By Mitchell Smolkin
5
88 ratings
The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.
I once had the opportunity to meet the mayor of Alsace, a region in eastern France where the Alsatian language is pretty well dead. The mayor spoke to me about a book that he had written which talked about endings. He wanted to explore the idea of a beautiful end.
This idea of a beautiful end never left me. It has guided me in many parts of my life when I have decided to end certain careers or move on from certain jobs. It has always felt important to really pay attention to what was driving me and in many ways to block out other people's perceptions and any kind of normative or collective ideas of what I should or shouldn't do.
Today's podcast in some ways will be about me deciding to pause the podcast, potentially end it for a while, and take some time to restore my creative energies.
Many of you will have heard of the quite famous Canadian analyst Marion Woodman. She passed away a few years ago but she was iconic. I was once sitting in one of her lectures and she said, “The greatest affront to the ego is the self.” In that sentence, she's referring to the capital “S” self which was a concept of Carl Gustav Jung. The concept described the complete and whole repository of a human being. This included the unconscious parts of us that we can't consciously access. The ego was often tethered to the self but could at various points in our life move away from or become dissociated from the self so that we sometimes come out of contact with this rich repository of who we are.
For me, this always connects with the Greek idea of Chronos and Kairos, Chronos being the time that we are aware of (such as looking at one's watch and knowing that it is one in the afternoon) and Kairos representing a kind of other time that we are unaware of.
It also makes me think of Wolfgang Giegerich’s concept of the soul’s logical life: there is a kind of logic in our lives that confronts our conscious awareness. We may make decisions to do something, to go somewhere, to plan a trip, or to study a subject. We may think everything is going to go in a particular way and, as we know, life intervenes. There is that very cute expression that exists in many languages: “One thinks and God laughs.”
I know that in terms of building this podcast, bringing on guests that have really touched me, reaching out to you, and delving into subject areas that are very close to my heart, this is something that I have done out of love. But I can also tell that it has come to a natural end for now. There's been a conflict there between an expectation that I set for myself and that others have had for me and an internal rhythm that is certainly demanding that I take a break. These moments (moments when you build something or have a particular architecture and other voices that are swimming around begin to grow in power and clarity and go against a conscious attempt in life) are quite unnerving.
So welcome to this year's last installment as we head into the holiday season. Welcome to a podcast where I'll take some time to open up with you, explore what it means to end things, and share some of my thoughts on why this is often the hardest thing but a very important thing that we must do.
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We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/podcast/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
Welcome to episode 32. In today's episode, I have a meaningful chat with psychotherapist, couples therapist, and certified emotionally focused therapist Louise Wästlund.
One of the reasons that I love this interview is that, if you're not familiar with the research that looks into the neurobiology of attachment, Louise's way of talking about relationships (and a kind of democracy in relationships when it comes to our emotional needs) is clear, compassionate, and just very thoughtful.
I wanted to do a series before I break for the holidays on looking at how we deal with all of the different challenges and opportunities of meeting with family and of spending time together. I wanted to consider some of the more superficial ways that we might respond to the complications that family and other important relationships can often provoke in our emotional and interpersonal lives. It's very easy to put people and in particular our partners into boxes around some of the frustrations or sensitivities that get evoked when it comes to family.
I think Louise does an amazing job at what we call in therapy “attachifying” certain phenomena that come up. What that means in simple terms is that when somebody perhaps becomes irritated or tired or maybe somebody freezes because of a certain emotional response, it brings up discomfort in us. But when we look at things through an attachment lens (meaning what is the need and longing that is driving someone to behave in a particular way), then the whole lens shifts. As you'll hear Louise explain, even when somebody is seemingly minimizing somebody's feelings (as in, “Why are you making a big deal about this?”), on the surface that looks like someone is being uncaring. But Louise goes in and talks about how, at the end of the day, even when someone is trying to turn down emotion in that way, it's coming from a very sensitive place in them.
Perhaps they don't want their partner to be upset. Maybe they just want the night to go well. Possibly they're just feeling nervous about their own emotions. These are altruistic and somewhat benign sensations from the point of view that on the surface it might look like somebody’s being irritable but, when you actually dig deep, you can see that there's a real attempt at caring about their partner.
