Hi everyone, It's Sophia and welcome back to Work in Progress. Today's guest was such a delight for me to have on. I got to sit down and dig in deep with Lori Gottlie, a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which has sold over a million copies and is currently being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the Atlantics weekly Dear Therapist advice column, and she is the co host of the popular Dear Therapists podcast, which is produced by former Work in Broadcast guest Katie Kuric. Lorie is a sought after expert in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS, This Morning, CNN, and NPRS Fresh Air, and her recent Ted Talk was one of the top ten most watched the year. Today, we're going to discuss that talk, along with the importance of therapy versus talking with friends. Her book issues in relationship and identity. There is so much great advice in this episode. I honestly don't even want to say anymore. I just want to jump in so you can benefit from this conversation as much as I did enjoy. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. Well, I'm so excited to be here. Where are you at the moment, Laurie, I'm in Los Angeles, Oh amazing. I'm I'm just a couple of hours north uh this week, but I'm based in l A. Two. I know we were going to meet. I think well last year, a year ago, we were going to meet at south By Yes and the world shut down. What a time. How I'm so curious how that has affected you and how you've seen it affect people. I would imagine that the content or or shape of the letters in your inbox has probably really revolved around what this year has meant to so many people. Yeah, I think, on the one hand, it really has. But I think on the other hand, what I've seen is that a lot of people have started to deal with things that maybe they hadn't dealt with before because they've been forced to slow down. I think whatever was going on before has been amplified or magnified. And I think the positive part of that is that people are saying, I want to prioritize this now. That's very cool. I'm excited to hear more about that. But before we get into the present, something that people may not know and that I always get so excited about when it happens, is when I meet another fellow Angelina. Because you were also born in Los Angeles and and very rare birds. So I'm curious, where in l A are you from and and did you love growing up there? Well, yeah, natives are very rare. People are always surprised when I say that I'm from l A. They're like, really, yes, people are actually born here. Um, but so many people come from other places that it is rare to find other Angelina's. I grew up in Beverly Hills and it was not I think, you know, when people think of Beverly Hills, I think when I was growing up, they were thinking of Beverly Hills nine o two and know the show. It was definitely not that. It was a quiet suburb in the middle of Los Angeles and it was sort of a very kind of normal suburban existence. Yeah, where did you grow up? Um? I grew up not not too far from you. I was kind of you know, West Hollywood, Miracle Mile. Um. My parents, my dad's first rented photos studio was on the corner of Beverly and Stanley right Caddy corner to wear Arawan, the grocery store is, and now my dad's old photo studio is a coffee shop called on Dante Roasters. And I get really excited anytime in that neighborhood and I go in there for coffee because the coffee shop has these beautiful terra cotta tiles on the floor and my parents installed those. Yeah, in the late seventies. They took a trip down to Baja and loaded up my dad's truck with these cool terra cotta, you know, twelve by twelve tiles, and then drove back and did the floor there. And so I kind of just have this interesting nostalgia, um because you know, that was where my dad was working when I was a baby. And our our first house was on Fifth Street, right off Sweetzer, and it I know where that is. It's such a sweet neighborhood. And there's all these old kind of they feel almost like thirties forties little bungalows, tiny little houses that maybe have two bedrooms, sometimes three. And my parents did so much work on our house and my dad and I when I was I think five, I must have been five, maybe six we put up a little white picket fence around our house and it's still there, and it really Yeah, it's just so so sweet. And I similarly to you, I think there's this kind of misnomer from TV that every house in l A Is a mansion and everyone in l A Is really wealthy, and that l A is such a fancy place. But it really felt like this cool series of neighborhoods to me, almost like series of little suburbs. But then you could drive, you know, onto a big boulevard and see a show, or go to a museum or you know, see a movie at the Pantageous, all these things that felt big and and historic, which I really loved as a kid because I remember feeling like, you know, there's places here that are castles, And now I realized the Magic Castle is like actually just a magic show building that was built to look that way. When I was a kid, I was sure it was part of a Disney movie. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's what was great about l A. Is like you would just go outside and play with your friends, and and it was very much like um, you could be anywhere, but then you had all of this culture around you. That's what I really loved about it too. That was what I missed. I had a big chunk of my childhood where I lived up in central California, which I loved and it was so cool and you know, just five thousand people in my town and you know, cattle and horse ranches everywhere. But I missed I missed museums, which was probably a really early nod that I would do something like this, that I wouldn't want to interview writers and therapy iss and culture leaders and you know, talk about society and how we you know, how we learn to know ourselves. Like I was a little kid who had you know, California beaches and ranches like right outside my door, and I was like, I just really missed the museum. Mom. It's true, though. It's funny people people forget that we actually have culture here though, and then it's really, I think a place of ideas when you think about it. I mean, that's where people feel free to just say, here's this idea or I'm thinking about this. And I think that people here love story and so for someone like you or someone like me, where that's what we do is our lives are about story and the human condition. It feels like this seems like the place where we would call home. Yes, that is so cool. So did did story? And I wonder this for you because, of course, now in hindsight, I can see for myself where as a child I was identify find curiosity and storytelling and performing and research and all those things. But for you, do you look back now when you think about your childhood and think that your current career was somehow obvious? You know, what, what were you like? Who was Lorie as a little girl? What were you fascinated by? What were the things that really drew your attention? Well, it's funny because I never in a million years would have thought I would end up as a therapist, Which is interesting because I know because I've always been interested in people, but I never envisioned that for myself. I was a reader. I was an obsessive reader. I still am. I always like to say that I have books the way other women have shoes, like I can't. I don't know what to do with all the books. I have so many books, and I won't get rid of them because they're all dog eared and annotated, and they all mean something to me. And what I was feeling or thinking at that time in my life. And I you know, if someone were to look inside my books, it would almost be like looking inside my journal because I have just such a personal connection to certain lines or passages. So I was always a reader. And when I went to um College, I studied literature. I studied actually French literature, and I studied other languages as well. So I was interested in literature and different cultures and language. And when I graduated from college, because I'm from l A, I my family was not a Hollywood family at all. We had no connections to the industry. But I was really fascinated by story and so I thought, I'm going to see what this is all about. And so when I graduated from college, I started working in the entertainment business. I first did film development and then I moved over to network development. And I was actually an executive, like a baby executive when I got there at NBC. The year that e Er and Friends premiered. Oh my goodness, what a time to be in TV. Yeah, and that that was at a time when people kind of look down on TV. It was always about film was the thing. But I love television because I loved that you could develop characters over many seasons that you could really get in there. So when I say to you, right, so, when I say to you, I never thought I would be a therapist. When you look at it, it's like, well, of course, right, because I was all about what's going to happen to these people and why and