel i'm a mediterranean camel okay stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare okay thanks for bearing with us it's our first time ever of all three was having to go to the bathroom oh man i'm so sorry that was really unique i never have to pee am i making you all nervous no maybe well there is of course when we see how observant you are it'd be crazy to not assume that when we chat you're probably gonna see the reality of what we are which is awesome well yeah okay so i understand the resisting the labels and not even being useful but i also think we are intuitively pattern recognition machines that is useful useful and an achilles or no i don't think it's an achilles but what i was trying to say is not that diagnostic labels are not useful they're stations on the way to something better they help you organize information they help you see a pattern let's use another thing not narcissism if i see that someone is organized around what we call a schizoid personality organization what's that the tendency to retreat from too much social stimuli and kind of encapsulate one in a very insular personality organization closed off not too much feeling that's people's way of defending against too muchness it's not a place to say but that would be the couple this season rex and joey yeah yes yes but then yeah we'll spoil as a clinician it's helpful to identify those patterns so you're not wasting your efforts treating someone as if they're suffering from bipolarity it helps like if you realize someone is bipolar or has that inclination to be intensely consumed by really intense shifts in mood it's really helpful to know it it doesn't define everything but you have a bit of a playbook yes you minimally know what stuff will set them off right yes if someone is bipolar you know to understand if they're showing up and they're looking disheveled for a few weeks you're like okay we're on a ramp up yeah yeah interesting by the way i imagine that's exactly what we keep your job kind of endlessly interesting is you're adjusting and react or not reacting now we have like a better word for react we don't want to react we want to respond yes yes no no words so yeah you want to respond accordingly and i bet that it keeps it almost endlessly novel yeah so yeah two things are happening like one is there is this pattern and that's observable but then there's all this novelty intermixed and all these diagnostic entities you can think of them as just ways that a person figured out how to organize themselves whether it's because they were born with an inclination to go that way or things happen to them but a person is capable of much more than just that and that's why a therapist is there you have taken me personally monica and i talked about it monica as well it's like you have with your endless optimism and hope there are people that i wrote off in many seasons and we get to episode eight i'm like god yeah they're a fucking suffering person like all of us and i'm so glad she was patient i wouldn't have been and now i'm here thank you for bringing me along with you yeah one of us is like a few episodes ahead and then the other person's like oh this person is doing this normally like just wait just wait just wait don't make any decisions yeah it's beautiful i feel that this is gonna sound very braggy but i feel that a little bit about this show we'll have people in and people have preconceived notions about a lot of these people and i think what's nice about it is when you really get to hear someone and hear their story you like them agree it's the same with all these people they come in and i'm like ooh and then i miss those people on the next season it's nice what i can tell you just from my experience sitting here is that you guys are doing the thing that for example an analyst does i feel like you're offering a lot of negative space in terms of poetry like you're really curious and you're giving a lot of space to think and talk this particular kind of interview you're not sitting here with your agenda but you're curious curious and opening the space and i feel like oh i'm enjoying this yeah by the way i bet that also parallels being a new therapist and being one that's been doing it for a while yes at the beginning out of fear i think i did drive a more linear line through all this and over time when i was very confident and comfortable something arose that was much greater than the thing i was aiming at and then learning to trust that as its own skill set that's what an analyst does can we trade jobs for a couple weeks what's your job like you're seeing it yeah this is my job does this look like fun yeah right yeah just a whirlwind of really fun interesting people cycle through the one thing i we're doing right now so my wife and i are watching season five four i feel like i'm already gonna know the answer to this no but do you have a belief that everyone can be a couple because often i go well i know why they're attracted to each other but this is really a match made in hell and i think people will be better off finding so you know do you enter it with a belief that everyone can make it if they do the work or are there times where you feel like you have to help them exit this peacefully i generally don't feel like it's my job to make that decision unless there's like a really abusive situation where i feel like people get kind of caught in the addiction of abuse and then i feel like my job is to at least try to help them break that but that's rare most people are not caught in that and even people who are temporarily caught in that they want help they want to get out of it and then i try but other than those cycles of snm abuse and mutual destruction it's not my job to say who should stay together i'm going to help you try to stay together and bring out the best in you the best version of what you can be and i'm not here to levy a verdict right people are incredible they do all sorts of really amazingly