Doctors go to the doctor, yoga teachers take yoga classes, and yes, therapists go to therapy. In this Taboo Tuesday, best-selling author of the book “Maybe you Should Talk To Someone” and psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb joins Dr. Emily to discuss all things therapy, from why people often wait too long to start, why the stigma around therapy is tough to break, even for therapists, and why our friends don’t necessarily make the best substitutes for help and support from a professional. Listen now to find out how to avoid having your own emotional heart attack.

Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health, and surprising, funny, and shocking conversations on Taboo Tuesdays - because the things we’re most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Follow Lori Gottlieb on Instagram and Twitter 

Read Lori’s book: Maybe you Should Talk To Someone 

Watch Lori’s TED Talk: How changing your story can change your life

Listen to Lori’s podcast Dear Therapist

Read Lori’s column for The Atlantic: Dear Therapist

Thank you for listening! Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(01:31) - Mental health is as important as physical health - “They feel like you have to be in crisis or have a diagnosable condition before you step in a therapist's office, and so they don't do anything about it, and then they land in my office when they're having the equivalent of an emotional heart attack.”

(04:49) - Idiot compassion vs. wise compassion - “A therapist will hold up a mirror to you and help you to see something about yourself that you haven't been willing or able to see.”

(07:36) - On growing as a therapist - “You go and you get trained and you learn the scales and the technique and the form and all of the rules. And then when you get really good at that you start to improvise, and the more you improvise, the more you see who you are going to become as a therapist.”

(11:23) - Stigma and therapy -  “People need support andI think it would be a lot easier if we just acknowledged that human beings are ridiculous, and I mean that in the most compassionate way.”

(18:22) - Embracing our feelings - “Feelings don't go away. They just get stuffed down, but they're still there. And in fact feelings need air, so they just get bigger. So I think the danger is that you feel like you've numbed out your feeling, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”

(25:41) The connection between therapist and patient - “The person's training, the kind of modality that they're using, the years of experience, all of those things definitely matter. So I'm not saying they don't because they do, but what matters most of those factors is the relationship that a person has with their therapist.”

I had this client who was very self critical and could not see that, and I said, "Listen, I want you to write down everything you say to yourself in the course of the next few days. I want you to really pay attention to the voice, listen to the voice, write down everything you say to yourself and then come back next week and we'll talk about it." So she comes back the next week, she's written it all down. She starts to read and she says, "I can't read this. I am such a bully to myself. I had no idea."

Welcome to Taboo Tuesday on the Emotionally Fit podcast! I'm Dr. Emily Anhalt and I've always loved talking about taboo subjects, sex, money, drugs, death, because being a therapist has taught me that the feelings we're most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join me as we flex our feels by diving into things you might not say out loud, but you're definitely not the only one thinking. Quick disclaimer that nothing in this podcast should be taken as professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment because while I am a therapist, I'm not your therapist and I'm not my guest's therapist. This is intended only to spark interesting conversation. Thanks for tuning in!

Welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time. I am such a huge fan of your book. I read it a long time ago and reread it again recently. And as a clinician myself, I just resonated so much with everything that you had to say. Maybe you could start just by introducing yourself, telling us a little bit about yourself and your journey to get to where you are now.

Sure. So I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm a psychotherapist. I have a private practice and I'm the author of the book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, I write the weekly Dear Therapist column for The Atlantic and I recently did a TED Talk, which is related to Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. And I have a podcast called Dear Therapist, which is produced by Katie Couric for iHeart Radio and I am very excited about bringing the things that we talk about in my office to the general public because I think we all need to be talking more about them.

Yes, we could not agree more. I really think it's kind of time for the mental health revolution and this idea that working on ourselves should be not only common, but stigma free and a sign of courage and strength. And it used to be that you would tell someone that you were going running and they'd say, "Running? You're just going to run?" Now it's like, "Oh yeah, of course you're going running." And I think the same is going to be true for therapy pretty soon, where it's like, "Of course you're going to therapy. Why wouldn't you go to therapy?"

