The Dignity of Suffering

Welcome to episode 23. I just came back from quite a long adventure, criss-crossing Ontario, Canada, visiting family and friends, singing, and also working with a lot of my clients that I still see virtually overseas. I'm back here in Stockholm, landing, getting my bearings again, and here with you.

I was reflecting on what I wanted to talk about today. I think it's time to do a solo podcast and reconnect. What's on my mind is a kind of moment that I went through during my Master's degree in psychology which was a moment that I think a lot of people go through when they study a subject with a certain intensity. It had to do with feeling kind of unmoored from some of my earlier assumptions when it came to theories of the mind of life.

For practical reasons, what I would like to delve into today is this tension between an area of psychology that tends to focus on self-help solutions and looking at human beings on a particular spectrum in terms of functionality and sort of the foundation of what had brought me into the field of psychology which was much more attuned with a kind of mystification of human life.

To put that in clearer terms, looking at life experience as divined in a way, in the way that we might say, "Well, that didn't go so well but I learned from it and it was meant to be." You don't get a job, for instance, or a relationship ends and you can very casually say, "Oh, it was meant to be." There's a real question of whether that's just us rationalizing something away or saying that to comfort ourselves or whether that is really true. What does that mean if someone says, "That was meant to be"? That betrays that we don't really think we had much choice in the matter.

I don't know if we always scrutinize these casual assumptions in that way. But, personally, my first introduction in any profound way to psychology was to the work of Carl Jung and dreams and looking at the ways that the images and events that we dream of at night act as a kind of unconscious counterpoint to our waking life. This is the idea that there's a kind of wisdom and logic that is always present and guiding us and there are ways that these ideas have evolved in a much more contemporary way. To an extent, this kind of literary understanding of our lives, seeing a kind of narrative in our life, stands in contrast with a more reductive way of looking at the human body and our behavior from the sort of somatic and physiological standpoint (which is somebody makes a decision not because it was divined or meant to be but out of a more reductive way of saying, "Well, there's a craving there").

I might, in today's podcast, stick a little bit with the foundations of my own thinking which I come back to often. They have to do with a basic idea that Carl Jung had as a kind of matrix, if you will, for psychological health. It was this basic notion that connected the ego (our conscious experience of ourselves and what we know) with what he called a kind of capital S self (this kind of broad, all-containing, often unconscious, breeding ground for our creativity). Dreams and symbols from dreams would emerge from and represent these core foundational notions that we're trying to connect with and touch. The idea is that we get glimpses of the capital S self in moments in our life (in connection with others, in spurts of creativity, or in dreams). There's never this perpetual connection to the self so much as an increasing awareness of what it means to become who we are.

Another idea that I wanted to have in the back of our minds today is this notion of teleology, which is that we're driving towards something. Whereas, in some sense, when we talk about having a crisis or something being wrong, there's one end of the psychological spectrum which looks at that really as something being wrong. Why did you get into that car accident or what was wrong with you that you weren't paying attention at work and you made this mistake or you missed your flights? These are very kind of pedestrian mistakes that could have been avoided.

There really is a kind of tension of when and how do we treat something as just some error and when do we think about events in our life that don't go our way as a kind of other logic that is unfolding? I don't find it easy to hold that tension. Tune into this episode to hear more of my reflections on this topic.

Show Highlights:

• The religious guilt that often drove people to therapy in the early 20th century.
• How the motivations for attending therapy have changed in our modern society.
• Why we often question if we're "normal" when entering adulthood.
• How we "zombify" other human beings.
• Why I struggle with the teleological idea that everything in life has a purpose.
• What archetypal psychology is.
• How our body is like a symphony.
• What happens to us when that symphony becomes so sufficiently damaged during development that it stops working properly.
• The potential of merging the two philosophies of romance and logic.
• Why dream work can be so powerful.
• Why we need to address both the symbolic and physiological aspects of psychology.
• Why existential crises will always occur and the dignity that that fact affords.

