1KHO 796: How to Solve the Problem of Human Disconnection | Dr. Kelly Flanagan, The Road Less Triggered

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It's so practical and I felt like almost when you read fiction and you're like, you don't want it to end because you love the character so much. I read this like a fiction book. I was like, I really don't want this to end. I like it so much but I need it to end because I got to prepare for this podcast. It is called The Road Less Triggered Turning Conflict into Connection with a Single Choice by Dr. Kelly Flanagan. I've already ordered three copies for more people. It is, wow, welcome Kelly. This is officially the best start I've had to a day in a very long time. Just after that introduction. Thank you. Well, I'm having way better starts to my day because of this book. Okay, you are Kelly married to Kelly. So we have to throw that out there because that's really interesting. I love that. I'm very curious. I, you know, I've got a more unique name and I've only had one podcast interview with another Ginny and I was like, this is really weird to say my name or an overgave. But you live with someone with your same name. But that's, we're not even talking about that because there's so much to talk about. Okay. I would not have considered myself. I've never heard any of this before. First of all, being close-hearted. I never heard it. Yes. And I would, I mean, I'm a pretty, well, I've kind of been enthusiastic, fairly optimistic person. Yes. So I would never even considered myself to possibly be close-hearted. But then when I read the book, I was like, I'm close-hearted a lot. Like I'm close-hearted if I'm trying to finish something and my kids come in, I'm close-hearted to my husband, you know, like, you know, something happens. And then I'm like, oh, and now I'm doing the ripple jump thing. And I was wondering as I was reading the book, like, because I bought it for other people, like I bought it for a couple of family members. I bought it for a friend. I'm talking way too much, but I want you to know it doesn't even come in a couple of days because I think it already is selling out. Yes. Like normally if you order a book, it will come like tomorrow or in two days. This is like, oh, you'll get it in three weeks. I was like, I think it's because everybody who read it was like, I know six people who would like this book and I'm going to order six more. The first print run did sell out. I'm happy to report we hit the USA Today bestseller list. And yeah, I have a lot of people who are waiting for their next round of books to give to friends and family, which just makes me so happy because the idea that, you know, that loved ones are reading this book together and getting to start to start to share that common language. I think it's just going to be a really powerful thing. It is a life changing where I had a whole conversation with my friend Nicole and she was like, and I was like, this book changed my life. I got her copy, but it won't come for a couple of weeks. She was like, and explained to me like, how do you be more openhearted and what are these different situations? And I was wondering as I read the book, Kelly, like, what happens if I read it, but nobody else does? Like, can it still work? And it does. It has just changed my life. Yes. Completely changed my life forever. Everybody should read it. The road less triggered is what it's called. You have got, OK, let's give a little bit of your backstory. So you are a relationship expert pretty much. You say, I've been studying relationships since I was on my dirt bike, you know, like as a kid. But beyond that, you spent for, you know, getting your PhD from Penn State. You watched thousands of hours of videotaped conflict. Well, you're writing your dissertation. I'm like, no one else has done that. So can you talk about your interest in relationship and how that started and has? Yeah. Even so, you're like, I'm still struggling in my own personal life. Yes. I just I was out to dinner with my 18 year old who's about to go off to college last night. And he was just sort of rambling in that blessed way they occasionally do at that age, you know, where you're like, just soaking it all up. And he just said, he blurred it out. He goes, I'm going to have to do something in sports. I can't picture myself being happy without sports in my life. And I was like, that's it, dude. And I think I think a lot of times we accidentally blurred out what we want to do with our lives. And I was in a sophomore psychology class at the University of Illinois. And the professor was trying to sort of push me on what I want to do my honors paper on for the class. And she said, well, what's the one problem you want to solve in the world? And I said, I just blurred it out conflict. You know, I want to want to work on communication and conflict resolution. Now, years later, I would say what I really want to help people solve is the problem of human disconnection. Because we're here to be connected. We're here to belong. We're here to be in relationship and miscommunication and conflict gets in the way of that. So yeah, I just blurted it out when I was a sophomore in college and went on to work in a communication laboratory at the U of I. Then I went on to Penn State for grad school. That's where I watched all. That's a standard way of actually doing communication research is you invite these couples into the laboratory. You promise them a little bit of feedback about their communication. That's the the care, you know, but you just say you sit them down and you say, talk about the biggest problem in your relationship. And then you videotape them for 15 minutes doing it and you watch what kinds of communication behaviors they show up with. So that's what I did for my dissertation. It was like 200 newlywed couples. They each had a couple of interactions that were videotaped. And I just sat and watched them encoded their behaviors for the whole interaction. Wow, what a backstory. OK, but here is the point. You say that even though we can have this toolbox and this is why this book is so different. I think other books are filled with tools like I'm going to box, breathe, you know, and they're fine tools. But you're like in the moment they don't work. They don't work. Why? Because we have closed our heart. And I was like, I have never in my life heard anybody say that. I've never heard that phraseology. And it makes 1000 percent sense. And you talk about you. You're giving your own example. So the examples are the best. They're so good because they're so relatable. And so I want to start off with like this to give people an example of what might happen. And I'm going to get I can give an example for my own life, too. That just happened in this past week. But the example is that you really like a certain type of bagel. Mm hmm. You like the plain bagel with chocolate chip cream cheese. Yes, ma'am. And one time your wife got you the chocolate chip bagel with plain cream cheese. So she flipped it and you said, I was not interested in that at all. I handled the minor mix up poorly. And then you start to talk about, you know, and then you're like, OK, we have this big party and I'm a vegetarian or a vegan. I don't know. Let me get it clear. I have a strange disease called alpha-gal disease that comes from ticks where I can't eat mammals, basically, or I have a terrible allergic reaction. So I stick to the veggies and vegan side of things for burgers. Yeah. OK, well, that