Hi everyone, This is Guy and I'm here with Laurie as always, and we have a special guest with us today again, Ben Bernstein, who is a therapist in training who does all calls to the guests and speaks to them and make sure that they are the best guests for our podcast.

And Ben is here to discuss with us a recent episode, Adam's cheating boyfriend.

So Ben, welcome, Hey Guy, Hey Laurie, tell us been about your conversations with Adam before he came on the show, what your impressions were, and where you thought that session would go.

Of course, for listeners, for just a quick refresher, So, Adam's a young man whose family never talked about the death of his mom when he was a kid.

Now, as an adult, he's struggling to set healthy boundaries in his romantic relationships.

So before we get to the session, I'll tell you what I was thinking about ahead of the session.

I thought in my initial meeting with Adam that there was clearly a link between his mom's death and the relationship issues he was having.

He clearly wondered about it as well.

I guess the mystery for me was twofold.

First, what is the nature of that link, like why were they connected those two things?

And then once you figure that out or have some idea about that, how do you share that link with Adam in a way that feels emotional and not just intellectual.

So my first question is you start by asking him about his current relationships and I'm wondering why started his current relationships, and not go back immediately to the mom's death.

I think what you often see us do on the podcast is somebody's writing in with a real time problem, and we want to get more information about that problem, and we also want to join them, because if somebody's writing in about something and they want help with it, and we start asking about something that they feel is totally unrelated or they don't see the relationship, they're not going to feel like we're there with them.

We really want to be there with them, So we want to understand what is causing the pain right now, and then we can unpack that a little bit.

Then we can move somewhere else with them.

And what you'll typically hear us do is get to a point at the beginning where we're finding out something that's going on in the present.

In this case with Adam, in his present relationships and the behavior he has after he set standards for behavior and they get violated.

Being way to forgiving, then you get the opportunity to say, let's look at where you learned to do that.

Now, let's go back in context for him as well as for us, and so you'll hear us doing that.

Look, it's also very different to have someone describe a problem in a letter that we read and then to talk to them and then hear more.

So it just flushes that out.

So, for example, Adam said, in the very beginning, you know, there were these little lies.

I didn't really think anything of it.

And what he called little lies were things like would he would go out and not tell me where he was.

He would be out with people, but he refused to tell me who he was with basic information like that.

No big deal is what he said.

You don't get that in the letter, You get that in the conversation.

So that contextualized what was going on for him much more for us.

It was very helpful to know that about him.

So there's a moment in a session where Laurie, you ask Adam whether his stepmom, not officially his stepmom, but functionally his stepmom had changed the house after she moved in, And it turns out that stepmom had changed things completely and had been quite emotional for Adam.

I'm going to play with the clip.

When she moved in, did the house still have the presence of your mom in it?

Meaning there was still pictures up for you kids, so that both things could co exist.

There's the memory of your mom and then there's this new person in the house.

Was there any kind of presence of your mom that continued in the house after she died?

You know, when she moved in, a lot did change.

A lot changed quite quickly.

The color of the walls, you know, the decorations, and it was a very very different style to what we had before.

There were a few pictures I think of my mum in the house, but not many, not many at all.

What was that like for you when she moves in and the house changes, because as kids, that often feels like a bit of the betrayal in terms of your mom or being replaced.

Do you remember how you felt about her moving in and about the I'm going to guess that nobody asked you how you felt about her moving in, But correct me if that's incorrect, But do you remember how you felt about her moving in and those changes.

No, you're right, I don't think anybody did ask me, but it did feel like a betrayal.

I just want to say right away that sometimes when we're doing these podcasts and I listened to how Guy works, or he listens to how I work, there's something the other person says that really touches us.

And Guy in that moment, I was so touched.

It was sort of an off comment you made, but it was so true.

You said.

I'm guessing nobody ever asked you how you felt.

And you could just feel so much compassion for little Adam there when he was a boy of his mother dies, He's I think nine years old, and this new woman comes in.

Nobody has talked about the mom's death that became this taboo topic, and the house is being redecorated, and I'm just picturing this little boy, and I love how you brought that to light.

Nobody asked you how you felt.

You didn't just say how did you feel about it?

Adam?

You said, and I'm guessing nobody asked you.

I love that moment.

There are many moments in that session where I was looking at Adam, but I was seeing the nine year old.

There were so many and I think both of us our hearts broke for that nine year old and really for the other sisters as well, because such a difficult thing happened and no one spoke about it at all.

There was no comfort for them.

I remember that scene after the mom died.

They were all sitting together in the living room and talking.

They were all just sitting and crying, but there was no reaching out.

There was no physical contact and there was no emotional contact.

It was just very heartbreaking.

Can you say a little more about what you mean by you felt like you saw him as his nine year old self.

Adam was very open.