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 22. Today's kind of an exciting conversation on many levels. If you've been following my work and my podcast, you'll have gleaned some of the important ideas around how difficult it is to get through some of the more defensive ways that human beings deal with the world. We are so exquisitely intelligent and wired for survival that our environments growing up and generationally contribute to create these very sophisticated, emotional matrixes that govern us. And to some extent, as you'll hear me and my guest, Joe Satin Levin, talk about today, the processes of these shifting grounds underneath our feet as we mature and try to make sense of ourselves and the world and answer certain existential questions, a lot of that is is often out of our hands. And we are, in many ways, here for the ride and we kind of just need to pay attention and let certain events in our life affect us and to take them seriously.

On the other hand, as Joe opens up about today when he helps us understand neurodivergency, what that means, how it affects people, and really a contemporary way of appreciating the different ways that people are wired, it can really affect our ability to have relationships with ourselves and with others. The reason that Joe ended up on the podcast with me today is that he wrote a very moving piece, an essay which I introduce in the podcast, that I read and it touched me. Not only is he a great writer and super intelligent but he took a risk in the piece to name some very personal parts of his own journey towards dealing with medication and entering into the world of looking into the effects of psychedelics on human beings and in the healing process.

I have had the privilege of looking at some of the more current research, particularly with MDMA in the United States and PTSD with soldiers. It's fascinating from the point of view of how it contributes to us being able to get through these intransigent ways that the human being protects themselves. This has been our quest as human beings for thousands of years. It is not new, this question, at all. The idea of coming to our own self-awareness and consciousness has brought with it a tremendous weight and burden as we reflect our own existence to ourselves and to others and all the ways that that goes right but all the ways that that can go so terribly wrong. We are often just hanging by a thread in terms of our own sanity and I think this is really at the heart of our conversation today which is how we maintain our identity, how our identities become sometimes supremely rigid, inflexible, and also at moments in life when we all of a sudden become aware of parts of ourselves that were previously hidden to us that are crucial.

Joe tells a beautiful story in the podcast today about a moment with his son where he becomes aware of himself and his relationship to his son and this emotional pivot that he made to hold his son in mind. That's another theme that, of course, you will recognize from my work and from the conversations I've had with you and with others here.

I'm always kind of tickled and it's a continual process of restoring my faith in the world when these moments of I wouldn't say synchronicity, but just sort of when things align and I'm touched in a way that inspires me to reach out to people that not only I love but also when there's a convergence of our lives. This was one of these cases where I'm here with Joe Satin Levin, my old neighbor but also now a future colleague who is jumping into the psychotherapy fray and, in particular, passionately writing about and trying to disseminate information on some of the most exciting frontiers in psychotherapy.

So, without further ado, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Show Highlights:

• How Joe's article came to be.
• What neurodiversity is and what it means to Joe specifically.
• The internal and unconscious aspects of being social for the neurodivergent.
• The decaying of personality we all go through as we mature.
• Why we need to wrestle with our privilege.
• Modern stigmas around medication.
• Why people need more stimulation today.
• What Joe's medication allows him to do.
• His experience of feeling unworthy.

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 21, The Power of the Breath. Today I interview a colleague who became a friend who I met at an interesting conference in Boston on trauma a number of years ago. We clicked and spoke about many aspects of the field and our lives that are important to us. Esther's real gift is a commitment to the body, to yoga, and to creating space. In our interview today, I really discovered a real lightness of being that I can only imagine people benefiting from when they can be in her presence.

When all the noise fades away in our lives, when we are on our own, when we're trying to fall asleep, maybe we're on a plane and it's quiet, we come back to our breath. I know for me, I've had a religious yoga practice for many years. There's always a moment where I am able to reconnect with the depth of my breath. Esther has a lot to say on this and I'm gonna let her speak for herself. But there's something about breathing that underscores our entire life.

If you remember in an earlier podcast when I interviewed Sean Smith, he went to great lengths to talk about the fact that these primary drives, like breathing and eating, they are always unconsciously there, they are always a priority, and they are often beyond our conscious awareness. So it seems important then to slow down and take some time and to talk about breathing.