Right. And I think it's not just so much about therapy, but it's really about paying attention to our emotional health and realizing how important it is for the quality, not only of our lives, but for the lives of the people around us. And so I think that we treat our physical health differently from our emotional health. So if something feels off in your body, let's say you're having chest pain, you're going to go get it checked out by a cardiologist probably before you have a massive heart attack. But if something feels off emotionally, usually people say, "Well, it's not that bad." Or I don't even know what words to call it because they don't know sort of what... something feels off, but they don't know what's off.

And so they feel like you have to be in crisis or have a diagnosable condition before you step in a therapist's office. And so they don't do anything about it and then they land in my office when they're having the equivalent of an emotional heart attack. That's when they'll come. And at that point they've suffered unnecessarily for however long. And also it's harder to treat at that point because now we're not dealing with preventatively what's going on, but we're dealing with something that we kind of have to dig them out of the hole. So it's like people who don't go for the regular checkups to their doctor and then they come in and they have all of these things going on that should have been addressed earlier and would've been much more easily addressed earlier.

Absolutely. And it's really not... The expectation's not set in our society. From the time you are a literal tiny infant human, you are seeing a doctor every year to show, "Hey, you should be working on this." We don't see therapists every year as kids to make sure things are going well and we should. I mean, think of all of the difficult childhood stuff that could be prevented if there was someone checking in on us every once in a while.

Yeah. And that someone could be anyone, right? It could be any sort of trusted adult. So it doesn't, again, have to be a therapist. It's funny because the title of the book, Maybe you Should Talk to Someone, is of course a nod toward when you say to somebody, "Well, maybe you should talk to someone, a therapist." But to me it means maybe we should all talk more to one another.

I like that distinction a lot. So one of the things that I really identified with when I read your book is that as a clinician myself, I really understand what it's like to try to find a therapist in a community that's pretty small, where everyone kind of knows each other and wanting to keep some separate spaces, but that's almost impossible to do. I'm curious, how did you end up landing with someone that you felt comfortable with and you felt like you could keep things private enough? Do you feel like you just ended up trusting him to hold that separate space for you or did you feel like you really had to get a couple degrees away?

Right. Well, I don't recommend what I do in the book, but I shared what I did in the book because it was very human, I think, which is that I had just gone through a breakup and I was very clear that I wanted to see a male therapist about the age of the person who had broken up with me who was married with kids, my ex was divorced with kids, because I was sure that if that person said to me, "What he did, the way he broke up and the sort of suddenness of it, it was not okay what he did." Then I would feel vindicated. Now, of course, first of all, two things about that. One, a female therapist would've done the same thing that my male therapist did. So this idea... and I of course as a therapist knew better, but you're not thinking as a therapist in those moments. So I was very sure that that's the kind of validation that I needed.

But therapists aren't there to provide that kind of validation. And I talk in the book about the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion. So idiot compassion is what we do with our friends and what my friends did with me, which is, "Yeah, that's terrible. You're right, he's wrong," those kinds of things when we bring our friends issues because they feel like that's how they're supporting us. But it's not really that helpful because often the stories that we're telling our friends are stories we've told many times, meaning different characters, different scenarios, but there's some pattern or something that we always... some blind spot that we have that we aren't seeing. And maybe our friends can see it better, but they're afraid to sort of rock the boat.

It's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. We don't say that to our friends. A therapist will offer wise compassion, which is a therapist will hold up a mirror to you and help you to see something about yourself that you haven't been willing or able to see. So when I went to my therapist and I told him the breakup story, he did not say, "Oh yeah," like what all my friends said, which is, "Yeah, that guy's a jerk. That's terrible. How could he do that?" He said, "Isn't it interesting that you didn't see this coming?" And that threw me for a loop, but that was the best thing that somebody could have said.