surprising things who they choose to be with and why and what couples end up having like a long long long marriage that you never would have predicted and others you thought they're imagining heaven and they break up people are unpredictable thank god well we even talk about like the success rate for arranged marriages like you have to take that on board too that's a reality right i can't predict what's going to work and i try to help people just make the best of what they want to do and it sounds like it's incredibly low percentage and that kind of makes sense because there's some self-filtration process that they would end up in front of you in the first place that you've definitely weeded out some sector that's on some hell-bent collision course they're not looking for help but on the occasions where it has happened you ever break the bond of the system you do in the room or have you had to sidebar a member of the couple and say i'm worried about you and does that feel like a betrayal of the if that has happened that's a really good question it's kind of a technique question you're asking a technique question not about the show correct yeah yeah sorry we're dipping in and out i rarely see people separately i like to see couples together because of my strong leaning on systems thinking but once in a while i've had situations where i've asked one person to actually leave the room so i can talk to one person and talk to them really face-to-face head-on about how abusive they're being and i didn't want to humiliate them in front of their partner so i've had that i've had situations where i felt like someone is really not at all acknowledging the degree to which their alcoholism is getting in the way of anything that could be possible in the room and again not to humiliate them i wouldn't have their partner leave the room and talk to them directly but most of the time i try to keep it in the room yeah so you have this incredible optimism and understanding and then also you have this very sexy set of boundaries and directness now this is where i think there's a little bit of israeli in there totally when they're highly disagreeable group in our society is it easier for you to be direct like that yes it's totally an israeli thing yeah it's very very cool i'm like really impressed the way you wrangle some tigers that's israeli have you ever been to israel no no i haven't everyone's like that it's all wrangling tigers well we have a lot of sociologists and we'll talk about these different indexes cross-culturally and we all have these fun things and a fear of power you know brazil's very high in their fear there's zero fear of power america's close so i think it's really fascinating these cultural differences yeah the patience you have with some of these people what season was it it was a jewish couple michael and michael yes yes and i ended up loving them yes i loved her i know let's be honest her yes at first yeah but at first she was a lot yes she was coming hot very and i was you're a loser you don't like you're blatantly going i'm like a loser yeah so that's a rough first sell and i was so impressed by you not immediately jumping on her i was like get her out of here i would not be able to handle this so i do think you and probably couples therapists in general have to have an extreme level of patience and then also do you think you care a lot how do i ask this like do you care a ton about justice yes not in the world but like my running thing that's a justice issue for me i'm way too easily triggered by quote injustices not real heavy injustices so those are fine no those are way worse my guess is most my guess is most people have a problem with that whole pot you get a pass these fucking people on the sidewalk well everyone's just a person you know i don't know but no so i would guess that it's actually a little lower because some of the people in your office are committing these quote injustices a lot like even that even an example of just straight up like you're a loser to me that's horrible you can't talk to someone like that and that's my own trigger i would assume you don't have that or you turn it off it's a good question i mean if you saw with being in will yes yep i confronted her very harshly about the way she was talking to will that's true i don't know if i can figure out the rule here or how it works for me it's some kind of gut feeling with michael i could sense that with all the i'm gonna use a label like histrionic suffering i could sense her suffering under and that she needed to be calmed down she was like a fussy baby she needed to trust you yes i needed to build trust in the moment that was the salient knockout punch my wife was watching this and heard this in a way i've never heard you said and that's your anxiety yes exactly that was the moment i thought all that goodwill got you to the point where you could say and that is your anxiety and that's why you're suffering from it because it's in you yes which i had to say maybe times she wasn't that open to that but eventually she yes you really brought her there it was really beautiful to watch so i have different triggers i don't necessarily watch it and think something's unjust i also go to the person who is generically subservient in this and i'm more curious why does that please you you have found yourself in this situation well that's systemic thinking okay right okay yeah because i'm like no one's a victim no one woke up here's your partner fuck you deal with it so we're all getting something out of this and trying to figure out why is this soothing to me is interesting i agree that was the most interesting piece of in the first season there's a couple that we referenced before again upon first glance the male seems to be very controlling let's say that but actually what me and that ended up talking about a ton was what was she getting out of the relationship that was way more interesting actually she was getting