I felt my breath actually many times in the conversation with Esther, just bringing our attention to being present which I know has become somewhat of a cliche. It's become fetishized. It can even be a critique of somebody you're with: "Hey, come on. Be present with me. I haven't seen you in a while." To be honest with you, I don't think that a lot of what is conveyed in the mindfulness movement and notions of being present goes all the way. It feels to me like it is a stepping stone to what lurks underneath. But to be able to feel ourselves breathing and to reconnect with our breath is a luxury and, I know for me, a very powerful way of centering myself.

So, without further ado, I want to introduce you to Esther who is a psychotherapist, a yoga teacher, an artist, an art therapist, a creator, and someone that really has devoted her life to connecting with others and creating space to breathe. Esther has had her own multifaceted journey to becoming a psychotherapist, art therapist, and student of yoga and meditation. Please listen in and enjoy our conversation.

Show Highlights:

• Why breathwork is such an important part of healing.
• What a breath signature is.
• How your breath controls your mind and emotions.
• The dangers of having a shallow breath signature.
• How breathwork creates community.
• What the experience of deepening our breath does for us.
• The power of silence.
• The cultural differences in breath.
• Why we should experiment with different ways of breathing.
• Why, even though there are consequences for breathing a certain way, there is still no one right way to breathe.
• Why breathwork isn't about you.

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:

Esther on Instagram

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, I would like to focus on some of the feedback that I've been getting on the podcast. In particular, people are writing and asking about a phenomenon that I see a lot in my practice. I've certainly gone through it in my own life. It is a situation in relationships where loneliness can creep in or, worse, one of the partners feels like they are doing all the work emotionally.

What's very interesting about this is that when couples come to see me, it isn't normally both partners that feel this way. I may have touched on this a bunch before in the podcast but in the literature on attachment and the ways that human beings organize themselves around the ways that they reach for comfort, there really are different styles.

When we look at the neurophysiology of emotion, what we tend to see is that this organizes itself around fight or flight. Specifically what this means is that if somebody has the instinct of feeling alone or in need of comfort, one person may up-regulate (go into the sympathetic nervous system and go into action towards, to reach, to ask for help, to pick up the phone, to write an email). Other people will down-regulate (will go into the parasympathetic nervous system, will go read a book, want to go for a walk, not want to talk about it).

Of course, these lines are not that simple. We can oscillate: sometimes we just want to go for a walk or sometimes we want to talk to somebody. But I can tell you in my thousands of hours of practice, there really is a clear distinction between what somebody does the vast majority of the time.

Now, where it gets really tricky is when, over time, this very kind of binary dynamic sets hold in a relationship. One person who tends to go into outward action when they need something comes up against another person who tends to down-regulate and really ruminate in a very personal, private, and quiet way.

There is something we call the pursuer and the withdrawer in relationships. The pursuer is the person who plans everything and comes up with ideas for the weekend or is the one that's doing the activities for the kids. The other one is more of the silent helper who doesn't really come out in the same way, doesn't take the initiative in the same way, and maybe supports through action. There are a whole bunch of threads here for us to bring together and to explore in this regard. Listen in to hear my reflections on them.

Show Highlights:

• The connection between typology and the fight-or-flight response.
• The importance of continual self-reflection.
• Why emotional pain can halt our interior function.
• How our brains adapt to respond to danger during development.
• The difference between a sense of urgency and vulnerability.
• Our body's capacity to push away discomfort and dissociate.
• The software our brain develops during childhood.
• Why some people are so independent.
• The deep-seated fear of disappointment that is at the root of many up-regulating partners.
• How transference occurs in relationships.
• Why putting language to our emotions is so critical.
• Why vulnerability can be so difficult for some people.
• How becoming conscious of our internal software can improve our relationships.

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 we go all the way to Australia to find and speak to this incredibly dynamic therapist, Isiah McKimmie, who is a sexologist, couples therapist, sex therapist, and coach. If you want to find out what a sexologist is, you're going to have to listen to the interview.

It is a huge pleasure to have Isiah here all the way from Australia. I recently started interacting with folks on Instagram and there she was kicking up a storm, teaching folks around the world how to have better sex and better relationships.