what's motivating them? And um so I was. I was so interested in the long term arc of these characters and these stories. That is so interesting. I have so many questions about that. But I must pause because there are other questions coming up for me, which include how does a teenager in Los Angeles get passionate about French literature? I did not expect that curveball. I was like, I'm sorry, what so I need to know how you went for being this voracious reader in your childhood too to winding up studying French literature and college, and then how in the world does that take you into film. I'm so curious about the particulars of your story. Well, what I loved about French literature even as a teenager was that it was all of these big existential questions about life. What is the meaning of life? Like, what is our purpose here? Questions about agency and free will and all those big questions. So I think when you're a teenager, and you're a teenager who doesn't quite fit in like I was, I was sort of the the academic kid, so I had my sort of intellectual friends, but it was it was really sort of a friend group of people talking about ideas, and we were really curious about like what is life about? And we would have these very sort of you know, when you look back, you feel like they're very naive kinds of conversations because you know you're a teenager trying to figure out the world. But I think it some ways, they really are the questions that we all deal with as adults in our lives. And so I was fascinated by that, and I loved reading it in French because I think, you know, there are translations, of course, but when you read it in the actual language, there are certain things that just don't translate in exactly the same way. Yeah, that's so interesting. And when you ask, or when you reference rather that you were asking those questions, you know, what is life about? And what is our purpose here? I think that that is so much of what we all as humans ask of ourselves repeatedly throughout our lives, you know. I I know that I've laughed with my therapist and been like, remember when I was thinking about this five years ago, Well I solved that, and now I got to do the next version of it. Like there's always a level up. I wasn't prepared for that. Why did nobody tell me that was coming? And and so I love actually imagining that as a teenager, you were asking those questions that I then would pause it that you've likely asked yourself and your friend group has likely discussed throughout stages of your life, right, And I think we come at these questions differently. So when you say you say to your therapist, well, you know, now I have to deal with this. I think there's a certain readiness based on your life experiences when you start to look at certain things. You know, I find that all the time where people come to me for therapy and then we're sort of done for the time being, and then something else happens. They have a child, or they're getting married, or they're getting divorced, or a parent dies or whatever it is, and they say, oh, I didn't realize I was going to react to this in that way, and I need to come and understand this better. That's so interesting, so obviously questioning life and it's motivations, and you know, the human place in this sort of global condition speaks to unwinding each each of our stories and the work that you do today. Do you also see connections in terms of how you grew up in your family or your upbringing and how it might have influenced your career. Yeah? Absolutely. I mean I think that the very questions that my patients are asking in their lives or questions that I have had to ask in my own life, and I feel this idea of story is so central to what I do as a therapist. And I think that's because I think that the reason people come to therapy is because they're sort of stuck in their story. And and the other part of it is is that we're all unreliable narrators of our stories. I love that part of your ted talk. I love Will you explain what that means that we are unreliable narrators? Yeah, so you know, and maybe you should talk to someone. In my book, you can see that where I follow these four patients as they come in and they go through their struggles. And then I'm the fifth patients in the book, and I go through my struggle, and you can see that all five of us come in with these very unreliable narratives of our lives. We're telling our stories through these this very particular lens. And it's not that we're purposely trying to mislead the therapist. That my patients aren't trying to mislead me, and I'm not trying to mislead my therapist. It's more that we have a very particular take on what happens to us, and often we can't see the big picture. We can't see why the other person is doing what they're doing, or we don't understand what our own role is in self sabotaging ourselves. We can't see our own blind spots, of course, so those aren't in the story. Um, what we choose to emphasize or minimize when we're telling a story, who are the heroes in the story? Who are the victims? Who are the villains? That all starts to change as you start to really examine the story in therapy, and I almost feel like my job, as I'm sitting in the therapist chair is that I'm more of an editor than a therapist, because I'm helping people to edit these faulty narratives. And some of the faulty narratives are these internal narratives like I'm unlovable, or nothing will ever work out for me, or I can't trust at anyone. That's the narrative that informs every decision, choice, um behavior. That that is happening all the time, every day, and you don't even realize that that story is running in the background all the time, all the time. And one of the things that really blew my mind in terms of understanding that we all do that well. First your brilliant quote that we're unreliable narrators of our stories. I was like, oh my god, I feel attacked. And seen what does it mean? And and and the other idea that whatever story you've told yourself, whatever the story is that you carry and you believe to be true about your life, it will always be easy to find evidence for it. So if the idea is I'm unlovable or I'm unworthy, anything that happens in your life, you can say, see that's proof. See that person didn't call me back when they said they would. See I didn't hear from so and so on my birthday. See, and and it can keep you trapped in a story that once you admit that that's your internal story, the people who do love you look at you and go, are you crazy? But it's a it's a thing that colors are experiences unless we're willing to look inward and deal with it. And I I really must say, I'm I'm so grateful for the work that people like you do. And I must also say I'm amazed at the courage it takes as a leader in your field, as a therapist, as someone who you know has been on the TED stage and is so looked to in this world for you to say, yeah, I'm going to put four patients in the book and then myself. Who was that an intense choice to not only talk through how you would advise these four people, but then be revealing about ways you have needed to be advised yourself. Well, I never intended to write a book where I included myself and my own therapy sessions. And I wasn't even going to write this book. I And in this book, I described that I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness, and the happiness book was making me miserable. I called it the miserable, depression inducing happiness Book because I felt like it just couldn't capture what I have the privilege of seeing every day, which is I get to see the human condition in the room every day. It's not the social media version of life. It's not the dinner party version of life. It's not necessarily even what we tell our friends or our family. It is the real tough stuff that we're dealing with. And what I see are these real heroic moments, these moments where people are making small changes. I think people don't realize that most big transformations come about from these tiny, almost imperceptible steps that we take along the way, and that's what we're doing in therapy. So I said, I don't want to write this happiness book. I canceled that book, and I said, I want to write a book where I bring people into the therapy room so they can be a fly on the wall and they can see how people actually get through their struggles, how they grow and change, how they transform through this process of connecting with another human being, which is the therapist in this case, and so they can connect with the other people in their lives outside of the therapy room. But at the same time, I was going through my own struggle, and I thought it would be really disingenuous of me to write about these four patients and to not include the fact that I was going through something at the same time. So I made a fifth patience in the book, and that was me. And when I when I actually sold this book, publishers said, no one's going to read this book. They all wanted the Happiness Book, and they said, no one's going to read this