a lot yeah oh okay let's talk about the throuple they're not a throuple oh sorry they're a polycule a poly what polycule cule polycule polycule yeah a throuple is when all three are oh they're all engaged with each other intimately involved they're not great distinction and i didn't mean to screw that up now full disclosure i was in an open relationship for nine years it was lovely but our rules was like i i want you to like me so i'm just gonna say we met cheating on people i was 21 she was 20 i very much loved her i said i think this is one of the requirements for you and i make it long term i'm afraid we're gonna break up over this and i don't want to i would like to have a baby with you i want to stay together and we've demonstrated we're bad at this what about that we demonstrate we're bad at monocity yes we're bad at monocity like let's call this what it is and then many many talks our arrangement was basically i don't really care if something happens and i don't know about it i have no desire to hear about it and that was the thing so that worked pretty darn good for us there was evolutions over the course of nine years all that to say the poly scenario seems so complicated because you have three relationships happening like the two individual relationships that are happening and then their collective relationship and they all have other relationships yeah and now i'm gonna expose my old fogey puritanicalism i have a hard time watching it going guys this is not tenable i have a pessimism about how tenable that is again it's almost impossible for two humans to go have it's so hard and it's not just it's twice as hard it's a permutation math equation it's actually nine times harder there's some math there and so has that even been hard for you or does that challenge your optimism or you seem to be very optimistic even about the polyandry life polyandry i love that i fucked that up the poly life that just means women i think who have multiple partners polyandry i'm learning from patients and participants about the world of non-monogamous different kind of social structures my patients and participants on the show in a certain way they're my teachers the way i'm thinking about it what i've come to this far is when you're in this kind of poly arrangement there are heavy prices to pay certain kinds of safety possessiveness that we all have we like to know what's ours this is my toy am i the most special there are all sorts of things that most of us want and need but what i'm also learning is several things they're gaining what they've said to me many times more love more joy more sex they've got more it sounds appealing i mean so i'm joining you whatever works for you as long as people are not getting hurt too much as long as truth is being preserved in a certain way you're respecting each other's contracts i'm learning with you how this goes and i don't know i don't have a conclusion right you did at one point this season have sessions with the two unique pairs within they wanted it they wanted it like that would that have been an instinct of yours my instinct is always who's my unit if this is the system i'll meet all three of you but they taught me that it's not necessarily the three of them that is the unit they have this kind of other map you're dancing around this term primary partner yeah and there's some hesitation on one person to declare a primary partnership it's really interesting but i also this is not what you're asking but i'm just going there please there's a way in which i've come to think about all these new structures of relationship as a way that the younger generation is organizing in response to the big things that are happening now like climate crisis interesting and ways that the general social structures have collapsed they're looking for new ways to be they're looking for how can we live as a community that is not about each tiny little unit circling the wagons around our little unit and everyone else is an enemy yeah they're doing something that i find really interesting and politically interesting inclusivity inclusivity in a big way that's a very interesting take on it it's almost like i see the generation before me i see their approach i see the outcome i see the system and the results of the system so maybe i'm rejecting all parts of the system or many parts of the system this one would be the most fundamental for minimally american history like the family unit yeah family values they're looking at us and they're like you guys suck what are you where you love us what are you preaching about what are you doing life no i'll tell you a new thing yeah you're either together but you hate each other or you're divorced yeah congrats you're gonna be so poor you're gonna be homeless and who's gonna support you yeah but it's hard though because i love that i love this idea of inclusivity and do what you want and make your own do what you want they don't live do what you want well within the rules that they build right they're very conscious of ethics and of respect but it's a new arrangement that they've created and i'm for that but then you see these sessions and you see this unfold and it is hard not to watch and think but we're just humans at the end of the day who want yes to feel special to feel picked to feel like someone's person and only person these very primal things are sprouting up within the new arrangement right although humans i mean if we think not only with western eyes humans have all sorts of social structures bedouins live very differently yeah historically 95 percent of the time we've been here as a species we're not monogamous yeah we have much much proof in the archaeological record that generally high status people had multiple partners and wives and it was communal so yeah it is new but then why did monogamy evolve well there's a ton of people who are anti-monogamy that'll tell you a lot of it is transference of property yes it has ties with