I reached out to Isiah because so much of what I do with individuals, couples, and in my own life has to do with how our bodies, over time, let others in. When it comes to intimate relationships, there's no hiding in sex. It often reveals our pain, our vulnerability, and as we get close, this is a place that couples often have to work at to get even closer.

So after spending a week writing about and talking about the body and why, in certain cases when language fails us, sex can often be a place where people find refuge but also where people start to get very confused when it creates an imbalance or it creates a lot of friction in relationships (people can often feel unseen, exposed, and vulnerable), Isiah just brings this incredible lightness of being to the conversation. I was so impressed with the joy and positivity and just lightness that she kept coming back with as we explored this in relationship.

So, without further ado, here's my interview with sexologist Isiah McKimmie.

Show Highlights:

• What brought Isiah to working with couples.
• Why intimacy is such an important, hot-button issue in relationships.
• How sexual rejection can feel like abandonment.
• Why working on connection and communication is key to building sexual intimacy.
• What a sexologist is.
• How to deal with the loss of the "honeymoon phase" and move forward to the new phase of your relationship.
• Why putting in effort is so crucial.
• How to normalize the ups and downs in the process of building intimacy.
• How trauma can make safety not feel safe to us.
• How to navigate the intimacy differences between men and women.

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 18. I was once attending a conference in downtown Toronto and the theme of the conference was the entry problem: how do we enter into psychological material? There's a whole philosophical tradition, most notably at present taken up by a German psychologist and philosopher named Wolfgang Geegref who relies on a way of looking at psychology that postulates that it is basically psychology studying itself.

So when we're in therapy or we're thinking about ourselves, it's a very difficult thing to do. It's not like looking at an organ, for instance, and assessing what's wrong and deciding whether to do surgery or take another approach. Psyche studies psyche.

And about halfway through the day at this conference, I had to go move my car and I put the car in the underground parking lot at this hotel. I went to go back upstairs to rejoin the conference and there was a doorway not too far from where I parked. And up the stairs, there was another door that I opened and the door closed behind me. And then I realized that there were no handles on any of the doors in the room that I was in. Actually, there was a window just facing the street. I found myself with all these locked doors with no handles.

Sounds like I'd entered into a psychiatric ward. But no, I somehow had entered a door that I wasn't supposed to. And the irony wasn't lost on me that here I was at a conference discussing the entry problem and there was no way for me to enter. I eventually bang so hard on a door a man in a chef's hat came out. It must have been the rear of the kitchen and I imagine that security fixed the issue after that.

The reason I tell you this story is apropos of my interview today. Dr. Dustin Atlas is the director of Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His current book project, Buber Talks Jewish Dialogue and the Nonhuman World, uses the work of Martin Buber to interrogate contemporary post-human concerns in Jewish thought, politics, and life, exploring the ways in which Jewish thought allows us to engage the nonhuman. I reached out to him because I have only a peripheral knowledge of the philosopher Martin Buber's work. Martin Buber, who lived from 1878 to 1965, was a prolific author, scholar, literary translator, and political activist whose writings ranged from Jewish mysticism to social philosophy, Biblical Studies, religious finance, rhinology, philosophical anthropology, education, politics, and art.

But most famous among his writings was a short but powerful book entitled I and Thou which he wrote in 1923 where he considered our relations to others as twofold. There was the I-it relation which prevails between subject and objects of thought and action. And there was the I-thou relationship on the other hand which exceeds the subject-object relationship. All to say that Buber, and as you'll hear Dustin go into great detail in our interview today, was very much concerned with the limitations, challenges, and obstacles informing authentic connection.

And this goes back to the entry problem because this is not something that can be forced or manufactured. This is a notion that pervades much of our lives but also a lot of psychological theory.

In thinking about my preface to my conversation with Dustin today, I wanted to share a kind of moment that I don't know whether I talk about it very often. I don't know if I've heard many other therapists talk about it. But it's the moment when somebody first walks in the door for therapy and there's a kind of unknown that enters the room. Usually, there's a lot of hunger when somebody finally decides to go to therapy. Usually, there's a lot that comes with that in terms of expectation. As I publish and produce more, people come in maybe having a sense of who I am, having listened to this podcast, having read my writing. And all of that is in the room.

