June 17, 2025 • 53 mins
On this week’s episode of Next Steps Forward, Dr. Chris Meek is joined by psychologist, researcher, and acclaimed author Faust Ruggiero for a timely and empowering conversation about the nature of addiction and the path to recovery. With over 35 years of experience in private practice and clinical settings ranging from substance abuse centers to prisons and nursing homes, Ruggiero brings deep expertise and compassion to the conversation. He discusses his upcoming book, The Fix Your Addiction Handbook - the fifth installment in his groundbreaking Fix Yourself Empowerment Series.
In this episode, Ruggiero breaks down the complex emotional, physical, and psychological layers of addiction, offering actionable steps that anyone - whether struggling with addiction or supporting a loved one - can take to reclaim their life. From understanding the roots and types of addiction to learning how to apply a slow, steady, process-oriented approach to healing, this episode is a must-listen for those seeking clarity, hope, and change. Whether you're personally affected by addiction or simply want to be better informed, this conversation provides both the knowledge and encouragement to take the next steps forward.
About Faust Ruggiero: Faust Ruggiero is a psychologist who has been in private practice for over thirty-five years. Before entering private practice, he worked in clinics for deaf children, prisons, nursing homes, substance abuse centers, inpatient facilities, and is a consultant for major national and international corporations. He is a published research author and a professional clinical trainer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are few things that make people successful. Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some time to get there. How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you? Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek. Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward. Now here is Chris Meek. Hello.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
Welcome to this week's episode of Next Steps Forward, and I'm your host, Chris Meek. As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Our focus is on personal empowerment, a commitment to well-being, and the motivation to achieve more than you ever thought possible. This week, we welcome Dr. Fos Pergero. He's a seasoned psychologist, author, and clinical trainer with a career spending more than four decades. Dr. Pergero has provided counseling services across diverse settings, including clinics for deaf children, prisons, nursing homes, substance abuse centers, inpatient facilities, and major corporations. He's the president of the Community Psychological Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania, where he developed the Processed Way of Life Counseling Program that he detailed in his book, The Fix Yourself Handbook. Dr. Pergero's other books are also aimed at empowering individuals to address various mental health challenges. Those books include The Fix Your Anxiety Handbook, The Fix Your Depression Handbook, The Fix Your Anger Handbook, and The Fix Your Addiction Handbook. Dr. Fos Pergero, welcome to Next Steps Forward.
Speaker 3 (00:01):
Chris, it's a pleasure to be with you today. Thanks so much for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
No, thanks for your time. I know you're a busy man. Before we get to the Q&A, though, as I'm reading the work that you've done, can we touch a little bit first on the work you did for deaf children? And I ask that because my mother was a deaf education teacher, and so that's something that's very near and dear to me. That's very unique, and so I'd just love to hear your work in that space.
Speaker 3 (00:01):
Deaf people, again, very special to me. I had a relative, actually, who was an audiologist and worked with them. We're dealing with the behavioral things that happen. With deaf people, you're in a different world. There are frustrations. There are things that people have to deal with psychologically, emotionally. She asked me to come aboard and help, and that's going way back in the 70s. It was a great experience. We helped a lot of mostly young kids learn how to deal with different processing in their lives and changed my life in terms of how you deal with other people and not to be afraid of what we call a disability. It's something different, and we don't understand it. Be willing to get right in there and love them and deal with them as whole people.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Well, you mentioned doing this back in the 70s because, as I mentioned, my mother was a deaf education teacher starting in the 70s onward, and back then, you didn't really have the tools available to you as a parent with children with special needs, and so your work is just even more impressive and fascinating, so thank you for doing that. As we both mentioned, something near and dear to us, and so I know we'll get more into that. During your introduction, I talked about your books. The themes of your books, Fix Yourself, Fix Your Anxiety, Fix Your Depression, Fix Your Anger, clearly demonstrate your commitment to helping others be their best selves. Now, I apologize. I took Psych 101 in college, and that's about it, so I'm going to sound like an amateur psychologist here, but did that commitment grow from your childhood? Did you grow up in an environment with people who were anxious or angry or depressed, or did that just commitment grow over time as you counseled people professionally?
Speaker 3 (00:03):
You know, Chris, it's a good question. I was that kid that just grew into it. I always found people fascinating. I found myself always watching what they were doing and how they were doing it, and as time goes on, I was, you know, the kid people came to and talked to, and then it was, you know, through high school and college, the same type of thing, so it was a natural for me to go in and get into a clinical psychology program and just take off from that point. That was, in my mind, what I was meant to do.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
So you just started out being everybody's priest, rabbi, and bartender.
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Yep, I got practice from an early age.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
There are so many aspects to the human condition. Why did you decide to research and write about anxiety, depression, anger, and addiction in particular, and why all four, except perhaps just focusing on one single issue?
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Well, you know, in the first book, the Fix Yourself Handbook, you know, when I was researching that, looking at what was out there in the literature, what I was finding was general books on the subjects, long chapters, didn't tell people what to do, there weren't action steps provided, so I decided that I would write a book, and I had 36 different problems in it, and the publishers all said, no way, you need to, you know, you focus on one. We did the 36, it was the flagship book, if you will, and still the one people go back to. That was right before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit, and the anxiety spiked, and the depression followed, and the anger followed that, so it made sense to now start to be a little bit more specific, you know, use the same format, small chapters, lots of information, but then straight to the action steps. And we've done that, and you know, through the first five books, and now I just published one on last week, last Wednesday, the Fix Your Internal Language Handbook, helping people, you know, what they're thinking, because that's what paves the way for how we feel and how we behave. So it's just about trying to hit all the subjects, but giving people advice and roadmaps on every one of them, that's what's important.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And as you write these books, you just mentioned you just published one last week, do you intentionally think about what the next one is going to be after this one, or is it just, okay?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Yeah, there are probably a dozen other topics, and I'll look at, you know, those as we go forward, and okay, which one makes sense right now, so, you know, addiction was something I was certified in, I dealt with for many, many years with lots of addicts, all different types of addicts, so that made sense in the previous book, and then, you know, I'm listening to people when I counsel on the way they think and how they're angry and they're tearing themselves down and everyone else, so it's a common sense for me that it made sense to go in that direction.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
You've written separate books on each topic, but is there a through line or a common thread you discovered as you wrote them all?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Oh, there are a couple of them. The first one is, and I say this often, is to be able to slow our lives down enough so that we can think and understand what we're feeling. We go too fast, everything's immediate gratification, you know, another line is communicating with other people, we do things online, we don't touch anymore, we don't spend the time face to face and really get involved with each other, and the other thing is I keep telling people we've got to get our emotions down and get our intellects in the game a little bit more. You can emote later, but start thinking about what you're doing and making good conscious decisions based on factual information. So those are really the cornerstones in the first book and all six books.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Well your point being in a fast paced world, how do we actually slow down a bit and make those good factual decisions without just Googling something or using chat GPT or just whatever my thumb just scrolled on, that's going to be the answer?
Speaker 3 (00:07):
You just touched on it, disconnect. Spend a couple hours a day disconnected from your phone and your tablet and your computer. Example, I was in a chiropractor's office yesterday and there's a young mother there and a child who's maybe I'm going to say maybe 10 or so, and the mother walks out from talking to the receptionist and sits down and they're both on their phones and I'm waiting for my wife and we're at about 20 minutes and mom and daughter never said a word to each other. Both of them sat six inches apart from each other and were on their phones the entire time. Disconnect. Slow down. Stop reacting to emotional news, fake news, things designed to make you become emotional. Take a breath. Spend time with your family. Talk. Take a walk. Do something together. You'd be surprised how it changes your life.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I'd like to ask you a few questions about each of your books to introduce to our audience some of your insights on each of their topics. Now first you've emphasized empowerment in your books. What does personal empowerment look like to you and why is it central to your work?
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Well empowerment really when you think about it is nothing more than working from the inside. Let me look at maybe some of my weaknesses, things that aren't so good and fix those, get those to be strengths for me. Be confident in the way I think and feel. Be able to lead myself and not be led by other people. I see this all the time. People believe that they're stronger because they're part of the herd. That's not strength. You don't find strength out there. Strength for me is being able to rely on myself, to think for myself, to gather facts and emote only on those facts and put together plans that move my life along into efficient places. Right now I see people raising their fists and yelling and screaming but I don't see one plan being voiced by any of them to move forward. We only yell about what we don't like and what we're not getting anymore or what we fear or whatever it may be but no plan. Doing all those things from the inside and having a plan for your life, that's empowerment.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Well it's the old saying that hope is not a plan or a strategy. That's right. You have to have a plan. Got to have a plan. How did the process way of life counseling program develop? What are its principles and how does it work?
