Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Let me ask you a question.
Who is the person you talk to the most in life?
Your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, maybe your best friend?
Is it your mom or your dad or one of your siblings?
What if I told you?
It's none of those people.
The person you talk to the most is you.
And what you're going to learn today is you not only talk to yourself, but you're telling yourself a story that runs your life.
And that story is probably not great.
Maybe it sounds like, oh, it's never good enough.
I'm never good enough.
I'm not lovable.
I'm not smart enough.
I always screw things up.
It's never going to work out for me.
You've probably been telling yourself that same story day after day after day.
That's why it feels like the facts.
It's not a fact.
It's just a story.
And today you're going to learn you have the power to edit and rewrite that story you've been telling yourself.
And our guest today is going to teach you how.
Because changing your story can change your life.
And this isn't just a catchy idea.
It is a scientific fact.
You do need to rewrite the story.
Because that story you've been saying over and over and over again.
It's keeping you stuck in self-doubt anxiety, people-pleasing overwhelm.
It's keeping you from tapping into the potential that you have to achieve your goals.
And no one can teach you how to do that, to change that story better than today's guest.
She wrote the New York Times bestselling book about it.
Her name, Lori Gottlieb.
She's a world-renowned therapist.
And she says, you are the sole author of your future, not your past.
Not your parents, not your partner, not your friends.
You.
You're the author.
And today, with Lori's help, you're going to pick up the pen and turn the page and start writing something new.
Hey, it's your buddy Mel.
Now, let's make a plan with each other around Thanksgiving, shall we?
Can we just agree that before we walk in, we're going to stop racing.
We're not going to bend over backwards this year to keep the peace.
Here's the new plan.
Let them.
Let them.
Let them show up late.
Let them complain about the turkey.
Let them stir the pot.
And I don't mean gravy.
Let them say the thing that always makes your eye twitch.
The let them theory is how you and I protect our sanity without blowing up at our family.
Because you can love people and still let them be exactly who they are.
Even when who they are is a lot.
The let them theory is the number one book in the world.
Because it's your holiday survival guide.
This Thanksgiving, stop trying to manage everyone else.
Manage you.
Grab your copy now at letthem.com or wherever books are sold. to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
I am so excited that you're here.
It is always an honor to be together and spend time with you.
And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just wanted to personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
I cannot wait for you to meet Lori Gottlieb and to learn from this world-renowned therapist about how changing your story can change your life.
Lori Gottlieb is a renowned psychotherapist and one of today's most influential voices in mental health and mindset.
She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, a book that has sold over 3 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.
She's also the writer of the wildly popular column in the New York Times, Ask the Therapist.
And she hosts two podcasts, Dear Therapists and Since You Asked.
She has degrees from Stanford and Pepperdine and before she became a therapist, she attended medical school and had a career as a journalist.
She says she has always been drawn to stories and how they're told, and today she's here to help you rewrite yours.
Please help me welcome Lori Gottlieb to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm such a fan of the show.
Oh, well, thanks for saying that. is here with us right now.
They have no time, but they have made the time to be here to learn from you today.
And the first question that I have for you is how is my life going to be different if I take to heart everything that you're about to share with it and I really put it to use in my own life?
Right.
Well, I love this question because I think that after listening to this episode, you will experience a profound change in in the way that you move through the world and in the way that you relate to others, whether it's family member friends, romantic relationships, people you work with.
And, most important, you will experience a profound shift in the way that you relate to yourself.
And what's interesting about this is these aren't things that you can do later.
These are things that you can put into practice right now.
I'm going to feel differently about myself.
You are going to do something differently that makes you feel differently about yourself.
That has been true all along, but you have not been paying attention to it.
Wow.
Well, I believe you because you have seen thousands of patients.
You also write some of the most popular advice columns in the world.
You have New York Times bestselling book, two podcasts.
I've got to imagine Laurie, that you see some of the same things over and over and over again, in terms of what people write to you about.
So, no matter somebody's background or age, across all the patients and readers that you encounter, what is the core struggle that people are dealing with?
I think what people are dealing with and it's very human, I'm guilty of this too is that no matter whether people are coming to me in my clinical practice or they're writing into my New York Times column or they're writing into a podcast.
It's the same thing is that they want to feel better.
They want something to change.
But what they want to change is someone else.
Right.
So so you know.
You see this all the time when someone comes to you and they're like here's my problem.
And the problem is over there.
Right.
Yes.
And it's so interesting, you know whether, whether it's like you know in, maybe you should talk to someone in my book.
I follow four of my patients, but I'm the fifth patient in the book and I'm going to my therapist and I do the same thing.
I come in and I'm like, here's the problem.
It's this person over here.
Right.
We all do that.
And it's not to say that there aren't difficult people out there.
You know, I often say that the person who comes into therapy is coming because the people in their lives who should have come to therapy haven't or won't.
So, you know, there are difficult people.
You know we have the saying in therapy before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes.
So, you know, I'm not saying there aren't difficult people.
But I am saying that we have a role in what is keeping us stuck, what is making us frustrated, what some of our relational difficulties are.
And that's what I call our story.
And our story is something that we form from our past experiences, our current experiences, their beliefs that either we were taught or that we've acquired along the way.
And the stories that we tell are faulty. they're incomplete, they're misguided.
I don't mean that we don't have some semblance of what the story is, but we're leaving so much of it out.
And the way that we narrate our lives determines the quality of our lives and how we're going to live our lives.
So we have to examine these stories.
And that's my work as a therapist, is I help people to edit their stories.
I want to go back to something that you said because, As you were talking, I was thinking to myself and I'm sure, as you're listening or watching, you probably thought to yourself but wait a minute, my husband is the problem.
But wait a minute.
If my kid would just be motivated because they have that saying that you're just as happy as your least happy child.
Right.
Wait a minute, if my dad weren't such a narcissist in terms of like, my life would be better.
It's not me, Lori, it's everybody else.
And so is it pretty commonplace now that when you start to flip it back on somebody that really we need to talk about your story, that people are like no no no no no, it's them.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
And I think, first of all, part of it is the other person, right?
It's an interaction, it's a dance.
We're all doing a dance with somebody else, but you're doing certain dance steps.
And if you can change your dance steps, then they're either going to fall off the dance floor or they're going to have to change their dance steps too.
And that has to do with, you know, which I'm sure we're going to talk about.
How do you set boundaries?
How do you change your response to a person reacting versus responding?
So there are lots of things that you can do, but also that person has a story and you're not seeing their story.
So if you can't see the story of why they're doing what they're doing and you start to personalize it, then you're going to react differently than if you can see oh wait, there's a reason that they're doing this.
They're communicating something to me, not in the most effective way.
And if I can get to that, I can respond in a much better way.
That's then going to get a better response from them.
Okay.
So I already got two very powerful takeaways that I don't want to just run away from.
I want to highlight them to make sure that, as you're watching or you're listening right now to us in the car or on a walk, that you really get this.
So the first thing that I got that I found to be profoundly helpful is this image of a dance.
Because if you take that image in your mind and you insert the person who's driving you crazy, or the most challenging, it could be your boss.
I don't personally want to like think about myself dancing with my boss, but you know what I mean?
It When I think about the dance, I've never really thought about it as a dance.
But when you think about it as a dance, oftentimes with the challenging person, it feels like they're leading.
Yes.
And what you're about to teach us if I'm about to read between the lines is that you can actually, in seeing that it's a dance, you can take the lead.
And by taking the lead... you can change the way the dance is going.
Is that a fair assessment?
Yes, absolutely.
You can't change another person, but you can influence another person by doing something different.
Okay, okay.
That makes a lot of sense.
But the part where you lost me is when you started to talk about.
You have to change the story you're telling yourself.
Yeah.
And so can you give us an example of a patient or somebody that you've worked with, or somebody that's written into one of your like wildly successful columns about how your story plays out in a relationship dynamic that's not working?
Sure.
Here's kind of a typical example that you might see.
A woman wrote in and she said, my husband is cheating on me.
I found out that he's been having these late night phone calls with a woman from work and And he's been distant and he's been pulling away.
And I'm devastated because my father cheated on my mother with a coworker.
And I can't believe this is happening with me.
This is the kind of thing I never thought would happen in my life.
Well, this has happened a few times, where the same person writes into the column and you know, because one of them uses the other person's name and you're hearing the other side of the story, you know.
You've had instances where the same people write in?
With this example, I'm changing it a little bit for privacy.
But this is, yes, I've had that happen more than once, which is insane.
But people will write in because they're not talking to each other.
Think about that.
They're writing to me instead of talking to each other, but- Because we're so pissed off at the other person.
We don't want to talk to them.
Because we're sure, we're pissed off because we're sure that our story is accurate.
