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Episode 146: Binging on broccoli, Do we want what we can't have, Live caller
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall with the beat your genes podcast dr. Lyle how you doing this evening EDA bout yourself doing pretty good so good news for our listeners today I was able to upload the podcast on Spotify which is a major app for most of the Android and Apple phones so if you guys prefer to listen to us on Spotify it should be up in a few hours maybe a day or so but but join us there can also join us at blogtalkradio.com/ropeadoperadio or alright dr. Lyle got a question about binge eating and cramming you said that no one ever binges on broccoli or carrots well here I am I eat completely unprocessed mainly vegetables but I still binge and cram on the healthiest of stuff just to give you an idea that can be eight pounds of broccoli in one sitting easily Wow also the reason I completely avoid legumes and potatoes as they always make me overeat and in fact gain weight and while my vegetarian my veggie binges don't necessarily mean weight gain it is a huge burden that I have this drive to stuff myself until it hurts binging on junk and high-calorie foods makes so much sense and seems straightforward to overcome do you think that mechanisms behind my low-calorie veggie binges are the same and can it therefore be tackled with the same measures can you make sense of it all thank you for your help okay let's think about this kind of seems like I answered something like this before but if I didn't I was just hallucinating okay let's see now so we have a person who would you know is doing you know eating prodigiously and there's a very likely reason for that and the reason for that is that you have diet that is unnaturally low in calorie density so this person is there eating a diet that you know you can survive on because it's the modern world and somebody can actually hand you pounds and pounds and pounds of this food and you don't have to work very hard to get it so you can survive this way but you aren't designed to survive this way and the so one of the problems is is that you've got two major mechanisms of satiation for you know diverse species including humans and those mechanisms are chemo receptors or nutrient reception that is going to detect the calorie density of food on the one hand and then stretch receptors or what we might call volumetric control that's going to be on the other so it's essentially how much are you eating ie volume and what are you eating ie chemical analysis that makes perfect sense so if you hand a a kid pilot money pilot change in his Christmas stocking or you know in a sock for his birthday he not only feels the how much you gave him or her but then they dump it out on the bed and then look and see how many quarters and dimes there are as posts and nickels and pennies and this is exactly what the nervous system does it's it's looking for the calorie density of the food now if it finds that there's no calorie density in the food to speak of in other words it's broccoli so it's a hundred calories a pound then remember that if it said this is a woman needing a couple of thousand hours a day to be at equilibrium for her weight for ideal health she's going to she would need the twenty pounds of broccoli a day so eight pounds of broccoli at a sitting wouldn't be unreasonable at all for somebody that's eating a diet like that so it's interesting to note that the mechanisms association which would never allow her to eat eight pounds of cheese will allow her to eat eight pounds of broccoli because the the detection mechanisms are working as some kind of summed average of how much you ate and what did you eat now people will you know since the time I was a kid people would say I would hear particularly you know be feeding American mail say oh boy if I eat Chinese food for lunch like an hour later I didn't need anything and that's because what was happening is is that they were eating you know they were typically eating very high calorie dense diets so their stretch reception mechanisms were were adapted to eating very low volumes of food maybe three or four pounds of food a day and now they've eaten you know pound and a half of Chinese food at lunch and there's really not that many calories in it and so they feel full by the time they've eaten you know pound or a pound and a half of food but at the end of that they really haven't eaten very many calories and so as a result you know they're quote hungry couple hours later and they're not used to that because they were used to putting a cheeseburger in there with a with a chocolate shake and drowning themselves in thousand calories which would last them for five hours so alright enough of it wandering around here so you're making mostly so uh do it anyway before once more so what we've got is a person that an unusual individual obviously that that has the self-discipline to exclusively eat very low calorie dense foods and there are people that will do this she also notes that if she starts eating potato she gains weight we're not we're not hearing from her and we don't know for example what her height weight is I'm concerned that this is a this could be a borderline eating disorder type of a situation where she's very thin where she just may she may not be she may not be in any trouble as far as that goes but a perfectly reasonable amount of fat for this for this person might be actually healthier and better off a few pounds heavier if she was he a diet that had more normal calorie density CIMMYT ie potatoes rice beans corn oats etc not to mention meat which which is a perfectly natural food in principle though I don't think it's ideally healthy but it's it certainly was a major component in the natural diet of human beings and at eight hundred calories a pound it's an awful long way from broccoli at one hundred so I think the the way I would look at this and this is why I can't I can't go too far much further with advice here and I don't want to act like I know the answer for the specific individual other than I would probably say that the solution to the problem is to eat a diet that is higher calorie density that is still on the low side because this person is obviously concerned about her weight but I don't think that you're going to have a weight problem and I don't think you're going to be overweight if you're eating a diet that has potatoes rice beans corn etc in it and I think by increasing the calorie density of the food