Yeah, that pattern matching is so powerful and just having that outside view, I identify with that from both sides of the couch for sure. Personally, I feel like I learned more about how to be a good therapist from my own therapy than I did from any course I took in grad school. I'm curious if you can share what are some things that you pulled from your own treatment that you kind of hold onto as gems when you are sitting with a patient?

Well, it's funny because so many people say that Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is like the book about how to do therapy that they wish they had had in grad school. I really don't think it's about therapy. I think it's a book about the human condition. But I think that what you see are very human ways that we self sabotage and how therapists deal with those. And so you're right, when you go to your own therapy and you watch your therapist help you to see something that you haven't been able to see, you want to take those things and bring them into the therapy room when you are the clinician. So you can see how much I take from my experience with my therapist where he'll do something or say something. And one thing that he just did so well was he brought his whole personality into the room.

So there were specific interventions that were very effective and I definitely brought those into the therapy room, but I made them mine. So you can't do therapy by the numbers, you can't take somebody else's approach and then mimic it because it will come off as inauthentic and scripted. And what you really want in that room is you want to have a really deep, rich, intimate human interaction and you can't do that if you're not being you. So I think what I took most from him was how much he was just himself in the room. And I don't mean that he was sharing personal information or crossing any boundaries, I just mean that I knew I was with a real human being who was having real time human reactions to what I was saying and what was going on between us. So he didn't feel like he's being a therapist right now. And I think that new therapists often come across that way.

Yeah. You know, I read an article a while ago that really resonated with me. It was talking about Winnicott's theory of true self, false self, and just for our listeners, it's this idea that we are sort of born without a self and so we sort of borrow the egos and the selves of the people around us until we're hopefully encouraged to let that go as we developed our own sense of self. But there are a lot of people who kind of hold onto these false parts of themselves that are really other people's needs because we're scared to let them go. And so this article was comparing new therapists to this theory and saying when you become a new therapist, you first kind of have to borrow the therapist personas of the therapists around you, your teachers, theorists, your own therapist and then hopefully over time you start to develop your own style as a therapist and you can let those things go if you're encouraged to be your more authentic self. It sounds like you felt like you could do that.

Yeah, I mean I kind of think of it if you want to be a great pianist, so first you have to learn everything by the book. You have to learn the scales perfectly, you have to learn how to play the classical pieces, just the form. You have to get the technique down, you have to get all of that down and then you can improvise. And that's where the real music comes in. The other stuff, yeah fine, but this is where the music that comes from you emanates. And so I think the same thing about therapy is that you go and you get trained and you learn the scales and the technique and the form and all of the rules, and then when you get really good at that, you start to improvise. And the more you improvise, the more you see who you are going to become as a therapist.

I like that comparison a lot, identify with that. So in this podcast we talk about taboo topics and one of those topics is therapy because there is still a big stigma. It's dropping for sure, but it's there. And I'm curious, as someone who has both been in therapy and is a therapist, do you still feel any of that stigma? Is there any part of you that still feels a little whatever it might be about the fact that you are in therapy or that there are times that you have your own vulnerabilities and need support?

No. I would say not at this point, but certainly earlier, yes. I mean even in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, when I'm looking for a therapist, I'm afraid that even though I'm a therapist and I'm surrounded by therapist, and so I'm in an environment which is probably the least judgemental about therapy, I don't want to tell anybody that I need a therapist because I'm worried that people will feel like, "Well, I don't want to keep referring to her or I don't want to share cases with her because she's going through something and maybe she's not in the right frame of mind for this." Which is ridiculous because most therapists at some point go to therapy and often at different times in their lives, not because they aren't functioning well in their careers or even in their lives, but just because they want to understand themselves better.

Or just because life happens, things happen, there are different life stages. You have a baby, you get married, your parent dies, somebody gets ill in your family, whatever it is, people need support. And I also think that the other thing about the stigma around therapy is that I think it would be a lot easier if we just acknowledge that human beings are ridiculous. And I mean that in the most compassionate way that it's if we could just not take ourselves so seriously and laugh at the situations that we get ourselves in and the ways we tangle things up and the way we really are blind in a lot of ways until we go to therapy and start to see our own role in the situation. My own therapist said to me at one point, "You remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars desperately trying to get out, but on the right and the left, it's open, no bars."