Speaker 3 (00:10):
You know when you hit graduate school and you're getting into the advanced ways to help people, you're taught a lot of different things. Then you get into the field and many, many of them apply. I would never abandon any but I start to see that some of those processes, some things that I need to continually reinforce for people. I mentioned slowing down and these are all processes, gathering facts, being brutally honest with yourself, your intellect over your emotions and there are 52 actually that I have in the books. They're all little things that you do. If you master those, they help move your life ahead. Conscious thought is another one. People like to call that mindfulness. I don't. It's a really kind of a watered down term of mindfulness. Everybody jumped on. No one knows what they're talking about. It's conscious thought. It's being able to take a step back, see what's going on, think about it and make some decisions on what I'm hearing, on how I want to react to that, how it's making me feel, what I can do to that and being able then to put a plan together. Processes help me if I do all these things the right way. They help me to do all the things that empower me inside.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Was there a moment or experience that sparked it all to come together or this just evolved over the years from your work?
Speaker 3 (00:11):
It developed over the years and then as my kids got older and they were leaving the house, I said, now it's time for me to start doing something a little bit different. I looked at them, I said, well, how am I working with people? Let's start there. Then I saw, all right, I'm emphasizing these points, these processes. I didn't really have terminology for them, but I knew they were processes. I said, let me put all these together and start there. Really, what I write, it comes directly out of my counseling with people. I know it works there. I started using this formally over 20 years ago. My people make it because I give them the roadmap. I give them actionable steps that are easy to do. They are measurable. When you get stuck, there's an easy way to move around them. I write all my books as reference books, just like a counselor with counselors, so that if you down the road say, gee, I'm getting angry again, well, let me go to that chapter on anger, that book on anger, and I can get that roadmap out. That's the way we should be doing things.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Let's talk about the topics of your books, starting with anxiety, because it affects so many people at work and even at home these days. You talked about that when COVID hit us. How do you define anxiety? Is anxiety different from everyday stress or worry, or do everyday stress and worry qualify as anxiety?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
One can lead to the other. What I would like people to understand when it comes to anxiety, and it's the thing you never hear, is that this is primarily a physical condition. We have the tendency to go mental health first, and then our bodies. We need to go our body first. Let's look at what's happening. Ask yourself the question. Something comes along, it's really anxiety-provoking, my God, this can tear you apart, and the guy next to you doesn't seem to be bothered by it. It's in his life, too. Why not? Because your body's not overreacting. If you think about anxiety, when you have it, you can't calm your body down. Any medications they do, whether it's prescription or you are self-medicating with alcohol or marijuana or whatever you're doing, you're thinking they calm your mind down. They calm your body down is what they do. Your mind comes along with it, they're connected. I tell people, let's give you ways to learn how to keep calm every day, not just when you get anxious. That's another problem. I got anxious, now I have to do something. No, you should be doing things like breathing exercises and if meditation or prayer or yoga or whatever works for you, these things should be in your life every day so you learn how to calm down. The other thing we need to do, again, is to disconnect because connecting to the internet does not produce tranquility, it does the opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
You talk about having these things in your life every day. How do we get to the point where we can actually start programming those so it is our routine as opposed to I've got to take this kid to school or this kid to soccer practice or I've got a meeting, I got to the airport or let me check my social media?
Speaker 3 (00:15):
You just said it. If you disconnect, I guarantee you, if you disconnect from your phone or whatever you're using, you will have at the minimum a free hour, at the minimum. For some, it's two or three. I get that all the time. I love this. They'll come in the office, they'll put their phone on the end table next to the chairs they're sitting on with the face up, of course, and it'll ding and we're talking and I see this and I say, is it really important? They all say, I was waiting for this. No, no, you're not. You're talking to a guy raised long before computers came in. We were able to function. You're getting your advice from a guy who was not raised with computers. Think about what's going on here. We disconnect. We will calm down in and of itself. We calm down to begin with. Now we can program those times in there, whether it's meditation or prayer. You're talking at the most a half hour. Do it every day. The combination of this connection and doing something that causes your neurology, your body, your nervous system to calm down will change your life.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
When you talk about disconnecting, it's going through my head that every Sunday morning I get a pop up on my phone saying what my average daily usage was. I'd like to highlight that to my viewers and listeners to take a look at that on Sunday morning while you're having a cup of coffee. Can you shave it by 30 minutes? Can you shave it by 45 minutes? Did you really have to go and check on whatever post it was? So disconnect is something we're going to start weaving more into the daily routine here.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
The other thing you want to say is when you're on social media, how are you feeling? How's it making you feel? Now you saw this protest over here, this guy that didn't like this. When you're done, did it rev you up a little bit? Is that what you wanted? Did you want to feel that way? And the reason we have a problem with social media is that we're addicted to it. So we don't want to give up our addiction. We will now turn the problem person will now be someone else because you kids did this or you did that over there and I just didn't have enough time. And what happened is you used up all your time. You got anxious and angry on social media. And now when your responsibilities come in the picture and they're not being addressed, it's the other person's problem. And that's not empowerment, obviously.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Have you noticed the causes of anxiety have changed all over the years as you've practiced?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yeah. I mean, you know, people ask me that a lot. When I started practicing, we're going back four decades, very few people were on medicine. Now when they come in the office, probably 70% are on medicine. We go so fast that we can't calm down. So what's changed? The pace of our lives, horrible, horrible diets, sleeping patterns, which are sometimes almost non-existent with people, you know, they'll stay up until midnight. They'll go to bed with their phones in their hands and then wonder why they don't sleep because your brain is attached to something that's got you so engaged. But what happens is since it becomes an addiction and the brain and the body adjust to it, you can't see that it's a problem anymore. You think it's the norm. It's a problem. It's something I call habit formation. I put it in all the books. It's your brain normalizing behaviors that you do that are not healthy for you. And as a result, you don't stop.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
We just talked about lack of sleep from gripping to your lifeline called the iPhone or whatever your device is. What role do habits such as poor sleep, excessive screen time, skipping meals or poor nutrition play in heightening anxiety?
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, let's start with sleep. Let's say you went to bed and you got five and a half, five hours of good sleep. I always ask people how much sleep you're getting and they tell me, you know, they tell me something completely different than it is. They'll say, well, yeah, I'm getting seven, seven and a half. I said, what time did you go to bed? Was about 1030 and you got up then at 630.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
I said, how much time did you sleep in there? So then now you can, now there's apps on your phone that can tell you how you're sleeping. So I said, let's get you one of those apps and then you bring it in next week and we'll, we'll, we'll go over seven nights of sleep. What it really came down to is about four hours of good sleep. They're waking up. They'll say, well, I went to the bathroom. I said, well, yeah, but you woke up here. Look, look at these five different places you woke up. If you woke up, you're not getting deep sleep. It's that deep sleep that rejuvenates the cells and gives us what we need. Now we don't, we don't have the sleep. So now we get up and we garbage. You know, most American, any, even we're in, in, in a industrialized nations, we don't eat well. We eat fast. We eat according to what we like and we overeat and we put caffeine in our body to the point that, you know, we're not calming down. So now you do that and then, then it's about exercise and how much do you exercise? Do you exercise? That's another issue. And then you have those calming things, as I said, meditation, prayer, yoga, whatever. Many people will put one in maybe and some of that, but we're not giving our, our body is an organic device. It runs on sleep, food, and all the things we need to do. I always ask them, would you put water in your gas tank? Or if you have a gas tank yet, uh, no, my God, my car wouldn't run. And I said, okay, then why do you load yourself up with sugar, fats, and carbs? Because your body doesn't want to run on those either, but it tastes so good. Okay. So these things all lead to anxiety. They lead to depression. They lead to anger. And then what we do is we medicate. So now we start leading to addiction.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah. Circular motion that never stops.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Is anxiety more common in certain personality types or life stages?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Used to be. Now it's across the board. And I, I, I see kids coming in, you know, school people, uh, guidance counselors and so forth coming to me and saying, I got five, seven year old, eight year olds that are loaded with anxiety. Um, and I tell the parents, you gotta, you gotta calm them down. But the problem is the parents lifestyles going so fast. It's so chaotic. And the excuse is always, I had to have them here and this and I had to have, I said, well, do they need to participate in sports all year long? And what do you do when you take them to sports? You stay on your phone for two hours. So you know, we got to calm this down a little bit and they'll say, well, if, if they don't play all the time, they'll never, they won't get a college scholarship. And I say, college scholarships are one of those 5% of the population. Most of your kids aren't getting one anyway. You know, it's an easy place for you to go and dump them and you be with the other parents or be on your phone or whatever it may be. And I find the happier kids are the ones that are not playing sports all year long because they get a chance to settle a little bit and relax. It's the same thing with kids. They don't disconnect. They go to school. If they had an argument at school, they come home. Now it's on social media. There may even be a film of you having the argument. You never get a chance to just catch your breath.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah. Speaker 2
Speaker 3 (00:23):