This is the bread and butter of healing relationships and of looking at what on the surface may look like someone being somewhat malicious when, in fact, they're really just trying to settle themselves. These kinds of reframes are at the heart of deepening our close relationships with others and really scrutinizing why we get our backs up, which I think can just make us closer.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Louise, looking at how we should think about our relationships and some tips to help us get through the holidays in a more collaborative and loving way.
Show Highlights:
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We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/podcast/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
Welcome to episode 31. I feel quite inspired as we all realize that the holidays are soon upon us. For those of us that live in parts of the world that get colder at this time of year, things really start to change. As we get into late November, things are getting ready for this time of the year that is quite special. No matter how you celebrate, you can't avoid the ways that people start to get ready to hibernate with each other.
The interesting thing about family and relationships is that it can be a very stressful time for many people to be home and to face relationships that don't get a lot of attention when we're working throughout the year. So I want to dig deep with you all and prepare us emotionally to go into some of these opportunities to get closer.
To do that, I'm going to talk about intimacy. I’m also going to have a number of couples therapists and guests to share from their perspective why it's hard to stay close and to get close and also some ideas about what we can do to get ourselves ready.
I wanted to address a kind of misconception that a lot of couples come to even when they come to couples therapy. There can be a very superficial notion that couples therapy is about the relationship. That may seem like a very strange thing to say. Of course, it's about the relationship. What I mean is that couples will come and say, “Oh, our problems are about this relationship,” as if there's another relationship the person is in which is better. Of course, if that is the case, then there are bigger problems in that relationship, but that's a subject area for another podcast.
The issue is that what is so profoundly important when it comes to thinking about intimacy is that, in so many ways, it doesn't have to do with the other person at all. If we're evacuating something that we want for ourselves (for instance, if somebody else is outgoing, and we're like, “Oh, I love how you are at parties” or “how you can schmooze or how social you can be”), often that represents our biggest fears. Or, the other way around. Maybe we see someone who's quiet and pensive and it just seems so refreshing to meet somebody who's not always talking all the time and it's hard for us to slow down.
Eventually, shit hits the fan. Period; full stop. That's what I mean that couples therapy is not really about this relationship. Often, it's about the cross that somebody has to bear in their own life.
This is what I discuss throughout today’s podcast. I hope you benefit from this introductory episode to the upcoming series on deepening our relationships over the holidays.
Show Highlights:
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We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/podcast/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
Get “The Intimacy Problem” eBook: https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
This episode is the third in a series of podcasts that I have been recording on the subject of shame. I think it's a really important area of investigation because, as the neurologist Stephen Porges pointed out, the strong emotions that human beings contain drive our actions, our thoughts, our behaviors, and our decision-making. There was a huge shift in the classic notion of mind over matter when, around the turn of the last century, there really was an emphasis on investigating how emotions influence human beings’ behaviors.
I think that what I'd like to focus on today, since I've gone into the elements of shame and what it looks like, is perhaps to give some insights from my clinical practice on how shame can be addressed. I'm reminded in thinking about this of the late Jaak Panksepp, who wrote a seminal book called The Archaeology of Mind. Jaak was once quoted as saying that he could not develop any pharmaceutical solutions for depression and other forms of mental illness that could replicate human connection. He could never synthetically create a solution that is as powerful as the way that another human being can affect you. Of course, he was referring to that in the positive sense as in the comfort and solace and soothing that we receive when things go well in human interactions.
That is a segue to basically articulate that what inevitably helps soothe views of self that are based in shame, such as I am not deserving of affection, comfort, love, or validation, in simple terms is the opposite. If a human being can allow in a view of themselves that can temper or begin to shift some of these hard and deeply established negative views of self, that can start to create change.
Now of course, if it was that easy to simply hear that we are different than what we believe, then we would just have a very quick mechanism to fix some of these more intransigent emotional states. So obviously, it's not as simple as just hearing this.
In this episode, I open up with you and give you some insight into what this looks like in my office. Often this happens in couples therapy because, in couples therapy, we can leverage the affection and desire that someone has for the other to get into some of these more difficult emotional places that people guard. The process in individual therapy is somewhat different. There needs to be a very strong alliance. The relationship that a therapist has to their patient or client obviously has different psychodynamics and emotional reverberations than a couple.