That's true.
She's sure that her husband is cheating.
Well, the husband, the husband's story is-
My father died last year, and I have been shaken by this.
My wife thinks that I should be moving forward, and she doesn't understand it.
She does not understand.
Her father cheated on the mother when she was young.
This is how I put together the stories, right?
Cheated on the mother when she was young and went away and abandoned the family.
So she doesn't really know what it's like to lose a father in that way.
She knows what it's like to lose a father as a young child, but she doesn't understand how close I was with my father and the love we had between us.
And she is so tired of me and my grief.
And there's a woman at work who also lost her father recently.
And it's completely, she's a friend, she's married, no interest in her, but I'm able to talk to her.
But what's sad to me about that is that I can't talk to my wife.
I miss my wife.
So hers is a story about a cheating husband actually not happening.
His is a story about grief that he can't share.
Yeah.
But what they have in common in their story that they don't know is that they both have a longing to connect with each other.
That's the story.
The story isn't he's cheating or she this.
It's we want to get closer to each other and something is getting in the way.
And you say what's getting in the way is our story and how that keeps us from being curious about what's going on with the other person.
Yes.
So she doesn't take into account that.
You know there's something else going on with him and maybe I'm not really giving him what he needs around his grief because of my own history.
And he isn't taking into account.
Maybe she doesn't understand because of her history and I'm not being sensitive to that.
You know what I'm thinking about as you're sharing that last example in particular is how scary it is Because if you are sequestered as a couple in your corners and you're not talking because of your story like I think he's cheating your story the husband's story is I can't talk to you.
You can see how that little kernel of distance becomes a huge crevasse that ultimately ends up separating people.
Right, right.
And we do this all the time.
We do it with people in our lives.
In my book, there's the first patient that I talk about.
I call him John.
And he's... extremely, I would say, obnoxious.
Some people will call him narcissistic.
I don't really care about the diagnostic terms in terms of how we describe him.
But he's insulting.
He puts me down.
He's critical.
His problem that he comes in with is all the idiots are the problem.
Everybody is bothering him, whether it's people at home, people at work.
The person at the Apple store couldn't help him.
Everybody's an idiot, right?
And and people really dislike him.
And so when we talk about story, when we find out what his story is and why he is the way he is and how he needs to, kind of his story is, he needs to be the rock.
He needs to be the solid one.
There was a trauma in their family.
And this is how he protects himself.
Well, actually, he cares so much about. about his wife and his family.
He cares so much about being loved and loving people, but he doesn't know how.
And by the end of the book everyone thinks.
You know they've said to me like we want to give John a hug.
We love him.
He's our favorite person in the book.
They despised him at the beginning.
So I think when we get curious, like, what's the actual story here?
Can we expand the story?
Because that's when everything becomes possible.
If we have this rigid story and we believe that and that is the absolute truth, and there's nothing more to this story, there's nowhere to go with that.
Now, this may sound like a dumb question, but what does it mean that you have a story?
Yeah.
You know, for somebody that's never sat across you in a private, you know therapy session.
How do you even define or understand what your story is, since most of us has probably been telling it for a very long time?
A lot of us don't even know that we're carrying around a story.
So that's the first part of it.
So when people come to therapy, they're surprised that they have all these ideas and beliefs about themselves that they didn't even realize were there.
So there are things like you know when you're growing up and people label you like you're the sister who's very sensitive, and your sister was really resilient and easygoing.
Well, that's your parent's story.
You were difficult because you were so sensitive.
Another way to frame that story is you are a keen observer.
You see things.
You feel things.
You are a caring person.
Feelings matter to you, right?
And you're seeing something that everybody else in the family is denying.
So it's not that you're overly sensitive.
It's like you're the sane one in the family.
We call that the identified patient.
That's the person in the family who actually becomes, everyone in the family says, you're a problem.
But that person is saying, wait a minute, there's a problem.
And people are like, no, we don't want to hear that there's a problem.
So you're too sensitive, right?
So that person grows up thinking I don't want to express my needs to people because I'm difficult and I'm too sensitive.
So then they end up with friends and romantic partners and professional situations where they let people walk all over them because they're afraid that people are going to think I'm too much, I'm too sensitive, I'm too difficult.
Let's say you're in a family and your parents say oh, you were the lazy son and your brother was so ambitious.
Well, you probably weren't lazy.
It's that you were not interested in the very narrow definition of what your family valued.
So if your family valued academic success or going to an elite school, but you were really talented and creative well, Or you valued connections with people and you're really good at connecting with people?
It's not that you're lazy.
It's that you didn't want to put time into something that was not interesting to you or that you didn't value or wasn't important to you.
But that person grows up and they think, I'm not capable.
I've been told that I'm lazy.
I've been told that I don't have drive in me.
And yet they know they do because they have passions, but they don't act on them.
So that's where the story gets in the way.
They know they have these things, but they think, wait a minute, but I'm the lazy one so I'm not going to really do anything about it.
You know when you're reading a book and you want the character to be consistent?
Yes.
It would be really out of character for the person that I'm reading about to do this.
That's what we do to ourselves.
So the person who was labeled as lazy says I really want to do this thing, and maybe I want to be entrepreneurial or maybe I want to do this artistic thing, but it's out of character for me to be ambitious about this.
We don't say that consciously to ourselves.
It's just what is the roadblock to our actually acting on that.
So these stories and untangling them and making sure they're accurate is so important, because otherwise everything you do, every choice you make, every decision you make, every way that you move through the world is dictated by stories like I can't trust anyone, or I'm unlovable, or everybody's life is better than mine.
Thank you, social media, for that story, right?
I'm an imposter, whatever the story is.
And so we learn these stories and then we play the role of that character as adults, without even realizing that they're not our stories.
We don't own them.
Somebody gave us that story and that person gave us that story because of their own story.
Like the person who says you're too sensitive, the parent who says that to the child.
That parent probably grew up in a family where nobody talked about feelings.
It was not okay.
Yeah.
So they don't want a child who talks about feelings.
If you're taking this all in like I'm taking this all in right now with you, but you're not sure what your story is, is there something that you can do right now that sort of awakens it in you?
You know what I mean?
Can you find the story by going, my marriage isn't working, I'm not getting ahead at work?
I don't know what to do in this situation with a friend.
Like, how do you?
Because as we go through the different scenarios and we start to talk about how you can change the story and how that changes the dance at work and the dance in relationships and the dance with your family, and you feel more empowered and you start to write a new story.
I'd love for myself and for the person watching, the person that's listening right now, To have something that they can hold on to, whether the story is I'm never good enough or I'm not smart enough or I've screwed up my life.
Like, how do you identify it?
Yeah.
First of all, I think that in a relationship, you can find out what your story is by.
We like to say, if it's hysterical, it's historical.
If it's hysterical, it's historical.
Like crying or funny?
Meaning a big reaction.
Oh, okay.
Okay, a big reaction.
So let's say that your partner does something.
And, and you have a really big reaction to it.
There's probably some story that you're telling yourself about yourself.
Like well, of course you know he's doing this because I can't get a partner who will treat me this way.
Or of course this is happening because my partner is this way.
Right.
And so we want to say look at, you know What happens is, if you have a story, so you know there's a story behind it, because if you were having a reaction and your feelings are valid, you're having some kind of reaction, but how big is it?
It's like if it's 80 degrees in the room, it's hot.
Yes.
But does it feel like 95 to you?
Is your thermostat off?
Like how annoying it is.
Right, right.
Like how much do you feel inside?
You go from zero to 60, right?
Yeah, there's some history, like there's something happening in the present, but there's also something that's informing your reaction.
So that's part of it is just to notice that.
And then if you can say, what is actually happening between us right now?
And then where is this big feeling coming from?
Like, how do I get it back to, yes, it's 80, which is uncomfortable, but it's not 95.
How can I figure out?
You know, what am I reacting to here?
That maybe is not all of what's going on in this interaction right now, in the present.
What's one question therapists secretly wish that people would ask themselves more often?
Is there something about what I'm experiencing right now that feels familiar?
Okay, is there something about what I'm experiencing right now that feels familiar?
So give me an example.
And part two.
And as an adult, what can I do differently with that feeling?
Okay, is there something about this experience that feels familiar?
And as an adult, what can I do differently with this feeling?
Right.
So let me give you an example.
Because this is a real example that you have counseled someone on, and I think a lot of us can relate to it.
And it was a woman who had this very painful realization that two of her closest friends from high school were just sort of quietly excluding her from their lives.
That, despite the amount that she was reaching out and how hard she felt that she was trying, that she discovered, for example, that one of the friends was getting married because she saw the wedding invitation at the friend's house.
And neither one of them invited her to their weddings, even though she invited them to her weddings.