could be a whole different podcast. Right. Yeah. I highly recommend you looking into it if you have terrible reactions. Yeah. OK. All right. So you're like, I need to have this veggie patty and we have this big party and my wife didn't make me mine. And so you. So OK, everybody can write this is like a pretty minor thing. But you're like, I'm getting mad and I'm starting to think of my wife is so inconsiderate and like I want to attack her shortcomings and she's thoughtless and she's careless and she's ungrateful and unkind and she's delinquent. And you say, it's absurd. I know. Yes. And everybody reading it is like, yes, it is absurd. But also I've been there. Yes, exactly. I have felt it over these minor things. And so what you say is, you look, of course, you have all the tools you've been studying, you know, millions of minutes of conversation, but we're closing the toolbox. We're closing our hearts. So can you talk about that story? Yep. It's so entertaining treat. I'm staring down at my plate, pushing the potato salad around with my fork. My head is spinning with the effort to keep my mouth shut. Everyone has been there almost two decades after the mistaken bagel. It is still so tempting to bring it up. You know, bring up the forgotten burger, you know, in. So you're saying you have to pivot. Yes. What is going on here? Yeah. So great question. So one of the things I get out of that, you know, that graduate program at Penn State, I get into the real world, I start doing work with couples and I have been trained, I've been given all the communication tools in the world. And I start to work with these couples and I start to teach them the communication tools and it helps a little bit. But what I start to realize like really quickly is the couples for first and foremost, they have most of the tools I've already given them there in most spaces in their lives. They communicate well, they're successful doctors and teachers and attorneys and stay at home parents of busy households and that sort of thing. It's just that this moment happens where they close their communication toolbox and they can't use anything that they have, anything I've given them. And I actually quit doing couples therapy for a while as a trained couples therapist. I was like, until I know what to do with that moment, I can't really, really help anybody. And it was only a little later that I realized that what's happening in that the toolbox or communication toolbox is our heart. And when we close our heart, we are flipping from connection mode into protection mode. So even though we're ostensibly still in the conversation in order to connect, we're actually actively just mostly trying to protect ourselves. And so, yeah, see, when when you start to realize that there's that switch that flips in us, where our heart goes from open to close, you start to see it everywhere, which is what you're describing. You're now starting to see that everywhere. And by the way, I would say like, yeah, you hear close hearted and you think of good people versus bad people, but probably a more accurate distinction is. Children versus adults, children are open hearted. That's how we start. And then we get into a habit of closing our hearts. A lot of us in subtle ways, so we don't even know we're doing it. So I'd say if you're close hearted, you're not a bad person, you're just an adult. That's that's all of us. And now and now you're starting to see these moments where that happens. So yeah, I'm I'm sitting there and I knew it was absurd because she had just put on an incredible spread for my entire family. It was all my family. I mean, treating them like they were her own, like her own blood, right? And here I am getting bent out of shape about the fact that she forgot to throw a veggie patty on the grill and and oh, yeah. And it's like that moment where she brought home the wrong kind of bagel on Father's Day. And oh, yeah, it's like how this is how I felt the whole time she was training for that half iron man and I was home alone with the kids and oh, my gosh. And this is what you start to realize eventually. Once you can really have to regulate your nervous system first to be calm enough to actually do this kind of self reflection. But once you get calm enough, you go, this is less about the person in front of me and more about the pain point that's getting stirred up inside of me, this feeling of no one's thinking of me. No one's caring for me. I'm all alone, right? And this is I'm in this by myself. And once you can start to see that really it's the pain point, not the person. You have now an entirely new perspective to work with through that moment. You know, now the pivot is from talking to the person in front of you to becoming more familiar with that pain point inside of you. It's so good and it works. So I'm going to give you my example. And so I've got this podcast. It is the main source of income for our family. We've got five kids, four teens and one's nine. So this is like expensive years, although my mom's like, it's going to get more expensive just wait till they get married. So, you know, these are these are pretty intense years with a lot of moving parts. And so we don't really have a team. I've got I just we hired in the past six months of a childhood friend of mine named Megan, she's helping to bring in guests and schedule and she's doing a phenomenal job, but it's just really the three of us. So it's a husband, me and Megan who's like part time. So, you know, and I'm like, we're kind of at our wit end here. We don't have a lot of margin and and my husband, well, he messes things up occasionally, you know, as happens in life and it's happens. I'm with the podcast, like the sound isn't coming through or whatever. So a couple months ago, we realized that I've got almost 800 podcast episode. Um, you know, it's a lot. So the computer is running out of space. And then it was like, oh, well, it's not going to, uh, you know, record the episode if it runs out of space. So my husband said, I'll make sure that it's good. So I recorded with this girl named Teran, who was 25 years old and rode on a rowboat across the ocean. Wow. And I lost the interview because there wasn't enough space on the computer. So that happened and it was a thing. Well, then two weeks later I interviewed. So then my husband was like, well, I'm going to change it around so that it uploads to the cloud. Okay. I interviewed this man, Michael Hyatt. He's like a pretty well known business guy. Like familiar with Michael Hyatt. Yes. Yeah. Don't have the interview. Oh, so. Okay. So this is a situation where, okay. I immediately was like, I'm close-hearted. Like in this moment, and actually I was like, kind of fine. I was like, I'm close-hearted at the moment. Like, you know, but then I jumped the ripples. So I was like, okay. Cause at the end of the day, it's not life or death. It doesn't really matter. We can email Michael, maybe he'll come back on, maybe Teran will come back on. Even if they don't, it's two interviews. I got 800 other ones, right? It's, it's not, you know, a dire situation, but I jumped the ripples. And I was like, well, Michael Hyatt reminds me of two weeks ago when I lost that interview, which reminds me of that time when I didn't, the sound didn't work. Yep. And it really is about, can I depend on you? Oh, yes. That's it. That's it. Uh, you, I'll put a couple of things together there that you said, just they're so important. Um, and, and what a blessing it is that you've, you've