(dramatic music) How much does your pain really matter? Does it have to meet a certain threshold before anybody's going to care? Do you have to have life-threatening instances to be able to say that you've had traumatic experiences? And how might that be shaping your relationships today? In this episode, if I wish you knew, I am joined by Teal Swan, and brilliant, brilliant existentialist who talks extensively about human relationships and what we need to do to fix that trauma that is stopping you from finding real happiness. She and I also dissect, and pretty brutally, I should add, the therapy complex in America and how it's actually preventing people from getting better in many cases. Let's jump right in and have this conversation. Teal, I'm so excited for this conversation. I have been watching your material for years. Most of my coaching clients have brought me your information and asked me about it. Most of my people in my private community bring your stuff in and share it around the whole community and ask about it. So you have unknowingly been a part of my work for quite a long time with everybody that I work with. So it is wonderful to finally meet you face to face like this. Could you please tell all of the people in our audience, the few of them who don't know you yet, what is something that you wish they knew about you and what you do? - I wish people knew that I have taken it upon myself, a personal mission to figure out the answer to suffering, human suffering specifically, and how to solve it. So what I'm doing on a weekly basis, daily basis really, but most of the time people see what I'm creating weekly, what I'm doing on a weekly basis is answering to human suffering, whatever that might look like at a given time. - I love that about you, to be honest with you. The passion for alleviating and reducing or eliminating even human suffering as much as possible is phenomenal. That's something that's been echoed in my heart. So I was really thrilled to see somebody in the world making the impact that you are. And you are making quite an impact. I've seen you across all the platforms. It seems like everyone these days is talking about Teal and it's a good thing. We need more of that out there. One thing I'd like to dive into immediately and get your take on is the current state of the American therapy industry. Could you perhaps maybe share some of your thoughts on that or I'm welcome, I'm ready to go first if you're not. - I mean, I really struggle with this because on one hand it's like you wanna kind of like work with the people who are in this industry that really do care about people and who, to be quite honest with you, don't have good enough tools for helping people. But it's like at the same time there's so much about it that is not working for people and that is so backwards and it is so wrong that it's like you get in there wanting to collaborate and then you just end up wanting to sort of like burn the entire system to the ground to be quite honest. I mean, there's no accessibility. I just feel like we keep talking about, oh, go get therapy, but in America that's not a thing that people can do. I mean, if you wanna walk down that train of what a disaster the insurance companies are and what people do and don't have access to and we're living in a country where the great gas light if you want my honest truth is that we're this opulent country where everyone has enough. That is not the case. The vast majority of people do not have the resources to access genuine help especially for mental and emotional stuff and they don't even have enough for physical stuff and that seems to be the priority. But even that we don't have access to. I mean, I remember the first time that I was overseas in Europe like years ago and I realized what life was like for people that actually genuinely had access to help for health concerns regardless of whether those are physical or mental. I started crying and it's just gotten worse since I've been traveling more and more. So, I mean, our system is completely broken. It is set up for the best interest of the maybe income generator corporations on this planet. It's not set up for the best interest of the people themselves. And not only that, I mean, very well-meaning people get into these industries and they train on old information that is completely outdated and they train in processes that are allowed but don't really work and there's so many misconceptions and anybody who's wanting to come in with a radical new approach is like instantly demonized. So right now it's like we're in this time period where so many of the people who trained as traditional therapists who hold licenses or having to let go of those licenses just to do the right work with the people that they are seeing. - And that was me. That was me. I was a licensed manager, family therapist, six years to get my master's degree, right? Tens of thousands of dollars and I was the fortunate one at only $50,000, $60,000 in student loans to take on a master's degree. And then an additional three years of training and apprenticeship to get a license, nine years. But here in this country, they say, right, nine years. But they say, oh, mental health is a priority in this country. We want to give everybody access. It's not. I launched into a clinic because my passion was helping at-risk families, especially with trauma, very much like yourself, trauma and attachment were my two specialties. I worked at an at-risk low-income kind of clinic where the county paid us some tiny pittance that I couldn't even afford to really feed my family. I had to work a second job on top of my therapy job full-time. I had to work a second job just to be able to feed my family. And I provided care at-risk families in this and I couldn't even make ends meet. So everybody else, once somebody leveled up enough as a therapist, they left to go find anywhere else. So the only people available to people at this level because the county was paying for it, the taxpayers were paying for it, was the therapist who either couldn't get another gig or a therapist who were just barely out of school once they got education and experience they had to leave. It was a horrible program. And that opened my eyes to just what you said. There was no accessibility for real good care for the people who need it most. - Yeah. Well, and then those of us who give out this kind of information for free, really wanting people to have it are now put in a position where it's like we're threatening the career trajectory of people who have gone to school for so many years. So it's like we're all at each other's throats, even though at the end of the day, I mean, most of us want the same thing, which is for people who not feel bad, you know? - Right, at the end of the day, people like yourself. I mean, you're YouTube channel alone. You give away thousands and thousands and thousands of hours that people could consume to get better, to heal, to grow. You are doing more for the average person than the therapy complex here in America is. Just you yourself as a creator. So thank you for that. But as you've highlighted, it's not the individual therapists that are really necessarily usually the problem. They're usually good-hearted individuals who are trying, but they're ham-strung by a system. I recall when I wanted to expand to do online coaching beyond just the one state where I was licensed, my therapy board said, no, anything you do, any coaching you do will be treated as therapy and all the rules will apply to you and all the penalties will apply to you and everything will apply to you. So I was not allowed to help anybody. I had to give up that nine years, I had to give up those credentials to be able to go help people. What? - Well, I'm really glad that you did. - Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It was helpful having people like you out there in the field saying like, look, I can teach, I can guide, I can help. It's been phenomenal, not only for me, but for many other practitioners who are leaving the industry to try to make a living, number one, but also just to help people across the planet and really get good information out there. You are helping lead that in many capacities. So thank you for that work that you do. - They're coming after me. - I was really. - They're coming after me. - I know they are. I know they are, it's crazy. What have you seen? As far as them coming after you, what are they doing? - Oh man, like, I mean, basically right now, I'm trying to get this new process, the completion process through clinical trials and I am being blocked at every single juncture because they don't want any new revolutionary ideas coming from somebody that does not hold a traditional therapy