You know, again, we didn't do all those things. And the problem is kids are doing it now. I'm wondering what happens when they become parents. They're already accelerated to the point that that's normal. A lot of the kids don't, believe it or not, kids, a lot of them don't want to do this. It's the parents that are pushing them. And I just tell the parents, if your kids want to play, let them play. If they tell you they'd like to play club ball and they want to go out and do some things out of the school system, fine. Give them what they need and don't push them. Don't tell them what they did wrong. Don't do all those things. Just say, fine, you did a great job. Talk about how good it makes you feel. Talk about anything you want to work on, we'll help you out with it. But don't be the parent on the sideline screaming to your child on the side, come on, do better. You should have had that. It's the anxiety is self-perpetuating, it just keeps on going.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Anxiety often shows up in both physical and emotional ways. How can we recognize when our body is telling us that anxiety has become a real problem?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
You're uncomfortable. One of the things we've done, we talk about disconnecting. We've disconnected from our own bodies. We have gotten to the point where we don't read the signs anymore. If you are anxious, your body's putting up a yellow light, if you will, and saying, okay, you need to stop. And we tend to run through those. We even run through the red lights. You will feel either excited, you might feel pains, you're skipping meals, you're doing all that kind of stuff. Now you're feeling anxious, you're feeling overwhelmed, my God, I've got so many things to do. And you look and you say, three or four of them didn't get done, they should have got done. I'll get them tomorrow. No, you won't. And so, as soon as you feel that you are not at peace. And here's the way I tell people to measure it. We are physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual entities. That's the human being. If physically you're not comfortable, that'll tell you something. If intellectually your mind is racing and going to many things, that should tell you something. If emotionally you can't seem to calm down, that should tell you something. And if spiritually, if you're that person and you can't feel it, you can't feel that connection, that should tell you something. Those are the four ways you measure. And they're very easy to measure, very simple. And if you think about it, on a day when all of those are checked off and they're all good, you're having a great day. If you think, I had a great day today, I felt good, my mind was nice and calm, I emotionally felt good, I could feel connected to myself, I felt good. That's what you should. And that is the advanced, if you will, version of empowerment. When you get to the point that you have all those in balance, you've got power.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
In the Fix Your Anxiety Handbook, you emphasize the importance of internal control. How do we create or master internal control and what's the first internal shift someone should focus on when addressing anxiety?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
And we're back to that same thing. We want to slow down. Think about it. How can you do anything if you don't slow down? If I'm giving you instructions on something and you're running around the kitchen doing things and putting things away and maybe cooking, and I'm giving instructions, you're not going to get them. But if we sit down at the table and I say, okay, here are all the things I need you to do, you have time to think about them, to organize your thoughts, maybe write them down, do whatever. We've got to slow down enough so that internally we're giving ourselves a chance, we're giving ourselves the option. I think that we do this with ourselves and then we do it with our kids. I told you to do those three things while you're doing something and that kid's on the game, playing his game. Did you think someone was going to get the advice? Never going to happen. We need to slow down, look at each other, talk to each other, make plans, decide how we're going to execute them, go forward.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
You describe anxiety as being both emotional and physiological. Find that connection or dichotomy where most people go wrong when trying to treat anxiety.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I always teach the mind-body connection. We have this, and we think about this all the time. If I ask someone about, given this question, I'll say, my mind and my body are different things. No, they aren't. They're connected. They are one in the same. We have to start with that. If your body's not being taken care of, I will guarantee you neither is your mind. The person that decides they're going to do the two things at the same time, I'm going to work on conscious thought, I'm going to slow down so I can think, I'm going to not react real fast because you know how it works. The first three seconds someone does something and whatever your reaction is, that's how you're going to follow through. If you take care of those things and you sleep well and you take care of your body and eat properly and keep it calm, that connection fuels everything because the brain as an organ in your body is what drives all the other organs. If your brain shuts down, you die. On the other hand, if your body isn't healthy enough, your brain is not going to be stimulated properly. Neurotransmitters, the chemicals that stimulate the brain, aren't going to be produced properly. Now you have this imbalance, which is constant, and then what you'll do is go to your doctor and they'll say, here, take this pill. Don't worry about changing anything in your life. Just take the pill, which is what big pharma wants from us.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
That's a perfect segue into my next question. You've talked about medicating before. Where should medication fit into the broader picture of managing anxiety and healing ourselves, or just not at all?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Medication comes in as a last resort always in anything we do. I have four people right now that were overweight coming to see me and they needed to get on plans and I said, okay, here's what you want to eat and here's how you're going to do it and here's how you're going to change your life to support it. All four of them were either pre-diabetic or in the early stages of diabetes. We worked a plan. Within six months, all four of them were off the medications. Now if I can do that with them, you can do it yourself. What did we do? We changed the diet and got all the junk out. We ate properly. They slept better so that they weren't making poor decisions and they put an exercise plan in as soon as they were able. That's taking someone that's 350 pounds and has arthritis, they get on that treadmill. No, you're going to go to your doctor, make sure that can happen and then you are going to put that plan in place. Four people off the medication. My anxiety people, I used to treat them all without medications. What we do now is we feel it. We don't want to feel uncomfortable. We want it to go away as fast as possible and the pill does it rather than changing the routines in your life. Now you go take Ativan or Xanax and maybe an antidepressant and you stay on your phone until 11 o'clock at night. What's the point? Then you go back to your doctor and say, it's not working and he said, well, let me just increase the dose a little bit. Maybe we don't have the dose right. The doctor who is connected to the pharmaceutical company who gets kickbacks because they prescribe a particular medication is telling you, you need more. The doctor doesn't win much. I mean, he might get something for his office if they're still doing that, but big pharma wins and you keep on losing because big pharma wants to keep you as sick as possible as long as they can because otherwise you don't need their drugs. You can do this all naturally. It just takes time, commitment, and you're going to get a little uncomfortable in the initial stages. That's all.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
How do we get to the point where we're just pushing pills? I deal with a lot of veterans with PTSD and mental health issues and with all due respect to the folks at the VA and they do some great work, they just keep giving you more and more and more. To your point, you're seeing that with big pharma. Was it to your point maybe 20 years ago? Were those kickbacks where the doctors would go on golf trips or conferences or whatever it may be?
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Let me throw an example at you. You're sitting at home and you have the television on and you're not streaming, you're watching TV where commercials apply. If you were sitting for three hours watching TV one night, you probably saw a dozen big pharma commercials. Do you notice that everything they're selling, you can't buy without a prescription? Now I say, why are they giving the viewer that? They can't go buy it. They don't care about you buying it. The doctor's going to prescribe it. They just want you believing that you need it and that's what they sold. This is a cartel without the guns. You believe it. You have been duped into believing that medication is going to change your life. Eventually big pharma will come into things like pot and whatever else they can get their hands on, but the bottom line is any drug you put in your system will eventually be normalized by your system and it will either be addictive or have you to the point that doing without it makes you very uncomfortable and that is you surrendering all of your power. No empowered people live their lives addicted to medications.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Cartel without guns, that is a powerful and unfortunately true statement. I appreciate you flagging that and giving that insight because that is a powerful statement and really sums up the unfortunate situation that we're in now in this environment. Sometimes fear is our brain telling us that something is dangerous and we shouldn't move forward. How can we differentiate between productive fear, legitimate warning signal, and an anxiety that is unnecessarily holding us back?
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Sure. It's a good question. When you talk about anxiety or fear, it's in our DNA. It's the way we work because we need that to tell us either you're going to stay and fight or engage your flight and run. That's what it was there for from the beginning. That's what the human species used it for. So it tells us something is not right here and you need to look at it and make a decision. What we do is we don't do much with a decision. We stay in it. Now fight or flight raises the whole neurological system. It's very taxing on the body. So now we stay in it a long time. We don't make any choices. So it's debilitating. It brings us to the point that we're stuck in it because we're not making decisions about it and then we rely on something to change that. So again, we're back to some type of quick fix to get me past the pain that I'm feeling. Fight or flight and fear, they're just telling you, hey, something's there, something's wrong. You need to look at it and make a decision. We procrastinate. We push it off. We're not going to do it. We don't know what to do. We go to the doctor. Doctor is a medical person. Medical people don't do much counseling, particularly now with the hospital models taking over all the doctors. Get them in, get them out. And hospitals are all hooked up with Big Pharma. So now we have this model that says, feel bad, don't do it, don't do anything about it, go to the doctor, get the medication. By the time they come to us and I want them to work on things, they say, well, I'm feeling a lot better now. I say, no, you're not. You think you're feeling better. Your symptoms are covered. Big Pharma put a blanket over your eyes and you don't see the problem anymore, so you don't make any changes.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You talk about the hospital model, talk about Big Pharma, private equity is running everything now. It is. You talk about getting them in, getting them out. I've been going to physical therapy for a pinched nerve. Private equity owns the practice. You got a 45 minute window. That's it. Get them out. You talk about Big Pharma, private equity, Big Pharma, middleman in the hospital slash rehab center. Serious. Simple as that. How can we make people more aware of this?