book. Who wants to read a book about people talking in the therapy room. And of course now it's sold over a million copies, and you know, it's like, it's it's it's a lot of people have seen it. Actually, I a pretty good gauge on what people come to therapy for, and I'm telling you, this is the book they need exactly exactly. And that was why I wanted to write it. I wanted to write a book that would actually help people. I did not think The Happiness Book was going to help people, because I don't think it's about happiness. They think it's about like what we were talking about, meaning and purpose and and getting unstuck and so I wanted to show how people get unstuck. And so people said, you know, no one's going to read this book. So I was very unself conscious in writing about myself because I thought, well, maybe three people will read this book, and for those three people who read it, I want it to be transformative for them. And so I just let it rip, you know, like I just I did not edit myself. It's very raw and authentic. And then I turned in the book to my publisher and they said, oh my gosh. I laughed, I cried, I saw myself in it. I gave it to all these people, and I thought, oh, maybe I should edit myself a little bit, Maybe I should clean myself helf up, because maybe three hundred or three thousand people will read this. Of course, I had no idea just how many people all over the world would be reading this. And I didn't clean myself up, and I am so glad that I didn't, because I think that the reason that it has resonated so widely is because it is so real and raw and vulnerable. Yes, and I think people are craving that. And you really hit the nail on the head. But it was just a passing moment a few a few minutes ago where you said that when you're in the room with people, you get their whole selves. You don't get social media version. You know, social media is a highlight reel so often, and I actually love that you didn't put the social media version of yourself in your book. You let it be complete and complex. We are as humans, these three dimensional, complicated, beautiful, multifaceted beings, and so often were reduced to a title of you know, a job or a position in a family, or whatever it is you do in the world. That's one thing, one word, one term. And I think that that's something that causes so much pain for people and makes people feel so frustrated. And that's terrible expectations. You know, this notion that your idol can't have a bad day, or that someone who is successful is not also suffering, or that someone who is suffering does not also have joy. It can begin to make things feel, as you said, so sticky. And I'm curious, because you are you are the expert, you know in the room, what are some of the things that you think are really sticky for people that can be true for everyone, and and of those whichever those themes are that you're going to share with us, how do you recommend people take that first step towards getting unstuck. I think what's really hard for people is this question that's at the core for all of us, which is how can I love and be loved? And I mean not only by others, but by ourselves that I think we have so much trouble taking in love, giving love in a way that goes smoothly loving ourselves. When I give talks, often I will be up on stage and I will say to people, show of hands, who is the person that you talked to most in the course of your life? Is it your partner, lots of hands? Is it your sister, is it your parents? Is it your best friend? Lots of people will respond to that. But the person that we talked to most in the course of our lives is ourselves. And what we generally say to ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful. And so I had this therapy client who was so self critical, and she could not see it because it just became part of the noise. She didn't even notice it. At a certain point and I said, listen, I want you to go home, and I want you to write down everything that you hear yourself say to yourself over the course of a few days, really listening for it, and then come back and we'll talk about it. So she comes back the next week. She's got her phone, She's written it all down, and she starts to read it, and she starts crying. She can barely get a word out. She just breaks down crying, and she says, I can't even read this. I am such a bully to myself. And I had no idea. And they were things like she had made a typo and she was writing an email and she said her mom, you know, and herself that voice in her heads, you're so stupid. She caught a reflection of herself, and she said, oh, you look horrible, right, And you would never say that to a friend, not because you're sugarcoating it or trying to be nice, but because you would not actually think your friend was stupid if she made that typo, or you would not think she looked terrible if she looked that way, right. And so this whole idea that we need to be kinder to ourselves. I think we have this idea that I need to put myself to be better, to achieve more, to be more successful, whatever that means. And the thing is, when you self flagellate, you're actually working against yourself because you're just bathing yourself in shame. You don't allow for your humanity. When you are kind to yourself, that's when you actually have the space to become more successful, to become to inhabit the person that you want to be because you're being kind to yourself. It's almost like think about how you would talk to a child, right would you say to that child who may be made a mistake, like, well, that's terrible, You've got to do better. You know you wouldn't do that. You would say, that's okay, let's look at what happened. You would be really compassionate with that child. Why can't we be that compassionate with ourselves? I see that so much in therapy. No matter what the issue is that they're coming in for, ultimately people are so hard on themselves. They are apologizing for having feelings, especially women. Women especially will start to cry and they'll say, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm crying And just like you're in a therapy office, do you see the tissues there? Do you see them all over the office? You're supposed to be crying here. This is the place where we expect that you're going to cry. But they'll even apologize in a therapy office for crying for having feelings. Mm hmm. God, I'm trying to find my words because you've said so many things that just feel like our our friend and other podcast guests here who we love so much, love the Agi E Jones. We'll talk about, you know, the women in her life who dropped gems, and she'll go, boop, dropped a gem. So you know that, you know you've said something that's impacted her. And I love that because it's such a it's such an act of love. And and as as you said, women in particular can really be so self critical and feel like we're not allowed to have feelings, meaning we're also not allowed to have joy. And so in my head, I was like, oh my gosh, this notion that being a bully to yourself is actually bathing yourself in shame. There's a gem. How is a person supposed to be capable or or to do more if they're shrouded in shame? That's a gym. What you said about how if we're kind to ourselves it enables growth another one. I'm just like, I feel like I'm picking them up behind you as you go. It's so it's so amazing. But I know that men also struggle with you know, feelings and emotion, and that, especially in our society, men so often are basically pushed into the box of your only reasonable response to anything is anger and you can't have a sensitive feeling, which I would imagine as the root of so much of the you know, discomfort and violence we see happening, you know, in gender roles in this country. How do you think you mentioned that women are so apologetic for having feelings because we have been made to feel so ashamed about being quote emotional. And I think emotions are great because they're the root of empathy. I think of empathy as a superpower. But what what are some more of the things that you see in the differences between how men and women talk about their issues in therapy? What what do you think those differences speak to for us in society? How how can we be aware of them? Yeah, there really is a difference in terms of what I see in the therapy room. But I wanted first to say something about when you talk about those little nuggets what you just said about women and joy, that we have so much trouble being able to feel like we deserve to have joy that it almost feels indulgent. Right. And when you talk about, you know, women feeling like they're two emotional feelings, people tend to think there are good feelings and they're bad feelings, Like a good feeling is joy and a bad feeling is like sadness or anxiety or even envy. And I always say to people, your feelings are like a compass. They tell you where to go, they tell you what direction to go in. And so instead of trying to tend that you're not feeling what you're feeling, use your feelings. If you're feeling sad, what is