And so she's feeling... this grief and this loss and does not know what to do.
And I think a lot of us have had that experience where you feel like there's no explanation, there's silence.
All of a sudden you go from the inside of something to the outside.
What do you do?
How do we apply this in that situation?
So it's interesting because you are telling her version of the story, as she told it to me in her letter to my column.
And so what I helped her to do was to see in her letter there was also information that she was not focusing on.
So for example, she saw the wedding invitation while she was visiting with the friend.
They don't live in the same city.
So the friends take time to visit with her, to be with her, to stay in touch with her.
And her thing was, they don't want to be friends with me.
Well, that's quite a conclusion because they do want to be friends with you.
Another example in the letter was she said I invited them to my wedding and they weren't able to come.
Again, they live out of town.
And she said I didn't think anything of it, but now I realize it's because they didn't want to be friends with me.
That's her version of the story.
No, she didn't think at the time that they don't want to be friends with me.
She realized we don't have the same relationship that we had and weddings are hard and not everybody with their families and travel and all of that can get away.
But she remained friends with them, stayed in touch with them.
They matter to her.
She matters to them.
And so the bottom line of this letter is that guest lists for weddings are tricky and you can still be a valued friend of somebody and not get invited to their wedding circumstances, or you know all over the place.
Right.
But she came to this conclusion of I'm losing these friends.
And if you had asked the friends, I'm sure because of the other information that she had in the letter, they would say oh no, we really care about her.
She's an important part of our lives.
And for whatever these reasons, we couldn't invite her to this wedding.
So the bottom line here is that I want people to look for counter examples.
That's hard to do, Lori, because you get it.
OK, now I'm falling into your trap.
You get a narrative in your mind that, see, I didn't get invited.
We're not friends.
And now it's like DEF CON 10 and my mind shifts and I block out all the things that point to the fact that we are friends.
Right.
And I laser focus like a detective, looking for all kinds of things that point to oh nope, friendship's over.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We do that all the time.
That's what people do is because they find the things that support their story.
And so it's interesting, like, why would you want to support a story that makes you feel bad?
So it's not about tricking yourself or not telling yourself the truth.
It's that there's more to the truth.
That you're just picking and choosing the examples that make you feel bad.
People are drawn to the negative.
Look at social media.
Do we doom scroll, right?
Mostly, we're scrolling through things that make us feel bad.
As opposed to thinking about when we tell our stories.
What is the other information that I'm leaving out of this story?
And so it's like well, the friend called me here or the friend wanted to talk to me about this.
That's not part of the story.
No, because it doesn't support your thesis.
And your thesis is, I'm being dumped by my friends.
Yes.
So anything that doesn't support your thesis suddenly is left out of your story.
And so this is where I talk about.
It's interesting, I talk about idiot compassion versus wise compassion.
Oh, you have a section, I want to read this to you.
I'm so glad.
It's on page 51 of your New York Times bestseller.
You have this term, Buddhist cult, idiot compassion, an apt phrase.
And, in idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking, and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.
People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves.
Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.
So what does that mean?
We don't want to be an idiot.
We want to be wise.
Right, right.
And so this goes into friendships and why we're so afraid to have real conversations and friendships.
Yes.
I think that if that woman would have asked her friends about this, I think that, given that they knew each other in high school, they would have said we're really sorry.
Here's why you weren't invited.
And she would have felt better about it.
Maybe she wouldn't have felt great, but she would have felt better.
So idiot compassion is what we do.
So Anybody in your life, your children, your partner, your siblings, your friends, they come to you and they say listen to what my boss, my mother my, you know, whoever did.
And we say, yeah, you're right.
They're wrong.
And how dare they, right?
Right.
That's idiot compassion.
We don't think about like somebody.
Let's say they say my boss is I think I'm going to get fired, right.
Now you say, well, you deserve a better boss and you're so great.
But we know about that friend that they're not really into that job and they haven't been trying so hard.
That's true.
You wouldn't hire them at your company.
Right.
But now you're saying the boss is the problem.
Right.
So we support their position because we think that that's what it's like to be a good friend.
And I think the best friendships are where you can say to somebody and offer wise compassion.
It's what we do in therapy is we hold up a mirror to people and we help them to see something about their role in the situation that maybe they haven't been willing or able to see.
So could you say, it seems like you haven't really loved that job.
So you don't say like, we know you suck at that job.
You say it seems like you haven't really been invested in that job, because it doesn't seem like you like that job.
And then your friend might say yeah, but I still, you know, and you kind of, you just kind of point out things and ask questions so that they can come to some sort of conclusion.
Sometimes you have to be a little more direct.
Like an example is I had a you know, the boyfriend is broke up with me and I can't believe it.
And people keep breaking up with me.
And she's like, my friends say that I deserve someone great and I'm wonderful and great.
Okay.
But it's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you.
What keeps happening here that you keep getting dumped?
Because you are wonderful, but something is going on.
So the question is, what's going on?
But I don't want to look at that, Laurie.
I just want to point the fingers at these idiots I'm dating.
Except, except you don't want to keep getting dumped.
So then we start to discover what her friends are not saying, which they know about her.
Which is what?
Which is like well, you know, you can be a little bit.
You know when you've been looking through his texts and you always do that because you're so afraid of abandonment and you're worried that something else is going on.
Or you know, when he doesn't call, you text him 25 times, or you It is kind of hard to say to your friend, you're really clingy and psycho.
And so I'm not surprised, but I can see what you're saying, which is have you considered that the way that you text him might've felt a bit smothering?
You can say that, or you can say, you can ask, what do you think was going on for him?
Because obviously he liked many things about you.
So what do you think it was about him that that made him decide that, despite all the things he really likes about you, that this was not working for him?
What do you think wasn't working for him?
You know what you are?
You're a psychological grenade thrower.
Because the second you asked me that question it was like I don't want to think about that, because I just want to blame him.
But when you ask that question, you go, what do I think it was?
Because there was a lot of things he liked about me.
Yes.
And so that's the thing.
I started with that.
Did you notice?
I didn't say, what do you think didn't work for him?
I said, there was so much that he liked about you.
Yes.
And he wanted to be in this relationship with you.
So, given that something must have been going on that made him feel uncomfortable or made him feel like this wasn't going to work, despite how wonderful he thinks you are.
So it's easier that way.
And you're not like blowing smoke up someone.
No, you're so good.
Because it does make you stop and think.
Like there must be something other than he's a jerk.
Right, right.
And it must be something other than I'm a terrible person and I'm unlovable because he liked so much about her.
So we're emphasizing, again, counterexamples.
You also say that part of knowing yourself is to also unknow yourself.
What does that mean?
Yeah.
That goes back to how we are told these stories about ourselves, or we form these stories based on the experiences that we have.
Again, I can't trust anyone or I'm unlovable or- I'm too much.
I'm too much.
I'm too sensitive.
I'm lazy, whatever it is.
I'm unlovable.
What do you think is the most common story that you hear that it boils down to?
I wish I could give you one story.
I think at the end, I think we all want to love and be loved.
So the story might be a little different, but at the core of it, the theme of the story is how can I love and be loved?
That is the ultimate story that everybody is trying to figure out.
So if you say to yourself constantly I'm not good enough, the add-on to that is and that means I'm not going to be loved.
Right.
Got it.
Or if I'm not smart enough, I'm not going to be loved.
Right.
And so when I say that we need to unknow ourselves, I think so much of our culture is about get to know yourself.
Get to know yourself journal meditate, get to know yourself.
I'm not against journaling and meditating.
What I'm saying is that I think that we need to first unknow ourselves meaning.
We might say I'm the sensitive one.
I'm the person who's too much.
We need to unknow all of that.
Start with a blank page. as writers do, because we're writing stories here.
Start with a blank page.
What do you know about yourself?
What can you unknow about yourself?
So we start with the unknowing.
Let's talk about some stories that you have about yourself, and let's make two columns.
Let's write, here are the things that you think you know about yourself.
I'm very sensitive, whatever it is, right?
Yeah well, give us some more examples, because I think this is very important for somebody who's listening or who's watching right now.
What are some examples of typical things that people write down when it's?
This is what I know about myself.
Because is it typically negative?
It's typically negative.
Okay.
Yeah.
They might say something like you know, they'll put in like a little bit of a positive thing, like I'm a really good friend.
Now let me bash myself and be a terrible friend to myself.
But let me give you the example of the friend who didn't like me.
Immediately that comes up.
You know, but they'll say something, but they don't like.
There are so many wonderful qualities that you have that you don't express because you think oh, that's ridiculous.
Or someone would laugh at that.
Or no one has ever told me that about myself.
Right?
