Transcript #476 How to Achieve Radical Emotional Acceptance with Dr. Alex Wills

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1. Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Dr. Alex Wills, who joins the show to talk about how to achieve radical emotional acceptance. Negative emotions suck, but can actually be a great benefit to our lives. Many time we resist negative feelings, pushing them down instead of accepting them for the tools that they are. Dr. Wills discusses so many amazing topics on how to get in tune with your negative emotions and use them to your benefit. He talks about the 5 steps to radical emotional acceptance, how to make fear self-serving, and the techniques he uses with his patients to help them use negative emotions to their benefit. We also go over my own journey to overcoming negative emotions, and what you’ll find in his incredible book Give a F*ck Actually.
2. Learn more about Alex and why he wrote his book Give a F*** Actually.
3. Learn more about the concept of radical self-acceptance.
4. Find out why it is important not to avoid negative feelings in your life.
5. Learn about how Dr. Wills works through the emotions that his patients are feeling.
6. Find out why it is important to think about how an emotion is helping you when you feel it.
7. Learn about the 5 steps to radical emotional acceptance.
8. Find out how our core beliefs impact our emotional health, especially with a partner involved.
9. Learn about how Dr. Wills works through trauma in his practice.
10. Learn about how to make fear self-serving.
11. Find out why it is key to make people aware of the emotional war they’re waging inside.
12. Find out why Dr. Wills uses the term “Name the f-bomb” throughout his book, and how we can learn to listen to our f-bombs.
13. Learn about the top piece of advice Dr. Wills has for someone struggling emotionally, and what inspired him to write his book Give a F*ck Actually
14. See how Dr. Wills walks me through my all of my negative emotions while discussing one of my own journey’s of emotional struggle.
15. Find out where you can learn more about Dr. Wills and his incredible book Give a F*ck Actually.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. And on the show today, we have Dr. Alex Wills on the show, and is a psychiatrist who has written an amazing book called, “Give a Fuck, Actually.” So yeah, I’m just going to say the F-bomb on the show because that’s the title of the book, so I can’t avoid it, okay. But we’re going to be talking about how to have radical emotional acceptance. I think so many of us spend a lot of time and energy avoiding negative emotions, doing anything to get that dopamine hit, to not feel lonely or boredom or feel depressed or anxious or sad, or whatever the negative emotion the label is. And so I think we spend a lot of time and energy resisting these emotions rather than accepting them and looking at them as tools, looking at them as a kind of window to improvement, which they are. All these emotions are important. They’re survival mechanisms. They’ve been built into us as survival tools, and they have very important messages for us to learn from.

  And so we talk about Dr. Will’s five steps to radical emotional acceptance, and I talk about my own personal story of jealousy and how I overcame that in my own relationship. It was a really interesting story. And we also talk about what you resist, persists. These emotions aren’t going anywhere. People have fear, they have different emotions, and they serve a purpose. If you resist them, it really doesn’t serve you, and so we talk about a lot of those concepts and more in today’s show.

  And I know you guys are listening; you’re very focused on detoxification of all kinds. And emotional detox is something that’s very close to my heart because for a lot of you guys and me listening, I’ve spent so many years focused on my physical health, focused on eating the right diet, taking the right supplements, exercising, and all that stuff. But I felt like I’d reached the pinnacle of my physical health, but still woke up, this is many years ago, just feeling just kind of, meh, just not feeling good, not feeling joy, not feeling love and happiness that I really craved, really, truly craved. And so I’ve been on a journey my whole life to figure out how to be happy. That’s what some people want. They want to feel love, joy, and peace in their lives. That’s the ultimate goal.

  And so it’s not just physical health, or you’re not here just because you want to detox, you want to feel good. So I created a program called the Emotional Detox Program, and I equated a masterclass that you can take that’s totally free, and you can check that out at emo-detox.com. And in this kind of over one-hour masterclass, I talk about some fascinating statistics about how emotional trauma contributes to 65% of physical health issues. So if you’re looking to feel better physically, you need to work on your emotional health as well and really get to the root cause of emotional trauma, which lies in parental childhood development, attachment issues, the relationship you had with your parents or your primary caregivers, because that very dramatically impacts you and how you are interpreting the world, perceiving the world, interacting with your loved ones, and what kind of job you pick can be very much the results of your coping mechanisms to trauma and childhood. So we unpack a lot of interesting stuff in this hour masterclass, so definitely check it out; it’s well worth your time at emo-detox.com.