And, of course, this is who I am. But in that moment, meeting an individual, it isn't who I am. I've never been in that moment before. And, as I've maybe talked about previously in this podcast, I also think it's important to resist certain temptations when it comes to finding answers. And I think that that pervades to a degree the conversation with Dustin today where, at some point, I felt that the two of us were talking about a kind of space to hold the nonspace, the nonbeing.

Later in our chat, he references relationships and references Martin Buber, talking about all of the different revolutions that human beings go through in a long-term intimate relationship. This is something that I face every day in my clinical practice with couples and in my own marriage

where it's really important. I think that that's what I really appreciated about Dustin sharing with us his expert knowledge in the work of Martin Buber and others. It's crucial at least to try to frame the dissolution of moments in time, of ways that we understand ourselves and others, which we need on the one hand to not become psychotic so that we have some kind of predictable, continuous psychic skin and experience.

But also one of the huge challenges existentially is having to mourn the loss of so much of what we experienced as familiar and real. And, understandably, there can be an incredible clinging on to what we have come to know about ourselves and others. And to be honest, I think this is half of what I do as a therapist: sitting with people in mourning the loss of what they imagine themselves, their future, and others to be and tolerating a kind of nonspace, nonbeing that often we have no indication of how long being in that state will last.

I also want to avoid in my preface any kind of reification of these notions. There's certainly an attempt on my part to share a very private experience as a therapist where there's a very real part of me in the room trying to connect with someone, especially when we are first meeting, but also a part of me that needs to just observe and wait and listen. And frankly, the older I get, the more I've noticed that I'm not only listening to a voice which is not mine and is mind at the same time but also a somatic felt sense of what my body is telling me in the moment. And in other podcasts, maybe I'll go into some of the great work of people like Allan Schore and Peter Levine who confirm and really shore up the brilliance of those parts of our membrane that allow us to know a certain wisdom. But really I think what pervades my conversation with Dustin is a kind of lament between an attempt at reaching some kind of connection with others, with animals, with inanimate objects, and the necessity to have to wait, withhold, and not cling on to experiences that, ultimately, we experience as true or authentic. Dustin doesn't mince words with the ideas that he finds very troubling. I often bristle at the notion of authenticity because I don't really know what it means. We're never fully authentic. That's what the discovery of the unconscious, I think, really solidified for us, that we don't really know often if we're being true or not being true.

Dustin and I sat together a couple of years ago now in Kingston. I was just getting to know him and he, first of all, let me know that he was a scholar of Martin Buber's work. And then he added that it wasn't even so much the conventional notion that a lot of us think of when it comes to Buber and his focus on relationship and really that delineation of relationship, but he brought up the fact that he's even more interested with his work on relationship with animals and even with things, with objects. And so I wanted to bring Dustin onto the podcast in part because it's just an interesting area of thought to consider how two people connect and as a therapist I'm constantly oscillating between the fact that I think I'm just making everything up and maybe occasionally I actually connect with somebody. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Dustin Atlas.

Show Highlights:

• What sparked Dustin's interest in the work of Martin Buber.
• The nothingness that comes with dialogue.
• What animals teach us about how dialogue is ephemeral.
• Martin Buber's hostility to Carl Jung.
• The different kinds of relationships we can have with objects.
• Why Buber said religion isn't experiential.
• Why children interact with objects much more easily than adults.
• The differences between young and older Buber.
• How to bear disappointment about the things you thought you knew and had but don't know or have anymore.
• Why you live in a narrow world if you only relate to other human beings.
• How playing with our kids is a form of dialogue.
• The fractured space of relations.

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 doing my research for this podcast, I came across a book online that had been written by Mitchell Smolkin. But this book was not a book that I had written. The name of this book was called Understanding Pain: Interpretation and Philosophy and had been written over 30 years ago when I was about 12 years old.

I was surprised and I did a bit of digging and it turns out that now living in Arlington, Virginia is another Dr. Mitchell T. Smolkin, a retired internist who, in his life, also has had a deep fascination and interest in the human being's struggle to deal with pain and how they do so through philosophy and religion and how we contend with the often existential crises that painful events and physical symptoms caused us in our lives.