So that's most of us, we sit there shaking the bars and we either don't notice or willfully don't notice that we're actually free, that we're not actually in jail. But the reason that we don't walk around those bars is because then if we are free, with freedom comes responsibility and we can't blame other people for what's not working in our lives anymore. If we walk around the bars, if things don't go the way we want them to, we are responsible for that. And so a lot of people would rather stay in that position of, "This is happening to me, I can't change anything, nothing can be done and isn't it awful," than to walk around the bars and say, "Oh God, now I'm in the driver's seat here." Scary and exhilarating at the same time.

I love that. Let's all have permission to see and laugh at ourselves because we are such interesting pattern makers.

Well, I think that we are so unkind to ourselves and that's why we can't laugh at ourselves. So I don't think people realize that they have this voice in their heads. When I do public speaking, when we're allowed to be around people on a stage, I always ask people, I'll say to the audience, "Who's the person that you speak to most in the course of your life?" And I get a lot of hands for, "It's your partner. It's your best friend. It's your sibling. It's your adult child. It's your parent. It's your best friend," whomever. I get a lot of hands on those. But the truth is that the person we speak to most in our lives is ourselves. That's who we speak to most. We will hear that voice more than we hear anybody else's voice in the course of our life.

And so I had this client who was very self critical and could not see that. And I said, "Listen, I want you to write down everything you say to yourself in the course of the next few days. I want you to really pay attention to the voice, listen to the voice, write down everything you say to yourself and then come back next week and we'll talk about it." So she comes back the next week, she's written it all down, she starts to read and she says, "I can't read this. I am such a bully to myself. I had no idea." And so what we discover is that what we say to ourselves generally is not kind or true or helpful. And so the things that she had on her list were things like, "Oh, you made that mistake, you're so stupid." Which by the way, if a friend had made that same mistake, and not because she would be giving idiot compassion to that friend, but because truly if a friend had made that mistake, she would not think that woman is stupid.

It would never occur to her, she would think, "Oh yeah, she made that mistake." Or "Oh, I looked terrible today." If her friend looked the equivalent of how she looked that day, then she would not even think about it, it would not even cross her mind. So I think that it's so important that we notice that voice, that we notice how unkind we're being to ourselves because nothing good comes from self flagellation. What something good comes from is self-compassion and people feel like, "Well, if I have self-compassion, I won't hold myself accountable." And it's quite the opposite. If you have more compassion for yourself, then you allow yourself the space to be more accountable. You get rid of the shame, you're able to look at what you want to change and then you're able to change it.

There's a quote I love, "Be careful how you talk to yourself because you are listening." I don't think we realize, we take this stuff in, we incorporate it into our identity.

Yeah, we do. And we don't realize that that voice is playing like a bad radio station all the time and we can change the radio station.

Absolutely. You mentioned something a second ago that I always find fascinating, which is this idea about, hey, therapists are in therapy and I know in your book you mentioned we're required as therapists to go into therapy, but actually, in my program at least, we weren't required. It was not... it was strongly encouraged for sure, but it wasn't a requirement to graduate. And as a result, I know several therapists who have literally never been to a single session of their own therapy, which to me is wild. Can you imagine going to a yoga class with a yoga teacher who's never actually taken a yoga class? It's insane that that's how it goes sometimes and I'm curious, what are your thoughts about that? Do you think someone could actually become a decent therapist if they've never done any of their own work?

I don't know how they would do that. I think it would be really hard. It's like if your doctor had never been to a doctor, they would never know what the experience of being a patient is like.

Right.

And I think the experience of being a patient is so unique. Your physician has never sat on that table in a physician's office and had to take off their clothes and put on the gown and do all of that. That's very much what patients have to do emotionally in our offices.