what is causing that? If you're feeling angry, well, did somebody cross the boundary of yours? Did you feel hurt? What happened? Right? So it tells you what's not working, so that you can figure out how to make things work. Even envy people say, you know, oh, I don't want to especially for women, it's like very taboo. You can't feel envious of another person. But I say, yes, welcome the envy because it tells you what you want. It tells you something about desire, and women are so afraid of desire. We're not allowed to have desire, right, And so I say, follow your envy because it tells you maybe I want something like that in my life, and maybe I have permission. I can give myself permission to go after it and get it. So I just wanted to to say that because when you mentioned joy, I thought, yes, we really need to be able to own our joy and to be able to own our desire. But in terms of men and women, here's something I'll see in the therapy room. So let's say I'm seeing a heterosexual couple. Others comes out in all kinds of couples, where the woman will often say to her husband or her partner, um, you know, I feel like there's this gap between us. I feel like there's this distance. I feel like you're not sharing your inner world with me, and I want to get closer to you. I really want you to tell me what's going on with you, right, share your emotions with me. And so then he will, and let's say he starts crying. Let's say he sheds a tear, or let's say he really starts crying right inevitably she will look at me like a deer in headlights, and like and what comes out in those conversations is and she doesn't quite say this, and then we we sort of unpack it is I don't feel safe when you don't share with me, because I feel distance from you. But I don't feel safe when you share too much with me because I do I'm buying into these gender roles around, like you're supposed to be the strong one, and if you kind of fall apart, I get really anxious. So men are getting these mixed messages they're saying. You know, we say to them, like, we want to level the playing field. We want to be able to do the things that men do, and we want you to be able to do the things that were traditionally things that that we're in the in the kind of bucket of what women are allowed to do, like to be able to share your feelings, to be able to be vulnerable. But when men are vulnerable, they often get shut down by women's attitudes towards that. God, that's so interesting, and I wonder how that plays out. You know, we're in this time where we're seeing that so many women in our country are becoming the breadwinners, you know, are are becoming the heads of households, and men are having to or wanting to, you know, take over more of the work of house and childcare, and how that shifting dichotomy is affecting people's relationships. I've certainly had some conversations with friends who say, you know, I want equality, and I ultimately believe in feminism and all of these things, and I kind of want him to deal with this because he's the man, and and everyone's sitting around going, okay, well, what does that mean? How do we unpack this? You know, we've been steeped in this very gendered tea for such a long time that we don't realize how deeply it's permeated all of us. So I'm I'm so curious about how that's going to play out, and I think it will only play out well if we're all willing to be vulnerable about it. Well, that's right, and I think that we as women need to make space for men to be vulnerable. So men will often come into the therapy room and they'll say to me, you know, I've never told anyone this before. And they have a good marriage, they have they have a partner, or they have good friends that they have family members that they're close to, but they feel like they still can't tell a soul. Women will come in and they'll say, you know, I've never told anyone this before except for my mother, my sister, my best friend. Right, So they've told like a few people, but they feel like they haven't told anyone. Men literally have never told any right and women when they feel like when they say I've never told anyone, they actually have maybe confided in someone they can do that they have permission to do that, right well, And and I think with women, for so long, we've had these little almost like societies, we've had these little sisterhoods where we can air our secrets. But it feels like they're still in a container that is secret. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like it's still held away from the world. And it's striking to me to imagine that. If it's striking for me to imagine that for us, even when we feel that we're being seen in this secret container of our most trusted confidence in the world, we feel unseen. How unseen do you know the men we love in our lives, our friends, our partners, um if we are in you know, how our sexual relationships as you mentioned, how do those men in our lives? Our fathers are brothers? How invisible are unseen? Do they feel if they've literally never said something out loud? It's fascinating to think about it is and this is really near and dear to my heart because I'm raising a son. And it's interesting because when I do my Dear Therapist column, often I will say to him, what do you think right? What do you think should happen here? And it really gets him to really think about relationships and emotions and just to be able to know that this is normal to talk about these things, that this is part of life. And so I'm so glad that I feel like it's sort of my mission to raise a boy who feels really comfortable talking about his feelings. Yes, And I think that's the key to ending this very traditional gendered sexism that we've all grown up in. You know, when we look around at the world and we realize we live in this society that is unpacking it's it's evils. You know that we've wanted to sweep under the rug. As we've had successes, it's so important to examine how we allow men to be different, because, as a woman who's experienced sexism and violence and oppression based on gender my whole life, I'm exhausted. I'm like, these men better get their ship together. And and I know that hurt people, hurt people, And I know that these toxic roles we've all been raised with have been hard for them too. You know, the patriarchy has nothing for men either, And so I'm so heartened when you talk about the conversations you're having with your son. I get so excited whenever one of my really good friends, who I just think is a legendary human and has a son, and I'm like, a better future for men is coming, and I think we all need that. Yeah, I mean, I think when we talk about the patriarchy, I think one way that that we can topple the patriarchy is by creating the space for men to be able to be vulnerable, because, like you said, hurt people hurt people, and and I think that's that's exactly what I had. I had a couple that I was seeing and one person said to the other, you know what three words would make me feel so loved And the person said, obviously, I love you, and the other person said, no, it's I understand you. Those three words I understand you. Isn't that what we all want? Absolutely? And I think that there's something that you talk about in your book that is sort of leaping out of my brain. It's like a flashing light bulb right now when when you talk about the fact that there is no hierarchy of pain. But we all whether we're talking about these gendered rules for men and women, whether we're talking about people who think that their pain is higher or lower on a scale based on privilege or access, whether we look at the verticals of how people are defined and have been harmed in society. You know l g B, t Q plus folks are non binary friends UM folks who are oppressed because of because of race or so zoo any economic status. What can happen as we get conscious is that we say, oh, well, my my pain is not as important as this person's pain, or yes, this terrible thing is happening in my neighborhood. But did you see um to pull from current events at the time that we're recording, did you see what's happening in Columbia right now? What do we have to be upset about? And and you talk about how this insistence on our place, our position in this quote unquote hierarchy is actually simply a false belief that leads to each of us. Man, am I using her feelings? And and when I think about minimizing our feelings by comparing them to what we perceive as the suffering of others, what I really think is it shuts us down and be it gives us a very weird excuse not to deal with our ship. That's right. And I think what happens is people start to feel very alone in their struggles and in maybe you should talk to someone. I purposely chose people who seem very different from one another so that you can see that lots of people with lots of different histories, ages, um, socio economic status, you know, all kinds of differences, really are the same at their core, that we're all more the same than we are different. And so when we talk about the hierarchy of pain that I