Think Act Be Podcast

My guest this week is holistic executive coach Doug Holt. It was Doug’s second time on the podcast (the previous episode is here) and another great discussion. This time we focused on the marriage relationship—especially when you fear that you married the wrong person. Our discussion focused mostly on male-female couples, but many of the things we talked about are relevant for all committed partnerships.

Topics we discussed included:

• What leads people to think they married the wrong person
• Feeling like one is married to a “roommate with a ring”
• Blaming one’s partner for marital disconnect
• Focusing on the person you can control, vs. the other person
• The disconnect between one’s reception in the wider world and at home
• The common isolation from a brotherhood that many men experience
• Looking to one’s partner to fulfill all of one’s needs
• The book No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert Glover
• Putting our validation for our self-worth on our partner
• Doubling down on relationship behaviors that aren’t working
• The turn-off of needy energy
• The downsides of interacting in a transactional way with one’s partner
• Asking one’s partner about how much their relationship needs are being met
• Choosing a spouse that is perfectly positioned to challenge us and push our buttons
• Taking marital challenges as feedback and opportunities for growth
• Self-betterment as a no-lose option
• Time and money as indicators of one’s values
• The very rough patch that Doug went through in his marriage
• Working with parents to improve kids’ lives
• What it means to be a “powerful man”

Doug Holt has been changing lives through his coaching for nearly 30 years.

He owns several successful companies and specializes in helping men (especially business owners) to grow their businesses, strengthen their relationships, and design the life they want to live.

Doug lives with his wife and two kids in Oregon.

Learn more about Doug and his work at his website. 

My guest this week is Dr. Paul Kesselman, a clinical psychologist and close friend of mine. It was Paul’s second time on the podcast (the previous episode is here) and another great discussion. This time we focused on how to keep open lines of communication with our kids.

Topics we discussed included:

• The advantages of keeping open dialogue with our kids
• Creating a safe environment for our kids to talk with us
• The downside of coming to our kids with an agenda
• Talking at, to, or with kids
• Making sure children are engaged when we’re speaking with them
• Capitalizing on moments when our kids are available to talk with us
• How early to start thinking about open dialogue with children
• Many children’s preference to go to Mom to talk rather than Dad
• How to deal respond when our kids do something wrong
• Shifting from content to process with our kids
• Remembering our goals in our interactions with our children
• Our expectations for how children “should” respond to our critiques and corrections
• Letting kids know we’re there while also respecting their privacy and space
• The downsides of jumping in to fix or resolve things for our kids
• The book Paul referenced, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee (affiliate link)

Paul Kesselman, PsyD, completed his doctoral degree in psychology at Yeshiva University. He has taught college level courses in child psychology. He has been working in private practice seeing individuals, families, and running groups since 2003.

Paul works with children as young as four years of age and sees children, pre- teens, adolescents, families, young adults, and adults. He has also conducted research studies on social anxiety at New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Paul grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He and his wife have five children; he enjoys spending time with his family, listening to music, and playing baseball when he is not helping patients and families.

He has a passion for his work and enjoys the opportunity to work with issues such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, learning issues, OCD, anger issues, impulse control disorders, school avoidance and refusal, and adjustments issues.

Paul has spoken at both public and private area schools on a variety of topics including ADHD, anxiety, special needs children, and school anxiety.

Learn more about Paul and his therapy practice at his website.

My guest this week is Dr. Nadia Colburn, a poet and author of a new book of poetry entitled I Say the Sky (affiliate link). 

Topics we discussed included:

• Developing greater interest in poetry later in life
• Turning to poetry as a spiritual or devotional practice
• The ability of poetry to express or point to things that are difficult to capture
• The emotional connection that poetry can inspire
• Presence that exists outside of traditional narrative
• Readings from Nadia’s books
• Wanting to live and yet forgetting we’re alive right here and now
• Mistaking the world for a task
• Making the body more spacious so it can contain more
• The ongoing life of the past into the present
• The dialogue between writing and meditation
• Letting go of the desire to show that we’re good and acceptable
• Nadia’s description and evocation of the experience of anxiety in her poem “Anxiety”
• The missingness of poetry, according to Kieran Setiya

Nadia Colburn, PhD, is also the author of The High Shelf.

Her poetry and prose have appeared in more than 80 publications, including the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Spirituality & Health, Lion’s Roar, and the Yale Review.

Nadia holds a PhD in English from Columbia University. She is the founder of Align Your Story writing school, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement.

Learn more about Nadia at her website, where you can also find meditations and other free resources.

My guest this week is Dr. Carla Naumburg, a clinical social worker and author with a brand new book called How to Stop Freaking Out: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping Cool When Life Feels Chaotic. This is an excellent guide for young people who are struggling with overwhelming emotions.