you're going to find that the hunger drive is going to be not having you chomp down eight pounds of food and and this is so we essentially take the pressure off of a system that the only way it's working properly and keeping enough food in the person is to to eat to continue to eat until there's enough evidence that there's been a reasonable amount of food eaten meanwhile by the time that's happening the stretch receptors are screaming for mercy because we've gone way past the amount of food that human beings would have never normally eaten because they never would have sat there and tried to make a diet out of a out of food that's you know a couple hundred calories a pound per on average so you know if this person's eating that many vegetables the average calorie density of the diet is is it's very low and I'm not saying that the person is unhealthy but we're doing a bizarre behavior and you could continue to do it and the system is adapting to it there's nothing in principle wrong with stuffing your self up to the gills probably with eight pounds of broccoli but if you don't want to do it then let's do something else so let's put a pound of potatoes in there first before we start eating any broccoli and then we're going to I think we're going to see that we're not going to be interested in meaning so much broccoli after that if the person winds up two to three months later they wind up three pounds heavier as a result you know so be it that you would have to prove to me with actual data that a person eating a diet that was balanced with respect to fruit salad starches whole grains etc that that individual eating say six or seven pounds food a day two or three pounds of food at sitting etc of a low calorie density diet maybe averaging you know 350 calories a pound eating six pounds fit a day you would have to prove to me that that that diet was actually you know made that person overweight I think that would be a very unusual situation and we would look at that on a case-by-case basis I think that what we've got here is a what I would I affectionately call H cncs which are hyper conscientious nut cases which is we find in this arena of the the dietary arena a lot I mean I I'm acquainted with some of them I've I've written a book with one to do a podcast of another yeah okay so we've got hyper cut judges in that cases and I think that that that's what we've got on the other end of this question and I would I would ask that this person experiment by loosening the grip a little bit on worrying you know and let's hat let the evidence prove to us you know after 90 days what would actually happen to your weight remember what could happen and what hyper conscientious nut cases that worried about their weight and eaten very low calorie dense diets often do is they're weighing themselves every day and so when they start eating some potatoes they step on the scale and they're up three pounds and they think see I can't eat potatoes but the truth of the matter is what they're doing is they're finally some glycogen in their liver and so it isn't fat you don't gain a pound of fat a day you won't even gain a pound of fat in a week the your human weight gain and weight loss is quite slow typically in other words it may be an ounce or two a day under fairly intense circumstances those would be changes that would be fairly dramatic so but what happens is the HCN see you know you know breaks down and eats a couple potatoes and then goes and steps on the scale and they're a pound up the next day why well because for every every pound of glycogen that you're storing in the liver ie which is not fat it's just essentially sugars that you're going to be using it's like fuel in your gas tank in your car so for every pound of that you're going to add two pounds of water the bodies can absorb an additional two pounds of water so so a person could by starting to eat a diet with more starches in it they could suddenly be a couple of pounds heavier typically when they weigh themselves and they're thinking that they've gained fat they haven't gained any fat so this is why I would want such an individual to trust the process and wait you know essentially make a dietary change this direction for several weeks and let's find out if between you know between day seven of this and day seventy of this whether or not there's been actually any substantial weight gain and and if there hasn't or it's minimal than the answer we have found the answer which is to move our calorie density from 200 calories a pound to 350 and in doing so we should be able to take care of the of the drive to binge fantastic I always get excited when someone tells me that they can't that they that they gain weight when they eat low calorie density foods because yeah it tells me that that if they can violate the laws of thermodynamics and we can actually win a nobel prize in physics so I get really excited to really want to get some good data and then you know we're still still searching for that data but you know I keep my fingers crossed right right you got it all right what else do we have all right so we've got a couple more questions we've got a caller on hold mm-hmm dr. Lyle how much truth is there to the view that we want what we can't have for example in a mate and that we don't really value what we already have does something become more desirable just from the sheer fact that it is hard or impossible to get no now this is a this is a an interesting this is a this is an interesting misinterpretation of a of a correlation that people are watching so you'll see you'll see this this concept written about and by various philosophers and different kinds sort of lamenting the human condition that you know some guys got a wife somewhere and he he just he's just not that hot on her and he really wants something else and he can't have it and yet his wife's you know perfectly good upstanding excellent human any sort of water before but now he doesn't now I want something else and everybody says gee what a cruel fate you know that that humanity faces no this is not a cruel fate and here's what the truth is the truth is is that the reason why you want something is because it is subjectively more valuable to you and the reason why it's subjectively more valuable to you is that it is in all probability objectively superior and so in others you were not born with a nervous system that wants things that are not valuable in fact the whole concept of value is the concept of evaluation and the concept of evaluation is one of comparison