license. And anybody who does hold those licenses, even psychiatrists, like really, really upstanding psychiatrists who want to be the ones to fund these studies and to run them are being blocked by the boards that are in charge of whether they get to do that or not. So it's like running into red tape, red tape. Also, I was completely shocked by this in the very beginning of my career. I used the word social anxiety when I was discussing something with somebody on a one-on-one call like this, but it was a real call that was being recorded and that was turned into the state and the state that I live in find me for practicing therapy without a license because social anxiety is something that is listed in the DSM and I'm not allowed to use that word if I'm not a licensed therapist. - Man, I wondered, so I was checking out your completion process, it looks amazing. By the way, everybody at home, you need to check her work out. But the completion process, you were interviewed and someone said, well, what is this? And you said, well, I am trying to help people and fix, you said some words, but I remember you used the phrase post-traumatic stress disorder and inwardly I went, she can't claim to fix that because they'll attack her, they'll send a squad to her house if she does that. And I know from my work in the field that we definitely can fix trauma in many better ways than the system typically allows for that to happen. There are definitely pieces that need to be worked on and even post-traumatic stress disorder itself, it is such an arbitrary threshold that they've created of you only have PTSD, if you go over this threshold, anything under that, you have nothing, you're just whining and complaining. And it's this whole pathway from attachment all the way up to absolute PTSD. Everything goes that way. How are you getting around that? Because that must be an uphill battle for you to be able to help people. - Lawyers, we're very expensive lawyers. I mean, I'm in the position where it's like every single thing that I do and everything that I create, I have to like try to find every single loophole to make it so that I'm within the bounds of what's not gonna get me into serious amounts of trouble and always trying to figure out how to thread that eye of the needle, basically. It's a nightmare, it's one of the worst aspects in my career, honestly. - I hear you loud and clear. And thank you for doing it because if you weren't, they would be stomping on all the rest of us so hard. I've been curious about how that's gonna play out as my own platforms get bigger and bigger. I work on attachment theory and it's something so far that psychology hasn't been able to really thread 'cause they don't care about it, right? I went through graduate school, I remember them telling us, they briefly touched on attachment theory because I was a marriage and family therapy focus. And they said, there's this thing, if you're a baby, it might impact you, it's called attachment. If you're an adult, it does not matter. The only people with attachment issues have personality disorders. Those are unfixable, they go over here in this box, we forget about them and we exclude them from humanity. And if you have attachment issues, that's it. So don't worry about attachment theory, it's worthless. That was what they said. And as I've traveled the United States, as I've traveled Canada, as I've spoken to people throughout the European continent, Australia, I keep hearing the same thing from other practitioners, they didn't teach us attachment theory, they told us it wasn't important. They said, learn the diagnoses in the book, this is all insurance is gonna cover, and learn the specific CBT methods to treat those that you can put in a treatment plan. That was what every practitioner I've spoken to has been encouraged to do. And I know that when I went through my own licensure process for three years, I started in California, I moved to a different state. In California, you had to pay, I think it was eight to $10,000 out of your own pocket to get supervision. The group super visions that you tried to pack into were eight, 10, 12 people deep. You were lucky if you even got to speak to a supervisor. California is one of the few states in the United States that requires therapists to actually go through therapy themselves to make sure that you're gonna be proper, you're not gonna be damaged, yes, yes. And then you have to go through 4,000 hours of licensure to have work to be able to do this. Much of it, a lot of it unpaid or massively underpaid. And all of this, it just weeds you out. So they are churning out therapists who then go into the field or just textbook academically trained, as you said, on old outdated information or not information at all. And they're trained to apply the insurance model to everything and then work on it with what they've been told. And then they burn out, they wash out of the system, they can't handle it, they can't feed their families. We have marriage family therapists have the highest divorce rate of all kinds of therapists for a variety of reasons. It's the system is falling apart. I would love to hear more, please, about how you are approaching trauma. I know that you don't just fix when you say trauma, it's not just, I was in combat. I experienced SA, these horrible painful nightmare experiences we would imagine of that's trauma and anything below it is fine. You handle every layer of trauma from childhood, what we would call attachment issues, all the way up to the most extreme stuff. What are you seeing? What are you doing in your work for the people at home? What are you doing to help them with that trauma response, those trauma pathways in their brain? - Well, first and foremost, I'm trying to change the way that people think about trauma. I think that's the most important aspect because most of us in our adult life, we have no idea why it is that so many things in our adult life are not going well. And I'm telling you that it is overwhelmingly the case that it is always traced back to some kind of trauma that you've experienced usually before age about like 8, 9, 10. And these formative years where we're essentially experiencing the world primarily through felt perception, we're experiencing these situations where we're created distress, where we can't bring resolve to that distress. And so this is what I'm hoping that people will adopt as their new definition of trauma, is distress without resolve. When we go through something distressing that we are not able to resolve the system, the human system, we could call it our consciousness, if you would like to, we could call it our psyche, it depends on who we're talking to. It does an interesting thing where it adapts to that stressor, essentially. But that adaptation does not usually benefit us in the long run. And it's that adaptation primarily, which is causing a lot of these effects in our adult life that are making things not okay. So let's go back to this definition of trauma so people understand it better. Distress without resolve could be something like, you know, on the extreme end where we would normally look at trauma, something like I got rushed when I was five, my uncle, and ever since then, I've had huge issues with sexuality. Maybe I've become hypersexual. I mean, it depends on what the adaptations were that that person took on. All the way down to, you know, it's that time that I was in the grocery store and my parents said no to getting something and then there was no reasonable explanation I could give myself as to why the answer was no. And so I made it personal. And because that particular, you know, distressing situation meant to me that I was worth nothing. Now I started adopting myself to feeling like I was worth nothing in XYZ way. And now operating in the world in that way has ruined my social life. It's made it so I have not taken opportunities that I should have taken. And now here we are in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and we're living a pretty miserable existence based off of these adaptations that we made to these traumas where there was nobody to really sit there with us and to process through emotionally what was happening and to help us construct a meaning that didn't destroy our lives and, you know, helped us with some kind of empowering step where we could take that thing, that unwanted thing that happened and kind of weave into the tapestry of who we are so that we become more not less. Ideally, obviously, when these types of situations occur, we would be able to work through the traumas so that there was resolve to whatever distress that we were experiencing but that it's just not the case for the vast majority of us. Not only that, we live in a society