dived so deeply into the book and kind of can pull all these pieces out. You said it's not life or death. Right. Um, one of the most. There, if you can ask two important questions back to back. Number one, is my nervous system activated? And the answer is yes. And then is this a life or death, death situation? And the answer is no, then you know, there's something more going on in the moment than just this situation, right? Cause your nervous system is designed to protect you from life and death situations. That's the only time it's supposed to activate like that. It's the only time you're supposed to be triggered. So if you're triggered, it means there's something in you that is relating to this as if it's a life and death situation. I, I encourage people not to think of it as like, well, my, my nervous system is misfiring and I need to get it fixed. No, there's something in you that interprets this as life and death. So let's try to get connected with what that is. And what I'm learning and what I've learned over time is that we have a wide range of sort of initial pain points we recognize in that moment. But when you really just sort of like settle into them, they all start to converge on the same experience, which I call loneliness. Um, and I say that loneliness has basically three pillars to it. Feeling unseen, misunderstood or unsupported. And Jenny, you just named the unsupported one, right? Can I depend upon you? Will you support me? And, and what you're pointing out is that as an adult, like this isn't life or death. It's not catastrophic. We can rerecord, um, of course, like I, I can depend upon him for a lot of things, but this, this is tapping into a very primal, uh, probably early experience in which when we're unsupported as kids, it is life and death. Right. If we're not seen as children, it is life and death. If we are not understood and feel like we belong through that understanding to the tribe, it is life and death as a kid. And you, and, and then you mentioned the ripples, this idea that when you sort of trace the ripple effects of this moment backward in time, you start to see, oh, and that's where I felt unsupported and that's where I felt unsupported. And eventually you get back to a moment in your life where feeling unsupported might have been a little bit more of an existential crisis. Um, and you start to realize you're experiencing it now the way you did then. And suddenly you have a lot more emotional flexibility about how to deal with this moment. And something that would have lasted a lot longer lasted so short. Exactly. And Michael did reschedule and even if he wouldn't have, it didn't matter. So, I mean, it really has completely changed my life, especially considering the fact that I would view myself as an optimistic, positive, you know, force really. And I would never have considered using this word to describe myself, but I was like, I do do this. And I can see the effects of when I do it and I can see the effects of no one else in my family has read this book, except for me. And I was like, this has already completely changed my life. Everybody should read it. It's called the world less triggered. This time of year in homeschooling is really special. You're wrapping up projects, looking at how far your kids have come and helping them finish strong. 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Get IXL now and 1000 hours outside listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash 1000 hours. Visit IXL.com slash 1000 hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Can we stick with this ripple part for a little bit? So one of the things that you talked about was that there were these people like I'm thinking of them in my mind as like monks, but they probably weren't monks. They were just like these people that are like, everyone's bugging me. Everyone bothers me. So I'm just going to go live in the woods by myself and I'm not ever going to be bothered. I'm just going to be like this emotional, cool as a cucumber person. And then you're like, they're there, but they stubbed their toe and they're mad. And so there you say this, we think we are reacting to people, but really we're reacting to pain. So this ripple method, that's what I'm saying. Like in this book, I've read a lot of books and I'm like, I've never heard of these concepts. So we're reacting to pain, but then a lot of people, there's a couple of problems. They don't want to deal with their, they don't want to deal with their painful past, right? I think that's kind of normal. Like I'm like, I don't want to think about that or I don't want to drudge up these things. And also sometimes you don't remember. So you might feel like you're kind of stuck. So this ripple part is that you just are trying to follow the ripples and you, you had a couple in here, you know, you're kind of like following through their story. I'm sure they're kind of like a fake amalgamation. Is that even a word? Yes, it is. Of a bunch of people that you've talked to, but this is this Henry and Sarah. And Henry's like, I don't do my past. And I think a lot of people are like that. I do not want to, I don't want to go there. And you're like, that's fine. Nobody ever says that's fine. Kelly. You're like, that's fine. You know, we don't have to go try and dig it up. Just hop the ripples. What does this remind you of? You know, you trace your triggers back through time to find out where the original stone got thrown. So can you talk about that as a, that's a very different approach as to, you know, let's start when you were four years old. Yes, exactly. Well, I know everyone, like you read a book by a therapist, you're like, I was just going to rub my nose in the past, you know, we're going to have to dredge all that up. And I don't actually find that very helpful in the sense of like going on a sort of research and destroy expedition into our past. I don't like, as it just an exercise, it doesn't make much sense to me. But what I have come to realize is that our past is always pushing its way into the present, right? Yes. And that, and that we don't have to go looking for our past because it comes looking for us in our triggered moments. And what we just need to do is to begin to recognize that that's what's happening. Like when my reaction doesn't quite fit the situation. Like the bagel. Yeah, like the bagel. I had one last night, I'd be happy to share with you. Like, like, oh, this isn't about just this moment. It's my past pushing its way into the present. I start this, the sentence I started off my, my today only novel with is that the past is always behind us, but it is also always within us. Right. It's always stored within our nervous system and in a nervous system that is designed to protect us from that thing happening again. Um, and again, to the point that we were discussing earlier, I always caution people, this isn't like, we're not looking for like big T trauma, the big thing, you know, because a lot of us, myself included, will say, I had a really good childhood. You know, I don't really have anything to pin, you know, when I, when I trace my ripples and it's like, yeah, but being human is hard. Being human is really hard, especially when you are a vulnerable child with no way of really protecting themselves completely dependent upon other people. Being humans hard. It's a shock to a child to experience that we're all separate. You know, I think a kid is like, we're all here to be together. Right. We're all one. We're all in this