  My guest today, Dr. Alex Wills, is a board-certified psychiatrist, and he’s the owner of Perma Mental Health private psychiatric practice. And Alex’s clinical days are spent using the radical emotional acceptance method to help his patients heal from issues ranging from past traumas to interpersonal struggles in their marriage. Alex’s book, Give an F-bomb, is actually based on that experience. You can learn more about Alex and his work at radicalemotionalacceptance.com.

  Dr. Wills, thanks so much for coming to the show.

Dr. Alex Wills: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote your book, Give a Fuck, actually. I love your title, by the way.

Dr. Alex Wills: You can say the F-bomb on your show, I guess.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Dr. Alex Wills: I am a psychiatrist practicing here in Boise, Idaho. I did my training in Hawaii for a psychiatry residency and a year of child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship. And just in my private practice for about eight and a half years, practicing a lot of psychotherapy with patients. We do medication management, but we have more of a holistic approach than the typical psychiatrist.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. Yeah. And so, in your book, you talk about radical self-acceptance. Can you explain that a little bit, that topic?

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah, the subtitle of the book is “Reclaim Yourself with the Five Steps of Radical Emotional Acceptance,” and basically, that focuses on the idea that emotions are not the problem. And as long as we define emotions as a problem that we have to deal with or cope with or get through or do some emotional work, that actually creates a big problem. So I’m trying to maybe reconceptualize the way that we think of emotions.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Because people don’t like their emotions. I think we spend a lot of time being very resistant to our emotions, especially our negative emotions, and spend a lot of energy and effort running away from negative emotions and getting that dopamine fix and just anything but feeling bad and sitting in negative emotions and feeling them. And that’s what you resist, persist. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Alex Wills: And that’s commonly the way that we refer to negative emotions, or the icky emotions, the ones that we would rather not have. I’m really careful to redefine the definition that I like to use for the book as well as for talk therapy. An emotion is just sort of that pure gut feeling you get in your body and your chest that’s given you some emotional data. And the emotion itself, although it may be painful, unpleasant, very scary or joyful, or happy, it’s not necessarily a negative thing or a bad thing. But what happens is we attach a story to the emotion, and so I define the emotion plus a story to be feeling. And so all of a sudden, we have all of these toxic beliefs, or we have an emotion of shame, for example, and we start to believe that, “Oh, this is proof that I’m no good and I’m never going to be loved,” or whatever the toxic story might be.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I recently had kind of an issue like that because I think when we have an emotion, we start creating a movie in our mind about what that means. And I think a lot of times people, let’s say in your current relationship, you’re experiencing something with that person, and you are maybe having a negative emotion, or a stress response is something they’re doing, but it’s actually about something that happened in a past relationship or a past trauma, and you’re having this physical stress response to it, and your mind’s telling you, “Oh, just shut up. There’s nothing to worry about.” And you have this intellectual conversation, but your body and your emotions are telling you something else. Can you talk a little about that?

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah, absolutely. I often find that when people get caught up in their heads about all these ruminating thoughts and we just sort of can’t stop getting over something, that’s usually evidence that we are not practicing accepting our emotions. So I’ll really try to start simple with my patients and keep it really simple. I ask them to name their emotions, maybe the top six emotions that they have going on at the moment. They might have a little bit of joy, a little bit of fear, a little bit of hate, a little bit of sadness, a little bit of disappointment, without involving the story about it. And then, we try to dissect the story and see how the story is actually causing the problem.

A lot of the influence is, of course, from cognitive behavioral therapy, but it really focuses more on validating those emotions, and the simple act of validating the emotion can really be healing in itself. If I were to hook us up to a functional MRI, simply naming whatever distressing emotion might be going on will show in real time how our amygdala might become calm, just the moment that we are actually naming and just accepting like, “Okay, I’m having a lot of emotional pain right now.”

Dr. Wendy Myers: And people have so much resistance to that. They want to avoid it, they don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to talk about it with their partner, with their loved one. It’s easier to avoid uncomfortable conversations and avoid our feelings and self-abandon, essentially, by not discussing our feelings. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how you really need to accept your emotions and not resist them if you really want to live the life that you want and create the happiness you want?