right now that is normalized to all kinds of trauma and we don't even, we won't look at it as trauma, we won't acknowledge it as distressing because we've decided that it's normal but, you know, in my position, this just drives me banana sandwich 'cause I'm like, you know what? They used to say the same exact thing in, you know, the early 1700s, 1600s when it was just completely normal in places like Europe to send every baby, every baby, okay? It doesn't matter, the class would be handed off to a wet nurse and if it was a wet nurse who had a baby, she'd hand her baby off to an even poorer wet nurse. So we've got like this, this chain of absolute horror happening with infants dying all over the place but if you would have brought up the idea that it's a huge trauma and a problem to separate it like an infant from its mother, especially within the first few hours of birth, everyone would have laughed you off the stage. So for somebody who's kind of awakened to the amount of distress that we're causing just through the normal stuff that we do every day, it's really hard to kind of walk around this world and be like, oh, and that's the ripple effect of that and that's the ripple effect of that. There's like, I mean, sometimes you just wanna hide. But what I'm trying to do is to reverse this process of fragmentation within the psyche that occurs as a result of trauma and these adaptations which I think a standard therapist would most likely call maladaptations to the distress that a person experiences so that they can have a adult life experience that is the opposite of whatever negative thing that they're experiencing currently. So one of those things that I've done is create the completion process which is I think a standard therapist would call it a form of regression therapy where you selectively are using triggers to go back into whatever root memory is being caused or is causing I should say this triggered reaction state in a person or causing the unwanted experience that they're having in their current adult life. - You know, it's fascinating, I love this. I'm gonna ask you about that regression therapy thing piece here in a moment 'cause I agree, I've looked at some of the methods and they're fascinating. The research is absolutely clear. It completely supports everything that you've said of that trauma aspect growing through our society and no one talking about it. The research shows that the baby boomers had secure attachment at a rate of about 65% from what we've been able to determine and about 35% insecurely attached as kids. The millennials in Gen X and Gen Y, it was 50/50 if you were securely attached or not. And now with Gen Z adults, the best we can find is 65% are insecurely attached, 35% are to secure. The numbers are going absolutely in the wrong direction. And as you know, attachment issues, they're an adaptation to a dangerous, painful environment, to growing up with fear and on supportive systems. So the research is 100% backing up what you're saying. Is that, it's not surprising to you in the least, I'm sure. - It is surprising because when you say that the research shows that there's that many securely attached adults, I'm like, where? - One in three is shocking. I hear that, I hear that. I hear that a lot to be honest with you. People are astounded that there's that many. I think that they're invisible. They tend to pocket off. They get married pretty quick. They don't get on the internet much. Or if they do, it's to learn things, it's to do things. They don't pop into the big forums and complain a lot. It's, they are so segmented off. I talk about like two different populations that don't even signal to each other properly. Blue fireflies and red fireflies. And they can't even see each other's signals. They are invisible to each other. Those two populations. So I'd love to talk about regression. The regression pieces are what you term regression pieces. I'd love to talk about some of that work. I've taken a completely opposite approach. Everybody who knows me, I am very behaviorist. I tend to be here and now. Okay, let's look at what was, let's focus on here and now and then let's build a plan for forward. So I haven't myself dive much into the regression pieces and looking at memories and pieces like that. Some people come to me because they say, "I don't want to look at that. I want to fix it now. Let's move forward." And I'm like, cool, let's do that. But some people absolutely adore. They need to get that information about those memories, that understanding. They need the understanding before they can move forward, which is why I'm glad they have people like you. Could you please talk to me a little bit? Why did you choose that aspect of the regression of the memory pieces? Talk to me there. - Well, it was very intuitive. I mean, I'm approaching this not from a standard psychology angle, but from a spiritual angle. And I was doing work with people that would be more comparable to what shamans for thousands of years have been calling Sol retrieval. So obviously being born with a range of these very strange abilities. I was actually working on people at a very young age, doing very strange things with them on an energetic level, where, I mean, it sounds funny for somebody who's not really been part of this world, but I could join in with people's memories. So when I would actually go do that, I would go through a whole experience of pulling them out of these memories. And this was all this very intuitive type of experience at first, and it never really occurred to me that a person could do any of that type of stuff that I was doing for them for themselves. But it's much more compelling, obviously, because, I mean, if somebody's limited to what a shaman can do for them, then A, that's not very empowering, and B, I mean, who has access to that, right? So what happened is, is that I was approaching a lot of this from the perspective of an intuitive, from the perspective of a spiritual guide, and from the perspective of a medical intuitive, first and foremost. And there's this mentality, I feel like, it's very different when you're in like the, I should say the sort of natural pathic circles versus the allopathic medical circles, which is that your body is never against you. And that is something that I have a lot of proof for, my own experience, and a lot of the information I have about this universe. And so, I started to think about triggers, because the attitude towards triggers when they occur, especially when you're dealing with somebody who's got, like, complex PTSD, a lot of those triggers are approached as like, this is against you. It's something that's interfering with your life every day, and so we have to find some way to get rid of the trigger. So I started thinking to myself, you know, the body really doesn't do anything against itself. That includes things like autoimmune disorder. So, if the body is getting some signal to do this, or is giving a signal to the brain that it needs something, like what is the point of a trigger? And it hurts me. - Right, and really quick, this is true, because BF Skinner said the organism is always right. There is always a purpose, it's not nonsensical. So what you're saying, 100% with you, please go ahead. - Oh, good. So, basically, when I started to look at triggers, it started to become very obvious to me that the being is trying desperately to get your attention with triggers. And it's trying to draw your attention to what is unresolved. So instead of taking this approach, which was the standard approach most people took, which is to try to get rid of the triggers, I was like, that's just a symptom. Not only is it a symptom, it's a very important symptom. It's basically with dragging you towards what needs your attention and focus and resolution. So I started to aggressively work with it instead of against it. And what I noticed is that triggers act like a wormhole, like this big open wormhole, the more intense the emotion, the better actually, back to whatever memory is not resolved, back to that distress. So, I was watching how dissociative states are, in fact, what is causing a lot of the splitting and the fragmenting within the consciousness of a person. And I was like, how do we reverse the process of dissociation? Dissociation is the choice to not participate in whatever it is you're experiencing. So I'm like, you know, an interesting method for trying to reverse dissociative states, which I was struggling with myself immensely when I got away from my abusive situation, is to actually consciously choose back into it. Because the element of free will, I choose to see this, I choose to experience it, I choose to feel it, I choose to understand it, and I choose to accept it. Accept it