It was quite moving for me. It was another sign that what I am doing is worthwhile. I dug a little deeper and contacted his son and he put me in touch with his father. So on today's podcast, I have the great pleasure of interviewing, drumroll please, Mitchell Smolkin.

What really caught my attention on today's podcast, which surprised me to an extent with the candour Mitchell addressed it, has to do with the placebo effect. Placebo, from Latin, means "I shall be acceptable or pleasing" and refers to what is often ruled out with the scientific method. It is a nonorganic cause and effect when it comes to treatment, and it needs to be separated from actual cause and effect so that we can replicate and disseminate tools, methodologies, and medication that will have a similar effect across the board.

When I was having a chance to read over my summer vacation, I was floored as I was connecting yet again with different scientific developments in psychology that seemed to suggest placebo playing a significant role. In this instance, it was in the field of neurofeedback, a method of retraining the brain for a number of psychological conditions. Once again, I was confronted with the notion that the personality, passion, commitment, patience, and idiosyncratic nature of the doctor plays a significant role in outcomes. And as a result, there is criticism that there isn't enough evidence that this actually works. And yet, for people who practice this, the anecdotal evidence from their practice, their clinical experiences overwhelmingly support the outcomes that they see every day with people. This is of course an old and important fault line, and a difficult one to cross when it comes to agreement on the efficacy of certain treatments.

I remember shaking my head because every time that I investigate a new area of the field, it seems to come down to the power of human relationships. I often reinforce this point, and you've probably heard me say it on this podcast before, that so much of what we see and experience as mental illness or difficulties in living are relational. I focus and dwell on this because it strikes me then that if we're going to make headway in terms of helping the human organism feel safe again or sometimes for the first time, it is going to have to happen in a relational context. And so I'm not surprised that as we search for new ways to treat individuals, groups, and families, that we keep coming back to this notion of the placebo effect.

I was very touched and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Mitchell. For me, to be honest, it was emotional and I felt a certain calm in our conversation and a different kind of pace with the two of us just sitting with some of these questions of how we contend with suffering. What an amazing experience that the two of us, who have never met and share the exact same name, have spent a great deal of our professional lives thinking about these issues.

My final comment will be something that I perhaps gleaned from my conversation with him: the humility that we all have to bring to these issues in our lives. Sometimes all we can do is sit with somebody and marvel at the awesomeness of the questions that these crevices in our lives provoke in us. This is not easy to do when there is such a hunger for answers and for peace of mind which of course I long for as well.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Mitchell T. Smolkin.

Show Highlights:

• Mitchell's career history.
• How being an internist is different from being a physician.
• How Mitchell bridges his philosophical interests with his daily clinical work of dealing with people who are physically ill.
• Why he shows his patients that he's willing to talk and the result of doing so.
• How mental illness can disguise itself through physical symptoms.
• The healing power of relationships.
• How seeing a doctor in a white coat can be a placebo in and of itself.
• The tension of finding meaning in life.
• Why we need to sit with unanswered questions and drop the pressure to find answers.

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!

Supporting Resources:

Understanding Pain: Interpretation and Philosophy by Dr. Mitchell T. Smolkin

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

I spent the last little while focusing on parenting but at the same time, considering the theories in psychology that support our understanding of human development and how that can inform us as parents to either make decisions that shift our behavior or to reflect on them with our children. In that light, It was really a great pleasure to have my son Gabriel on the podcast last week.

Today I wanted to share that clinically, in my practice and my thinking, I have found myself at times returning to some of the foundations of my own training. Something that scares me from time to time is the way that we can glom on to theoretical frameworks and forget that, actually, they form part of a moment in time.