together. And then you just sort of run into this moment over and over again as a child where it's like, oh, we're not here to be together. Everyone's playing this game, like a separation and protection that doesn't feel very good. And, uh, and so just in an ordinary, even sort of fairy tale life, you end up with, um, a lot of reason to start, to start closing your heart. And so that I'm interrupting you because I want to, I want to share the story that you shared because I think this is a really good one to illustrate that point before we move on. Yeah. The story that you shared was that you went to your friend's house. So talking about like your childhood might be just like fairly, you know, as people would say normal, you know, they want any of these adverse childhood experiences, nobody died, nobody divorced, you know, um, exactly. You know, it was just fairly smooth in, in that sense, but you're like, I went over to my friend's house. This is my, you know, my favorite friend to play it with. I knock on the door and he opens a door and he's like, I can't play. You're like, well, what the heck? You know, why can't you play? You can play every other day and, and, and, and appear, you know, peering, this is like how I'm envisioning it in my mind. Like appearing around his shoulder is another kid from school and you, and you're like, Oh my gosh, I was just replaced. I was traded out for someone else. And you can say as an adult, it's easy to forget how painful that was for a little boy. Nowadays I just delete that person, you know, they're out of my Facebook. They're off my social media. I would text any of my other friends. I would, you know, I would find some analog connection. I'd go do something with my wife or my kids. But at that point is the belief that you're not good enough. You're not worthy of love or belonging. And then you say, from that point on, I tried to become the kind of person. No one would trade out for anyone else. Hmm. Yes. The lifelong project, um, which my wife was not cooperating with when she didn't make me that veggie burger, right? Like, Hey, I'm doing such a good job being a husband and a father and everything. And you're supposed to sort of put me first and not, not prioritize other people above me. Um, and so you sort of see how much of our lives becomes a project. Your family replaced you. You know, she's serving your family, but she forgot you, but she forgot me. So the feeling of being replaced takes over in that moment. Exactly. Okay. Thanks for letting me bring it up because I think the book has such great examples. Uh, your own examples are so phenomenal because everyone can relate to them in different ways and you see that like this didn't have to be, you know, I, obviously some people listening will be in this case where they were abused or something more horrific happened, but this is a very, in a lot of ways, like what people would consider an innocuous childhood experience. Oh, you got left out. Yep. That's right. But it was very informative. Yeah. Um, because for a child getting left out is an existential threat. Um, whereas for us adults, it's not. Um, yeah. So just, it can feel like it though, right? I mean, isn't that what people talk about? Like you see on, online that everyone went to a party and you weren't invited, you know, well, I just had it happen. I, I mean, it's interesting. You bring up that story from the book cause yeah, I found out recently that two good buddies went and hiked the Grand Canyon. I didn't know anything about it. And it, right. And, and it's like, yeah, what's tempting to do then is to start to feel like that kid who showed up at his friend's door, you know, in like third grade and, and was rejected and to act like that kid too, to close my heart, to go home, to be quiet and to sort of just go well as I'm never hanging out with that person again. Um, and instead to sort of feel, you have an opportunity in that moment, not just to feel this moment, but to feel that one too, from the past. Um, and then to open your heart and decide how you want to show up open heartedly to this moment. Um, and, and that's the sort of emotional and relational flexibility that gets restored because when your heart closes to protect you, um, from this moment and the one like it in the past, you lose all that flexibility. You're, you're sort of in an auto autopilot defensive protective mode. Get that heart back open and people always ask me, well, okay, so when I open my heart, what should I do? I'm like, actually, I can't tell you that the, the creative possibilities that will present themselves once your heart is open are going to blow you away. Um, I had this happen on, on Thursday, Friday morning. Good Friday. It was on Friday morning. I woke up with my head all in a tizzy about my son, uh, going off to college and he's sort of low in the residence hall lottery and he's going to get a bad, you know, dorm room and he's going to not, you know, connect socially. And I was just spun up about it. My heart was closed. I was in protection mode and, uh, fortunately I had this, uh, this Friday morning meditation I was doing with a group of people and it was the space where I could open up my heart. And I realized what I was really trying to do is I was trying to protect my son from the pain of my departure from home, which was where I wound up in a terrible residence hall situation and I was alone and I just gave myself the space to feel that open my heart again, feel like how hard that was for me. And all of a sudden all sorts of ideas came to mind about how I could actually support him, um, from an open hearted place rather than sort of anxiously trying to protect both of us from a closed hearted place. And they've really paid some dividends. So once that heart gets open, uh, you, it's not a, I think people assume open heartedness is this sort of passive state. Well, I'm open-hearted, so I just have to let things happen now. I guess. And it's actually open-heartedness is a very creative, actively engaged state with the reality that you're facing in the present moment. Wow. You have to read the book. So because the questions that you're saying people ask you, I was telling my friend Nicole about it. I was like, this is the best book. And she was like, well, how, how do you become open-hearted and like, what does it look like? But you get it. Like you read the book and you're like, no, I can do this. I understand. And so, you know, we were talking about this part that instead of, you know, sitting in some room and being like, let me drudge up my past, you just in the, in the triggering moments that happen, you have opportunities all the time to just pop these ripples to figure out what exactly is going on. These pain points are rippling out across time. And you wrote in the book, the book is called the road less triggered that our nervous system cannot, this is the key. Our nervous system cannot differentiate between a system, a situation happening 30 years ago and a situation happening right now. And I just talked to this man, Dr. Kurt Thompson, he was talking about in his book, like in the right hemisphere of the brain, there's no time, which is why like, if I hear a Goo Goo Dolls song, I'm like, huh, that's right. Here that takes me back to being 17 years old and like listening to it on the school bus and like loving it, you know, I mean, I changed my whole stance. No, nobody else cares that much or group in the nineties they do. But you're like, what is this? And I'm like, I don't