doesn't mean find approval for it. It's literally just, I swallow in my system that this is what occurred, right? To consciously go through that re-experiencing process is to really understand the self and to have like the greater context for so much of what you just subconsciously experience as a child. And then, I mean, from that point on, it switches, like the process that I created, switches from a re-experiencing process where you're choosing to reverse the dissociative state to a resolution of whatever trauma occurred. That's where we become aware of those deep needs that were not met. You become aware of what, almost like the negative aspect of what it is that you went through becomes crystallized in the consciousness you are in a deep understanding as to why that was so distressing for you. That puts you in the position to bring in all kinds of resources through visualization, through felt experience of whatever it is that was needed at that time for the sake of resolve. And the positive thing about going through it this way is the sky's really the limit for that. Like I'll give you an example. Let's say that in your childhood, you were so incredibly attached to a sister and that sister went off to college. Here in the physical world, there's constraints as far as somebody's siblings going to college with them. But what is this kid supposed to do if they're stuck at home with two parents that are disconnected and the only person they had that attachment to is their sister? There's now this open door that we have to create all kinds of scenarios that would bring whatever that child and that particular circumstance needs. Now, the child and the circumstances really acting as a carrier for that deep vulnerability that the person is experiencing. So the person themselves naturally knows and comes up with what the resolution needs to look like for them. And then there are several more steps to the process that serve the function of creating a cognitive distance between what happened and what is. And then taking forward that, well, I know what I'm needing and I know what healing looks like for me and then practically applying that to somebody's life. So before we look at our trauma in a deep way, we don't really know what it is that we need. It's like crazy when you bring people through a re-experiencing of the trauma so they can really intellectualize it. People are able to say, oh my gosh, like I never got that understanding. Now I understand why I'm so triggered in every conversation where it feels like somebody doesn't understand me. I just pop off and my anger is at level 12 and I don't even know consciously that I'm what I'm asking for is understanding, right? So now it opens the door. We just say, well, here I am in my adult life, I'm 30. What could I do in order to get that understanding? What circles of people could I spend time with? Do I need to get a therapist who has the capacity to provide that understanding and validation, which some of the people in my life will not do for me? Am I gonna share myself more? Because if I've got an understanding trigger, chances are I'm just gonna shut down and not really think about how to communicate myself to other people. We now have this big, wide open door for the resolutions that could be brought about and applied in our life right here and now. And I feel like when a lot of us go through traumas and problems, it's like we use this word healing. It's kind of thrown out there, but nobody knows what the hell that means. It's one of my favorite games to play. I walk up to somebody and I say, okay, what's healing? And I mean, nobody can answer it for me. And what's so powerful about processes like this is that you don't need to know objectively what healing looks like for you because it's revealed to you in the process of seeing what was missing and what is needed in order to have some kind of resolve. And it becomes very straightforward. I wasn't understood, I need understanding. I didn't have that security. I would really like to develop security. And now all of a sudden, the person has that trajectory and that path to walk down towards whatever it is that they specifically need based on their specific trauma. - I love this. You're following very much in the footsteps of Carl Jung and his vision. That he had himself as he built his own system. And he's, for everybody out there listening at home, Carl Jung, I consider him the healthier, better alternative to Freud that we should have had that psychology should have been built on, but it was not. I'll ask you this question, but I may give you context here upfront. I myself, similar path with yourself. By the time I was age 12, I was counseling the other kids in the neighborhood in my low-income neighborhood in a bad California city in our California city. I was counseling the other kids, trying to walk them away from life-ending decisions, self-harm, things like that. And when kids would be devastated, afraid, hurt, and they would bring the kids, bring them to Adam. And I would try to help that kid. I'd help this next kid. I was up all night, every night. Every time somebody needed something, I was there helping them. By the time I turned 18, 19, people asked, "What do you want to do for a living?" And I said, "I don't know, I just need to keep helping people." And someone finally steered me toward therapy and said, "Well, maybe you could get proper training." And I went, "Someone would teach me how to do this?" And that's what launched me into training was I'd been doing it like yourself. I'd been through that battle myself for so long. I also had attachment issues pretty severely myself growing up for a variety of reasons. And I had to fix those in myself virtually alone with no one to guide me in that. And that's what launched me on wanting to tell everybody in the world about attachment and how that needs to be healed. So my question to you is, and I think I know your answer because I snuck a peek at your website and some of the answers on there, and they're fantastic. So what do you think? What do you think is the importance of having a guide, a mentor, a therapist, a coach, a whoever who has been there through the experience versus someone who is academically trained? What is the reason it's important to have that personal experience? - It's a completely different perspective. Absolutely different perspective. I mean, there is no way that somebody can speak to somebody who is in a certain position unless they've gone through it. I'm not gonna say that they can't help it all because they absolutely can. Like me, for example, if I limited myself to only people who've been through severe ritual trauma, there's no way in hell I'd get help anywhere and people can provide all kinds of assistance. It's just that when it comes to like an expert who is hired to answer to a specific issue and they're like, oh, I've never dealt with that, what it always feels like on the other side is like somebody's yelling from the top of a mountain about a meadow they've never been to. And so they're like, go left, left makes more sense, but you're sitting there turning left like, but there's literally an entire herd of rhino that way. And they're like, well, those are just in your mind. You're like, I'm pretty sure it's not in my mind. It just misses like every time, right? And the difference is when somebody's actually been through something, they know exactly what they're saying that's gonna be a hit or a miss based off of experiencing what it is that you are currently experiencing. It's like a completely drastically different perspective. It's so different, I can hardly even come up with words as you can tell. - I hear you loud and clear. No, it's very true, if I could be candid, so I work with a lot of coaching clients right now. And many of them, when they begin their journey of fixing attachment, many of them have not had that warmth that oxytocin bonding feel. They haven't experienced much serotonin in their relationships, they're cold, they're isolated. They've been mechanical, they've been unhappy. And I tell them, hey, okay, here are the steps. And then I say, just so you know, when you start experiencing this bonding, it's gonna feel weird. And they go, what do you mean? I say, it will feel weird. It's gonna feel like your brain's going crazy. You're gonna want things you've never wanted before. You're gonna feel like your mind is pregnant and you're craving ice cream and pickles and you won't know what you're like, why am I wanting to spend time with these people? Why am I having these feelings? Why am I crying? Why am I happy? And you're gonna be suspicious and scared? And I said, it's okay, I've been there. Everyone who's done this has been there. I think that's