So things that um, you would put in one column are those stories that you know you are carrying around.
And then, what are enough?
I screwed up my life.
I'm always going to be single.
That kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's say like, I can't trust anyone.
Let's take that one.
Okay.
I can't trust anyone.
Like every time, I confide in people.
They screw me over or um they dump me or you know they don't think it becomes awkward.
Um, or I told them a secret and they told someone else and that was really embarrassing.
Um, you know, or I thought they were going to show up for me and they said they were going to help me move, and then they didn't.
I can't trust anyone to do anything for me that they say they will do.
Nobody will keep their promises for me.
Okay.
That's your story.
So that's on one side.
On the other side is.
I want you to think of just one example of a time when you could trust someone, just one person.
And then they might say, oh, it's no one.
There's no one.
And I'll be like, okay, let's think about this.
One time in your life that you could trust someone.
I might say, do you trust me?
Oh yeah, I trust you.
Okay.
Have I broken your trust before?
Have we talked about it?
Oh, did that increase the trust?
Yes.
Who else in your life?
Okay.
So well, when I was in college, I had this advisor and I told the advisor a little bit about what was happening with my family.
And I'd never told anyone that before.
Oh, did you trust that advisor?
Yeah, that advisor was really helpful.
We only met a couple of times, but I really liked those conversations.
Okay, there's another example.
And then you maybe can come up with even if you only come up with one two, three examples, it's not.
I can't trust anyone.
Here are three people that you can trust.
So then the question is in your story, what can you do in the world to choose a better audience?
So it's not that you can't trust anyone.
It's that you have something that you are doing that is putting you in relation to people that maybe aren't trustworthy.
So what can you do differently?
Let's talk about what it takes.
Like what happened with that advisor?
How did you know that you could trust that person?
What happens with these other people when they turn out not to be trustworthy?
Was there a sign?
Was there something?
Can we look at this?
And so now the person's going to go out into the world and they are going to really be intentional about who they share things with, or who they ask favors of, or who they trust to show up for them.
And they're going to go small steps because you don't develop trust in a day.
And you test it out and you see.
And then you start to create this world where I have five people around me that I can trust.
I never thought that.
I thought I couldn't trust anyone.
That is such a helpful example because in writing, then the three people down, it kind of gives you a framework to then start scanning the world for more of the positive versus evidence of the negative.
Could you walk us through that exercise with the story that a lot of people write in about to you know, the Mel Robbins podcast, which is, I'm not good enough.
So you start with a blank piece of paper and you, On the left, you talk about what you know about yourself, right?
Is that what you're saying?
And so if the story that you've always struggled with is a sense that you're never going to be good enough, it's never enough.
No matter what you do, it's not enough to make people happy.
Can you walk us through those kind of three parts on how you do that?
First of all, we tend to globalize our story, right?
So it's like maybe you struggled in something in school, let's say.
Or you really wanted to be this kind of artist.
And maybe you're not good enough to go to the level that you want to go to.
But that doesn't mean you're not good enough globally, right?
So we tend to do that.
Oh, so if you have one failure, you didn't make the baseball team in high school.
Right.
Now all of a sudden...
I'm not good enough.
And that starts to become the drumbeat in your head.
Right.
So every time something doesn't work out for you, you go back to the I'm not good enough, but you're not looking at all the things that did work out for you.
Gotcha.
Right.
Okay.
So I think that's the selective attention that we pay to the things that corroborate our story.
So I'm not good enough.
Every time something happens where you didn't get the thing that you wanted, whether it's like the date, the job, you know, whatever the thing was.
Yeah, I walked right back in your office, Lori.
I'm like, see?
Yeah, I told you.
Exactly.
Didn't work out.
I'm not good enough.
So on the other side of the page, I want you to write a time, no matter how small it is, where you were good enough, where you got something that you wanted, or you know you asked the person on the date and they went on the date with you.
It doesn't matter whether the relationship worked out, right?
So again, it's looking for the counter examples.
We tend to do this always or never type of thing.
And we need to, you know, stories are not always or never.
There's a lot to the story.
There's so many different, every interesting story has all different kinds of plot points.
And so we need to make sure that we are including all of the data.
And so we leave out the data that doesn't support our story.
And once you have just a couple examples.
Even though, for those of us that struggle with feeling like it's never enough, those examples might not feel like enough, but we're gonna go with it.
What was the third part, where you then ask yourself what could I do now that I'm an adult to be good enough?
Or is that how I would do it?
Right.
I would say I am going to have a different framework.
So when I go out into the world, when I tell myself that I am not good enough, I'm going to assume that I am.
Now, you're going to say, well, that's really difficult, right?
But there's this rubric and I want people to think about this, which is so.
I want you to think about Who is the person that you talk to most in the course of your life.
Who's that person for you?
Do you want me to answer?
Yeah.
Oh, my husband.
Your husband.
Yes.
Unless it's a work week, then it's Tracy, who's my executive producer.
Okay.
We're basically married at work, so.
Okay.
Those are not the people you talk to most in the course of your life.
It's not?
It's not.
You talk to yourself.
Oh.
All the time.
That was a trick question.
In your head.
We don't think about it, right?
So when I ask people, who's the person that you talk to most in the course of your life?
They'll say, it's my husband, it's Tracy, it's whoever it is.
No, we are talking to ourselves all day long.
And so what we say to ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful.
So when we talk about I'm not good enough.
I'm going to get back to that in a second, but I just want to talk about this idea of how we talk to ourselves.
Um, You know, I had a client, I had a therapy patient and she said to me no, I'm not self-critical.
I don't talk to myself that way, but I could hear her stories.
So I'm listening for stories all the time.
And her stories told me she's really not nice to herself, like many of us.
And so I said, I want you to go home and I want you to write down everything you say to yourself.
Just notice how you talk to yourself in your head.
And I want you to write it down and let's talk about it next week.
And she was very skeptical.
And she was like, yeah, I'm going to prove that you are wrong about this, right?
Yeah.
She comes back the next week.
She takes out her phone and she starts scrolling through it and she starts crying.
And she says, I'm such a bully to myself.
I had no idea.
And I said, tell me, tell me some things you said to yourself.
She passed herself walking by a store window and she saw her reflection and she said you look terrible today.
I said, where were you going?
She said, I was going to meet a friend.
I said, do you think the friend looked at you and thought you looked terrible?
She said, no, I actually look pretty cute.
I don't know why I said that.
Why did you say that?
Right?
She was typing an email.
She made a typo.
She sent it.
She immediately said, I'm so stupid.
That's what she said to herself.
Right?
If you got an email with a little typo in it, would you say the person who sent it is so stupid?
No.
You'd be like, they were typing fast.
Right?
So...
I think it's really important that we ask ourselves, is it kind?
Is it true?
Is it useful?
And once we start talking to ourselves in a different way, we are changing our story immediately.
Because if it doesn't meet those criteria, it's not worthy of being in the story.
It's not even, it's not accurate.
So this idea of I'm not good enough.
Is it kind?
No.
Is it true?
Probably not.
Is it useful?
Definitely not.
So even if you don't believe number two, you don't yet believe that it's not true.
It doesn't meet criteria one and it doesn't meet.
It doesn't meet criterion one and it doesn't meet criterion three.
So it's out.
So there are three things you should always ask yourself.
Is it kind?
Is it true?
Is it useful?
It has to meet all three.
Why?
Because otherwise you're walking around with a faulty narrative and that's going to keep your story small and and limited and you're going to repeat the thing that is inaccurate by choosing people to surround yourself who will corroborate your inaccurate story, because it's a selective group of people who are not the right people for you to surround yourself with.
Or anytime something happens to you, you will see it through that inaccurate, faulty lens.
And that's not an accurate version of what just happened.
You didn't get the job, doesn't mean you're unemployable.
You didn't get that job.
There were however, many people applying.
Somebody else knew somebody.
Somebody else had this very specific piece of experience that you didn't have, that every other candidate didn't have.
And the other candidates are not unemployable either.
They just didn't get that job.
You and the, you know, 100 other people who applied for that job didn't get it.
Lori, this is so powerful.
I want to give the person who's listening or the person that's watching right now on YouTube a chance to really let this sink in, because I know the wheels are turning, because mine are turning too.
And I also want to give you a chance to share this conversation with somebody that you love, someone who needs to stop telling themselves the same old sad, depressing and disempowering story, which is basically all of us is what I'm learning.
And I also want to give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words.
So thank you in advance for being generous with this conversation with the people that you care about and sharing it with friends of yours.
And don't go anywhere, because Lori Gottlieb and I are going to be waiting for you after this short break.
Stay with us.
Welcome back.
It's your buddy, Mel Robbins.