For instance, attachment theory has become incredibly popular right now. And so when it comes to relationships and understanding ourselves, I see a tremendous amount of chatter about safe attachment, avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, mixed states. And if this means nothing to you, don't worry about it. I'm just holding it up more as a mirror to the way that we, in various times in history, use theories and certain schemas to try to understand the human experience.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who I studied for many years, was the one who came up with psychological types, which informed a test that many of you are probably familiar with called the Myers-Briggs, which became the most popular corporate assessment tool for personality, at least in America, for many, many years. And what's interesting is that these tools sort of get co-opted for productivity. So in the case of the Myers-Briggs, it was used to try to understand how to make teams work better together. If you discovered that certain people were extroverts and certain people were introverts and certain people led with their thinking functions as opposed to their feeling functions, then you might understand why there is friction in teams and people are not working as efficiently together as they can.

A huge piece, though, I think gets missed when we oversimplify and we label human behavior. With regard to the Myers-Briggs, one of Carl Jung's most singular points was the fact that it wasn't so much that you discover that somebody is an extrovert. That's true and helpful if we understand that we tend to recharge and get energy by going out into public or making friends. But what Jung was really on about wasn't just so much our dominant function. I believe that he was very interested in our inferior function, that is what is unconscious to us or what comes up in relationships that we project onto others, places we tend to ignore and that we have to put our focus on. And I believe somewhere he said that we play in the inferior function or magic happens in the inferior function, meaning when we can play around in our weaker muscles, that's where growth happens.

But today, I wanted to go back a little bit to my thesis that I wrote, which in part was a history of psychiatry and psychology looking at how we've evolved from a more mystified and mythological framework to theories, such as even personality types or to go to a more contemporary idea (such as attachment and the way that that leans heavily on the neuroscience of emotion) but to talk about this with a certain flexibility so that all the time we are recognizing that theories, to a large extent, are cultural. I hope you enjoy my reflections on this topic.

Show Highlights:

• The danger of being overly simplistic and trying to find objective criteria for self-development.
• Why it's hard for immigrants to reflect on their emotional lives.
• The slow transition over time from identifying our pain and major psychological difficulties with mythology and religious ideas to viewing our emotions and psychological lives as being entirely secular.
• The first time mental health was connected to physiology.
• What our disappointment with those we admire and see as leaders actually signify.
• Why our healing and self-work are never finished.
• How examples of excommunication in history reveal our unwillingness to tolerate differences and assaults on the collective.
• The power of being familiar with the emotions that cause you trouble.
• Why therapy can sometimes mean becoming a little bit sadder but wiser.

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, I decided to do an interview with my son Gabriel, who is 10 years old. I speak a lot in the podcast about him. It is never intended to suggest that somehow I know better but it feels more honest to open up about my experiences than always speak about clinical or hypothetical situations. 

The discussion with him was very moving for me. He opened up about parts of our relationship that I never knew and, as you'll hear, he also shared with me some hurt that I caused him that I was aware of but that I hadn't quite appreciated in terms of how he dealt with it. 

My hope in bringing him onto the podcast was to offer a first-hand experience from a child talking about what helps him and his friends feel safe. He was really excited afterwards, and talked about how much fun it was. That warmed my heart as I didn't want him to feel co-opted in any way. 

As a preamble to our discussion, I wanted to perhaps speak a bit more technically about why it is important to go into the trenches as much as possible with our emotions, especially in relationships, because the neuroscience that supports it is clear and I believe very helpful.

From the minute a child is conceived, the organism begins to organize itself around its environment. The reason that there's so much focus primarily on the first three years of life is because the foundation of the nervous system is being laid down. Trillions of neurons are being paired together and the maxim “neurons that fire together wire together” is never more true in the human being’s life. During this development, a chronic maladaptation can emerge. Just like someone writing software, the pre-verbal child's nervous system is literally adapting and responding to the emotional valence of the environment, encoding it, and it's one of the key tools that the human being consistently relies on throughout their lifespan. Those tools are the primitive responses to emotions that the child has at their disposal, which, in the beginning, are primarily in the reptilian brain and increasingly in the limbic and the neocortex systems which take about 30 years to grow. 

This is why there is such a high precedence of distress in romantic relationships after children are born. The higher-order mammal (the parent) is in the soup with a child who is mimicking basic emotions that are reminding the adult nervous system, quite unconsciously, of feeling states that may have not been touched in decades or may have never acquired language. When we talk about symbolizing a child's behavior and responses, this is literally the act of using the fully developed adult brain of the parent to interpret the more primitive responses of the child. 