capitalism yes and the ability to join families join alliances the control of i'm putting this daughter with that king's son the catholic church maybe i shouldn't say why did monogamy evolve why did jealousy within these constructs evolve if we didn't even really then we get into another thing that we don't have anymore is a really clearly defined hierarchical order of the group we're in which would have been 100 members so all this anxiety we have about where we are on the status ladder would have been assigned and defined you actually wouldn't have spent much time thinking about it you would have said oh i'm gamma in this situation there's no aspiring to hire i'm here so in a bizarre way like things are much more defined but here in this individual you could be the highest status person in america in 10 years you could be the lowest status we don't know and then we look for all these symbols to alleviate our anxiety about that hierarchical status and some of those involve the single partner and the most desired and all these different things so i definitely think it's cultural i don't think it's primitive or biological agree it's complicated and that's why they're very devoted to study relational dynamics people who live in these alternative arrangements they put so much work into how to relate it's so much work yeah people think it's just an easy way out it's hard no no it's way more work than like a couple yeah the one in particular on the show this season i'm looking at i'm like oh my god it's two wives is what it is it's hard enough to just be with one person and you're just doubling that it's a lot of emotional labor yes i guess i want to end with the thing that i think is the biggest gift of the show at least for us and a lot of other couples i know that watch it it is so comforting to see that it is hard that it's not a fairy tale that it's a lot of work it's a lot of communication it's a lot of thoughtfulness of where you're trying to go you'll just get there the simple fact that every single patient you've had on the show one person wants more sex and one wants less i mean this one's universal in a couple that's comforting you just literally go oh yeah they're all different radically different and all the same thing that's the comfort of a is like i'm not alone knowing you're not alone is so deeply comforting and i think you really put on display how much you can tackle these things your hopefulness is really quite infectious i think that's my summation of why well as a single person i'll say i watch it and i think whoa maybe not maybe it's it is so hopeful it's like maybe this is fine my situation because you always want what you don't have you're walking around feeling i'm missing this piece and that's the reality of it being in a couple it's work yes okay i have one last personal question for you which is spending your days in your emotional energy wading through all of this how has that impacted your own life and partnering my life and partnering meaning in your personal life does it have an impact then for you partnering up with somebody well let me first talk about life in general okay i have a close friend he's actually in the peer group we all and we often talk about what does it mean like to be living day in day out as an analyst yeah in certain ways it's like an incredible profession i learn something every day i love the people i work with i feel so lucky to be doing what i'm doing i get to care about people to develop trust to be trusted is one one of the most beautiful things it's beautiful for people to give me their trust and to show up for that it's an incredible thing but it's also really heavy i carry within me a lot of difficult stories a lot of pain you're a cop in a way yeah who sees so much luckily i see other things than what cops see but an inordinate amount that a human is probably not designed to observe it's hard and i guess if i applied that to relationships it's a mixed thing i know a lot about human relationships and i know a lot about myself in human relationships i can be very wise in certain ways but i think i've developed and i think a lot of analysts are like that i've developed a certain kind of remove that it's probably not easy for people who are romantically close to me and not easy for friends there's a certain level of like you know i know right yeah i know how this is gonna play out i'll add there's the housekeeper who doesn't clean their own house i was a car prepper for 14 years and i had the dirtiest car in the world i'm not gonna wash my car after i've been washing cars so i can imagine also a little bit about the tea it's all day and you walk in your kitchen oh fuck now i gotta do this for me now i know yeah there's some of that but i think the remove is probably the that's what y'all and i often talk about whoever's really in our lives and close to us have to suffer that yeah well orna this has been so wonderful for me too really you guys are awesome oh thank you you're really really awesome it's about privilege to fall in love with someone on tv and actually get to sit with them yeah it was a joke at first we were like you think we could ever have a lot on a show yeah so this is a huge program very very exciting i love the show so much monica loves the show so much the new season is out on the 31st do you know where it's strange i'm a little confused by that it's on showtime it's on showtime which is now paramount plus okay great it's on paramount plus not the new season but they're showing other seasons on other platforms i think on hulu and tv it's on some airplanes i know a lot of people that's how i discovered it i know shout out to our friend jediah jenkins we were interviewing him and he proselytized about how we have to be watching ironically i was on a flight three days later i'm scrolling through like oh there's that thing watch two got to my hotel room okay Once you start, there is no stopping. Cannot recommend it enough.