And today you and I are learning how to change our life by rewriting our story with world-renowned therapist Lori Gottlieb.
So Lori, my next question is what is it that you are going to lose when you start to edit the story you tell yourself about yourself?
And why is this loss of the familiar a sign that you're on the right path, not the wrong path?
This is so interesting because I think when people think about making a positive change, like you're going to get married or move to a new city or take a new job, people think well, that's great.
Why am I feeling so unsettled about this or ambivalent about this?
And that's because or even something like I'm going to get out of this relationship.
That is not good for me, right?
Right.
Because with change comes loss, and it is loss of what we already know.
Humans don't like uncertainty.
We like what we know.
It's like there's a saying that the certainty of misery is better than the misery of uncertainty.
The certainty of misery is better than the misery of uncertainty.
So we would rather have something that is not great for us, but we know what it is, than the uncertainty of what we don't quite know yet because we haven't experienced it yet.
So you come from, you know, this is why we say we marry our unfinished business.
Wait, hold on.
We marry our unfinished business.
If we haven't processed.
Wait, what does that mean?
It means that we cling to the familiar.
So for example- We've married a child?
Some people would say that, but what I mean is this.
You grew up in a family where, there were certain things that happened in your family, right?
Even if you had a really happy childhood, there were certain patterns that were in your family.
So let's say that you had a parent who, when they were upset with the other parents, they gave that parent the silent treatment.
And you said, I don't like that.
I want someone who's going to communicate.
So then you grow up, you get in a relationship And you find this person.
You say that person is so communicative.
They're the opposite of, you know, that parent who gave the silent treatment.
I didn't like that.
I'm so glad I'm with this person.
Then you realize that this person is avoidant in a different way.
Maybe they don't give the silent treatment, but there's something that was familiar about their pattern.
Like they can't get too close with you.
They shy away from intimacy.
They communicate well, but there's something about like getting very close. right?
So it's like we replicate that thing, or you know, I'm not going to be with someone who drinks too much.
And then, lo and behold, I have someone with a really bad temper.
You know, you know, whatever it is, it's something like when they drink, they have a really bad temper.
They're not an alcoholic, but, um, so we tend to replicate those things.
If we, because we think I couldn't control that as a child this is totally outside of our awareness.
I couldn't control that as a child.
But as an adult, I'm going to master that situation that made me feel so helpless as a child.
Now I'm going to beat that thing.
So like a moth to flame, you know, you find someone, you're like, we have amazing chemistry.
Turns out, how did this happen?
I ended up with someone who has this trait that I said I didn't want.
That was exactly what feels like home.
And so we're always searching for home.
But if you process the things about home that weren't optimal, now you can search for a healthier home.
But you have to process those things that made home feel like home and then the things that you don't want in your new home.
Otherwise, you're going to take the whole bucket of home, which includes the things that you didn't want.
So can you unpack that a little further?
Because what that left me feeling?
Because I think a lot of I know I can relate to that idea that you marry the familiar.
You end up with a very same dynamic that you saw in your parents.
It doesn't mean, you know, your parents had a good or a bad one.
You just end up with the familiar.
And now you have an opportunity to evolve and to edit and to write your own story.
But if you hear that and you're like, oh my God, my dad was a drunk and I'm married to one.
Or you're like, oh my gosh, I was a kid that basically had to be the adult and the second parent.
And now I've fallen in love with a grown child and I am nitpicking the heck out of this person.
I realized as I'm listening to Lori, because I'm nervous that this person's never going to take care of me.
Yeah.
And just like I heard my mom complain constantly because she didn't have anyone taking care of them.
I've basically fallen for a man child that I'm now angry at.
Right.
So when you said though, that it feels like home, but now you can choose a different home.
It doesn't necessarily mean you're in the wrong relationship.
It means that by editing your own story, you have an opportunity to change the dance.
Is that where this is going?
So you're going to decide whether you're in the right relationship or not.
Okay.
So, and this is going back to why change is hard.
Okay.
So change is hard because we have to change ourselves, right?
So it's so much about.
Oh, I want to change this about the other person as we were talking about, but we have to do something different.
And it's really hard to change a pattern.
Like you're used to being in that role.
You're back home.
Yeah, that's true.
Because if you grew up with a mom constantly complaining and nitpicking- at either the world or their partner, and now you find yourself repeating the same,
You're like, I'm back home.
This feels like home.
Yes, even if you don't want it.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
So what's the first step?
Do we go back to the story exercise?
Right, so first of all, I think we have to understand that there's always going to be loss.
Change and loss travel together.
Oh, why?
That sounds like a bad road trip.
Even if it's good, even if again, even if it's something positive that you're moving toward.
Think about New Year's resolutions.
Why don't they tend to last very long?
I don't know.
Okay.
Because we don't take into account that we're going to be grieving something.
Let's say you're going to, you say, I'm going to exercise.
I'm going to really do something for my body and be healthy, because I want to live a long life and I haven't been taking care of myself.
So I'm going to take care of myself so I can live a long life.
And then, right?
What happens is you're giving up the lifestyle that you were used to.
It's really hard to give up a habit, a pattern that you're used to.
And so you miss it.
And it's hard.
It wasn't good for you, but it's hard.
You miss it.
You know, let's say that you say, you know, I'm going to leave this relationship.
There are things that you miss about the relationship.
But with New Year's resolutions, people think that it's like you make a decision.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to be healthy now in terms of I'm going to exercise.
And I'm either going to succeed or I'm going to fail.
That's not how change works.
It's.
There's the grief and the loss which you have to acknowledge, or else it's just going to sink you.
You know, it's like you won't even know that it's there.
It's going to be pulling at you and pulling against the change.
So if you say, hi, grief, hi, loss.
Nice to see you.
I know this is really hard.
You can talk to it.
I know this sounds completely cheesy and like people think that's insane, but actually it's incredibly helpful.
Why does that work?
Because we all have parts of ourselves.
You know, it's like when I talk to people who are thinking about like, leaving their marriage or having an affair, I'll say tell me about the part that wants to leave or wants to have an affair.
Let's talk to that part.
What is it not getting?
What is it needing?
Let's talk to the part that wants to stay.
What makes it want to stay?
Let's talk about the different parts.
Let's give all the parts.
Let's bring them all in the room together.
I'll even have them sit in different chairs and say okay, you go over to this chair and You're the part that wants to leave or wants to have an affair.
Let's talk.
There's nothing off the table here.
Tell me everything about this that makes you want to do this.
Let's talk about it.
When you give something air, it's like a valve is released, right?
And everything needs air.
So it's not like you're going to act on it.
It's that you're talking about it so that you don't act on it.
So I think that it's really important to talk to the part of you that's grieving.
Like, let's say you're getting married, you're going to miss these things about your independence or these things about brunch with your girlfriends on Sundays.
You can still do that, of course, if you're married, but there's just, your life is going to change a bit.
Or having a baby, your life is going to change a lot.
Or moving.
Or moving, right?
Yeah, moving's a big one, because a lot like I'm realizing, as I'm listening to you, that my therapist, Ann Davin, had me doing this, but not in a therapy session.
I was so discombobulated over moving from where we had raised our kids for 26 years to a small town in the mountains in Vermont, that I was just, I was in a, I was just in a state.
And so she told me that from driving from Boston when I would come down to work, because I'd be like I don't want to leave.
Like, I wish our old life were new.
I don't have any friends yet.
I hate this.
Why did we move?
Of course, blaming Chris, nitpicking my husband.
My husband, Chris, I love you.
I always...
Start to have to own the amount of I don't know like just crap that I've thrown at him, that I feel terrible about.
But he was all excited about the move.
My son was all excited.
I hated the move because I left my friends.
I left everything that was familiar.
But my therapist said that when I got halfway that I had to pull the car over, get out of.
The car turned back toward Boston and I got to say whatever I wanted to say about how I was feeling.
Yes.
And then I had to turn and point myself toward the direction I was driving and say everything I felt about this move, that I was not happy about.
And when I felt like the valve was released, I could get back in the car and I would keep driving forward.
Right.
And Before doing that, as I would be driving the car holding it in, all I would want to do is turn around.
And it took just a couple times and I'm sure people driving by thought what the hell is that woman doing screaming into the wind?
Let them, right?
I've got to do the thing.
But I realized that's what she was doing.
She was giving me the space to let the story out so I could actually... start telling a new story.
Right.
So there are multiple levels to the story and we have to look at all of the parts of the story.
Everything was true that I was feeling.
And contradictory things can be true at the same time.
I'm excited about this.
I'm losing this.
So first you want to give some space to the grief, just like you did.
Yep.
And not try to push it down.
People try to push it down and say, well, it's not good for me to feel the grief because it'll impede me moving forward.