Dr. Alex Wills: Sure. If we can see that emotions are not the problem in the first place, I like the analogy of surfing waves. So we may have some really big giant tsunami waves going on, or you may have some regular size waves. The rule in surfing is you don’t fight the wave; you go with the wave. So whether the emotion might be a painful emotion, or if the emotion happens to be really joyful, you can find a way to be at peace surfing that wave and kind of going with it. Instead of trying to avoid it or fix it or work through it or drown in it, you can simply become curious about it and see. The question I always ask is, how is this emotion trying to help me? And it’s there for a reason. It’s coming from us. That we wouldn’t be having the emotion unless it wasn’t trying to serve a purpose. And so we’re trying to be curious about, okay, what is my emotional truth trying to tell me about this relationship, about this situation?

Dr. Wendy Myers: And so, what is radical emotional acceptance? What does that look like? How do people get to that point?

Dr. Alex Wills: Right. Well, basically, the five steps are just brief to go through to try to make it really simple and applicable to your life; the first step is to simply name the emotion. The first step is actually to realize that we might have an emotional shield, such as anger going on, that might shield us from deeper, more vulnerable emotions. So we have to sort of recognize that shield, that might be a defense mechanism or another emotion or numbness, and then be curious about what emotions are underneath the shield.

The second step is to name the emotion. The third step is to listen to the emotion and be curious about what it’s trying to teach you. The fourth step is to act with your emotional wisdom and make a decision on what to do. Oftentimes we don’t need to do anything. We just might decide that the best choice is to be patient or to wait. And the final step is gratitude. If you can find pure gratitude and sincere gratitude for the emotion, it’s impossible to be at war with yourself and at war with your emotions because you realize that they really are trying to help you.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, the worst thing people can do is avoid what they’re feeling, avoid their emotions and not think about it, articulate it, figure out what’s going on, and express that to their friend or their partner or their parents. And I think it’s a form of self-abandonment in not doing that because you get your needs met.

And I think for me, a lot of times when I haven’t wanted to express my emotions to someone were an issue, it was because I was afraid they were going to leave, or they wouldn’t accommodate me, or that it’d be too much trouble or something like that. But the reality is if that’s the case, that person needs to go out of your life, and they’re not in alignment with you. But what about our core beliefs? How do our core beliefs impact our emotional health? With these beliefs that we’re kind of on automatic pilot, they’re software behind the scenes, running the show that we may not even be aware of.

Dr. Alex Wills: Sure. And a good segue into the core beliefs is we often will get caught up in, well, I don’t want to talk about my emotions because it’s going to take forever. Or my partner might want me to do all of this stuff, or my partner might feel like they need to help me and fix me. But that’s oftentimes when we start talking about our feelings and talking about the story because that way, we feel like we need to solve the problem or fix something.

But I try to coach my patients into simply listing the emotions, which can literally take less than five or 10 seconds, and then your partner can be aware of what your emotions are, and that really makes all the difference. So when we get into core beliefs, I’m having an emotion of disappointment, and we get into those classic core beliefs of I’m not lovable, I’m not valuable, I’m not worthy. And because I have this emotion of disappointment, there’s sort of proof that might be true. And so then we get stuck in this sort of downward spiral where we have these toxic beliefs that remain unquestioned.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, I mean, it’s so easy to fall. I mean, I think most people deal with some amount of self-hatred and worthlessness and powerlessness and survival fear and things like that that really affect us on a deep, deep, deep level that we’re not even aware of. And it can very much drive our behavior and addictions and relationship choices, and job choices. So there are a lot of layers of this onion that you need to peel.

Dr. Alex Wills: And I noticed you used the term self-hatred, right? And so I notice all the time we use these terms, and there’s like a whole story attached to that term, that the emotion of hate might be a pure emotion, but we start to say, “Well, this is self-hatred,” and all of a sudden there’s a story that I am deserving to be hated. There’s something about my essence that is worthy of hate instead of simply allowing ourselves to experience the emotion of hate, which happens when you stub your toe, for example.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And can you talk about how all those negative feelings can or emotions can be rooted in trauma. And how do you work with trauma in your practice?

Dr. Alex Wills: And trauma, there’s a wide variety of subcategories of different types of trauma. I find getting in touch with the emotions is essential in that work for most of the psychotherapies that we do. For example, there’s a lot of fear with trauma, and tapping into that emotion of fear and becoming curious, what is this fear good for? Why do I have this intense fear, and how can I just get rid of it? Well, we can’t just get rid of our emotions. That’s creating a battle with ourselves. So we start to become curious; well, how is this fear supposed to be helping me? How can I somehow have a better relationship with this part of myself and see how it’s maybe making me aware of a threat, or a potential threat, or a horrific memory from the past of something that happened.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Tell us how we can make fear our bitch, and have it serve us instead of us serving them, serving the fear.