write about, what I'm talking about is in our culture, with our physical health, we don't do that. So if you break your arm you don't say, well, I'm not going to go to the doctor and get a cast for this and get an X ray because someone else has stage four cancer. We just don't do that. We're not comparing it to someone else. We're saying, my arm is broken, I need to go get treatment for it. We do that with our emotional health, right, So what happens is we feel like, well, yeah, I've been feeling sad, or I'm having trouble sleeping, or I'm having this trouble in my relationship, or I'm feeling a lot of anxiety, but you know, I have a roof over my head and food on the table, so really it's not that bad compared to And then people will compare it to whatever they want to compare it to, and so they don't get help. It's almost like the physical equivalent would be like, yeah, I have this discomfort in my chest, but I'm not going to get it checked out until I have a heart attack and then I'll end up in the e R. That's what people do with their emotional health. They say, yeah, you know, I'm I'm experiencing this and and you know, something feels off, something doesn't feel right, but you know, they don't really end up in my office until they're having the equivalent of an emotional heart attack. And two things happen when you wait that long. One is that because you've waited so long, you've suffered unnecessarily, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, and sometimes for years. And the other thing is that when you come in when you're at the emotional heart attack stage, we now have to deal with the where you are now sort of the crisis at hand, and then we got to get you back to baseline, and now we can deal with all the stuff that we would have been dealing with if you would just come in when you were first feeling like maybe I should talk to someone. So I think if the question is should I talk to someone, the answer is always yes. Yeah. I love that don't wait until you're having an emotional heart attack. And I do think so many of us, you know, when you when we reference those sort of secret circles you know of of women, so many of us think, well, I talked to my close friends. I have. I have one person at least I tell all my secrets to. But you know, as a professional that it really helps to work through patterns with someone other than your friends. A professional person who's listening to you in an office, who also has been trained to do so well will offer you different things than than friends might are. Are there are there terms for the differences that our audience should know about. Yeah, there's such a difference between what happens between friends and what happens when you bring something to a therapist. There's this Buddhist notion that I write about of idiot compassion versus wise compassion. So idiot compassion is what we do with our friends. Our friends come to us and they say, listen to what happened. Can you believe that so and so did this? And we say, yeah, they were wrong, you were right. How terrible? I can't believe that happened to you. And then it feels so delicious in the moment, doesn't it when your friends says that, because you feel so validated. But the problem with that is that you don't learn anything from the experience. You can't see what your role was, you can't see that. Maybe there's a different way to respond to that. And I'm not saying, by the way, that there aren't sort of difficult people in your life, right, because everybody has difficult people. We have this saying as therapist before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes? Right? So I like that. So so you know there are always going to be difficult people. But the question is what are you doing in that relationship? Do you need to be in relationship with that person? If you want to be in relationship with that person, what are you doing that is exacerbating the situation? How do you contribute to this person acting in this way toward you? How are you responding in a way that makes it even worse? Um? Do you have boundaries? What kind of boundaries do you need? Right? Um? And So the problem with idiot compassion is that if you listen to your friends over time, you will probably hear some kind of pattern in the sense of they're telling the same kinds of stories over and over, maybe a different cast of characters, maybe the same person they're complaining about. But it starts to sound very much the same, starts to sound like a broken record. It's kind of like, if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. But we don't say that to our friends with idiot compassion because we feel like our friend will feel unsupported by us. What you get at a therapist is you get wise compassion, which is we hold up a mirror to you and we help you to see something about yourself that maybe you haven't been willing or able to see. And that's where change happens. And so it's very different when you think about, well, I feel really good when I complain to my friend about this person in my life. That might feel really good in the short term, but notice that nothing's changing. Notice that you aren't moving or growing. And and that's what you're going to get if you go to a therapist. You are going to have that mirror held up in the most compassionate way so that you can see yourself more clearly. And that gives you choices, yes, and the choices are what makes an a new pathway forward possible. And and to your point earlier about how we would never not treat a broken arm, we we tend to want to shy away from treating what's going on in our brains, but they're the most powerful driving engine of our lives. And and one of the things I find so fascinating about what you're discussing. You know this, this notion that essentially, a therapist will hold up a mirror and say, hey, do you notice this pattern about yourself, and then they'll help you figure out where it comes from. So one example you cited earlier, I just can't trust people, Well, okay, let's figure out where your original wound around trust happened. And perhaps that will be the first time a person sitting in your chair has thought about what happened between their parents when they were eight years old, or has thought about this thing that happened in their young adult life. And then you go, see, if that's the root, the tree has been growing out of it, the fruit that's been coming off that tree has been tainted by this experience. What if we what if we plant you a new tree? It's so freeing and and I think it's just something that hasn't been encouraged for so many people. There's so many myths about therapy and this notion that maybe I don't deserve it, maybe my problems aren't important enough. And I do hope that that begins to change for people. And I think to your point, this book being such an enormous bestseller and your column being such an incredible success, your podcast as well, and and for the folks listening at home, if you haven't read the column or heard the podcast. Uh. The column is called Dear Therapist and it's in the Atlantic, and the podcast is Dear Therapists. It's produced by another former Work in Progress guest, Katie Kuric, who we all love an a door. And I just think, I don't know, maybe I'm personalizing this, but for me, I think that these things, being these big smash hits, are so exciting. I'm like, look at all these people who care about their mental health. It feels it feels like something to celebrate. Does it feel that way to you? It does. I think one of the things that I'm really trying to do is democratized therapy and provide access to what it is. I think that so many people I don't know what therapy is. They have all kinds of misconceptions about it. That's why. And maybe you should talk to someone people get to sit in and see what these sessions sounds like and what can really happen when two people sit in a room like that together. And I think the and I think the other thing is with the podcast, there's this misconception about therapy that you're going to come to therapy, You're going to talk about your childhood forever, and you're never gonna leave. And that's why I think a lot of people don't go to therapy because I think I'm not going to sign up for that. That sounds horrible, right, And I think that you can see, first of all, in the book, you can see that we really deal with the present. We deal with how the past is informing the present, what's keeping you stuck. What you were saying earlier about I can't trust someone is sort of like punishing the person you're with now for a past person. Since so if somebody did not earn your trust in the past, maybe that was a caregiver, maybe that was a parent, maybe that was a relationship you were in, and the person broke your trust. Don't punish the person in front of you for what somebody else did. And people don't realize that they're doing that. And so these are the kinds of things that come to lights. You're really dealing with the present and how the past might be getting in the way so that you can create a