No, it'll help you to move forward if you can have a conversation with the loss and with the grief.
What do you say to somebody who says who feels like a bad person for having these complicated feelings, whether it's the feelings that you know?
You just mentioned the example of somebody coming in and they're so stuck in their relationship they're thinking of having an affair.
Mm-hmm, or it's somebody who is secretly harboring a ton of anger at their parents, or something you're like.
I shouldn't feel this way.
So there's that shame of even admitting the story that you silently tell yourself.
What do you say as a therapist?
So I get so many letters.
In fact, to our podcast, we got a letter that we characterized as tell me I'm not a scumbag letter.
And it was, you know, it's like, I think that a lot of people feel like I'm sharing.
That's why they're writing to us.
They can't, they feel like they can't, tell anybody else that they're having these feelings that they don't realize everybody has feelings like this.
It is so normal.
It doesn't make you a bad person.
It makes you a person.
If you don't have complicated feelings like this, you are not fully engaged in your humanity.
We have all kinds of complicated feelings, but we shouldn't judge them.
We need to notice them.
We need to have compassion for them.
And then we need to say, what do I want to do with them?
It's kind of like, you know, when you say to your kids, like, it's okay to be angry.
It's not okay to hit your brother.
Yes.
Like, have the feeling.
That's great.
Acknowledge it.
Don't say to your kid, don't be angry.
So you say, I know you're angry.
I get it.
Right?
You can't hit your brother, but I get it.
As opposed to the parent who says, you know, don't be angry.
You shouldn't be angry.
Your brother loves you.
He didn't mean it.
Well, now you're really going to want to hit your brother.
So in the example that you gave us that you're thinking about having an affair and you just said you're not a bad person.
You're just a person.
You're just a person.
You need to notice that you're having that conversation with yourself.
You need to talk about that with yourself instead of shaming yourself.
And you need to understand the story behind it.
Like why?
So this person might say you know, I feel I mean, there's so many different versions of this, but what it generally comes down to is and it's not.
I want to be really clear.
The person who decides to have an affair, it is not the partner's fault.
Okay.
The other person, there might be issues in the marriage.
So I think people get really tripped up by.
Yes, there might be things in the marriage that make one partner think maybe I want to have an affair, but the choice to have an affair is totally on the person who has the affair.
So I just want to clarify that.
Um, But I think that the person, if you put them in the chair and say, tell me, I'm talking to the part of you that really wants to leave the marriage or really wants to have an affair.
And the person will say, I feel so stuck and hopeless.
I feel unalive.
I want to feel alive again.
I want to feel connected again.
I don't know how to do that in the situation that I'm in.
And I think I can do that outside of the marriage.
Tell me when you felt a lot.
Now we go back to the other chair.
Tell me when you feel alive or have felt alive with this person in this marriage.
Oh, they light up so much.
It was like this and we did this and I love this about him or her, right?
You know, and you get to that.
Okay, now we can work with this.
Now we have.
Okay, here's the gap between what you want and what you had and what you want to have again.
Let's talk about what you want the next page of this story to be like, right?
And so now we have something to work with.
Lori, let's take a pause right here.
I want to just give this a chance to sink in.
I'd also like to give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words with you.
And if you're nodding along, I've been nodding along to so much as I'm listening and learning to Lori Gottlieb.
I can feel you doing it with me.
Do someone a favor.
Send this to them.
This is the kind of conversation.
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And don't go anywhere because we'll be waiting for you after this short break, so stay with us.
Welcome back.
It's your buddy Mel Robbins.
You and I are in the middle of an amazing conversation with best-selling author and therapist, Lori Gottlieb.
We're talking about how changing your story changes your life.
All right, Lori, so let's get back into it.
I keep thinking about this section in Atomic Habits where James Clear talks about the importance of, or the power of, attaching identity to the kind of changes that you want to make.
So saying things like, I'm the kind of person who doesn't drink during the week.
I'm the kind of person that makes my bed in the morning.
And that sort of identity attachment to the change can help.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how you coach your patients when they're going to make a change on the type of story to tell yourself.
Because if it's true that no matter how hard we try, There will always be gains and losses.
It's sort of like climbing a set of stairs.
You're going to go up a set of stairs and then you're going to hit a landing.
And you get to choose whether you hit the landing and you go back downstairs or you go up to the next flight of stairs right.
Is there a story that you would coach us to tell ourselves during the process of taking on a change, so that we're not seeing those landings that we hit as we're climbing toward new heights as a sign that there we go, not good enough again, when it's actually just part of the climb?
Right.
So what's the story you would tell yourself?
I think, you know, I want to bring in something that my therapist told me.
Okay.
Which is that, you know, when we feel like the problem is out there and it's everyone else, everything else, we're trapped, we can't.
And that happens when we're trying to make a change and we fall back down and we feel like well, this is hopeless right.
Right, he said to me you know, you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out.
But on the right and the left, it's open, no bars.
So why don't we just walk around the bars?
Because if we walk around the bars with freedom comes responsibility.
With responsibility means we have to change.
If we take responsibility for our lives and we will have to make some changes to make our lives the way we want to make them.
So when somebody says they get on the landing and they've tried to make a change, I want people to take ownership of the fact that this is their choice.
They walked around the bars.
It's their decision to make this change.
It's their choice.
They're doing it because they want to.
Is it hard?
Maybe. but they want to.
And if you can hold on to the why, I'm doing this because I don't want to stay trapped.
I don't want to keep shaking the bars thinking that I'm trapped and I can't get out.
I want to walk around them and I want to make some changes and it's going to be hard, but the why of it is, and whatever the change, is right.
I'm doing this because, and if you have a why, Like a one sentence why.
I make my bed every morning because it makes me feel better.
I feel happier in my space.
That's it.
That's your why.
It's not like when you were little and your parents are like, make your bed.
Okay, but that's the thing.
I'm trapped.
Other people are telling me I have to do it.
The why is I don't want to make my parents mad at me, right?
Right, right.
Exactly.
Yes.
As opposed to the why is, oh, this makes me feel good.
It makes me feel like the room looks... better to me.
I feel calmer in the space that is neat.
So if there are no negative feelings, they're just feelings, and feelings act as a compass that point you toward important information.
If you're somebody that's really struggling with anxiety, what is anxiety pointing out?
What is that telling you?
Yeah.
Anxiety means that you're either operating in the past or the future, but you're not sitting in the present.
Oh.
So what we do with anxiety is we tell ourselves a story.
I know I keep saying story, but this is how we make sense of our lives.
From cave people on who made these pictures to tell stories, this is how we make sense of our lives.
So we're always telling stories, even if we don't realize it.
So when you are feeling anxious about something like I think my boss doesn't like my work, or I think my partner is angry with me, or- I think I'm gonna get in trouble, or I think I screwed up, or I think people are talking about me,
Yes, yes.
You are telling a story, and again, we tend to tell the negative story.
So you're writing the next page of your story, but it's like a horror story, right?
It's not like, oh, this worked out, and here's how it worked out.
It's like, this is the worst possible thing that could have happened.
That's the story we tell ourselves, right?
Like.
Okay, so people are talking about me.
Or I messed up, or I said this thing and now people are not going to like me, or they're going to tell about it on social media, or you know, some catastrophic thing is going to happen as opposed to oh, this thing happened.
Okay, what can I do about it now?
Instead of writing a story about something that hasn't happened yet and probably won't.
You know, one other thing that I've read that you said is that Partners hand you the owner's manual for how they need to be loved, but we ignore it.
Yes, yes.
It's so interesting.
If you think about it like when you get a new appliance or a new piece of technology you don't know how it works.
Now, most of us don't read the owner's manuals.
We're kind of like, okay, I'll just try to figure this out.
And then when it glitches, we're like, oh, let me look that up.
Let me see how this thing actually works.
We do the same thing with partners.
We don't think about, I should know how this person works.
We just notice then, oh, something went wrong.
I better figure that out.
So what you want to do is your partner is giving you clues all the time about how they work.
So A partner might.
You might notice that, like when my partner is upset, if I put my hand on her shoulder, she finds that really calming.
Like it connects us and then we can have a better conversation.
Oh, that's something for the owner's manual, right?
So I need to know.
Now there might be another person where, if you're in a heated argument and you put your hand on their shoulder, they're like what are you doing?
No, we're in a fight right now, right?
They don't like that. everybody's different.
Everybody has a unique owner's manual.
I think about a client who was saying that you know, when she came home, her husband would ask her a million questions about her day and she would get really irritated.
And so she would be like I just need to go change into my sweats and I need like 15 minutes to like chill out.
And then I really want to tell you about my day, right?
No, I had another client who said I don't know why my partner doesn't ask any questions about my day when I come in the door.