the benefit of working with someone who has been there. When you're working with people, guiding them through trauma, what are some of the weird things that they should know for everybody at home? What are some of the weird things they're going to experience? Maybe good things, but weird as they do this healing work. - I'm limited to good things, I don't know. - No, no, it doesn't have to be limited to good things, but some of the weird things that only someone like yourself who's been there would really know this. - Identity crisis. - Ooh, good one, tell me about it. - The reason being that primarily our entire personality system is set up on whatever kept us safe in whatever specific environment we were in. So when you go to heal a lot of these traumas, what happens is that the authentic self that is kind of hiding underneath those adaptive strategies and those ways of interacting with the world so as to keep the self safe are what comes forward. And so it'll feel like you don't know yourself very well. You're gonna have an authenticity crisis, basically. That's what happens when you work on trauma. And I mean, that's why it sort of comes up and answers the question around weirdness is 'cause when you get used to yourself being a certain way for so many years, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh wait, I don't relate to that anymore. Oh, I don't even know how to dress. Like I used to know how to dress, but I don't even know how to dress anymore. Do I even like the place that I live? Normally I would react that way, suddenly I'm not reacting that way. It's almost like you've had a personality change except for you don't feel, it's not like you feel like you are a different person. It's just all of a sudden you're coming across in a different way and you're questioning your desires and everything. I mean, it's like your whole life comes under question. And that's very difficult. I think it's very difficult for some people to go through. Many because most of us have built our life honestly on these types of things. So like let's say that you grew up in a situation where the way that you kept yourself safe was by just becoming almost codependent to everybody around you and you're just a people pleaser. Okay, well what happened when that person came around and asked you to marry them? Being a people pleaser, are you the person who was like, no, I can't do this or we were like, okay. Now what, you're like four years down the path of having married them, you've got a kid or two and all of a sudden you're like, I don't know if that was an authentic answer for me. I don't know if I even like this person anymore. I mean, your whole life can fall apart honestly as a result of doing trauma healing. But the thing is that it's one of the things where it gets difficult so as to get better, you know? I have never met anybody that has gone through that storm and overhauled their life as a result of doing this type of work and been like, oh, I regret that I did that. Everyone's like that. Thank God, but in the inter-rama and nobody can say that that's okay, you know. - When somebody's rebuilding, it does. When someone's rebuilding that identity, what do you do? What do you, even a better question, Teal, how do you identify an identity? How do you define somebody's identity? How do you define your identity? What is the core piece that tells people who you are or tells you who you are? - Oh, that is too complex of a question. The reason is that when we're defining boundaries, right? Which is really how a boundaries nothing more than you defining yourself from the rest of the world, right? I love to play this game with people. I play a game where I say, what's your favorite ice cream flavor? And they'll say something like, you know, strawberry and I go, mine is coffee, guess what? That's a boundary. It's literally nothing more than just defining yourself as what you are in the world. And that is made up of so many different things. It's made up of the way you think and feel towards every subject and with the sun. It's made up of your feelings. It's made up of your preferences, your versions. So it's like the picture of who a person is, is this kaleidoscope of things. It can't be narrowed down to like this one thing is how you know who you are. It's just as you're moving through life, if you're really doing so consciously, you're examining the why behind everything you're doing. And a lot of that reveals, you know, who you really are versus not. You know, why did I say that? Why do I have this opinion? When you start to go down the rabbit hole on those types of things, you're like, oh, so if the reason that I'm doing that is this, is it really me? Or is it, you know, what I'm doing to try to stay socially safe, for example? And you can't help but answer those questions and end up at, this is my core. It's interesting because it starts to develop as this feeling of internal strength, kind of. Even where at the perimeter, you might be feeling shaky and a little bit like you're falling apart sometimes in the world that you're engaging in. It's like you can't really fall apart because you've got that sense of solidness that you never had before. So it's like, you know, defining who you are is really a huge process. That's the result of questioning everything. (laughs) - I like this. You sound like if I had to classify you and put you in a box somehow, I think I would, the term I would use so far is existentialist. Would you consider yourself an, yeah, okay. I hear you, that's a good one. I would be much more of a behaviorist of just, let's get the job done, here's where you're at. And yet, and yet, your answer just made me incredibly happy because what you're talking about is what behaviors are you doing and why are you doing them? Making sure that your core behaviors are true to the self that you want to be, it all comes down to that behavior. So I think that you and I can be at the same place and from different angles and be very, very happy together there. So thank you, that's good. Talk to me a little bit, please, if you would. What are some of the opening steps for everybody at home? Who's maybe experiencing some trauma pieces? Again, it doesn't have to be for everybody at home. I'm gonna remind you, this is, as Teal and I will both say, trauma is not, you know, I watched my entire family get run over by a truck and now I am sad. It's, it can be everything where you've taken wounds. It can be all of those painful moments where you then said, how do I make sure this pain doesn't happen to me again? And you didn't come up with an answer, right? All of those moments where you felt, as Teal said beautifully, where you felt distress, where you felt where you were helpless, you could not resolve it. Where are those in your life, think about those pieces? And then Teal, for those people at home right now who are thinking of those moments where they felt helpless, they felt distress, they couldn't resolve it. What are some core opening steps? And I know you're the person to ask 'cause you've got your process for this. - Well, the first thing that I would say before I get into this is that it's very important for people to understand that even somebody like myself who's experienced some of the worst things that you can experience will tell you that it's really interesting how even the things that you might be tempted right now to label as little, you know, almost like judges and minimize compared to other people's traumas are the most serious things. Like I can't tell you how many times when I do trauma work with myself, you know, it's not that umpteenth time that I was raised by a perpetrator. It was that time that, you know, my family forgot me at the grocery store. And it's like I go back to that trauma 800 times in a row because that was far more damaging. So I really want people who are watching this to get it into their system, that this sort of comparison thinking that we have with trauma, we need to throw it out the window because even the things that you're judging right now is like very little and not a big deal can completely wreck your life. Okay, so having said that, I think one of the first and most powerful things that people can do when it comes to looking down the throat of healing their own trauma is to just think back with three examples of situations in their life where they felt distressed. These are situations that are where we're bad. They don't feel good. You have a negative memory about them. And then with each one of these, you know, each three, you're going to answer what you made that mean when it happened or what decisions you made as a result of it. And then with that, you're going to go to the next step, which is based off of what I made