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Well, it's getting out there. That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to tell people, take control of your life. Don't give it away. If you take these medications without making all the changes, you're giving your life away. Now for some people, they'll go through all the changes. They'll do everything and the anxiety stays. That answers your question before. Now let's get a small amount of medication in because we know that your body can't deal with this. You don't ever go to medication before making all the changes, sleep, diet, exercise, and self-care techniques. You do all those first and you stay with them. You don't do them for a month and say, gee, it didn't work. Your problem didn't happen. It didn't develop in a month. You stay committed to it. Give yourself about three or four months and you will see a change if you do it right every day.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah. Speaker 2
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Think about one more thing. This is the thing I've always looked at and they said, okay, this is going to make your skin clear up or you'll feel better. Then they give you the list of all the possible stroke and death and you still buy it and still put it in your body. You're at a point where they have normalized danger so that it doesn't look like danger anymore. What they did is the surgeon general said, you must put this on these ads. So they did. But then of course their marketing people said, but let's put it at the end and let's make it something real easy. And who's in the big commercials? All the nice pretty people and they're looking, they're dancing and they're writing and having wonderful times. That's not who's taking medication.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's a great point. Question often comes with an overwhelming, sometimes crushing sense of despair and hopelessness. What tools or steps do you recommend for reigniting a sense of purpose to help someone believe in themselves in their future again?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Little steps, always little steps. We have to get used to small changes, a plan that has small changes. I even teach people goal setting plans that have small incremental steps. You achieve one step at a time moving towards your goal. You give yourself a pat on the back for doing it and you keep going forward and you never stop and you make that how you live your life.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
We've been talking about medication for anxiety. It would seem to me that medication would be even more crucial for someone coping with depression. Talk about that premise. You know, when is it important to seek professional help and medication for depression and when there's a potential for self-harm?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, depression is a different animal. For some people, it can get very, very intense where they just lose it and their perception is gone and just get me out of it. Depression causes a tremendous amount of pain, that's the problem, physical pain. You're locked in it. The devil has you, you're in a dark place. For those people and those people only, medication is probably going to be in their lives. We can make some changes. We can make sure the sleep is where it needs to be and diet and exercise and all those sorts of things. Then for some people, the medication is going to be there, but again, last resort, if you're taking medicines, particularly for depression, but even anxiety, be involved with a counselor so that while you're taking the medicine, your goal should be to change your life while you're still a bit more comfortable and then get off the medicine because now you've made the changes, but get involved with a counselor and talk through all the things that are affecting you. Sometimes depression is a purely physical condition and you're doing everything you can and it's still there. Other times it comes from past traumas and things that you didn't settle along with some of those physical things. Be able to define which one you have, be able to define where it's coming from and try to do some things to help yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
How do you advise people to deal with the stigma that still surrounds depression, especially in professional or family settings where people may still have the old, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you don't have anything to be sad about, which is certainly less than helpful advice.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
It's still out there. What I tell people is, look, stop listening to other people. Did those people help you? Do you feel better? Obviously not. Has your plan been working? Well, probably not. Then just go make one appointment. Go and sit down and say, okay, this is what I'm dealing with. Let them take the history. Let them hear what you have to say and tell you what they can do for you. If you feel comfortable enough, go back again and don't worry about the other people. This is your life. Why would someone want to tell you, oh, stop? I don't know anything about your condition, but I'll just tell you, get over it. That's the person you want to listen to? No, I don't think so. The first step in empowering yourself is to make that first decision, which is a choice to get help.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We've talked about anxiety and depression. In the Fix Your Anger Handbook, you challenged the idea that anger is always harmful. When can anger be useful and how can people learn to recognize the difference between productive anger and destructive anger?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
The productive anger is the one that motivates you to do something different. Okay, I am angry. I don't like my life the way it is. I don't like these conditions. I need to make some changes. That just motivates it. Then you push it down a bit and say, okay, now I either need help to do this or I'm going to make some changes in my life. Now comes the plan. That's when anger can help. The rest of the time, anger doesn't do much but destroy.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
If someone grew up in a household where anger was explosive or repressed, how can they start unlearning those emotional blueprints?
Speaker 3 (00:44):
That's where you need help. You said the key word, learning. The brain is a learning machine and it learns by what we repeatedly provide it with. The reason people have a hard time making changes is because they believe if they see it, they diagnose it, if you will, they identify it, then they want to make the change quickly. That's not how your brain worked. Your brain learned it over time. You're going to present it with a learning program that is going to include commitment and repetition over time, constantly. That's how your brain will look. I always tell people, look at it like you're learning a list of 20 vocabulary words. You have to learn how to spell them, what they mean, and use them in a sentence. You're not just going to read that and be done. Okay. You know what? You're going to do that rope thing over and over and over again. That might take you three or four days to learn a 20 word list. Now you're talking about changing behaviors and thinking patterns that have been with you for maybe decades. It doesn't have to take decades to change it, but it will take a good year of retraining your brain to get you where you want to be, but be willing to do it. What I always tell people is this is your life. This is the most important thing you have, your life. Why not spend the time making it what you want it to be?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
You emphasize response of a reaction when dealing with our anger. What's the difference between the two and how does response keep us from lashing out?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
We respond quickly and what I tell people to do is take that step back. In anger, when I deal with people with anger and I say, hey, what you said before, the first three or four seconds, that's what's going to happen, except in people with rapid anger. They just fire constantly, but for the rest of us, take a step back and say, all right, I'm not going to respond. Say those words. I'm not responding to this right now. I'm going to just take a walk. Think about what was said and now go back and think about how I want to do it. Have a plan to do that. Anger is fast. That's what we need to know about that. The more we slow it down, the better the opportunity we have to be successful in how we deal with it.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Shame is often at the root of anger, depression, or anxiety. What role does shame play in sustaining addictive behavior and how can people break that cycle?
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Shame leads to frustration, which leads to anger. We're always feeling ashamed. We feel less than other people. We feel not capable of doing things. We feel judged. We don't feel like we can connect on other people's level. We're always at a disadvantage, or we were ashamed because we did something that we feel was horrible and we need to pay the price. We don't belong with other people or enjoying our lives. Again, you're back to past circumstances that need to be addressed. Most of the time, you need help. It may be help to forgive yourself or someone else. It may be to put the events of the past in order and get to the point where they're closed, meaning not that they're forgotten, but they're no longer emotionally impacting your life. Then you're going to replace that with a plan to move forward.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
How important are routine and structure when recovering from addiction, or for that matter, recovering from anxiety, depression, or unmanaged anger?
Speaker 3 (00:47):
The structure is important. If you're going to change anything, that's the plan. That's your structure. You need to have that. The first step is always to be able to say to yourself, okay, I have this problem. Not deny it or not blame it. I list a slew of defense mechanisms in the books that I write, saying these are the things that people will do. Well, it's because of that person. Well, I didn't really mean it. Well, it wasn't that bad. Well, I did it because I had to. You made me do it, whatever it may be, but they don't own it. The first thing you have to do is own where you are. When we come into counseling, I say, let's look at where you are right now. They'll give me their excuses. I'll say, no, let's talk about you. Where are you right now? That's the point where we have to start. Once we do that, now we can start making all those changes. Now the structure, now the plan comes into place, but if we don't do that first, we're really giving them a disservice because we're saying we're going to put a plan together, but we really don't know where we're starting.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Across all four topics, anxiety, depression, anger, and addiction, what unites your approach in helping people heal?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
The most important thing is there's no judgment whatsoever. When you come into my office or counseling online, whatever it may be, you know there's no judgment. You know that I have unconditional love for you and that I know what I'm doing. You're going to pick that out in someone trying to help you very, very quickly. How do you know that? You know that because they can put the plan together. They're saying, okay, we got this information. I got all this from you. I can take you here. No doubt about it. If you do this every time you come in and I say, let's do this, let's try this, you're going to get to where you go. I'll guarantee it. I'll be right there for you. When they hear those things, and it comes through with impact. I'm a dynamic counselor. You can see the way I speak. You're here to get better, and I'm here to help you get better. We're going to work together, and we're going to take no prisoners on this. We're going to do this.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
In all your years of practice, what has surprised you the most about human resiliency?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Two things. The first is that it can continue to do all the wrong things and survive. The second is that it can do the right things and thrive.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
What key lessons have you learned throughout your career that you hope to see this next generation of therapists carry into the future?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's easy. That is to continue to have the love and the slow patience to help people work. We're going to move away from counseling and offices. Guys like myself are going to be dinosaurs, and there'll be a few things that some people will do things in the office. Online counseling is easy. We can lose the personal approach. We can lose the body language. The person leaves the session and they're in tears, and you get an opportunity to give them a professional hug, we call it. If you're going to be in this business, you must connect with people. They must absolutely feel like you've got them. You cannot make this easy on yourself because many of you will be counseling from your home, and after you're done with this session, you go and put the clothes in the washer and do something about dinner. Now, you come back. We don't do that in offices. We're there to counsel. We are professionally engaged all day long. You need to find a way to stay professionally engaged because those people are important and they mean something.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Before time gets away from us, how can people find your books and you have a website or other social media for people to connect with you?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
The best way to get to me is my website. It's mynamefostergerald.com. All the books are there. In addition, I have excerpts from all six books, three excerpts for each book. You can see how the books are written and, hey, do I want to buy this kind of a thing. You can see media appearances, so you can see how I speak. As far as contacting me, there is a contact link, and I do return emails.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Dr.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Fostergerald, thank you so much for being with us today. It was a real pleasure and honor, sir.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Same here. Thanks so much for having me, Chris.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
No, thank you. I'm Chris Meek. We're out of time. We'll see you next week. Same time, same place. Stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Thanks for tuning in to Next Steps Forward. Be sure to join Chris Meek for another great show next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and 1 p.m. Eastern Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, make things happen in your life. We'll see you then. Bye.