I feel like they don't care about me.
So you have to know.
Do you see how the owner's manuals are different?
One person really wants questions when they walk in the door.
The other person really needs 15 minutes and then they want to engage.
So...
If you get to know your partner, things go much smoothly if you read the owner's manual.
Now, just like with our tech and our appliances and whatever it is, if we know how it works, we're going to have fewer breakdowns.
So I think that another part of the owner's manual is that you can't assume that just because you operate in a certain way, the other person does too, whether it's about spending or saving money, or spontaneity versus planning.
You might be like, I feel this way about it.
Why don't you feel this way about it, right?
Or this person said this to you.
Why are you upset about it?
I wouldn't be upset about that.
Well, because they have a different owner's manual.
So you've got to understand that.
And I think when you've been with a partner for a long time, you assume that you know their owner's manual because you've been with them for a long time.
And then you find out, oh, wait a minute.
I don't know everything.
I need to be curious and I need to ask.
So, instead of assuming I know what they want or I know what I would want in this situation and that's what they would want, you really want to find out and you want to notice, like how do you learn what works?
And they need to learn that about you too.
I would love to have you answer some listener questions.
Sure.
So this one comes from Kaylee.
I'm in a five-year relationship.
I find myself nagging him a lot and almost searching for a problem with everything and anything he does.
I need help stopping this behavior because he feels attacked, which only makes him put his guard up, leading to even more things for me to pick apart.
I love him and I just want to figure out why do I do this and how do I stop?
I love that she is asking, why do I do this?
That is the most important part of her question.
Why do I do this?
And I would want to know, where did she learn this?
Where did she learn that when somebody else disappoints you because whatever he's doing is disappointing her, it's not going the way she wants, that you come at them.
That you come at them.
That's not how you get people to change.
You don't come at them and tell them all the ways that they need to do things, so that you will be happier.
You tell them that there's something going on in our relationship.
It's us.
It's not you.
It's not me.
It's us.
And here are some of the things.
And you might say, I'm wondering why.
I don't know what the specifics are.
Let's say it's, I'm wondering why you don't do the laundry.
I have no idea what they're thinking.
I'm wondering why you don't walk the dog.
I'm wondering why.
That's all.
It's just, I'm wondering why.
Oh well, I thought you were going to do the laundry, or I thought you know, I didn't really want the dog.
It was really your thing and we kind of got the dog.
But I'm actually kind of resentful that we got the dog right.
Things will come up in the conversation about the why, and now you have a place to talk about it.
Nagging him is as she said and as she noticed, is only going to make him not want to engage with her even more and probably not do the things You know.
He's not going to be inclined to want to please her because he sees her as.
You are doing things wrong.
You are bad.
You are bad.
You are bad.
You are bad.
That's what he's hearing.
Doesn't matter what the content is.
He's hearing you're bad.
You're disappointing me.
You're failing.
You know, you're making me unhappy.
Who wants to hear that?
Well, and I think what's super relatable about this is everybody has had an experience where they've either been the one nagging
Yeah.
And they are trying to stop or you're the one who's being nagged and you're shutting down.
Yeah.
And so, if you take everything that you're teaching us around the fact that it's a dance and you're in a dynamic that doesn't work, you start with your story first.
So let's say you're the one being nagged.
So you're shutting down.
The question that you ask yourself is, when else in my life have I felt this way?
Is that what you're asking yourself?
Because you're looking for why this feels familiar.
Right, right.
Well, where else have I felt this way and reacted this way, which is to withdraw?
As opposed to if somebody says something...
And you feel like they're complaining about something about you.
Yeah.
And by the way, maybe her remarks sound like complaints as opposed to requests.
So there's a difference between a request and a complaint.
A request is, you know, when there are dishes in the sink, could you put them in the dishwasher?
Right?
That's different from, you never do that.
Why do you do that?
You're such a slob.
Right?
Sounds so terrible when you say it that way.
That's a complaint.
So then if the request isn't met, you can say, you know what?
I was asking if you could put the dishes in.
I'm wondering why, what makes it hard?
And whenever you can say to somebody, we've talked about this earlier, what makes it hard, right?
Because there's something getting in the way.
What makes it hard?
That's different from, you know, I just don't feel like doing it.
It might be, you know, I just feel so stressed all the time and I'm overwhelmed and I'm resentful, you know, or whatever it is.
You'll be able to get to some kind of solution from that.
And then what happens is, because nothing gets resolved in these arguments people do what I call kitchen sink fighting, which is everything but the kitchen sink.
So it's, you don't do the dishes.
Oh, and by the way, and the laundry, do you remember that?
And the dog, do you remember that?
And then there was that time that you did this.
And remember that time that you said this thing that was really hurtful to me?
And why don't you ever care about me?
As opposed to like, we were just talking about there was some dishes in the sink.
We weren't talking about the laundry and the dog and the thing.
The time you did the hurtful comment.
We're not talking about any of that.
But people then spiral into a whole laundry list of everything the other partner ever did that disappointed them, hurt them, that they didn't like.
And then nobody can have a conversation because it just feels like, you know, like a a fight.
It doesn't feel like a conversation anymore.
Again, it's just a litany of complaints as opposed to a request to come together and do something different.
So if you're listening, you're like, that's me.
I'm the kitchen sink fighter.
What would be the one or two things you would recommend that they do immediately after listening to this podcast?
Okay.
So the first thing is when something comes up, you decide is this worth it?
Is this something from my past?
Is this realistic to ask of my partner?
What are the things that he has to put up with me that I'm not perfect, that I don't do?
So do I have to bring up every single thing?
You want to kind of pick your battles.
So that's the first thing.
Secondly, if it is something that is important and after you've reflected on it maybe not in the moment maybe you think about it for about 15 minutes or 30 minutes and you go take a walk or you go do something else.
And then you think like, is it still that important to me?
So you need some time between stimulus and response.
So in the response is going to be you know oh actually, after 30 minutes it's not that big of a deal.
I've really kind of forgotten about it at this point.
I don't need to bring it up because you don't want to bombard your partner with every single thing that you wish they did differently.
So pick your battles.
So let's say that you decide after 30 minutes, no, this is really important.
So then you bring it up.
But you bring it up then not like two days later when the dishes are in the sink and you're like remember two days ago when that thing happened.
So you always want to bring the thing up if it's worth it that day, so that you don't do kitchen sink fighting.
So there's not this whole list that you have in your head that your partner has no clue about.
They don't know you have 10 things in your head that you didn't like. that they're upset about.
They have no idea.
So then you get into a fight.
So you say something about the dishes and then you have your 10 things just ready to go.
You're ready to rip with those 10 things.
No, if you already brought them up at the time or decided they weren't worth it.
Either way, you only have one thing to discuss.
You don't have 10 things to discuss.
You only have one.
And that's an example of how the change starts with you.
Yes.
Managing yourself.
Robin has a question that, I think a lot of us can relate to because I see this a lot in the inbox.
And that is that she has a 29-year-old daughter who is thriving.
She's in her third year of medical school.
Very proud of her.
But we're struggling with her partner.
This is that you see the person that you care about is with somebody who is bringing them down.
Yeah.
Or you suddenly see that this person that you care about is no longer themselves.
And...
You know, she goes through a long list about how this person is 30 years old.
He barely speaks when he visits.
He has a very traumatic past.
Might see my daughter tiptoeing around his needs.
Seems to be falling into a rescuer role.
I've even started therapy to help myself cope with this.
I'm really struggling and would value any advice to cope with the relationship drama that has been brought to our family.
How do I support my daughter without damaging our relationship or enabling something that feels unhealthy?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, it's so hard to watch your child be in a situation that you feel is bringing them down or even dangerous.
And when they're younger, we feel like, well, we can kind of do something about that.
And as they get older, we have to let go more and more and more and more.
But that doesn't mean you have to do nothing.
So what do you do?
Because if you complain about the partner, you push them toward them, right?
Right.
And they won't come to you.
Like when there are real things happening.
Your daughter is going to be.
I don't want to tell mom that's going to give her more ammunition to tell me why I shouldn't be with my partner.
Your daughter is not ready to break up with this person.
So first of all, that is a hard thing to accept.
Your daughter is not ready.
If she were ready, she would do it.
So she's not ready.
So how do you...
Help her to get to a place where she's more aware of what she's signing up for.
And so you don't do it by saying look at your partner, and here are the things about your partner and I don't like these things about your partner.
When you see something that happens, you say, wow, that seemed really hard.
And then you stop talking.
Just, oh, that seemed really hard.
Are you okay?
She'll be like, no, no, I'm fine.
It's okay.
Um, you just, you just observe and you're reflecting back reality to her.
You're reflecting back what you see.