that mean and what decisions I made about it, what changed. And this is going to be like, almost like physical and behavioral. So I'll give you a flow chart, something like this. I was four years old, my dad left the family. That's the distressing situation. What did I make it mean? I made it mean that I'm not valuable enough for somebody to stay with. I made it mean that I'm all alone in this world. So based off of that meaning or those decisions or beliefs, basically that you made, you know, maybe one of the decisions, let's do a decision, a decision I could have made as a result that would be something like I had to perform in order to keep people. Okay, so then you just, then the next column, what did I do as a result of that or what changed as a result of it? I might say I became a class clown. I realized that by being funny all the time, people would want to be engaged with me and I figured out that that was my way of kind of staying on the treadmill, rushing towards relationships and trying to pull them towards me because I was so terrified they were going to leave. So I became funny, I became the class clown. I stopped being somebody who could actually express who I was and how I felt when I was sad because I actually now looking back, think that when I was sad, maybe that's why daddy left. Okay, so in my relationships, this might be what changed, in my relationships because I couldn't express when I was sad, I ended up feeling completely alone in my relationships. There was a lack, a severe lack of intimacy and I noticed myself that anytime somebody brought up something sad, I would just immediately joke it away, which made people feel like I was better off than I was. Another behavioral thing could be something like, you know, everybody's going to leave, I stopped getting really close to people. I noticed that when I felt like anybody with withdrawal, I would not initiate any contact with them anymore. So I stopped being a person that initiates in relationships. Okay, so that flow chart, if people will sit down and actually do that, just with three traumas will show you, you know, really what's happening in all of our lives, which is we go through these distressing events, we develop beliefs because of it and we make decisions because of it and those drastically altered the trajectory of our life and it's important to put those dots together, which we're not doing. Most of us are walking through our lives, you know, totally oblivious to the way that those two dots connect, you know, the ways we're behaving and the things that we're doing in the trajectory our life took as a result of this thing that we experienced back in the day. So that step is really, really, really a powerful one for people to really grasp this concept of how even the smallest of traumas are, you know, are affecting our current life. That's the first thing that I would say. The second thing that I would say is, we have got to become better at feeling than staying obsessed with feeling better. Now, I am saying this is a person who's taken it on as a personal mission to resolve human suffering regardless of whether I succeed or not. That means I'm somebody who wants everybody in this world to feel awesome. But even I will tell you that one of the main reasons we don't feel awesome is because we have such an insane resistance to emotions. So as people, we need to learn how to be completely and unconditionally present with the way that we feel in the given moment. We need to learn that these emotions that we have are the carriers of information and most especially of personal truths. So it is the practicing of sitting with emotions and the experiencing of emotions that these types of personal truths rise into the conscious mind that then can inform us how we feel based on how we feel, what we're needing, what direction is right for us or wrong for us, it informs us actually of the correct steps to take. And that only happens when we have this deep presence with our emotion as opposed to suppressing denying disowning or simply acting on them instantaneously as if the emotions themselves are causing us to react. So for people who are really interested in that actually, I have a whole separate process than a completion process for that. I did put that up on YouTube. It's called the emotional experiencing process. If anybody wants to try that, it is a little bit like speaking a different language for those of us that are very mental, myself included. When you start to get into the emotional space, it is like, I'm telling you, it's like speaking a different language. So it takes a little while to feel comfortable with it. - Tell me a little bit more about that please because I'll admit as a behaviorist, my focus is not usually on as much the emotions. And I do have so many clients that come to me and say, Adam, I don't know what my feelings are. I don't even know how to find them. Where do I go? What do I learn? Is that something that they could use? If they've been so out of touch with their feelings, their entire life that they don't even, you give them a feelings wheel and they don't even, what are these? There's more than two and they're stunned. Is that something they could use? Tell us a little bit about that please. - Yes it does. The emotional experiencing is definitely something they could use for that. For people who have a really hard time with feeling though, one of my favorite things to do with people is to have them set a timer. And every time that timer goes off, whatever interval feels doable to them, for one person, it might be like every two hours for another, it's like, I can only do this like three times a day. What I do is I have them sit there with a list of sensations. So what they'll do is they'll close their eyes, they'll pay attention to their body because emotions show up as sensations in the body. So when we're really mental, we're saying things like sadness. But how does sadness show up for one person? It might show up as a kind of constriction, as a sinking. So we want to attune people to the somatic sensations. Obviously having a list in front of them helps them to kind of cross-reference and identify that. So they start off for the first week, all they're doing is right in the sensations when that timer goes off. Just by, by the way, tuning into the way that the sensations occur in the body, a person is becoming more embodied and it basically intensifies the feeling. It's like you develop a sensitivity. It's the same as when you're driving a car. When you first start off driving a car, you're like, I don't understand any of this. And like somebody who's driven a car for a month is like, oh, wow, that was the road, the grain in the road changed. And the person's like, what? So basically when you tune back into the emotions like that, just over the course of one week doing that, you become much more sensitized to the sensations as they occur in your body because you are no longer suppressing, denying, disowning and distracting yourself away from them. So week two, we up it where we basically, we look at those sensations and cross compare it to a list of emotional states. And so they can be like, oh, that's interesting. What we kind of resonates with what I'm feeling right now is like irritation. Oh, that's interesting. Irritation feels like heat, feels like buzzing, feels like. So they start to like learn about their own emotional system. That's all they're doing for week two, week three. Still with the intervals, still at the timing and doing those two things, we add a third thing. That is that they look back to when they started to feel that sensation. So they're starting to link what happened with what they feel, right? And in conjunction with that week, they start to write down any thoughts or insights that arise when they are focusing on the sensations and the emotions. Something like, oh, my boss really shouldn't have done that. And we start to question, right? Why should my boss not have done that? Well, because it made me feel totally disrespected. Okay, well, now you've got context for why you feel the way that you feel, right? And some of that personal truth is I want to be respected. Okay, now we can work with that. I want to be respected. What are some ways that I can go about directly, gaining more respect? It's obviously not going to be through popping off and flipping out at my boss. But at least we have a way of sort of troubleshooting and problem solving it. Okay, so that's basically my process. I love putting people through who have an issue, feeling emotion. I will also give people a little bit of a tip that for my people who are the most difficult with feeling emotions, getting into submerging in water intensifies emotional states. So it's