It was one of the things that was very clear from the beginning of the session.

We confronted him with his behavior of being so forgiving with these boyfriends, and he was very undefensive.

He took it in, he thought about it, he reflected on it.

He really responded in a very very open way.

And the same was true when we were talking with him about what was going on.

Laurie asked him at some point again it was a very very touching moment about whether his mum ever spoke to him about the fact that she was dying, whether that was ever discussed between the two of them, whether she ever said goodbye in that way, and of course she didn't.

And what she said was don't be sad.

So again, good intentions.

You know, as a mother, it breaks your heart.

I'm leaving my children.

I don't want to leave my children.

I don't want them to feel pain.

But the message he got was don't feel your feelings.

Of course he's going to be sad, his mother is dying and he's nine years old, right, it.

Was don't feel them, don't talk about them, And that was indeed what happened in that home.

And so when you hear that, and it's so detailed and rich in that way his emotional experience, you can really visualize him as a child, and that was very front and present for me during the session.

And also then getting to know that child what he does in his relationships now as an adult makes so much more sense because you think, well, why would you put up with that, Why do you ignore that, Why do you not listen to your own feelings around this, Why are these things that are big deals being kind of categorized in your mind?

Is not a big deal.

There's a really cool moment that actually, I think really nicely with that in which you kind of find moments both of you in this case, Laurie, that seemed to mirror what's happening for the patient.

The relationships outside the session you find them in the session.

So I'm going to play a quick clip of that.

From a young age, I was very close with my mom, and I always was a little bit scared of my dad, not because he was a bad guy or anything.

It was just, you know, sometimes he could lose his temper, and I found that a little bit scary.

Just noticing how you minimize his anger.

He said, well, I kind of avoided him when I was younger because he had a little bit of a temper.

A temper from an adult when you're young and small is incredibly scary, very frightening to see an adult with that big kind of rage, even if other times he's very loving and kind.

I just want you to notice how much you minimize the experiences is that happen to you that elicit some kind of emotion in you, like fear or sadness, or even your own anger at your boyfriend for cheating or at your father for being angry with you.

These external things get minimized, and then you don't allow yourself to feel your feelings because you're not really acknowledging how these things are affecting you.

I thought, this is a really cool moment, and I'm wondering, are you guys on the lookout for moments like this where you can bring the outside in and what are the benefits of finding these kind of live moments in the session.

The therapy room is a microcosm of what happens outside there.

So what happens outside there will happen between the therapists and the client inevitably at some point.

But also the connections of what's happening in the current problem with something that happened in the past.

And so it's one thing to intellectually talk about something.

People have a much more visceral reaction when you can point out, look at you doing that again, look at that pattern, look at that thing that had happened when you were younger, watch yourself do it now as an adult.

So yes, we always want to make those connections for.

People, and it's really impactful when it happens that way because it happened live in front of us.

We're pointing out something they did in that moment.

So those are always the most powerful, so we absolutely look for those.

The link you eventually made between his mom's death and the relationship issues was avoidance.

Adam's family avoided feelings connected to his mom's death, and now Adam he's avoiding going on dates.

When he does date, he avoids important issues in the relationship, like loyalty and honesty.

To what extent do you think Adam brought that avoidance to the session, if at all?

I guess relatedly, like, how do we work with people when they are avoiding things in sessions?

Well, I think that the issue was not so much avoidance and more about defect fact that he learned that his feelings don't matter.

Because when something huge happened in his childhood, and a lot of huge things that happened afterwards, no one asked him what his feelings were.

He learned to dismiss them.

Mom said, don't feel right now, don't feel sad, and that's what was happening.

He had an emotional reaction when his boyfriend was cheating on him.

He just didn't know how valid that was.

If the boyfriend explains it away in a very poor way.

He could easily dismiss his feelings.

He had been doing it his entire life.

He had learned to do it in childhood.

And when children learned that no one is there to attend to their feelings, they learned to dismiss them.

And that's what happened with him, and that's what was manifesting in his adult life.

I agree with Guy about the difference between avoidance and not trusting your feelings enough to let them have some air, even with yourself.

And I think that we provided an environment for him where we actually asked him the questions that nobody was ever asking him, which was, tell us about your feelings.

We're interested in your feelings, we care about your feelings.

Your feelings matter.

And I think he craved that he had not gotten that, and that might be one reason that he was so open with us and so willing to share them with us, because it was something very long overdue for.

Him over time.

If this were an ongoing therapy, that could have been a very curative thing for him to just sit with someone on a regular basis who's interested in his feelings, who's asking him about his feelings, who's listening to his feelings, that whole process.

That is powerful in itself because it's corrected.

And then they can apply that to their relationships out in the world.

But they need to have the experience first.

You're listening to dea therapists.

We'll be back after a short break.