It's so comforting whether you're in a relationship or not, but I find it enormously comforting. I hope we get to do this again. Nico, great job. Nico's here for the listener.

If you do watch couples therapy, you know about Nico the dog. Nico joined us and was a very good girl. You know, at first, I think, because you said, can I bring Nico? Or someone reached out to us and we were like, of course.

And then I thought, stupidly, I'm like, oh, I wonder if Nico is a comfort dog. And then I read enough interviews about you that actually Nico has a tremendous separation. You just can't endlessly find your way into these situations. Your dog is patient.

My patience makes so much fun of me about my dog having separation anxiety. Nico knew that she was being talked about, so now she's showing up. Okay, so much fun. Adore you.

Everyone watch season four of couples therapy on the 31st. I don't even care about backdacks. I want to get in your pants. Wow.

I can't put this on for you. I love it. I just took out my super filthy. You didn't wear that on the airplane?

No. Lincoln was wearing hers, so we got plenty of attention, yeah. Oh, you were recording here last. I can always tell with your headset volume.

Yeah, my long-sleeved t-shirt that I've been in for 25 hours was so filthy. So I had to quickly put on, yeah, things everywhere. That kind of off-white color, not a great choice for an airplane ride. And then I quickly grabbed a shirt, and I thought, I'm going to wear my Taylor Swift shirt for you.

Wow, I love it. I don't have that one. I don't have it in black. Oh, you have it in white?

Yeah. I do, too. Oh, my God. Okay, first of all, before you reveal too much, remember, we aren't editing.

Oh, right, right, right, right. And I'm a loopy, yeah, so this could be a high-risk scenario. Be careful what you say, be careful what you wish for. Okay, well, I already got what I wish for.

Aw. But boy, was it eventful. I mean, did you already hear any of the drama? No, you texted Rob and I on Friday, right, on Friday, and you said, hey, you're supposed to be home yesterday.

And so you said, hey, due to a crazy chain of events, I won't be home until Tuesday at 3, so we need to record at 5, whatever. And I had an idea. I thought I knew what happened. Okay, hit me with what your theory is.

I thought, oh, no. Because I would imagine this could have traveled through the pod by this point. Well, I thought, oh, no. Well, oh, my God, I already want to edit.

You're so stressed. You're so stressed. Okay. Okay, the next day, you sent connections in.

Yeah. So I knew nothing, like, so bad was happening. Right, I wasn't in the hospital. Well, though, you could play connections in the hospital.

I would be so mad if you were in the hospital, I didn't know. Right, and I just was playing connections. Yeah, exactly. But you were playing connections, and you said, I'm in France.

I'm sending this from France, so blah, blah, blah. And I thought, oh, I know what happened. Okay, what do you think? The Portugal concert was for next weekend.

Oh, that's a good pick. And France is this weekend. So I've rerouted. So we had to pivot.

Okay, it's much worse than that. Oh, my God. And we're not editing, so this is going to be a tricky story to tell, but for reasons, it'll become obvious. Okay, so Thursday morning, Lincoln and I get up.