so the entire process is comparative and so your your nervous system is designed by nature to be discerning different inputs and in different you know sensory inputs and be observing in those different sensor inputs across all sensory demands you're actually looking for the optimal the optimal target of your action and you're attempting to move into circumstances that can take advantage of processes with respect to the optimal targets that's what your nervousness is all fancy talk for saying that all things being equal try try to sleep with the hot person okay and so this is this is how you're designed all things being equal get the job that has the nicer conditions all things being equal get the job that pays more okay all things being equal drive a fancier car being a fancier house take fancier vacations and try to B's having sex with fancier people so that we can have to answer your children so that they can be more competitive in getting our genes into future generations that's how you're built and so of course then it's going to be the case that your nervous system is designed to be essentially trying to tap into the truth and the truth is which opportunities are objectively superior for the genetic code to others so which food has more calories densities which Apple is sweeter okay the one that is sweeter is probably the one with greater calorie density so these things are not by any means entirely subjective this is why the reliability data of the reliability agreement coefficients between any two observers on the attractiveness of humans is extremely high it exceeds 0.90 in other words it's it borders on perfection it's not perfect and we all know this is true this is why we can we can disagree about who should really be Miss America and who should be mr. universe etcetera now the however so this is what I'm going to call the objectivity within the subjectivity or you could flip it around and you could say well there's subjectivity within the objectivity that may be a better way of looking at it in other words essentially human what human beings value is objectively extremely in high agreement that's why you don't have people running around absolutely excited out of their mind because they're going to purchase a home that the rest of the market thought was was worth you know you know the market thought it was worth three hundred thousand but these people these people thought that it was worth five times more than any other house that they saw in that range that as far as they were concerned it's worth a million five and they were going to spend a million five if they had it but they look at this house oh my god it's only three hundred thousand that's not how anybody feels okay people's evaluations of real estate that are easily within 5% yeah if you know what you're doing you can do a drive-by appraisal on a house and you can be within a few percent of knowing what that thing is going to sell for everybody that's an experienced investor knows this so are there differences of opinion of course they are but they're slight okay so no no no no non drange a non-high mail drunk mail ever looked at at a ten ten female the three other men thought was a ten and said that's a seven never happened okay so much less a random number like a three or four or five so the the the objectivity is great so the question is is there truth in this notion that we don't value what we have and we just want what we can't help no you value what you can't have because you don't have the chops to get it and it's objectively superior okay so that's what's going on so now you know so this here lies the human condition you're designed by nature to have yourself generating goals and what the goals are is that they are improvements in your circumstances from where it is that they are here now and it's going to take time and energy in competitive stress in order to achieve those goals in order to improve your situations with respect to mates friends trade etc objective physical circumstances and so it's going to take an investment of energy and your your brain is designed by nature to run probability assessments on how much energy is going to take to get there and what is our probability of getting there and that multiplication will give rise to how much motivation you're likely to have so you you're going to but but even if you can can see that it's a losing proposition that it's exceedingly unlikely that you could get whatever it is that the that is subjectively and and by definition certainly objectively valuable in the marketplace if you can see that you're unlikely to get it it doesn't stop you from wanting it okay so you're designed with desire chips or excitement ie the derivatives of evaluation that are drawing you to those stimuli in order to so that you can tell the difference between an eight and a six it's exceedingly important that you can tell the difference between an eight and a six so that you're in high agreement with other members of the gene pool so you don't make the tragic error of if you could have had an eight you took a six instead and now you wind up with children that are less sexually attractive and now they are then you could have had and now your genes are going to be struggling for the rest of eternity unnecessarily okay so the so the truth is is that you want what you want because it's valuable and you want what you can't have because it's more valuable than what it is that you could get now do we not want what we can have no okay very often you want what you have oftentimes you had to work very hard to get it and it was difficult to get it and you got it okay now there's a lot of things that I that I have that I that I like all kinds of stuff I could point to them all over my house including my cats now when this person is talking about specifically about mates is it likely that I'm not going to want what I could get sure of course that's true why because what I can get or people that want to trade with me and the people that want to trade with me are are likely to be statistically likely to be a octave Li inferior to me now I even hate to say that I'm objectively too superior a planet I could just see the little the little quote you know that this is let this whack-job psychologist say but the point is is that of course this is true okay so the it's going to be the case that everybody on earth there's somebody who is objectively the least valuable human being on earth out of seven billion okay some some 114 year old individual that just no longer