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah. I struggled for a long time. I had a personal quest to become kind of like zen and enlightened and rise above things, this pathway to peace.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Did that start in Hawaii, by any chance?

Dr. Alex Wills: Definitely some influence from there. But I found myself coming back to the truth that I still have fear and anxiety pop up from time to time. And so, becoming curious about it and realizing, well, what if fear is not a problem? What if it is trying to help me? So when I notice any anxiety or fear come up, I simply ask myself the question, how is this trying to help me? What threat is it making me aware of? And do I need to do anything? Do I need to ask for help, do I need to take action, or do I need to just practice trusting myself that I can mediate that bridge when I get there.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, fear does serve a purpose. I mean, it was a survival mechanism at some point. It’s helped you get through a difficult situation or difficult childhood. And it’s a survival mechanism built into us, so there’s no escaping it; you have to work with that. And so, what are some of the most challenging aspects of radical emotional acceptance that you found?

Dr. Alex Wills: I’ll ask a patient what their emotions are, and they’ll start to talk for several minutes about all of these explanations and rationalizations, intellectualization. And at the end of five minutes, say, “You know what? I didn’t hear one emotional word this entire time”. And so helping people to become aware of how we are at war, trying to avoid or fix or somehow not be in touch with the emotions, thinking that the emotions are a problem. And it does take a bit of coaching, I’d say, to really help people have that truth become real in their lives and really apply to them. And the challenge of psychotherapy is making it a reality for that person.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so, how do you work with people in psychotherapy and in doing talk therapy? How do you work with your patients?

Dr. Alex Wills: Well, I swallowed a psychotherapy pill in Hawaii and became addicted to psychotherapy. There are dozens of different modalities, and I want to learn them all. Everyone has different pearls of wisdom. And so I really like to adapt a combination of different modalities for each patient. Whatever my gut tells me is going to work best for this person.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. And so you use a phrase in your book called “Name the Fuck” throughout the book. What does that mean, and how does it relate to our emotional reality?

Dr. Alex Wills: And for those of you who may not know, the F-bomb is sort of the fun word for emotion or maybe a painful emotion. And so the second step of radical emotional acceptance is to name that emotion, name the F-bomb. And so yeah, simply by naming it really can already start to diffuse things and bring people back to a sense of peace.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And so what are some helpful ways to take down our shield emotions, our defense mechanisms, so that we can learn to listen to our fucks, our F-Bombs?

Dr. Alex Wills: I think the first part is to realize that it is a shield emotion or it is a defense mechanism, and then ask ourselves the question, “Well, what am I defending against? What emotion am I trying to avoid? What fear or pain am I trying to not be in touch with”? And then to become curious. One technique, for example, is it’s easier to see things in other people. So sometimes I’ll ask patients to imagine that the situation was the same for their best friend, and what do you imagine your best friend’s emotions are? And it might be easier for people to identify it because it’s not about them, so they’re less defended.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And it’s a practice of looking at your emotions. There are a lot of people who just weren’t brought up asking how you feel, or they weren’t validated emotionally or rewarded for their emotions, positive or negative. I think there are a lot of people with emotional neglect out there that are really just kind of numb, and they’re really just trying to feel anything and pursuing pleasure, addictions, whatever the addiction may be. They’re just trying to feel something. When I think of our kind of epidemic of emotional neglect, there are a lot of people very dissociated from their emotions, and they need practice in identifying them.

Dr. Alex Wills: And that’s a good example of a shield emotion. Just the other day, I was speaking with someone, and I asked what their emotional state was, and their reply was, “I’m just numb. I don’t feel anything”. And so there are emotions underneath that, but for whatever reason, they’re unable or possibly unwilling, or unconsciously unwilling, to try to get in touch with what those might be. And for levels of severe trauma, it’s very challenging sometimes, and it might be a slow process to get there.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And especially there’s a lot of people that are those therapy junkies, people that love to go to therapy and they’ve gone to all these different therapists. And that was certainly me, and I think a lot of times people think that they’ve dealt with stuff in the past, and they think they’ve gotten over it, and then it still continues to haunt them. And so it can be hard to unpack the trauma that people have and how it’s affecting them today.

Dr. Alex Wills: Absolutely. Yeah. I love the specialty because every single person is a unique sort of mystery novel to sort of figure out. There are no two cases that are identical, so it always keeps you on your toes and keeps you engaged.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And so, what is the top piece of advice that you have for people that are struggling emotionally?