So she is not wanting to see certain parts of the story and you're just kind of being the narrator and you're not.
You're not passing judgment.
No judgment, no judgment.
You don't seem like yourself.
No, no, I wouldn't even say you don't seem like yourself.
What do you say?
No, no, no.
Give us a list.
No.
Instead of, you know, I noticed that you're not yourself.
What did the daughter used to like doing?
And you say, hey, let's say she liked, you know, going to museums or something, right?
So, hey, you want to go to a museum together?
Daughter goes to museum with mother.
Daughter thinks, oh, that was really nice.
I haven't done that in a while.
See, so daughter's going to notice, wait, something's a little bit different.
Boyfriend never wants, he doesn't even want me to go to the museum.
He doesn't want me to spend time with my family.
He doesn't like that.
I went with my mother, even though the boyfriend that I want would be happy that I enjoy spending time with my family.
So you're just doing things and saying things that are not about the partner and not about what you think the daughter should do, but you are playing a role of the narrator.
So the narrator is saying hey, let's go to a museum or, you know, Let's travel, or whatever the thing is that the daughter used to do.
Or, you know, oh, oh, I remember you used to read a lot.
You know, like, hey, what books?
You might say, let's say the daughter used to read a lot.
Now she doesn't read.
You might say, like, what books are you reading right now?
Oh, I can't read right now.
I'm in medical school.
I'm really busy or whatever.
Oh, okay.
You know, because if you want me to, you know, like, I read this great book in my book club.
I'm just giving you this recommendation in case you want it.
So you just reflect back what you're seeing and you offer positive reminders of the things you're not seeing.
It's different if it's dangerous.
So let's separate that out.
Like, if it's dangerous if, like you know there's abuse going on, you're going to have to say something.
That's different.
But if it's like this person doesn't have his emotional life together, he is dragging my daughter into this.
She is playing this role of kind of trying to save him. and it's not her role to save him.
He hasn't gotten to the place in life that she has.
He seems to not want her to spend time with family.
He doesn't really talk to us when he's with us.
So those are the things.
And so you want to just help her kind of notice without saying any of those things.
Like when you see him, you start engaging him in conversation.
You don't just say like, okay, it's fine.
He's not talking to us.
You're like, hey, John, how you doing?
What's going on?
How was your day?
Oh, how's work going?
And he might get, and she will notice the interaction.
Like, he's really not talking to my mom and my dad.
That's really strange that he's not doing that.
As opposed to the parents trying to accommodate and being like okay, he's just not talking and we're noticing that.
It's like, let the daughter notice.
Let her see these things.
Shine a light on this part of the story.
Not by changing yourself, but just being yourself and not just going around it.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
What role do boundaries play in rewriting your life story?
Well, I think the story of boundaries is what people need to rewrite.
And what I mean by that is we think, most of us think that boundaries go like this.
You say you know hey mom, if you say anything about my appearance or my boyfriend, let's use that example.
You know hey mom, if you say anything about my boyfriend or you say anything about my appearance, I'm going to end the conversation, because I don't like it when you do that.
Well, okay.
The mom says something, right?
And you say, you didn't respect my boundaries, so I'm going to cut you off or whatever it is.
People go really extreme, like this person didn't respect my boundaries.
By the way, sometimes you have to ask if your boundary is reasonable, first of all.
So is the boundary reasonable?
Are you saying to somebody, you have to do this thing that is not really humanly possible?
You have to be perfect.
You have to this.
You have to that, right?
Not really possible.
Or you aren't taking care of your emotional side of things.
And so you are asking your partner to take care of your emotions for you.
That's not reasonable.
So let's assume your boundary is reasonable.
I don't want you to criticize my appearance.
Or if you raise your voice when we're having a conversation, I'm going to end the conversation.
We'll come back later when we can have a calm conversation.
So let's say that... the partner doesn't do it.
Your mother doesn't do it.
And you say, well, they just can't hold a boundary.
So I'm going to distance myself or whatever it is.
No, that's not the issue.
The issue is you don't know how to set a boundary.
So setting a boundary is a boundary that you set with yourself.
What are you going to do?
Not what is the other person going to do?
What are you going to do if your request is not met?
So you make a request.
Hey mom, when you talk about my appearance, it is a lot less fun to be with you because we have kind of a history with that.
So if you do bring up my appearance, I'm going to end the conversation.
Okay.
Mom brings it up.
You don't say, you didn't respect my boundary.
You say mom, it was so fun being with you.
But you know I don't like the thing about the appearance.
Talk to you later.
That's it.
Very calm.
Every time that happens, it has to be a hundred percent of the time.
If you do it 98% of the time, it doesn't work.
So, but you, not them, you.
100% of the time, the person yells during a conversation and you say, you know what?
We're going to come back.
Let's do it later.
I know this is getting really heated.
Let's come back.
Do you have to identify the behavior?
Yeah.
You do?
Yeah.
Even if it scares you?
Like somebody that raises their eyes or makes dismissive comments or gets all agitated.
Yeah, but you don't say it in a dismissive way.
So you don't say like, you know, you're being crazy or you're being insulting.
You just say, oh, I see that this is getting really heated right now.
And I ask that we not talk that way.
So let's talk later when we can have a better conversation.
Lori, if you could speak directly to, to the person that is watching right now or who's been listening to this incredible conversation, if they were to take just one action of everything that you have taught us today.
What is the most important thing to do?
I would say think of a story that you're telling yourself right now in your own life.
That is not serving you.
It could be about a circumstance that you're in.
It could be about a person in your life.
It could be about yourself.
What is a story that you're telling yourself that is not serving you?
And now that you're an adult and you get to write the story, what do you want the next paragraph to be?
I'm not saying what do you want the next 20 pages to be.
It's this small adjustment in the story.
What do you want the next paragraph to be?
And what do you need to look at in the story you're telling yourself so that this next paragraph is possible?
What kind of edit do you need to your story so you can write a new paragraph that is more in line with the story you're trying to tell about your life?
What is that one thing?
If everybody right now, if you can just think what is the story that I'm telling myself, that does not serve me well.
Lori Gottlieb, what are your parting words?
So I want people to think about this.
There is a story that is going to be written about Every single one of us.
And that is an obituary.
And we don't like to think about that.
But the fact is, we don't have forever.
And we want to write our story while we are here, while we are alive.
And we want to take control of that narrative.
We don't want somebody else writing the story about us.
So I want everybody to remember that you are the sole author of your life.
It's not co-written by your parents or by another person in your life or by the culture and what the culture says you need to be or do or how you need to live your life.
You get to write that story.
So the question is, do you want to write a story about someone who is stuck and afraid?
Or do you want to sit down and do the hard work of facing the blank page and examining your story and writing a narrative about a character who created something that is unique and imperfectly beautiful, that became a masterpiece of a life?
That doesn't mean it's perfect.
It means it was a story that had all the messiness, but that you got to write it.
You got to make intentional decisions about it.
So that story is available to every single one of us.
And so I want you to ask yourself, what is the story that I want to write?
And then I want you to sit down and I want you to write the next sentence.
That's all I want you to do today, because that sentence will lead you to the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
And from that, you will create your life.
Lori Gottlieb, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I want to end because I want to go grab my pen and go write the sentence, because I do want to be the sole author of my life.
And I cannot thank you enough for unpacking this at such a deep level, for giving us tactical things to do.
You truly have a gift.
And there's no doubt in my mind that the person who is with us right now watching or listening that their life will never be the same if they take everything to heart that you taught us today.
So thank you.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
And I want to thank you.
Thank you for caring enough about yourself that you spent time watching or listening to this that you recognize that, as Lori said, you are the sole author of your life.
I hope you take everything that she poured into us.
I hope you pick up a pen, you turn the page and you start writing a masterpiece of your life, because you are capable of doing it and you deserve to do it.
And, as your friend, I wanted to be sure to tell you, in case nobody else does, that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life.
And what you learn today is going to help you change the story that leads to it.
Alrighty, I will see you in the very next episode.
I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play.
How changing, okay, changing your story can change your life.
Okay, hold on a second.
Rewrite that story because our guest, oh, okay, got it.
In fact, changing your story isn't just a catchy idea.
It's, oh, okay. which was also published in the Atlantic for the last six years.
She's, oh my God, hold on a second.
And the host of two podcasts, one, oh my God.
She has degrees from Stanford and Pepperdine and before, okay.
She says she's always been drawn to stories and how they're told.
And today she's helped, oh my Lord.
Okay, great.
Wow.
Fantastic.
And one more thing, and no, this is not a blooper.
This is the legal language.
You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.
This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.
I'm just your friend.
I am not a licensed therapist.
And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional.
Got it?
Good.
I'll see you in the next episode.