I hope you enjoy some of my musings around the landscape of healing from shame and injuries. Don't be disheartened if, when you make the decision to heal or find yourself exposed, you start to feel different (either softer or you have anxiety for the first time in your life) because you've been working so hard to keep these things at bay. Unfortunately, as is the case, we must go through. There's no real way to circumvent or shortcut the strong emotions that one has been keeping hidden.
Show Highlights:
Subscribe and Review
We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
More and more people who walk into my office are sharing with me that they get to know me here in this space and feel in some ways that they already know a bit about me before they walk through my door. It's an interesting feeling. In some ways, it's kind of nice to have this forum to go into aspects of what I love and what I do. It's also a space that's quite personal and I'm trying not to push myself to perform or create something that doesn't feel germane to my mission.
On that note, I'm in the middle of what I've conceived as a kind of three-part series looking at shame. In thinking about today's episode, I thought about conveying some very clear ideas that come from the science of emotion.
I was reflecting on the last podcast and realized that I went in many directions and circumambulated around the idea of shame. But for today I thought of zeroing in on some concepts that are extremely helpful when I'm working with others and perhaps even when I'm reflecting on myself. Specifically what I'm referring to is the notion of the way that emotions get organized in the human being.
One idea that we often talk about is the notion of action tendencies. An action tendency is something that someone might do in response to an emotional signal in their body. How one responds to those basic emotions, first of all, varies quite dramatically. Second of all, whether moments are going to feel repaired and whether they have the potential to even bring two people closer together is highly dependent on one's ability to be able to be present with and understand one's emotional response.
An action tendency can look like somebody trying to fix it. Somebody might feel like they're letting their partner down or letting somebody down at work and they go into a hurried response to fix it because they're worried something bad will happen.
When we talk about notions such as shame, which many people carry from having felt like they let others down going all the way back to childhood, those experiences will color how overwhelming a particular moment is for somebody. Join me for this episode as I get further into this idea and explain many facets of shame in this arena.
Show Highlights:
Subscribe and Review
We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
Welcome to episode 28. As many of you who listen to the podcast know, I just came off of a really intense, creative journey with some colleagues and friends from a number of different countries. We all met in Sweden to work on a project which is tentatively called the Boris Project or Boris's map. We explored material that goes back to the 1940s during World War 2, letters that were written by my great-grandmother to my grandfather. Unbeknownst to my great-grandmother, these would be the last letters that she ever wrote to him.
To be honest with you, the energy required to go through this material took me to the core of my being but it also left me bereft of a lot of creative energy because I gave it everything I had. Over the last 72 hours or so I was seriously thinking about pausing the podcast just to recoup and to collect my creative energies. But, after speaking with my producer, my assistant, and some other people that collaborate with me to help support the podcast, I'm going to consider this chapter two. I’m going to change the format a little bit and focus in on areas that are very close to my heart. Today, I would like to focus on shame.
As a close friend who very lovingly listens to the podcast recently told me, for him, the way that I've talked about shame before on this podcast is very foreign. That makes sense to me because how we experience others and ourselves and the world is very specific to the individual. At the same time (and today in my work was a great example of this), certain feeling states can be difficult to survive.
Nothing for me is more powerful than being with people when they take the risk to articulate profoundly difficult emotions. I think that one of the most difficult things about negative feeling states such as shame and guilt and humiliation is that we want to move as far away from feeling this way as we can. The reason that this is such a focus of mine is because I believe very strongly in human relationships. I know, personally and professionally, what it means for people to be able to stay in their own bodies, to have a language for how they feel, and to be able to communicate that to somebody else, particularly if that other person is someone that they are close to.
I spent hours today in my office with many beautiful souls, brave individuals who, on multiple occasions throughout the day, dug so deep to talk about how broken they feel. I don't mean perpetually broken. These are people that go to work, have kids, and are enjoying life. This isn't a kind of brokenness that arrests people in their tracks. No, I'm referring to setting a very high bar when it comes to the level at which we connect with other people.
So, over the next three podcasts or so, I would like to open up and talk to you about what it means to put language to some of the hardest emotions that human beings have to face. I hope you will join me and benefit from digging deeper into your own difficult emotions.
Show Highlights:
Subscribe and Review
We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
Today is another special episode that links back to last week. If you listened to last week's episode where I met and interviewed and talked with my fellow artists and collaborators, then you'll recognize some of the melodies in today's episode which we recorded in the great synagogue in Stockholm, this beautiful art deco sanctuary that is very special.