like my kids music. It doesn't make me feel the same way. Like the things my kids like to listen to. But I'm like, this is immediate nostalgia. Like, I'll feel like a different person. It's because there's no time there. So there. So your whole point is the past is never dead is a quote by William Faulkner. It's not even in the past. Your present. And so you're closing. So here's what happens. You're closing. It's a little bit about your presence, your present moment. Right. Absolutely. I, I really wanted. What is it that you wanted? You really wanted the plain bagel. Yes. The chocolate chip crepe. With the chalk. Thank you for remembering that, Jenny. I feel very seen. I had to have it written down though. We really wanted. So there it is a little bit about the present. It's like someone's throwing a temper tantrum. Your, your husband is ruining your business. No, that's how you're feeling in the moment. Right. You're like, oh, but it's this past. It's coming through. So even if you decide like Henry in the book, I don't do the past. You're like too bad. You're, you have this trail of triggers. You have to remember your ripples. And so it gives you this opportunity on probably a daily basis to be like, what the heck is going on with me? Yes. So can you talk about, I love this. I think this is a great example, especially for this podcast. You talk about the rings of a tree and there is no going back in erasing a ring. Hmm. Yeah. So I have really come to, uh, and by the way, Kurt's amazing and I appreciate what he shared with you there. Um, the, um, I've come to think of our nervous system is growing like, like a tree does, uh, where each year of the tree's life, there's a ring that's left behind for it, uh, for that year. And, um, and the, the, the tendency that we have as people is like, if the 17th year was a tough year, you know, if that ring shows some burn marks on it, cause there was a forest fire and everything else. We'd like to remove that ring from our nervous system. Right. We'd like to go, I don't want that in there. Um, but a tree is able to actually endure, um, the weather and stress because of all of its rings. It doesn't, you don't remove that ring of the nervous system. I had a situation that happened right after I wrote that chapter about how, um, our nervous system is sort of made up of a ring for every year of our lives. Um, we were walking out of a restaurant locally and I hear, Hey, flan over my shoulder and it's two high school friends, um, who I haven't seen in ages, they live, they live way up north now and they're in town and they're like, Hey, how are you doing? I'm like, Oh, great. What are you guys doing in town? Oh, we're here for so and so dad's funeral, um, uh, another peer, uh, of ours. And it hit me that I had somehow missed the news and I'd missed the funeral and these friends had gathered without me and my wife and I were going to the grocery store right after dinner and she just sent me, she said, go get some bananas and I came back like 10 minutes later, no bananas. She said, where are the bananas? I'm like, Oh, I, I forgot. And she looked at me and she said, how old, how does it feel right now? Having run into them. And I was like, I'm in like my 17th ring, 16th, 17th ring, like feeling a little left out socially, um, feeling, you know, and then I start to do all the things I my Brit, my nervous system starts to do all the things I used to do when I was 17, what did I do wrong? Will they ever want to talk to me again? What do I need to do to repair it? Um, and she, she just looked at me. She goes, you're 47 now. You're here with me. I love you. Um, you know, and it was like, it helped to sort of like, uh, soothe, soothe that, that ring of my nervous system. Um, but that's, that's one of the, the real rewards I think of, of, of what you encounter in the book is this opportunity to love every ring of yourself, right? To welcome them all into your experience and make sure that no part of you is left out of your love. Gosh, it's so good. Oh wow. Oh wow. It's such a good book. So you, you kind of hopped these ripples or these rings and you say, this wouldn't be so hard if it didn't remind me of. So in my case, if it didn't remind me of the last podcast that I lost, you know, if it didn't remind me of the other time that you let me down, you know, and, and you kind of go through these rings, but this is what you say. It's so cool. And you talk about your, you know, when you were 16 and the golf team, it's a fabulous ring read. You say the rings are with us forever. And you are, you are the sum total of your rings. And I love that's like God has given us so many cool truths through creation that you can learn these lessons. I've been really understand like that will really stick with me. There's no way to erase a ring of a tree. Everyone has seen a cross section of a tree, you know, you can't go in and, you know, erase that somehow it's there. It's all through the entire trunk. And you say to love every version of you and to love every ring. It's so good. So when Henry says, I don't do the past, you can't not do the past. The past is always there. And that's what to me, like personally, when, when you, when you read a really good book or when you hire a really good helper or guide, you're paying. To be saved all of the wasted time and energy that they spent trying to do things that will never work. And it's only like $15. I know that people don't buy a book. I'm like, it's 25 bucks. Like you're getting someone's life. Their life, you know, unless they're young because they blew up on social media or something. But for the most part, it's like someone who has lived for decades and has studied this stuff and like for 2499, you can learn it all. Yeah. And that's, and that like what I want to save one of the things I want to save people from wasting time on with this book is this idea that they can, you know, fix, eliminate. I would say even heal parts of themselves, because a lot of times healing is a spiritual bypass. Basically, like I want to heal that part of me so I never hear from it again. You know, versus this isn't as much about healthiness as wholeness. Right. And recognizing that the whole or we are, we actually, that's the healthier we are. And so one of the, one of the things I want to save people with this book is just all that time we spend sort of disguising self-improvement or disguising self-rejection as self-improvement, you know, it's like, I don't like this about me. So I need to improve it so I can be better so that I can, you know, and it's like, actually slow down. You can't eliminate any part of you. You can't eliminate any part of your story. And peace will come from embracing all of it, not from eliminating any of it. Wow. Love every ring. It's so powerful. Okay. I got to move on because there's so many things. Sure. Obviously we're going to miss some stuff. You are going to get so much out of this book. So you talk about Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey and Oprah Winfrey. And I actually got to interview Dr. Bruce Perry, but there's a book I did called what happened to you. Actually, you know what he talked about on the podcast, he went a different direction, but he talked about this dosing and spacing and how there's no space. You know, we're just constantly like throwing information and especially for kids, it's like so much schooling and he's like, there's never the space to digest it. And this is sort of very similar, right? Like you have to be able