There are few things that make people successful. Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some time to get there. How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you? Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek. Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward. Now here is Chris Meek. Hello.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
Welcome to this week's episode of Next Steps Forward, and I'm your host, Chris Meek. As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Our focus is on personal empowerment, a commitment to well-being, and the motivation to achieve more than you ever thought possible. This week, we welcome Dr. Fos Pergero. He's a seasoned psychologist, author, and clinical trainer with a career spending more than four decades. Dr. Pergero has provided counseling services across diverse settings, including clinics for deaf children, prisons, nursing homes, substance abuse centers, inpatient facilities, and major corporations. He's the president of the Community Psychological Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania, where he developed the Processed Way of Life Counseling Program that he detailed in his book, The Fix Yourself Handbook. Dr. Pergero's other books are also aimed at empowering individuals to address various mental health challenges. Those books include The Fix Your Anxiety Handbook, The Fix Your Depression Handbook, The Fix Your Anger Handbook, and The Fix Your Addiction Handbook. Dr. Fos Pergero, welcome to Next Steps Forward.
Speaker 3 (00:01):
Chris, it's a pleasure to be with you today. Thanks so much for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
No, thanks for your time. I know you're a busy man. Before we get to the Q&A, though, as I'm reading the work that you've done, can we touch a little bit first on the work you did for deaf children? And I ask that because my mother was a deaf education teacher, and so that's something that's very near and dear to me. That's very unique, and so I'd just love to hear your work in that space.
Speaker 3 (00:01):
Deaf people, again, very special to me. I had a relative, actually, who was an audiologist and worked with them. We're dealing with the behavioral things that happen. With deaf people, you're in a different world. There are frustrations. There are things that people have to deal with psychologically, emotionally. She asked me to come aboard and help, and that's going way back in the 70s. It was a great experience. We helped a lot of mostly young kids learn how to deal with different processing in their lives and changed my life in terms of how you deal with other people and not to be afraid of what we call a disability. It's something different, and we don't understand it. Be willing to get right in there and love them and deal with them as whole people.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Well, you mentioned doing this back in the 70s because, as I mentioned, my mother was a deaf education teacher starting in the 70s onward, and back then, you didn't really have the tools available to you as a parent with children with special needs, and so your work is just even more impressive and fascinating, so thank you for doing that. As we both mentioned, something near and dear to us, and so I know we'll get more into that. During your introduction, I talked about your books. The themes of your books, Fix Yourself, Fix Your Anxiety, Fix Your Depression, Fix Your Anger, clearly demonstrate your commitment to helping others be their best selves. Now, I apologize. I took Psych 101 in college, and that's about it, so I'm going to sound like an amateur psychologist here, but did that commitment grow from your childhood? Did you grow up in an environment with people who were anxious or angry or depressed, or did that just commitment grow over time as you counseled people professionally?
Speaker 3 (00:03):
You know, Chris, it's a good question. I was that kid that just grew into it. I always found people fascinating. I found myself always watching what they were doing and how they were doing it, and as time goes on, I was, you know, the kid people came to and talked to, and then it was, you know, through high school and college, the same type of thing, so it was a natural for me to go in and get into a clinical psychology program and just take off from that point. That was, in my mind, what I was meant to do.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
So you just started out being everybody's priest, rabbi, and bartender.
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Yep, I got practice from an early age.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
There are so many aspects to the human condition. Why did you decide to research and write about anxiety, depression, anger, and addiction in particular, and why all four, except perhaps just focusing on one single issue?
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Well, you know, in the first book, the Fix Yourself Handbook, you know, when I was researching that, looking at what was out there in the literature, what I was finding was general books on the subjects, long chapters, didn't tell people what to do, there weren't action steps provided, so I decided that I would write a book, and I had 36 different problems in it, and the publishers all said, no way, you need to, you know, you focus on one. We did the 36, it was the flagship book, if you will, and still the one people go back to. That was right before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit, and the anxiety spiked, and the depression followed, and the anger followed that, so it made sense to now start to be a little bit more specific, you know, use the same format, small chapters, lots of information, but then straight to the action steps. And we've done that, and you know, through the first five books, and now I just published one on last week, last Wednesday, the Fix Your Internal Language Handbook, helping people, you know, what they're thinking, because that's what paves the way for how we feel and how we behave. So it's just about trying to hit all the subjects, but giving people advice and roadmaps on every one of them, that's what's important.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And as you write these books, you just mentioned you just published one last week, do you intentionally think about what the next one is going to be after this one, or is it just, okay?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Yeah, there are probably a dozen other topics, and I'll look at, you know, those as we go forward, and okay, which one makes sense right now, so, you know, addiction was something I was certified in, I dealt with for many, many years with lots of addicts, all different types of addicts, so that made sense in the previous book, and then, you know, I'm listening to people when I counsel on the way they think and how they're angry and they're tearing themselves down and everyone else, so it's a common sense for me that it made sense to go in that direction.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
You've written separate books on each topic, but is there a through line or a common thread you discovered as you wrote them all?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Oh, there are a couple of them. The first one is, and I say this often, is to be able to slow our lives down enough so that we can think and understand what we're feeling. We go too fast, everything's immediate gratification, you know, another line is communicating with other people, we do things online, we don't touch anymore, we don't spend the time face to face and really get involved with each other, and the other thing is I keep telling people we've got to get our emotions down and get our intellects in the game a little bit more. You can emote later, but start thinking about what you're doing and making good conscious decisions based on factual information. So those are really the cornerstones in the first book and all six books.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Well your point being in a fast paced world, how do we actually slow down a bit and make those good factual decisions without just Googling something or using chat GPT or just whatever my thumb just scrolled on, that's going to be the answer?
Speaker 3 (00:07):
You just touched on it, disconnect. Spend a couple hours a day disconnected from your phone and your tablet and your computer. Example, I was in a chiropractor's office yesterday and there's a young mother there and a child who's maybe I'm going to say maybe 10 or so, and the mother walks out from talking to the receptionist and sits down and they're both on their phones and I'm waiting for my wife and we're at about 20 minutes and mom and daughter never said a word to each other. Both of them sat six inches apart from each other and were on their phones the entire time. Disconnect. Slow down. Stop reacting to emotional news, fake news, things designed to make you become emotional. Take a breath. Spend time with your family. Talk. Take a walk. Do something together. You'd be surprised how it changes your life.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I'd like to ask you a few questions about each of your books to introduce to our audience some of your insights on each of their topics. Now first you've emphasized empowerment in your books. What does personal empowerment look like to you and why is it central to your work?
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Well empowerment really when you think about it is nothing more than working from the inside. Let me look at maybe some of my weaknesses, things that aren't so good and fix those, get those to be strengths for me. Be confident in the way I think and feel. Be able to lead myself and not be led by other people. I see this all the time. People believe that they're stronger because they're part of the herd. That's not strength. You don't find strength out there. Strength for me is being able to rely on myself, to think for myself, to gather facts and emote only on those facts and put together plans that move my life along into efficient places. Right now I see people raising their fists and yelling and screaming but I don't see one plan being voiced by any of them to move forward. We only yell about what we don't like and what we're not getting anymore or what we fear or whatever it may be but no plan. Doing all those things from the inside and having a plan for your life, that's empowerment.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Well it's the old saying that hope is not a plan or a strategy. That's right. You have to have a plan. Got to have a plan. How did the process way of life counseling program develop? What are its principles and how does it work?
Speaker 3 (00:10):
You know when you hit graduate school and you're getting into the advanced ways to help people, you're taught a lot of different things. Then you get into the field and many, many of them apply. I would never abandon any but I start to see that some of those processes, some things that I need to continually reinforce for people. I mentioned slowing down and these are all processes, gathering facts, being brutally honest with yourself, your intellect over your emotions and there are 52 actually that I have in the books. They're all little things that you do. If you master those, they help move your life ahead. Conscious thought is another one. People like to call that mindfulness. I don't. It's a really kind of a watered down term of mindfulness. Everybody jumped on. No one knows what they're talking about. It's conscious thought. It's being able to take a step back, see what's going on, think about it and make some decisions on what I'm hearing, on how I want to react to that, how it's making me feel, what I can do to that and being able then to put a plan together. Processes help me if I do all these things the right way. They help me to do all the things that empower me inside.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Was there a moment or experience that sparked it all to come together or this just evolved over the years from your work?