We're so excited. I cannot express how excited we both were for two whole weeks leading up to this. It's like the most excited we've been about anything ever. So we are on it.

We leave early. We ride the motorcycle to the airport. We're there so early. I've got the bags, like, fucking bungee, not bungee, but ratchet strapped to the side of the motorcycle.

Oh, my God. Carry on only, we said, so that we could ride the motorcycle. Smart. We get there.

We're high-fiving. We're already celebrating. We're supposed to be there two hours early. We're there two hours and 15 minutes early.

Wow. Checking in on a United flight, which is supposed to go from L.A. to... Fuck, no.

I can't even remember where we were. Walking in D.C. Oh, my God, yes. We were flying and watching D.C.

And then from D.C. direct to Lisbon. So we're checking in. My whole soul left my body.

Oh, no. Because this isn't something you can solve. Right, you can just buy another ticket. We are only...

Like, the way this is going to shake out with everything going perfectly is we're going to get there Friday afternoon, and then we're going to have Friday night, and then Saturday's the concert. Okay, okay. It's 11.35. I don't even know what time it is.

And Lincoln immediately starts crying, as you'd expect, because this isn't like... This isn't Disneyland. It's not Disneyland. And there's nothing to replace it with.

I have this immediate thought of, like, oh, what now? What do we do? How do we salvage this? There's no salvaging it, because it's Taylor Swift.

Yeah. And it's Saturday. We're going to solve this. And in my mind, we're not going to solve this.

Oh, you were. You're like, it's done. No, because how am I going to get a passport in the next few hours, then return and hope there's a flight that night that gets us in it? Was there a Sunday show also?

You could, like, maybe try to get tickets for us. No, there's no Sunday show. It's Saturday. That's it.

Saturday or bus? Yes. And so many things are going through my mind. It's like, this isn't going to work, but I'm going to act like, we're going to just keep trying.

And also, what would be a backup plan? It's almost like filing through. Do we go to Orlando? No, again, nothing's going to...

And I know we're going to drive home and have the worst weekend of our life because we're so excited. So I basically get on the phone with a fixer. The fixer says, I can pull a bunch of strings. It's so much money.

And I can get you an appointment at 10 a.m. on Friday. That's the earliest. And I'm like, that is not going to help.

And he's like, that's all that can be done. And I'm like, goodbye. I go, let's go, Lincoln. I strap the luggage back to the motorcycle.

We then race to the federal building on Wilshire. In like Santa Monica? Yes, Wilshire in 405. I guess that's that far from the airport.

But a mess. It's like traffic city. Like, we get up there. We walk in.

Well, we don't walk in. You're not allowed to walk in there. Okay. This part of the story is going to get dicey.

The fixer part wasn't already dicey? Well, it didn't work. It didn't work. It didn't work.

We get up there. I don't want to get anyone in trouble. Do you know? Oh, okay.

But I'm like, let's just say this. A complete miracle happened. I was able to enter there. But you need both parents.

You can't get a passport for your kid without both parents. Because that could be a parent leap, like stealing the kid. So I am like calling Kristen. You know she won't answer.

I text her. This is kind of emergency. You really need to answer. Luckily, she didn't FaceTime.

And she squealed up to the federal building like 24 minutes later with the birth certificate. Oh, my God. Long story short, we walk out of there at 3 p.m. with a fucking passport.

And now I'm like, how do we get? I find a flight that leaves at 7 p.m. that goes to London, that then goes to Paris, that then goes to Lisbon. That was the France.

Wow. So now we have like four plus hours in the airport. We got there at 11. The flight's at 7.

We had this trip to the federal building. But it's a long day. Yeah. Now, a really nice icing cherry on the cake was we're checking in.

And I hear Lincoln go, hi, Lauren. I look behind me. Lauren Graham's checking in for flight. I'm like, oh, my God.

I'm like, you're not going to believe this. Where are you going? I go, no, you're not going to believe this. We didn't have a passport.

So we hung out with Lauren and Sam Pancake for two of the hours, which was really, really fun. What's Sam Pancake? Sam Pancake's a great actor and one of Lauren's best friends. And he's super funny and wonderful.

