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January 30, 2024 19 mins

We hope you enjoyed Season 3 of Dear Therapists. As we get ready for Season 4, we have two special bonus episodes to share with you. Sometimes after a session, we like to think about what worked well, and also what we would do differently if we could do it again. In these two bonus episodes, we do a case consultation with our intern, Ben, a psychology graduate student who pre-interviews the guests and helps select who gets on the show. 

 

This week/Next week we’ll unpack what worked with a session we loved, “Adam’s Cheating Boyfriend.” The next week, we’ll talk about a session that didn’t go as well–and share what we would have done differently.

 

If you have a dilemma you’d like to discuss with us—big or small—email us at LoriAndGuy@iHeartMedia.com.

 

Follow us both online:

 

LoriGottlieb.com and on Twitter @LoriGottlieb1 and Instagram @lorigottlieb_author

 

GuyWinch.com and on Twitter @GuyWinch and Instagram @Guy Winch

 

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
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,

(00:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
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

(00:58):
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

(01:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
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

(01:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
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

(02:32):
for us, and so you'll hear us doing that.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
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

(02:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (03:33):
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?

Speaker 5 (03:53):
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.

Speaker 6 (04:15):
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

(04:37):
you remember how you felt about her moving in and
those changes.

Speaker 5 (04:40):
No, you're right, I don't think anybody did ask me,
but it did feel like a betrayal.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
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

(05:08):
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

(05:29):
about it? Adam? You said, and I'm guessing nobody asked you.
I love that moment.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
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

(05:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Can you say a little more about what you mean
by you felt like you saw him as his nine
year old self.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
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

(06:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
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.

Speaker 5 (08:13):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:29):
Just noticing how you minimize his anger. You 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

(08:50):
of rage, even if other times he's very loving and kind.
I just want you to notice how much you minimize
the experiences 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

(09:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
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

(10:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
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,

(10:50):
if at all? I guess relatedly, like, how do we
work with people when they are avoiding things in sessions?

Speaker 1 (10:55):
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

(11:17):
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

(11:40):
in his adult life.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
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

(12:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
And then they can apply that to their relationships out
in the world. But they need to have the experience first.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
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.

Speaker 6 (13:09):
So back to Ben.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
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

(13:45):
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

(14:08):
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?

Speaker 1 (14:28):
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

(14:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
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.

(15:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
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,

(16:26):
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

(16:47):
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?

Speaker 1 (16:58):
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.

(17:20):
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

(17:42):
in touch with him, because this was not touching.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
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

(18:07):
to it.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Well. Thanks for the questions, Ben, These are great conversations.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
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.

Speaker 6 (18:33):
Next week.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
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. Your reviews really
help people to find the show.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
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

(19:28):
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. Deotherapist is a production of iHeartRadio

Speaker 2 (19:44):
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