different future for yourself. And what I love about the podcast is that it doesn't take years of therapy. In one session, we do a session, people hear what a therapy session sounds like, and at the end of the session, we give them concrete, actionable advice that they have one week to try out. And they come back and you hear it all in in one episode, and we hear what happened after the session, And I think that's so satisfying because you can learn so much from simply hearing what worked, what didn't, um and and and you see people making significant shifts, maybe they've been stuck for years, and they say, oh, my gosh, I was on the podcast and after one session, I did all of these things and it really changed things for me. That was going to be my question is how having clients in your office on a regular basis or at regular intervals differs between what you do in the advice column or on the podcast. So that that makes so much sense. How how else does that work? If someone writes a letter to the column, what can they expect? Right? So, so in our offices, I think it's a lot about what I like to call timing and dosage. So when somebody is coming in with something, what is the timing of when you're going to help them to see something. What are they ready to hear? Because if you come into early, then they have this big wall up because they feel so much shame around it. You're not going to really make any change for them. You're not going to help them see something because they're so again, they feel so much shame around it, they're not ready to look at it. Um And the other thing is dosage. So what is the right time? But then how much in that session are you going to push them? Because you've got to push them, but then how much before it becomes counterproductive? So we're always thinking about that in the room in a clinical session. On the podcast, so there's a column where I respond in writing to people, and then there is and what I really do is help them to see something as I would in the therapy room. I really kind of put it all out there. Here is what I think you aren't seeing, and here are your blind spots, and here's what I want you to look at. But the beauty of the podcast is that it takes it a step further, which is that we get to see what those conversations actually sound like. So it's a back and forth, it's an eye thow and I do it with another therapist, Guy Winch, who's also a fellow TED talker and also a fellow author. And what's great is they get too therapists for the price of one, basically, which is which is that if he's pushing, I can kind of hold space and contain the person, or if I'm pushing, he can do that. So you have these two people working together, um, and I think it makes us move faster because you have both of us, so we can move really fast in those sessions. And then you have that piece of you know, very satisfying. I think when we go back to story, Um, what happened? What was the end of the story. And I think that then people can say, oh, I can use that advice in my own life, even if I don't have that exact situation going on. That was really helpful and I can use that in you know, different ways. That is so cool. And and I have a question if you don't mind me veering into the personal for a moment, because you just said something so interesting. When you and Guy are doing the podcast together, if he's pushing, you can old space and vice versa. How as a person whose brain is so trained to pick up on what people are really saying to see their patterns, to to respond with help. How do you draw a line in your life as Lorie you know, Laura mother, Lauria friend, Laura partner, Lauria therapist. How in the world do you find that balance? Because I feel like if I had your wealth of knowledge, I would just be trying to give everybody advice all the time, which probably makes your life a nightmare if you do it. How do you keep those two parts of your brain and your heart? Really, because therapy is based in so much empathy, how do you keep those separated? I think that what we do is so emotionally intense that we really truly care about every single patient that we see. We think about them between sessions, you know, and and and people were surprised by this in my book and maybe you should talk to someone that there was so much love there. And people are afraid to use that word, like, oh, it's crushing boundaries or it gets me, See it doesn't. You're just too human beings. We're not talking about romantic love. We're talking about human to human love. And when you really when people show you the truth of who they are, you cannot help but love them. And people out in the world are so afraid of sharing the truth of who they are for fear that people will not love them. They say, if people really knew who I am, if they knew all these parts of myself that I feel mortified by, then they won't love me. And the reality is, if you show the truth of who you are to the right audience, so choose your audience. Well, that's where all the love is going to come from. And I think that's where that's what relationships are built on. And so when you say, you know, how do you separate that, I feel like it's it's it's not depleting, it's the opposite. It's energizing. It makes you feel really positive about the human condition. I love that. I love that. So balance is easier than I thought it might have been, right because I think it makes me really optimistic about the world. And we live in a really difficult world, so it's hard to be optimistic about it. But when you deal with people one on one as opposed to all of the noise that's out there, and you hear them, and you hear them kind of untangle things, and you hear them, you know, really shift in their lives in ways that are just so profound. It gives you so much optimism about all of our capacity to change, not only individually on that individual level, but on a societal level as well. Yeah, I think that being able to connect with each other has always been the root of love for me, no matter what part of the country I've been in, how people vote, what they believe in any time I've been able to sit with somebody one on one who might on paper look like they believe all the things opposite to what I do, we find that we have so much in common and we can kind of break down the noise that we've been taught to to sort of whether it's consciously or subconsciously, that we've been taught to believe about each other. And I think that I think that's such an important thing for us moving forward as a society, right. And part of that is about knowing how to listen. I don't think a lot of us had good modeling for what it means to listen. And so when I think about even in couples, when one person comes to the other person with something, so often we listen in the way that we want to be listened to, but not in the way that the other person needs. So if you can ask someone at the beginning of a conversation, I'm here, how can I be helpful to you right now? What is it that you're needing right now? So simple? And then they sit back and they say, wait a minute, what do I need right now? Oh? Right now? I just want to tell you what happened. I'm really you know, I'm really like riled up around this. I really just want to tell you what happened. I just want to vent right now. Or I really need a hug right now, or I really want to hear what you think about this because I'm really confused and I need another opinion about this, or I really need help being up with a solution. Right Those are very different conversations, but at least you know what the person needs, and maybe in a different conversation that person will need something different. Right But maybe when something just happens, they need X, Y or Z, and in a different conversation they're going to need something else. And that it is really important because sometimes we really want to tell people things like I want to tell you what I think about this, or I see what happened here and I have some really good advice for you, But you can't do that if they aren't wanting that in that moment, right, And so listening is about being present. It's about knowing what is it that they need so that they feel understood in this moment, and maybe they need something else and they will tell you what they need. And I think as a parent that's such a good lesson too, because so often our kids come to us and they say things like this happened, and then we try to give them advice and try to fix it for them, or we try to take away their feelings and we give them the message that like, oh no, don't be sad, Hey, let's go get ice cream, right, or oh you're worried about that, that's nothing to worry about, But they really are worried. So we try to talk people out of their feelings that make us uncomfortable. M hmm, And that's really about our discomfort and it becomes not about them anymore. Don't try to talk people out of how they feel. Let them feel how they feel, even if it makes you a little bit uncomfortable. Yeah. And I think if if you can recategorize the responsibility of a of a friend or