Having Gabriel on my podcast today is an example of this where I am using a meta-process of analysis (which is this podcast) and hopefully synthesizing and thinking through with him more basic and younger responses to situations. That is why you'll hear me at times being quiet and restrained when he's sharing something, even if I have a more adult response to it; I hopefully understood that it was important for his voice to have oxygen and for him to feel fully heard. So, without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Gabriel.

Show Highlights:

• What it’s like for Gabe to have a psychotherapist and podcaster as a dad.
• What he thinks makes a good parent.
• Why situations get harder in high stake moments for both a child and a parent.
• How places can become significant of bad emotions.
• A parenting moment I’m not proud of.
• The right balance between liberalism and conservatism as a parent from the perspective of a child.
• Why I became more restrictive when we moved to Sweden and how Gabe felt about and responded to it.
• How kids deflect when they don’t want to be mad at their parents.
• What happens developmentally at the age of 10.
• What has made Gabe feel loved and safe as my child.
• Why it’s so important for parents to be accepting. 
• What the dissociability of the psyche means.
• Why I choose to give Gabe so much freedom.

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/dos015 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

I am delighted to bring Pripo Teplitsky on today's episode as we talk about parenting and what it takes for us to make room for the spirit of the child to emerge. From the minute I heard Pripo's voice, I felt this kinship with his raw and relatable style of connecting. Pripo is a licensed clinical mental health counselor in private practice in Asheville, North Carolina. He has worked with thousands of couples and individuals over the last 17 years. He's also the host of the podcast, Relationships! Let's Talk About It.

Pripo and I share a love for talking about parenting, and it was an incredible pleasure to hear him open up about his life, his son, and his passion for creating a safe, emotional landscape for his family to thrive.

I love something that Pripo said in one of his podcasts on parenting that in doing this work as a clinician and psychotherapist, he had learned so much with couples and individuals about the pitfalls of development when it comes to children.

Pripo has always wanted to experience being a father, having experienced a close and loving relationship with his own. When his parents got divorced, he moved in with his father who told him there are three things to their relationship: communication, communication, and communication.

Modeling how his father trusted him to make decisions by being hands-off in many ways, Pripo's advice to other parents is to trust your child's path. Not that you have to get everything right. He explains how parenting is not linear, and so, you just have to trust and not get freaked out whenever something's not happening according to your expectation – because expectation is a yet to be realized resentment. And if you're constantly attached to your expectations, there's also going to be constant resentment. Instead, you need to bring yourself in the moment and make the best of what you have.

When parents are freaked out about the direction of where their child is going, Pripo likes to stress the focus of the relationship – specifically feeding the relationship, instead of reacting to the worry. You're going to have issues with kids throughout their life as they grow older, whether with sex, money, drugs or a host of difficult areas. Pripo stresses that if you can cultivate the relationship with trust, vulnerability and openness, your kids are going to talk to you about all that stuff, and it's going to be a lot easier for you to be able to make your mistakes as well.

What I appreciate most about having this kind of conversation with people like Pripo is how we're able to normalize what it takes for us to withstand the burgeoning being that we are bringing into the world and how that affects us and challenges us to grow and make room as parents.

Show Highlights:

• Feeding the relationship vs. reacting to the worry
• Trusting your ability to respond instead of figuring out the right answer
• Creating an atmosphere that gives children confidence
• Holding space for your kids especially in their traumatic experiences
• Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable
• How conflict is an opportunity
• Being a strong model for your child
• How to teach compassion to your kids
• Modeling intimacy and vulnerability with friends as men

Subscribe and Review

Have you subscribed to our podcast? We'd love for you to subscribe if you haven't yet.

We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select "Ratings and Reviews" and "Write a Review" then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

If you really enjoyed this episode, we've created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just go to the episode page at https://mitchellsmolkin.com/podcast to download it.

Supporting Resources:

https://www.pripo.com/

https://www.pripo.com/podcast-1

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