has any sex appeal to anybody under any circumstances so there's going to be somebody somewhere that is the least and then there's somebody somewhere that is the best okay and you could say well what on earth does that mean it's the best well if we actually took the time to run the data and give everybody a bunch of photography on them we could actually assign the objectively most sexually attractive individuals on the planet we could do such a thing in principle so the is a long drawn-out answer but what the hell so the point is it is something become more desirable because it's hard to get no absolutely not it becomes it is more desirable and it is harder to get because it's objectively superior that's why it is and competitive pressures make it let's less uh less likely for you to be able to obtain it so this this old saying that gee you know you you don't want what you can what you can have you want what you can't have and gee you know what a what a silly kind of bizarre human condition silliness that this is and what you ought to have is just love the one you're with okay you know we'll take that little tune to the bank and try to have some solace in it good luck okay the truth of the matter is if you're very fortunate and you actually want what you have that's terrific good for you this is part of the holy grail of life is to find such a situation you're going to find that most of the time in the human conditions that isn't going to be the situation the situation is going to be people are going to be scrambling under competitive pressures to try to get something that is at the upper limit of their ability to reach it with respect to its objective value and usually they're going to get fooled and they're going to think they've got it but they don't have it okay in various guises so the guy who's who's superior to the female pretends like he's really into her preparer bonding but he's not he may actually have to self deceive himself in order to get it and so he's doing a number on her that he's going to hit and run she feels at that time for the first 90 days that she has skin the cat she is now found the Holy Grail and every love chip in her head is going off as she's got this magnificent situation but it is in fact true no okay so now we got the woman scorned and feelings how you etcetera so this is this is the type of thing that we're going to typically see we're going to see an awful lot of heartbreak and frustration and the very reason why we see a lot of heartbreak and frustration this should this should help us see something that's fascinating it's telling us how unbelievably objective made value actually is if mate value were not extraordinarily objective we would not see the widespread frustration and difficulty people have in actually finding partners and getting happy with them and remaining happy with them okay yeah the hopefully people can understand this if the standard deviation on the the disagreement of individuals in other words the subjective values was high it would be very easy for people to feel like they had had in other words very very easy for two people who are a pair of sevens to think that the other one is an eight and have everybody incredibly excited the but as we can see you can understand that if the purpose of the deal is to try to get the best possible deal at the upper reaches of your ability then you're going to essentially see that what we're trying to do is squeeze the last nickel out of what it is that we can get out of the marketplace and we're going to see that those tolerance or the standard deviations must be pretty narrow indeed or else that's why we have a hard time getting us okay I think I've meandered around enough and halfway answered that thing and the answer is not what I said okay let's try another question oh look at me while I'm talking to myself at this point no it's great I think yeah this this question I found it very interesting because Matt a friend a couple years ago who had just gotten gotten into the job market and he was getting calls from recruiters and he was telling them oh I'm kind of busy today why don't we talk you know such a such date at old money that we had a little disagreement over I said you should you should make yourself scarce like you should make yourself appear eager to get this position or at least talk to somebody that wants to help you and he was his position was that well if I appear too scarce or if I appear too eager then it means I don't have a lot of people after me and right so so this is goes beautifully into our next question which is on the same topic which in self-improvement circles people are often advised to make themselves more scarce so that people will respect and appreciate them and their time more what do you think similarly can people acting more over rewarded or under rewarded relationships fool their partners with regards to may value and so from your previous answer it's actually pretty much know the answer the baseline answer is going to be no okay so there's going to be exceptions to this and there's a little bit of slop in the system as you can imagine and that slop is specifically going to be taking place very very early when people are trying to sort of figure out figure out where where things seem to be at now no no guide tried to act cool to some girl who wasn't hot on him you know was able to is going to be able to trick her for very long or peak much interest this is all this is all this every guy that's having a hard time getting what he wants wants to hear the SIRT the secret from the pickup artist and the great secret is act cool like you don't care because then what happens is is that she then infers that that she's actually you know that you're that you've had better and therefore she's not so fancy relative to your expectations so therefore she must be miss reading her own nervous system that feels like you're beneath her and suddenly she will recalibrate as a result of you being cool and then she'll bite like hundred like a mere that'll attitude good luck okay now I'm not saying that that that that never worked on some girl that was you know two or three sheets to the wind you know maybe so okay but it's a terrible strategy in general the in its it's not going to fly people this would this is assuming people don't have an independent method ie their own eyeballs to to look and see what they think about how attractive somebody else now the now let's let's III thought you know I thought about this this is kind of interesting as I suppose