So contempt is criticism on steroids.
This is what John Gottman calls sulfuric acid for love.
Nothing will erode a relationship quicker than contempt.
Contempt is when you are looking at your partner
from a superior position.
So you are eye rolling, you are name calling.
There's a mockery, mocking, even physical mockery,
imitating them, imitating their voice.
Contempt is meant to just take the legs out
from your partner, make them feel pathetic, ridiculous.
And it can be abusive.
But most people have engaged in contempt
at some point in their relationship.
Lower level would be sort of the eye rolling.
But that is the biggest predictor of a split.
The following is a conversation with Shannon Curry,
a clinical and forensic psychologist
who conducts research, therapy,
and psychological evaluations pertaining to trauma,
violence, and relationships.
She received worldwide attention in April of last year
by giving a lengthy televised testimony
on her psychological evaluation of Amber Heard
during the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.
I found her testimony to be an eloquent description
of complex psychological concepts
and evaluations procedures.
So I reached out for a chat.
In person, she was brilliant, funny,
thoughtful, and truly kind.
I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Shannon Curry.
Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog
that burns away with the first daylight of reality.
I love that quote.
Do you think romantic love fades away in this way?
Bukowski.
Does it have to fade?
The truth is that you have all of these chemicals
pumping through your body.
You're essentially high on heroin
in the beginning of a romance.
And you're going to have these rose-colored glasses on.
Everything your partner does is magical.
But really, it's the novelty.
It's just like going on a vacation.
You're fully present.
You're just attuned to the magic of another human being
moment to moment.
And then on top of that, you're just flooded with dopamine.
So you're high on drugs.
And we can't go on like that.
You will die if you are using these kinds of chemicals
all the time, all day long.
Eventually, our bodies are sort of made to dial it down.
We've made it.
I mean, we're evolutionary beings.
We are doing the same thing we did 200,000 years ago
to find a mate, procreate, spend enough time
with each other that we have sex a whole bunch of times
and make babies.
Now we've changed the rules of the game.
We're living almost till we're 100 years old in some cases.
We're making these marriage commitments
that last half a century.
And we're expecting it to be all because of love.
And we're signing these contracts
based on how we feel when we're high on these drugs.
So the reality is we know based on the real,
and I'm also talking about
certain Western civilizations here,
because as you know, there are arranged marriages.
And a lot of times those marriages,
if we're looking at longevity,
are actually way more satisfied
than people who are marrying for love,
which logically makes sense.
If you're making a decision based on a feeling
that is basically based on endorphins and dopamine
and oxytocin, I wouldn't sign a contract
just because of a feeling necessary for 50 years.
Whereas an arranged marriage,
if you have your elders kind of deciding for you
that this partner has a bunch of traits
that you're going to appreciate more and more over time,
I think there's some wisdom there.
So you don't think that feeling could be a foundation
for a 50-year relationship?
Well, I don't think that specific feeling
you're having based on drugs
is going to be the same feeling
you have 20, 30, 40 years down the line.
If you're gonna wake up and turn to your partner
when you're 70 and think,
oh my God, I'm so glad you're hot, you are so hot,
then sure, marry for hotness.
But if you've been through life a little bit,
and I think most people who are on a second marriage know,
shit happens in life.
It is hard, you're gonna have maybe a kid with special needs
or your dad gets dementia or you get diagnosed with cancer.
Who are you gonna wanna come home to?
Who is going to hold you when you are sobbing on the floor
and tell you we're gonna get through it together?
Who's gonna know the names of your kid's special ed teacher
and the process for getting a 504 plan?
Or is it gonna be you on your own?
I think those things matter.
But doesn't that hotness,
don't those drugs kind of solidify
into a deeper appreciation of the other person
into something you could call beauty?
They can.
But isn't that the same thing?
When you notice the beauty of another human being,
aren't you high on drugs still?
You're making it sound like there's a brief rockstar period
of going on heroin and then it's over,
but can't you be on heroin your whole life a little bit?
I have some good news, I have some good news.
I think one of the reasons I got into studying relationships
was because I wanted that, right?
So I'm a scientist, but I also love art
and I love writing and I love literature.
I wanted to know that true love could be real,
but as a scientist, I am cynical.
I just need some data.
So I practice a type of therapy called the Gottman Method
and I love that because it tends to be,
well, it is one of the most evidence-based therapies
we have based on John and Julie Gottman,
two psychologists who have been researching relationships
for now about 50 years,
and this therapy happens to be for couples.
They found that you absolutely
can make longevity work in a relationship.
You can build, you are not just settling for companionship,
but you can have passion and intimacy
and growing love and appreciation,
but there is a blueprint, a set of skills
that we were never given.
We're not taught it in school.
We changed the rules of the game
and we haven't learned the rules yet.
And the Gottman Method for couples therapy
kind of gives you a few guidelines,
the rules for longevity in a relationship.
Yeah, they did a beautiful job
at taking these findings they had
through decades of research, quantifying it,
and then codifying it into a therapy method.
It's really skills-based.
I tell couples when they're starting out with me
that they're essentially gonna be starting a class.
So what's the five to one golden rule?
What I read is there's a kind of balance you can achieve
of how many interactions you have in a relationship,
so they're positive versus negative,
and I think that's what the five to one means,
but basically there should be kind of an empirical,
like if you just look back over a month,
how many of the interactions were positive,
how many were negative?
Look at the day, right?
So the idea of this ratio, well, it's not an idea.
It was a finding.
It is a research finding that the Gottmans got
after looking at thousands of couples
and codifying these interactions that they were observing.
Couples that tend to be satisfied in their relationships,
that are happier, they have better health, et cetera,
they are having approximately five positive interactions
to each negative, and I wanna be clear
about what I'm defining as positive and negative here.
So this doesn't necessarily mean that you're,
these don't need to be big, sweeping romantic gestures,
buying flowers, having sex.
These are things like paying attention
to what we call your partner's bids.
We make these bids for affection, for connection,
all the time in our relationships,
not just with our partners, but with our friends,
our coworkers, and we may not even know
what our style of bid is, but if you see them on a sheet,
you can pretty quickly identify them.
Bids could be wanting to show your partner,
tell your partner something and have them be proud of you.
It could be wanting to go buy groceries
with your partner doing things together.
Hey, you wanna come with me?
It could be telling a joke and hoping that your wife
looks up from her email on the computer and acknowledges it.
If she laughs, then you've got a positive.
But if I don't even look up, that's a negative, right?
So it's not necessarily
that I'm calling my husband an asshole.
It's just, am I connecting with him?
Am I meeting those bids for connection and vice versa?
But do those also give you a guide of how you should behave?
Well, I think what's really important
is actually asking your partner or paying attention
to what your partner's bids are,
because what matters to Ty, my husband,
may not matter to you.
For instance, I mean, Ty's bar is so low with me,
I thank God for him.
In terms of what defines a positive interaction.
Right, he just wants me to ask him if he wants a water
when I get up to get myself one.
Just be a basic, decent, considerate person
is all he asks of me.
Whereas mine might be sort of like,
stay up later with me, watch a show,
go to bed at the same time as me,
or know about the people in my life.
That's sort of a thing.
I should highlight this, and hopefully it's okay,
that you were running a little bit late,
and you sent me this text, which people do really rarely,
and there's a subtle act of kindness within that text.
So the text you sent was that I just decreased
the amount of stress in your life or something like this
by saying it's cool.
But that means that you're signaling that you were stressed
because you care enough to be there on time.
And that was like, that made me feel really special.
I was like, oh, you know, people don't often,
people don't often, don't always do that,
because that puts you also, that makes you vulnerable.
And that-
I actually thought that after I sent it,
but I feel that most of the day.
And he interacts, and like, God, I just expose myself.
But absolutely, I was excited to be here,
and I didn't want you to think that I didn't care.
And I think being a therapist has shown me
that it really, it's so lucky to be in that position,
because you meet people that you would have thought
are cooler than you, or smarter than you,
or just somehow impervious to life,
and you realize that we are all in it together.
We all want to be cared about and liked.
We don't want to be liked as a baseline.
Some people will say they don't care, but everybody does.
It's human.
And I have gotten much better being a therapist,
much more comfortable showing caring, showing love,
and genuineness and vulnerability
than I think I ever would have been otherwise.
And that kind of vulnerability is what's required
to do a positive interaction in a relationship?
I think so.
And people have different levels of comfort, right?
So, but as long as it's working for both partners,
and typically you have to communicate
to figure out what your partner,
what makes your partner feel cared about.
However, you might be working, for instance,
with an older couple,
and I have a couple that's perfectly happy,
and they sort of have a system.
It works for them.
If there's some sort of a rupture,
if they get into some sort of a disagreement,
they don't talk it out.
She might go to the store, run an errand,
do a little shopping.
He'll work in the wood shop, and then they'll come back,
and there is a repair attempt, though,
but it's maybe she'll say,
hey, do you want to have dinner?
Come, I made your favorite dinner.
Or he'll say, hey, I recorded your favorite show.
You want to watch it tonight?
So they don't need to process it,
but there is an understanding between them
that we're still in this together,
we care about each other, and there's a repair attempt.
Most people need to be able to process it verbally
and talk about what happened, but not all.
So for most people, if there's a conflict,
you should talk about it and resolve it and repair it,
versus like, just put it behind you?
I don't want to say should.
I guess it depends on the couple.
Everybody processes emotions differently.
Everybody handles emotional expression differently.
I have couples where I have one person in the partnership
who has autism and the other doesn't,
and so they're obviously going to have different ways
of communicating or processing what happened.
We all have different perspectives.
It really depends on what makes a person feel
like it's been repaired.
What makes a person feel understood?
Does that need to be verbal,
or in the case of that older couple I have,
where they know they understand one another
because there's a gentleness toward one another after?
What are some common ways relationships fail
that you've observed in all the therapy you've done?
Well, the Gommans identified what they call
the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Okay, what are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
I mean, I could just keep it simple
and go off their research.
So those are four different behaviors
that they identify in couples,
or that you can identify in couples
that are really highly predictive of a divorce,
some more than others, but I'll start with the lower ones.
So one thing that we, by the way, actually,
we all do these things.
These would be in that five to one ratio.
You'd wanna stay away from some of these.
These are the ones.
So as they pile up, now that ratio's gonna get imbalanced,
and then you are headed for a split, okay?
So the first is criticism.
So criticism is when we have a complaint,
complaints are normal, but instead of owning
our own problems, our own feelings,
we assume that our perspective
is the only valid, accurate perspective,
and so we take it upon ourselves
to tell our partner what is wrong with them, okay?
So there's essentially no real belief
that they might have a valid perspective to.
So this could look like you never helped me out
with the house, or even you're so lazy,
can't I just get you for five seconds
to help with the kids or something like that?
And then what happens is horseman number two, defensiveness.
So not everybody is defensive
just because they were criticized.
Some people just are more prone
to defensiveness than others.
None of us really like admitting our faults,
so it's pretty natural, but defensiveness
is essentially making excuses or worse,
turning it around on your partner,
not accepting any responsibility,
and definitely not validating what they're feeling.
Now, if you get criticized enough,
or if you get really flooded,
the flooding is what happens when our heart rate goes up
kind of around 100 beats per minute,
our frontal lobe shuts down,
that's our thoughtful brain, our logical brain,
and our reptilian kind of hindbrain takes over our thinking,
and we just go into fight or flight in a way.
We just wanna annihilate our partner
instead of say anything that would be helpful
to the relationship.
If you're getting flooded, you could do a couple things.
You could get super critical, you could get contemptuous,
which I'll talk about in a second, it's the last horseman,
or you do the third horseman, which is stonewalling.
And in their research, the Gottman's found
that men are actually more likely to stonewall.
I also am someone who stonewalls,
but it's where you just sort of
disconnect from the conversation.
You shut down, you turn away.
You can physically even turn away, kind of arms crossed,
but you're shut off.
And stonewalling happens usually because you get flooded,
you feel like you can't win,
you don't know what to do to make the situation better,
it feels pretty hopeless, and talking feels unproductive.
So you can see how in a typical heterosexual relationship,
the gender dynamic, we know that women tend to use criticism
more often because they're the ones
that typically raise issues verbally,
and then if men are feeling more criticized,
that they tend to stonewall,
and it becomes this vicious cycle of then more criticism,
but the criticism is really just a plea to be loved
and get your partner to show you they care.
And then the man tends to feel like
he can't do anything right, this isn't even productive,
if I say anything, I'm just gonna make it worse,
and they don't have any real,
you haven't given them a specific need, a solution,
something they can do to shine for you.
So they turn away.
And where does the contempt come in?
All right, so contempt is criticism on steroids.
This is what John Gottman calls sulfuric acid for love.
Nothing will erode a relationship quicker than contempt.
Contempt is when you are looking at your partner
from a superior position.
So you are eye rolling, you are name calling,
there's a mockery, mocking, even physical mockery,
imitating them, imitating their voice.
Contempt is meant to just take the legs out
from your partner, make them feel pathetic, ridiculous,
and it can be abusive.
But most people have engaged in contempt
at some point in their relationship,
lower level would be sort of the eye rolling,
but that is the biggest predictor of a split.
If you allow yourself to think, yeah,
that mockery or contempt just a little bit,
it's like this weird slippery slope.
It sure is.
And the opposite is true,
where I just look at a person and think,
wow, isn't that the most wonderful creature
I've ever seen in my life?
Just think that.
And you notice the little details about who they are.
And so I just observe them the way you observe
a weird peacock at a zoo or something like that.
Intention is powerful, isn't it?
Yeah, and it changes.
You start to notice beautiful things
and then let the things that annoy you.
You're exactly right.
You're touching on some really important things.
So in relationships, we actually know that
wearing rose-colored glasses is important.
It's healthy.
We need it.
And it's a choice you're making, right?
So there is a saying that getting married
is just choosing one person's faults over another.
And the reality is that we may become infatuated
with somebody else as human beings.
Love is an emotion, attraction is an emotion.
And as you go through life,
even if you're in a committed relationship,
you might see beauty in another.
And that person who is novel might seem attractive to you.
But if you can remember that they too have a set of problems
that you would be marrying,
it really helps you to see the beauty in your partner again
and recognize all of their incredible strengths
and all the ways we meld with a person
and become our own family.
Almost become, I mean, our lives intertwine
and we grow those oak trees.
So by the way, there's a line I read somewhere
that when you're wearing rose-colored glasses,
all the red flags looks just like flags.
So I think it's a good line.
So you think that humans are fundamentally,
all of us are fundamentally flawed or have flaws.
They're unique flaws.
And they're basically relationships.
It's just a way to figure out how the two can fit together.
Right, and we're different.
So no matter what, we're going to have differences.
We are raised differently than our partner.
We have different stories,
different experiences that shaped our value systems,
especially when it comes to the big ones
like parenting, love, money,
these principles that are based in our history.
We're gonna have differences.
So is this a set of differences
you can accept from somebody and work with?
Do the benefits and do their strengths,
do they make it worth it?
Or are they deal-breaker differences?
Tricky question, but in the couples you've worked with,
is there the feminine and the masculine,
is there different dynamics that come into play,
like dominant and submissive?
Is it like a dance where it just changes
from minute to minute?
Is there dynamics that you observe
that both limit and enable successful relationships?
Yes, so there are,
if we're talking about masculine, feminine,
then how also are we could get into,
are we talking about actual gender, identified gender,
or are we just talking about these traits?
Because like I said,
I stonewall, which is typically in couples,
something that is more associated with straight men.
But that's my style of coping when I get overwhelmed.
That is not tied to any sort of success
or non-success of a relationship,
but what we do know is that gay couples,
so lesbians and gay men, tend to be gentler with one another
when they are having conflict discussions.
So that's actually been identified in the research
and it's something I've witnessed and it's just fascinating.
So with my straight couples,
I'll be going through one of these,
if we're processing the conflict that occurred,
I'll be going through the sheet
and it's very, very structured
because you don't want couples doing more damage
when they're there with you.
You want them practicing skills
that protect them from criticism,
that protect them from contempt.
And when I'm working with a straight couple,
I am like a referee or sometimes I'll relate it
to being like a ski coach and keeping people on a funny hill
and you let them make like two turns and then you stop them
and you meet up again
because you don't want them to veer off.
With straight couples, you are doing very short turns
before you need to kind of intervene and re-scaffold.
I had a lesbian couple recently
and they were so lovely with each other.
They skipped like seven steps
to the advanced final portion
where they were already coming up with solutions
and suggesting things that they might be able
to do differently next time
to make it better for their partner.
They were asking each other questions
about how their partner felt with no agenda,
no attempt to sort of be like,
well, do you think you're feeling that way
which straight couples do all the time.
You just see this humility and openness.
It's lovely.
Yeah, it's lovely.
But I wonder if maybe watching too many Hollywood films,
if some of the drama, some of the tension
is required for a passionate lifelong romance.
No, it's not.
And that's great news.
So we actually know that the closer you feel
to your partner.
I mean, you've talked a lot about beauty
and you can ignite that beauty, that interest, right?
So when you're falling in love,
it's usually that a person is sort of a mystery to you
and you're uncovering these layers
that you find really appealing.
There are continual layers that you can uncover
with your partner over time.
I don't think we realize that.
I think we get complacent
and we think we've had every conversation imaginable.
What else are they gonna do to surprise me?
But we don't know the questions to be asking.
One of my favorite questions,
I like turning these conversations kind of into a quiz
because I get bored easily.
So rather than just asking an open-ended question,
there's a way you can do this with your partner
where it's sort of like the dating game.
What is my as of yet fondest but unrealized life dream?
And see if your partner knows.
You might not even know.
They might know you better than you know yourself.
That in and of itself is a beautiful reminder
of the relationship and how special it is.
But then also when they say it
or when you realize or have to think critically,
what is my husband's as of yet unrealized
but fondest life dream?
And then you can talk about it.
You just, I don't know, you just kind of transcend
into this new area and you feel tight again.
You feel like, you feel close.
Well, you really talk to each other.
Like I've recorded and without intending to publish
podcasts like this with microphones, with friends,
with people close to me.
Because it's literally that.
You get to ask questions like as if it's an interview.
And we don't do that.
That's exactly it.
The way you're talking with me.
Sit down with your partner, have that conversation.
Like years later.
Right, show interest, actually be curious.
See what they surprise you with.
And actually what you learn is you don't know the answers
to most of these questions.
100%, exactly.
Like what's your favorite movie from the 80s?
You might not know the answer to that.
It's like those first date questions or whatever.
Or what's your favorite movie this year and why?
And why, yeah.
It's fascinating.
It is.
It's hard to do that because I think that
you'll probably be offended at first
how little the other person knows.
So I think you have to work through that.
You know, I actually find that there's this rekindling
because partners are shocked that their partner
does know so much about them.
Especially if they've been feeling dissatisfied
or disconnected.
It's a reminder of all the good that's still there.
What, I know we've said some of those things,
but what's on the opposite side?
What's the key to a successful relationship?
What are the things you see time and time again
that do you designate that they're on a good path?
Yeah.
There's a real attunement, honestly.
Just it's sort of an us against the world feeling.
Nobody, neither partner's gonna talk shit on them,
the other.
There's a loyalty.
They handle each other in the relationship with care.
You can tell that they've worked some things.
To me, it usually indicates that these are some people
who have figured they've had to work some things out.
They know that this is delicate.
They know that you're on thin ice.
You take a wrong step and you can be back in a tough place
in your relationship.
Or you treat it with care and it can be amazing.
So they're careful with one another.
They give each other compliments.
They are considerate.
So you'll see, he'll bring the car around for her
because it's raining.
Or she'll bring him home some takeout.
She'll order for him too at the restaurant.
They keep each other in each other's minds.
But that us against the world thing,
that definitely is there.
100%.
You've seen that, right?
Yeah, you've seen it.
And you've seen it like,
I like it when couples have been together for a long time.
And when one is talking, the other one looks at them.
If you don't do that, that's not a bad sign.
But it's a good sign when you do that.
Yes.
And I think it's actually a really good exercise to do
because I enjoy when I see in others.
It's a way to show that you don't take them for granted.
And then you still find them like this mysterious,
wonderful creature to observe.
I think too often, we have that with our parents.
We have that with people close to us.
You think, yeah, I've heard what they're about to say.
I know you can complete that sentence.
Yeah, take them for granted.
And then if you just look at them and say,
wow, this is the most brilliant person
I've ever seen in my life.
I can't just appreciate every word that comes out of them
and look at them in that way.
You actually begin to believe it.
And you actually begin to see the beauty
of what they're saying.
You are exactly right.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And it's caring, yeah.
It's very caring.
So that's, I mean, that's I think the beauty
of what the Gottman research showed us,
taught us, provided us, is that we can do these things
that become cyclic and just keep growing this relationship,
making it stronger, more powerful, more loving.
You would never want to cut it down.
Well, you were talking about the sheet
for conflict processing.
What are we talking about?
So a couple will come and say there was this conflict
and you put it on the table.
And then what does it mean to process it?
In that Gottman method of therapy,
there are all these different, I mean,
hundreds of different interventions.
And based on what the issue is in that session,
you can decide the most appropriate intervention.
And so this is a specific intervention
for if it is a conflict that occurred
and there are different types of conflicts.
So this would be more like an incident.
It's not a perpetual recurring problem,
which has actually a different intervention
where you kind of look at the underlying belief systems,
values, and the goal is not to solve that problem.
The goal in that situation is to actually
just get a better understanding of each other
and your positions and just,
you stop seeing your partner as the adversary
and you start seeing them as a person who makes sense.
But if there's been a specific event,
a specific fight that's just sort of situational,
but it's left bad blood, things were said,
or you didn't feel understood,
this intervention I was talking about
is one that you would go through a series of steps
where first you identify the emotions that you were feeling.
Then you describe, play by play,
your movie, your perspective.
If your partner were looking through your eyes,
this is what they heard, saw, thought,
then they saw this, then they heard this.
So you're not saying, yeah,
then you came in and were yelling and acting crazy.
You're saying, so then I saw you come in.
I heard you say, and I thought to myself,
well, great, now everything's ruined.
So you're showing them your movie.
Then they have to summarize the movie for you
and then vice versa.
And then there's this step where each person
validates some part that they can understand.
Based on what you saw, heard,
I can actually understand how you felt
one of those feelings that you said.
Then my favorite part is you rewind the movie
from that day back through into childhood
and you land on a time, a memory,
when you felt a similar set of feelings.
And this is the most beautiful part ever
because let's say the feeling was I felt misunderstood.
I felt misjudged, uncared about, unloved,
like you didn't even like me.
And I'll say, when did you feel that way?
Land on a time and they're like, my whole childhood.
My parents were, my mom was always accusing me
of doing things I wasn't doing and it would set me up
and my dad would come home, he'd hear about it,
he would just believe her.
And then you have a partner climbing up on the couch
to give their partner a hug
while they're sharing the story, it's beautiful.
And it changes the way you interact
in future disagreements.
So you have those moments.
Yeah, you can't unlearn.
Now you know this about your partner,
you know what they're sensitive to.
Yeah, and again, you kind of see the beauty
and the flaws then.
Right, it all makes sense.
Yeah, it all kind of makes sense.
So you maybe were in this dumpster dive in your head
of how your partner sucks and all the things
that are wrong with them and it's so hopeless.
And then you get this light shining through
and you realize, oh my God, of course
they would be sensitive to that.
And suddenly it's not about all the ways
your partner is wrong and proving that they're wrong.
It's just how can I in the future make sure
that they do not feel this again?
I would never want this person I love
to misunderstand me and feel so unloved.
What are you, the early days of that,
what do you think about the whole dating,
modern dating process?
How do you find a partner that you can
stay with for the rest of your life?
So we are absolutely doing it wrong.
But there is a way you can do it.
And I am such a fan of the psychologist Ty Tashiro.
I adore him, he's brilliant, he's lovely,
he's also very humble.
Just a wonderful salt of the earth guy.
I'm gonna tell you a very true story here, okay?
I was in a bad relationship and I was
at a psychology conference with my partner at the time.
We were both at this conference and we were sitting
in a lecture hall there for Ty Tashiro
to do his talk that day on his phenomenal research
on relationship satisfaction and dating.
And I was sitting next to him and we'd been,
it was just always unpleasant on trips,
there were always fights.
We're sitting there and Ty Tashiro starts talking
about his research and how he found that most people
are signing this agreement, getting married,
and doing it based on the love endorphins
and really only about 35% of anybody who's married
is actually happy.
And he said, so then, you know, and.
Pretty low number.
Exactly, but here's what I love about Ty Tashiro
is he didn't stop there.
He wanted to know what those people who were happy
had in common.
And then same thing with the people who were unhappy.
He found a couple fascinating patterns.
So the couples who were happy tended to rate their partners
higher in three different traits.
And I love talking about this because if you are somebody
who can follow instructions, you can find this.
I mean, very easily.
Those three traits tend to be conscientiousness, okay?
And I love the word conscientiousness
because it's not just kindness.
Kindness is a good way to think of it,
but you can be kind and kind of be a pushover
and that's not attractive.
Conscientiousness is smart, attentive.
It's somebody who reads into a text message
and thinks, wow, she was making herself
very vulnerable there.
That's conscientiousness.
I like how you just threw in a compliment.
I appreciate it.
It's true, it's a certain intelligence,
awareness, and attunement.
And then on top of that, conscientiousness is motivated.
So you can't be on your ass all day and be conscientious
because then you can't meet the needs
that you anticipate about the person.
So conscientious is that guy who drives the car around
in the rainstorm so his wife's hair doesn't get met.
It's my husband who checks my alarm for me every morning
because he knows I'm terrible at time management
and he makes sure that I set it a reasonable amount of time
before my first meeting and not the 20 minutes
I think I need.
And then he'll come wake me up with a cup of coffee.
That is ultimate conscientiousness.
And it is true.
I mean, I will tell you,
as somebody who's with a conscientious partner,
your love increases over time as you continue
to feel grateful and admiring of that person.
The second one, you want somebody who is low
in a big five personality trait called neuroticism.
You want somebody emotionally stable in a way.
Now this doesn't mean you can't have somebody
who doesn't get the blues
or struggle with mental health issues.
Trust me, Ty is with somebody who, you know,
I'm all over the place.
But you want somebody who kind of owns their shit
and isn't going to just be emotionally unstable all over.
You know, you want somebody who is generally happy
and has some life satisfaction.
Having a partner who has serious, not mental health issues,
but unmitigated emotional distress and instability
is really hard on the partner.
And it's really hard on other family members,
including children, if you have children.
So it's just a predictor of happiness.
There's a certain threshold of chaos
that if you exceed it is going to be destructive
to a long-term relationship.
A perfect description about chaos.
Not the mystery chaos you love with your little poet brain.
I'm talking more like just somebody who,
there's just no peace.
There's no peace.
There's a problem with everything.
Everything becomes more difficult.
Going to a party is a chore.
You don't know if they're gonna have a meltdown
at the party or how many complaints about your friends.
Everything is a problem.
So you want somebody who has just some resiliency,
I think is a good term for it.
Some flexibility.
Some spice is okay, but not too much.
Right, flexibility, resiliency, easygoing, okay?
The third is really interesting, I think.
So he found that having a partner
was sort of moderate adventurousness,
not high adventurousness,
actually leads to greater satisfaction.
And the reason for that is high adventurousness
equals novelty-seeking, shiny new things.
And so if you're in a monogamous relationship,
if that is what's important to you,
it's going to be very hard for a partner
who is novelty-seeking to be faithful.
So that will cause a lot of pain.
But also, novelty-seeking people
tend to always have new projects, new interesting things,
and so their attention is drawn away from the relationship.
And so you can just feel pretty neglected or unimportant.
But a little bit.
But you want a little bit of adventurousness.
So you want your person to be
sort of self-motivated, individuated,
have their own interests, not completely dependent on you.
But also, low adventurousness is not a bad thing.
Ultimately, what you're getting
with low to moderate adventurousness
is that rock, that feeling of stability, that home.
And I made some references earlier,
like when you're 70 and you turn to your partner.
Do you want him to be hot?
Or for instance, my dad has dementia right now.
And my husband turned to me on the plane.
We were all coming back from a trip
where we really saw how severe it's getting.
And he just turned to me.
He knew how much pain I was in,
even though I wasn't showing it.
And he said, I want you to know
that if it comes to a point
where we need to take care of your dad,
he needs to live with us,
you don't even need to ask.
It is, I am 100% on board and will help.
And those are the things that matter, that home feeling.
And technically, that's a trait that's usually,
that's sort of a,
my husband caring so much about family and home
and taking care of things that matter,
those are things that tend to be associated
with that low to moderate adventurousness.
Somebody who really cares about simple things and family.
I wonder if those things,
those three things are something you can work on,
conscientiousness, you can probably
proactively observe yourself
and do it more regularly.
Neuroticism might be the hardest one, probably,
to control. I think so.
Well, I mean, I was pretty neurotic in my early 20s.
And when you wake up to it,
maybe if you're self-aware about it,
you'll be able to control it.
Yeah, I think self-awareness is key.
I think that's why I love therapy so much.
I think life is about growth and our potential for growth
and to make our own lives better,
to make the lives of others better,
to serve others, to heal.
All of us are this collective healing.
And I think we're all capable of growth.
And the same with adventurousness.
I'm somebody that's pretty low on adventure,
but I keep throwing myself out there
just for the extra adventure.
You can grow in that way.
Yes, and I am high in adventurousness,
and I was not really ready to settle down.
I was married earlier in my 20s,
but I would say that I am much more prepared
to be in a committed, long-term relationship now
in my 40s than I was when I was younger.
But in that same way, for me,
I like to connect myself to high adventure people
so that it brings me out.
It's like they're a horse,
and I get to ride them.
And that's the thing.
So high adventure people are attractive.
They're interesting, exciting,
but it can be a world of heartbreak
because you're only under that spotlight
for a few minutes,
and then they're on to the next shiny thing.
Yeah, but heartbreak is part of love.
That might be the drug thing that you were talking about.
Speaking of adventurousness, what about sex?
What role does sex play in a successful relationship?
Well, okay, so I'm saying it's important,
but I wanna qualify that.
Everybody has different levels of sex
that are satisfying to them.
Sex can definitely bond you to your partner.
Orgasms are amazing.
They de-stress us.
They're healthy.
They, I mean, you can have an orgasm
and have a lower level of stress for 48 hours.
I think that's pretty incredible.
If you have, I mean,
just that kind of physical contact with your partner,
even a 20-second hug with your partner
has similar benefits to an orgasm.
You're gonna have a lower stress level.
You're gonna feel immediately close to your partner.
You're gonna get a rush of oxytocin,
which is gonna make you feel happier,
more grounded throughout the day.
So that's a 20-second hug.
You extrapolate that to sex and things are gonna be great.
So it's just physiological.
But I wonder, there's probably metrics
about how often you have sex,
how that correlates to successful relationships and so on.
Well, there are, but it really has more to do,
it's sort of like, remember I was talking
about processing conflict and what matters is,
do people feel like it's been resolved?
Do they feel like there's been a repair?
Not necessarily how they go about doing it.
Same with sex.
Does each partner feel sexually satisfied?
So that could be once a month for one couple.
It could be five times a week for another couple.
It could be never for other couples, truly.
I mean, so sex has a ton of benefits,
but its absence isn't necessarily detrimental, I guess,
would be the qualifier, depending on who you are.
And I know couples that use sex
as part of the conflict resolution process.
It's hugely effective for that,
if it works for both parties.
All parties, not just both, all.
That's true.
What do you think about infidelity?
What's the cause of infidelity?
Why do men and women cheat?
It's different for everybody,
but even earlier I was saying with adventurousness,
if monogamy is something you're doing.
In my own practice, I've seen the entire range
of couples who are open about having sexual relationships
with other people and fine with it.
Couples who wanna be fine with it,
but find out they're not.
Couples who aren't just couples,
couples with multiple romantic relationships.
I've had couples where affairs are tolerated
and not talked about.
They're not enjoyed, but they are not the type of betrayal
that will destroy the relationship.
Sort of a understanding and keep it out of my face.
And then also we won't talk about it.
So an affair that happened without getting permission first,
and as long as you don't talk about it,
it's not going to do a damage to the relationship.
Right, but we can't even talk about it like that, right?
So nobody's going to admit that the affair is happening.
There can't be any evidence of it.
It's sort of a just look the other way type of a situation.
But the partner who is not having the affair, right,
they typically know.
They certainly know that their partner is capable of that.
They just kind of know,
but they don't want it in their face.
It would become a problem if it was in their face.
As long as certain needs are met
and everything else is okay at home,
it's just one of those things where don't ask, don't tell.
Well, that's an interesting point
because I had a bunch of arguments with people.
I tend to hang out with, especially in the tech sector,
people who really value honesty and radical honesty.
And I keep arguing with people about this
because to me, it's not that simple.
That's an example right there
that honesty can be really destructive.
Honesty is also a really complicated thing
to get to the bottom of because what is really honest?
And how do I look in this dress?
Like there's a million ways to answer that.
Yeah, it can be a cesspool in my mind.
If I'm in a bad place or my partner and I haven't,
if Taya and I haven't been connected lately,
my honesty of what I actually think about him
would be horrifically damaging and completely unfounded also
and it can change on a dime.
Yeah, but that's also not actual honesty
to the big picture of how you feel about him.
I have interacted with a few folks
who talk about their previous sexual partners, for example,
on the numbers of sexual partners they've had
and they feel like that kind of honesty
is actually empowering and reaching to the relationship
because all the sexual experiences you've had in the past
make you a better sexual partner,
better partner in the present.
And to me, from the culture I've come from,
that's like anti-romantic.
Yep, yep.
You kind of throw the past kind of away.
You don't really talk about it.
It's kind of there in this amorphous shape
but it's almost as if you've met together
for the first time and this is a beautiful new thing.
Like you're creatures that have woken up
from a long slumber.
Right, you're starting anew.
Starting anew.
Right.
And you want some mystery there.
Right, I think the mystery,
and you have to figure that out about each other.
So I'm not exactly sure that honesty is always.
Super for everyone.
And then also, is honesty harmful or helpful
at certain points too?
So you're talking about disclosing prior sexual history.
I thought you were going to go to,
so if you've had an affair,
do you hold, do you keep that under your hat?
Oh yeah, that's a really tough question.
Or are you obligated to disclose it?
It's a really, that's a great question.
It is a very tough question.
Very tough.
Well, what do you think is the right answer?
I have my own personal beliefs.
I also then, like I have my therapeutic beliefs.
I think, frankly, and this is just me as a human being,
not Shannon the psychologist,
I believe that if you have fucked up,
and again, I'm coming from a framework right now
of monogamy, if you are committed to somebody you love
and you have fucked up,
you don't get to shed your guilt onto them.
You need to carry that burden.
It's not necessarily, I think it's simplistic
and unsophisticated to be like,
but then you're being dishonest.
I think it's actually selfish to unload it on somebody else
and give them the trauma of imagining,
what we do know about infidelity is that it can create
an actual post-traumatic stress-like experience
for the betrayed partner,
where they are having intrusive thoughts about it.
Those are unwanted thoughts and it's uncontrolled.
It comes in at multiple times a day.
They'll have depressed mood.
They'll have nightmares about it.
Their entire sense of security, safety, self-esteem
gets shattered because of your actions.
I think it's kind of, yeah, moralistic and naive
to think, well, they deserve to know the truth.
If you actually know the harm
that that sort of betrayal does,
especially if you truly mean to stop it,
so if it was a one-and-done or if it happened
and you've stopped it and you do not intend to do it again,
frankly, I think you live with that burden.
You live with that discomfort.
Thank you for saying that,
because I totally agree, but it's like logically,
it doesn't quite make sense to give that advice,
but psychologically makes complete sense,
because you really are destroying another person's mind,
their faith in love, in relationships,
their trust, everything, and then you're imprisoning them
to be stuck with you for months or years
if you're trying to work through it, through that torture,
so you should be carrying that burden
and working through it, I think.
Why do you say that that's your personal opinion
versus your therapeutic?
Therapeutic is more apparent.
Well, I think everybody has different values,
so I think that's a value-based decision,
because to me, the hierarchy is kindness
and do no further harm over,
that's in that case, over truth, right?
Whereas other people, my husband, for instance,
he is like truth above all else.
You don't get to decide what I know
or you don't get to decide whether or not
I can handle that knowledge,
so he would even see my determination
that I should carry the burden sort of arrogant.
Well, why don't you let your partner decide
whether or not they, why do you get to choose?
I don't know.
I think there's value to both arguments.
I absolutely see his point.
It's fascinating.
It's fascinating.
I absolutely see his point,
and his, I think, is a very humble sort of option.
You don't get to choose what's better.
You just need to give them the information,
and they can choose, but I think, I don't know,
I think it's kinder to hold.
I think it's going to cause your conscience
more discomfort to hold it,
and I think there's sort of a cleansing we do
when we share that information.
I think in real life, most people disclose it
because they can't stand the secret anymore themselves.
That, to me, is a selfish act.
I have unemployment applications and so on,
and just with friends would ask people,
would he care more about truth or loyalty,
just to get to see how they think about
those different questions.
Yeah, I was surprised how much variance there is on that.
And also, conceptually, I bet,
I, conceptually, I don't think we actually know
where we stand until we're faced
with a situation like that.
Yeah, I think people, a lot of people,
especially when they're younger, say,
especially if they're kind of intellectual,
they'll say truth above all else.
It's like, all right.
You're exactly right.
All right.
It's a platitude.
Until you get to hear a truth that truly breaks you,
or truly hurts you, or causes suffering to you,
and then you realize,
or a truth you give to somebody else
will cause them suffering,
and then you get to see that suffering destroy you,
their life, and maybe your relationship and so on,
and then you're like, oh.
Yeah, like, should I sit my dad down right now
and be like, Dad, your dementia,
you have dementia again today.
I'm gonna tell you, Dad, you're not making sense.
No, it's not going to be discussed.
We're gonna make him comfortable.
I mean, yeah, I think truth can be
a little bit of a platitude sometimes.
Some of those complexities are all the things
involved in the challenges
of what makes a relationship work, right?
What do you think about open relationships in general?
My worldview is such that I see the beauty
and value in monogamous relationships just for me,
but I'm also open to the possibility
of what works for other people.
Have you done any kind of work
with people in open relationships?
As clients or researchers?
As clients.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Is there some interesting differences
between open relationships and monogamous relationships?
I think that may have been actually
what was behind my question about
the satisfaction with them being on the extremes.
My hypothesis essentially was,
is it because if you are really all in,
you've worked out some of the kinks?
I think I've seen couples who are trying it out
for the first time, it tends to get a little haywire.
There's some excitement in the beginning.
Everybody's really excited about it.
I think the philosophy makes sense to a lot of people.
The science of it makes sense to a lot of people,
but we have been raised in a society
that is pretty monogamous,
so there isn't a lot of scaffolding around it,
and there's a lot of inner conflict, I think,
for people to go away from the values
that they've been taught since they were kids.
And so jealousy arises a lot.
And also, it's very difficult to be, I think,
as truthful and direct as you need to be,
which you're describing in these polyamorous situations
where everybody is laid out on the table.
So I think that's something that may be practiced.
In my own work with clients,
I've just noticed that the partners
who are happier in these situations who I've worked with,
they are more experienced at it.
They seem to have it down.
You testified in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial
based on your role as a clinical and forensic psychologist.
It was watched by, I don't know how many people,
maybe tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people.
What was that experience like?
Thank God I didn't know that at the time.
Were you scared?
Oh, yeah.
Given the size of the platform,
how many people are watching?
Scared typically isn't the word when I testify.
I'm always excited and a little trepidatious
before I testify because the stakes are so high
for everybody's life in that room.
This was different.
Anxiety isn't usually my brand,
and I just skipped anxiety that morning
and went straight to terror, and I was mad.
I was mad at the legal team.
It was funny.
I was having all these strong emotions.
I couldn't find my bobby pins.
I almost started crying because I couldn't find them.
I was pretty unhinged that morning,
and in a way that was really unfamiliar to me,
and it was right when I cried
because I couldn't find my bobby pins
that I realized I needed to get a grip
and that I was a professional
and that my hair didn't matter
even though it ended up mattering.
People noticed that it was crazy,
but I got a grip, and I went in, and I just did my job.
So the terror in the end helped you focus
and do your job well.
I think it does, and it's a little scary though
because I know what fear does cognitively,
and there is a sweet spot where you want some stress,
and then you can be really acutely focused and attuned,
but then if you go over this threshold,
you get that frontal lobe shut down
where you're not thinking clearly,
and everybody knows that experience
from taking a really stressful test at some point
like in high school, and then they're going over the answers
with the teacher in class later,
and they're like, how did I miss that question?
I know that.
You're just in a different state.
That's when you have too much stress.
I think this day I actually was bordering on too much stress
if not clearly in that threshold,
but once you're sitting there for a little bit
and you're asked the questions,
you can kind of go into a routine
of just wanting to talk about your work.
So what is the work, the job of a forensic psychologist
in that context?
In the DEP-HERD trial, I was serving as an expert witness
based on a psychological evaluation of one of the parties.
So forensic psychologists can serve the court
or in legal matters in a number of ways.
They can act as a confidential consultant
for an attorney on a case,
or they can even assist with jury selection.
They might testify without doing an evaluation
if they're just coming to testify
about sort of a subject matter,
and then they wouldn't be answering specific questions
to either of the parties,
but just talking more hypothetically about a field area.
In this case, because I was ordered
to conduct an evaluation, I evaluated one of the parties,
and then you provide a report to the court
with your findings, and then you testify
as to what your findings were.
But from my perspective, just watching you,
you seem to have held it together really well.
So what do you attribute that to?
So you said it calmed down
after you were able to ask the question.
So to me, if I were just to put myself in your place,
it seems like the internet and the world
would be very nitpicky about individual words.
You're speaking from a place of scientific rigor,
and so you have to be very precise with your wording.
I would feel like so much pressure
about each single word I choose.
Did you feel that pressure,
that you have to be extremely precise with the words?
Always.
The pressure is so high going into testifying.
I think that's where I feel the most pressure
is preparing and literally the moment
until I start having to answer.
And then I don't even have the luxury
of thinking about myself because it is so important
that that answer be clarified
and understandable to the court,
that that becomes my focus.
And that's the godsend,
is that I can stop thinking about how scary it all is
because I need to pay attention to explaining something.
So if it's okay, I would love to talk to you
about the personality assessment test
because I think it's actually super fascinating.
The personality assessment inventory or the MMPI-2?
You're probably referring to the MMPI-2,
which is one I talked a lot about.
MMPI-2, yeah.
So maybe can you explain that MMPI-2 seems fascinating.
It has its output, the results,
has some basic scales, it has code types.
It's just reading through the different.
It's so complex, it's a thing of beauty.
Because the human mind is really complicated.
Even depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder,
all of these things are really complicated.
There's many of them we don't understand well.
There seems to be a huge amount of variance.
And yet you have to be able to stitch together
a bunch of characteristics that gives you intuition
about the unique aspects of each person.
You want to be able to have tests
that get you closer to identifying the peculiar flaws
or beauties of a particular mind.
So this seems to do a good job.
Just reading through the different descriptions
of the code test.
Can I borrow that next time I testify?
That was the best description.
I don't know, I'm being poetic, I apologize.
No, that was a beautiful description.
You have to be in part poetic about the human mind.
It's not math, it's psychology.
Okay, so what is the MMPI-2?
What are we talking about here?
It's a questionnaire?
Yes, that's a great start.
So it is a questionnaire, yet 567 yes, no questions.
I'm gonna tell you what's most beautiful about this test.
So they used an empirical keying method to develop it.
What that means is that they didn't have
a bunch of psychologists get together and say,
let's ask them, let's make sure that we identify people
who have somatic complaints or physical complaints
by asking them questions about numbness in their hands,
nothing like that.
What they did instead was they threw,
take a thousand questions at a group of people
who they know had a certain mental illness
and a group of people who didn't have that mental illness,
and then they looked for patterns
in what the people with the mental illness
endorsed as yes and no of those random questions.
So it would be, for instance,
there's a bronze light fixture right there.
One of the questions out of the thousand might be,
I like light fixtures that are bronze, true or false.
And they looked for correlations
in the way people would answer
to these completely innocuous, just boring questions.
So there was no real way that a test taker
could foresee the point of answering.
Mm-hmm.
And so because they can't foresee,
it's very difficult to cheat to get to a conclusion
that you can't. Very difficult.
And not only that, but you can imagine using that approach,
you can then look for patterns
for almost any type of response style,
for any type of personality trait,
any type of mental illness.
You just get a comparison group
and then a group who's using that specific strategy
or has that specific mental illness
or has that personality trait.
And you just look for patterns.
And there's a scale output of different kinds.
So I think- And there's code types.
Yep, so you've got validity scales
and those are just fascinating
and often one of the most useful parts
of this test in forensic contexts
because they show you how a person is approaching the test,
how they're answering questions about themselves.
So for instance, you can see if they are tired.
You can see if they're kind of responding randomly.
You can see if they are in an unsophisticated manner
trying to make themselves look perfect,
but not very nuanced.
You can see if they may be deceiving themselves
and truly believe that they are perfect,
whereas others don't see it that way.
You can see if they're exaggerating.
You can see if they're exaggerating
because they're truly, it's a cry for help.
They are in extreme distress,
but they feel as though they need to really punctuate it
to get people to notice.
Or you can see if they're exaggerating
in a way that is driven for a specific outcome or gain.
It's just fascinating
and it's the most well-developed assessment we have
for a person's approach
to answering questions about themselves.
So it gives you the context of-
How honest they're being.
The state of the person as they're answering them.
Yeah, yeah, their honesty.
How forthcoming they're being
and how accurate they're being.
And then the result of the classification
based on the test are these code types.
Right, well, so you have these clinical scales as well.
You have 10 clinical scales that look for different
kind of primary clinical pathology issues.
This test doesn't tell you anything good about yourself.
At best, it just tells you that you're not responding
in a way that is dishonest
and that you are not hugely problematic.
But it's not looking for strength.
So you have these 10 clinical scales
that look for variations above the mean of the population
in certain areas, anywhere from depressive symptoms,
manic symptoms, physical complaints,
anxiety, nervousness, aggression, social engagement,
whole scope of human experience.
And then there are much more nuanced scales from those,
so little subscales.
And then the real power, though, of the MMPI-2
is in, as you said, these code types.
And these code types are additional patterns
that have been detected
that really can be more defining of a personality.
So you look for peaks.
There can be either two extreme peaks or three, typically,
that make a code type.
And those peaks are higher scores
on these personality traits.
And specific code types can give you a very nuanced picture
of a person's general approach to life
and their personal relationships, their personality.
So you can build on top of those code types
an understanding, yeah, of how that person's going to deal
with different kinds of situation.
And then there's, by the way, a lot of code types.
There are a lot of code types.
I was looking at them.
They're pretty interesting.
It is truly fascinating. I wanna take this test.
I wanted to see which one I would.
I have given it to some people in my life.
It's just phenomenal.
How hard is it on your side of the table to give the test?
Oh, it's easy.
You just proctor it.
You just make sure that somebody, there's no distraction,
that they're well-rested, they are sitting there,
and they can just take it in front of you.
So I guess the question is,
because the questions are well-designed
and that it's hard to mess with them,
you just give the-
It's very hard to beat it.
You just hand it to them.
And it's yes and no.
It's yes and no.
But I should also add to this,
that this test, as much as I love it,
and it is the most researched
and widely used personality assessment in the world,
it is not in and of itself definitive.
So you use it like you already have sort of a hypothesis,
and you use this for clarification.
And it has a ton of value for showing somebody's response
or their approach, how forthcoming they're being.
But other than that, you really need to consider it
as a piece of the puzzle.
You had said stitched together earlier,
and that was just one of those points you made
that was perfect for describing this.
There's probably no one perfect test, right,
for personality?
No.
I wonder, especially with advancements of AI,
there could be more and more sophisticated ways
of measuring, of collecting data about your behavior
and being able to measure some kind of more productive,
especially not in a forensic context,
but more in trying to figure out
how to improve your lifestyle, improve your relationships,
all that kind of stuff.
So the result of the test with Amber Heard,
if you can speak to the public stuff,
you said that the results of Ms. Heard's evaluation
supported two diagnoses, borderline personality disorder
and histrionic personality disorder.
Can you speak to each one of those?
What are the basic characteristics
of borderline personality disorder?
Sure, well, so right now, the DSM-5,
which is sort of the Bible for mental disorders,
it's what we go to, our diagnostic manual,
it classifies personality disorders according to clusters.
And cluster B is one that involves the emotionally erratic,
interpersonally erratic emotional disorders.
And those include histrionic personality disorder,
borderline personality disorder,
narcissistic personality disorder
and antisocial personality disorder.
Eventually, there's been some research on this
and a lot of support for us eventually moving
into a more spectrum-type approach
to considering personality disorders
where you'd essentially be looking at dysfunction
in different domains of somebody's functioning
that has persisted over time.
And again, the really important part
is it seems to be a stable trait,
part of their personality,
it's in their interpersonal relationships,
it's in how they handle their own life,
their own functioning, their mood,
and it's not just situation-based,
it seems to be all areas.
I don't love the title histrionic personality disorder.
I think its history, it's pretty controversial
and there's some misogyny in it.
But that all being said, as a servant to the court
and somebody who is there to just provide the science
as it exists today, my job is to relay,
and in this specific case, I was ordered
to provide my diagnostic impressions a diagnosis
and I don't get to decide which diagnosis,
whether I like a certain diagnosis or not.
Ultimately, if the criteria are met,
that diagnosis is given.
So as we have it right now
with the current personality disorder categories,
histrionic personality disorder
is probably the most controversial.
Some people believe that it is
narcissistic personality disorder lite,
so sort of a less obvious, less malicious version
of narcissistic personality disorder.
And I think that will probably get sussed out
if we do move to a more spectrum-based approach
because then you would be describing
sort of a personality disorder
and then you would add the traits to it.
So with issues in interpersonal functioning and et cetera.
So you could be a little bit more specific
rather than having to just put somebody in a category.
So that's where things are moving, you're saying?
That's where things are moving.
From a clusters-based view of NPD,
antisocial personality disorder.
To more of a spectrum with personality dysfunction,
then you list the traits that are there.
And I think that'll be more accurate,
especially there's so much overlap
between these personality disorders right now,
especially cluster B, it is not uncommon
for people to have two or three personality disorders
to meet criteria for two or three at the same time.
So speaking about borderline personality disorder
and histrionic personality disorder,
borderline personality disorder can best be thought of
as a disorder of instability and impulsiveness,
emotional instability,
instability in a person's self-identity, sense of self,
instability in a person's relationships,
and then underlying all of this
is an intense fear of abandonment.
Histrionic personality disorder
is more of a disorder of emotionality,
dramatics, and attention-seeking.
This, you know, histrionic disorder
typically is known for the dramatics
and people who are observing or interacting with somebody
with this disorder may even feel themselves
almost kind of wanting to turn away.
There's a sense of play-acting as the person is speaking
or engaging with you.
Something just feels a little bit disingenuous.
And a lot of attention-seeking,
similar to borderline personality disorder,
you might see with histrionic personality disorder,
attempts to manipulate.
However, the motivation with histrionic personality disorder
is that attention,
whereas with borderline personality disorder,
the underlying motivation for almost everything
is to avoid abandonment.
So you'll see frantic attempts to avoid abandonment,
frantic attempts to keep people close,
and those frantic attempts can be really harmful
to the person and to others.
To the person themselves.
So the fear of abandonment can result
in the very thing you're afraid of.
Right.
And there has been some research also
to suggest that borderline personality disorder
has different types as well.
And I think this is really important
because in my own work,
I have encountered many people
with borderline personality disorder in my own life.
And there are different types.
I'm thinking specifically of a girl,
I really love who I've worked with for years,
who is so self-aware about this and endearing.
She owns her shit.
I can forgive almost anything
if somebody just owns their shit.
She might lose her temper, she might lash out,
she can be erratic,
but she will come back and apologize, own it,
and accept full responsibility.
And not only that, but identify it and make changes.
She doesn't want to be harmful.
I adore that about her.
I think it's an admirable quality more of us could have.
That's very different than,
when you think about it,
there are nine different symptoms
and you only need five to meet criteria.
So depending on which symptoms you have,
you might be far more calculated,
conniving, manipulative,
or you may just be more of the impulsive,
kind of messy, emotionally erratic type.
And so there's some new research also coming out
that's even suggested that among women,
those that score higher
in some of these more calculated traits of the disorder
may actually be,
it may be a certain presentation of female psychopathy.
Yeah.
Are some of these personality disorders,
again, probably impossible question to answer,
but how much of it is nature, how much of it is nurture?
Or how much of it is in the genetics
and you just can't do much with?
Maybe another question,
a different way to ask that is,
how much can you help that?
How much can you become better?
That is a tough question.
So there's been a ton of change
in the way we've thought about the etiology
of these personality disorders
specific to borderline personality disorder.
I think in general,
the view is that most people believe
that it's associated with neglect or trauma in childhood.
While there is a correlation there,
there's a correlation between that
and many mental health issues,
not just borderline personality disorder.
We also, there is evidence to support a genetic basis
for this personality disorder.
And there are people who have
borderline personality disorder
that report no childhood trauma or difficulty.
Sometimes things just happen.
So I think it's a mix.
I think we need to think of it as bio-psycho-social,
which is generally the answer to most things
when you're talking about
how a mental health issue comes to be.
I certainly think that in most cases,
and here's just me speaking personally again,
I think in my own work, in most cases,
what I see is that somebody may have
some sort of predisposition,
then they go through certain life events
and learn patterns of behaving
that may serve them well as a child
in a dysfunctional situation,
but end up being very problematic later on.
Or they just have enough hardship
that that gene, whatever it was, lying dormant,
that little borderline personality disorder gene
expresses itself.
And you'll see that with things like schizophrenia,
depression, anxiety disorders.
There tend to be certain ages
where you'll just see that expression happen.
All right, for the record, it got cold in here,
so we upgraded with a blanket.
You look cozy.
Just as a question for me, just observing the trial,
it was interesting that,
first of all, it was a really raw and honest exploration
of an intimate relationship between two people.
It was interesting to watch.
I suppose I haven't watched that kind of thing.
It made me think about what makes for a good relationship.
All the many things we've already talked about
in this conversation, it was useful for that.
But also, there was raw recordings
of two humans' interaction.
What did you think about that, that there's recordings?
It's kind of interesting.
The act of recording your partner?
Yeah, and not the ethics of that or so on,
but the fact that you have this data.
It made me wonder, if I recorded myself, how would I sound?
Well, you do record yourself.
No, but here with microphones,
when you're in private, you wonder.
I had a bit of a fight with a friend last week,
and I wondered which one of us was the asshole.
I would love to hear the recording,
because I think we were a little bit rude to each other,
and I wonder how it went wrong.
I love that you asked yourself that question.
That's so useful.
We made up the next day,
and I think we both agreed to not ever talk about it.
But I want the data.
Just bury it deep.
I record my couple sessions,
and one of the primary purposes of that is so that
if they start to get nasty with each other in the session,
I can stop it, and I can say, what was that?
And most of the time, what you're describing is so useful
because we don't see ourselves,
we have no idea that we just came off as critical.
We think we're being completely reasonable and thoughtful.
Whenever somebody's sort of retelling an argument they got,
and they said, and then I was just caring and just asked.
I mean, why, is there a reason you didn't?
Something like that.
If they can actually see themselves, they realize,
no, their jaw was clenched, their voice was raised,
they actually called a name.
Sometimes they're shocked.
So just a quick, just to linger on it,
you labeled Amber Heard as a 3-6 code type,
going back to our discussion,
which can mean that, quote,
she's heavily concerned with image,
prone to treating others with cruelty,
unable to admit responsibility for wrongdoing,
and prone to externalizing blame.
And then I also went into the MMPI-2 list.
3-6 includes anxiety, tension, rigidity, fear of criticism,
suppressed hostility,
merging impassive or episodic aggression,
suspiciousness, egocentricity, what else, projection.
What can you say about that code
that is not captured in the different personality disorders?
What are we supposed to do that
from a forensic psychology perspective?
And what are we supposed to do that in general,
forget the 3-6, in general, these kinds of code types
in that context, in the context of a trial?
If I'm understanding you correctly,
it's sort of, what's the point of these code types?
Yeah, thank you for asking the question better.
But...
But...
I don't know what I'm doing.
I just actually honestly really find MMPI-2 fascinating.
I love that you do.
Yeah.
I love that you get it, because I just,
to me, it's such a,
it's almost unbelievable that humans created it,
but I think that goes back to that empirical key method
of creating something that enabled it
to be as robust as it is,
and something that is very difficult to beat,
if not impossible.
But the code types really, so,
it depends on, in any forensic case,
what really matters is the legal, psycho-legal questions.
So what is the legal question,
and then what is the psychologist's responsibility
in assisting with whatever question they're being asked?
And there's some questions we can't answer,
some that we can.
You don't always need to provide a diagnosis.
When you're asked to provide a report,
it depends on the jurisdiction,
it depends on the statute.
Some jurisdictions actually require a diagnosis.
In this case, I was asked to provide a diagnosis.
So when I'm considering a diagnosis,
you're integrating multiple different sources
of information.
You're integrating an examinee's self-report.
You are adding collateral data.
Usually, I wasn't able to obtain collateral interviews
in this case, and that was the decision of the court.
They said no collateral interviews,
but typically, that would be something that you would add.
You're looking at records, ideally,
from birth up until the date
that the alleged injury occurred.
And I'm speaking now specifically
to a personal injury evaluation,
or something where somebody is claiming
that they were harmed psychologically.
But you want as many records as possible
to show how a person functioned before that event occurred,
and how they functioned after.
And you want it to show financial functioning,
physical functioning, academic functioning.
Basically, where is there evidence
that something in their life changed?
Where is there evidence that harm occurred
other than from what they're telling you?
And in addition to all of those records
that you're reviewing, in addition to their self-report,
then you're also going to give some of these tests,
like the MMPI.
So the code types are really that strength of the MMPI-2.
It gives you really nuanced information
about a person's personality.
Now, again, you're not gonna use the MMPI-2
or any other test by itself to diagnose someone,
or decide that the person is telling the truth,
not telling the truth.
It is just another piece of data.
And when it's working the way it's supposed to,
it lines up really nicely
with all of the other data you're getting,
including what you've observed from the person
during your interview with them,
the information they're giving you,
or inconsistencies with the information they're giving you,
the consistency or inconsistency of their self-report
from the records, what the records themselves say,
et cetera, et cetera.
So it's adding, it's helping you clarify and clarify
and clarify the picture you have of the person.
Yep, just dialing it down more and more.
You're just making sure that it is as accurate as possible.
Okay, so given how huge this trial was,
given how eloquent you were,
I know you don't think of it that way,
but from a public perspective,
you were like the star because of how well you did.
That's insane.
I'm pretty sure Camille's the star.
Camille is also incredible.
I've gotten a chance to interact with her.
She's somebody that really inspires me
by how good she is at her job,
how much she loves her job,
and how much the fame, the money,
whatever has not affected the basic core integrity
of who she is as a human being.
So she's also incredible.
Okay, what's the takeaway for you personally from the trial?
How has it made you a better person?
How has it changed or solidified who you are
as a psychologist, as a forensic psychologist,
clinical psychologist, and so on?
Wow, I mean, a lot happened in my life around that trial,
leading up to the trial, after the trial.
So let's tackle forensic psychologist first.
Okay, so in terms of forensic psychology,
I am grateful to that trial
for really strengthening my abilities.
The stakes were so high that I took,
I was retained about two years prior to the trial.
So I really delved deep
into the academic side of forensic psychology
and making sure that I was adhering as closely as possible
to standard practices, best practice recommendations
for this specific type of an examination.
It was intellectually awesome and challenging.
I felt like my brain was on fire for a full year
leading up to the trial, and that can be really, really fun.
It was just challenging,
but I am really proud of the work I did.
I think the stakes were really high.
It's serious work.
It's important that it's done well and accurately,
and I felt really good about it.
So have some of those lessons carried through
to your practice now, to both research
and some of the things you're doing
in terms of helping couples?
No, I mean, my practice hasn't changed that much.
This was more just something that was more,
it demanded so much more of my time
than my typical forensic work does.
And personal injury cases,
in cases where there is an allegation of trauma
or psychological harm tend to be super labor intensive.
This, given the magnitude
and how long it had been going on in the back and forth,
required a ton of work before the trial as well.
So it pulled me away from the practice.
I think it's been nice to go back a bit.
So now, personally, I've learned some things.
I've learned that I need to slow down a little bit.
So this took a lot from you?
It took a lot, but it was really the culmination.
I feel like there are these hoops we jump through
again and again, academic challenges
that we continue to meet,
and then there's a next one and a next one and a next one.
And in the beginning, when you're getting into college
or applying to grad schools,
you don't really realize
this is going to be a never-ending thing,
especially if I continue with research or forensic work.
I love it because it is so academic.
You're writing these 75-page reports with citations,
and you have to be accurate.
It feels like I'm doing giant board exams
again and again and again.
It never ends, but that feeling,
I think you and I were talking about
how it's fun to doubt yourself
because it pushes you to do better work.
But so if you keep having high stakes,
you're going to work all the time,
work yourself into the ground,
constantly be thinking about, oh, this question,
I'm not sure if I fully know the answer
and all the research behind that, so I should go there.
And again, super fun,
but I don't just do forensic psychology all day.
I also own a clinic.
I provide therapy.
I've been providing therapy for 15 years.
So what happens is you have clients
who maybe you've stopped seeing,
but when they have a crisis in their lives,
they reach out to you again, even if it's seven years later.
So you've accumulated hundreds of clients
who at any given time are going to reach out
when they're in crisis,
whether or not you're working on a federal case
or in Virginia for this.
And that is never going to be something easy to grapple with
because I feel that I am letting somebody down.
I know I am because these are people I genuinely care about
and they care about me and they trust me
and I want to be able to be there for them.
I know that it's disappointing if I can't be.
It is also very difficult to separate out
the professional therapy relationship from loving someone
who you've seen through some of the most difficult parts
of their lives.
And I can explain that to people all day long,
but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be easy
for someone to accept when I can't talk to them
and they just found out their husband
was leading a double life or their sister just died
and I can't even get on a call
because I'm getting maybe 15 messages like that a day
and have to testify and have to run my practice.
So I think that was why I need to slow down.
In this case, I was doing all of that.
And then the academic load or the work involved
was just tremendous.
And some stuff happened, like my dad,
he started having his cognitive decline.
I got a medical diagnosis that was stress-induced.
I really thought I was getting away with it.
I really believed that people who talked a lot
about self-care were kind of full of shit
and just didn't know how to push themselves.
I still believe in pushing ourselves,
but I think I kind of traversed into an area
without realizing it where I was no longer pushing myself
to challenge myself or see what I was capable of.
I was almost pushing myself as a necessity
because I didn't know what else to do anymore,
just an obligation.
It wasn't even, I wasn't pushing myself to do,
the Deb Hurd case reminded me of that feeling
of pushing myself to do something
I wasn't sure I was capable of
and overcoming that challenge.
That was rewarding.
But when you're piling that on with running a business
and all these other things and trying to be perfect
at all of them, that just starts to become
like a feeling of necessity and it's not healthy.
That said, you somehow managed to hold it all together,
to put forward a masterful performance,
and like you said, still take care of all these clients,
because you're the most important person in their lives
or many of them.
Is there a secret to that?
Was there any hacks?
Is there a...
I don't sleep a lot.
I don't get a...
No, and honestly, it's not,
it's a work in progress, right?
I don't have an answer for,
I wouldn't want my life to be any other way.
I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work on this case
if I hadn't established my practice and had outreach.
So I can't figure out which piece you take it out
without it all crumbling,
but I would love to have a little more downtime.
So it all kind of works together
and this passion is the fuel that's behind all of it.
That's probably the reason
you haven't lost your mind quite yet.
Maybe, yeah, maybe.
Unless, I mean, it depends who you ask.
What about the stress of just being in the public eye?
Has that been difficult for you?
That's a lovely question.
Thank you for asking it
because it is nice to talk to you about this
because I feel like you probably understand it a little bit.
That was something I was absolutely unprepared for.
Like I said, I had no idea how many people were watching
when I testified.
I had no idea and I got off the stand.
I kind of staggered to the back room
and truly thought about lying down on the floor
because I was so exhausted.
And I'd been up studying all my stuff,
terrified that I was going to forget some statistic
about the MMPI-2.
It's going to be so great.
It's great for me.
It's going to be great for people to hear this,
that you're human.
You're too flawless.
That's extremely stressful for many, many hours.
I wondered how you can sit there for so many hours
and stay so focused and listen so well.
It's so difficult.
Well, I mean, I could talk about that too.
The moment I came to almost like came back to my body
and realized where I was and just wanted it to stop
and felt like I was burning alive.
I just was thinking, I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't want to do this anymore.
Is this going to stop?
And then another question came
and I just had to get back to it.
But so after I testified,
the first time I went in that back room,
I might've laid down on the ground.
It's kind of a blur.
I mean, I might have.
I do remember that Wayne Dennison,
one of the senior managing partners at Brown Redneck,
who is a phenomenal guy and absolutely brilliant,
I will be indebted to him for life because I trusted him.
I trusted him and that made all the difference
in probably how I testified.
But he came in the back and he was looking at his phone
and he said, you're on the cover of Time,
something on Apple News.
And I thought, I mean, I really,
I thought he was messing with me.
I thought it was his joke way of saying like I did great.
You've worked with veterans.
What is PTSD in that context?