Yeah, it's so vulnerable. How has being a therapist informed how you parent your son? Because anyone who's sort of deep in therapy world understands that there's a lot of parenty stuff that comes up there, your feelings about your own parents, your feelings about your own children, all of that. I'm curious, how has your experience both as a patient and as a therapist, shifted or changed or informed the way that you parent?

Well, I definitely try not to be a therapist with my son, otherwise I would have to move his college fund over to a therapy fund.

Yeah, I'm sure he appreciates that.

But I think that just knowing more about child development and knowing about the importance of our role in helping them to develop their own sense of self. And as a parent, that's really hard because on the one hand, we have more life experience and we feel like we're wiser and on the other hand, just like with our therapy clients, we can't really know what's best for that because we're not living their lives. So when a couple comes in and you think about, "Well, should they stay together? Should they get divorced?" I know what I would do in that situation, but that might not be the right thing for them to do in their lives. And so a lot of times what parents do with their kids is they're very uncomfortable with their kids' discomfort. And so they want to talk them out of that feeling to get rid of not just their kids' discomfort, but their own discomfort with their kids' discomfort.

So a kid will come to them, their kid might say, "I'm sad about this." And the parent will say, "Oh, don't be sad. Hey, let's go to a movie. Let's go have ice cream. Let's go to Disneyland." Or the kid will say, "I'm really worried about this thing that's going to happen." And the parent will say, "Oh, don't be worried. That won't happen. It's okay." As opposed to just three words that would be so useful, "Tell me more." If you can say that to your kid instead of trying to talk them out of their feelings, because what happens is if you try to talk them out of their feelings, they lose the ability to access their feelings. They don't even know what they're feeling. And so they grow up to become adults who don't know what they're feeling anytime they feel sadness or anxiety, which is really useful.

So people often label feelings as sort of negative feelings or positive feelings. So a positive feeling might be joy and a negative feeling might be anger or anxiety or sadness. There are no negative feelings. The point of our feelings is that they're like a compass. They tell us what direction to go in. If you're feeling sad, what is going on that is making you feel sad? If you're feeling anxious, what's not working in your life right now? If you're feeling angry, what boundary got crossed or what happened? So something happened, there was something that did not sit well with you and then you can sit back and say, "Well, what was that about?" And maybe it's something about you or maybe it's something about the other person, or maybe it's something about your history.

But if you just kind of stuff down your feelings and you do what the parent might have done, which is, "Yeah, let me just go eat or drink or mindlessly scroll through the internet," these are the adult equivalents of the parent method. What happens is the feelings don't go away. They get stuffed down, but they're still there and in fact, feelings need air so they just get bigger. And so I think the danger is that you feel like you've numbed out your feeling, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And so it's going to come out in insomnia, in a short temperedness, in relational difficulties in, like I said, the overeating, the under-eating, the drinking too much, whatever it is, whatever distraction you use. And then you're not dealing with the feeling, therefore you're not dealing with the problem and therefore you're not changing anything.

You just said something that I could not love more, which is feelings need air. I love that because there's so many people I think, who believe that the best way to move away from a tough thing is to pretend that it doesn't exist or to... There's so much rhetoric out there about how to be happy, how to be happy all the time. But being happy is not a sustainable feeling state. It's above average and we can't live in the above average place all the time. So this idea of we can let all of our feelings see the light of day and feel them. And I love this idea of asking ourself, "Tell me more."

Yes.

Like if I'm angry, being able to say to myself, "Okay, but why am I angry or what is this? Or what does it feel like in my body?" All of that.

Yeah. I think people don't realize that if they mute one feeling, they mute the others. So if you mute your feelings, you're going to mute all of your feelings. So if you mute the pain, you're also muting the joy.

Yes.