The theme of today's podcast has to do with a very special ritual that is close to my heart, which in Hebrew is called havdalah, which translates as separation. The reason I'm so fond of this idea and ritual is because of attempts to provide support for the transition between the sacred to the profane. I believe that much of what we experience as suffering in our life has to do with moments where meaning, relationship, our fantasies, and our sense of ourselves breaks down.
I'm a firm believer that progress in our lives happens when we move forward, we change, those around us change, we lose loved ones, we don't recognize ourselves because we're older, we don't think the same way we used. It could even happen in just the simple moments where we feel off, can't get our bearings, and don't feel grounded. All this language describes times when we're in between.
If you've been following my podcast, there have been many conversations about this from different angles. My podcast recently with Dustin Atlis about Martin Buber comes to mind and Dustin talking about how Martin Buber said that we can never inhabit a permanent sense of connectivity. We'd be out of the world if that were the case. The world is full of this kind of brokenness.
The ceremony and the music that you're going to hear in today's podcast is intended to give a container to what is often a really tricky transition. I think we all go through it. It's the same transition of coming back from vacation and the first day of work or even something as simple as a night out or a day off or a visit with someone you love who has to leave or saying goodbye to somebody for the last time. These are incredible transitions that we have to face and bear and integrate and hold.
You'll hear me talk a little bit about this ritual in the podcast but I thought I’d just give a preface to it so it's a bit more orienting for those listening who may not be familiar with it. There's a moment where wine, fire, and spices are used as three elements to denote this liminal space, this space in between, a movement from a time of connectivity and sacredness into the world of the banal. The first song that we will sing for you today in the podcast is called Liba. The lyrics have to do with transcending the darkness in us and how do we withstand nights, for instance, where we can't sleep and the time is ticking away and everyone else is asleep around us and we're kind of alone with ourselves. It’s about a sort of yearning for love to help us deal with these moments.
Being able to hold the space where nothing makes sense, where there's a kind of foreignness to ourselves or to the world, is really crucial because they're always there. You might wake up and there's a very dramatic news story, for instance. The anniversary of the Twin Towers comes to mind. These kinds of events punctuate our seemingly seamless reality which is not seamless at all. We just want it to be so we can rid ourselves of anxiety. This is a noble goal but I think that the ceremony you're going to hear today reverses things and says, “No, we're going to stare this kind of transition in the face.” For instance, we smell the sweetness of spices in a moment where we are transitioning out of a time of connection and into the world of the everyday. It's an important skill and tool to be able to recognize when things do not go our way, when somebody is unavailable to us, and when the world around us is changing, and to recognize and find space to contend with, try to make sense of, and withstand those moments of absolute foreignness.
I hope you enjoy this ride that we will take you on today from the great synagogue in Stockholm with my good friends Aviva Chernick, Marcelo Moguilevsky, and Cesar Lerner. I hope you'll let yourself go, listen to the music, and maybe put this on in moments when things feel off and it's hard to feel one's direction in life. I hope it brings a kind of recognition that this is all of our stories. Maybe knowing that we have people around us and behind us in those moments when it's hard to make heads or tails of life will give us what we need to get through and contain the uncontainable.
Show Highlights:
Subscribe and Review
We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
This episode is inspired by a letter that was written by my great grandmother to her son, my grandfather, in 1941. These would be the last letters that she would ever write or he would ever receive from her. I am exploring this material in Stockholm, trying to take something from these artifacts of a lost time to understand memory, pain, loss, failure, and absence.
In thinking about the podcast, which is called The Dignity of Suffering, there's an interesting translation of this material to offer it a kind of renewed dignity. They are dignified on their own, of course, and they don't need anything more but something about giving them music and life seems to connect something that couldn't be materialized in the world as we know it.
I'm here with some wonderful friends from around the world. Joining me are Aviva Chernick from Toronto, Masha Dimitri from Switzerland, Cesar Lerner from Buenos Aires, and Marcelo Moguilevsky who is also from Buenos Aires.