to like have a little space about like what you have to be able to hop the rings and figure out what's going on here, what's going on with these ripples. I do not want to miss though talking about, because this was such a great example for parents about poodies. Okay. So good. I was like, this really, I mean, I'm already changing because you think that if you're going to be openhearted, that you're going to get all walked all over. There's going to be no boundaries and you can't ever say no to anybody. And so can you give the example of poodies? And I think this is a really helpful example for any parent. Like for my own self, I was like, I do do this. Like if I have to get something done, I am close-hearted to the people around me, but I don't need to be. That's right. Yeah. One of the first things I realized in starting to share the concept of open hardness with people is that people assume that if you were openhearted, your boundaries would get weaker. And so one of the points we really emphasize in the book is that open hardness doesn't make your boundaries weaker. It makes your boundaries wiser, actually. And so you're able to set your boundaries with greater care and tenderness, but no, but you don't set them less. And so yeah, the example I gave in the book was I had a seven-year-old nephew staying with us with his, with my wife's brother and sister-in-law. And I was sort of extroverted out, you know, like, okay, I'm an introvert and I just need to have some time and space. So I woke up super early one morning just to get in a quiet workout before anybody could possibly be awake, but sure enough, here he comes walking into the exercise room, right? And, hey, Uncle Kelly, you want to make poothies? Cause we've been making poothies the night before. The idea was like basically take like plastic, uh, you know, fruit and pretend that we're blend, that they were dinosaur poop. We were, it was what we were pretending cause he's a seven-year-old boy, right? And, uh, we were putting them in and we were making poothies out of them, out of imaginary dinosaur poop. So you want to make poothies? And I was like, oh dude, I'm working out right now. And then he just started, he, he, he's very interpersonally sensitive. So he knew how to, to make me feel guilty. Like he did this big demonstration of playing ping pong by himself and just showing me how miserable he was playing alone while I'm sitting there working out and watching him. And then he comes up to me again now that he's sort of induced a little guilt, right? And he says, now do you want to, now do you want to play ping pong with me? And I, I felt my heart close and I was like, no dude, I'm exercising. Then I went over to my wife and even though she's not awake yet, I texted her, come get your nephew from the basement. Right. And so now I am closed-hearted and setting boundaries. But what I've learned in this process is that boundaries are actually far more effective if you set them in an open-hearted way. So I'm like, what does an open-hearted boundary look like in this moment? And I, and I realized like, I get it. Like this hurts for him. Like Uncle Kelly is establishing his separateness and his differentness. And that hurts. That doesn't mean I need to change that. It's not my job to rescue him from that hurt. But it is my job to be open-hearted to him in, in holding that boundary. So I just went over to him, you know, got down on my knees, looked him in the eye and I said, dude, I love you. And I think you're awesome. And we'll play again later. And, and, and I can't wait to do that. And his eyes filled up with tears. Because I think when you set an open-hearted boundary, people know that they, they may be separate from you, but they're not severed from you, that there's still a connection there, even though we weren't going to be playing together. And so that's one of the things that I, especially with parents, you know, I think as parents, we tend to think, I often say, like, there's a spectrum that we think we're on from boundaries to empathy. And if we're going to have empathy for our kids, then it's really hard to hold boundaries. And if we choose to have boundaries, we think we can't have any empathy because then we'll get weak and we'll, you know, we'll let go. But actually both of those things can go together. You can have deep empathy for your children while holding healthy boundaries with them. I'll never forget a time with my, my son. He was 15 years old at the time. We're driving in the car and he was just, he was acting like a 15 year old. And I'd been really patient with it. And finally I said to him, dude, I love you unconditionally, but I don't drive you unconditionally. If you keep treating me this way, you're going to have to get out and walk, right? And, and to me, that was an example of like, and I was really meant, I think you could feel it. I do love you unconditionally and I want to drive you there, but this is my boundary. This has got to stop if we're going to stay in the car together. So yeah, my encouragement to parents, you can set open-hearted boundaries and they're far more powerful than a boundary you set with a closed heart. Yes. It's so that that situation is so relatable because, you know, of course the kid wants to play poohies. It was fun yesterday. Yeah, exactly. Super excited. Like, and that's how kids are. They want to read the book again. But also life has got this part where you've got responsibilities. And so here's what you say. When do you turn your need into a boundary? You set a boundary when your heart can't be open without it. You can't keep your heart open without it. You talked about like, this is why you charge clients when they miss their appointments. And I think that makes sense. You know, so I do it so that I don't get angry with you. Keeps my heart open. You say many of the most likable people I know are closed-hearted and unbounded. They have this intersection. You say they're generally nice, you know, people like them, but they're miserable. Codependence often masquerades as a, as stateness. So this is really going to help you. It's going to help you, you know, with your parenting. And, you know, I had read, now this is a book I read and I would talk about, we're going to go into tears. Can you talk about sadness and tears? I never heard this phrase. I read Dr. Gordon Newfield's book. I wish I would have read it a long time ago. It's called Hold On to Your Kids. I read it recently and I was like, I wish I would have read this to my kids or younger, but he uses this phrase tears of futility. And I was like, I've never heard that phrase. But there's so many situations in life that are futile. Like I lost my podcast with Michael Hyatt. He said some really nice things about me at the end. I would have loved to have that, you know, I don't have it. And, you know, he was like, specifically, this is why I really like how you do your podcast interviews. You know, and I was like, oh, that's so nice. It's gone. You know? It's gone. A life is filled with futile moments. So he uses this phrase tears of futility and like part of childhood and life is learning that like you, you have to cry them and it's, it's not going to change. You're not going to play poohies because you really do need to take care of yourself and you need to exercise. And this is part of being a healthy person. Okay. So you talk in the book then about that kids have open hearts, but eventually they stop crying altogether. There are a lot of ways to mark the