Dr. Alex Wills: I’d say realize that maybe the emotions, in fact, I don’t believe the emotions are a problem., And so, let’s rethink this.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay. And is there anything else we haven’t talked about that you want to elaborate on?

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah, such a wide topic. I was inspired to write the book because most of us have heard of this book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. And the first time I read it, I thought it was an interesting, kind of fun, interesting take on things. And a lot of the advice there was somewhat helpful. But something about it kept nagging at me and kind of rubbing me wrong. And I got to thinking about it more, and when I reread it, I saw all of these sorts of new advanced tips and tricks for emotional suppression and how we can control our own emotions and whatnot. And it really wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t working for me in my personal life. It really wasn’t jiving with the different types of psychotherapy that were helping my patients. And so that helped to inspire me to say, “Hey, I have something to say about this that can maybe help people a bit more.” We don’t have to go through this art of emotional suppression and create a battle when there’s really no battle to be fought with ourselves.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I want to give a fuck, actually. I do. I spend a lot of time in my life running away from negative emotions and suppressing them, and I want to feel them. I want to feel my emotions, good and bad, and sit in them and process them, with the end goal of being happier. Happier and healthier and have more fulfilling friendships and relationships and business partnerships as well.

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah. I’m curious, do you have any sort of maybe a small thing or something that was causing you any emotional issues that you wouldn’t mind sharing in recent days, by chance?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, actually, there have been some things. it’s a little bit embarrassing, but my boyfriend, we’ve had a few conversations about him looking at other women or on Instagram. And I think it’s a big conversation a lot of people are having with Instagram and liking other people’s posts and maybe potentially talking to people, and they could term it micro-cheating, almost like having conversations with other people online. It’s a big issue for a lot of couples. And so, for me, I was like, why? So your guy looks at another woman or is doing that a lot; why does that really bother me? It really took me a long time to unpack it.

I mean, yes, it doesn’t feel good, and it can be a potential threat to your relationship, but most guys, they’re looking, and they’re looking around. Women too. But it’s like, well, why am I having a stress response to that? Why am I starting to feel angry about it? What is really going on?

And I was listening to a podcast with Mark Groves, who I think is an amazing relationship coach, and I realized it was the first husband who looked at women a lot, but also, I was not his physical type. I’m a big bitch, I’m like a tall blonde, and I’m not like this petite person, and that was his physical type. So I always felt like I wasn’t enough. I always felt like I couldn’t be thin enough, and I starved myself and took diet pills, and I just killed myself to be this person’s physical type, and it was just never enough, no matter what I did. And then that person eventually left me, and I felt abandoned. It was very, very traumatic. I don’t know why I was so into this person, but I just was. So I look back, I’m like, what was I thinking?

But it created trauma in me, and I thought I had processed that and all this therapy and whatever. But then I realized that my current boyfriend, who is looking at other women, created this fear of abandonment in me that had nothing to do with him because I know I’m that person’s type, like a hundred percent. And I made sure in any future relationships I will be with someone, I’m their type, and I don’t have to worry about that.

Dr. Alex Wills: Sure.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Men like what they like. And so, for me, that’s what the root cause of that was. And, for me, it took a lot of unpacking to figure that out because I couldn’t even figure it out myself after months of thinking about it.

Dr. Alex Wills: So I heard a couple of emotions there. You mentioned anger, and then you also mentioned some fear. Without explaining why, can you name any other emotions when you think about this Instagram situation for you?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean, it was really more like in person, but it definitely brings up sadness. The thought of your partner wanting to be with somebody else or fear that you’re not enough. Fear that person doesn’t really love you like they say they do, or maybe they don’t want to be in a relationship; they want to be out there playing the field and experimenting. So there’s a lot of things that can come up for people, I think women and men too, but I think women deal with this a lot. They have these feelings a lot.

Dr. Alex Wills: I imagine if I put myself in that situation, I might have some fear and possibly some jealousy. My emotional radar might be picking up some, like you said, sadness, disappointment, and obviously frustration, anger. So the other category of emotions that, at least, I like to think of them as emotions is our desires. And so, on the flip side of every negative emotion or painful emotion, there’s a desire. So when you think of the emotion of jealousy, what’s the flip side? What’s your desire or your emotional need that you want to have met?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to feel jealous. I just wish I was a Brazilian or something. I was just totally free, who cares and just enjoys life and looks around, and I want to be that person, but I am my trauma, I am my past, and I can’t erase that.