that I'm a young I don't know professional some kind and I I have like one client a week and somebody calls me and says gee you know could I get an appointment on you know could I get an appointment and you say certainly they said well when could I get an appointment here here's waste here's a good thing not right now really anytime you want - happen single thing on the books okay that's probably not a good strategy so we are going to do a little bit of bluffing here and we're going to tried and what we're trying to do is we're trying to infer that we have we have some reasonable trade constraints because there are in fact other people after us so we might say well what would day would be best for you and they say well Thursday well that's good actually I've got a couple of times on Thursday so this is this is an example of the deep examples here is what I call the fish trick okay so this is I've talked about this in previous podcast but this is this is a store the story of imitation throughout nature in the fish trick the I don't remember the name of the fish and somebody can email it to me but some tropical fish off the coast of Madagascar I think it was yeah the I don't think it's Madagascar I think it's uh Tasmania this tropical fish where the male has a has an orange amount of material on his body on the side and it turns out that females find the male that have the most of that orange sort of stripe to be the most attractive and so what investigators did this was in the late 1990s was published in Scientific American it's a really interesting study I've seen other versions of this sense but this is the one that I remember the is that there was a three different level or three different Guppies or whatever these things that are that they used one of them had 18% orange on his side the other one had 27 I think and the other one had about 42 so this was sort of you know short medium tall or skinny medium built or whatever you want to call it okay so this is and so what they did was they actually they presented these males in pairs to females but the females were observing older females of the species who who having a choice between these pairs for example between the 18 and the 27 the older females chose the 18 and so what they then did was release the young female since the cage opted to this and the young females went for the guy there was 18 instead of 27 this is very interesting and then they did the same thing between 27 and 42 and the young females went for the 27 and then they went 18 against 42 so that it looked like the older females went for the 18 and the young females went for the 42 so they were able to establish that there are limits to the imitative function in other words you can have a bunch of beautiful models clamoring all over Danny DeVito but the the real one that isn't being paid to do so that walks in the joint ain't interested okay so the question is what is the degree of the ability of human beings to be lured by what other members of the species are doing and the answer is a little bit okay a little bit and so the it's not a lot it's not it's not this is what I call the fish trick and so the fish trick is going on in commerce so if you say you know I I've only got two appointments available on Thursday this is the fish trick okay the fish trick is other people are buying my services and therefore you should I e this is the concept of demonstrating that you must be valuable or you wouldn't you wouldn't have any degree of scarcity at all okay the there are very pretty severe limits on this as I said yet in something like this where people don't know you haven't traded with you and and have don't have an ability to evaluate your ability versus others then this is going to be the most powerful position and utility of the fish trick if it's some girl in a bar that you're trying to hit on good luck to you so go ahead and pay the hot hooker to come up and kiss you on the cheek see how that works out for you my guess is the girl on the bar you're interested in will have it has a pair of eyes and she has a stone-age brain and she has mating search images in her head and I don't think no matter who it is that gives you kiss on the cheek is going to make much difference about what it is that she thinks all right there and fantastic well we've got two more questions on marijuana usage and spousal abuse but we're going to keep those for next week and we're going to welcome our caller who's been on hold here so very good Stephanie welcome to the show thanks for calling in hi thanks for having me very good where you calling from Stephanie Utah Oh Utah whole history cold okay all right all right well tell us a story what's going on what are we working on and what are we trying to get better okay well there's a lot of pieces involved so I'm going to try to condense it as much as I can okay I'm not too long-winded here but are its overall about setting boundaries with family we my husband and I we lost our daughter our first stars a couple years ago and began a whole journey of a great journey for me for both of us but especially for me on a number of levels and we always had really good relationships with our families before hand but as time was passing they learned more pregnancies and more babies and the families and it just became really difficult for me to be around family go to family events and so I kind of had two stops of like pull myself back and stepped out a little bit my husband would still go to some things with his family but I just kept doing this feeling just like I just need to be out of here I need to get out most of our family we both have large families most of them are in Utah as well and so they're always always events happening always things are being invited to or feeling obligated to go to and I just kept feeling like I need to get out get out and finally we up and left and we actually went to Europe for a couple of months and when we were there I just felt so liberated and so free and just so so good and happy then I came back to Utah and being started to be progressively more difficult and so we kind of cycled about three times where you come back to Utah community it really difficult and I were just like I need to get out and make it out and then we leave then we come back leave and then we come back but this time I have been actually wented a job here in Utah and so we're we're here to stay and I just felt when we were away I finally had the space and the ability to have all those relationships that were hub in my