Okay, I’m talking with Richard. Richard, thank you for sharing. Can you give the short version of the long-term-ish kind of struggle with anxiety that you have had? Sure. I mean, my struggles with anxiety probably, you know, date back, you know, date back 20 years. Largely, you know, focused around things that that probably grew out of relationships with my dad or other authority figures in my life. I think a lot of my anxiety earlier on grew from, grew out of dealing with authority figures in a way, and not really knowing how to, how to properly understand my own boundaries and my own sense of worth in dealing with authority figures. So I would tend to let that create a lot of anxiety, and that was combated in a variety of ways as I dealt with it over the years, but I think that was probably the initial starting point, just the impact of authority figures in my life. Now, you struggled with this for a long time. How did this impact you in terms of your mood, your feelings of well-being, self-esteem, other aspects of your life? In dramatic ways, and when I was first trying to come up with ways of coping with this, I remember, you know, coming out of colleges where I probably felt the biggest impact of it, where the anxiety grew and grew over time, and the way I learned to deal with it is I got very much into, you know, the positive thinking, self-help movement, where I was
really trying to just keep myself above water, and I did that through, you know, every motivational technique, you know, you hear about from affirmations to, you know, programming my subconscious, anything that I can do to kind of stay above the fray, but I always felt like the other shoe could fall at any time, and I felt in many ways I lived a very inauthentic self, why I was trying to battle these things, because I was trying to come off as positive and assertive and in control, where, you know, the dark secret was that I was anything but that. I have two basic questions more for you. With all of the self-help programs you enlisted in, in previous therapy, etc., what was the major thing that was not working? Self-acceptance. Self-acceptance. I mean, I would say, you know, that if there’s anything that I can stress as being the kind of the opening up the Pandora’s box for me was that you cannot mask these feelings, you cannot overcome, you can’t struggle with them, overpower them, try to replace them, you know, dealing with negative thoughts and what you got into, the nurturing of oneself, to me, has to come through self-acceptance, and a lot of these programs, although they talk about it in a cursory way, I never really understood what that, it took a long time for me to really get self-acceptance and that, you know, you can’t begin to change anything
until you accept that it’s a part of you, the good, bad, and the ugly. One day you came into my office and you brought the ego graph with you, and you had taken all kinds of detailed notes on it. I was really, really impressed. You gave it a lot of thought, and that’s when you really opened up the door to the concept of nurturing, self-nurturing. That is the primary thing from this interview that I would like to get across to the audience. How did you and how do you understand that concept? Well, it was funny because I remember when we got into nurturing, we got into that concept, I called you one day and I said, I don’t know how to nurture. I don’t know how to nurture myself. How do I do it? Because I was so used to being driven by the critical content in my life, and that being, I always thought that was being like a motivator. I was worried that not having that critical driver would make me less effective or make me less motivated, so the idea of turning that around and nurturing was a very, very new thing for me, and it seems so simple, but it’s not. It’s one of the most difficult concepts I’ve struggled with, and nurturing to me, when I distill it down to its core, is that self-acceptance, and when I say self-acceptance, getting in touch with, I would say, the things that we are the most disappointed in with ourselves, the things that we
hate, that we’re self-loathe the most about ourselves, that we struggle with and trying to get rid of, desperately, those measures, trying to get rid of things, struggling with things, that there’s a lack of nurturing. And when you got in touch with those things, what did you do with them? I understood them. I accepted them at the core, meaning I made an agreement with myself that I would no longer beat myself up or bash myself about these things, and it was a very behavioral adjustment for me, because it’s very hard to do that initially. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to understand that you’re getting a thought, so let’s say whatever thought it might be, you know, you know you’re never going to be able to do this, or whatever thought would hit me, rather than try to suppress it or fight it, I would say, you know, thanks for that mind, you know, just like thank my mind for that thought, and let it go.