For today's podcast, we're just going to talk together, with their beautiful music in the background, about what it means to live in the spaces in between what we think we know and the eruption of what we do not know. Just before we hit record, Marcelo offered that he never knows when the emotion is going to come but it always comes. There's always that tug of war in life. One of my teachers says that, “Desire is pleasure remembered.” We're always trying to invoke moments in our life where we feel some kind of connectedness. And yet, of course, we can't force these moments.
Certainly, our workshop, for me at least, has been an exercise in purpose and then destroying that purpose over and over again. On that note, we're just going to talk a bit about what it means to fail. We’re asking questions like, how do we survive each other's despair? How can we survive together this edge of oblivion, this nothingness that we are always walking every day of our life? I hope you enjoy the conversation and the music.
Show Highlights:
Subscribe and Review
We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
When I was thinking of creating a podcast or some of the books that I'd like to write, one of them is to go in this direction of “Confessions of a Couple’s Therapist.” If you're new to the podcast, you can go back and listen to me do a session with a couple live, which I'd like to do again. But one of my great joys in my life, in my professional life and my life as a teacher, is talking and thinking about human relationships.
I'd like in today's podcast to zero in on a particular dynamic that I am laser focused on in every session that I ever do and, frankly, focused on in my own marriage. It has to do with a very simple idea on the surface, that the human being loses their higher order capacity when the ways that we confront the world become literalized. What I mean by that is that there's a phenomena that when we are scared, overwhelmed, slighted, or embarrassed (and of course this is different for everybody in terms of the valence and how this manifests), there's a particular way that the human brain reduces things to binaries when we don't see another way out.
You've heard me talk about how the real goal in life or the goal of most situations is to figure out what is a perceived threat (when we believe there isn't a way out but really there is) and what are the situations where we have to be acutely aware that we are in danger. Of course, there's no recipe for that. That is Darwin, to an extent, at its core in terms of the way the organism evolves and shapes around an environment to be as successful as it possibly can.
This isn't just related to couples therapy. Maybe those of you who are out there aren't in relationships or don't care about couples therapy. What I'm underscoring is less to do with a kind of cliche of a couple coming in and seeing a therapist. It has more to do with the fundamental ways that we organize and protect ourselves. I dive into this much deeper throughout this week’s episode. Please join me to hear more.
Show Highlights:
Subscribe and Review
We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what The Dignity of Suffering is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!
If you enjoyed this episode, we've also created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from it. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/ to download it.
Supporting Resources:
https://mitchellsmolkin.com/
Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
***
Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
This conversation today is quite a close topic to my heart. I interview podcaster and life coach Furkhan Dandia who left the corporate world as an engineer and had this realization in his life that it would be important for him to devote his energies and his time to helping facilitate conversations between men.
As you'll hear in the podcast, I feel in some ways like I had the privilege of going to a high school that was focused on the arts and theater. In many ways, the stigmas around talking, especially between men, were confronted quite early on. But obviously, that isn't the case in so many parts of society.
Furthermore, we have to be sure that we do not lump all societies together. This idea of talking about our inner lives and putting language to our experiences has such an incredible range around the world. It's very important, I think, not to jump to any kind of ethnocentricity around it, meaning we have to be careful not to look at other cultures through our own lenses. In many ways, because the podcasting world tends to reach a bit more of a Western audience, we exclude (I think to our detriment) the range of ways that masculinity expresses itself around the world. I like that theme in Furkhan’s and my discussion today.
There's a great need to foster and facilitate conversation, not in any kind of positional way that would suggest that there is any one way of being, but when it comes to the fractures of emigration and of moving, which I've spoken about quite often in this podcast. At that stage, there becomes a need to facilitate exploration of one's experience. That is something I see clinically all the time.
So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Furkhan. I think the world is a better place with people like him who have taken up the mantle in their life of challenging patriarchal ideas, challenging old social norms, recognizing a significant difference between the thrust of his own life which may be culturally informed by certain gender stereotypes, and digging deep and making space for other men. I really liked the generosity of energy and spirit he has and I hope you'll check out his podcast, EZ Conversations, and let anyone you know, know about his work in case it would be helpful.
Without further ado, here is my interview about men talking with men.
Show Highlights:
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Supporting Resources:
EZ Conversations
Furkhan on Instagram
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Mitchell Smolkin is a sought-after clinician, speaker, and author. For media and interview requests please contact his publicist Randy Phipps at [email protected]. For all other inquiries, please send mail to [email protected].
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The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.