There's a quote at the beginning of Maybe You should Talk to Someone where somebody is proposing that happiness be diagnosed as a mental disorder. But it's about that, what you were saying, that it's kind of like happiness is a byproduct of living your life in a fulfilling way is I think what we're all interested in. But happiness as a goal in and of itself is not anything real. There's nothing to it. It's just, "I want to feel this way," but there's nothing that supports it. What are you doing in your life that feels meaningful? What is your purpose in life? That's where happiness comes from, meaning, purpose, connection, all of those things. And I think if anything, what the book is saying is that we grow in connection with others and that's where people are going to start to move toward those states that they want to feel, the joy.

And I think too, the way you spoke to this idea that sometimes parents try to move kids away from the "negative feelings," I think what that also does is it teaches us that there's nothing good to be had from feeling a bad feeling. But I don't know about you, last time I felt really sad and I leaned hard into it and I put on the sad music and I let myself be really sad, it felt good. It was hard and painful in one way, but it also felt cathartic and beautiful. You feel alive and you're honoring whatever it is that you're sad about. I think we forget that there's something very positive to be gleaned from the full range of human emotion.

Yeah. There's a lot of value in feeling the range of our feelings.

Yeah.

I was listening to what you were saying about what you did with your sadness, and there's something very cathartic about it where you can say, "I welcome you." It's like I have a client who has a lot of anxiety and every time he would feel the anxiety, he would get more anxious. He's like, "Oh no, it's coming back." And I would say, "This is just a piece, a piece of what's going on right now." Feelings are like the weather systems, they blow in, they blow out, the weather changes.

People feel like, "Oh, that feeling's coming in, it's never going to go away." Or "I won't be able to tolerate it." And so I had him welcome his anxiety. So now when he feels his anxiety, he says, "Oh hey, anxiety, my old friend." And that's [inaudible 00:25:16] and it immediately takes away that threat of, "Oh my God, I'm going to be enveloped by this." It's like, "Oh, hey. Hey, welcome. Okay, here you are. I see you. I don't need to spend every bit of my energy entertaining you right now, but hey, I see you, you're here. Take a seat in the room. That's okay."

I think that's so important of a reminder. And it's a reminder I don't think we get in society enough. Everywhere I look, there's some book or some podcast or some article about how to race toward happiness and it just feels disingenuous to me. It's just not the whole story.

Well, that's why I couldn't, you see, in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone how that wasn't the book I was supposed to be writing. I was originally supposed to be writing first the parenting book and then the happiness book and why both of them felt not as useful. They were sort of scratching the surface of something deeper that I was trying to bring to people. I feel like what I do every day as a therapist is something... I get to see something. It's this privilege of being able to see life as it really is, and people imagine that it's really depressing. They think that we're here, people come in and they're crying and it's horrible. It's not like that. And that's what I'm trying to show in the book is that you see the range of the human condition and I think there's so much vitality in that, there's so much heroism in that, there's so much, I would say, richness and meaning and yes, joy. There's so much laughter that happens in the therapy room, too.

Yes. I'm pretty sure I picked my therapist because in our first session she laughed really genuinely at one of my jokes and I felt seen and I said, "Okay, I think we could do this."

Yeah. Well, they say, if you look at the research, the most important factor in the success of people's therapy is the relationship with their therapist. It matters more than the person's training, the kind of modality that they're using, the years of experience. All of those things definitely matter so I'm not saying they don't because they do, but what matters most of those factors is the relationship that a person has with the therapist. And I think people forget it's not like you come in and you're talking about all of these relationships out there. You are, but the therapy room serves as a microcosm for those relationships. The relationship between the therapists and the client is a safe place to kind of practice those things that you do out there that maybe aren't serving you so well. And now you can really see them without shame, without judgment, without self judgment, and adjust the behavior, understand where it's coming from and then go make changes out in the world.

I always say that in therapy you have to be both vulnerable and accountable. And so the vulnerable part is that you're going to take off the mask, you're going to let me see who you really are, and that comes with trust with the relationship, but then there's the accountable part, which is sometimes people will leave and they'll come back the next week and they'll say, "Oh, now I understand why I got into that argument with my partner." And I'll say, "Well, did you do something different?" "Well, no, but I understand it." Well, we like to say the insight is the booby prize of therapy. You can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't make changes out in the world, the insight is useless. That's where the accountable part comes in.