Speaker 3 (00:11):
It developed over the years and then as my kids got older and they were leaving the house, I said, now it's time for me to start doing something a little bit different. I looked at them, I said, well, how am I working with people? Let's start there. Then I saw, all right, I'm emphasizing these points, these processes. I didn't really have terminology for them, but I knew they were processes. I said, let me put all these together and start there. Really, what I write, it comes directly out of my counseling with people. I know it works there. I started using this formally over 20 years ago. My people make it because I give them the roadmap. I give them actionable steps that are easy to do. They are measurable. When you get stuck, there's an easy way to move around them. I write all my books as reference books, just like a counselor with counselors, so that if you down the road say, gee, I'm getting angry again, well, let me go to that chapter on anger, that book on anger, and I can get that roadmap out. That's the way we should be doing things.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Let's talk about the topics of your books, starting with anxiety, because it affects so many people at work and even at home these days. You talked about that when COVID hit us. How do you define anxiety? Is anxiety different from everyday stress or worry, or do everyday stress and worry qualify as anxiety?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
One can lead to the other. What I would like people to understand when it comes to anxiety, and it's the thing you never hear, is that this is primarily a physical condition. We have the tendency to go mental health first, and then our bodies. We need to go our body first. Let's look at what's happening. Ask yourself the question. Something comes along, it's really anxiety-provoking, my God, this can tear you apart, and the guy next to you doesn't seem to be bothered by it. It's in his life, too. Why not? Because your body's not overreacting. If you think about anxiety, when you have it, you can't calm your body down. Any medications they do, whether it's prescription or you are self-medicating with alcohol or marijuana or whatever you're doing, you're thinking they calm your mind down. They calm your body down is what they do. Your mind comes along with it, they're connected. I tell people, let's give you ways to learn how to keep calm every day, not just when you get anxious. That's another problem. I got anxious, now I have to do something. No, you should be doing things like breathing exercises and if meditation or prayer or yoga or whatever works for you, these things should be in your life every day so you learn how to calm down. The other thing we need to do, again, is to disconnect because connecting to the internet does not produce tranquility, it does the opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
You talk about having these things in your life every day. How do we get to the point where we can actually start programming those so it is our routine as opposed to I've got to take this kid to school or this kid to soccer practice or I've got a meeting, I got to the airport or let me check my social media?
Speaker 3 (00:15):
You just said it. If you disconnect, I guarantee you, if you disconnect from your phone or whatever you're using, you will have at the minimum a free hour, at the minimum. For some, it's two or three. I get that all the time. I love this. They'll come in the office, they'll put their phone on the end table next to the chairs they're sitting on with the face up, of course, and it'll ding and we're talking and I see this and I say, is it really important? They all say, I was waiting for this. No, no, you're not. You're talking to a guy raised long before computers came in. We were able to function. You're getting your advice from a guy who was not raised with computers. Think about what's going on here. We disconnect. We will calm down in and of itself. We calm down to begin with. Now we can program those times in there, whether it's meditation or prayer. You're talking at the most a half hour. Do it every day. The combination of this connection and doing something that causes your neurology, your body, your nervous system to calm down will change your life.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
When you talk about disconnecting, it's going through my head that every Sunday morning I get a pop up on my phone saying what my average daily usage was. I'd like to highlight that to my viewers and listeners to take a look at that on Sunday morning while you're having a cup of coffee. Can you shave it by 30 minutes? Can you shave it by 45 minutes? Did you really have to go and check on whatever post it was? So disconnect is something we're going to start weaving more into the daily routine here.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
The other thing you want to say is when you're on social media, how are you feeling? How's it making you feel? Now you saw this protest over here, this guy that didn't like this. When you're done, did it rev you up a little bit? Is that what you wanted? Did you want to feel that way? And the reason we have a problem with social media is that we're addicted to it. So we don't want to give up our addiction. We will now turn the problem person will now be someone else because you kids did this or you did that over there and I just didn't have enough time. And what happened is you used up all your time. You got anxious and angry on social media. And now when your responsibilities come in the picture and they're not being addressed, it's the other person's problem. And that's not empowerment, obviously.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Have you noticed the causes of anxiety have changed all over the years as you've practiced?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yeah. I mean, you know, people ask me that a lot. When I started practicing, we're going back four decades, very few people were on medicine. Now when they come in the office, probably 70% are on medicine. We go so fast that we can't calm down. So what's changed? The pace of our lives, horrible, horrible diets, sleeping patterns, which are sometimes almost non-existent with people, you know, they'll stay up until midnight. They'll go to bed with their phones in their hands and then wonder why they don't sleep because your brain is attached to something that's got you so engaged. But what happens is since it becomes an addiction and the brain and the body adjust to it, you can't see that it's a problem anymore. You think it's the norm. It's a problem. It's something I call habit formation. I put it in all the books. It's your brain normalizing behaviors that you do that are not healthy for you. And as a result, you don't stop.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
We just talked about lack of sleep from gripping to your lifeline called the iPhone or whatever your device is. What role do habits such as poor sleep, excessive screen time, skipping meals or poor nutrition play in heightening anxiety?
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, let's start with sleep. Let's say you went to bed and you got five and a half, five hours of good sleep. I always ask people how much sleep you're getting and they tell me, you know, they tell me something completely different than it is. They'll say, well, yeah, I'm getting seven, seven and a half. I said, what time did you go to bed? Was about 1030 and you got up then at 630.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
I said, how much time did you sleep in there? So then now you can, now there's apps on your phone that can tell you how you're sleeping. So I said, let's get you one of those apps and then you bring it in next week and we'll, we'll, we'll go over seven nights of sleep. What it really came down to is about four hours of good sleep. They're waking up. They'll say, well, I went to the bathroom. I said, well, yeah, but you woke up here. Look, look at these five different places you woke up. If you woke up, you're not getting deep sleep. It's that deep sleep that rejuvenates the cells and gives us what we need. Now we don't, we don't have the sleep. So now we get up and we garbage. You know, most American, any, even we're in, in, in a industrialized nations, we don't eat well. We eat fast. We eat according to what we like and we overeat and we put caffeine in our body to the point that, you know, we're not calming down. So now you do that and then, then it's about exercise and how much do you exercise? Do you exercise? That's another issue. And then you have those calming things, as I said, meditation, prayer, yoga, whatever. Many people will put one in maybe and some of that, but we're not giving our, our body is an organic device. It runs on sleep, food, and all the things we need to do. I always ask them, would you put water in your gas tank? Or if you have a gas tank yet, uh, no, my God, my car wouldn't run. And I said, okay, then why do you load yourself up with sugar, fats, and carbs? Because your body doesn't want to run on those either, but it tastes so good. Okay. So these things all lead to anxiety. They lead to depression. They lead to anger. And then what we do is we medicate. So now we start leading to addiction.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah. Circular motion that never stops.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Is anxiety more common in certain personality types or life stages?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Used to be. Now it's across the board. And I, I, I see kids coming in, you know, school people, uh, guidance counselors and so forth coming to me and saying, I got five, seven year old, eight year olds that are loaded with anxiety. Um, and I tell the parents, you gotta, you gotta calm them down. But the problem is the parents lifestyles going so fast. It's so chaotic. And the excuse is always, I had to have them here and this and I had to have, I said, well, do they need to participate in sports all year long? And what do you do when you take them to sports? You stay on your phone for two hours. So you know, we got to calm this down a little bit and they'll say, well, if, if they don't play all the time, they'll never, they won't get a college scholarship. And I say, college scholarships are one of those 5% of the population. Most of your kids aren't getting one anyway. You know, it's an easy place for you to go and dump them and you be with the other parents or be on your phone or whatever it may be. And I find the happier kids are the ones that are not playing sports all year long because they get a chance to settle a little bit and relax. It's the same thing with kids. They don't disconnect. They go to school. If they had an argument at school, they come home. Now it's on social media. There may even be a film of you having the argument. You never get a chance to just catch your breath.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah. Speaker 2
Speaker 3 (00:23):
You know, again, we didn't do all those things. And the problem is kids are doing it now. I'm wondering what happens when they become parents. They're already accelerated to the point that that's normal. A lot of the kids don't, believe it or not, kids, a lot of them don't want to do this. It's the parents that are pushing them. And I just tell the parents, if your kids want to play, let them play. If they tell you they'd like to play club ball and they want to go out and do some things out of the school system, fine. Give them what they need and don't push them. Don't tell them what they did wrong. Don't do all those things. Just say, fine, you did a great job. Talk about how good it makes you feel. Talk about anything you want to work on, we'll help you out with it. But don't be the parent on the sideline screaming to your child on the side, come on, do better. You should have had that. It's the anxiety is self-perpetuating, it just keeps on going.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Anxiety often shows up in both physical and emotional ways. How can we recognize when our body is telling us that anxiety has become a real problem?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