a good trick to use, to like get in the shower or get in the bath, or even some of you have access to a lake or a stream to do that and then to feel the emotions in the water. It will blow your mind how much it intensifies everything. That's fantastic. And one thing I love about this is, as you said so much earlier in this podcast, you said we spend so much time suppressing our feelings, shutting them down, shutting them out. And we forget that the word is feeling. You are feeling something, meaning you are sensing something. I talked to a lot of my avoidantly attached men who come in, they've tuned out those feelings. They are in hardcore, lone wolf survival mode. They have no time for feelings. Those go over here in this bucket and we will never speak of them again. And they say, what is the purpose of feelings? My girlfriend is always talking about feelings, feelings, feelings, why, why can't she stop? There must be something here. And I said, well, yeah, your girlfriend is using her senses. She is sensing a problem in the relationship and she's trying to bring your awareness to it. And you're telling her, nope, that doesn't matter. Nope, it doesn't matter. If she's, if you're driving a car and she's in the passenger seat looking at you, saying, well, I can smell smoke. And you say, no, you can't, it's just your imagination. And she says, well, I can feel heat coming through the dashboard. Nope, it's just your imagination. This is stupid, stop feeling those things. Well, I can see flames coming out from under the hood. No, you can't. She is, she's waiting until the last moment to bail out of that car, but she's hoping you will listen to the sensors that she is beeping all around her and she's warning you. That's what feelings are supposed to be. So everybody listening, feelings are important. They are useful data. They don't always tell you maybe what you think they're telling you. Sometimes they can get, they can be over tuned. They can be tuned in correctly. They can tell you something that maybe isn't accurate. We talked about this a lot with some of the anxieties we experienced, but they are telling you something. You should always listen. And if they're tuned differently, learn to fix that so that they're useful data to you. That's very, very important piece as well. Teal, I would love to get one last piece from you here. There's a joke going around now that now that we have self-driving cars, eventually there is going to be a country music artist who will write a song about his truck leaving him. So there are so many new problems facing us in the modern day, so many new threats to relationships to people, to children, to everything the internet brings everything into our home in a way we haven't really had before. What are some things that people can do, not to protect themselves against having experiences necessarily, but what have you found is helpful for people who are wanting to become more resilient against some of these trauma experiences, more resilient against future hurts, or maybe even help their children become more resilient against future hurts. What have you seen? The primary thing that makes us resilient as a species is our human connections. I mean, it's like I struggle to even go in different directions with this, which I could do. I could talk about the importance of really making a very healthy lifestyle choices because we're in a time period where nothing that we are doing is conducive to human health, so we need to be very conscious about what we're eating and what products we're putting on our body and whatever we're breathing and all that good stuff and making it so that we're disciplining ourselves to move our bodies. We're not just sitting on a screen for 500 hours in a row or whatever, but I feel like all of it just sort of pales in comparison to the fact that we are a deeply social species. I mean, I can't stress it bad enough. I mean, if you go and you compare us to other species on the planet Earth, we are so relationally dependent. It is absolutely unbelievable. I mean, the fact that we are relationally dependent as children for so long, just as a standalone, should say something to us. But then we have this idea that that need just kind of at an arbitrary point vanishes, which is not the case. We are such a group species. We desperately need that sense of closeness and very deep, meaningful connections with other people in order to feel good and thrive. And that is what I see building the most resiliency or even in areas where you've got serious conflict, the people that are able to be the most resilient to it or the people that have the best relationships. So if you want my honest answer for resiliency, building resiliency in the changing world the way it is today is go the opposite direction. Everyone is going. Instead of going towards your phone, instead of in-person connection, go towards in-person connection. Instead of developing relationships where there's no attachment whatsoever, because it's just like easier that way. No, let's master how to actually provide secure connection to each other. Like we all, all of us, I mean, all of us actually have a job right now and that is to master relationships. I don't care whether you have relationships put in a category of like, oh, that's for those sort of touchy feely people or not. I mean, sorry, but right now if you want to talk relationships, us not getting blown up by a nuclear weapon is about relationships. So right now, all of us are being charged with the mastery of relationships as being the way to build a kind of resiliency for the world, but not only resiliency, it's our only way to thrive. All right, so I lied. I have one more very, very important question for you that I absolutely have to ask now, 'cause that answer phenomenal. Thank you for that. Three parts to this question. I'm gonna lay out a little bit of information. You know me by now. I lay out information and I'm gonna ask you a big question. The work of Dr. Sue Carter from the Kinsey Institute. She extensively covers oxytocin and vasopressin bonding, especially in the context of fear, love, intimacy. She studies it in rodents and says, okay, this is what the oxytocin bonding does for them, the socialization for them, the vasopressin bonding, the feeling secure, feeling resilient, feeling safe. And she's tracked their stress levels, their cortisol, their response to traumas. And she's shown extensively that when you have higher oxytocin bonding with other mammals, that when you have higher vasopressin bonding with other mammals, your resilience against future stress goes through the roof. You are so strong and so enduring against those things. Her work is foundational. And then I think again of about 10 to 15 years ago, I remember back when I was going through graduate school, they talked to us and they showed us an article of a female soldier who was over in different country. She got kidnapped or captured, kidnapped. And she was held prisoner. She was salted many, many times over the course of many, many months. And then they flew her home and somehow or another, the press got in the helicopter with her and they were interviewing her on the flight home. And they said, what was it like? How are you, how are you still living? Most people couldn't endure this. And they put like this phenomenal quote from her that said, you know, this really, it sucked, but it was not the biggest experience of my life. I'm really just looking back, I'm looking forward to getting back to my husband and my kids and my family. And that is the biggest experience of my life. And everyone was, yes, everyone was in all of her answer and they were like, how, how could a person be this resilient? How could they do this? And the answer is secure attachment, is secure bonding and attachment through the oxytocin, through the vasopressin, if we want to go to the chemical route. I'm curious if I just, I got wind of some news the other day, some research with this, that injections of oxytocin that people are now taking, because we're trying to synthesize human interaction just by injecting the hormones that you get when you try to bond with someone. But you just sit in a room and they just inject you, which of course is exactly the same thing. The injections for oxytocin are now by the year 2035, expected to explode exponentially. It is the next big pharmaceutical push, is to inject us with synthetic bonding hormones to pretend that we are bonding to people. Yes, you'll sit in your room, you'll have your AI girlfriend on your headset and you'll shoot oxytocin in your neck or up your nose, and you'll feel good. And this is actually being peddled as a cure for male erectile dysfunction, because low oxytocin after the first year of