And they were going to Scotland together or something. Oh, fun. So whatever. We kill another three hours in the airport.

And then we fly to London. Then we fly to Paris. And we fly to Lisbon. And we get in at basically one in the morning on Friday night.

So all told, we only lost 12 hours. OK, not bad. Not terrible. I mean, I really, up until.

Wow. God, no passport. That's so sad. Yeah, this is done.

So then Saturday, we were like, are we going to walk around a bit? But we were fucked from the day before. And I was like, adrenaline dump for those three hours before we got the passport. How was she?

How was she during all of this? Well, I'll tell you, she cried intermittently, but she had her shit together. And it was time to go to the motorcycle. She was all business.

And then we got to the thing. And you couldn't go inside that building. She started bawling. Yeah.

Kind of the perfect time imaginable. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. But we were like, you know what? We're not going to be ambitious on Saturday.

We woke up. We went down to the pool. We took a swim. The whole hotel is Swiffy's.

Oh, I missed the best part. When we got in at 1230 or whatever, when we pulled up to our hotel, we found out she was staying at our hotel. No, stop. So Lincoln stayed on the balcony of our room waiting for the police motorcade to bring her back, which she saw.

So he was like screaming from the balcony. Oh, that is. I was like, girl, play cool. You got to play cool because we bump into her.

You can't be like fucking hollering. Of course you can. Of course you can. If we have any shot of getting like invited to lunch with her or something, we got to be like huge fan, but I'm not going to freak you out.

No, Taylor loves kids. I saw a video of her like, you know, head down, trying to walk out of the building. Everyone's screaming at her. And then there was a little kid and she turned around and went and hugged the little kid.

So you got to use these powers while you can. Okay. Okay. I just, I had bigger fantasies.

I'm like, we're going to bump into her and we're going to have lunch with her or something. This was my fantasy. Anyways. So everyone at the hotel is Swiffy's.

Wow. So it's really fun already. Everyone's like, are you here to see Taylor Swift? So all the little girls are talking, right?

And I'm the only dad there, as you would imagine. It's just like a bunch of moms with their daughters and I'm at the pool. And then we go to the show and this is, now listen, we talk, we like Winx. Okay.

I'll let you decide. Oh no. Oh God. In fact, I'm going to, I know we're not editing and we're in a little bit of a time crunch, but I am going to try to quickly just send you one video while I tell you about the show kicks off.

You know better than anyone. You've already been. It's incredible, right? I'm in all pink.

I should say I got a full pink outfit so that I'm, cause you have to go as an album, as you already know. And Lincoln wanted me to go as a lover. And so I had a whole outfit. So I was headed to go pink.

Okay. I'd see if this video went through because to my knowledge, this song has never been played at a Taylor Swift show. Crank the volume. That's my song that she wrote about me.

If I need to remind the listeners, you do. He's so tall and handsome as hell. He's so bad, but he does it so well. When she fucking played Wildest Dreams, I lost my mind.

Okay. Cause she doesn't play the song. That's what I'm doing. Well, that's okay.

So I'm not going to look it up cause I don't want to ruin it. Was she playing that as one of the secret songs? Cause you know, she plays two secret songs at each show. Okay.

Oh, it wasn't acoustic. It was not acoustic. She played a bunch of songs off of the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Department.

But she also does two secret, Rob, can you look at the two secret songs from this Portugal show? I'm curious. Oh, okay. Okay.

Cause she also played, so my, my three favorite songs are Wildest Dreams, Lavender. Yep. Wait, did she play that when you saw her? Yeah, that's not in the background.

I don't know how to do it. And then Willow. That's in there too? Yeah.

Lavender Hayes. Yeah. Okay. So.

I got to set up just really quickly. Of course, my joke for two months has been that she's going to play Wildest Dreams. Cause I tell my children that she wrote this song about me. I know.

It was like a longstanding thing. That Taylor started a song about your dad. And fucking, by God, she pulled that out. And Lincoln was like, she didn't play that in LA.