You're uncomfortable. One of the things we've done, we talk about disconnecting. We've disconnected from our own bodies. We have gotten to the point where we don't read the signs anymore. If you are anxious, your body's putting up a yellow light, if you will, and saying, okay, you need to stop. And we tend to run through those. We even run through the red lights. You will feel either excited, you might feel pains, you're skipping meals, you're doing all that kind of stuff. Now you're feeling anxious, you're feeling overwhelmed, my God, I've got so many things to do. And you look and you say, three or four of them didn't get done, they should have got done. I'll get them tomorrow. No, you won't. And so, as soon as you feel that you are not at peace. And here's the way I tell people to measure it. We are physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual entities. That's the human being. If physically you're not comfortable, that'll tell you something. If intellectually your mind is racing and going to many things, that should tell you something. If emotionally you can't seem to calm down, that should tell you something. And if spiritually, if you're that person and you can't feel it, you can't feel that connection, that should tell you something. Those are the four ways you measure. And they're very easy to measure, very simple. And if you think about it, on a day when all of those are checked off and they're all good, you're having a great day. If you think, I had a great day today, I felt good, my mind was nice and calm, I emotionally felt good, I could feel connected to myself, I felt good. That's what you should. And that is the advanced, if you will, version of empowerment. When you get to the point that you have all those in balance, you've got power.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
In the Fix Your Anxiety Handbook, you emphasize the importance of internal control. How do we create or master internal control and what's the first internal shift someone should focus on when addressing anxiety?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
And we're back to that same thing. We want to slow down. Think about it. How can you do anything if you don't slow down? If I'm giving you instructions on something and you're running around the kitchen doing things and putting things away and maybe cooking, and I'm giving instructions, you're not going to get them. But if we sit down at the table and I say, okay, here are all the things I need you to do, you have time to think about them, to organize your thoughts, maybe write them down, do whatever. We've got to slow down enough so that internally we're giving ourselves a chance, we're giving ourselves the option. I think that we do this with ourselves and then we do it with our kids. I told you to do those three things while you're doing something and that kid's on the game, playing his game. Did you think someone was going to get the advice? Never going to happen. We need to slow down, look at each other, talk to each other, make plans, decide how we're going to execute them, go forward.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
You describe anxiety as being both emotional and physiological. Find that connection or dichotomy where most people go wrong when trying to treat anxiety.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I always teach the mind-body connection. We have this, and we think about this all the time. If I ask someone about, given this question, I'll say, my mind and my body are different things. No, they aren't. They're connected. They are one in the same. We have to start with that. If your body's not being taken care of, I will guarantee you neither is your mind. The person that decides they're going to do the two things at the same time, I'm going to work on conscious thought, I'm going to slow down so I can think, I'm going to not react real fast because you know how it works. The first three seconds someone does something and whatever your reaction is, that's how you're going to follow through. If you take care of those things and you sleep well and you take care of your body and eat properly and keep it calm, that connection fuels everything because the brain as an organ in your body is what drives all the other organs. If your brain shuts down, you die. On the other hand, if your body isn't healthy enough, your brain is not going to be stimulated properly. Neurotransmitters, the chemicals that stimulate the brain, aren't going to be produced properly. Now you have this imbalance, which is constant, and then what you'll do is go to your doctor and they'll say, here, take this pill. Don't worry about changing anything in your life. Just take the pill, which is what big pharma wants from us.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
That's a perfect segue into my next question. You've talked about medicating before. Where should medication fit into the broader picture of managing anxiety and healing ourselves, or just not at all?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Medication comes in as a last resort always in anything we do. I have four people right now that were overweight coming to see me and they needed to get on plans and I said, okay, here's what you want to eat and here's how you're going to do it and here's how you're going to change your life to support it. All four of them were either pre-diabetic or in the early stages of diabetes. We worked a plan. Within six months, all four of them were off the medications. Now if I can do that with them, you can do it yourself. What did we do? We changed the diet and got all the junk out. We ate properly. They slept better so that they weren't making poor decisions and they put an exercise plan in as soon as they were able. That's taking someone that's 350 pounds and has arthritis, they get on that treadmill. No, you're going to go to your doctor, make sure that can happen and then you are going to put that plan in place. Four people off the medication. My anxiety people, I used to treat them all without medications. What we do now is we feel it. We don't want to feel uncomfortable. We want it to go away as fast as possible and the pill does it rather than changing the routines in your life. Now you go take Ativan or Xanax and maybe an antidepressant and you stay on your phone until 11 o'clock at night. What's the point? Then you go back to your doctor and say, it's not working and he said, well, let me just increase the dose a little bit. Maybe we don't have the dose right. The doctor who is connected to the pharmaceutical company who gets kickbacks because they prescribe a particular medication is telling you, you need more. The doctor doesn't win much. I mean, he might get something for his office if they're still doing that, but big pharma wins and you keep on losing because big pharma wants to keep you as sick as possible as long as they can because otherwise you don't need their drugs. You can do this all naturally. It just takes time, commitment, and you're going to get a little uncomfortable in the initial stages. That's all.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
How do we get to the point where we're just pushing pills? I deal with a lot of veterans with PTSD and mental health issues and with all due respect to the folks at the VA and they do some great work, they just keep giving you more and more and more. To your point, you're seeing that with big pharma. Was it to your point maybe 20 years ago? Were those kickbacks where the doctors would go on golf trips or conferences or whatever it may be?
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Let me throw an example at you. You're sitting at home and you have the television on and you're not streaming, you're watching TV where commercials apply. If you were sitting for three hours watching TV one night, you probably saw a dozen big pharma commercials. Do you notice that everything they're selling, you can't buy without a prescription? Now I say, why are they giving the viewer that? They can't go buy it. They don't care about you buying it. The doctor's going to prescribe it. They just want you believing that you need it and that's what they sold. This is a cartel without the guns. You believe it. You have been duped into believing that medication is going to change your life. Eventually big pharma will come into things like pot and whatever else they can get their hands on, but the bottom line is any drug you put in your system will eventually be normalized by your system and it will either be addictive or have you to the point that doing without it makes you very uncomfortable and that is you surrendering all of your power. No empowered people live their lives addicted to medications.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Cartel without guns, that is a powerful and unfortunately true statement. I appreciate you flagging that and giving that insight because that is a powerful statement and really sums up the unfortunate situation that we're in now in this environment. Sometimes fear is our brain telling us that something is dangerous and we shouldn't move forward. How can we differentiate between productive fear, legitimate warning signal, and an anxiety that is unnecessarily holding us back?
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Sure. It's a good question. When you talk about anxiety or fear, it's in our DNA. It's the way we work because we need that to tell us either you're going to stay and fight or engage your flight and run. That's what it was there for from the beginning. That's what the human species used it for. So it tells us something is not right here and you need to look at it and make a decision. What we do is we don't do much with a decision. We stay in it. Now fight or flight raises the whole neurological system. It's very taxing on the body. So now we stay in it a long time. We don't make any choices. So it's debilitating. It brings us to the point that we're stuck in it because we're not making decisions about it and then we rely on something to change that. So again, we're back to some type of quick fix to get me past the pain that I'm feeling. Fight or flight and fear, they're just telling you, hey, something's there, something's wrong. You need to look at it and make a decision. We procrastinate. We push it off. We're not going to do it. We don't know what to do. We go to the doctor. Doctor is a medical person. Medical people don't do much counseling, particularly now with the hospital models taking over all the doctors. Get them in, get them out. And hospitals are all hooked up with Big Pharma. So now we have this model that says, feel bad, don't do it, don't do anything about it, go to the doctor, get the medication. By the time they come to us and I want them to work on things, they say, well, I'm feeling a lot better now. I say, no, you're not. You think you're feeling better. Your symptoms are covered. Big Pharma put a blanket over your eyes and you don't see the problem anymore, so you don't make any changes.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You talk about the hospital model, talk about Big Pharma, private equity is running everything now. It is. You talk about getting them in, getting them out. I've been going to physical therapy for a pinched nerve. Private equity owns the practice. You got a 45 minute window. That's it. Get them out. You talk about Big Pharma, private equity, Big Pharma, middleman in the hospital slash rehab center. Serious. Simple as that. How can we make people more aware of this?