a listener. As being a human who holds space for the person you care about, then you can hold space for whatever they need to put in it, for whatever their feelings are. And as a person personally who wants to help so much that I can, I can jump into that role of being like, well, what if we did this? What what if do you think this would make you feel better? And how could I help you? You know, find a solution? And I've had to learn as a friend not to jump to trying to make the people I love feel better as quickly as possible, but to holding a container for them. And there's something about the visual of holding a container. Holding that space to me feels like such a sacred responsibility and act of love as a friend that it has allowed me to stop my let me figure out how I can help you fix this immediate response right, because it's hard for us to see the people that we care about suffer and what we want to do is we want to take their suffering away, but we're not doing it in a way that it is actually helpful to them. And the bottom line is that we can't take their suffering away. What we could do is we can help them and I really truly feel as a therapist, I've seen this with every single person that I've seen, that they have the answers inside of them. And our job is therapists, and I think our job, just as humans to one another, is to help people hear themselves, to give them the space to to let that voice be heard without all the louder outside voices shutting down that voice of knowing, that place of knowing that we all have inside. Yeah, I really love that when you think about way as we can lean into our knowing, you know things we can do to improve our emotional well being. I'm curious what you believe some of those concrete things are that we could offer to our listeners and and have any of those concrete steps people can take to improve their emotional well being changed given the past year and and the pandemic, or do you feel like it's your tips are the same. I feel like they're similar. I feel like change is hard. We had to go through a lot of change in the last year, and in general, change is really hard. And I think that when I talk about that place of knowing, a lot of times people know what they need to do, like this is not a good relationship for me, or I need a different job, or I need to get my addiction under control, or you know, whatever it is. They know what they need to do, but they aren't ready to make the change. And I think that a lot of people need to understand more about what change is. Change isn't this thing of you make a decision to change and boom, you've changed. Sometimes that can happen. Usually it doesn't think about New Year's resolutions. They just you know, why why do they fail? Because there are so many stages to change and they go like this. There's the pre contemplation stage where you don't even know you're thinking about changing. Then there's the contemplation stage where you're starting to think about it, Oh maybe I should make this change, but you're not ready yet. Then there's the preparation stage where you're starting to prepare, you're getting used to it. You're preparing logistically for the change and also emotionally for the change. And then there's action where you make the change. And most people think it ends there at action. It doesn't. Action is the beginning. What happens next is maintenance, and maintenance maintenance is how do I maintain the change? And a lot of people think that if I make a change and then I slip back, like you call the partner at at three in the morning, because you slip back and you got lonely or you were supposed to, you know, be eating more healthy and then you didn't, and oh, well I failed. I'm incapable of that. No. Built into maintenance is that it's not going to be linear. You're gonna have peaks and valleys and things are going to happen, and you just know that, Okay, this happened again. Going back to kindness to ourselves and self compassion, be really kind to yourself. Of course, it's hard to change, and then you just get back on track and you know that you're going to slip back, and that's just part of being human. And I think people need to understand what they can do in therapies, understand why this change is so hard, because change and loss are tied together. A lot of times we we cling to the familiar. So we might say, oh, I don't really like the situation I'm in, but at least I know it. At least it's familiar. And humans don't do well with uncertainty. And so if you make a change, you have to leave something that's familiar, even if you don't like it, and go to something that is unfamiliar and uncertain, which can make people so anxious that even though it's a positive change, they won't do it because they think it's almost like they're plunged into this like foreign land where they don't know the culture or the language, or the landmarks or the directions, and they feel like, I don't know how to go there, I don't know how to be in this new place. But this new place is really healthy for them. So I think people need to understand why change is hard, how it serves them to stay in the current situation. Um Sometimes staying in the current situation can help serve you by it perpetuates that story, like I'm unlovable, so I'm going to stay with a person who makes me feel unlovable because that corroborates my story, as opposed to I'm going to go find someone healthy for me and I'm going to see that I'm actually lovable. They're scared to do that, and I think it's hard to admit that sometimes our subconscious mind is putting us in those positions, is trying to validate even the worst story. When you talk about change being hard, it's so spot on. I mean, this has been a year filled with change for so many people. And and I'm curious, you know, from from the macro of the work you do for us and teaching so many of us how to look within, what's been a change for you and your family during the pandemic. Did you have to change the way you work and move mostly online or or did you all pick up a family quarantine hobby. I mean, so many things I think are new this year. Well, I think it's kind of the both, and that makes this taboo to talk about that there's been so much devastation and so much pain and loss that I think people feel like when we were talking about the hierarchy of pain earlier, there's this hierarchy of grief where people feel like, well, if it's not loss of life, loss of health, loss of a job, which many many people experienced with COVID, then I can't talk about any kind of loss, right And so in therapy a lot of people have come to me and said, I'm really struggling, here's why, and they feel like they can't talk about it with anybody else. And once they do, they start to feel like, oh, it's okay that I feel this way, that I feel lost, even though nobody in my circle died. It's okay that I can talk about other kinds of loss that I've experienced. But I think the other thing that's even more taboo than that is talking about what we've gained, because people feel like I can't talk about anything positive in the face of so much loss, And yes you can. And here are some of the things that people have gained. People have said, I've realized that family time is really important to me, that family dinner is really important to me, and I'm going to make sure that I separate my work life from my family life in a way. I'm going to try to find a way to make this more manageable because I was really drowning in my work. Some people have said, oh, I don't need to commute an hour every day back and forth. I really didn't like that time. I lost a lot, and I'm going to figure out if there's a way to make my work life more flexible. Um. Some people have said, like, this is something happened to me. I used to go to the office every day and I would put on my work clothes, and I would not be able to get outside during the day, even if I had half an hour in between things, because I didn't want to go take a walk. I would get all messed up, and I didn't have the right clothes and those kinds of things. Now, working from home, I'll just go outside and take a walk for half an hour, or you know, talk to a friend or whatever I I normally felt like I couldn't do when I was at the office, And I think it really showed me that there are other ways to be right. There are other ways too for self care, how do we take care of ourselves and how important that is, how much it really changes the entire tenor of the day when you start building little things into the day to take care of yourself, even things like you know, we can just sit there and go through emails all day, and to say I'm going to step away for ten minutes and I'm going to walk outside or look outside, or I'm going to go eat something, whatever it is. I think we've become more mindful of about the rhythm of our days because they had to slow down. Mm hmm. Yeah. Something that's been so interesting for me for years I've had a goal of keeping bees, you know. I think maybe that ties back to living in a really small town for years as