Dr. Alex Wills: Sure.

Dr. Wendy Myers: So I think the desire is I want freedom, or I want to feel free maybe from that emotion. And I want to feel trust. My desire is to trust my partner very much.

Dr. Alex Wills: So you said trust. Would you say you want intimacy and that sort of connection, and so on?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Dr. Alex Wills: Okay.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Absolutely.

Dr. Alex Wills: So in this way, I see jealousy or this fear as a very helpful emotion because if you didn’t have that, you might be oblivious, and then he might end up not knowing that you really do want this commitment, this trust, this intimacy, this exclusivity with him, and then he might actually wander off or whatever. And so the emotions make you aware of your desire to have that fidelity.

And so I always like to imagine, well, if I didn’t have this painful emotion, what would I be like? And it’s like, well, things would probably go in a very bad direction. I have a lot of polyamorous friends, and life is great until it’s not. And some of them don’t really have those jealousy radars, but sometimes it comes back to bite.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean, I think it feels good when your partner is jealous, not too much, but a little bit, jealousy is not love, but it lets you know they want to be protective of the relationship. And I think it’s also an innate survival mechanism to feel protective of your relationship because back in the caveman times if you were a woman and you were pregnant with a young baby and your man wanted to be with somebody else, you could die. You could die of starvation. So for us, it’s an innate survival mechanism, I also think, to want to preserve that union and be hyper-aware.

And a lot of women spot a threat in their environment before the guy even sees them because it’s just innate. It’s built into us. So it’s just been an interesting journey trying to unpack all that stuff. But I think jealousy, a little bit good; too much is overbearing and controlling, but I think a little bit is nice and serves a purpose.

Dr. Alex Wills: Well, you seem to be very in tune with your emotions and your emotional wisdom. Your emotional intelligence is helping you to make a lot of sense of the situation and your relationship. And you’ve learned a lot from tuning into those, based on what you’re saying, and so I think that’s great.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And I think in other relations I’ve been in, I haven’t brought it up at all or discussed it because I felt shame in it or weakness or the person didn’t want to deal with that, and I very much self abandoned it. Then I’d become very angry all of a sudden, and people would be like, “What’s your problem”? And that makes it so much worse. But now I’m choosing not to self-abandon and bring up issues and discuss them calmly and invite this person to support me in my emotions and in my past trauma, and invite them to support me rather than being at odds about it, which you can very easily fall into that. Where I’m angry, and then that person’s resentful, and then ruins your whole night, rather than saying, “Hey, can I just have some support? I’m feeling really vulnerable right now”. And that’s a very different conversation.

Dr. Alex Wills: One of my favorite types of therapy is, you’ve probably heard of emotionally focused therapy for couples or EFT, and the Jedi trick with EFT is whenever you find yourself at odds with your partner, go super vulnerable and let your partner know what your vulnerable emotions are and allow your partner to share theirs with you, and that helps to bring us back to that emotional intimacy instead of fighting and arguing and digging in and becoming defensive. So I recommend that to everybody and their dog because it gets such great results, statistically, for EFT.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And vulnerability is sexy. It’s sexy when someone is talking about their emotions or the ways that they were hurt in their past. It draws you to that person, I think. But people, for themselves, feel ashamed about talking about their past or their feelings because they’re very much afraid of being abandoned or that person not caring about their feelings or something. But you have nothing to fear because if that person goes away, let them take that long walk off that short pier.

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah, I agree. I think it is very attractive because we’re most similar where we’re deepest, and making someone you trust aware of your emotional state, draws them in; you’re tapping directly into their neurology, those mirroring emotions. And for people that are able to empathize, they can really empathize and maybe have a deep sense of what it might be like to be you. And what greater experience than to be able to connect on such a special level.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely. And so, why don’t you tell people where they can get your book, where they can find your website, work with you and learn more about you?

Dr. Alex Wills: Yeah, it’s available on Amazon and wherever English books are sold in the world, it’s available for pre-sale, but it’s going live in mid-January 2023. You can go to radicalemotionalacceptance.com, which is one of the websites, or just type, Alex Wills MD into Amazon and it should pop up for, Give a F, Actually.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. Well, Dr. Wills, thank you so much for coming to the show. That was awesome. And everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. I’m Dr. Wendy Meyers, and it’s just a pleasure every week to bring you experts from around the world to help you not only uplevel your health but your emotional health as well, which has a tremendous impact on your physical health. So thanks for tuning in, and I’ll talk to you next week.