a relationship can often lead to erectile dysfunction, especially with pornography addiction. What do you think? What do you think, Teal? That everybody at home should do right now in this kind of a future to secure some kind of better relationship with a human being. You, you are excellent with relationships. What can somebody do if they're listening right now, thinking my relationships are not where I want them to be? I am not resilient. I am definitely tempted to take the oxytocin shot, sit in my room and feel a little bit better. What is something they could do to build a little bit of a better relationship with a human that would give them that resilience? I would start from a place of understanding. You know what's interesting is, it's like when we're trying to develop better relationships, we think a lot about this word love and how to love someone, right? And I feel like what's the most important thing to do if we're in that position is to throw the concept of love out the window, actually, and to hook our sails basically to understanding rather than love. Why? Because if I take the time to really see into you, feel into you, listen to you and come to an understanding, a deep understanding about you, then I have an understanding of what is best for you and what you need. And so it is in the understanding that I develop the capacity to act in your best interests, which is the baseline for developing trust in a relationship, trust being the holy grail of relationships. We have good relationships if in those relationships we feel a sense of trust. That's why the folks that sense of safety and security. So we have to start from understanding and based off of that understanding, we know exactly how to act towards the other person. And that naturally starts to create this positive bond with the other person. But most of the time when we're engaging in relationships, what I notice is that we're not really focused on trying to understand the other person. And we're not really pulling them into an understanding of us. Instead, it's like we're desperate to get what we wanna get out of the relationship just right off the bat. And so it becomes this like almost a war from moment one over needs. - Or we seek to make them understand us and take us seriously. - Yeah, but not in ways where they're actually going to, yeah. - Correct. - I think of that answer, beautiful answer. That makes me think of St. Francis of Assisi with his prayer about love. It begins with me, may I not so much seek to be understood as to understand, right? To begin understanding others. When I work with couples, the number one thing I have to teach them is curiosity about each other. - Curiosity. - If you go to the person. - Yeah, curiosity. If you go at the other person and say, you did this and this is how it ended and this is where we're at. And now we're gonna, if you do that, you're done. That conversation is not gonna go. You may as well just get a divorce right now, which I'm not saying get divorced, but you may as well because that's where you're headed. But if you walk in, here's what I tell people, walk in and say, I noticed this. I noticed X, tell me about that. If you give them the chance to go first, if you just make an observation and give them the chance to go first, you will learn so much. But probably number one, you're gonna learn Hanlon's razor, right? Do not ascribe malice where stupidity is adequate. You're gonna understand that somewhere along the line, they were foolish or not aware of something. And they made a choice that wasn't fully informed. Or even just, it was informed on their end, but not informed about your needs. So they've made an uninformed decision. So, okay, now we can talk about that perception. Let's fix it. The vast majority of people, I hate to say it this way, the vast majority of people are not malicious. They're in some capacity stupid. They're foolish, they're confused. I certainly am confused many times in my relationships. And when people say, Adam, I've noticed this. Tell me about it. I go, okay, I mean, I tell them my answer. They say, hmm, that makes sense. Let's correct that perception. I say, great. And I'm grateful for those opportunities, right? I think we could all agree with that. Teal, this has been a fantastic, wonderful, wonderful conversation. For everybody at home who has listened to you talk about your programs, especially that completion process, for everybody who is eager to learn about how to feel their feelings, how to move past traumas, please, please, where can they find you and where should they look first? - I'm on every single platform there is to be on. So basically, all of my information is condensed on my website, which is tealswan.com. So all you gotta do is remember my name. But I also release a new video every single Saturday on my YouTube platform. So if you just go to YouTube, type tealswan, believe me, I'm the first thing that's gonna pop up. And you can look through an entire rabbit hole worth of information that I've been doing for like 13 years now. So it's like thousands and thousands of hours on whatever subject you might wanna look at. - I love that so much, thank you. What is one last thought you might wanna leave the audience with before we close out today? - That the why behind what you're doing is the most important step to our self-awareness that you could have, especially right now. Right now when I'm looking at the collective of humanity, I'm seeing so many issues with people not really understanding their true why behind what they're saying and behind what they're doing. And it's by getting in touch with that why that you can actually make a choice that's more conscious in the direction of something that's gonna be more successful for you and bring you towards what it is that you're genuinely wanting rather than to be engaged in kind of this deterministic, subconscious way of going about interacting with the world. - I love that, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for helping. Everybody at home, please, please, please check out her information. You're gonna find so much hope in this world beyond anything that you thought was on offer. You need this help. And for now, I'm Adam Lane Smith, the Attachment Specialist.
🎙️ In this episode of "I Wish You Knew," Adam Lane Smith, the attachment specialist, sits down with Teal Swan, a renowned spiritual teacher and trauma expert, to brutally dissect the flaws of modern therapy and its impact on relationships.
The conversation dives deep into why the current therapy system keeps people stuck in emotional cycles, how unresolved trauma is sabotaging your relationships, and the hidden reasons therapy often fails to bring true healing. Together, they explore the harsh realities of navigating relationships while dealing with trauma and offer powerful insights on how to break free from these toxic patterns to build healthier, more connected relationships.
Tune in for an eye-opening discussion that challenges everything you thought you knew about healing and relationships.
✨ Moments You Can’t Miss ✨
👉 The brutal truth about why modern therapy often keeps you stuck in toxic relationship patterns.
👉 How unresolved childhood trauma is silently controlling your adult relationships.
👉 Why many people feel betrayed by the therapy system, and what they need to do to break free.
👉 How trauma creates a false sense of power in harmful relationships and why it feels familiar.
👉 The hidden reason toxic partners keep showing up in your life, and how to stop the cycle.
👉 Why men aren’t aware of the level of fear women navigate daily, and how it impacts relationships.
👉 Powerful insights into using your emotions as valuable data, even when they feel overwhelming.
Don’t miss this eye-opening conversation that challenges the modern therapy system and equips you with the tools to break free from toxic patterns and build healthier, more connected relationships. 🎧
If you enjoyed this episode, you will probably love our episode titled ‘Who Are You Afraid To Be? (& Why You Will Become Him)’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv3wIf4IrGI&ab_channel=IWishYouKnewPodcast
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Need more help with your attachment? Work with Adam: www.adamlanesmith.com
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theiwishyouknewpodcast/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iwishyouknewshow
Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/iwishyouknewpod
Twitter /X: https://twitter.com/iwishyouknewpod
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Ncc0MBgm04xTIQ5ByiCGI
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-wish-you-knew/id1713427809
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