So it's about understanding and gaining insight, but then it's about then doing something with that insight and making changes out in the world. One of my supervisors once said to me, "Before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes." And so I'm not saying there aren't difficult people out there. So when people come in and they're saying, "Well, there's this difficult person." That's right, but how are you responding to that person and what changes can you make? Because you're not going to change what they do, but you will influence what they do by changing your behavior.

You are speaking my language, Lori, I could not appreciate more what you're saying. I'm realizing we're coming to the end of our time so quickly. Time flies talking about therapy for me. One of the things we do on this podcast is the podcast is about several different taboo topics, therapy is one of them, but we also talk about sex, death, drugs, money, all kinds of other things that are taboo. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to send you a list of questions and read through them and they're about all the different taboo topics and see if there's anyone that you would feel comfortable reading out loud and then answering.

Okay. Okay. I'm going to go with, "What do you think happens to us after we die?"

Yes. Love it.

That one is top of mind for me because my father died a few months ago and I was very, very close with him. He was 85 and he had congestive heart failure. And because he had been sick for a while, we had so many conversations before he died about this question of how will I live without him? Which I know sounds strange, to talk to the person who's dying about how you will survive his death, but they were these beautiful conversations and one of the things that we talked about was how he survived his own parents' deaths. So when he was an adult and his parents died, he was very close with his parents as well, and one thing that he said to me was he was talking about how we live on in other people.

So what happens after you die? We believe, my father and I believed, that your body deteriorates, but that everything that you gave to people when you were alive lives on in them. And I see that my son was extremely close with my father, it was such a beautiful relationship, and so I see that there are ways in which my father lives on in me and in my son. And so I think what happens after we die is it's a reflection of how we lived. And if we lived a certain way and if we gave parts of ourselves to people, because we're all dying, as I'm speaking, I'm dying, you're dying, right? Life has a hundred percent mortality rate and if you are a biological creature, you are going to die. There is a limit on how long you will live. And so I think that...

In the book I'm treating this young woman, Julie, who is this newly wed who goes on her honeymoon, she comes back, she has this thing in her breast, she thinks she's pregnant because they wanted to get pregnant right away and it turns out to be cancer. And ultimately she has terminal cancer. And one of the things she said to me was, "Why do we need a terminal diagnosis to do the things that we really wanted do in our lives? Why should it take that?" Because she started doing all these things that she had always wanted to do. And I think that having an awareness of our limited time is really important because we should be thinking about how we are dying and so what can we contribute right now while we're living? How can we live with intention every day? What are our priorities? What are we spending time on that we don't need to be spending time on?

Where are we putting our emotional real estate and do we really want to spend that kind of emotional real estate when we have a limited time here on that particular thing? And what are we contributing to our communities, to our loved ones? What are we leaving here? So I think what happens to us after we die is we live on through the people that we loved. And for some people that's going to be family members, for some people that's going to be their close friends, for some people that's going to be a community that was really important to them. But I think that we do have an impact and sometimes we don't see how deep our impact is or how deep it can be if we are more intentional about it.

What a beautiful sentiment and reminder. A lovely reminder that we should all go live like we're dying because we all are. Thank you so much for your time, for your thoughts, for your perspective, Lori. It's such a pleasure and I really look forward to seeing all that you continue to manifest in the world and do for all people who are just waking up to the idea that we can ask ourselves, "Tell me more."

Oh, well, thank you so much for the conversation and thank you so much for the gift of this podcast.

Take good care and I hope that we'll be in touch.

Yes, thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit, hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. New Taboo Tuesdays drop every other week. How did today's taboo subject land with you? Tweet your experience with the hashtag #EmotionallyFit, and follow me at @DrEmilyAnhalt. Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live, therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com, that's join-c-o-a.com, to learn more, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @joincoa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!