Topics we discussed included:

• The defining features of a freak-out
• The balance between acknowledging big emotions and controlling freak-outs
• The difficulty in controlling an active freak-out
• The role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in regulating emotions and behavior
• Fight, flight, freeze, flip-out, and fix as different manifestations of freaking out
• Why freak-outs happen in spite of the costs
• Handling the triggers that can push our buttons
• Checking in with your body as a way to manage emotions
• The power of thoughts, for good and for ill
• The crucial difference between feelings and thoughts
• Whether it’s helpful to express anger through, e.g., punching a pillow

Carla Naumburg, PhD, LICSW, is a clinical social worker and the author of five books, including the bestselling How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, CNN, and Mindful Magazine, among other places.

Carla lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters.

My guest this week is Diane Manser, a long-time high school teacher with an important message that she shares in her recent book, I Didn’t Sign Up for This: One Classroom Teacher’s Journey Through Emotional Fatigue to Personal Empowerment (affiliate link). 

Topics we discussed included:

• What led Diane to become a teacher
• The best and hardest aspects of teaching
• The point at which my guest started to wonder what she had signed up for
• Aspects of teaching that can lead to frustration and burnout
• Some of the needs and expectations that teachers can bring to the classroom
• Embracing organic developments while teaching
• Teaching as a both/and experience that is both rewarding and challenging
• Experiencing of meanness from students
• The emotional elements of being a teacher
• Learning to recognize the familiar reactions we have to certain types of people
• How being a teacher can force a person to grow on a personal level

Diane Manser is a devoted high school English teacher in the Philadelphia suburbs, focusing most of her teaching career in the ninth grade.

She is the founder of Teaching is Emotional, which encourages educational leaders, current teachers, and emerging teachers to support teachers’ emotional strength as they navigate a challenging profession.

Diane loves to be the sunshine in people’s days and to find joy in the simplest of moments.

She relishes summertime at the beach, self-discovery podcasts and non-fiction books, TV watching with her husband, and playing with her kids.

Find Diane online at her website and join her private Facebook group Teaching Is Emotional.

My guest this week is Dr. Scott Rick, an associate professor of marketing and author of a great book called Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships (affiliate link). 

Topics we discussed included:

• Why our relationship with money is often complicated, no matter how much we have
• Where our attitudes toward money and spending come from
• Mental and emotional tendencies that predispose a person to being a tightwad
• The tendency to act more like one’s parents as one moves through adulthood
• My own tightwad tendencies, on the tightwad-spendthrift scale
• The daily suffering that tightwads experience from not spending money
• The lack of distress that spendthrifts feel about spending money
• The tendency to unfairly criticize spendthrifts more than tightwads
• Spendthrifts shopping for things they might need
• The extent to which being a spendthrift or tightwad may be domain specific
• Possible generational or situational effects on spending attitudes and habits
• The experiences that tightwads often miss out on
• Feeling like we have more money when we’re willing to spend it
• The tendency to treat a raise and higher cost of living differently, especially for spendthrifts
• Shopping momentum and what-the-hell behavior among spendthrifts
• Why spendthrifts tend not to learn from their overspending
• Why spending regret tends to be different for material things vs. experiences
• Personality correlates of spendthrifts and tightwads
• Why tightwads and spendthrifts often wind up together in romantic relationships
• Whether it’s better for couples to have joint or separate bank accounts
• The degree of financial transparency that is ideal for couples

Scott Rick, PhD, is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Scott received his PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon in 2007, and he then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Wharton.

His research focuses on understanding the emotional causes and consequences of consumer financial decision-making, with a particular interest in the behavior of tightwads and spendthrifts.

The overarching goal of his work is to understand when and why consumers behave differently than they should behave (defined by an economically rational benchmark, a happiness-maximizing benchmark, or by how people think they should behave), and to develop marketing and policy interventions to improve consumers’ decision making and well-being.

Find Scott online at his website where you can learn more about his work.

My guest this week is philosopher and counselor Dr. Samir Chopra, author of the fascinating new book, Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide (affiliate link). 

Topics we discussed included:

• The extent to which we are experiencing unique levels of anxiety in human history
• Philosophical inquiry that springs from anxiety
• The unconscious cognitive work we do to make the world sensible and navigable
• My guest’s loss of both parents fairly early in life and the consequences on his psyche
• Comparing our experienced misfortunes to the visible misfortunes of others
• The fear of not making the best use of our lives
• Being in the moment as an antidote to continual anxiety
• The Buddhist explanation of why anxiety can persist even when all is well
• Freedom from suffering through seeing the persistence of self as an illusion
• Managing and reducing anxiety vs. living with it
• Viewing anxiety as an ever-present entity in one’s life

Samir Chopra, PhD, is a philosophical counselor and professor emeritus of philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

He’s the author and coauthor of many books, including Shyam Benegal, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, and Eye on Cricket.

His essays have appeared in the Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, Psyche, and other publications.