We're back discussing Adam's cheating boyfriend with intern Ben.

So back to Ben.

The one thing that I thought about a lot listening to the episode was why is this so easy?

What makes session like that kind of just coast along really productively all the way through.

That's a very good question.

With somebody who is so agreeable, you want to make sure that they actually are telling you what they really feel if they disagree with you.

So if there was a point where Adam was thinking, no, that doesn't really sound like it matches my experience, or I don't really think there's a connection there, or I didn't really experience it that way, but let me tell you how I did experience it.

I don't know if Adam would have been comfortable enough to do that.

I think because we get the homework part of it, and we get to see how he did that week with the homework I think he actually was just being very open.

I don't think that he was being agreeable for the sake of being agreeable.

Well, no, a year later when we do the follow up for season three and season four, But I do think that's a great question because you always want to wonder if someone's being just very agreeable about everything what's going on there?

Are they afraid to disagree with us?

Are they afraid to tell us something for fear that we might not like what they have to say?

That seemed easy, I think in some ways because this piece we spoke about just now from his childhood, from the death of his mother and how that impacts him.

I think that was quite straightforward.

The work for him is going to be in truly applying these limits and the pact that we had him come up with to his dating situations to risk losing the person he's dating by setting limits with them, by making demands that are reasonable, by expressing his feelings.

That's going to be the difficult part for him.

That's the part we'll hear about next year because we can't really know about it.

There was a hint of it in the home loook, but really not enough to know if that's something he'll be able to do in the emotional stakes a high.

But I think that in order to do that, he needed the piece that he got from the session, which was we need to start talking about mom.

Yes, And when he was able to open up that conversation with his family and it went relatively well, and it certainly went very well with his aunt, and I think with his father and siblings it went better than he expected.

So I think once he starts integrating some of those feelings into his experience and they're not a secret anymore, that's going to really help him with this other issue that he's been experiencing relationally.

You both shared in the session in different moments that you felt moved even moved to tears by Adam's recounting of his childhood, especially his mom's leaving him that ring.

What made you, guys, decide to share your emotional reactions with Adam?

And then I think, more broadly, how do you decide and to share your emotions with your patients.

Well, my approach as a therapist, and I think guys too, is that we are people before therapists, that obviously we're using our training and our expertise and our experience.

That's what we do.

But we're people and we're connecting on a human level, and so I think it's important that people see that we're having whatever reaction that we're having, because otherwise there's no human element to it.

You're telling a sad story and the therapist is stonefaced, Well what kind of human interaction is that?

Or you're angry about something and the therapist feels angry on your behalf, but they're just stone faced, you know.

I think for a lot of people, what they were getting was the stone face and one way or another.

And so here's a real human interaction.

Here's the eye thou of the therapeutic relationship that makes it so powerful.

So why would we want to hide that from someone?

I completely agree, And I also think that it's modeling sometimes for somebody who has a hard time getting in touch with his feelings and he's telling such a moving story.

There was a lot of gulping going on on my end when he was telling that story because you could just picture it.

It was incredibly touching.

What the mom did, she folded it in a picture of the two of them.

I mean, it was one of those movie moments that it was just would have the whole audience weeping.

So I think, especially in those kinds of moments, it's really important to be open about the human reaction that we have as people to also model to him like this is an appropriate response if you want in touch with your feelings about that moment.

Enough, here's permission to get in touch with him, because this was not touching.

Thanks so much.

I really enjoy hearing you guys reflect on the session and learning some really important ideas like I can use my own practice as a therapist.

Certainly interviewing him beforehand and not knowing where the session was going to go, feeling like it was full of possibility and then seeing the ways that you guys took it in different directions was great and I really enjoyed listening to it.

Well.

Thanks for the questions, Ben, These are great conversations.

It was really great men.

To hear your thoughts from your interviews.

To get a sense of your initial impressions of these people that then we get to know during a session was an interesting thing for us to hear as well.

So thank you very much for being so thoughtful and for having these questions for us, and for this really interesting discussion.

Next week.

In the last about two bonus episodes, we're doing another case consultation with our intern, Ben, a psychology graduate student who pre interviews the guests and helps select who gets on the show.

We're having an honest conversation about the session, Becker and Jake's marital impulse and what we wish we had done differently.

If you're enjoying our podcast, don't forget to subscribe for free so that you don't miss any episodes, and please help support your therapist by telling your friends about it and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.

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If you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us, email us at Laurie and Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.

Our executive producer is Noel Brown.

We're produced and edited by Josh Fisher.

Additional editing support by Helena Rosen, John Washington and Zachary Fisher.

Our interns are Ben Bernstein, Emily Gutierrez and Silver Lifton and special thanks to our podcast fairy Godmother Katie Curic.

We can't wait to see you at our next session.

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