mind just be lifted and to feel like we could I could explore more of us explore more of who we were as a couple and where we're trying to go as we're navigating this through this Greece dream and as we had time and space to ourselves outside of family you realized that we were really diverging a lot from like our our tribe our family norm weather like religiously how we ate we went and even politically or how we wanted to do health care or anything a lot of ways that we knew would be disapproving by our families and could even be really heartbreaking for them and so we kind of kept a lot of me sheltered or away from them right question yeah exactly and so not that we're living secrets but we kind of felt like you had to be really intentional to say that we are saying and how we're doing these and which makes it obviously difficult to have really meaningful and wholly open relationships with your family so they become a little bit more surface level and you don't feel like you can be seen for who you are and be supported and accepted and anyway and we so we've been married for almost 10 years now and in a lot of ways I still feel very parented by my parents mm-hmm and we're like if you can sat me down they told me aside like we need to talk about something you know or just like I'm concerned for you in this regard you know kind of feeling like you're not--' that's no longer your role anymore like you're not my parent like but anyway I don't really feel like we're seeing as our own unit as the two of us they don't really understand boundaries of whether it's like the religious culture here or just the Utah culture to them it's like weird we're happy down we all loved being together and what is expected that everyone's here for Chris mission and and and so it's I just feel like we're in this really big transitional state of through grief and our lifestyle and religion religion and I finally end up being pregnant again so I am currently six months pregnant and you neither of our families actually know yet and I would also keep it to ourselves and so what's difficult being I was worried coming back to Utah that I was going to approach approach to pregnancy and if I was like emotionally ready to tell them and how much I wanted them involved I'm and my husband is very much a people pleaser and so I know that when we spend time with his family he's wanting to help he's wanting to be involved he wants to maintain some of those relationships but for me it's just it becomes really difficult and sometimes I wonder if he's appeasing them it is like oh I just need so so they don't think bubbeleh or it's actually like snowing for him and because at one point he once told me like you know what I'm done I'm done with my family but just be us and when he said that like I got it was like big if we leave and I just felt so so excited like yes this is what I've been wanting and wanting us to do to be our own you know I want to feel to just define who we are and figure out how we want to live and not be limited by these family relationships but I know that I can't I can't push and I can't push him there and I just I don't feel like I can expect my gonna give up his family relationships because I just know I need I need some need some space I need to be able to say like I think I like understand and we're as I mentioned we're in such a transitional place I don't really know exactly where we are and there's nothing definitive we're trying to figure I feel like I don't have the mental capacity to even deal with any of family relationships before I can just get settled back here and trying to navigate all these emotions and the problem is with this new baby coming up coming I just know like I know I need some sort of boundaries I know something needs to change because it's really hard for me to be here and so close to family and constantly being invited and obligated and feeling like I can't really fully be join them and but I don't know because I still do find some value in one-on-one relationships but at the same time I still so inhibited but because new baby coming my initial knowing is that I don't really want very much involvement from family but I'm not having any living children I have no idea how much support I'm going to need and and feeling a little like I want to be able to tell my family we're not going to be here for the holidays we're not going to spend it with you we're going to spend it alone because I just can't go through another cycle of horrible holidays and I don't want you involved in our life right now but if I do need you in baby comes and maybe I'll call you but otherwise you know like I know what I like China's music you sort of really cease it was like I don't need you but I'll let you know if I actually do but and so I just all I know is that like when we left the country we were out of state I I've never felt so liberated and so happy and felt so good and but I just I'm still trying to figure out what exactly goes behind reads I just yeah I don't know if having no contact or maybe having some phone contact or some some one-on-one or if it needs and how that affects like my relationship with my husband and we're I think suspecting to be or anyway okay Here I am here's a favor I got all kinds of ideas about this and so so we'll you know what we'll sort of run around the the chessboard here it's just a lot a lot of different things to consider and there's a lot of details that hmm that I won't be able to know so I'm not going to try to give you some ideas the I think the richest set of ideas that I can point you towards is Harry Brown's book how I found freedom in an unfree world I think that that for you and your life as for many people this this is just an extraordinary document that will will point you towards a way of looking at relationships that's somewhat you know I think it will clarify for you a little many life strategies that that might be useful he's a little too honest for my tastes I'm much more willing to be deceptive than he is but the notion of being true to yourself and figuring out what it is that you want and live in your life the way you want to live it that's that's what we are that's what we're coming to do now your your husband and you are not the same person and so you you have you each have your own lives no those lives intersect but you're two independent unique points of consciousness and so what's optimal for him it's not the same thing that's optimal for you it's a there's a this horse trading and negotiation and compromises