dividing line between childhood and adulthood. I wonder if the day the tears stop is one of them. So you talk about tears in this book. And here's what you say that we think that the sadness is going to drain our energy, but it's actually the suppression of sadness. Yeah. That's what's draining our energy. And you talk about the 90 second rule. So can you talk to the person who thinks, okay, if I hop these ripples. All right, Kelly, I'm going to hop the ripples. I'm going to be too sad. It's going to be too much. It's going to be too overwhelming. But there is this 90 second rule. Absolutely. Yeah. So this is something I realized early on in my work, my clinical work as an out patient mental health therapist, I worked with individuals as much as couples. Um, was that the, the clients I was meeting with who were clinically depressed. Um, we're not people who are crying all the time. More often than not, they were people who never cried. Um, and I started to realize that, um, and this is not true of every form of depression, but, but of many forms of clinical depression, uh, that's that clinical depression is not an intense form of sadness. It's an intense emotional exhaustion that comes from bottling up our sadness. It takes a lot of emotional and spiritual energy to keep all that sadness in there. And, uh, and we end up sort of like feeling empty and exhausted because of it. And, uh, and so my job, ironically, this is the only way I saw to move people out of clinical depression was to get them crying regularly. And once they could fully release the tears, uh, then their, their mood started to improve. They actually started to experience joy and energy and vibrancy that they hadn't experienced in a long time. And it, Hey, if it's true, people who are clinically depressed, it's probably true of all of us to, to a lesser degree. And the 92nd rule is the good, the good news in the hope of this is that any emotion, uh, that you allow yourself to fully experience without inhibiting it or suppressing it, you just allow it to come all the way through unimpeded. It comes and goes in about 90 seconds. Um, and so I, I tell people that you might have, you might have stopped crying when you, I mean, I went, I went through a point, Jenny, where in 2012, I probably hadn't shed a tear in 20 years and I was a therapist and I had a moment where about 20 years of backlog tears came through all at once. And you know how long it lasted, not more than 90 seconds, right? To clear 20 years and 90 seconds. Um, and, uh, and then of course, after you, you clear the backlog, uh, it's, it's never quite that intense again, but, um, but yeah, that's the, that's the promise is that, uh, we're walking around weighed down by unfelt feelings and that in 90 seconds, we could move those through us and get back to some of the joy and vibrancy and passion of childhood that we had before we started blocking those feelings. This is what you say. This is the point of time where you started to write. You, you're in these years. Okay. You said you watch Lars and the real girl. So I watched that with my kids. They were like, this is such a weird movie. It's a weird movie. But they sure liked the, who's the guy that did it? Um, he's the guy that was just in project Hail Mary. Yeah. Ryan Gosling, it's one of his first big movies. Yeah. So, and they liked the movie fall. I think it's called fall guy, the fall guy. So I was like, Oh, my kids are going to like this movie. It's got Ryan Gosling in it. And everyone was like, this is odd, mom. It's strange. But you said you watched that movie and that was kind of like, some minute, like allowed you to release your tears. I had known for at that point, probably like for three or four months that I, I had a lot of, of emotions in there that I had was not just not feeling and not, not moving through me. And, uh, and my wife and I watched that movie at someone's recommendation that night and, uh, Ryan Gosling is an utterly lonely character in that, in that movie. And she asked me what I thought of the movie and I started to say something about his loneliness and the tears just sort of came through finally. Um, and I often say that like the, um, you know, one of the many things that, the chat GPT gets wrong. They say, you know, um, if you have, if you have feelings you need to feel, you probably need to feel them alone and then you'll get good at it and then you can go feel them with other people. But in my experience, it's the opposite. Um, when you've sort of got like a backlog of feelings, um, I very rarely see anybody first feel those again on their own. They feel them in the presence of a safe, another safe person. Um, and, uh, and that's where, you know, sometimes therapists come in, but, um, but yeah, so that's, it came through for me in that moment. And, uh, it was a, it was a really bizarre movie that happened to be the trigger. Um, but one of the things they talk about in the book is you, you feel your way to understanding, you don't understand your way to feeling, right? Like you, you don't go, well, this movie made me feel sad for this reason. So now I will cry about it. You let the tears come through and then you go, oh, the tears, the tears tell you what the sadness was about. And now you totally understand. Yeah. Yeah. And that this just really opened up a whole new part of you. Like you talk about, you could, things are lodged, you know, they're lodged in there. So you say that a week later is when you started writing regularly for the first time in your life. So that, you know, this goes back to lards and the real girl, whoever recommended that to you. And I'm sure it maybe would have been something else had it not been that, but you say a few months later, I started a blog. And so this USA today best seller that is literally sold out on Amazon, you're going to have to wait a couple of weeks to get it. Cause it's already in its second print. Maybe wouldn't be here except for those tears and they didn't last for longer than 90 seconds. You write people are afraid that it's going to be so intense that it's going to eviscerate you. It won't. Second, it feels like it's going to be so bottomless that if years I get, you feel it's going to go on forever, it won't 90 seconds is all it will last. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it, you would do well to pay attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not, God is speaking to you through them. And so it's just, it's going to help increase your power. You say, until you face your past and face your, and feel your pain, you are operating at a fraction of your power. It takes a tremendous amount of energy, emotional energy to keep your pain trapped inside of you. And then you also talk about how pain, if you, if it can feel pain, you're not going to feel joy either. You know, when you block pain, you also have to block pleasure. I want to, we're running out of time. I want to bring up one more topic. Can I say one last thing about that? Yes. Okay. Real quickly, the last thing I would say about that is this is not a story that's just true of me. Um, it's a, a dynamic I've seen play out with, uh, you know, countless clients. I get friends who text me and they say it happened. Like last night it finally came through and I felt it. And in the story is always the same. Um, last night I felt completely hollowed out and emptied out. I wondered if I would ever feel anything ever again. And this morning I woke up with more energy and vibrancy and passion and