a kid and and seeing, you know, bee hives on some of the ranches near where I lived. I just love them, and I think they're such incredible little creatures. And I've been talking about this for a long time. I even started planting things in my garden that I know bees love. And one week into the shutdown in March, I discovered a massive beehive that had built itself into the woodpile in my backyard and I thought, oh my god, this is this my field of dreams. I haven't even built it yet, and they already came, what's going on here? I spoke this and do existence, and I had some guys come and help me rescue the bees, and we put them in a proper hive box that, you know, I could maintain them. And I've been keeping these bees all year, and our rhythm together and the way I watched them work for each other, and the way that they build structures and the way that they prioritize each other. In the months at the end of last summer when there were all of those horrific fires, and you know, it was a hundred and fifteen hundred and twenty degrees in l a every day in the evenings. As soon as the sun would go down, the bees much like penguins do, and they huddle up to hold each other and keep each other warm. The bees would rotate in lines and they'd get out on the little front porch of the hive and they'd fan their wings as fast as they could toward the door, and they were blowing cooler air in, and they were circulating cooler air into the hive. And they did it every night during this heat wave. And I would just watch them, and they taught me so much about how you are supposed to serve your community and how it's possible to take care of each other. And it was it makes me kind of emotional. It was this wild experience while so many of our communities were falling apart, and we're finally acknowledging the harm that our society has done to members of society. I watched these bees just build this community and quite literally grow it. I mean I keep having to add boxes to the hive because they keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And that for me was such a sort of mirroring and an opposite of what we were all going through. It was. It was so inspiring to me. And I never thought that, you know, my silver lining in in such a tough year, one of my silver linings would be these funny little creatures, but they are. They've been such a cool thing for me and something I certainly look back on a very tough time for the world. That's that's a point of gratitude for me when I'm watching you talk about this year just lighting up and I'm fascinated by it. Because in my book, Charlotte, one of the young women who's sort of having trouble in relationships, one of the things she talks about is her dream of beekeeping. There's a whole chapter called the Bees, and I think she was talking about it because she felt so disconnected and she had a very similar reaction to it. She had a very similar idea of like, you know, why she was so moved by bees, And I think when we connect to nature, we're reminded that we are all connected to one another. It's such a reminder that that image of all of the bees flapping their wings to kind of cool things off and I think we've seen that during the pandemic, where we've become much more aware of how we're connected within our communities, where people were bringing meals to other people, we were checking in on other people. We were saying, how can I help you? People who were more vulnerable, the elderly people in our communities, people who had pre existing conditions that we're making them more vulnerable, checking in on people who maybe we're alone, and we thought, you know, we want to make sure they stay connected. And and seeing our kids, I think our kids being really aware of how connected we are and just making sure that that everybody was being taken care of. It was something very different from how we are in daily life, where we're so involved in our own lives and our own little nuclear families that we we aren't looking at the big picture. And I think that metaphor with the bees is just beautiful and I hope we can all take something away from that. I highly recommend if you ever you know you, or or anyone listening at home, if you ever get the chance to visit anyone or anywhere where there's hives, spend some time because they're they're very very cool. Oh and before I Forget your book is being developed into a TV show. Yes, it's very exciting. I'm so glad that. Yeah. And the reason that I'm so glad is because I feel like, to me, this is a show not about a therapist, but a show about a person who happens to be a therapist. And I think that distinction is very important because you know, when you look at how therapists have been portrayed in the media, there are these kind of two tropes. Right There's like the brick wall, the person who says nothing, and you know, nobody wants to go talk to a brick wall or a robot. And I think the other one is like the therapist who is really competent in the therapy room, but they're a hot mess outside of the therapy room and they're like crossing all these boundaries with their patients and that's just not real either. At the beginning of maybe you should talk to someone, I say that my most significant credential is that I'm a card carrying member of the human race. That I know what it's like to be a person in the world. I know what it's like to struggle, and I think that all of us as therapists. We use our humanity to help other people through their struggles, not that we talk about ourselves, but we use the fact that we've experienced life to be able to help people with their experiences in life. And so on the TV series, I feel like, maybe you should talk to someone has really opened up all of these conversations about emotional health and help people to kind of look at themselves with more compassion and understanding and growth and see their blind spots. And I feel like we're going to do this TV series that is going to include all of the humor and the ridiculous that I like to say, the ridiculousness of the human condition because we are human beings are ridiculous and we need to be able to laugh at ourselves, right, and then just a real window into what makes us human. And so I am so excited for the TV series. I'm so excited to see it. When when can we expect it? Where will it be? We're developing it right now. It will be at ABC. We got a little delayed because of COVID, but I'm really excited for it. I can't wait. Laurie. My favorite thing to ask everyone who comes on the podcast is the question I'm about to ask you, and I I do feel like you encourage this energy and you know, this permission to explore and grow for so many of us. But I wonder what in your life feels like a work in progress. I would say every everything about life is a work in progress. I was thinking about my dad died at the beginning of the pandemic, not of COVID, but he had been sick, thank you, and he was like just the sweetest man, and he was my son's best friend. And when we when we were going through all of this in the middle of COVID, and you couldn't have you know, people calm and all of that, and we were trying to decide, you know, what do we say on on the on the gravestone, and you know, all of those things. It was just so surreal. And I was noticing that I said the year on everyone. I was walking around the cemetery and it said the year of people's birth and the year of their deaths, and in between there was always a dash like here's where they lived. And I was thinking about when you just asked me about a work in progress, it's the dash in which we live. We are all living in that dash between the year we were born and the year we will die, and that dash is such a work in progress. So much happens there, but we have to be intentional. And I think that all of the work that I do, whether it's the book or the Ted Talk or the column or the podcast, having these conversations with you, it's about being intentional about what we do with that dash. And that's why I love your podcast, because I feel like everyone is a work in progress, and these conversations are helping us to be more intentional about what happens in that dash. I really that that will stick with me, that notion of living in the dash. I I feel so inspired by it. I see it, you know, not to be a cheesy social media highlight real person, but I'm like, that feels like a hashtag and maybe a retreat and maybe a series of some sort I don't know, but I find that to be a really good zinger of a phrase. I like that a lot. Well, LORI thank you so much. I honestly I feel I feel like I'm buzzing right now. I'm on such an emotional high. I feel excited and inspired, and I'm I'm sure everyone who's been listening to this conversation today does too. We are very grateful for you taking the time. Well, I'm such a fan of your podcast, and thank you so much for having this conversation. And uh gosh, yeah, I just I hope I get to see you again soon. You're in l A, so now you know both Angelina's. That's right, awesome, Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure.