Robert welcomes back Susan Hough, counselor, philanthropist, and life partner, to explore how each of us carries on the central feelings we had with our original family. These repeated behaviors are usually outside of our awareness and show up most strongly in our intimate relationships. Robert and Susan discuss why we need to heal childhood patterns while talking candidly about their past relationships as well as their current one. The audience can see a real and honest way in which this plays out. It is completely normal to have these patterns surface again and again. It is nothing to be embarrassed about, instead, we get to learn from it to become better partners and happier more intentional people.

Our childhood is a place we often do not permit ourselves to look deeply because there is so much caught up in it. However, if we don't, these unprocessed feelings seep into other relationships, often inappropriately and to our detriment. Robert offers tools to begin identifying, as specifically as possible, the challenging feelings. Emotions that were either directed at you or that you knew were there even if they were unspoken and your emotional reactions to them as a child. From this step of recognition, Robert introduces the next step, which is moving toward a place of caring for these feelings and yourself when these challenging emotions or defenses bubble up. This is a great place to implement the Introspective Guides to help identify your core needs, and welcome your partner into this process to create a dialogue about what their needs are in these challenging times and in general. This is a chance for you to become more resilient, to be more responsive, to open your heart to yourself, to be able to have a more intimate relationship with a significant other, and also have a more significant relationship with yourself.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

This week Robert discusses core childhood relationships and how they can unconsciously affect us in our adult lives. He is joined by his life partner and fellow counselor, and philanthropist, Susan Hough. We are guided on how to use awareness of our feelings and needs by using the Introspective Guides, which can be found at AwarenessThatHeals.org, Robert talks through identifying each of your strongest childhood relationships and the feelings associated with them. It can be shocking what surfaces because our reactions often still reflect our childhood responses. Most of us are in the habit of either suppressing or criticizing those feelings because they frequently don't make sense in our current relationships. People in our original family and the people that we live with experience the most acute responses to our challenging reactions and emotions. The key is not to get rid of feelings, but to do our best to be aware of them, respect them, and foster a response that will support you when they arise. What feelings and sabotaging reactions play out today that are similar to what happened in your childhood?

Robert will guide you through a 4-step process of Self-Assessment, Intention to Heal, Inquiry, and Self-Communication. Join Robert and Susan as they share their own childhood experiences to illustrate how these have played out in their own lives. It is important not to compare yourself

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Using the Introspective Guides, Robert and Dave pick up where they left off last week on the topic of Neurotic Responsibility. This imbalance in relationships is part of our conditioning and can be hard to recognize. It occurs when one person in the relationship feels the problems around them are much more their responsibility than they rationally are. It feels good to give and can last for a lifetime. It can most frequently be recognized when the "giver" has unusually strong needs arise like becoming sick or a deep financial loss and it becomes apparent that the one that is neurotically responsible has been doing a lot of giving and not nearly enough receiving. Robert and Dave, share their personal and professional experiences with this dynamic and offer examples and tools so you won't have to wait to find a deeper connection and more mutuality in your close relationships.

This episode gets at the nuanced ways in which both people in the relationship can be taken care of. From Robert's experience as a psychotherapist, he has observed that the finest love is that of great mutuality, humility, and co-responsibility. Again referring to the Introspective Guides, Robert and Dave clarify ways to locate traits such as guilt, excessive pleasing, enabling, and suppressing your own needs that indicate neurotic responsibility tendencies. This could reflect an entire relationship dynamic or just one aspect. From this moment of awareness and intention to care, Robert offers a sequence to break this pattern little by little to create more mutuality and intimacy. The Introspective Guides will help you articulate these new insights. Robert reminds you to open to growth with humor, courage, self-trust, and love.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Robert and Dave dive right into this week's episode with something Robert likes to call, Neurotic Responsibility. This term refers to someone who takes on the problems around them more than is rationally warranted. It occurs when your partner is upset and you focus mostly on what you might have done to cause it, even though you already have likely admitted it outwardly and inwardly feel guilty, inadequate, and critical of yourself. In these situations, the key is not seeing the other's contribution to the situation in a balanced way. Are you showing up immediately for them and not having the same standards of wanting them to be there for you? This is hard for most people who suffer from this to see because they usually feel like it is part of their love. In Robert's extensive work as a psychotherapist, he notes how incredibly common this is in relationships but the awareness of it is rare.

Neurotic Responsibility is not on the Introspective Guides chart that Robert so often refers to. If the Guides are new to you, you can go to awarenessthatheals.org and download them for free. Neurotic responsibility is experienced most frequently as guilt, inadequacy, and failure, which can be found on the chart. It feels so good to be loving towards others that it sometimes becomes difficult to recognize that what is also going on here is a form of self-abandonment. Join us as Robert and Dave share their personal stories about recognizing how they have disregarded their needs to make others happy or more comfortable. Robert provides tools and a process of caring for your needs and your partners in a balanced mutual way. This new awareness can awaken a deeper sense of love where it empowers the person that has been receiving to learn how to give and empowers the person that has been giving to learn how to receive.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Robert kicks off the episode with a guided meditation. Relax into his words as he grounds into the moment and melts defenses that may be blocking you from accessing your inner wisdom and heart space. Using the Introspective Guides, Robert delves into how we can face our challenging emotions with curiosity. Recognizing that part of us wants to care instead of rationalizing or blocking challenging emotions is a courageous step. Robert will talk you through the tools necessary to develop from the first step of awareness, an intention to care, and a growing self-acceptance toward bringing that heart guidance into the world.

Through his work as a psychotherapist, Robert has seen time and time again that deep down everyone can recognize that bringing their goodness out is fulfilling. Robert and Dave reminisce about their early days together when they ran a residential treatment center for teenage boys. The mantra that emerged was, we believe that beyond their defenses, all our boys have the intention to be and do good. This is a universal principle that has not been universally embraced, especially by the most powerful countries. Instead of may I be a force for good, it's been more like, may I be a force for wealth. Being raised toward power and wealth has led to political parties and a world that has brought us where we are and has led us to feel discouraged. There is a danger here of finding yourself fighting against what you don't like instead of focusing on the world you want to create. Developing a curiosity towards yourself and your inner world harkens back to the very beginning of the Awareness That Heals podcasts. Where am I unaware? What are the consequences of that? How can I best respond to these consequences? Continually asking these questions can change the quality of your life.

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Pretty much everyone you talk to these days has some emotions related to the country, gun control, global warming, or the war in Ukraine with an awareness of being overwhelmed. What isn't reliably there is the question, Do I want to care for this emotion and How can I navigate in the world with some positivity? Robert and Dave will continue their focus from last week with specific challenges unique to the anxiety, fear, anger, and terror many of us are experiencing in response to the dire problems facing the planet and the increased authoritarianism in the world today. If more people were committed to what their needs were and not committed to their emotions, it has the potential to start the stepping stones to stop war and start much needed contemplation. Instead of being dominated by our emotions, we would be dominated by our wisdom and our hearts.

Robert continues to use The Introspective Guides as a tool to navigate a path towards integrating what challenges us individually. Starting with caring for ourselves, and our loved ones and then exponentially moving our concern outward into our communities, country, and the world. It can feel easier to avoid and not to be aware of, what some people would call burdensome work, but it is through this journey our most fulfilled selves become accessible. Using the lists of 75 Needs and Emotions, found at AwarenessThatHeals.org, can help make what can seem like a grandiose task achievable while this process becomes familiar. Keep developing a courageous honesty with yourself, get ready to dive in, and together let's find a way to work toward greater peace.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Here we are, listening to the news and hearing about elections, global warming, the dangers of nuclear war, the invasion of Ukraine, and we are feeling freaked out. Wherever you are on the political spectrum you are bound to be dealing with some level of anxiety connected to the direction our world and country are going. Robert and Dave assure us this is perfectly normal, and in fact, a good sign you want to be engaged and paying attention. Using the Introspective Guides available at AwarenessThatHeals.org, Robert will use this episode to uniquely focus on integrating what challenges us individually with relating to the dangers we face in the U.S. and the world today.