creativity that I've experienced in the answers since I was a kid, since I started blocking that, because all of those energies are trying to get up through you, but they can't get past that, that sadness you've blocked that blockage you've created. Once you do, it's a whole new world, man. And, and, and, and for me, that was, that was writing and where we're at today. So thanks for letting me share that. It's so important. I mean, and, you know, in general, I think men don't cry that much. Yeah. Right. Right. You had this question in here. Why do we, someone had asked why? Do we treat the people? This was, I get a, I'm totally changing subjects. I want to, I just want to say, because this is my notes and I have it bolded. You were at, you were like doing a marriage retreat or intensive couples there. I don't know. It was like a thing and your wife was there too. And someone said, why, why do we treat the people we care about the most, the worst? And your wife said, because they're around. Now I was, this is one of the most insightful books I've ever read. I guess this, my last topic that I would love to talk about, and then the book obviously covers so much more. I cannot recommend it more highly. I mean, I think everybody should get it. The road less triggered turning conflict into connection with a single choice. If you order it today, you might get in a couple of weeks or, you know, like, go order now, maybe order four copies because you're going to think, oh, a bunch of other people are going to want to read this. But you know, talking about the people that are the closest to us, one of the things that you say in the book is we're tempted or maybe not even tempted. We think it's a possibility to eliminate how our heart closes. We want to eliminate the closing. And what you say is that, and this is why the book matters so much. You say your heart will forever be triggered to close. No matter how long you go between triggers, another trigger will always present itself. You're going to close. It's going to happen. So can you, as we're wrapping it up, can you talk about the salt in the lake thing? Yes, absolutely. So again, saving you time by putting all my failed efforts into a book. And I watch couples and clients do this as well. They want, we all want to not be triggered again. We all want to never, like once you get a, to your experience, like once you start to really realize what open-heartedness is, you don't ever want to be closed-hearted again. And so the temptation is to want to eliminate that tendency. But the reality is our hearts close because in that moment, the, the, the experience we're having is a little more than we can handle. And so there's really a great grace in the fact that our hearts can close, that our hearts can kind of go, oof, I'm not sure if I want to go through this. Not sure if I want to feel this. And, and so that capacity is one that's a gift, not a curse. The, the curse is when we are not in charge of it, when we don't feel like we have a choice over it, when we start to realize like, oh my gosh, my heart's closing all the time or it's always closed and I don't really have a say over it. So one, we talked about early in the book, one of the, the first really places where you get a choice is learning to, number one, your body tells you your heart's about to close, gives you an 80% earlier warning. I present a study of that in the book. If you can use your bodily signals, you can 80% earlier warning your heart's about to close and that's a lot of time to make a choice with. Then you watch your defenses kick up inside of you. You watch them instead of wielding them, we say. And by the way, that is a skill you have to learn and practice a little bit because everything in you is going to be telling you to respond. But then ultimately you have to get that nervous system regulated. You have to tell it and train it that, hey, we're not in danger right now. We, there's no mortal threat to us. So we can actually calm down and bring our higher mind back online. And one of the mistakes and the salt in the, in the lake that you're talking about, one of the mistakes that we make in trying to calm ourselves down is we, as we try to eliminate the feelings of tension in our body. And oftentimes that becomes a more stressful process because you're like, you're doing the breathing technique the guru told you to do and it's not working. And you're like, Oh, no, like if the guru stuff doesn't work, what chance do I stand? And so a new wave of psychology has come through in the last 20 years. It says, don't try to fix the arousal. Don't try to get rid of it. Learn how to learn how to be with it. Learn how to expand your capacity to hold tension in your body. Become a space in which that tension doesn't feel so overwhelming. And then all of a sudden you develop a sense of resilience in those moments. So there's an old parable that I share in the book where, you know, the student comes into his teacher's sort of meditation, how it's an old Eastern sort of story. It says, Hey, I've been working with you for a year. Still got all the same tension. Still got all the same terrible thoughts, all the same terrible feelings. Like when's it going to get better? And the teacher says, smiles, been through this before. Says, go ahead and get me a cup of water and a fistful of salt. So the student comes back. He says, put the salt in the water. Does it? It says, drink the water. Student chokes down the salty water. How is that? Almost difficult to drink. Go get me another fistful of salt. The student does and he comes back and the teacher gets up and sort of walks out of the hut and threw a wooded path down to a crystal clear lake. And he says, go ahead and throw the salt in the lake. Student throws the salt and he says, now cup your hands and drink from the lake. Right. Yeah. Student does it. And he says, how is that? It's quite refreshing. And the teacher says, quit trying to eliminate your salt and become a larger lake. Right. Same amount of arousal, same amount of attention, but the capacity to hold it expands and all of a sudden you're feeling quite refreshed in the midst of the same level of tension. Wow. What a book. The defenses you come to depend on cannot be dismissed, discarded or destroyed. They cannot be fixed, healed or transformed. Your heart will forever be triggered to close. Your defenses will always be standing at the ready, wanting to come to your aid. You don't pivot by becoming defenseless. You pivot by surrendering to the presence of your defenses and softening to their purpose, to their purpose. When your emotional heart is closing, your physical heart is entering fight or flight mode. This is an incredibly important book. It's wonderful. Honestly, my heart was kind of closed and reading it. I was like, man, you know, I don't know what's about being triggered. Then I was going to change my life. And I wanted to say, I know we're out of time, but here's what you said. The other people around you noticed, even when they didn't know you were doing it. And that is one of the things that I noticed. It's like, you can just do it. You don't have to tell anybody and it will completely work. It works. It's called the road that's triggered. We are out of time turning conflict into connection with a single choice. Dr. Kelly Flanagan, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me, Jenny. I'll get this up soon and then I'll put Michael Hiats right after it. Sounds good. And I'll get it out to everybody too. Okay.