Find Samir online at his website where you can learn more about his work and contact him about counseling sessions.

My guest this week is Dr. Marla Deibler, a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety. We discussed her excellent new book, The BFRB Recovery Workbook (affiliate link). Check out the publisher’s website where you can download many free worksheets and resources.

Topics we discussed included:

• When a body-focused repetitive behavior becomes a diagnosable disorder
• Common physical consequences of BFRBs
• Behaviors associated with the hair-pulling of trichotillomania, a type of BFRB
• The buildup of hair in the digestive system (trichobezoar) from ingesting hair
• What makes BFRBs so hard to stop
• The rewarding feeling that often accompanies BFRBs
• Fixing something with a BFRB that doesn’t feel quite right
• Why willpower alone is usually not enough to stop BFRBs
• Ambivalence in the process of change: wanting to change and not wanting to change
• The importance of a functional analysis to understand what drives behaviors
• Wanting to jump to fixing a problematic behavior before understanding it
• The importance of awareness for treatment
• Practicing incompatible responses to interrupt the habit of BFRBs
• The relation of BFRBs to OCD and other types of compulsive behaviors
• The important role of acceptance and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• The problems of using punishment to shape behavior

Marla W. Deibler, PsyD, ABPP, is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Board-Certified in Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology, and Founder/Executive Director of The Center for Emotional Health of Greater Philadelphia.

Marla serves on the Faculty of the Behavior Therapy Training Institute (BTTI) of the International OCD Foundation.

She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OCD NJ, the NJ affiliate of the IOCDF, Consultant for the New Jersey Center for Tourette Syndrome, Visiting Clinical Supervisor at the Rutgers University Psychological Services Clinic, and Executive Council member of the ACBS OCD SIG.

She is co-author of The BFRB Recovery Workbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Effective Recovery from Hair Pulling, Skin Picking, Nail Biting, and Other Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.

Find Marla online at her website.

My guest this week is Dr. Alissa Jerud, a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety.

Topics we discussed included:

• The anxiety conditions Alissa treats
• Anxiety related to pregnancy and fertility
• The difficulty of experiencing miscarriage
• My guest’s own experience of two miscarriages
• The conditioned anxiety after the first loss
• Pregnancy as a perfect setup for anxiety
• Dealing with the desire to avoid distressing reminders
• The benefits of facing certain things that are painful
• Talking with others about difficult experiences
• Learning to sit with uncertainty
• Accepting the possibility that things might not go the way we want them to
• Ways that we try to subtly protect ourselves from anxiety or disappointment
• Embracing the good and the bad—opening to all of it
• The benefits and limitations of cognitive techniques for dealing with worry
• The willingness to talk with and listen to those who have experienced miscarriage

Alissa Jerud, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist working in private practice and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

She completed her doctoral training at the University of Washington and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety.

In her private practice, Alissa specializes in exposure-based treatment of anxiety-related disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety, panic disorder, specific phobias, and generalized anxiety.

Additionally, she specializes in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills training, which includes skills in mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness.

Alissa is passionate about helping as many people as possible, not only through her clinical work, but also through her writing and speaking engagements. She enjoys training other clinicians in exposure-based treatments and frequently gives workshops on anxiety, stress, mental health, parenting, and social support to companies large and small.

She especially enjoys helping parents (including herself) learn to accept, regulate, and tolerate their emotions, as well as their children’s.

Find Alissa online at her website.

My guest this week for part 5 of our series on mindful awareness is Ethan Nichtern, author of a new book called Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds (affiliate link).

Topics we discussed included:

• Confidence as trusting we can navigate our own minds
• Making friends with our inner experience
• Equanimity as realizing that everything affects you
• The eight worldly winds or forces:
  • Pleasure/pain
  • Praise/blame
  • Influence/insignificance
  • Success/failure
• Showing up and working with whatever happens to us
• Mindfulness leading one to feel more but suffer less
• The first arrow/second arrow metaphor from Buddhism
• Not pretending something painful is not painful
• The normalness of reacting to the eight worldly winds
• Being willing to admit that we’re having an experience we’re having
• Why hope can be a trap just as much fear is
• The stress that comes with the possibility of good things
• The longing to be OK … in every way … forever
• The incredible power in just knowing what our mind is doing
• Mindfulness as a good way to practice working with the mind

Ethan Nichtern is a renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher and the author of The Dharma of the Princess Bride, One City, and the widely acclaimed The Road Home (affiliate link).

Since 2002, Ethan has taught meditation and Buddhist psychology classes and workshops in New York City and around North America. 

He has lectured at meditation/yoga centers, conferences, and universities including Brown, Yale, and NYU.

Ethan has been featured by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, Vogue, and Business Insider, and has written for the Huffington Post, Beliefnet, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and more. He lives in Brooklyn.

Find Ethan online at his website and find his courses at Dharma Moon.