It may seem easier, or simply an act of survival to avoid challenging feelings as they relate to our planet and politics. You may wonder, what difference could I possibly make? How can I transform feeling helpless into being helpful? This episode will delve into how we can face our feelings and defenses of helplessness, withdrawal, grief, overwhelm, and terror as we navigate the high stakes we find our world in today into something we can work with. We can respond to these feelings with wisdom and love. We are capable of both suffering and accessing a place inside us that can guide us, but it won't happen automatically. We need to learn how to ask ourselves the most crucial questions: how do I care for myself from my heart and wisdom, listen to it, and act on it, while still feeling challenged? Join Robert as he lays out a guide map to show us the way, for if we do not have a process to work with our emotions, they will define us. Working with the examples of helplessness, withdrawal, grief, overwhelm, and terror Robert talks us through how we can both care for ourselves and also not be paralyzed in the world one realistic step at a time.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode on The Global Bridge Foundation website.

Most of us view anger and resistant emotions as something that we want to avoid. The idea of being with our anger and having a relationship with it is not something we have normally been taught. Robert presents an alternative for caring for ourselves while we are challenged in this way. These steps are a guide to setting up the ideal conditions for us to be fulfilled in our individual lives and to contribute to the world by living in a proactive constructive way, rather than be weakened by being reactive. The podcast begins by outlining this seven-step process. The first step always starts with being aware that we are angry or resistant in whatever way is most frequent in our lives. If we do not have a witness or an observer that tells us we are feeling impatient, annoyed, or irritated, most of us will go on autopilot, which dooms us to have more extensive conflict in our lives and not be able to get in a direction that can serve us. There is dignity in acknowledging our anger instead of running away from it. To avoid anger is to avoid your needs. Acting out anger is also to thwart your needs. Wanting to care for yourself in these moments is an evolutionary step and will allow us to perceive what needs we are wanting to support rather than fighting with what we were against.

Through Roberts's 40 years of counseling, using The Introspective Guides has been the simplest way for his clients to organize and understand how they can move forward when they are in an emotional state. Anger is the most volatile emotion that we have. Robert will use a case study to highlight how this all works. However, the most important person in this story is you. Use your own situation where you have anger or other resistant emotions like frustration, impatience, agitation, or righteousness to begin to track these seven steps on your journey moving toward your needs, rather than resist what you don't like.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

This week Robert concludes the telling of his journey through the hardest 10 years of his life as he navigated finding balance both emotionally and chemically after his kidney transplant. For many years he could not feel the joys of life. He had to dig deep to further develop his capacity to use inquiry, will, and focus on the intention to find what thoughts would be possible and helpful. Hopefully, as you are listening, Robert's story enables you to see your most challenging emotions, whether it be anxiety, depression, fear, or beyond. As members of Western society, we simply have not been supported to address these emotions, both inwardly and outwardly. Robert begins the episode with a brief recap of what they have gone over in the previous episodes of this series. We strongly encourage you to go back and listen to the four episodes beginning this section and utilize The Introspective Guides at AwarenessThatHeals.org.

This series of episodes are exclusively dealing with the very most difficult feelings you have ever had and offers tools for how to take care of yourself moment to moment, the next hour, and the next day. Cultivating awareness means seeing it, accepting it, staying with it, and learning how to care for something we usually reject. This is a very viable practice that with determination can help transform our most challenging feelings into wisdom. The key is that wisdom develops as an ally the more you practice it.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode on The Global Bridge Foundation website.

Robert continues with his story from last week about facing the biggest challenge of his life. He spent 10 years experimenting with medicine to find equilibrium after a kidney transplant. Join him and Dave as he shares the stories and the lessons he has learned with the hope that his journey will help you, the listener, navigate from your challenges into being a true ally for yourself and not compound the suffering with self-rejection. These difficulties are universal, whether they are recognized or not. The Introspective Guides are the simplest way to start the path toward integrating what is challenging and can be found at AwarenessThatHeals.org.

For 10 long years, Robert suffered from exhaustion, depression, fear, anxiety, anger, and beyond. He could no longer feel joy, happiness, or any of the qualities central to his life. However, on another level, he became acutely aware of wanting to care for himself through all of it. If he could not do it through his heart, he had to find a way to transform his experience through his mind. With the strong wish to care for himself and the intention to heal, he channeled his thoughts to find the most important questions and received guidance that would support him through the day. This enabled him to continue his practice as a psychotherapist, and make decisions that were most beneficial to live his life's potential even though he didn't feel well. It is possible to develop guidance from inside ourselves with friendly wise thoughts that lead us to what is possible and not let our challenging feelings rule. A wiser mind can be cultivated while we don't feel well. Join us to see how much you can learn to support yourself when you are most challenged.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.