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Well, it's getting out there. That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to tell people, take control of your life. Don't give it away. If you take these medications without making all the changes, you're giving your life away. Now for some people, they'll go through all the changes. They'll do everything and the anxiety stays. That answers your question before. Now let's get a small amount of medication in because we know that your body can't deal with this. You don't ever go to medication before making all the changes, sleep, diet, exercise, and self-care techniques. You do all those first and you stay with them. You don't do them for a month and say, gee, it didn't work. Your problem didn't happen. It didn't develop in a month. You stay committed to it. Give yourself about three or four months and you will see a change if you do it right every day.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah. Speaker 2
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Think about one more thing. This is the thing I've always looked at and they said, okay, this is going to make your skin clear up or you'll feel better. Then they give you the list of all the possible stroke and death and you still buy it and still put it in your body. You're at a point where they have normalized danger so that it doesn't look like danger anymore. What they did is the surgeon general said, you must put this on these ads. So they did. But then of course their marketing people said, but let's put it at the end and let's make it something real easy. And who's in the big commercials? All the nice pretty people and they're looking, they're dancing and they're writing and having wonderful times. That's not who's taking medication.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's a great point. Question often comes with an overwhelming, sometimes crushing sense of despair and hopelessness. What tools or steps do you recommend for reigniting a sense of purpose to help someone believe in themselves in their future again?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Little steps, always little steps. We have to get used to small changes, a plan that has small changes. I even teach people goal setting plans that have small incremental steps. You achieve one step at a time moving towards your goal. You give yourself a pat on the back for doing it and you keep going forward and you never stop and you make that how you live your life.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
We've been talking about medication for anxiety. It would seem to me that medication would be even more crucial for someone coping with depression. Talk about that premise. You know, when is it important to seek professional help and medication for depression and when there's a potential for self-harm?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, depression is a different animal. For some people, it can get very, very intense where they just lose it and their perception is gone and just get me out of it. Depression causes a tremendous amount of pain, that's the problem, physical pain. You're locked in it. The devil has you, you're in a dark place. For those people and those people only, medication is probably going to be in their lives. We can make some changes. We can make sure the sleep is where it needs to be and diet and exercise and all those sorts of things. Then for some people, the medication is going to be there, but again, last resort, if you're taking medicines, particularly for depression, but even anxiety, be involved with a counselor so that while you're taking the medicine, your goal should be to change your life while you're still a bit more comfortable and then get off the medicine because now you've made the changes, but get involved with a counselor and talk through all the things that are affecting you. Sometimes depression is a purely physical condition and you're doing everything you can and it's still there. Other times it comes from past traumas and things that you didn't settle along with some of those physical things. Be able to define which one you have, be able to define where it's coming from and try to do some things to help yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
How do you advise people to deal with the stigma that still surrounds depression, especially in professional or family settings where people may still have the old, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you don't have anything to be sad about, which is certainly less than helpful advice.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
It's still out there. What I tell people is, look, stop listening to other people. Did those people help you? Do you feel better? Obviously not. Has your plan been working? Well, probably not. Then just go make one appointment. Go and sit down and say, okay, this is what I'm dealing with. Let them take the history. Let them hear what you have to say and tell you what they can do for you. If you feel comfortable enough, go back again and don't worry about the other people. This is your life. Why would someone want to tell you, oh, stop? I don't know anything about your condition, but I'll just tell you, get over it. That's the person you want to listen to? No, I don't think so. The first step in empowering yourself is to make that first decision, which is a choice to get help.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We've talked about anxiety and depression. In the Fix Your Anger Handbook, you challenged the idea that anger is always harmful. When can anger be useful and how can people learn to recognize the difference between productive anger and destructive anger?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
The productive anger is the one that motivates you to do something different. Okay, I am angry. I don't like my life the way it is. I don't like these conditions. I need to make some changes. That just motivates it. Then you push it down a bit and say, okay, now I either need help to do this or I'm going to make some changes in my life. Now comes the plan. That's when anger can help. The rest of the time, anger doesn't do much but destroy.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
If someone grew up in a household where anger was explosive or repressed, how can they start unlearning those emotional blueprints?
Speaker 3 (00:44):
That's where you need help. You said the key word, learning. The brain is a learning machine and it learns by what we repeatedly provide it with. The reason people have a hard time making changes is because they believe if they see it, they diagnose it, if you will, they identify it, then they want to make the change quickly. That's not how your brain worked. Your brain learned it over time. You're going to present it with a learning program that is going to include commitment and repetition over time, constantly. That's how your brain will look. I always tell people, look at it like you're learning a list of 20 vocabulary words. You have to learn how to spell them, what they mean, and use them in a sentence. You're not just going to read that and be done. Okay. You know what? You're going to do that rope thing over and over and over again. That might take you three or four days to learn a 20 word list. Now you're talking about changing behaviors and thinking patterns that have been with you for maybe decades. It doesn't have to take decades to change it, but it will take a good year of retraining your brain to get you where you want to be, but be willing to do it. What I always tell people is this is your life. This is the most important thing you have, your life. Why not spend the time making it what you want it to be?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
You emphasize response of a reaction when dealing with our anger. What's the difference between the two and how does response keep us from lashing out?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
We respond quickly and what I tell people to do is take that step back. In anger, when I deal with people with anger and I say, hey, what you said before, the first three or four seconds, that's what's going to happen, except in people with rapid anger. They just fire constantly, but for the rest of us, take a step back and say, all right, I'm not going to respond. Say those words. I'm not responding to this right now. I'm going to just take a walk. Think about what was said and now go back and think about how I want to do it. Have a plan to do that. Anger is fast. That's what we need to know about that. The more we slow it down, the better the opportunity we have to be successful in how we deal with it.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Shame is often at the root of anger, depression, or anxiety. What role does shame play in sustaining addictive behavior and how can people break that cycle?
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Shame leads to frustration, which leads to anger. We're always feeling ashamed. We feel less than other people. We feel not capable of doing things. We feel judged. We don't feel like we can connect on other people's level. We're always at a disadvantage, or we were ashamed because we did something that we feel was horrible and we need to pay the price. We don't belong with other people or enjoying our lives. Again, you're back to past circumstances that need to be addressed. Most of the time, you need help. It may be help to forgive yourself or someone else. It may be to put the events of the past in order and get to the point where they're closed, meaning not that they're forgotten, but they're no longer emotionally impacting your life. Then you're going to replace that with a plan to move forward.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
How important are routine and structure when recovering from addiction, or for that matter, recovering from anxiety, depression, or unmanaged anger?
Speaker 3 (00:47):
The structure is important. If you're going to change anything, that's the plan. That's your structure. You need to have that. The first step is always to be able to say to yourself, okay, I have this problem. Not deny it or not blame it. I list a slew of defense mechanisms in the books that I write, saying these are the things that people will do. Well, it's because of that person. Well, I didn't really mean it. Well, it wasn't that bad. Well, I did it because I had to. You made me do it, whatever it may be, but they don't own it. The first thing you have to do is own where you are. When we come into counseling, I say, let's look at where you are right now. They'll give me their excuses. I'll say, no, let's talk about you. Where are you right now? That's the point where we have to start. Once we do that, now we can start making all those changes. Now the structure, now the plan comes into place, but if we don't do that first, we're really giving them a disservice because we're saying we're going to put a plan together, but we really don't know where we're starting.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Across all four topics, anxiety, depression, anger, and addiction, what unites your approach in helping people heal?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
The most important thing is there's no judgment whatsoever. When you come into my office or counseling online, whatever it may be, you know there's no judgment. You know that I have unconditional love for you and that I know what I'm doing. You're going to pick that out in someone trying to help you very, very quickly. How do you know that? You know that because they can put the plan together. They're saying, okay, we got this information. I got all this from you. I can take you here. No doubt about it. If you do this every time you come in and I say, let's do this, let's try this, you're going to get to where you go. I'll guarantee it. I'll be right there for you. When they hear those things, and it comes through with impact. I'm a dynamic counselor. You can see the way I speak. You're here to get better, and I'm here to help you get better. We're going to work together, and we're going to take no prisoners on this. We're going to do this.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
In all your years of practice, what has surprised you the most about human resiliency?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Two things. The first is that it can continue to do all the wrong things and survive. The second is that it can do the right things and thrive.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
What key lessons have you learned throughout your career that you hope to see this next generation of therapists carry into the future?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's easy. That is to continue to have the love and the slow patience to help people work. We're going to move away from counseling and offices. Guys like myself are going to be dinosaurs, and there'll be a few things that some people will do things in the office. Online counseling is easy. We can lose the personal approach. We can lose the body language. The person leaves the session and they're in tears, and you get an opportunity to give them a professional hug, we call it. If you're going to be in this business, you must connect with people. They must absolutely feel like you've got them. You cannot make this easy on yourself because many of you will be counseling from your home, and after you're done with this session, you go and put the clothes in the washer and do something about dinner. Now, you come back. We don't do that in offices. We're there to counsel. We are professionally engaged all day long. You need to find a way to stay professionally engaged because those people are important and they mean something.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Before time gets away from us, how can people find your books and you have a website or other social media for people to connect with you?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
The best way to get to me is my website. It's mynamefostergerald.com. All the books are there. In addition, I have excerpts from all six books, three excerpts for each book. You can see how the books are written and, hey, do I want to buy this kind of a thing. You can see media appearances, so you can see how I speak. As far as contacting me, there is a contact link, and I do return emails.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Dr.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Fostergerald, thank you so much for being with us today. It was a real pleasure and honor, sir.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Same here. Thanks so much for having me, Chris.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
No, thank you. I'm Chris Meek. We're out of time. We'll see you next week. Same time, same place. Stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Thanks for tuning in to Next Steps Forward. Be sure to join Chris Meek for another great show next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and 1 p.m. Eastern Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, make things happen in your life. We'll see you then. Bye.
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The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.