that need to be recently done I would say that in principle that you like for example don't have to have 1% more interaction with your in-laws than you want okay the for your own family for that matter and neither to see now the fact that he made it may make life easier for him if he is able to parade you into his family situation and ie you're a better daughter-in-law etc that's something that you guys need to talk through about whether or not that needs to be horse I would myself personally it pretty hard to drag me into anything just because I'm by an introvert by nature anyway I don't suffer fools well at all and it's it's torture for me to spend two or three hours with you know in some social situation with a bunch of people that I'm expected to be something that I'm not and I'm not happy about being there so that uh you know it's not it's not immature selfish or is selfish it is it's basically I want to do it the way I want to do it and so I completely understand where you're coming from that doesn't mean that we don't get a feel from your husband how how tired this would make him what would be reasonable compromises how much overlap would be reasonable etc but in general my strategy would be to say that we should be spending as little time as possible on any social situation that we don't like okay that's like very minimal the obviously you know you're you're already thinking through that you know family is possible family pleasant family can our insurance policies you're thinking that you might need some insurance if you you know have Nita bunch of help with a kid okay then now you're opening up yourself to a trade my my general strategy with respect to these kinds of things I have a phrase that describes it which is called pay market prices because when we start when we start trading in insurance policy ie familial and friendship relationships with people were not wild about trading with in order to save market prices on things than we wind up with these contracts that we don't really like with essentially you know debts that we don't want to have to pay so be careful there about that notion and be make sure that you can afford to be without these people and their insurance in case of needs of you know family help with kid a new child etc etcetera so think that through and make sure that you can afford to pay market prices because if you can't afford to pay market prices descent here then it's like too bad for you okay so you can get clear about what it is that you may need and understand what this mic purses are and we're not going to try to chisel some you know not very well-loved relative into ponying up a bunch of time and interest in in a faux exchange where we don't really want to make the exchange of friendship and family connection and love because we don't feel it okay so we want to we want to in principle have a clear understanding about what's in our best interest and when then we react from that position after we've communicated this with our partner and really get it clear now another lesson in life is that we we want to follow you know our feelings our clues they're trying to tell us things and and I heard you explaining that when you were out of Dodge life was a lot better and it wasn't the scenery okay it's what wasn't in the scenery ie this passel of relatives right so as a result we can tell that you feel the social pressure to be somebody you're not interact in ways that indicate that you value these interactions in a way that you don't that this is you know it grinds on your teeth and you got out of Dodge and suddenly all that's gone and the relationship between you and your husband you know the feelings that you have and let improve a lot do it's we don't have any problem with him we've got a problem with all these relatives right so the so anyway my point is also keep in mind you're not a tree so who was it your husband got the job in Utah yeah okay good job yeah it's a really good opportunity for him good really good opportunity for them is that is it what kind of work does he do computer science is this the only computer science job in the United States absolutely not no it's not so here's another lesson in life you're not a tree yeah okay so I don't really care how good of an opportunity is I've heard that there are opportunities in other places in the United States so if you need to be there for a while because this is the best opportunity on the chess board and you're having a child that's coming and you've got health insurance and you can afford everything and it's a good salary and you can save some money and pay off student loan debt blah blah okay don't care in that case my attitude is great this is a place to park for a while and we're going to have some you know difficult little problems with relatives that we're going to have to negotiate but my attitude would be this is time-limited ok phrase because from what you're telling me you know the old left they'd say this town isn't big enough for the two of us ok and from what I'm hearing that's that's where you feel that's how you feel and you feel a lot better by having geography solve the problem of what I call the disagreeable distance so you know your your life gets better if if the relatives are a thousand miles away that massively reduces the hurt feelings associated with the fact that you're not integrated with your life with their lives very much they would want a much greater integration you don't want that integration ok and so you don't necessarily agree so the and so the the most elegant way to do this is to not be living within a thousand miles of these people completely reasonable strategy if your husband was you know I don't know some some guy that was in an apprentice to somebody that has a fancy key shop and they only do those keys in Utah and this is the only opportunity he's ever going to have then I would say bummer oops okay we're going to have to figure out how to institute boundaries on the disagreeable distance as elegantly as possible and we're going to have to just choke down light because who is the guy who is Scrooge's helper Bob Cratchit any what you know whatever it is like hey if that's your husband and that's the situation and you got a you got a bunch of mouths to feed and no other abilities you got to choke down Scrooge but if you're not you're not a tree and you would to be looking over the horizon and realizing I don't care how good this opportunity is this is temporary and we are getting out of here as soon as it's practical okay I think that's a discussion that needs to happen and from the sound of how it is that you feel about being surrounded then like you know cut you've got to be got to be aiming at that escape that's great and there's no reason you shouldn't if you're if we're confident we've run the experiments enough to know you've got enough insight into your own psychology you can you've got your ol you've got all of your your phenomenological existence can run all the numbers on who it is that you like who you don't like in what way and this is not a set of circumstances you want to be in okay so now for the for the present when it comes to instituting boundaries there'd be all kinds of strategies you know we've got wish I could but I can't we don't communicate very we communicate pleasantly very pleasantly but rejecting lis by email we're real busy etc etc we just you know just shuck and jive and dodge as much as possible between now and the time when the moving bands coming but that's what I'd be aiming at that this makes some sense yeah okay it says know what what what question part of what a word weighs on oil is like having you know having those invitations come in the first place or even if I've gotten to a point where I would say I I just can't come to any of his family okay are you still there nope oh just like Stephanie's yes Stephanie's call got dropped so we can just kind of talk until yeah calls back it looks like she just had a looks like a cell phone problem or something so yeah I'll just wait calls back okay actually now I would continue just with the this thought probably for her she can listen to this later which is that where as pleasant as possible we can still do a lot of rejecting and the people on the other side can be a little bit missed and a little bit disappointed a little bit frustrated and put a little bit of pressure on the husband and other social pressure but that's okay it's like everybody can just be a little bit stressed a little bit strained a little bit rejected but not blatantly rejected and no no fights and no harsh words or anything else we just were just kind of you know just to aren't quite understanding that we should be getting with the program but we seemed all friendly about it but the answer keeps being no Stephanie this is in turns out we do it okay and we we just use that strategy to duck out of everything and once in a while four times in the next year we relent and actually show our face a few things for an hour and a half and we smile at everybody and kiss them on the cheek and you know here's our baby or what not and then we're out of there and we're aiming at a nice civilized place to live somewhere else does that make some sense yeah no they said let me say one more thing I have a little technique that when I'm when I have to face something that I really don't want to do I have what's called the mathematize ation of misery and that's that if you've if you've got to if there's something that you're going to have to do it's nice to know that it's really time limited so let's suppose you had I'll I don't know between in the next 12 months let's suppose we had to choke down a and family events and those dozen family events the best we could get away with would be four hours okay so it's like okay we got 12 times 4 is 48 hours so we have a little a little grid a little business card in our pocket from some realtor and on the back we draw you know 12 little boxes or 48 little boxes 24 little boxes 2 hours each and while we're there we got our special little grid and two hours goes by and we get to check a box ok and we keep this with us and the next time we go you know next month we check another box so it's pretty soon it's exciting to go because at the end we're going to be checking some boxes and we're going to get to see that you know it's not too much longer that I'm going to have all these boxes checked and I'm out of here so this is a way to to reward oneself and to have a nice reminder but this is time limited and we can put up with a lot of crap ok a lot of people across the history of the world have done an awful lot of suffering and had to endure a lot of difficult things we can endure for 48 hours in the next year you can endure your relatives if that's a reasonable minimum that will keep people right below the level of acute frustration with you so we don't have to have any big drama ok keep it right there and then get out of Dodge at the first quote good opportunity make sense yeah yeah and and my husband my husband is also looking forward to be able to get away and seeing this as kind of a springboard job yes and we yeah we just want to I guess do you think it's better to try to be dodging these things and risk them avoiding a like accusing of avoiding them or is it better to just kind of sit down and be really upfront and just say we're figuring ourselves out right now we kind of a little bit of speed I think you could send a group email or I don't know how what the structure is here but you could say listen you know you know we really appreciate the invitations and the warmth of the family just wonderful people bla bla bla bla bla how fabulous we flood the circuit a little bit however it's going to turn out that right now we're going through some you know we're going through a lot of things this is where you land the pregnancy on them okay yeah say listen you know we're you know for a lot of reasons as you can understand given our situation you know we're we're expecting a child I don't really want to be talk talking about it I don't want to be processing this with a family you know this is our own private journey here and it's difficult and it's fraught with a great deal of anxiety okay so please don't reach out okay because I want to cut we kind of want to walk this road quietly on a run we've got you know got a great deal to do in preparation a lot of management here to handle so we greatly appreciate the the family support and the warmth and connectedness here but for these next few months we're going to need to you know from your standpoint particularly you're going to need to you know we're going to need to be bowing you know away from some of these family things that that are that are just a warm and terrific you know testimony to to the fine people that are in it okay flatter flatter flatter flatter no no no okay nothing dividend somewhat yeah I appreciate it good all right very good thank you very good call Stephanie thanks very much yep thanks you bet
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