What's the landscape of psychological suffering
that veteran soldiers go through?
Well, if we're talking about combat exposure,
you're seeing things you're not meant to see.
You're seeing the worst of humanity,
people harming other people.
It's not natural for others to intend to harm us.
It's not natural for us to harm others.
And this dehumanization can occur
that's so troubling and disturbing
that people have a hard time living with it later.
Or they just feel this ongoing anger.
It depends, it depends on the trauma they're exposed to.
It depends on whether their convoy was ambushed
by weapons that were purchased from money
that was given to this village from the US government.
It depends on whether they did something
that they have a hard time reconciling outside of war
now that they're back home in civilization.
Depends on whether they lost a lot of their comrades
and feel that guilt of being a survivor.
And again, not everybody develops PTSD.
It really, it's a mental disorder.
It's serious.
We talk so much about trauma
and PTSD gets thrown around lightly
when actually it's very difficult
to meet the full criteria for that diagnosis.
And many people experience severe trauma in their lives
and only about 14% are likely to actually develop PTSD.
It's an exception, not the norm.
Traumatic stress is absolutely normal
after something traumatic happens.
You'll likely have nightmares.
You'll likely have anxiety.
You'll feel depressed because you're a human being
and something abnormal happened.
But PTSD is a longer standing condition
that is significantly impairing in a person's life.
And I think we've lost that
in some of the sort of narrative in society.
It just, everybody has PTSD.
But no, you can have traumatic stress.
You can be distressed.
You can be affected by trauma
and not have that particular diagnosis.
PTSD significantly impairs people's lives.
How do veterans, how do soldiers who suffer from PTSD
or are close to that kind of diagnosis begin to heal?
What's the path for healing?
Well, I will hand it to the military
because I think in terms of working
with their active duty service members,
they really invest heavily in mental health.
The US Department of Defense was one of the first
to bring animal assisted therapy into any type of treatment
in the early 1900s with bringing farming
into certain hospitals
and letting veterans help with the farms
and brush the horses, which is so advanced
because now we have all this research
on animal assisted therapy and how beneficial it is.
And just looking in the eyes of a dog
can increase your pain threshold
and speed healing after a cardiac arrest,
help people with dementia to ambulate more freely.
It's incredible stuff, simple.
And the military was ahead of the game on that.
And I don't think that's changed.
I did my training at a military hospital in Hawaii,
Tripler Army Medical Center.
It was phenomenal training.
And our psych department,
there was so much interesting research going on.
We had, and it was so integrated.
So you might not imagine that the military
would be doing this, but we had an acupuncture department.
We had a chiropractic department.
We had a yoga section.
We were doing yoga sessions there.
I mean, anything that has evidence to support its efficacy
was being utilized.
And I think that's pretty cool about our government.
They have a lot of funding,
so I'm glad they're using it on that.
The real challenge, I think,
comes with the large scale need of the veteran population.
And they slipped through the cracks.
I know that the DOD had a campaign going
where they were doing outreach to anybody who served,
for instance, in the Vietnam War.
The problem is they were trying to get
all of these people assessed for PTSD, and it was great.
They were getting phone calls, mail.
It was sort of saying, hey, we know that you served.
Come on in, or let's schedule you an exam
with a psychologist and just see if you're owed benefits.
The idea of it's great.
The problem is that they outsourced
to this third-party company.
They're paying really low rates
for a one-hour meeting with a vet.
And you don't need to be specifically trained
in assessing PTSD.
And so you're getting these variations and opinions
that are coming through.
And I've had clients who, to me,
who I've worked with for years
who have clear combat-related PTSD,
according to gold standard measures,
according to my knowing them and observing their symptoms
and how impaired they are.
And it is clearly associated with combat,
the content of their intrusive thoughts,
their nightmares, et cetera.
And they are having a one-hour meeting,
sometimes by phone, with one of these psychologists
who's been contracted by this third-party organization.
That's not even enough for me to get through
the first few symptom questions
on the CAPS-5 assessment for PTSD.
But in that hour, the psychologist is saying,
definitively, no PTSD.
And it's been a travesty for some people,
especially for those who need an advocate the most.
It tends to happen to my veterans
who are maybe a little bit less sophisticated
in presenting or advocating for themselves,
more humble, less, you know,
the guys who deserve it the most, right?
They're just getting passed over, and it's a maze.
I'm not quite sure what the solution is, though, before.
I mean, I've worked for government agencies.
It's a massive population.
I love that the outreach is even happening
and trying to get these guys in for assessment.
I think we can criticize any system.
I'm glad that system is even happening,
but it still needs to be better.
So I've gotten a chance to interact with a lot of soldiers
that served in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and now a lot of soldiers from all different kinds
of nations in Ukraine, went to the front.
There's a bond between soldiers unlike any other.
I don't know if you can speak to why do you think that is.
On the opposite side of PTSD,
there's a deep human connection.
There's like a love for each other.
What is that?
What is that about war and combat
that creates that kind of love?
Well, you're seeing,
we talked earlier about that vulnerability, right?
So I believe that combat,
I believe that most survival situations strip away all ego,
and I mean, there are a couple different layers to this,
but I have not served in war, so I wanna be cautious here.
But from what I know, just about psychology
and also from my own experience
of survival type experiences,
when you're with a group of people
and all the ego's stripped away, nothing else matters.
The focus is on the here and now
and a specific mission or your day-to-day.
You can get really close.
You're very, very vulnerable.
And also, in my experience,
the guys I work with who have served,
there aren't a lot of people
who understand what they've been through,
not only some of the unspeakable things
they've been through in combat,
but some of the things that they feel
are unspeakable about returning,
especially if they are experiencing trauma.
A lot of them, some of the things
that service members with PTSD are the most reluctant
to disclose is the feeling like they may not know
if they love their children anymore or their wife,
that they don't even know if they can love anymore,
that they feel emotionally numb,
that they wanna kill someone,
that they have a whole lot of racist beliefs and thoughts.
There are a lot of things that can be associated with PTSD
that aren't as clear or expected,
and these guys don't have many people who understand it
or they don't think they would,
but a lot of their fellow service members do.
Man, so I'm going back to Ukraine,
and boy, nothing makes,
nothing makes, reveals the human condition
in a more purer form than war,
especially the kind of war you get
in that part of the world, especially the war in Ukraine,
which is a very 20th century kind of war.
Brutal.
Well, like I mentioned in a few different ways,
you're exceptionally successful
by, I think, the best definition of success.
You're doing what you love,
and you're one of the best people in the world
at doing it, and so what advice would you give
to young people that look up to you
that saw you in the trial,
which is your most public-facing thing,
and are just young people that are looking to find
what they wanna do with their life, career-wise?
I love that question.
What would you tell them?
I'm gonna tell them something my dad told me.
He said to me, Shani, just pick anything.
Pick anything.
If you like it at all, studying it, just pick it.
He was like, look, don't worry about the job.
You don't even know all the jobs that exist.
Pick something you like.
You will make it your own,
and that is exactly what happened.
I like psychology.
I was reading some self-help books.
It's not like I had this calling where I,
looking back, I can actually create that story
because I think now it makes a lot of sense
that I do what I do, but I was lost and scared.
I started studying psychology.
I met a professor who was really inspiring,
who wasn't even a psychology professor.
He was public policy.
I stayed in touch with that professor.
He is a dear friend still to this day
that was 20 years ago.
We do research together in Mexico,
integrative research with public policy officials
and environmental engineers,
and I get to be the psychologist on the trip.
I never ever dreamed that that sort of stuff could happen.
I didn't know about forensic psychology.
I also wanna warn anybody who's interested
in forensic psychology that it's not like
you're solving crimes all day and getting calls by the FBI.
You are going to be sitting alone in your home office
with your husband bringing you bowls of cereal
and reminding you to go to the bathroom
because you haven't gotten up in 24 hours from the computer,
and you're gonna have papers all around you,
and you're just gonna write 75 dense pages
with citations of science.
It's brutal.
It's academic, but it's fulfilling.
My friend Franny posted a meme
of one of the girls from Glee or something crying
and saying, like, I'm the happiest I've ever been,
and she said it reminds her of when I try to convince her
to do forensic psych
because I think her mind is perfect for it.
You have to be strategic and thorough,
but it's a slog, but it's wonderful.
It's wonderful.
The image of your husband bringing you cereal
while you work on the 75 pages
is maybe the most romantic thing I've ever heard.
So we started on love.
Let me ask one last question about the same topic.
What's the role of love in this whole thing,
in the human condition,
in this whole experiment we've got going on on Earth?
I think it's all there is, like that Jules song.
How does that go?
God, don't sing it, don't sing it, don't get it in my head.
Please don't sing it.
There have been some profound moments in my life
where I feel like I am closest to kind of the truth,
the life, or what it's all about.
And usually there's this resonating sense of love and ease
and love for myself, love for other people,
sort of like it's all okay, we're all okay,
we're gonna get through this.
I liked what you said about the harm caused
by the misinformation or negative things
being said about you,
because you're right, it harms that bigger picture.
I think it holds us back, takes us back from that truth.
That there's a love that connects all of us,
and that if you remember about that love,
it's all going to be okay.
I really hope it's going to be okay.
Me too.
I believe it will be.
Thank you so much for talking today, Shannon.
Thank you.
You're an incredible person.
Thank you for everything you do.
You are too.
And for everything you stand for,
and from everything from your text message
to just who you are, and for this amazing conversation.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Shannon Curry.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some more words
from Charles Bukowski.
Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning,
and you think, I'm not going to make it.
But you laugh inside,
remembering all the times you felt that way.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.
Thank you.